Demob misery of many Second World War heroes revealed in new book

Oct 9 2009 by Paul Fulford, Birmingham Post

A new book reveals the sad reality that faced soldiers when they returned home in 1945. Richard Edmonds reports

Horrors of home

Demobbed – Coming Home Again after the Second World War by Allan Allport (Yale, £20.00).

After Belsen and Hiroshima silenced the world, the bells began to ring again. Suddenly it was summer in England and millions of ex-servicemen who had been uprooted from their lives and families to serve their governments in war were demobbed and returned home.

They wore demob suits given to them by the Government, often ill-fitting and rarely smart, but the men were back, the smiling heroes of a thousand street parties, cheered by family, friends and neighbours. Publicly they were riding in triumph, but these often disillusioned veterans came home to a sad Britain of ration books and a medical profession strapped for cash.

On the surface it was Blackpool every day, but scratch the surface and you would find marital infidelity, social disorder, deep disillusion and stringent austerity and poverty.

In this deeply sensitive account of what it was like to be a returning serviceman in 1945, Allan Allport turns back a disturbing page in this country’s history and makes us consider today’s young serving men returning from Afghanistan, frequently maimed and disabled, to an insufficient pension and insufficient medical treatment. Seventy-odd years ago it was much the same.

Using letters, diaries, reports, army data, law reports, criminal proceedings, as well as film and radio references, the author pens a many faceted, highly sensitive picture of a country exhausted by its war effort, crippled by war borrowing and in debt therefore to America, but above all, a country struggling to absorb its military survivors back into so-called normal civilian society.

Few, who had lived through the war at home could truly comprehend what it meant to be a serving man in a horrendous war. Some couldn’t even wait at home to find out.

When Eighth Army driver Maurice Merritt arrived home after six years abroad, notes Allport, no one was at home. Even the cat “couldn’t wait to get outside for a wee”, Merritt recalled years later:

“There was a short note on the kitchen table. ‘Make a cup of cocoa if you like – bloody cocoa, after all that time in the desert – and there’s a tin of pilchards in the larder if you feel peckish. Joan’. Pilchards! Ask any man who’s been in the army what he thinks of pilchards and see what reply you get...”

Many women had let their figures go while their men were at the front. The sylph a man had said goodbye to on the station had disappeared and he found a human barrage balloon waiting to say hello.

The agony aunts, such as Ann Temple in the Daily Mail dished out a quick crash course in grooming for wives. This included skin and hair care, advice on manicuring, etc, and it all went along with a faux happiness which had to be faked at the great reunion on the station with neither side knowing quite what to say.

Allport challenges in a crucial way conventional myths about the ease of transition to peace-time life signified by the comfortable nostalgia of political victory speeches and the celebratory and ever- present street parties.

Here is a book which brings individual stories to the fore and shows how many British families struggled, some times hopelessly, with the very real problems of assimilation after many years spent apart.

And it wasn’t only the domestic scene which was being torn apart. Many men came back to dull, routine jobs they had held before the war, and those who employed them found they were giving trivial instructions to decorated heroes short on patience and goodwill.

Other forms of stress in this area included humble, working-class families welcoming back a son who had suddenly gone up the social ladder and become ex-officer class. Mutual embarrassment set in on all sides.

One young officer, who had endured military rank and prestige, reported that he found his wife “rather common”. His language, like many another ex-officer now included words and phrases like “I say”, “actually” and “rather”.

In the curious post-war years, some men became tramps subsisting on meths and getting a lift here or there, often to a religious community who took them in temporarily.

Others took a chance on Group Captain Leonard Cheshire’s self-sustaining farm communes of ex-servicemen. But Cheshire’s vision of a quasi-religious utopia crumbled into vicious bickering between the utopians themselves and the Cheshire homes eventually became hospitals for sick men.

A darker psychotic element dogged many of the ex-soldiers.

The mental hospitals administered electric shock treatment to those who had slipped pitifully into physical breakdown. Once a week, generally on Thursdays, young wives waited with their husbands at the local bus stop in their town for the hospital bus.

The electric shock was administered to the patient often without quite knowing what the final effect would be. Later, the patient would stand in total silence with his wife who took him home until the next appointment a week later.

Gay men were given violent aversion therapy, with the same vague unconcern about the outcome. Shock treatment was again involved and drugs.

Some ex-servicemen died after the treatment, while others suffered dementia. It was the brave new world for heroes promised by Churchill.

Some unfaithful wives were divorced or even murdered by their demobilised husbands, other ex-servicemen turned to gambling, drink or crime, but many wandered the streets as homelessness figures soared.

Many civilians could not understand it and displayed indifference or hostility to the returning soldiers, while a number of politically disillusioned veterans carried out strikes and other acts of insubordination in protest at the slowness and inadequacy of the whole demobilisation process.

In this very fine and very moving book, Allan Allport concludes that despite the comparative wealth of 21st century Britain, we still do a disgracefully inadequate job of demobilising our young men and women from war and he suggests that the lessons that should have been learned from the experiences of veterans following the Second World War have been ignored. Few surprises there.