Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939-1945.

Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945 By Sonya O. Rose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. xii plus 328 pp.).

Which People's War? analyzes the tensions and contradictions of home fronts in a time of war, in this case Great Britain during World War II. Professor Rose acknowledges the ability of British society to subsume its many tensions and temporarily bury many of its contradictions in the greater interest of winning the war against Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, this book demonstrates that the tensions were never fully resolved and that the contradictions remained, causing many unintended problems for British society. Rose aims to flesh out the many complexities hidden by the national "Myth of the Blitz" that depicts a unified nation rallying behind the national cause and subsuming individual interests and needs to a higher national goal.

The book's best chapters analyze the issues of gender and regionalism. While the problem of femininity has received considerable attention in the literature of societies at war, that of masculinity has not. Here Professor Rose makes her most valuable contribution. She argues that notions of British masculinity were constructed in opposition not only to the obvious category of British femininity, but to German hyper-masculinity as well. As a result, British masculinity was constructed as a controlled, temperate ideal type. British men could demonstrate their masculinity simply by donning the uniform, but they had to be careful not to display the unnecessarily martial masculinity of German males in uniform. In this way, British men could prove that they were serving the nation while avoiding the excesses of virility so patently obvious in their enemies.

This process placed additional strain on men not in uniformed service. Civilian males had to prove their masculinity and thus their value to Britain in wartime without the obvious symbol provided by active service. As a result, she argues, farmers and war workers struggled with images of masculinity, especially as women moved into their traditionally male workplaces and career fields. The feminization of shirkers and conscientious objectors in public discourse helped to masculinize male war workers and farmers. It also underscored the importance, understood in gendered terms, not only of soldiers, but of the men who worked to provide weapons to the fighting front and food to the home front.

Questions of nationalism invariably arose for a multi-national empire whose power structure all too often made the terms "England" and "Britain" synonymous. Professor Rose focuses on the experiences of the Scots and the Welsh, two minority groups that saw themselves as having separate identities from the English but nevertheless contributed to Great Britain's war work and uniformed services. The war, and the government's portrayal of it in "English" terms, she argues, actually increased regional sentiment when one might expect the experience of wartime to have had the opposite effect. Thus the war promoted dual identity and transferable ethnic affiliations.

Despite these strengths, the book's focus on the home front at the expense of the armed services occasionally clouds the larger picture. The military had long served as a unifying institution in Britain, notwithstanding the numerous locally-raised regiments. Even today, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, and English citizens are willing to serve in the same army, but will not play on the same World Cup soccer teams. The military traditionally offered men from various regions (historically including Catholic Ireland) a chance to demonstrate not only their personal masculinity, but the value of their region to the larger entities of Great Britain and the Empire. Thus Professor Rose reads Scottish soldiers' desire to wear a kilt in battle as an anti-English statement. Perhaps it was, but it was also a demonstration of the men's pride in their long-time military service to the same British Empire so dominated by Englishmen.

The absence of the war itself and the contexts it provided creates other confusions for the book. Professor Rose reads the enthusiasm with which Britons greeted a Soviet Youth Delegation in November, 1942 as an expression of working-class solidarity. I do not doubt that for some Britons it was. But I imagine that for most it was more an expression of solidarity with an ally that was suffering in a way Britain never did, not even in its worst nightmares. At the time that the Soviet delegation was on tour in Britain, Russians were engaged in the titanic battle for the city of Stalingrad. At the end of that battle, just nine children were reunited with both of their birth parents, making the much-debated issue of evacuating London's children to the countryside seem quite minor in comparison. Stalingrad, and the Russian campaign more generally, were proof of the inhuman sacrifices that the Soviet people were making. Without those sacrifices, the Germans would have been in a position to train their entire war machine against Great Britain. The Russian front prevented the Germans from being able to do so, and the British people knew it.

The book also has a few errors that merit note. Both the battles of Cambrai and Tobruk are misspelled, a misdemeanor offense, but indicative of the relative lack of concern for important questions of military history that are generally neglected here. Her undocumented assertion on page one that more British civilians died than servicemen would be fascinating, if only it were true. Great Britain lost an estimated 60,000 civilians in the war, but official figures list 264,443 uniformed dead and another 41,327 missing and presumed dead. Finally, although I know it is exceedingly pedantic of me to mention it, "Give Peace a Chance" is not a Beatles song, but a John Lennon song (p. 285).

Which People's War? offers probing and original arguments about British society at war. It also presents solid research and an excellent review of extant secondary material on the social history of home fronts. Professor Rose's exploration of tensions inside British society adds to our understanding of democracies and how they fight. The real story about Britain in these years remains the unity that Britain displayed despite these problems.

Michael Neiberg

United States Air Force Academy