Creating the People's War: Civil Defence Communities in Second World War Britain by Jessica Hammett (review)

Reviewed by: Creating the People's War: Civil Defence Communities in Second World War Britain by Jessica Hammett Lucy Noakes Hammett, Jessica – Creating the People's War: Civil Defence Communities in Second World War Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. 262 p. Writing in her local civil defence magazine in December 1940, at the height of the London Blitz, an air raid warden in south London claimed, "At least one good thing has come out of this war. It has fostered comradeship and goodwill among us as never before. The great stand against the Blitz has brought us together in a manner unparalleled in our national history. … ARP has done something more than answer the murderous assault from the skies. It has softened our hearts towards our fellow man" (p. 72). In the midst of death and destruction, with sleepless nights and difficult and often unpleasant duties often the norm, this Air Raid Precautions (ARP) worker emphasized the sense of community and camaraderie that the war had engendered among her fellow volunteers. As Hammett's book examining the creation of community in wartime shows, civilian volunteers on the British home front during the Second World War often developed a language of comradeship more often associated with front line military units. Of course, in many ways, the air raid wardens and other civil defence volunteers—fire fighters, first aid workers, gas and heavy rescue teams—were on the front line of battle, particularly in the towns and cities that were the target of heavy and repeated aerial attacks between 1940 and 1945. Together with other civilians, including those who worked directly for the war effort, and those for whom the war was a part of daily life via measures such as conscription of loved ones, rationing, the blackout, and evacuation, civil defence workers were participants in the "people's war." The construction and understanding of the people's war at a grassroots level, through individual and group narratives, is the focus of Hammett's fascinating book. The meaning and indeed the very existence of the people's war has been the subject of discussion almost since the term first appeared in wartime Britain. Closely linked with the duties of wartime citizenship, the concept of the people's war circulated on multiple levels in the war years, appearing in political speeches, in newspaper columns, in propaganda, film, and over the airwaves. While its origins were radical, with the first usages of the term referring back to the people's militias of the Spanish Civil War, its meanings were diffuse and broadly interpreted. This very diffuseness has meant that historians have returned to the term again and again, considering who it included, what membership of the "people's war" entailed, its links with different forms of citizenship, and whether it even existed in any [End Page 191] meaningful sense during the war years. As Hammett shows, the people's war not only existed as a set of values with which people aligned themselves in wartime; it was also closely linked both to ideas of citizenship and to membership of a wartime community. When used unreflectively by those studying Britain's Second World War, the people's war can serve to elude and simplify both the lived experience of wartime for individuals and the complex means by which a society composed of people with often very different politics, beliefs, and desires not only held together over almost six years of conflict but went on to create a more egalitarian national community in the form of the post-war welfare state. By focusing not on the public discourse of the people's war but its use by the people engaged in civil defence, Hammett illuminates both its complexity and its success. Through a series of chapters focused on different elements of the lived experience of civil defence work, including often overlooked groups such as adolescents and conscientious objectors, Hammett demonstrates both the inclusivity and the flexibility of the people's war. For male veterans of the First World War working within civil defence the rhetoric of the people's war could provide them with the means to assert a separate, high status, analogous to...

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