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Fighting the
People’s War The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War
Jonathan Fennell
Armies of the Second
World War Series Cambridge: University
Press 2019 Hardcover. xxxiv+932
pages. ISBN 978-1107030954. £25 / $
35
Reviewed
by Charles Giovanni Vanzan Coutinho New York
In the past twenty years there has been a neo-revolution
in the history of war studies as it relates to issues concerning morale. Think
of it as the intermingling of that very old-time staple, war studies, with what
is in effect the social history of the military during military conflict. The
more recent examples of the genre are Alexander Watson and Jonathan Boff’s
books on the German and British armies during the Great War.(1) Following this
trend is Jonathan Fennell’s new book on the British Imperial armies during the
Second World War : Fighting the People’s War: The British and
Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War, an expanded version of
his earlier book dealing with the British and Commonwealth armies in the North
African campaign.(2) In this new study, Fennell expands his terrain by analyzing at
various points in time during the Second World War, the British, Canadian,
Australian, New Zealand and South Africa forces. It is as Fennell correctly
says the first single-volume historical study dealing with all of these forces
during the Second World War. Using findings based upon voluminous archival
research in all the countries concerned, Fennell argues that morale of the
British and Commonwealth fighting forces was strongly dependent upon conditions
on the home front in each of the three countries concerned and in turn morale
was crucial in the fighting effectiveness of these forces. As Fennell posits
it: “Quite simply, socio-political
factors were central to the performance of the British and Commonwealth Armies
in the Second World War” [3].
According to Fennell the impact of socio-political
variables was not merely one-way: it was equally the case that military morale
in each of the forces studied also had a profound impact upon the
socio-political establishment at home. Thus for Fennell, the armed forces’ influence
on the domestic UK political scene resulting in the Labour Party electoral
landslide in 1945 was not an outlier, but something which in different, but
ultimately similar ways occurred in all the countries concerned. So, for
Fennell, the triumph of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party in 1948 was something
which occurred due in important part to South Africa’s experience of the Second
World War. Employing primary resource materials that have not previously ever been
used or used so consistently, especially censorship summaries of upwards of
seventeen million letters home written by soldiers serving at the front, in
addition to morale reports complied by the various armies, Fennell claims that these
sources “provide an authoritative
insight into the many of the key factors that affected citizen soldiers in
pursuing victory and building peace” [14]. Fennell’s narrative
is chronologically a simple one: from the defeats suffered by the British and
Imperial Armies in the first three years of the war in France, North Africa and
the Far East at the hands of the Germans and the Japanese to the turn of the
tide in late 1942 and early 1943, then to the victory years of 1944 and 1945.
As per Fennell, it was the state of military morale as well as morale and
conditions on the home front which helped in many cases to decide the issue of
defeat or victory for the British and Commonwealth forces. As Fennell puts it: “The War demonstrated the extent to which
combat effectiveness was dependent on the cohesion of British and Commonwealth
societies” [697]. With the key to
British and Commonwealth victory for Fennell not merely the (by 1942 and
thereafter) superiority in material over their Axis opponents, nor the manifold
advantages enjoyed by the British due to the Enigma Machine, but also the fact
that skillful and intelligent commanders like Field-Marshal Montgomery or Sir
William Slim were unlike, say, Field-Marshal Lord Wavell or General Arthur
Percival, able to utilize the forces under their command in ways that did not
require that these forces fight in ways that were beyond their capabilities.
For as Fennell sees it, morale is not only something resulting from a
combination of conditions on the home front and the fighting front, but also a
result of being properly trained and prepared to fight and fight well.
According to Fennell, it was the failure of the BEF to have been properly
trained more than any other factor which led to bad morale and thus to military
defeat in the spring of 1940 by the German Army. For Fennell, the BEF was not
lacking in equipment, nor was it lacking in new thinking by way of tactics. Similarly,
he argues that the same failures in training and morale led to the various
defeats suffered in the North African and Far Eastern campaigns in 1940, 1941
and 1942. Likewise, it was the new tactics of Montgomery and Slim, in
conjunction with and shaping of, the morale of the British and Commonwealth
armies, which allowed the series of victories beginning with El-Alamein in
October-November 1942. And, while Fennell concludes that the British and
Imperial armies were never the equal of the German army, man for man, he does
state that by the time the war was over, they had improved considerably. What is one to make
of Fennell’s opus? First, one must, regardless of anything else, admire the
sheer amount of archival research that went into this study, which weighs in at
700 pages of text and another one-hundred and fifty pages of end-notes. Anyone
who conducts research on four different continents in five different countries
spanning the globe must be congratulated. With that being said, there are if
not serious then significant issues with both Fennell’s thesis and his
methodology. Specifically, Fennell’s argument is that change in morale in the
British & Commonwealth armies were the key to their changed fortunes on the
battlefield. The problem with this is it has very much a ‘post hoc, ergo
propter hoc’ logic to it. So in Fennell’s telling, what other historians might
regard as equally if not more important variables in the recovery of British
& Commonwealth performance, such as an almost complete command of the air,
a marked superiority in material and more often than not, a superiority in numbers
on the ground, as well as the possession of the Ultra machine, almost goes for
naught. Indeed it could be argued that the recovery in morale had more to do
with the fact that the increasingly massive superiority of Allied forces on the
ground and in the air due to these previously mentioned variables naturally led
to a positive change in the psychology of the British & Commonwealth forces.
In the case of the Monte Cassino battles, Fennell stretches credibility in stating
that the final Allied victory was due primarily to an improvement in morale –
especially given the fact that the Allied superiority in manpower over the
Germans was upwards of a ratio of eight to one at times [411]. Similarly,
problematic in the same post hoc
fashion is Fennell’s attributing to changes in the domestic political scenes,
in these various countries, the issue of army morale. So for example, while
Fennell posits that the ex-servicemen’s votes in the 1948 election in South
Africa made the Nationalist electoral victory possible, he himself admits that “there are, unfortunately, no known
documentary or other sources that can definitely prove or disprove whether
English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking veterans voted for Malan [National
Party leader] in 1948” [667]. Finally, while given
his vast archival research it behoves one not to belabor this point, it is
somewhat disappointing that Fennell fails to utilize one – yes,
one – non-English language source, either primary
or even secondary in this book. At the very least, a perusal of German
post-battle reports might have considerably supported Fennell’s thesis. In this
respect, Fennell’s book does not measure up to either Jonathan Boff or
Alexander Watson’s studies. To conclude, I would rate Fennell’s book highly in
exploring his morale-as-the-key-to-victory thesis via massive archival research.
Nevertheless, one could perhaps make the caveat that in assigning morale as the
key variable, Fennell has perhaps put the historical cart before the horse. _____________________________ (1) Alexander Watson. Enduring
the Great War : Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British
Armies, 1914-1918 (2008); Jonathan Boff. Winning and Losing on the
Western Front : The British Third Army and the Defeat of Germany in 1918
(2012); Haig’s Enemy : Crown Price Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the
Western Front (2018). (2) Jonathan Fennell. Combat
and Morale in the North African Campaign : The Eighth Army and the Path to
El-Alamein (2011).
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