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Fred M. Leventhal, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War. By Mark Connelly. Pearson Longman, Harlow, 2004. vii + 328 pp. ISBN 0-582-50607-7, £19.99, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 16, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 509–511, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwi042
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In contrast to his recently published The Great War, Memory and Ritual (2002), which closely examined memorials in East London between 1916 and 1939, Connelly's latest book ranges more broadly over the mythologized aspects of the Second World War. Targeting those he dismisses as ‘sensationalist revisionists’, especially Clive Ponting and Nicholas Harman, he defends the traditional myths about the Second World War less because of their veracity than because, readily assimilated to national culture, they have proven impervious to assault. Revisionists who have tried to suggest alternative accounts, stripped of propaganda, have had virtually no effect on the way that Dunkirk and the Blitz are popularly remembered. Nor is it merely the debunkers whose impact has been negligible: historians who have provided documentary evidence of faltering morale, class conflict, urban crime, or even defeatist impulses have been unable to dislodge the conventional image of a People's War in which a united civilian population remained steadfast, resolutely patriotic, and self-sacrificing.
