In a remarkable project inspired by the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the Imperial War Museum will, over the next 15 months, be working to make its collection of visual materials available to anyone who has access to a computer.
In one of the largest undertakings of its kind by any UK museum, some 45,000 objects, ranging from photographs and soundbites to maps, documents, paintings and personal diaries, will be digitised and added to the IWM website, enabling those unable to get to the collections in London or Duxford to access the war online on their own computers.
The museum’s magnificent collection of images and artefacts covers almost every aspect of this global life-and-death struggle in which more than 50 million died, and which shaped the geopolitical map for half a century afterwards. Young web voyagers will be able to log on, and share wide-eyed in the shock of battle; the silence and tension in which action is anticipated; the gruesome privations of the worst of the PoW and concentration camps; the annihilation of atomic warfare; and the heady jubilation of the moment of victory.
From the 33,000 hours of sound recordings, which cover Churchill speeches, British and German propaganda, the proceedings of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, as well as the sounds of battle, and air raids, more than 1,000 will be digitised, including dramatic coverage of the D-day landings.
Similarly to handle footage from the vast film archive is, in the present state of technology, not practicable. But the “dope sheets” — records scribbled by the cameramen of what they were filming on the ground — have already been digitised, and make compelling reading.
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Thus, during the Arnhem campaign at Oosterbeek on September 20, 1944, Sergeant G. F. Walker of the Army Film Unit (who with grim humour describes his soundman as: “Wehrmacht”) bleakly records: “Things are pretty tough. We are completely surrounded & the casualties are extremely heavy . . . The fighting is savage. If 30 Corps don’t come soon it will be too bad for us.” And on the following day: “ . . . the slaughter was awful, indescribable . . .”
In a completely different vein are still images from the war’s more placid, even humorous moments. On a seafront in summertime two jolly, gym-slipped little girls gaze through the rolls of barbed wire that will be the first line of defence against any enemy who may pitch up; a ragged section of the Home Guard, equipped with something less than the latest in weaponry, thanks to the tremendous losses in arms at Dunkirk, straggles along the shore of Loch Stack in early 1941; on a December morning, dawn breaks moodily over ships at anchor in Scapa Flow, while a seabird perches unconcernedly on the muzzle of a naval gun trained skywards.
There is, naturally, much of a harrowing nature, here: Hiroshima and its aftermath on the ground, are recorded in images that are almost unbearable. Some of the most poignant material is in the war sketches of Jack Chalker, an artilleryman who was captured at the fall of Singapore in February 1942, and sent to work on the notorious Burma-Thailand Railway. As a medical orderly, he managed to steal small amounts of paper and rags from his Japanese captors. Extraordinarily, he was able with these secretly to make drawings depicting the conditions endured by the prisoners. In many such cases the emaciated visage of a man about to die of starvation and disease amounts almost to a last will and testament. Chalker recorded the horrific experience of working on the Railway of Death in unsparing detail: the cholera hospital; the dysentery latrines; the ghastly reality of tropical ulcers and the problem of treating them without killing the patient.
Chalker preserved his drawings by rolling them up and hiding them in bamboo stems or in the hollow parts of the improvised prosthetics made for those who had had limbs blown off or amputated. On one occasion, after being detected hiding an item, he was savagely beaten over a period of two days. He was overjoyed, later, to discover that the sketch for which he had suffered had survived under a pile of rags.
These digitised images and artefacts are just some of the thousands which preserve for posterity the acts of those who fought or otherwise shared in the greatest conflict in history. They are part of a wider project for 2005, Their Past Your Future, launched on February 17, through which the Imperial War Museum, which has received grants of £4.2 million from the Big Lottery Fund, seeks to take its resources out to the nation.
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The aim is to encourage an enduring interest in a war which, for the first time in history, involved society both in and out of uniform, as, possibly, none of its predecessors had done. Travelling exhibitions; a schools competition to win educational trips to war sites throughout the world; and, in some cases, the involvement of veterans with schoolchildren in the teaching process; are all a part of remembering — and learning for the future.
Websites — digital collection: www.iwmcollections.org.uk
Their Past Your Future: www.theirpast-yourfuture.org.uk