The mobilisation of British manpower

On 1 September 1943, the fourth anniversary of the German attack on Poland, war chronicles recorded a figure meant to convey the scale of the British effort: according to the British Ministry of Labour, 22,750,000 men and women were serving in the armed forces or civil defence or doing work deemed essential to the war. War chronologies repeat this figure, but it must be read with care. Post-war government statistics, published in the official history British War Economy by W. K. Hancock and M. M. Gowing, give the total “working population” of Great Britain in June 1943 (men aged 14–64 and women aged 14–59, excluding Northern Ireland and domestic service, with two part-time women workers counted as one) as 22,286,000. The figure announced in September thus corresponds roughly to the country’s entire working population, not just to those working directly for the war. Even so, it shows what matters most: by the summer of 1943 Britain had mobilised its manpower to a degree that no other Western country achieved.

Bevin and the power over the labour market

The basis of this mobilisation was a decision taken in May 1940. When Winston Churchill formed his coalition government, the post of Minister of Labour and National Service went to Ernest Bevin, for many years general secretary of Britain’s largest trade union, the Transport and General Workers’ Union. On 22 May 1940 Parliament passed in a single day the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1940, which allowed the government to require any citizen to place “themselves, their services, and their property” at the disposal of the state. Under it Regulation 58A was issued, giving the Minister of Labour the right to direct any person to specified work.

Bevin used this power sparingly but effectively. He preferred persuading and negotiating with the unions to compulsion, and treated his coercive powers as a last resort. In March 1941 the Essential Work Order was introduced: in establishments deemed important to the war, a worker could not leave and an employer could not dismiss him without the consent of the labour exchange. In return the state guaranteed a minimum wage, decent conditions, canteens and welfare provision. In the spring of 1941 women also began to be registered by age group, so that the labour exchanges could direct them into war industry.

Women in uniform and in the factories

The turning point came in December 1941. The National Service Act (No. 2), passed on 18 December, for the first time in the country’s history made women liable for service: unmarried women aged 20–30 could choose between the auxiliary branches of the armed forces, civil defence and work in industry (conscription of women in Britain). In the following months the age limits were widened, while further age groups of men were also brought under registration (extension of conscription, lowering of the call-up age).

In June 1943, according to the same official statistics, 4,762,000 people were serving in the armed forces, including 462,000 women. Women served in three auxiliary services: the army’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the air force’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, which reached its peak strength of more than 180,000 in 1943, and the naval Women’s Royal Naval Service. ATS women operated, among other things, the fire-control instruments in anti-aircraft batteries – in 1943 most of Anti-Aircraft Command’s heavy batteries had mixed crews – as well as communications. Formally they did not fire the guns, but they were killed and wounded in air raids just as the men were.

An even greater change took place in the factories. In the so-called Group I industries – metals, engineering, aircraft, shipbuilding, chemicals and munitions – 5,233,000 people were employed in June 1943, 1,928,000 of them women; in 1939 there had been just over half a million women in these industries. Altogether the number of women in the “working population” rose from 5.1 million in June 1939 to 7.25 million in June 1943. Women worked at lathes, in foundries and in shipyards, on the land in the Women’s Land Army, and tens of thousands of mothers worked part-time, thanks to day nurseries set up by local authorities and employers.

Civil defence and the Home Guard

The 22.75 million also included civil defence. In June 1943 323,000 people were serving full-time in civil defence, the National Fire Service and the police – fewer than during the Blitz, because once the heavy raids had ceased some of them had been moved into the forces and industry. Behind them stood hundreds of thousands of part-time volunteers: air-raid wardens, rescue workers, first-aid workers, aircraft spotters, and women from the women’s voluntary services running canteens and rest centres for those bombed out of their homes. A separate army was formed by the Home Guard, set up in 1940 as a volunteer territorial defence force; from 1942 men could be directed into its ranks compulsorily. It numbered some 1.7 million men, who after their work in factories and offices stood guard, drilled and manned anti-aircraft batteries.

The manpower budget and the crisis of 1943

Britain reached the limits of its resources sooner than any other belligerent apart from the USSR. Hancock and Gowing state plainly that in the end it was neither shipping nor currency but the shortage of people that set the limits of the British war effort: the armed forces and the munitions industries reached their greatest size in the summer of 1943 and could no longer be enlarged, or even maintained at that level. In June 1943 only 60,000 unemployed were registered at the labour exchanges, compared with 1.27 million in June 1939.

From the turn of 1942 and 1943 the government planned manpower as one plans a budget. A committee chaired by the Lord President of the Council drew up the requirements for the eighteen months from July 1942 to December 1943: the armed forces and industry together wanted some 2.7 million new people, while about 1.6 million were available. A gap of more than a million could not be closed by simply trimming demands. The government had to cut the army’s requirements, scale back the aircraft and shipbuilding programmes, move workers out of “less essential” industries – textiles, distribution, services – and decide who would get each additional person. From 1943 the manpower budget was the chief instrument for directing the British war economy.

One symptom of the crisis was coal. By mid-1943 the mines had lost tens of thousands of miners to the forces, and output was falling. In the autumn the government resorted to an unprecedented measure: from December 1943 one in ten conscripts aged 18–25, chosen by lot according to the last digit of their registration number, went down the mines instead of into the forces. These young men were called the Bevin Boys; by 1948 nearly 48,000 of them, volunteers included, had passed through the pits.

Comparison with Germany

The British model is often set against the German one. Allied propaganda and some of the older literature were dominated by the picture of a Third Reich that refused to send women into the factories because this clashed with the Nazi vision of woman as mother and guardian of the home. There is a grain of truth in this picture: Adolf Hitler long opposed compulsory work for women, and German soldiers’ wives received allowances that discouraged them from taking jobs. Compulsory registration for work for women aged 17–45 was introduced in Germany only by a decree of 27 January 1943, after Stalingrad, as part of the “total war” proclaimed by Joseph Goebbels (the Sportpalast speech), and it was applied with numerous exemptions.

Economic historians, among them Richard Overy and Adam Tooze, point out, however, that the comparison needs qualifying. As early as 1939 the proportion of women in work was higher in Germany than in Britain – many of them worked on farms and in small family businesses – so there was less room for further growth. According to International Labour Office figures from 1944, at the beginning of 1943 some 9.2 million German women were working in the German war economy, not counting family members helping out in agriculture and trade. The essential difference lay elsewhere: the Third Reich filled the gap left by the men called up into the Wehrmacht above all with millions of forced labourers and prisoners of war from occupied Europe, brought in by the Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment, Fritz Sauckel. Britain, which had no such reservoir, had to mobilise its own society – and did so in a way that most citizens regarded as fair.

Significance

The figure announced on 1 September 1943 marks the end of the period in which the British war machine was built up. From then on Britain could only move people between the forces, industry and civil defence, not add new ones. This fact shaped strategy: with the growing involvement of the United States, it was the Americans rather than the British who were to provide ever more men and equipment for the campaigns of 1944. In 1944 British divisions in Normandy and Italy struggled with a shortage of infantry replacements, and some units had to be broken up to reinforce others.

Mobilisation also changed society itself. Bevin used his power to strengthen the position of the trade unions, extend wages councils and set standards of welfare provision in the workplace. Full employment and the experience of a shared effort created the climate in which the proposals of the Beveridge Report for universal social insurance were welcomed. Clement Attlee’s Labour Party built its election victory of July 1945 on this, and Bevin became Foreign Secretary in its government. After the war many women left the factories and the uniformed auxiliary services, but the experience of 1941–1945 – of working in occupations previously closed to them and of serving in the forces – permanently changed their place in British public life.