Green helmets and flushed cheeks – the Second World War in colour
It is still a shock to see the Second World War in colour. The past feels somehow more contained when seen in black and white, as it is in most of the surviving photography from that awful conflict. Most, but not all.
The colour photographs you see here come from a collection of around 1,500 that made it over land and sea, through censorship and Doodlebug raids, into the archive of the Imperial War Museum. The museum recently began restoring the images, and around 100 of them can be seen in a new book, Britain at War in Colour.
Many were taken for the Ministry of Information and have an obvious propaganda agenda. Others come courtesy of US service personnel operating from Britain, or on Allied combat missions, who had greater access than their British counterparts to Kodachrome film – the 35mm stock on which these pictures were then taken.
Their subjects range from the Home Front to campaigns in Italy and Tunisia. The Royal Air Force is also well represented, not least in the mid-war years, when air power became key to British defence.
Throughout, blue skies, green grass and flushed cheeks lend these images a poignant and unsettling intimacy, narrowing the gap between past and present.
“Black and white photography puts a barrier between subject and viewer, no matter how graphic its content,” says Ian Carter, IWM curator and author of the new book. “Colour photography restores that missing clarity and impact. As the most destructive war in history fades gradually from living memory, this is ever more important.”
Britain at War in Colour by Ian Carter (IWM, ￡25) is out on May 13
