A HISTORIAN is to shine a light on the experiences of the members of the Parachute Regiment who fought in the Falklands War.
Award-winning historian Professor Helen Parr will present a public lecture.
Hosted by the Department of History at Essex University, Prof Parr will explore the relationship between the modern military and British society by examining the social backgrounds of the men who joined the regiment in the late 1970s.
The professor is an author of Our Boys: The Parachute Regiment, the Falklands War and 1980s Britain.
The book was awarded the Longman History Prize, the Templar Medal Book Prize and the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History.
Her study of men at arms draws on her own family tragedy as her uncle was a paratrooper who was killed aged 19 while fighting in the Falklands War.
Prof Parr’s lecture will look at how men who joined the regiment in the 1970s were trained to become soldiers and at how they experienced battle and its aftermath.
She said: “The lives of these men open a window to the relationships between society and the military, between masculinity, regimental identity and armed violence and between Britain’s military past and its present.”
Formed during the Second World War, the Parachute Regiment, based at Merville barracks in Colchester, is Britain’s elite airborne infantry.
Fighting in the Falklands War in 1982, the 2nd and 3rd battalions took part in the battles of Goose Green, Mount Longdon and Wireless Ridge.
The cost of these battles for the Parachute Regiment was 40 dead and 93 wounded, the highest death toll of British land forces in the war.
Prof Lucy Noakes, the Rab Butler Chair of History, said: “Helen Parr’s moving study of the boys and men of the Parachute Regiment is an outstanding exploration of masculinity, class, militarism and grief.
“It provides both a window onto the experiences of the men who serve, and a reminder of the seemingly endless tragedy of war.”
The Legacies of Britain’s Military Past: Social Class, Masculinity and the Falklands War takes place on October 10 from 5.30pm at Essex Business School.
The lecture is free. To book a place visit helenparrparachutereg.eventbrite.co.uk.
(Source: Katerine Palmer, Daily Gazette- 30/9/2019)
https://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/17936646.lecture-explore-parachute-regiments-falklands/
