Soldier-Spy: The National Security State and the 1960s World War II Spy Film

Abstract

This article examines Cold War-era representations of WWII, observing the visible influence that sixties’ espionage media had on retrospective images of WWII. Representations of bunkers in the postwar were influenced by advent of atomic warfare, with images of Normandy’s brutalist pillboxes replaced by fantasies of Nordhausen’s subterranean rocket factories. While wartime propaganda had platformed film reels of vast public armies fuelling the Allied fight against fascism, cinema of the 1960s replaced total war with the image of the singular spy, operating covertly behind enemy lines in Nazi uniforms, and allegedly unmarred by ideology. Examining the visual rhetoric at play in these scenarios, this paper argues that it is not fascism which these films claim must be stopped. Rather, it is the Cold War-era fear of global insecurity, caused by the misuse or mishandling of advanced weaponry by nations which are not America or Britain.

Keywords:

• world war two
• national security state
• James Bond
• bunker
• undercover
• spy
• fascism

Acknowledgments

This research has received no external funding.

Disclosure statement

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

Declarations of interest

The author declares that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Notes

1 This is based on military unit badges and Challenge Coins found online which included the name “Dirty Dozen”, these include the Navy EOD Mobile Unit Twelve, 146th Signal Detachment, 44th Army Aviation, Air Force ROTC Detachment 012, and 12th Fighter Squadron. Further context or veracity of these badges was not researched.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maxim Tvorun-Dunn

Maxim Tvorun-Dunn is a cultural economist and media theorist, currently a PhD candidate at the University of Tokyo. Specializing in the postwar rise of postmodernity and neoliberalism within material and visual culture, Maxim has published on varied topics including transmedia storytelling, video games, environmental studies, the global counterculture, and global cinema of the 1960s.