History Today, Wednesday, 25th February, 2011 - Demobbed. "A fine winner of the Longman-History Today Book Prize for 2010. In telling the many different stories of returning soldiers at the end of the Second World War Alan Allport takes us on a rollercoaster ride, provoking anger at the authorities who managed the transition to civilian life so badly and sadness at the tragedies that engulfed many returning heroes and their families ..."
The Washington Times, Friday, 9th April, 2010 - Demobbed. "There has been far too much written in memoirs, fiction and history about the travails of veterans adjusting to civilian life for us to be able to believe, in the words of the grand old song, that everyone could really be feeling gay when Johnny came marching home again. The problems involved in the process are real and probably inevitable, especially when it happened on a huge scale, as it did at the end of both world wars ..."
Onion AV Club, Thursday, 25th February, 2010 - Demobbed. “The demobilisation experience in 1945 and all the powerful hopes and fears that it generated has curiously vanished from our collective memory,” Allport writes in the prologue. His task is to resurrect unpleasant forgotten memories of the post-war transition. He doesn’t wait to get started: In the first pages of the prologue, we get the story of Cyril Patmore, who returned home to an adulterously pregnant wife and stabbed her to death. In the following chapters, Allport covers a lot of societal dysfunction, much of it potentially lurid—ex-GIs turned thieves, psychiatric breakdowns—but never loses his cool ..."
The London Review of Books, Thursday, 25th February, 2010 - Suitable Heroes. "Whatever sort of welcome the former Eighth Army driver Maurice Merritt was hoping for when he walked out of the Second World War and in through his front door, it probably wasn’t the note on the kitchen table that greeted him: ‘Make a cup of cocoa if you like and there’s a tin of pilchards in the larder if you feel peckish. Joan.’ Of course, Merritt was luckier than thousands of his comrades ..."
The Spectator, Wednesday, 30th December, 2009 - Some Sunny Day! "In August 1945 Cyril Patmore of the Royal Scots Fusiliers returned on compassionate leave from India. A few weeks earlier his wife had written to confess that she was expecting a child by an Italian prisoner of war. ‘Why oh why darling did I have to let you down, me who loves you more than life itself?’ she wrote, pleading for forgiveness and a reconciliation. It was in vain. Patmore stabbed his wife to death. ‘I live for my children and my wife,’ he told the police. ‘I hope the children will be well looked after' ..."
The Times Higher Education, Thursday, 26th November, 2009 - Demobbed. "Men serving on the front line are like puppets on a string, postulated German playwright Wolfgang Borchert on his return from the Eastern Front: all individual thought and impulses reduced to an absolute minimum in the communal goal of victory. Running with the puppet metaphor, Borchert noted that after the war's end, former soldiers were torn from the strings that had controlled them, giving rise to the bewildering experience of being in charge of one's life once more ..."
London Evening Standard, Thursday, 19th November, 2009 - The Best Books of the Year. "No heavy reader should be deterred by the novelettish tale of Private Patmore's murdering his wife with which Alan Allport's Demobbed: Coming Home after World War Two begins. Beyond it lies a serious study, sexual and social, of the difficulties faced when millions of fighting men returned home at the end of the Second World War ..."
BBC History Magazine, November, 2009 - Demobbed. "It is one of the most endured images of our wartime history: the demobbed ‘Tommy’ returning home to his joyous wife and family, kit bag on his back, wreathed in smiles, reverting to his peacetime role as a husband and father and reintegrating effortlessly into a grateful society. It is a charming image, but – as Alan Allport’s masterful study of the subject demonstrates – it is one which often conceals a darker truth ..."
The Herald (Scotland), Monday, 9th November, 2009 - Demobbed. "Back in the 1950s there existed an instantly recognisable type known as the saloon-bar major. It didn’t matter what actual rank he had been – many were known to exaggerate the extent of their military careers – but the high point of their lives had been the glory days of the Second World War ..."
Dovegreyreader Scribbles, Monday, 2nd November, 2009 - Demobbed. "It may seem odd to launch into my November Remembrance reading with the homecoming, but this book has been irresistible. Demobbed - Coming Home After the Second World War by Alan Allport and published by Yale University Press has been wonderfully readable and informative though to me not a complete revelation for two reasons ..."
The Sunday Times, Sunday, 25th October, 2009 - Demobbed "In many ways Alan Allport’s portrait of the men who came home after the second world war is a study in disillusionment. Most histories of the war end in May 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany, or in August with the surrender of imperial Japan. But Allport’s wonderfully insightful study asks us to rethink the conventional chronology ..."
The Financial Times, Monday, 19th October, 2009 - Demobbed. "In his poignant first book, Demobbed, Princeton lecturer Alan Allport explores the problems Allied soldiers faced on their return home from the second world war ..."
Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover, Monday, 19th October, 2009 - Demobbed. "I have now finished it and boy, what a stonking book and if that sounds a bit flippant, bearing in mind it is a serious study of demobilisation, then I am sorry but I am bowled over by it ..."
The Times, Saturday, 17th October, 2009- Essay: No Peace on the Home Front, by Alan Allport. "During Gordon Brown’s recent stay at Balmoral it is said that the Queen enlisted Antony Beevor, the military historian, to give her Prime Minister a crash course in wartime leadership. If so, one wonders whether the troubled return of British soldiers from the battlefield also cropped up in the conversation ..."
Birmingham Post, Friday, 9th October, 2009- Demob Misery of Many Second World War Heroes Revealed in New Book. "After Belsen and Hiroshima silenced the world, the bells began to ring again. Suddenly it was summer in England and millions of ex-servicemen who had been uprooted from their lives and families to serve their governments in war were demobbed and returned home ..."
Daily Express, Thursday, 13th August, 2009- Demobbed: "Millions of men – who in many cases had been away for years – returned to their families in 1945. But was it a happy homecoming? A new book tells their stories ..."
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