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.
The Reverend G.O. Clayton worries in a letter to the Manchester Guardian about the moral effects of military service on the nation's young. “Conversations with men of 20 to 23 years of age who joined up at or before 18 is most discouraging ..."
Swept into the forces before many of them had obtained any secure prospects for the future, they are now wasting away their days doing simply nothing. I heard of one lad of 20 in the Navy – admittedly his group is in the 50s – who each day for six weeks had been going out on a supposed ‘route march’ which has ended at the nearest canteen, where the rest of the day has been spent in complete idleness. For another lad of similar age in the RAF, the past eleven months have seen him scrubbing floors, serving in a YMCA canteen … working two or three hours a day in an Air Ministry depot in London for two months, cooking for a small camp of 25 men working on afforestation, all interspersed with lengthy periods of leave and spells of idleness, often lasting weeks on end.
Meanwhile, in Woman the editorial team are concerned with the disenchantment of military demob back into civilian life. “His face was smooth and brown and his muscular body seemed a shade too big for his neat black suit. It was easy to guess that he was an ex-serviceman recently restored to civvy street, even if he himself had not hastened to say so in quick apology for not knowing the price symbols on his firm’s furniture. It was his first day back, and he was feeling lost and discouraged …"
The goods he was expected to sell appalled him, they were so shoddy and so expensive, and the efficient service which had kept this great store running like clockwork was now a rickety skeleton … we completely misunderstand [ex-servicemen’s] point of view if, when they voice surprise at life’s threadbare quality, we assume they are complaining. Their shocked exclamations are genuine astonishment at a state of affairs which produces in the rest of us a numbed, accustomed acceptance.
A reader of the magazine lays her demob heartache bare: “I am married to a man I no longer love. When we were first married I adored him. I thought I loved him all the time he was abroad in the Army – but now he has come back I find I don’t love him at all. His embraces are torture to me, his mannerisms irritate me all the time. He loves me, but I irritate him too … there is no valid reason for divorce, but am I to spend the rest of my life unhappily because of the great mistake I made?”
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