Context 160 - July 2019

C O N T E X T 1 6 0 : J U L Y 2 0 1 9 11 Second world war Editorial Eighty years on, the values on which peace depends can not be taken for granted. It is 80 years since the start of the second world war: one of those round- figure moments when we look back and reflect. At a time when the UK may be about to cast itself off from the European institutions that were created in the aftermath of that war, and when national and international democratic structures look fragile, that reflection seems all the more important. This issue of Context focuses on the vast scale of the production of munitions; the question of how the dead should be lain to rest and memorialised; the intelligence operation, secret long after the end of hostilities, that has been credited with significantly shortening the war; the destruction by bombing of large parts of British towns and cities; the large-scale movement of people serving the war effort; and the heritage that lies beneath the waves. We look at those strands of wartime history with a perspective of 80 years. The ordnance factories are now regeneration opportunities. The war graves are a continuing conservation challenge. The conservation of Bletchley Park raises the question of how to conserve a place that is of great historic importance, but whose fabric is fragile and inconsequential. In the bombed towns and cities the development that replaced the bomb damage is now in turn being redeveloped. Descendants of those who served in the war are investigating their forgotten family history. And the underwater sites of sunken ships are being managed in ways that balance the often conflicting needs of support for tourism and respect for the dead. Remembering all this, what strikes us? The impact of a nation and its economy totally dedicated to war. The immense loss of life in two world wars only 21 years apart. How much depended on extraordinary brainpower and cutting-edge technology. How the destruction of town and cities inspired new forms of urban development. How our own family connections with the war change with time and fading memory, yet may be renewed. How historic sites may gradually transform from places of remembrance to destinations for tourism. Above all, we are struck by the scale of the disaster that at a few happy times since 1945 we have felt could not happen again, the aberration that was Nazism having been overcome by reason and liberal values; and the feeling that in these troubled times those values can no longer be taken for granted. S E C O N D W O R L D W A R Opposite: Londoners sheltering inside Aldwych Station during the German Luftwaffe’s Blitz bombing campaign in 1940 (Photo: Imperial War Museums)