Christopher Somerville’s Our War: How the British Commonwealth Fought the Second World War is less a conventional military history than a collective memoir of the Commonwealth at war. Rather than concentrating on grand strategy, high command, or campaign analysis, Somerville builds his narrative around the voices of the men and women who served. Drawing heavily on interviews and personal recollections, he reconstructs the war as it was experienced by soldiers, sailors, airmen and service personnel from across the Commonwealth. Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians, Africans and Caribbean volunteers all appear in the narrative, giving the book a breadth that many Second World War histories lack. The result is a story that feels immediate and human rather than abstract. A point that I really enjoyed.

One of the book’s most valuable contributions is its emphasis on perspectives that are often marginalised in traditional accounts. Somerville gives considerable attention to the experiences of colonial troops and auxiliary personnel, including those who faced racial discrimination even while serving the imperial war effort. He also incorporates the voices of women in support and service roles, broadening the understanding of how the war was fought and sustained across the Commonwealth. These testimonies provide texture, depth, humour and boredom that sits alongside fear and grief, while pride in service is often tempered by frustration at unequal treatment or post-war neglect. In this sense the book works as a corrective to more narrowly British or European-centred narratives of the war.

The emotional tone of the book is one of its defining strengths. Because Somerville allows veterans to speak for themselves at length, the reader gains a sense of how individuals understood their own participation in the conflict and how those memories evolved over time. There is a reflective quality throughout, with many accounts looking back not only on wartime experiences but also on the social and political changes that followed. The war appears not as a single unified national story but as a shared yet uneven experience across a vast imperial system. That diversity of experience gives the book both its richness and its complexity. It is these personal looks back that make the book interesting.

At the same time, I was looking for a tightly structured operational history and this made the book less satisfying. Somerville does not attempt a comprehensive strategic analysis of Commonwealth operations, nor does he provide detailed examinations of campaigns or command decisions. Instead, the narrative moves between theatres and personal accounts in a way that reflects memory rather than chronology. Whilst the approach should be lauded it provide a very “bitsy” approach to the topic. For others this may create a vivid mosaic, but for me it felt very episodic or lacking in analytical depth. There are also occasional simplifications in the treatment of political and constitutional relationships within the Commonwealth, which I found a little frustrating, though these do not fundamentally undermine the book’s broader purpose.

Taken as a whole, Our War works best as a companion to more conventional military histories rather than a replacement for them. Although to be fair it was not trying to achieve this. Its strength lies in restoring individuality to a war often told through statistics and strategy. By foregrounding the lived experiences of Commonwealth servicemen and women, Somerville reminds the reader that the Second World War was fought not only by nations and armies but by millions of individuals whose stories rarely appear in standard accounts.

The book provides a clear and emotional view of the human side of the Commonwealth’s war. Again I picked it up for a few dollars, but I would definitely not buy it at full price.