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  • Soundtracks to the ‘People’s War'
  • Kate Guthrie (bio)

Of the various events commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the start of the Second World War, there was one of particular significance to the musical world: Vera Lynn released a compilation CD, We’ll Meet Again—The Very Best of Vera Lynn (2009), which quickly soared to the top of the UK album chart.1 Although not all the tracks were Second World War classics (track 2, ‘Auf Widerseh’n Sweetheart’, was an early 1950s hit, for example), the CD’s cover framed them within this period: the montage of romanticized images of wartime Britain set a youthful, beaming Lynn against the White Cliffs of Dover, two lovers on a railway platform, and airborne Spitfires. The historical imprecision is testimony to the impact that the war had on Lynn’s star persona: as The Guardian headline proclaimed, Lynn is ‘still our sweetheart’; still, that is, inextricably associated with this period, in spite of the long career she had after the war.2 At the same time, the cover reinforced the notion that this music defined the soundscape of wartime Britain—a soundscape that the CD promised to recreate for the nostalgic modern listener.

Lynn’s success was, by all accounts, unexpected. Not only did her 2009 album surpass those of Jamie T and the Arctic Monkeys in popularity, it also topped a collection of remastered Beatles’ albums released the same week. But perhaps critics should have been less surprised. After all, the Second World War still occupies a prominent place in British public consciousness. In classrooms and museums, films and books, pictures and music, the war is continually reimagined and reenacted—a process that influences more than just public perceptions of a historical event. The Second World War also continues to mediate British national identity in a powerful way: one need only recall recent references to the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ of the Queen’s Jubilee fans standing in the rain.3 The war’s powerful afterlife in the present raises a multitude of questions for historians. Whose war is being remembered? Where does individual [End Page 324] experience intersect with public memorialization? How has the meaning of this conflict been adapted in response to contemporary needs—political, social, cultural—across the past seventy-odd decades?

Of course, the past is always steeped in myths, but this is especially true of the Second World War. Nor are its myths just a product of the present: more than any previous conflict, the ‘Good War’ of 1939–45 was one of ideologies, fought as much with mass media—radio, cinema, gramophone, newspapers, and books—as with weapons. Even before it had begun, writers, politicians, and broadcasters were projecting ideas about war into the public imagination.4 While the sheer volume of surviving documents is a challenge to the historian, the conflicting narratives that weave through this surfeit of discourse have given rise to a historical landscape that has proved highly contentious. In particular, in an attempt to grasp what it was actually like living through war, and often motivated by personal political convictions, historians have frequently pursued a mission aiming to debunk the axioms of the previous generation.5 A brief historiography of the blitz, characterized by repeated struggles to relate official rhetoric to individual experience, provides an example. Official wartime discourse emphasized the way that the blitz drew the British public, particularly Londoners, together: the press described how people put their differences aside and united around a common, national cause. The reported dissolution of traditional class boundaries even encompassed the King and Queen: after the bombing of Buckingham Palace, the press printed photographs of them in front of the large pile of debris that was formerly one of the building’s wings.6 In depicting them among the ruins (rather than what remained) of their sizeable residence, the photographs underlined the shared experience of war. As one reporter explained, the bombers ‘made no discrimination between the lowest and highest homes in the City’.7 In 1991, however, Angus Calder published what has become a famous monograph, The Myth of the Blitz, in which he argued that such rhetoric revealed more about how the...

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