David Edgerton has argued that the term ‘people’s war’ was not much in use during World War II and that where it did occur it was used in ‘a critical and oppositional, rather than an official-celebratory’ sense. We show that Edgerton’s conclusions are an artefact of his limited source-base and narrow reading of the evidence. The phrase ‘people’s war’ was in fact used in Ministry of Information propaganda and cropped up widely in the press, leading contemporaries to comment on its overfamiliarity. But we do not merely seek to restore previous interpretations. We show the longer history of ‘people’s war’ terminology in both Britain and America. We further demonstrate how Britain’s US sympathisers, such as the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow, used this language to argue that British class barriers were breaking down, thus making the country worthy of American support. British policymakers consciously encouraged this, and there were consequences for US domestic politics too. The concept of the ‘people’s war’, then, was a contemporary Anglo-American co-production. It was not, as Edgerton wrongly suggests, an invention of the historians of the 1960s and after.

中文翻译：

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二战期间英美“人民战争”话语

大卫·埃哲顿认为，“人民战争”一词在第二次世界大战期间并没有被广泛使用，而在确实发生的地方，它只是用于“批评和反对，而不是官方庆祝”。我们表明，埃杰顿的结论是他有限的资料来源和对证据的狭隘解读的产物。事实上，“人民战争”一词曾在新闻部的宣传中使用，并在媒体上广泛出现，导致同时代人对其过于熟悉的评论。但我们不仅仅寻求恢复以前的解释。我们展示了英国和美国“人民战争”术语的悠久历史。我们进一步展示了英国的美国同情者，例如哥伦比亚广播公司记者爱德华·R·默罗，如何使用这种语言来论证英国的阶级壁垒正在被打破，从而使该国值得美国的支持。英国政策制定者有意识地鼓励这一点，这也对美国国内政治产生了影响。那么，“人民战争”的概念是当代英美共同创造的。正如埃哲顿错误地暗示的那样，它并不是 20 世纪 60 年代及之后历史学家的发明。