The ‘People’s War’ in Concrete and Stone: Death and the Negotiation of Collective Identity in Second World War Britain
Journal: The English Historical Review
Year: 2023

Abstract This article explores ideas and feelings about the burial of the war’s dead, and their memorialisation. It investigates the relationship between a drive to remember the conflict’s dead as members of the collective wartime nation, and a desire by many of the bereaved to emphasise familial ties and the individual lives of the dead. While this was not a new concern—and had already been seen, for example, in debates about where to bury, and how to commemorate, the dead of the First World Wa