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.
Captain Eric Horn writes to a friend of a recent visit to his old pre-war office. "Miss Garner was very much in evidence. She started discussing my post-war prospects, which rather annoyed me and I am afraid I cut her short. She passed the remark that ‘she hoped we service personnel didn’t come out of the army too soon as they couldn’t cope.’ I am beginning to realize that now the war is over people are not at all concerned with our fate.”
More frustration comes in a letter to the Manchester Guardian from a former POW in the Royal Corps of Signals:
In a camp from which I write, formerly an American Army hospital, situated in the West Country, are stationed hundreds of ex-PoWs who, because they are in release groups 23 to 29, are not being retrained. They are sent out, sometimes daily, sometimes for periods of a month or more, to do laboring and farming jobs in the neighboring towns and villages. A few days ago a hundred men were dispatched to a farming job.
On arrival, they found they were expected to make themselves at home in Nissen huts in which beds had not been laid and which, in addition, leaked both from roofs and floors. There was no coal or coke in stock with which to make the cookhouse fires … the food provided at this (the men already call it) Kommando is bad. Such a modest commodity as jam has not been seen for days. There are no amenities … the camp is pitched in the heart of mud and rawness. The poor exiles are naturally wondering what they have done to deserve all this preferential treatment … have not the authorities sufficient insight and sympathy to see that ex-PoWs need a complete change from Stalag conditions?
James Lansdale Hodson, meanwhile ponders one of the psychological problems of the transition to civilian life: "One of the problems before us is to invest the days of peace with some of the thrills and high adventure which war, as a by-product of its murder and horror, affords."
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