Totes Meer, or Dead Sea by Paul Nash. 1940 to 1941.

Richard Humphreys/Christine Riding/David Dimbleby

RH: Nash was commissioned to be a war artist in 1940, he'd been one in the First World War and he went to a dump where they left old aircraft, you know, shot down German aircraft near Cowley, and when he was there he took a lot of photographs did sketches and so on and when he was musing on it he said it looked to him like a great inundation, a sea...

CR: It does have a look of an ocean, so to him it's sort of converting what he had seen which would have been broken and twisted metal, he actually converts it into something that has this strange movement and it's almost as if he's trying to underline the fact that the crashed enemy planes are in some way paralleling the English Channel over which they must have flown in order to get to England, but now that they've been destroyed, they have sort of gone back to the earth and have become part of nature, but obviously there's a degree of triumphalism about the image because it underlines the success of the RAF in terms of shooting these plane down.

RH: What's interesting about it apart from that effect that he create of it looking like crashing waves coming in when you know it's in the middle of Britain. And the great big romatic moon and the owl flying off there on the right is that he genuinely though if the Germans saw this they would be so depressed they would virtually capitulate at the time he said 'this will give them something to think about' so he definitely saw this as a piece of propaganda.

DD: But he got sacked, they didn't think this was a good idea, they thought it would demoralise people because they would see oh - bombers crash, how ghastly, yes, it could be ours!

RH: Exactly

DD: Very strange

RH: Yeah - very odd, so he was looking for something that he then thought was going to be right for propaganda and I think he was in a minority of one on that!