‘Deterrence can be boring’: boredom, gender, and absence in Britain’s Cold War military

ABSTRACT

Boredom was an integral part of Cold War experience in western Europe and its manifestations and management were key political, military and social considerations during this long conflict, for militaries in particular. Using over 60 original oral history interviews (both individual and group) with a wide range of former residents of British military bases in West Germany, this article explores the presence and articulation of boredom within militarized communities. Its existence among soldiers was widely acknowledged, expressed and managed, but boredom was also refracted through prevailing gender and social hierarchies, permitting particular forms of boredom to be expressed, while silencing others. Through an examination of both soldierly boredom and the testimonies of military wives, this article suggests not only that boredom needs to be included in social histories of the Cold War – and conflict more broadly – but that we must understand boredom as a social phenomenon embedded within specific historic contexts. Its articulation is deeply affected by cultural and societal norms, particularly for groups with limited ‘agency’, with long-term implications for historical researchers looking for its traces. This article finishes by suggesting productive ways in which oral history can address militarized boredom and what, in turn, scholars of boredom might learn from oral history practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Boredom
• Cold War
• gender
• oral history
• agency

With its focus on potential calamity and catastrophe, popular understandings of the Cold War have overlooked the productive role of boredom in this long conflict. Prevailing interpretations of the Cold War in western Europe tend to stress its knife-edge tension, jeopardy, and risk, as well as the development of ever-more malign technologies including nuclear missiles, surveillance and ‘brainwashing’ (Major and Mitter 2012; Hogg 2016; Moran 2013; Carruthers 2009). War more generally is often regarded as a time of ‘heightened emotional intensity’ (Langhamer, Noakes, and Siebrecht 2020, 1). This dramatic characterization of the Cold War has held great sway, not only during fraught moments during the conflict itself, but into the twenty-first century, as its memory has been remoulded: in the recent rise of Cold War drama and nostalgia, from Deutschland 83 to Chernobyl, there is little space for boredom (Berger and Radsi 2016; Renck 2019; Hanhimäki 2014).

Yet boredom played an integral role in military Cold War experience. Not only, as this article argues, was boredom part of the lived social imaginary of the conflict, but its manifestations and management were key political, military, and social considerations, for European-based militaries in particular (Huxford 2017, 640; Calhoun 2004). Boredom was also refracted through prevailing gender and social hierarchies during the Cold War, permitting particular forms of boredom to be expressed, while silencing others (Kustermans 2017, 176; Basham 2015, 128). Using over 60 original oral history interviews (both individual and group) with a wide range of former residents of British military bases in West Germany conducted between 2017 and 2020, as well as a patchwork of archives, newspaper sources and ephemera, this article explores the presence and articulation of boredom within military communities. As I argue below, British soldiers (themselves often overlooked in domestic-centred British Cold War histories) felt the lack of ‘real’ fighting in Germany and the management of soldierly boredom became a key element of military thinking in the Cold War period. But we also need to move away from interpretations that view boredom as a psychological or military ‘problem’ alone, to understanding it as a social phenomenon embedded within specific historic contexts. As Boucher (2019, 1224) has argued, rather than isolating particular emotions and putting them under the microscope, we need to interrogate the broader history of ‘sensibility’; to ask, in her words, how wider emotional regimes were ‘perceived, felt and experienced’.

Boredom should therefore not be studied in historical isolation as part of a ‘cataloguing of discrete feelings’ (Langhamer, Noakes, and Siebrecht 2020, 2), but fully integrated into wider emotional and social histories. Through analysing soldierly boredom during the first decades of the Cold War, but also, crucially, balancing those responses with other perspectives from the wider service community and particularly military spouses, this article supports Basham’s (2015) argument that emotional expressions within military communities are ‘regulated by gender norms’. These norms permit particular forms of (largely male) boredom to be expressed or acknowledged, whilst other equally destabilizing boredoms, such as women’s boredom, are often relegated – or, worse still, mocked through jokes, rumours, and stereotypes. Nevertheless, both forms, examined in turn in this article, point to the pressing need to include boredom as part of our social historical analyses of the Cold War and, further still, to broaden the emotional register through which we understand conflict, confrontation, and modern militaries.

Through a detailed study of one European Cold War setting, I argue we can use boredom to tell alternate histories of military communities, learning how they have functioned and managed themselves over time – and, indeed, how they remember. This article first explores the British military presence in Germany, beginning with the initial post-war occupation (1945–55) where boredom was first discussed by military authorities and personnel. The pernicious power of boredom was increasingly highlighted as the Cold War moved into a period of détente (book-ended by the 1969 Helsinki Accords and the 1979 Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan), when the likelihood of fighting in Europe seemed even lower.¹ But it then broadens its focus to look at other boredoms on military bases – those of military spouses – in order to understand the broader emotional regime at work in this particular military community.

Finally, following the lead of feminist oral historians, this article underlines the importance of reorientating our methods to allow for boredom to be expressed by historical narrators, or its traces to be more fully recognized. So often historical approaches privilege action over passivity, looking for archival or oral traces of decision-making, causes or consequences. Yet, as suggested below, boredom potentially manifests as an absence in the historical narrative, rather than a presence, meaning we must work with these gaps and use other types of questions and ideas to explore it. As Toohey (2011, 154) argues, we must be creative in looking for ‘colourful circumlocutions and synonyms for boredom’, seeking out other traces and categories that reveal its presence – and oral history, so often used to explore absence and silence in narratives, can help us to do this. As this wider special section shows, boredom is far more than simply a gap or an absence in the historical record and it deserves a more prominent place in the social history of conflict.

The British military in Germany: purpose and perspective

Interviewed alongside his wife by the author in 2018 and asked if soldiers ‘enjoyed’ their time in Germany, one former senior Army officer answered:

Germany could get very boring for people because, um, we never actually did any fighting in Germany, erm, and in fact I know that battalions used to really enjoy going to Northern Ireland for four months because they were doing what they joined the army for. Because you knew the routine in Germany: you knew you were going to go on Summer Sales which was a big summer exercise and ‘WintEx’ and you know. A huge amount of sport was played to keep – you know, the old Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton – it was keeping the, you know, soldiery occupied … Hearts and minds stuff, which was important. And, you know, trying to do it for the families [too]. (BAOR/GH/17)²

The narrator was describing a period in the mid-1970s, when the Cold War détente meant that Germany felt devoid of ‘actual fighting’, in contrast to the British military involvement in the Troubles in Northern Ireland.³ Germany was the predictable, staid backdrop to this ‘real’ fighting, as it had been to earlier British deployments that were numerous in the post-war, post-imperial world (Newsinger 2018). But the narrator’s reference to ‘the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’, attributed to the Duke of Wellington and later critiqued by writers including George Orwell, points to a longer genealogy of boredom and conflict.⁴ It refers to the much-repeated idea that sporting and social values shaped military practice before anyone reached a battlefield (Orwell 1941) and that keeping military personnel (especially lower-ranked soldiers) ‘occupied’ were important tasks, especially for junior officers. Boredom has thus long been acknowledged as an integral part of military and even wartime experience (Mæland and Otto Brunstad 2009; Hynes 1997, 9).

However, the second narrator present – the officer’s wife – shone a light on how the wider community dealt with boredom too and some of the specificities of boredom in Germany. She pointed out that similar, ‘largely successful’ activities were staged for families or, in many cases, organized by the families themselves. Some of this ‘success’ emanated from the British community’s insularity in Germany: there was, she argued, always something ‘going on’ as ‘you looked in on yourselves’, rather than interacting with the local German community. Her husband added that there was a ‘totality of looking after everyone’, perhaps even too much so, as people became dependent on the military. Within the wider military community too then, the ebbs and flow of boredom shaped the rhythms of everyday life.

Boredom first became a problem for the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) in the early years of the post-war occupation. BAOR was born from the British Liberation Army at the close of the Second World War, when Germany was divided into four zones of occupation by the victorious Allies (Chrystal 2018, 11). British forces (largely Army, but also Royal Air Force and a small Royal Navy presence) occupied the north-west region of the country, as well as maintaining a military and civilian presence in Berlin under the Control Commission Germany (British Element). Some personnel had served during the Second World War, either as conscripts or regular service personnel, others had joined after, or some were sent to Germany as part of their regular careers or as peacetime National Service between 1948 and 1963. As Susan Carruthers has observed, the ‘haziness over both the length and the nature of the postwar mission contributed to the peculiar atmospherics in occupied territory’ in Germany (2016, 205). Being an occupier proved a hard role for many to conceptualize. Dwelling explicitly on the difference between wartime and post-war service, one conscript recalled how in 1946: ‘you weren’t quite sure how to behave, as the conquering heroes, or whatever we thought we might have been at that time. The war was over, we had won the war, for what it’s worth’ (BAOR/GH/23). Furthermore, the mundane routines of occupation jarred with the already substantial mythology emerging in the post-war period around Second World War experience (Eley 2001, 818–19; Dawson 1994; Higate 2003, 27–42; Carruthers 2018). One soldier, interviewed in 2018 and who served in Germany in the 1960s, was so in awe of his father’s Second World War experience that he stated that ‘my only ambition in life was for my father to say “well done son”’ (BAOR/GH/21). As Coughlan et al. (2019, 457) observe, the ‘absence of meaningful activities’ can heighten an individual’s search for ‘heroes’ and numerous other narrators cited how their parents’ experiences in the Second World War shaped their experiences in Germany and their feelings towards German civilians, ranging from anger and resentment, to sympathy and a sense of common humanity (BAOR/GH/34; BAOR/GH/38; BAOR/GH/41; BAOR/GH/45). As with much of the early Cold War, the Second World War cast a long shadow.

Yet the tone of the post-war occupation shifted as relations deteriorated rapidly with the Soviet Union, particularly with the 1948–49 Berlin Crisis and with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The formal allied occupation ended in 1955 and the Federal Republic of Germany joined NATO, but West Germany seemed to be becoming an open-ended commitment or ‘long patrol’ for the British (Bainton 2003). They continued to maintain a force of at least 55,000 men, even amid army cuts under the Sandys reforms of the late 1950s (Asteris 1987, 3; French 2012, 164–5). Berlin was a focal point throughout the Cold War period (with its 3000-strong Berlin Infantry Brigade) and BAOR too was expected to be in a state of constant ‘readiness’ for an attack from the east. In practice, this requirement led to the development of large military exercises and a yearly training cycle (Johnston 2019, 41–4). Since 1945, British military doctrine had been based on the unpleasant reality that, if the Soviet Union chose to start a war in Europe, they would be drastically outnumbered. As David French argues, this led to the development of what is now known as ‘manoeuvre warfare’, based on highly mobile forces who gathered large amounts of intelligence and instigated ‘well-practised battle drills’ (French 2012, 83–6; Moody 2020). The Northern Army Group (NORTHAG), established in 1952 and of which BAOR formed a part, also began to incorporate tactical nuclear weaponry into its exercise planning and by 1960, BAOR itself was equipped with nuclear weapons (French 2012, 202–3; Johnston 2019, 54). Yet even after the establishment of the multinational NORTHAG the figures still did not look promising and ‘deterrence’ became the primary approach (Johnston 2019, 40; French 2012, 53).

Yet despite the ‘very high state of combat readiness’ (Hansard 1962, v. 662 col. 716) that came with regular training, the Soviet danger, like the initial post-war occupation, did not necessarily dominate military life in Germany. As oral history narrators pointed out, military life settled into a predictable pattern of exercises, training, cleaning and replacing equipment, waiting and watching. In one interview, one narrator was reticent to even call this the ‘Cold War’ (BAOR/GH/23). This lack of identification with the ‘Cold War’ is significant: it perhaps reflects the increasingly ‘indeterminate and amorphous’ meaning of the term itself (Romero 2014, 685), or more likely shows the divergence between experiences in Germany and understandings of what the Cold War – or war in general – should be. For example, Grant and Ziemann (2016, 2) argue that the dominant image of the Cold War now is as a ‘harbinger of destruction, the symbol of what became a vast arsenal of power that seemed to threaten the very existence of humanity’. But this vivid cataclysm often failed to translate on the ground in BAOR, especially during the period of détente. In 1971, one journalist reflected that:

As a garrison army it lacks charisma. Deterrence can be boring, as much for the public in Britain as for the soldiers and airmen in Germany. BAOR is not quite a forgotten army. But, in many ways, it exists on the margin of political consciousness and active debate in Britain. It is an administrative task for civil servants, not a live issue for politicians. Yet British Forces Germany … represent Britain’s most vital defence commitment, the security of western Europe. (Lee 1971, 1)

The daily activities involved in maintaining a Cold War presence and deterrence in BAOR slipped into being ‘an administrative task’, rather than ‘real’ soldiering, even though preparing for war was still an active task. This sentiment was not necessarily new, but its prevalence was notable in the post-1945 world was notable (Pedersen 2017, 8). Soldiers’ expectations of soldiering, informed by memories of the Second World War and prevailing understandings of the Cold War, were not always met in Germany.

By the 1970s the predictable situation in Germany became even more apparent when compared with the ‘real’ fighting on the streets of Northern Ireland. As several narrators pointed out their experience in Northern Ireland was ‘what they joined the army for’ (BAOR/GH/17). By comparison, Germany seemed almost like a peacetime posting, somewhere to prepare for other deployments. One narrator argued that the possibility of nuclear war was so impossible to comprehend that it felt, to him, like Northern Ireland was a much ‘bigger problem’ and of more relevance to his service career, something with which others agreed (BAOR/GH/12; BAOR/JM/02; BAOR/JM/10). For a range of British residents, the associated IRA security threat in Germany felt more ‘real’ (BAOR/GH/12) than that of possible Soviet invasion (BAOR/GH/22, BAOR/GH/33, BAOR/GH/36).

This highly loaded demarcation between action and inaction, between ‘real’ soldiering and Cold War deterrence, was also not helped by the fact that Germany was not regarded by some soldiers as a particularly ‘foreign’ country by the 1960s: there was a widespread assumption that it in fact counted as a ‘home posting’, though without the advantages of being stationed in the UK (BAOR/GH/01; BAOR/JM/08).⁵ Gordon Walker MP stated in the House of Commons that whilst it might be ‘administratively sensible’ to see BAOR as a home station it was:

psychologically wrong because the Army is in a foreign country and its whole social environment is wholly different from the environment at home. This sort of betwixt and between position in which the Rhine Army finds itself must have an effect. (Hansard 1962, vol. 662, col. 709)

Walker was responding to a particularly infamous series of events that had taken place in BAOR in 1962, where many of these issues about military purpose reached a head. It all began with reports of a ‘hushed up’ court martial for ‘incitement of mutiny’ in March 1962, where six men stationed at Hilden, near Düsseldorf, had allegedly caused a ‘fracas in the canteen’ (Vine 1962a, 1; Anon 1962, 1). John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, dismissed the idea of a cover-up, saying that the press had simply ‘missed a trick’ by not noticing the court-martial earlier, but the incident encouraged journalists to dig deeper into the conduct of troops (Sewell 1962a, 5).⁶ Later in June, George Vine (Daily Mail [Vine 1962b, 1]) reported on the ‘Battle of Hermanstrasse’, where men of the Cameronian Regiment stationed in Minden had allegedly thrown bottles in a bar, before cars were overturned in the street. Whilst their Commanding Officer, Colonel A.R. Kettles, dismissed it as ‘high jinks’, which could have just as likely occurred in Glasgow as in Germany, others suggested that there was a broader antipathy between British soldiers and German civilians. By 25 June, Vine (1962c, 1) reported on another outbreak of ‘hooliganism’ by a group of 30 gunners from the 40th Regiment, Royal Artillery, at Schneverdingen, near the training area of Soltau. Profumo, Kettles and the Rhine Army Commander, Sir James Cassels, came under increasing pressure and by 5 July the Labour Party had arranged a House of Commons Debate due to the ‘considerable anxiety’ these issues had caused in Britain and its relationship with Germany and Europe.

Walker argued though that ‘boredom, simple boredom’ lay at the heart of soldiers’ malcontent (Hansard 1962, vol. 662, col. 711). Their lifestyles in Germany were scrutinized, as were their poor recreational facilities and weak grasp of the German language, hemming them into barrack life. This aching boredom led to violence and tension, so some MPs stated, not only with German civilians, but internally within British forces. As the Hilden and subsequent scandals show, boredom was not a tangential issue, but had become an integral element of Britain’s Cold War and its management among service personnel became a matter of military importance. The following section explores both official explanations for that boredom and how it was expressed and understood by personnel themselves: the contradiction between the two perspectives further complicates the meaning of inaction in the armed forces.

Managing military boredom in Germany

One possible explanation for boredom given during the 1962 Hilden debates and in oral history interviews – and a criticism that BAOR found it hard to shrug off throughout the Cold War – was the apparent lack of integration between the British and the local German community. Whilst some historians argue that western troops were ‘unofficial ambassadors’ and narrators were able to cite cases where they had made local friends, this was often not the case for the average soldier (Alvah 2007; Rollings 1977, 13; BAOR/GH/06).⁷ Indeed many narrators criticized their fellow British residents for not integrating properly or highlighted a ‘them and us’ culture (BAOR/GH/08; BAOR/GH/11; BAOR/GH/12; BAOR/GH/13). Though largely beyond the scope of this article, integration on the whole tended to centre around particular festive occasions or officially orchestrated ‘Anglo-German’ events, rather than organic interactions – though some highlighted how the local bar provided limited opportunities for more informal meetings and a few pointed to long-lasting positive relationships with German people (BAOR/GH/12; BAOR/GH/08).⁸ Smaller military communities might have had greater interaction with the local population too, especially in the immediate post-war occupation period, but the larger base communities that developed from the 1950s tended to be more ‘self-sufficient’ and focused on the British community primarily.⁹

Clive Blossom MP highlighted this lack of local integration in the midst of the Hilden ‘boredom’ debates and felt it emanated from poor management by unit officers: ‘They have not liaised enough with the Germans. They have not made a sufficient effort to understand the German way of life, and, therefore, have not been able to pass on the information to the troops under their command’ (Hansard 1962, vol 662, col. 737). Given the expectation that it was officers’ responsibilities to keep their troops from getting bored, this was a double failing in Blossom’s eyes. Not only did it produce boredom among troops, but poor integration confined British soldiers either to the barracks or to a particular type of alcohol-based social interaction in their messes. As Kingwell (2019, xii) observed of a later period, boredom is all about ‘getting stuck, feeling frustration at being so stuck and feeling acutely that one does not want to be stuck ever again’. Furthermore, being confined in this way had the propensity, Blossom argued, to lead to misbehaviour and scenes reminiscent of those in Hilden, destabilizing the Cold War garrison and leading to ill-filling with their German hosts.

Another cause cited for this boredom harked back to the difficulty of the Cold War mission itself and its sometimes-weak imaginative hold over the community. Some of this came down to geography: oral history narrators who lived closer to the inner German border, had a closer daily contact with nuclear weaponry or who lived in Berlin certainly spoke at more length about threat and danger, particularly in the early 1960s when the Berlin Wall was built. One teacher’s wife happened to be visiting Berlin the week the wall ‘went up’, and described how on ‘each side of the wall, [they were] wailing at each other’ (BAOR/GH/18). One military wife who visited Berlin later in the 1960s noted that it was ‘very, very sobering when you got down to the wall’ and described the wall itself ominously as ‘complete and utter blackness, nothing’, in contrast, as she saw it, to the vibrant life of West Berlin (BAOR/GH/06). Another narrator described how during his time as a junior officer, ‘Berlin was in every sense unique and had this sort of – still had a sort of Third Man type mystique about it’ (BAOR/GH/08).¹⁰ The cultural idea of what the Cold War should be had taken root, even then. As a result, Berlin became something of a tourist destination among British personnel and their families: ‘it was just somewhere one went’, one former military child and later army officer recalled, referencing the fact that many British residents tried to ‘get up to Berlin’ during their time in Germany for some Cold War sight-seeing, taking in the wall, the watchtowers and Checkpoint Charlie (BAOR/GH/26; BAOR/GH/35; BAOR/GH/38; BAOR/GH/41). Even before the end of the Cold War, Berlin had become a site of Cold War tourism, where the Soviet threat seemed most real to narrators. By contrast, the majority of German towns close to British bases, like Paderborn, Celle or Verden, did not measure up to this Cold War ‘mystique’, instead described as ‘lovely’ or traditionally ‘Germanic’ towns (BAOR/GH/18; BAOR/GH/22).

This complex relationship with Germany and Germans and the apparent distance felt by many from the British Cold War mission did not go unnoticed by senior military authorities. One narrator recalled a speech from a senior officer (who later became a high-ranking UK military leader) to an assembled parade in the 1970s:

Some of you will die riddled with bullets, as the Russians come pouring over the border; some of you will end your days choking with nerve agent, poison gas; some of you might survive. Now the problem with peacetime, is there is nothing to make you terrified; I have provided that terror. (BAOR/GH/26)

The senior officer apparently felt ‘terror’ was desperately needed in Germany by this time and that its absence was inhibiting military effectiveness. But the narrator who so evocatively remembered this story expressed his own distaste at such a heavy-handed attempt at engaging soldiers with their primary task, favouring an approach where the Soviet threat was always acknowledged but not over-exaggerated.

Yet one military chaplain recalled in an interview how inculcating military boredom could be intentional too: recalling Exercise Active Edge, the regular practice for Soviet invasion, he said how it ‘all seemed very ordinary, you know. I suppose that’s part of the point of military training, is that there’s an ordinariness about what you do, a routine about it’ (BAOR/GH/20). Boredom was not always a problem for soldiers, where routine might inhibit feelings of fear if the ‘real thing’ were to happen. As Langhamer, Noakes, and Siebrecht (2020, 12) note, twentieth-century total war had demanded ‘emotional strategies’ from states and citizens and indeed during the Second World War many militaries began to draw on expertise from the ‘psy’ disciplines to understand individual and collective attitudes and emotions. Soldierly boredom had to be constantly balanced, managed and understood in Cold War Germany: it was limiting, in many ways, but also a productive element for a military poised on a potential frontline.

It is this ‘waiting around’ culture though, Kustermans and Ringmar (2011, 1777) argue, that has led some to desire war, as ‘the restoration of meaningful agency’ amid a world of ‘enforced powerlessness’ and alienation (Coughlan et al. 2019, 257). John P. Hawkins (2001) suggests this alienation characterized American attitudes to Cold War soldiering in Germany too. Such settings can lead people to aspire after action or the ‘real’ thing. But some oral history evidence suggests that the awful prospect of nuclear war tempered this desire in BAOR, even among some fighting units. Whilst many within BAOR expressed frustration and their own lack of purpose in this state of limbo, not everyone relished the nuclear showdown that could see their families hastily evacuated westward and their own – and the world’s – future so imperilled. One narrator later expressed his unhappiness at putting his family, equally lacking in agency, through such a life: though he was assured there would be a ‘state of tension’ before any war that would provide precious time for his family to escape to the UK, he was ‘not sure’ he believed that (BAOR/GH/20). Yet again, despite their apparent contradiction, apathy, longing and fear could quite easily co-exist within British Cold War communities in Germany. Boredom was rallied against, but its logical endpoint – a violent, even potentially nuclear, war – was not necessarily eagerly anticipated either.

So military inaction and action were not necessarily in opposition and the articulation of boredom itself must be contextualized within its historical setting. Kustermans (2017) has argued that boredom is seen as a ‘vice or sin’ in certain groups: the bored person not only lacks agency but ‘shows himself to be insufficiently appreciative of his station in life’ and ‘transgress[es] societal rules by seeking relief in violence (or other indecent intentions)’. We see this again from the Hilden debate in 1962, as a group of soldiers wrote to their MP, stating that ‘we live decent, respectable lives and do not divide our time between maiming the local population with beer bottles and rescuing them from flood disasters [recently in Hamburg]’ (Hansard 1962, vol. 662 vol. 705). They wanted to portray themselves as rule-abiding, quiet residents, who did their best not to intrude on German lives and sought to distance themselves from the stories of violent outbursts: they were not so transgressive or ungrateful enough to describe themselves as ‘bored’. The articulation and expression of boredom itself is thus heavily influenced by the societal and hierarchical norms in which it exists: its very acknowledgement is shrouded in moral judgements in particular settings. This situational nature of boredom becomes even more apparent when we extend our analysis to wider military communities – particularly to military spouses.

‘No one should ever get bored in Germany as there is so much to do’: gender and militarized boredom

From late 1946, British families were permitted to join married military personnel and by the early 1950s, 32,000 family members had moved to Germany (Evacuation from Abroad, TNA, CO 537/6430). By the mid-1950s, requisitioned housing in German communities was being replaced with purpose-built military bases and housing areas, complete with schools and recreational facilities (Grattan 1956). Not all families lived on military bases though: even into the 1970s, narrators recalled living in apartment blocks far away from these facilities, hired private flats or even caravans (Letter to Macmillan, 1962, TNA, PREM 11/3983; Anon 1962, 29).¹¹ Military spouses expressed their feelings in interviews about living both within or at a distance from these base communities in Germany. One partner described moving from a close-knit community and family in Wales to Germany in the early 1970s:

I absolutely hated it, I have to admit. I was extremely homesick, um, my family missed me terribly. I, on one hand, was feeling those emotions, but on the other I was so happy I was with T—. And he would go to work, cycle to work, at six in the morning and come home at six in the night. So those days were very long for me. Clearly, I didn’t speak German, um, and it was a very lonely existence. (BAOR/GH/04)

The narrator recalled paying endless trips to the local supermarket, the only one within walking distance (she did not drive, nor did they have a car): ‘we weren’t part of the regiment, we weren’t part of anything social’. The narrator expressed her loneliness, but was also keen to stress her happiness too at being with her husband. She later pointed out that:

… if you were in the families’ office, that wasn’t good on your husband. If you were there, knocking on the door because you had this problem and that problem and you wanted this and you wanted that, it was reflected on your husband. So wives were seen and not heard quite a lot. (BAOR/GH/04)

Others too reflected on how being seen as a ‘problem’ wife could have ramifications for a husband’s career (BAOR/GH/01). One soldier noted that: ‘There was always a saying, you know: “We’re here for warfare, we’re not here for welfare”, you know. That was quite prevalent as a way of looking at things, you know, “we’re here to fight a war, not to look after you lot, sort of thing’. Yet his wife, interviewed alongside him, was keen to point out that ‘it wasn’t so bad as it sounds, we just, we didn’t have any rights of our own’ (BAOR/GH/44).

The choice of language in these interviews is significant. First, partners expressed similar drawbacks to life in Germany as service personnel, such as lacking something to do, poor facilities and meagre German-language skills. Yet instead of expressing this as boredom, women more commonly described their experiences (or others’ experiences) with words like ‘lonely’ or ‘isolated’, particularly when a husband was out at work all day, on a lengthy exercise, or on deployment. Soldierly boredom was often conceptualized as collective, but these sentiments of ‘isolation’ were experienced singularly. This language was used by other narrators to describe the wider community: several, for instance, point out that ‘lonely’, younger wives went back to the UK during such deployments to their parents and wider community networks at home, rather than waiting in Germany (BAOR/GH/04; BAOR/GH/07; BAOR/GH/28). As Langhamer, Noakes, and Siebrecht (2020, 18) have argued, assessments of ‘emotional capacity and resilience’ like this are ‘often read through gendered, imperial and classed lenses’, but in this case we might add age too, where young wives were seen as particularly unable to withstand being alone.

Opting to characterize their experiences in terms of loneliness instead of boredom, and the awareness that ‘speaking up’ might cause troubles for serving personnel, military partners also revealed the value judgements that existed around the term boredom. To the historian, their views also indicate the need to look to wider systems of ‘sensibility’, as Boucher (2019, 1224) suggests, rather than focusing on boredom alone. As Kustermans (2017) points out, boredom is a particularly loaded term for ‘unprivileged’ groups (and military wives routinely expressed how they felt they were secondary to their husbands in Germany): being bored would have implied an unreasonable unhappiness with their domestic situation, which many pointed out could be materially better than life in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s (BAOR/GH/01). Furthermore, for a generation of women who had seldom travelled abroad, the experience of living overseas was seen as unique opportunity by their friends and family, again making ‘boredom’ an ‘ungrateful’ emotion to express (BAOR/GH/04). In other words, as Basham (2015, 128–29) has argued, military communities permit certain emotions to be expressed among male personnel, but forbid them to female members of that community.

These wider judgements and collective understandings of who was permitted to be ‘bored’ manifested themselves in various ways within the community in the 1960s and 1970s. First, military marriages were seen as both an instigator and an alleviant of boredom: wives were blamed for removing men from the life of their unit, but they also were tasked with keeping men at home, out of trouble and soothing their professional boredom. This contradictory message was evident in the Hilden scandal of 1962. Following the violence, John Profumo, Minister for War, imposed a curfew on all unmarried soldiers in BAOR, to ‘protect individuals from the danger of wandering about in the early hours in a foreign country’ (Sewell 1962b, 9). In one debate in the House of Commons, Gordon Walker MP argued that the government needed to address the discrepancy between married and unmarried soldierly life beyond this sort of short-term measure:

Every day at five o’clock one sees officers and married N.C.O.s [Non-Commissioned Officers] leaving the barracks. They leave the unmarried men behind in the barracks, particularly at the weekend when they leave at about five o’clock on Friday and come back on Monday morning. This is all right. They have got families. They have got occupations, cars and ways of amusing and entertaining themselves, and this is perfectly right. The Army should have all this. Butthey leave behind in barracks private soldiers with nothing or very little to do. This is perfectly all right at home in Britain. Private soldiers in Britain are in their own habitat. They have lots of things to do. They speak the language of the country. They mix with people and go to ‘pubs’. To leave soldiers on their own during the weekend is all right in this country, but it is no good in Germany. In fact, it is very dangerous. (Hansard 1962, vol. 662 col 711)

Though Walker was at pains to point out that it was ‘right’ that married soldiers leave at the end of the day (the British Army was keen to point out at this time that the soldier was a ‘family man’), the distance between the two lifestyles was keenly felt.¹² Oral history narrators also stressed how boredom – or its proxy in many interviews, heavy drinking – was experienced most by single soldiers in the ranks (BAOR/GH/31; BAOR/GH/45). Some soldiers tried to break out of this ‘very, very boring’ camp life and made attempts to meet German people, as one narrator put it, ‘simply because to me just going to the same pub every week at that stage in my life seemed to be incredibly boring’ (BAOR/JM/03). Some soldiers overtly blamed married life for making military life less ‘fun’ and felt those who went home at five o’clock missed out too, but also said how lack of home life meant that soldiers’ antics became more outrageous (BAOR/GH/30). Either way, women were both cause of and solution to soldierly boredom.

But perhaps the most powerful impediment to addressing women’s boredom directly was the figure of the bored wife that pervaded military culture, often described in a derogatory or problematic way. Jean Whiston, who was married to a non-commissioned officer and spent much of the 1960s in Germany, stated that ‘no one should ever get bored in Germany as there is so much to do’, from beer festivals to shows for children, not to mention the active mess life (Whiston 2015, 81). The bored wife by contrast suffused wider military culture: by the 1990s, the bored military wife resorting to promiscuous affairs had become a mainstay of romantic fiction, for instance (Angus 1997; Jones 2005). As Basham (2015) points out, military communities invariably allowed for male heterosexuality (with officers even permitting their soldiers to visit brothels to alleviate boredom) but women’s sex lives were frequently the subject of gossip. And such dalliances seldom ended well for the wife: in Angus (1997, 90) novel Without Dragropes one wife is seemingly punished for her extra-marital behaviour by her husband descending into alcoholism and suffering an injury that will require his wife’s care for the rest of his life. Nor could she not bear to see her lover’s career within a ‘proud regiment’ destroyed by ‘gossip’ around their behaviour, so ends their affair. These novels are undoubtedly sensationalized, and as much for a civilian audience as a military one, but they are echoed in wider, implicit judgements of women’s boredom or dissatisfaction.

Women’s boredom was no less destabilizing though. Whilst there were no documented violent outbursts that brought such boredom into the spotlight, those women ‘unable to cope’ with separation from their partners, or dissatisfied at their isolated lives in Germany, were nonetheless deemed a disappointment at best, highly disruptive to a cohesive social community at worst.¹³ Military hierarchies and expectations implied that such boredom, whether real or imagined, could risk the careers of husbands, the wellbeing of a unit and the wider functioning of the military. Women were passive in many of these representations, either the victim of the military life, their own emotions, or of the nefarious intentions of predatory men. One soldier narrator even referred to the male service personnel not included in military exercises, left back at base as ‘Rear Echelon Mother F****ers (REMFS)’: rumours circulated, he argued, about how such men would take women home from the wives’ club, dropping the one he ‘fancied’ off last (BAOR/JM/01).

Overall, these unflattering representations of the bored wife did much to silence women, though some did speak out at their constraints on their lives. By the 1990s, many women began to express openly their dissatisfaction with their treatment: in the Army Wives Journal, a publication associated with the newly formed Army Wives Federation, one author asked ‘Are we always going to be the “baggage” that the Army might acknowledge but seldom consults? The Army can’t afford to ignore its over-travelled “single mothers”’ (Uxor 1994, 18).¹⁴ Women organized many of their own social events, or activities to keep women and families ‘occupied’ while husbands were away. Some of this was cast through the lens of social obligation, with senior military wives expected to provide entertainment for wives of lower-ranked soldiers in some units (BAOR/GH/07; BAOR/GH/17). It may be incorrect to assume that military authorities did nothing to address spousal boredom, as many enthusiastically supported these activities, particularly those through recognized groups such as the ‘Wives Clubs’. And of course not all partners felt a ‘dip’ or lonely when their partners were away: some expressed freedom at not having to ‘have a meal on the table’ or that the other women on the base ‘got it [separation]’ more than their families back at the UK would have (BAOR/GH/03; BAOR/GH/07; BAOR/GH/46).

Yet the point remains that in certain historical settings, dissatisfaction and boredom were interpreted as more dangerous, disappointing or even ‘ungrateful’ in certain groups, especially among those with limited agency already (Kustermans 2017, 176). Owing to a lack of agency (or the capacity for action), some individuals or groups feel less entitled to feel bored. Kathryn Anderson and Dana C. Jack (Anderson and Jack 1991, 11) point out how dominant cultural narratives like this can silence particular experiences or emotions in women’s oral histories: ‘women often mute their own thoughts and feelings when they try to describe their lives in the familiar and publicly acceptable terms of prevailing concepts and conventions’. They pose oral historians the challenge of listening to both ‘the dominant and muted channels’ within women’s experiences. How then should we approach oral histories of boredom within military communities, bearing in mind the silencing power of dominant discourses when it comes to boredom?

Oral histories of boredom: absence and presence

Much feminist oral history practice has involved convincing narrators that their stories are worthy of historical attention, something particularly important in a discipline that relies on voluntary involvement in research projects (Minister 1991, 27–31). Projects contacting potential narrators through 'gatekeeper' organizations potentially compound this problem still further. This project benefited tremendously from articulate narrators actively involved in reunion groups, former employment associations, or particular military units. Due to the structure of the research project though, oral history narrators tended to identify with these groups long after their time in Germany and felt that they had 'enough to say’ to warrant responding to an interview request about their lives in Germany. Prevailing understandings of what an oral history interview actually involved also framed decisions to come forward: much military oral history has been predicated on action and involvement, with questions about what one did rather than necessarily about what one felt. Again, this is what we might interpret as a potentially a male-orientated model of oral history interviewing, which silences other forms of ‘militarized’ life experience. Many narrators as a result naturally edit out that which they think to be insignificant, every day or ‘boring’, or simply do not step forward to share their stories (Minister 1991, 31).

Furthermore, in some narratives, boredom manifests as an absence rather than a presence: it is itself a gap in the historical record, something people intentionally exclude from their narratives. For this reason and others, philosophers have seen boredom as a crisis of selfhood, something potentially troubling for oral historians whose method relies to some extent on an awareness of self (Kingwell 2019, 34). But historically too, the cultural and moral framing of boredom means its articulation is frequently devalued and therefore intentionally or unintentionally omitted from the oral or archival traces upon which we rely for evidence. As feminist oral historians point out, women frequently see their everyday actions as not worthy of historical reflection in an oral history interview – indeed, many women involved in this project only did so as part of a group interview with their military partner. Does this mean then that oral history is an ill-fitting method through which to examine boredom in military communities?

I would instead argue that these issues pose a deeper, more productive challenge for oral historians and a call to reappraise our methods. Squire (2013, 47) notes that we tend to neglect ‘talk that is not about events but that is nevertheless significant for the narrator’s story of “who they are”’, valuing sequential and ‘meaningful’ storytelling above other forms of life-telling.¹⁵ Instead of action-centred questions or interview formats then, oral historians might embrace non-narrative interview methods which, rather than examining trajectories or chronologies, engage with non-linear or cyclical phenomena, such as long-term involvement in organizations, activisms, or the development of particular knowledge and competences. Questions such as ‘describe a typical day when you lived in [German base]’, for instance, provided more latitude for non-linear responses. Narrators reflected on different aspects of their lives alongside one another – from professional obligations, to childcare arrangements, shopping, socializing and even quotidian spaces and places that might have eluded direct questioning (BAOR/GH/20; BAOR/JM/04; BAOR/JM/06). Such framing potentially allows for certain emotions or life experiences to be expressed more readily and it also acknowledges that the absence of something – a war, a partner, a social life – can be a key element of lived experience (Bille, Hastrup, and Flohr Sørensen 2010, 18).

Similarly, historians of conflict might be able to engage more with the long history of boredom if absence were more directly acknowledged. Silences, gaps and absences have long proved fertile ground for oral historians and ethnographers, many of whom note how certain elements of a life story can be purposefully or unintentionally omitted in favour of others that provide more comfort, cohesion or ‘composure’ or simply make more sense to the narrator (Abrams 2010, 47–8; Passerini 1987; Van Roekel 2021). For example, owing to the prevailing cultural ideas of the Cold War as risky and dangerous, narrators might have failed to articulate boredom or to see it as a major element of their life story in Germany. We thus need to understand boredom as part of the very selfhood of historical subjects: as Kingwell (2019, 4) observes, ‘boredom is not so much a feature of the given context as of the figure confronting, or simply finding itself within, the landscape’.

Instead of looking for boredom directly then, we have to pay greater attention to the way narratives of boredom are created and explore synonyms or alternative expressions of dissatisfaction. Metaphor in particular can be a window onto a prevailing affective culture (Fernandez et al. 1974) and, as already seen in this research, one such metaphor for British boredom in Germany was heavy drinking. Some narrators looked back fondly on the heavy drinking culture among men in BAOR, but others described it as ‘horrendous’, a ‘problem’ at all levels of the organization, and how unmarried servicemen in particular spent their weekends in ‘an alcoholic haze’ (BAOR/GH/46; BAOR/GH/45; BAOR/GH/31; BAOR/GH/25). One Church of England vicar felt that tax-free alcohol was a major social problem the Army was unwilling to address (BAOR/GH/14). This boredom culture was again gendered, with only certain forms of boredom permitted: one narrator described being called ‘some kind of poof’ for not drinking (until he offered to drive his inebriated friends into town) and some other men sought to remove themselves from the all-male weekend trips to the same local pubs (BAOR/JM/03; BAOR/GH/38). Another narrator described her life as a single RAF officer, when it was routine in the evenings to ‘tartify yourself up … [it was] very much part of the culture, really – not a lot else to do, [they] didn’t encourage hobbies’ (BAOR/GH/45; also in BAOR/GH/39).¹⁶ Gendered terms like ‘tartify’ again imply, as Basham argues, how both sexuality and boredom (as well as attempts to mitigate it) were often problematized or relegated in military settings. But it also shows how context-specific synonyms for boredom can allow for its discussion in research interviews, even when it is not fully addressed by name. Overall then, oral history can help us to understand the wider epistemological and archival gaps left by boredom in historical narratives, especially where dominant cultural narratives – like wartime action – prohibit its direct acknowledgement.

Conclusion: a cold war culture of boredom

Boredom, this article has argued, occupies a central part in the history of Britain’s Cold War military and more specifically, so does the absence of action. In response to the need for more experiential histories of the Cold War (Douthwaite 2019, 188), this case study of everyday life in BAOR has shown alternative histories from that of daring espionage and tripwire diplomacy described in popular culture, both at the time and afterwards. Given the numbers of allied military personnel and civilians who called Germany home between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (and the eventual British withdrawal in 2020), these cultures of boredom are potentially more representative of Britain’s Cold War experience. Its presence among soldiers was acknowledged and its management deemed particularly important to maintaining this Cold War garrison. Boredom was understood to affect military partners and families too, though gendered norms and hierarchies mediated that boredom. This social, historically specific framework silenced the articulation of boredom by some, both at the time and many years afterwards in the oral history project at the centre of this article. However, this piece has also suggested productive ways in which oral history can address boredom and how, in turn, scholars of boredom might learn from oral history practices. The historian can also be creative in looking to wider ephemeral material and ideas circulating within military culture, such as novels, jokes and stereotypes: through this patchwork we broaden our understanding not only of military boredom but of the wider culture of ‘sensibility’ (Boucher 2019) which affected all those living on military bases.

Boredom continued to occupy a significant place in the affective world of the British military, and boredom in Germany in particular: in 2009, Hennessey (2009, 5) described his cohort at Sandhurst Military Academy as ‘a post-9/11 Army of Graduates and wise-arse Thatcherite kids … who would do more and see more in five years that our fathers and uncles had packed into twenty-two on manoeuvres in Germany’, most of whom were ‘too old now to win the spurs [they] never got the chance to[,] getting drunk on the Rhine’. For this new generation, their fathers’ task of waiting for a possible invasion in Germany felt like the most perfect expression of ‘boring’, peacetime soldiering in comparison with their endeavours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But dismissing that history as a static, homogenous period of inaction risks misunderstanding not only boredom, but the Cold War itself and the lessons it has to teach contemporary European militaries in a period of renewed tension. Waiting and watching remain key concerns of militaries today and thus the meaning and management of boredom are still highly important.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grants scheme (Grant ref: SG152333) and by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship Scheme (Grant ref: AH/S002634/1). I am grateful to all oral history narrators who were so generous with their time and for sharing their reflections and expertise on life in Germany. Informed consent was granted for use of interview material for research purposes and publication and all material has been used in line with narrator consent forms. Approval for this research was given by the University of Bristol Arts Faculty Research Ethics Committee. My thanks also go to Simon Moody, Eva van Roekel, Thomas Randrup Pedersen, Julia Welland and the anonymous reviewers of this piece for their helpful comments, and especially to Joel Morley who was Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the ‘British Military Bases in Germany’ project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data that support these findings are available in the University of Bristol Research Data Storage Facility on formal request at www.bristol.ac.uk/acrc/research-data-storage-facility/. The data are not publicly available to due information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/S002634/1] and British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Grant scheme [SG152333].

Notes

1. It should be noted that, as a global conflict, the Cold War as a whole does not necessarily confirm to this accepted European-centred narrative of action and inaction; nor does it fully encapsulate the full history that went on within nations or blocs during this period.

2. Summer Sales and WintEx (Winter Exercise) were both annual exercises in which British forces in Germany were heavily involved.

3. In line with narrative theory interpretations, oral history interviewees are referred to as narrators throughout this article, reflecting their role in shaping the narrative and the semi-structured nature of our encounters.

4. Eton is a prestigious public school in the United Kingdom.

5. Though crucially with foreign service financial benefits.

6. John Profumo famously resigned from this role the following year over his affair with Christine Keeler.

7. Bases were described as ‘British islands’ in a wider German setting by Rollings (1977).

8. For more information on Anglo-German relations, see Christopher Knowles and Camillo Erlichman, eds. 2018. Transforming Occupation in the Western Zones of Germany: Politics, Everyday Life and Social Interactions, 1945–1955. London.

9. Such as Joint Headquarters Rheindahlen, a large base complex that opened in the mid-1950s, see Grattan (1956).

10. The Third Man (1949) was a popular film set in Cold War Vienna, written by British novelist Graham Greene, encapsulating Cold War intrigue for many.

11. As was also raised in the Hilden Debates in 1962.

12. One MOD film from 1965 noted that: 'The soldier of today is a family man, well-versed not only in the skills of his military profession but also in his duties as a husband and a father’, see School is Everywhere (Central Office of Information and Ministry of Defence, 1965).

13. Even military charities, Anthony Beevor argued, linked back to the chain of command, with a duty to report any family issue that ‘could make a soldier unfit to carry out his operational role , see Beevor (1993, 66).

14. The reference to ‘single mothers’ refers to partners living without a partner due to them being away on exercise or deployment. ‘Uxor’ is Latin for wife.

15. I am also grateful to panellists on ‘The Value of Non-Narrative Oral History’ panel at the Oral History Association Conference 2019 (Salt Lake City) for their discussion of these points.

16. In this context, ‘tartify’ refers to being a ‘tart’ or overly-dressed woman.