War, huh, what is it good for?

We took advantage of a lovely Autumn day here in London yesterday and took our children up to town to visit the Imperial War museum (I hadn't been since I was a schoolboy and my kids had never been).

It turned out to be a really good day; there is a particularly child friendly exhibit on there at the moment which illustrates the second world war through the eyes of children. It details the mass evacuation of children to the country, how children lived and has exquisite little exhibits of drawings and letters authored by children themselves. I'd never seen my two so enthralled by any public presentations like this before, they clearly connected with the things on display it was delightful. My Daughter loved the example "toys" of the day, in fact didn't even seem to realise the separation in time between her toys today and the WWII samples. My son was fascinated by the drawings of spitfires and tanks in the school books of young 1940s boys, he was particularly struck by the stories written along side them too, it was difficult to drag him away. On the way home I wondered what they thought the most memorable thing they had seen was; I was expecting spitfires, V2 rockets, tanks, or something perhaps visually memorable however I was in for a surprise, it turned out to be none of these things. They both said, almost in unison, that the thing they found most memorable was the photograph of "the little girl crying", for a while we didn't click what they were talking about but eventually we figured it out; they were referring to the famous Pulitzer prize photo taken by Nick Ut of a burnt Vietnamese girl running down a road after a napalm attack surrounded by American soldiers (see below)

This was slightly odd since the vast majority of the museum is focused on WWI & WWII and Vietnam has a tiny single case display and this picture is only a tiny part of that. However they had obviously both noticed it and taken it in. I'm not really sure what to make of that, on the one hand it's a complex scene requiring a lot of background knowledge to really understand, and yet on the other it's an incredibly simple human picture. Since neither of them know anything about the background to this conflict or incident it must have been the pure "human solidarity" element of the photograph that they both picked up on; after a somewhat sombre afternoon I found that thought quite uplifting.