This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.
Philip Toynbee reviews J.B. Priestley's new demob novel, Three Men in New Suits for the New Statesman:
I doubt whether Priestley has fully appreciated the immediate problem. The real spiritual and psychological difficulties of the returning soldier will be far grimmer than the mere opposition of the old gang. War, and the wastes of German Europe, must have destroyed many old accepted values, left many wounds and many voids. Priestely's too simple hope is that the soldier has learned what's what and that he must stick by his pals and fight for it. But this fight against the old gang will be a mere skirmish before the real battle begins against the barreness of the human soul ...
A servicewoman reader of Woman complains about the treatment she and a comrade received at a recent dance when dressed in civvies: "Normally neither of us is a wallflower, but on this occasion there we stood, two ATS in mufti, and were completely ignored by the men, who obviously preferred the uniformed girls. When we did get a partner, we found they asked: ‘how did you dodge call-up’ and we finally retreated into a corner, defeated. What a far cry this is from the days of 1940, when men all declared they loathed the idea of women in uniform.”
End of month accounting: on June 30, 1945, there were 4,653,000 men and 437,200 women in His Majesty's armed and auxiliary forces.
During June, 1945, 22,108 men and 9,110 women were released under the Class A scheme; with 32,120 men and 11,694 women being released in total (including miscellaneous discharges on compassionate and medical grounds). No men or women were released under the Class B scheme.
Data from Fighting With Figures: A Statistical Digest of the Second World War (HMSO, 1995).
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