Gordon Thompson and David Heneker's 1942 popular wartime song “The Thing-Ummy Bob” lauded the contribution of a young female munitions worker who, though she may not have understood the technical details of what she was making, knew full well why she was making it:

Were Brian Short to produce a version of the song, the hero would not be female and would labor not in a factory but in committee meetings and alongside farmers. In

short, he would be a member of one of the County War Agricultural Executive Committees (CWAECs). Thus (with apologies to Thompson and Heneker),

Short's The Battle of the Fields is the first detailed study of these committees, their men, their bureaucracy, and the agricultural yields that their efforts achieved. Its thirteen chapters are largely thematic in coverage, and the book focuses on the CWAECs in their heyday, during the war, but with a chapter considering their place in postwar society as well as two chapters focusing on their antecedents in prewar British rural society. It provides a huge amount of detail about these committees but is at its weakest when covering this earlier period. For example, Short recommends that readers interested in food supply issues pursue some rather dated histories of the war, but these have been shown to be far too sanguine in assuming that the food rationing and distribution plans drawn up by William Beveridge were implemented, which they were not.

However, when Short covers the war years, he is on much firmer footing. He details how these committees were able to lead farmers into plowing up land to grow food and how, by advocating more efficient farming methods, Britain was able to get more food from the land available. The statistical facts of this labor are frankly astonishing. British land under tillage in 1938 totaled 8.9 million acres, but by 1944 this had increased to 14.6 million acres. Thus, in a period when 20 million people starved across the world as a result of the war, Britain did not.

How this was achieved constitutes the bulk of this book, and, broadly speaking, there are two elements to this narrative, represented by two terms in the book's subtitle: “rural society” and “authority.” However, one of the most striking revelations of the narrative is that “authority” in the form of CWAECs was not separated from rural society, but was part of it. Members were volunteers and were active in their own areas and thus coaxed, cajoled, or cursed their neighbors into accepted changes in land use and farming practices. This meant that while they could keep one eye firmly on the national imperative that formed their raison d'être, they could apply the scientific rationalism of agricultural improvements within the framework of local sociopolitical norms; their antennae, so to speak, were finely tuned to the local context, and they understood what was possible given the raw material of rural society. Thus CWAECs promoted a culture of what might be termed conservative modernization, promoting a high-speed evolution of farming methods rather than a revolution in rural areas. Nevertheless, these committees did have teeth and could use them. CWAECs had the power to dispossess truly recalcitrant farmers. Some 8,762 possession orders were issued during the war years, and while this may have been only 0.8 percent of the national total, the effect was doubtless salutary in many more cases.

Short is at his best when detailing the workings and personnel of CWAECs. And in many instances he has chosen excellent examples to illustrate the information. One memorable example is an incident involving Lord Leconfield, who, when out foxhunting with hounds in 1940, encountered a village football match at which the hounds stopped. His lordship shouted at the players, “Haven't you got anything better to do in war time than play football?” What went through the villagers' minds can perhaps best be left to the imagination. As a vignette of British rural society and the assumptions of its hierarchical pecking order, this is peerless. And yet this anecdote, and all the other descriptions of events and people in the book, has to stand in lieu of any conceptual analysis of power, status, authority, bureaucracy, or state power (to name but a few concepts deployed in this book), since these are lacking. Thus, Short defines “class,” but he largely eschews its use as an analytical tool, and when writing about surveillance he gives Michel Foucault's work nothing more than a passing mention. While these are serious shortcomings, they have to be balanced against the fact that this book recognizes the role of CWAECs in the British war effort. Issuing guidance about land drainage may not be as intellectually demanding as breaking codes or as dangerous as storming beaches, but its cumulative thing-ummy-bobs certainly did help to win the war, and Short is right to sing the praises of those who did so.