Demobbed | Alan Allport | Review by The Spectator

In August 1945 Cyril Patmore of the Royal Scots Fusiliers returned on compassionate leave from India. A few weeks earlier his wife had written to confess that she was expecting a child by an Italian prisoner of war. ‘Why oh why darling did I have to let you down, me who loves you more than life itself?’ she wrote, pleading for forgiveness and a reconciliation. It was in vain. Patmore stabbed his wife to death. ‘I live for my children and my wife,’ he told the police. ‘I hope the children will be well looked after.’

This bleak anecdote introduces a catalogue of disasters. At the end of the war five million Britons, 90 per cent of them male, were in uniform. The vast majority wanted to be allowed to go home as quickly as possible to resume their civilian life. Achieving this posed huge logistic problems. Bevin’s demobilisation plan was on the whole fair and easy to understand but many thousands of conscripts still felt that they were being discriminated against in favour of less deserving rivals.

Even where there were no such grievances, the pace of demobilisation seemed intolerably slow. Shortage of transport and post-war military commitments compounded the strains on an over-extended administration. With nothing to do and often enduring lamentable physical conditions, resentment simmered and sometimes exploded into violent protest. ‘An ugly mood is setting in,’ thought one ranker in the Far East. ‘If things are not hurried up there will be a considerable amount of trouble.’ There was.

This was just the beginning. When the soldiers were finally demobbed they often found that they were unprepared for civilian life. When the war was over, remembered one soldier, ‘I came to the surface like a blinded pit pony.’ Men who had learned how to handle great responsibilities and face alarming dangers found themselves expected to resume the menial tasks which had been their lot before the war. ‘In 1945 ex-servicemen with leadership experience were two-a-penny’, writes Allport. ‘Practical commercial skills were what employers were looking for.’