The 'People's War'?

In 2021 I published a long article in the English Historical Review which looked at the origins of the ideas that ‘Britain was alone’ in 1940/41 and that it fought a ‘people’s war’ (‘The Nationalisation of British History: Historians, Nationalism and the Myths of 1940’). The article grew out of my 2011 book on the history of the British second world war (Britain’s War Machine) in which I had shown that if anything was said to be alone in 1940/41 it was the whole British Empire, not Britain, and that the term ‘people’s war’ had various differing meanings in the war itself, including one which claimed that Britain was not fighting such a war. In the article I traced wartime usages further and looked into when and in what senses historians came to use ‘Britain was alone’ and ‘people’s war’.

The English Historical Review, in the first of a new feature called Forum, have published three papers upholding the standard view that a particular form of understanding of ‘people’s war’ was the dominant ideology of wartime Britain (Lucy Noakes, ‘The ‘People’s War’ in Concrete and Stone: Death and the Negotiation of Collective Identity in Second World War Britain’ ; Sean Dettman and Richard Toye, ‘The Discourse of ‘The People’s War’ in Britain and the USA during World War II; and, Jessica Hammett and Henry Irving, ‘Renegotiating Citizenship through the Lens of the ‘People’s War’ in Second World War Britain’). The papers, and one in particular, that by Sean Dettman and Richard Toye, take issue with my claims about wartime usages. As part of the Forum I have responded to the multiple misunderstandings of what my paper argued and tried to make sense of this as well as pointing to the ways historians have already looked afresh at the history of the war (‘A Cliché to Be Avoided Like the Plague: The ‘People’s War’ in the History and Historiography of the British Second World War’).