Starting on Thursday, 18 June, 2009, I'm going to attempt to post-blog* the day-by-day British experience of military demobilisation after the Second World War. The starting date is not accidental: Monday, 18 June, 1945 was the first day of releases from wartime HM Forces, a process which went on for over eighteen months and which saw most of the five million men and women in uniform on V-E Day returned to civilian life. My intention is to post-blog the first 365 days of the demobilisation experience, the period in which the bulk of all service personnel were discharged and during which the most interesting - and controversial - events occured. I'll be drawing on contemporary newspaper accounts, principally from the Times, the Daily and Sunday Express, Daily Herald, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Manchester Guardian, News Chronicle, News of the World, and the People; magazines such as John Bull, the New Statesman, Punch, the Spectator, and Woman; service papers like Union Jack and Soldier; and contemporary accounts from the document archives collected by the Imperial War Museum, London.
This project is a companion piece to my book Demobbed: Coming Home after the Second World War, which is being published by Yale University Press in 2009.
* For other examples of historical post-blogging, see Brett Holman's excellent chronicles of the 1938 Munich Crisis and the 1909 Scareship Wave.
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