Ow! That Unlovely War

THE PEOPLE'S WAR, BRITAIN 1939-1945 by Angus Calder. 656 pages. Pantheon. $8.95.

In the Century of the Common Man, the grandeurs and miseries of war were extended to more and more of the hitherto underprivileged. The guns of August (1914) ushered in universal conscription to sustain the mass armies. The warplanes of 1939 ensured a mass distribution of war to civilians--sadly changed from keeping the home fires burning to putting them out. Such thoughts are provoked by Angus Calder's The People's War.

The title is just. For the British, this was not so much a war of pitched battles between armies as it was of ersatz eggs, smashed plumbing, maimed children and "austerity"--general misery that is orchestrated by enemy bombs and British bureaucrats. The 67 pictures that serve as illustrations to the book will be emotive to the older generation in Britain and should be informative to the young everywhere. Calder himself is young. He was born in 1942, not far removed from Britain's "finest hour," according to Churchill. The calculative eye of history, however, might identify it as Britain's most miserable hour since the Black Death some 600 years earlier.

Sense of Community. Calder ably combines the methods of the journalist, historian, sociologist, researcher, pollster and commentator to tell how it was to be a British civilian in Hitler's war. The cumulative effect is occasionally overwhelming. The innocent bystander (if 25 years' distance makes the reader innocent) picks his way through the human rubble of five ruinous years of war and still wonders how the British managed to "take it." The impression is clear, though, that only a people long nourished by a willingness to "put up with things" and a strong sense of community could have done so.

Along with everything else that he does, Calder is a part-time poet. But recreated memories of his nation under the bombs do not inspire him to poetry. Indeed, there was precious little "war poetry" from World War II. Calder lets World War I Poet Robert Graves explain why: the soldier "cannot feel that his rendezvous with death is more certain than that of his Aunt Fanny, the fire-watcher."

The absence of poetics--and heroics --seems appropriate, but the reader is warned that Calder's historic rehash is served up with the left hand. Tories are the villains--for Munich, for building the wrong sort of planes, for sheer Blimpishness. The fact that the Labor Party kept on thinking that it could have peace and disarmament is barely mentioned. Such partisanship ill becomes a study that ends with the Empire overseas liquidated to the tune of 4,000 million pounds sterling, 500,000 dwellings smashed, 355,000 dead (62,000 of them civilians), more rationing looming up, and "with spirit and flesh rebelling against further effort." A more fitting and more sensible attitude was struck by the old Tory Churchill when, after the people's war, the people voted him out of office. "Ingratitude," suggested his physician, Lord Moran. "Oh, no," Churchill answered at once. "I wouldn't call it that. They have had a very hard time."

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