For all fans of Dad's Army and Call the Midwife, a warm-hearted history of Britain's countryside during the second world war -- and how that war changed rural Britain forever. Filled with evacuees, Land Girls, stories of rationing and the Home Guard, this is social history at its best. In England, Scotland and Wales, the Second World War dragged rural communities out of their former environment and changed their lives forever. Whilst urban people were liable to have their homes destroyed by bombs, rural folk had their territory invaded: evacuee children were dumped on them by the thousand, land was arbitrarily taken for airfields and other military installations, prisoner-of-war camps brought captured enemy to close quarters. Cornwall was closed to outsiders for a time, as was the whole of north-west Scotland, which was used for Commando training and became a Protected Area. The Government subjected farmers to draconian regulations about what crops they might or might not grow. The results often involved severe clashes of culture and a remarkable effort of resourcefulness. Drawing on anecdotes from diaries, letters, books, official records and interviews Duff Hart-Davis conveys something of the strangeness of the changes wrought in Britain by these odd combinations of hardship and farce. Nostalgic, amusing and filled with warm human detail, Our Land at War is a living history -- a rich, textured account of the profound changes to ordinary rural lives produced by an extraordinary time.

Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939-45 PDF

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