Review of "Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War (original) (raw)

2020, Canadian Military History

After a brief synopsis of the disaster that befell the unit, there is an epitaph. It reads, "In memory of the men of The Black Watch of Canada and their comrades who fought for the liberation of Europe and the hope of a better world." The final part of that sentence carries meaning beyond the popular expression that Canadian servicemen and women fought for our freedom. Fighting the People's War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War by Jonathan Fennell, Senior Lecturer at King's College London, tackles this subject head-on. Exactly what was the better world that Commonwealth soldiers were fighting for? Were they simply motivated to defeat the Axis powers and restore the prewar and pre-depression status quo? Or did their motivation come from something greater? As Fennell demonstrates, victory was not enough: "For the ordinary citizen soldier, the war was, at heart, about building a better postwar world at home" (p. 19). The war shaped these soldiers and, in turn, they shaped postwar societies across the waning British Empire. This core idea spans from multiple "key interlocking strands," as Fennell calls them. The first is the cross-national scope of the book. The British and Commonwealth Armies "were purposely designed to fight as a multinational team and they must be studied accordingly in that light" (p. 5). Although most of the chapters in the book are organized both chronologically and by campaign, the experiences of soldiers in the Australian, British, Canadian, Indian, New Zealand, and South African armies receive coverage. Fennell weaves two further strands within and between each of these institutions. Fighting the People's War is not simply a single volume operational history of the Second World War campaigns of the British and Commonwealth armies. Fennell also aims to establish the relationship between the state, the home front, and the soldier at brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk