The Discourse of ‘The People’s War’ in Britain and the USA during World War II

Abstract

David Edgerton has argued that the term ‘people’s war’ was not much in use during World War II and that where it did occur it was used in ‘a critical and oppositional, rather than an official-celebratory’ sense. We show that Edgerton’s conclusions are an artefact of his limited source-base and narrow reading of the evidence. The phrase ‘people’s war’ was in fact used in Ministry of Information propaganda and cropped up widely in the press, leading contemporaries to comment on its overfamiliarity. But we do not merely seek to restore previous interpretations. We show the longer history of ‘people’s war’ terminology in both Britain and America. We further demonstrate how Britain’s US sympathisers, such as the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow, used this language to argue that British class barriers were breaking down, thus making the country worthy of American support. British policymakers consciously encouraged this, and there were consequences for US domestic politics too. The concept of the ‘people’s war’, then, was a contemporary Anglo-American co-production. It was not, as Edgerton wrongly suggests, an invention of the historians of the 1960s and after.