Millions Like Us, By Virginia Nicholson

 

Arifa Akbar
Thursday 24 May 2012 16:27 BST
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Sixty million women played their part on the home-front while 64,000 service-women helped to win the Second World War.

This wonderful book uses oral history and war diaries to bring some of them to life. Stories cut across classes, from debutantes to bakery girls, to show that for some, war offered work, liberation, love. For others, poverty, evacuation, prostitution, and brutality at the front.

From pre-war, when one woman remembered Hitler as a Charlie Chaplin figure, to 1947, when another witnessed the broken community of Germans ("one felt helpless"), these are nuanced, candid and moving accounts.

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