The term “the People's War” is more complex than might at first appear. It was used in Britain at the time of the Second World War to suggest that this war was genuinely one for democracy not only in terms of fighting a brutal dictatorship, but because of the extraordinarily high level of participation and commitment. Also there was an implied promise, dramatically unfulfilled after the First World War, that this time the “People” would be “rewarded” after victory. Perhaps the coiner of the term was Tom Wintringham in his New Ways of War (1940). (He was using his experience in the Spanish Civil War to help form the Home Guard.) But perhaps the term was just in the air. The most significant historical work on the topic is Angus Calder's The People's War (1969) and its coda, The Myth of the Blitz (1991). The Blitz, no doubt, is the formative experience for the term; civilians in London and elsewhere were at severe risk for extended periods of time. From Calder on, perhaps even before, scholarship on the period can be ironic and interestingly full of contradictions. In his first book Calder was richly aware of this, and the term “myth” makes the same point. Paul Addison, whose The Road to 1945 (1975) tended to emphasize the positive, recognized the change of approach in a latter essay quoted by Sonya Rose: “once full of neighbourly Cockneys defying the Blitz, the home front has been repopulated with factious politicians, incompetent managers, malingering workers, unfaithful husbands and wives, racists, looters, [and] black marketeers” (290).

Rose has made an extremely valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion. She does not present the portraits one might have expected of the divisive figures listed above. Rather, using a wide range of archives, newspapers, pamphlets, and films, she has discovered splendid examples of attitudes and actions at the time that do chip away at the implied universalism of the term. She has deliberately chosen, a reasonable choice, not to consider the vast number of books on the subject by participants. They began to appear almost immediately and have continued ever since. They, too, are legitimate sources. But as they are looking back over an ever-increasing period of time, they do not have the same immediacy and are written, in large part, more self-consciously and with a greater awareness of audience. (Presumably some of the authors of the quoted manuscript diaries in the Imperial War Museum might have had a sense of a future readership.) Valuable here as well, mostly in the footnotes and the bibliography, are the citation and use of an extremely wide-ranging secondary literature, some quite theoretical (at times reflected in some use of jargon in the text), that helps us understand what was happening during the war itself.

The government knew that it needed the people's support, which was suggested in a tactless way in the famous poster, hastily withdrawn: “Your Courage / Your Cheerfulness / Your Resolution / will bring us victory.” Ultimately, the British government did organize the human resources to fight the war, and Churchill gave the “roar” that so profoundly helped. But in many ways the “People” came together themselves, to a large degree under the pressure of the Blitz, and they “carried on.” There was little choice other than hysteria or defeatism. But thinking of the term the “People” nowadays, we are likely to misunderstand what it meant at the time and to impose on it an ideal of inclusivity. The “People” who were being bombed were mostly in English urban centers (although Belfast, Cardiff, and Glasgow were also attacked), and they had little interest in including all who might make a claim to be British but whom the “People” did not regard as “one of us,” most notably in the case of the Jews, some of whom were as badly blitzed as anyone. As Rose discusses, despite the Nazis, there was a rise of anti-Semitism, particularly in London, as many were convinced that Jews pushed themselves into the best places in the shelters. Jewish refugees were even interned as enemy aliens.

Rose splendidly discusses the strength of the controlling idea of family and refers to George Orwell's take on England as being a family, but with the wrong members in control. But families are units that exclude others, and as we know families are not always in a state of harmony. What is very well done here is making clear who are to be included and who excluded from the “People.” Inclusion is based on what is seen as an “equality of sacrifice” and shared “structures of feeling.” There are intriguing discussions here about the ways that some strongly felt that women should be prevented—hence marking their weaker and need-to-be-cared-for status—from doing as much as men, most particularly over the issue of fire watching, feelings clothed in the rhetoric of gallantry. And there is a great deal here about sexual standards and the rage against “good time girls” who give into the temptations presented by wartime, the blackout, and generally relaxed standards. And there is intense racism in the exclusion of blacks. One of the most dramatic instances was when the great Trinidadian cricketer, Lord Constantine, is denied a room—because of the wishes of American army officers—at the Imperial hotel in London. (But he did win his law case against the hotel.) There is extensive discussion of the sexual threat Afro-American soldiers presented to the British women who were seen as far too susceptible. (There was no problem with a double standard: British troops were issued with condoms when they went abroad.) No doubt the British were racist, but in this case the situation was made much worse than it needed to be by the insistence on Jim Crow regulations by the American government. Attention is paid to the ways that the Scottish, the Welsh, and the nonwhite members of the Empire, badly behaved evacuated children, are not seen as part of the “People.” On the other hand, the Russians were at times given honorary membership. The term “the People's War” suggests an achieved unanimity that obviously did not exist. The great majority of those who found themselves involved in the war had little choice but to “take it.” Much of the population of Britain was exposed to danger and experienced hardship, and many met the challenge magnificently. It is extremely valuable to understand better what happened: the limitations and failures. One is grateful to know so much more about that story.