In the way they acted, the British civilians who apprehended downed Luftwaffe pilots generally answered to the characteristics of a “People’s War” – that is, a war that was democratic in its recruitment and liberal in its methods. These collective behaviors, which offer a positive image of the morale and political morality of the British people of the time, dovetail with what was until the 1970s the dominant historical analysis. In contrast to French historiography on the France of 1940, which has been almost universally negative from the 1940s to the present, British historiography prior to the 1970s presented a favorable image of wartime English society. Starting in that decade, as we shall see, it became divided over the question of whether the “People’s War” was myth or reality.