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.
Yesterday was the first Remembrance Day to be commemorated since the end of the war, and as the Times notes the official act of memorial in Westminster Abbey was a "deeply impressive" ceremony, "simple and beautiful"; trumpeters of the Life Guards sounded the Last Post and Reveille, delimiting the two minutes' silence, and from the steps of the Henry VII Chapel behind the altar they played the long, low-pitched cavalry calls "with loving deliberateness." [This will be the last occasion on which Remembrance Day is marked on November 11; from 1946 onwards it will be replaced by the second Sunday in November, Remembrance Sunday. Coincidentally this year November 11 happened to be a Sunday, thus allowing for a smooth transition].
In less elevated news, the Times also reports from Munster on the trial of six British officers accused of stealing 3,900 bottles of wine and spirits from a German wine store. Lieutenant William Brown, former assistant camp commandant at the British Control Commission HQ in Bunde, was found not guilty and immediately released; the verdict on the remaining five remains to be promulgated pending confirmation. Defending officer Major Shaw argued that "there would be horrible scandals if investigations were made into how the wine cellars of every officers' mess in Germany were stocked." One of the defendants, an Army chaplain, has complained that even if he is acquitted of all charges he has been so "branded by press publicity" that he will have to resign the charge of the parish he left to join the army in March 1940.
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