MostlyMHB: War Memorials in London

Americans make a big deal of the country's participation in the two World Wars, as they should. But the experience in other countries where the wars were actually fought is even more impressive and moving. On Monday we passed a number of war memorials. Here are two close-ups from a Battle of Britain memorial near the Westminster Bridge:

(Please be sure to notice the dog, which should pull at your heartstrings.)

Gas masks are always pretty horrifying, both for how they look and for what thry try to protect against. The women in this are at home, I guess, but in the next memorial we saw, it was different:

On Tuesday we spent hours in the Churchill War Rooms and museum. The first surprise was that this underground complex of rooms, from which Churchill and his cabinet ran the war, is only just below the street, nowhere near as deep underground as the Tube. The six feet of humongous steel beams encased in concrete might or might not have protected the rooms if a bomb had dropped right on the street above.

A section of the novel Life After Life describes the main character's work on a rescue team during the Blitz, and that part really brought home to me the terror, stink, grime, and exhaustion of her experience. Not surprisingly, the War Rooms have a lot of the same flavor. The attached Churchill Museum has much more detail on his whole life, which is fascinating but a bit hard to take in fully during one visit. The video of Churchill's funeral in 1965 was a flashback for me: one of my weekend trips from Stanford-In-Italy was to Switzerland, where TV in a café happened to be showing the funeral live. It was very moving to stand and watch, only about a year after watching TV coverage of JFK's assassination and funeral.

It was not a surprise to see how cramped the War Rooms were, especially with all the people doing their work down there month after month. (The lights were on for five straight years.) This contraption provided artificial sunlight to counter one of the hazards of the job:

In addition to all the military men, a number of typists -- women, of course -- worked down there. They had special gas masks with headphones attached that (I think . . .) allowed them to continue hearing dictation while typing during a gas attack. Kinda hard to imagine that situation. The angle of this photo isn't good, but you can figure it out:

A surprise to me was the Enigma Machine, with which the British broke the German codes -- a very big deal. The machine is like a big typewriter, not the huge thing I would have expected:

A little more light-hearted, a photo that I think was meant to cheer the home front. It's comforting to clean your gun with the little lady knitting at your side: