Military history is a booming genre. Whether it is because of the ongoing centenary of the WWI battles, or because Britain is both Brexiting from its recent history and secularising away from its roots that a nostalgic search for identity is underway, I cannot say. I suspect that both processes are involved. I also suspect that WWII studies gain readers who are attracted to a period in history in which Britain was engaged in one of history's few genuinely 'just wars', as if there was any moral connection between the sacrifices of the 1940s and Britain of today. While I have read a little about wars, of battlefield experiences, conflicts, generals and the like; I am far more drawn to those few historians who examine the 'home-front' in war. It seems to me that battles, for all their horror and intensity; pass into history along with the fallen; but the effects of battles live on and are of more lasting significance. Perhaps too, such histories more closely relate to my experiences. I have spent time as an at-home parent, raising children - I have never been in the armed forces. Virginia Nicholson is a first-rate war-historian who writes about the social consequences of war. Her former book, "Singled Out" dealt with the effect of the loss of so many men of one generation on the women of the WWI era. (My review of this title was published in Solas Magazine) 'Millions Like Us' is Nicholson's follow-on book, exploring the lives of British women as they entered WWII, engaged in it, were changed by the experience and how this affected them in the post-war era.
In traditional WWII books, the central narrative is of the progress of the war, from Appeasement through to VE Day, with landmarks such as Pearl Harbour and D-Day lining the route. The themes are then occasionally illustrated with individual anecdotes. Nicholson rather deftly reverses this norm, basing the book around the lives of women as they experience conflict and its effects. That is not to say that the progress of the war itself is not here - it it, but the ongoing fortunes of The Allies is the backdrop to individual women's stories. Many of these unfolding personal dramas are very moving, many compelling, and all rather insightful as they explore the departure of sons and husbands, rationing, austerity, bombing, bereavement and of course, the drafting of millions of women into the non-combatant elements of the war effort.
It was in the vivid descriptions of the difficulties faced on the home-front that I imagined - perhaps more profoundly than ever, what my two Grandmothers must have experienced. One in the North of England, with three small children living through the bltiz; and the other first serving in the WAAF, and then having a child, then being evacuated from the city. Although none of the life-stories in the book were of people who in themselves were much like either of my two grandmothers, there was enough of the life, times, values, and struggles of the period here for me to be able to picture them in it, which was actually rather sobering. To read such things and realise that it was so comparatively recent, is hard to comprehend.
Nicholson's stories of women's lives are taken from a wealth of research from diarists, official sources, post-war memoirs, and an array of interviews she conducted with elderly women who remembered the era. Yet this weight of data is presented in lively prose which is accessible and highly readable.
Along with mere survival, and the background story of the war itself, Nicholson guides the reader through an exploration of how the women of that generation faced alarming challenges and in the words of so many of them, "just got on with it..... you had to". The title, "Millions Like Us", was initially a 1940s public information film about the struggles on the home front, but is used by Nicholson to indicate that the stories she presents are not the exceptions but the norm. In the book we discover how women understood their role, understood femininity, and how family life was structured. We learn about the practicalities of family life, in Britain emerging from the depressed 30s, and how women felt about courtship, marriage, romance, sex, children, work, leisure and belief. Critically, we are guided through the process by which so many of their assumptions and values were challenged, as they negotiated the difficulties of war, and the very different problems of peace. Of course, many women had worked outside the home for the fist time, and were unwilling to retreat into their domestic limitations after their menfolk were demobbed. The home-front was in many ways a highly feminised environment. Here the oft-noted effect of war to promote social change, to fight not just a distant enemy but for a better future at home, laid some of the first seeds of feminism. Conversely the all-male fighting units of the British Army, who fought, and suffered together, seemed to have done so motivated (at least in part), to protect their women and children; and expected to come back to a heroes-welcome and domestic coronation. Unsurprisingly for many of Nicholson's women, 1946 was a stressful year.
Military history is a booming genre. If you habitually read about Montgomery, of D-day and of Stalingrad; make sure you balance that by reading something like Nicholson, and see into the other side of the conflict as it unfolded at home.
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