Governor’s Lecture Series – Reliving World War II

Join author and journalist Lucy Colback as she explores how an entire generation was shaped by the experience of global conflict, drawing on her book Afterbursts: Reliving World War II.

Over four years, Lucy travelled across Russia, the United States, Europe, Japan and China, interviewing men and women who lived through the Second World War. Her journey also brought her to the Royal Hospital Chelsea, where she spoke with two late Chelsea Pensioners, Roy Cadman and Harry Rawlins. In this talk, Lucy shares their remarkable stories—voices that illuminate a generation marked by war—and reflects on how personal memories can echo, complicate, or even contradict national narratives of pride, heroism, decency and shame.

Afterbursts began with a single photograph: a Chinese man and an American GI lighting their cigarettes tip to tip. At a time when governments were reviving wartime grievances to serve modern geopolitical agendas, Lucy set out to ask a simple but profound question: how do those who endured the war feel about their suffering being used to fuel division today?

What she discovered was far more complex. Survivors shared not only their wartime experiences but also how those experiences shaped their identities, relationships and understanding of the world. Afterbursts challenges nationalist myths and reveals the deeply human, often uncomfortable truths of conflict.