Permanent
IWM London
Everyone
Free exhibition
Explore key moments of the Second World War through people’s lives and the objects on display. Discover the role of strategic bombing and the fighting fronts in Russia and Africa, through to the D-Day landings.
War on the way
Facing growing persecution as Jews, Leonhard and Clara Wohl felt they had to get out of Germany. Their daughters had already reached Britain safely.
In the summer of 1939 the Wohls booked tickets to Chile, sending their belongings ahead, some in this trunk. Two weeks before they hoped to leave war broke out, trapping them in Germany and the couple later died in Auschwitz. Only their belongings survived, reaching their daughters in Britain in 1947.
This is one of many personal stories and objects on display in Turning Points.
War in the Pacific
The Mitsubishi A6M fighter (the Zero) was flown by the Imperial Japanese Navy and feared by Allied pilots early in the war.
Badly damaged in 1943 during combat over the remote Marshall Islands, in the Pacific Ocean, it was left a decaying wreck until found 50 years after the end of the Second World War.
Under the suffocating cover of the tropical jungle, large pieces of the Zero disappeared. But what survived offers tantalising clues of its vanished history: a British bullet lodged in the fuselage and a dried Lotus flower, carried by Japanese pilots for luck.
Don’t miss the newly installed Japanese Okha Kamikaze aircraft in Witnesses to War.
