Book Review: Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War
Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War
Written by: Jonathan Fennell
Cambridge University Press, 2019,
ISBN 9781139380881, 966pp
Reviewed by: Dr William Westerman
There is an unfortunate tendency with some writers of popular-level military history to produce big books that say very little—at least, very little that is original or insightful. Jonathan Fennell’s Fighting the People’s War is a towering example of what can and should be done with a well-worn topic such as the Second World War. Fennell, Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College, London, has written the first single-volume history of the British and Commonwealth armies in the war. In doing so, he has produced a significant book, both in its scope and in its themes—and those seeking a fresh, complex and mature history of the conflict are the richer for it.
Fighting the People’s War is no mere retelling of the Second World War from the British perspective. For one thing, the narrative includes the Dominions (Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa) as well as British India, correctly treating them as vital components of Britain’s war effort. Fennell tells a truly expansive story about the British Commonwealth at war—a good corrective to narrow nationalist histories. The interconnections among and similarities between the elements of the ‘British world’ are an important part of understanding the problems that beset the armies of the British Commonwealth and the manner in which solutions were found.
A second distinctive aspect of the book (and perhaps its most intriguing) is the way Fennell explores soldiers’ political and social engagement and the subsequent effect on morale. He writes about the citizen armies of Britain and the Commonwealth as armies of citizens, diving into troves of underused censorship material and morale reports to present a picture of citizen soldiers who were concerned about the nature of the society and the political state for which they fought. For Britain and the Commonwealth, the Second World War was a ‘people’s war’, in that the people who participated in it had expectations about what their sacrifices meant to civil society, both in the present and in the future. This emerges most strikingly with India, a nation expected to provide manpower to Britain’s war effort while it was demanding greater autonomy from London. The friction of Quit India in 1942 demonstrated how the British Government’s intransigence failed to fully mobilise the Indian people and how these political tensions undermined morale in the Indian Army at a crucial time in the war.
Fighting the People’s War follows the familiar narrative contours of the war. After setting the scene, the book focuses on the campaigns and areas of operations where British Commonwealth armies fought, dividing itself neatly between the West (Western Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa) and the East (Burma and the South-West Pacific Area). Even at just under 700 pages (not including almost 200 pages of endnotes and bibliography), the size and scope of the task Fennell has set himself limits how deeply he can dive into the war (a problem for any single-volume history of such an immense conflagration). Accordingly, Fennell literally chooses his battles: Italy and Normandy, for instance, are more prominent than Burma and New Guinea. From an Australian perspective, no major operation involving Australians is missing, although the Syrian campaign of 1941 is only mentioned briefly, as are the final South-West Pacific Area campaigns of 1944–45. Massive operations such as the Australian involvement in Operation Cartwheel are treated well, but in the scope of the book only occupy a few pages. This is not a criticism of the work—it is entirely necessary and appropriate given the aim of Fennell’s project—but readers need to be aware that not all British and Commonwealth campaigns are covered equally.
In his final section, Fennell goes beyond VE (Victory in Europe) Day and VJ (Victory over Japan) Day to see how the soldiers’ experience of the war shaped the societies to which they returned. It is an important coda to the British and Commonwealth war effort, and makes sense of some of the dramatic political events in the war’s aftermath, such as the 1945 British general election result. This is just one example of where Fighting the People’s War is as much about the societies that created citizen armies as it is about tactics, operational art and strategy directing the way they fought. The book bridges the divide between operational military historians and social historians of war in a way that should be illuminating for those who work in both fields. Crucially, he gives agency back to citizen soldiers, who are treated not just as cogs in a great military machine but as important in shaping their civil societies.
Overall, Fennell has written a fascinating book that blends narrative with analysis to produce an integrated assessment of mobilisation, battle, campaign and strategy, and also considers the geopolitical and socioeconomic preludes to and consequences of the war. Fighting the People’s War provides much food for thought for those interested in a deeper understanding of the Second World War and the citizen armies that fought it. It asks important questions about the obligations the state owes to its soldiers and it speaks to the challenges of having a cause worth fighting for, an issue no less relevant for professional armies fighting modern wars of choice.
