Demobilisation in Britain

Six weeks after VE Day Britain began returning its servicemen and women to civilian life. In mid-1945 some 5 million men and women were serving in the British armed forces – the army, the navy and the air force, including the women’s auxiliary services. Releasing them all was a task that would take years, and the government wanted above all to avoid what had happened after the First World War: chaos, a sense of injustice and mutinies in the transit camps.

Many war chronologies state under 19 June 1945 that “Britain begins demobilisation”. This needs a small correction: according to British sources – including studies based on Imperial War Museum material and debates in the House of Commons – the release of servicemen under the plan adopted in 1944 began on schedule on Monday 18 June.

The lesson of 1919

The memory of the previous demobilisation was still fresh in London. At the end of 1918 the government had decided to release first the so-called pivotal men – workers needed to restart industry. It soon turned out that these were often the men who had been called up last, while veterans with years at the front had to wait. In January 1919 there were protests and refusals to obey orders in the camps at Folkestone, Dover and Calais. The new Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, then changed the rules: the order of release was to be determined by age, length of service and wounds received. British historians agree that this experience was the starting point for the planners of the Second World War.

The Bevin plan

The principal author of the new system was Ernest Bevin, a trade unionist from the Labour Party and, from 1940, Minister of Labour and National Service in the coalition government – the same man who had earlier directed the mobilisation of British manpower. He announced the principles of demobilisation publicly on 22 September 1944, long before the end of the fighting in Europe. The plan had the support of both major parties, which, compared with the bitter disputes of the 1930s, was a rarity.

The basis was the so-called Class A. Every serviceman received a release group number (age-and-service group), calculated from his date of birth and the number of months spent in uniform: the older a man was and the longer he had served, the lower his number and the sooner he went home. The principle was simple and – most importantly – understandable to everyone, so it was hard to accuse it of favouring any group. Priority out of turn was given, among others, to married women serving in the women’s services, such as the WAAF, and to men over fifty.

Alongside it was Class B: a small number of specialists needed for the reconstruction of the country – above all building workers for the housing programme, but also miners and teachers – could leave earlier, in exchange for a shorter period of paid leave and an obligation to take up work in a designated occupation. As the government later explained in the House of Commons, Class B releases could not exceed ten per cent of Class A releases. A separate, smallest category consisted of releases on compassionate grounds.

The first groups go home

By the time the plan came into force Bevin was no longer Minister of Labour. On 23 May 1945 the wartime coalition broke up, and Churchill formed an interim, predominantly Conservative government to govern until the election. The machinery, however, had been ready for months: a month before the start date, men in their units received detailed booklets on their rights, allowances and help in returning to work. On 18 June the first, oldest age-and-service groups began to pass through the release centres.

The procedure was similar in all the services. Men returning from abroad went first to reception camps and then to dispersal units – the army, navy and air force ran many of them in different parts of the country. There they handed in their weapons and equipment and received their documents, a one-way railway warrant and clothing coupons. Formally, a serviceman first went on paid release leave – 56 days in the army, extended by extra days for service overseas – and only then became a civilian. On top of this came a war gratuity depending on rank and length of service, and the right to return to his former job.

The “demob suit”

The symbol of the whole operation became the demob suit – the civilian clothing issued to every man released. With clothes rationing in force since 1941, buying a suit in a shop required a large number of coupons and a long wait, and most servicemen, after years in uniform, no longer had anything to wear. At the civilian clothing depots – the largest operated in London’s Olympia exhibition hall – each man received a full outfit: a trilby or a flat cap, a suit (often double-breasted and pinstriped) or a jacket with flannel trousers, two shirts, a tie, shoes and a raincoat.

The clothes were made from the best materials available, but with millions of recipients the right sizes and cuts were in short supply. The suit that was too small or too large became a stock subject of jokes and sketches in post-war Britain. Small-time spivs also waited outside the depots to buy up the outfits and sell them on the black market; the government could not prevent this, since from the moment of issue the clothing belonged to the former serviceman.

The war that went on

Demobilisation began while Britain was still at war. In Burma, where fighting with scattered Japanese units continued after the liberation of Rangoon, British and imperial troops remained in the field, and the command was preparing to retake Malaya and Singapore; the Royal Navy had sent a fleet to the Pacific to operate alongside the Americans. The plan therefore assumed that releases would proceed in parallel with continued operations against Japan, and that their pace would depend on the needs of that war. Servicemen in the Far East, often abroad for years, were entitled to return to Britain after a set period of overseas service; according to British historians, the shortening of that period, announced in June 1945 during the election campaign, deprived commanders in Asia of many experienced soldiers just before the planned operation in Malaya.

Demobilisation in the shadow of the election

The release of servicemen coincided with the first election campaign since 1935. Parliament was dissolved on 15 June and polling was set for 5 July; because of the votes of servicemen scattered around the world, the results were to be counted only several weeks later. The pace of demobilisation, housing for those returning and the welfare-state promises of the Beveridge Report became some of the main themes of the campaign. The Labour leader, Clement Attlee, Churchill’s deputy in the cabinet throughout the war, argued that his party would best lead the country in peacetime, while the Conservatives relied above all on the Prime Minister’s popularity. Bevin, one of Labour’s most important politicians, took part in the campaign himself – after the election he was to become Foreign Secretary.

Poles with no way home

British demobilisation did not cover the Polish Armed Forces in the West, which in 1945 numbered, according to various estimates, some 200,000–250,000 soldiers. They fought under British operational command – General Władysław Anders’s II Corps in Italy, the 1st Armoured Division in Germany, airmen and sailors – but were subordinate to the Polish government in London, whose recognition by the Western powers was running out in the summer of 1945. For many of them, who came from the eastern lands annexed by the USSR, going home was not possible at all, and returning to a communist-ruled Poland meant the risk of repression.

Their fate was settled only in the years that followed. On 22 May 1946 Bevin, by then Foreign Secretary, announced the creation of the Polish Resettlement Corps – a formation under British administration intended to prepare soldiers who did not wish to return home for civilian life in Britain or for emigration. The Corps, whose Polish side was headed by General Stanisław Kopański, existed until 1949; according to British figures, some 115,000 people passed through it, while about 105,000 Polish soldiers from the West returned to Poland.

Place in the war

The demobilisation of June 1945 was the beginning of Britain’s transition from total war to peace – a process that took much longer than the servicemen expected. According to British figures, some 4.3 million men and women had returned to civilian life by 1947. The pace of releases, dependent on the needs of the occupation of Germany, the garrisons in Asia and the availability of shipping, nevertheless caused growing frustration. In the winter of 1945–1946 there was a series of incidents in all the services; the best known were the protests by RAF personnel, which began on 22 January 1946 near Karachi and spread – according to British studies – to several dozen bases in India, Ceylon, Burma, Singapore and the Middle East, involving nearly 50,000 men. Formally it was a mutiny, although its participants spoke of a “strike”; some historians link it with the mutiny of Royal Indian Navy sailors that broke out a few weeks later.

Despite these tensions, the Bevin plan is regarded in British historiography as a success: the mass disturbances of 1919 were avoided, and the principle that “the older you are and the longer you have served, the sooner you go home” was widely accepted as fair. Millions of former servicemen in somewhat ill-fitting suits returned to a country scarred by bombing and still rationing food and clothing – and it was they who, to a great extent, decided the shape of post-war Britain.