Public Lecture
‘Definitely unofficial Loot Patrols’: The British Army after D Day
Speaker: Dr. Jennifer Wellington, Associate Professor, University College Dublin.
Date and Venue
Wednesday
24 September 2025
1700 hrs
Massey 15
ABSTRACT:
War artefacts brought home by soldiers are objects of violence; and part of that violence is their taking: the acquisition of such objects is a violent process. The meanings and purposes applied to the war objects when they return from the front are the subject of vigorous scholarship, but the act of taking itself remains underexamined. Soldiers of the world wars took artefacts prolifically, and also wrote extensively about their taking. For example, British trooper A J Perman recalled how one morning in August 1944, British soldiers made a carnival out of taken objects in the middle of a battlefield. The men “happily drank our brew” surrounded by “glassy eyed corpses”. Around them, enemy artefacts were omnipresent, and even costumed the revellers: soldiers “were appearing togged in German garments” taken from the dead. This detritus of war, and in particular those of the enemy, exerted a powerful attraction for these men. The above example is drawn from the collections of British soldiers’ private papers from the Imperial War Museum, and which form the source material for this paper. Taking was multifaceted and included different types of violence. Taking was not uniformly from the dead, nor uniformly from the enemy; nor were all things that were taken intended to be kept. Many soldiers implicitly or explicitly engaged with the ethics of taking, and taking as a form of violence, in their writings. Soldiers varied on which acts of taking were licit or illicit, and motivations for taking varied in both content and depth. In this paper, I will assemble evidence which illuminates these specific manifestations of taking, and how soldiers understood them and the violence they represented.