We have just lived through nearly two years of vox populi. The 50th anniversary of VE Day and, to a lesser extent, VJ Day provoked a massive assemblage of what people had actually said in the course of the Second World War. It was as though these voices had been held back for half a century and were now bursting out. Martin Gilbert in The Day the War Ended, a recent account of the year 1945, showed how inexorably this could happen. In appealing to the public for material from those times, he had imagined that such replies as he might receive 'would provide an interesting if essentially minor element to the book; a sideline to history'. He was wrong. In the end he had to change the balance of the whole work to accommodate the hundreds of relevant contributions sent in.

LRB 21 March 1996 | PDF Download