Excerpt from Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009):
On V-E Day, over five million Britons were in the uniform of His Majesty’s Armed and Auxiliary Forces. Nine out of ten of them were male, the vast majority wartime conscripts or volunteers serving for the duration only. Most had been in the Army, Navy, or Air Force since at least 1941. Millions were abroad, a vast expatriate community of exiles scattered haphazardly from Norway to the Kenyan highlands to the fringes of Antarctica. Over a quarter-of-a-million of them had been overseas continuously for more than five years. Even the lucky minority who had spent the entire war on ‘home’ service had usually been billeted or bivouacked far from everyone and everything familiar. By the midpoint of the war, almost half of all British civilians had been separated from “someone dear to them” by military service.
These husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers had been rudely uprooted from their families, friends, and workmates by the national emergency. Now, their task done, they would be demobilized – ‘demobbed’ – and returned home. It is no wonder that servicemen were eager, even desperate, for this to happen as soon as possible: they formed a graying fraternity. Almost half of them were aged thirty or over by 1945. The war years had been long; there were apprenticeships and careers to resume, relationships to consecrate and children to nurture. The single biggest wartime topic of inquiry amongst letter writers to Union Jack, the Eighth Army’s newspaper, had been: “when are we going to get home?” Wartime servicemen were generally emphatic that they were short-term citizen-soldiers rather than regulars – not “faceless khaki pieces of a great game of Ludo,” as novelist Anthony Burgess put it, but “civilians in temporary fancy dress” whose time was now served.
Reabsorbing over a quarter of the working male population back into civilian life was a daunting proposition. The weight of responsibility was enormous. In a December 1943 poll, demobilization was voted the most urgent postwar challenge facing the nation. It would require “the greatest social and industrial operation” in British history ...
On May 12, 1945, a week after the German surrender, [the Minister of Labour and National Service] Ernest Bevin announced in the House of Commons that the first release cohort would be discharged on June 18 – ‘D’ (for demobilization) Day.
The essential details of Bevin’s demob plan had been announced back in September 1944. It divided servicemen into two categories, or classes. Most men – nine out of ten – were in Class A. For these men, the order in which they would be demobilized was calculated according to two factors: their date of birth, and the month that their war service began. Two months of service were equivalent in value to one year of age. Each servicemen was allocated a Release Group Number that he could consult on a simple table published in the official Forces guidebook, Release and Resettlement. The older you were and the longer you had served, the lower your Group Number would be. Groups were to be released in turn, with Group 1 first, then Group 2, and so on.
The exceptional one in ten servicemen were known as the Class B ‘key men.’ They had been in pre-war civilian occupations – coal mining, building and civil engineering, teaching, the police service – which were considered so vital to reconstruction that it was justifiable on grounds of national interest to discharge them ahead of the rest of their Release Group.
The plan was well received because it emphasized simplicity and transparency. Everyone’s place in the Class A order of release was based on two straightforward pieces of information; anyone could easily calculate anyone else’s Group Number if they wanted to. Officers and other ranks were to be treated identically. Men stationed abroad would be returned to the United Kingdom to be released at the same time as men on home service. As for Class B, Bevin was emphatic that this was not a soft option or an attractive way of jumping the queue. Anyone released in Class B was expected to work for his reconstruction employer only, and if he left that job he became immediately liable for recall to the Forces. Whereas newly released Class A servicemen would get eight weeks’ leave with full pay upon their release, those in Class B would only get three weeks.
Left: For Your Guidance and Release and Resettlement, two of the demobilisation handbooks mass-produced and distributed to all servicemen and -women in HM Forces in 1945. Right: The first page of Release and Resettlement.
The age-and-service table for calculating one's Release Group Number (click for a much larger version)
Yet by the end of 1945, demobilization was being described by one of the Labour Party’s own MPs as “the Achilles heel” of the Attlee government. “Thousands of us are becoming embittered and demoralized,” complained an RAF airman to the Daily Herald; other servicemen spoke of “disgust and rebellion” and how “bitter, frustrated, and completely disillusioned” they felt. Something had gone very badly wrong. What, exactly? Read on ...
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