Fighting on All Fronts: Popular Resistance in the Second World War

Seventy years separate the end of the Second World War from 2015 and yet the issues it raised remain fundamental to our understanding of the world today.

Contrary to later claims of anti-fascist intentions on the part of Allied governments, the Second World War began as a naked conflict between the haves and have-nots of empire. But the masses did not “keep calm and carry on” in the face of imperialism, or national or class oppression.

In places where Axis powers seized swathes of territory many
governments were driven into exile, so domestic opposition to occupation would depend on a tide of resistance from below. Elsewhere pre-war class struggles were given a new intensity by wartime conditions.

The result was a rejection of both foreign domination and a return to pre-war Depression. Millions fought for economic, political and social liberation despite appallingly difficult circumstances. The very existence of such mass popular movements meant the outcome of the war was not the one planned by the imperialists of either side.

Fighting On All Fronts explores the impact of these processes both in the war in the West (Algeria, Ireland, Jewish resistance in Eastern Europe, the Netherlands, Slovakia and the Soviet Union) and in the East (Australia, Burma, China, Japan and the Philippines).