Millions like us

The subtitle of Millions like us, by Virginia Nicholson, is "Women's lives in war and peace 1939-1949." I was 12, about 3 weeks short of 13, when World War II began on September 3, 1939, and an 18-year old second year medical student when it ended in 1945. I grew up in Australia of course, far away from the air raids, blitzkrieg, invasions, occupations, Nazi oppression, subjugation, the Holocaust; it all came closer after December 7 1941 and the lightning fast advance of the Japanese as far as Papua-New Guinea, the bombing of Darwin, midget submarines in Sydney Harbour. I grew up among women because most of the men were in uniform fighting in war zones far away. Some of my cousins and other close female relations had experiences very like those described in this excellent book. It is social history of a high order, a beautifully constructed synthesis of Virginia Nicholson's own writing and excerpts and quotations from the diaries, letters, memoirs, jottings of large numbers of women in all walks of life, all classes of the conspicuously stratified British society, all of it evoking the dramatic dislocation of the lives of women and girls by the total war between the aggressive forces of the Nazis, fascists of Germany and Italy, later Japan too, and those opposing aggression, Poland, France and Britain to begin with, Britain alone for about 18 months from May 1940 until December 1941, when the reluctant US forces joined the fight, tipped the balance, and with the insane Nazi assault on the USSR bringing the Soviet Union into the war on our side, the tide slowly turned in favour of the Allied forces. No other history of that tumultuous period focuses on what happened to the millions of British women whose lives were turned upside down by the 1939-45 world war and its aftermath. I think this is an excellent book, first class social history, very readable, sufficiently scholarly to be taken seriously. I've read Virginia Nicholson's social history of the subset of people she calls Bohemians who lived on the margins of respectable society in France, Germany, Britain in the early 20th century. She has written another book of social history called Singled Out, which is about the 2 million British women left unmarried because of the slaughter of their husbands, sweethearts, potential husbands, in the suicidal war of 1914-1918. After Millions Like Us, this has moved up to second place on my list of books to read. If you haven't read Millions Like Us, add it immediately to your reading list. I recommend it without reservations.