3
The Politics of Conscription, 1945–1949
[P]eople had not spent their energy building up the Labour movement to get a Labour government to enforce military conscription for the first time in this country.
R. J. Davies (Labour MP), House of Commons,
March 19461The chap who thought of this idea ought to be shot.
National serviceman undergoing basic training in the RAF,
late 1940s2
Constraint was the basis of national service and this was true for the country as much as it was for the men who turned up for basic training. Politicians did not introduce peacetime conscription because they thought it would do young men good. Anthony Eden, the Conservative shadow Foreign Secretary, said: ‘I have never heard anyone defend conscription for the sake of conscription.’3 Rather it was maintained after the war because politicians could see no other way to meet immediate military needs. The matter was not, in any case, at the centre of post-war political debates. Discussion, such as it was, revolved around the length of service rather than its necessity, and, just as conscripts gritted their teeth and said ‘two years to push’, so politicians made national service palatable partly by insisting that it was a temporary measure – one that was never, at any particular moment, underwritten by legislation designed to last more than five years.
Peacetime conscription was a novelty in Britain. In continental Europe, compulsory military service had been a defining feature of the modern state, but sea power was the key to British defence. The land armies that grew up in nineteenth-century continental Europe were unnecessary in the British Isles because there was no land frontier to defend. If the British fought on land at all, they often did so by subsidizing foreign forces or, in the empire, by recruiting local troops. The British army was small and composed in large measure of men who served for long periods of time. Far from being ‘the people in arms’, the British army consisted of men drawn from a distinct section of society, usually the poorest, who sometimes spent years serving in remote garrisons overseas, especially in India. Respectable people often regarded soldiers with horror. When William Robertson, the first man in British history to rise from the rank of private to that of field marshal, abandoned his position as a domestic servant to enlist as a private, his mother allegedly wrote: ‘I would rather bury you than see you in a red coat.’
The British did not introduce conscription during the Boer War of 1899 to 1902, but in its aftermath a group of politicians and retired army officers campaigned for universal military service and founded the National Service League. The League’s leaders argued that Germany posed a military threat to Britain. They also talked about ‘national efficiency’ and the poor health of many young British men. The League urged the government to introduce compulsory training, only a few months of which would be full-time, to provide the country with a trained reserve in the event of a German attack. The League became more dynamic in 1905 when Lord Roberts, recently retired as Commander-in-Chief, became its leader and Leo Amery, a rising Conservative politician, became its secretary and driving force. The League was well financed and well organized; it claimed a membership of almost 100,000 by 1913, but it failed.4 No government was tempted to introduce peacetime conscription.
During the First World War, Britain raised a large army but conscription was not introduced until 1916. Indeed, in some ways, deliberate direction of ‘manpower’ – the word itself was coined during the war – was about keeping men out of the army as much as getting them in because the voluntary recruitment campaigns that took place early in the war had stripped factories of their workers. Sir Auckland Geddes, a member of the National Service League and the first Minister of National Service, later suggested that the main function of such a ministry should be to ‘prevent the militant and pugnacious young men of the country flocking in excessive numbers into the fighting services to the detriment of essential civilian activities’.5
Between the wars conscription was barely discussed in Britain, partly because for most of this period Germany had no conscription and Britain faced no obvious military threat. When Charles de Gaulle published his book Vers l’armée de métier (‘Towards the Professional Army’) in 1934, it caused a scandal in France because calling for the professionalization of the army was seen as an assault on democracy. The book was published in English under a more anodyne title: The Army of the Future. A professional army in Britain was simply taken for granted. The size of the forces was in any case limited by the state of public finances and recruitment was partly sustained by unemployment – though the sense that the army was a last resort for otherwise unemployable men did nothing to improve the esteem in which soldiers were held and, even during the hungry thirties, there were men who preferred starving in Newcastle to eating in the Durham Light Infantry.6
Political opposition to conscription came from three forces. The first of these was nationalism. Irish nationalists resented the idea that they might be required to fight for the British empire. Though many Irishmen volunteered to serve in the British army, the government was reluctant to introduce conscription to Ireland, even during the First World War. The second force against conscription was liberalism. The Liberal party opposed restriction on individual freedom and some prominent Liberal ministers resigned from the wartime government rather than go along with conscription in 1916. The third force, and the one that mattered most after 1918, was socialism. The argument that military service was ‘democratic’ or even part of a revolutionary tradition, which was so often deployed in France, counted for little in Britain.7 Some members of the Labour party opposed militarism of any sort, including Britain’s participation in the First World War. More specifically, Labour politicians worried about the possibility of industrial conscription, i.e. that workers might be compelled to work under government direction or that military discipline might be used to break strikes. Left-wingers had complicated relations with military service during the 1930s. On the one hand, it was they who worried most about the rise of fascism and Nazi Germany; on the other, they were most opposed to increased resources for the military.
The threat of Nazi Germany did eventually force conscription on Britain. In April 1939, the government of Neville Chamberlain (who had briefly served as Director of National Service during the First World War) introduced the Military Training Act, which required single men aged twenty to twenty-two to undergo six months training as ‘militiamen’. The Labour party opposed the act. When war broke out in September of the same year, however, there was little opposition to conscription and the first National Service Act, which required that all men aged eighteen to forty-one register for military service, passed through all its stages, including Royal Assent, on a single day: 3 September 1939. This act was extended in 1942 to take in men up to the age of fifty and unmarried and childless women between the ages of eighteen and thirty.
National service in the Second World War extended beyond the purely military. Men of military age were permitted (or required) to work in war industries and could, indeed, be forbidden to join the armed forces. Men and women were directed to take civilian jobs of national importance. Even Princess Elizabeth was – much to the indignation of some courtiers – required to register at the age of eighteen.
Coal-mining illustrated the scale of wartime direction of labour. From December 1943, young men were drafted into the mines by ballot, something that many feared more than military service.8 The government defined the groups who were exempt from conscription to the mines with the precision that was characteristic of wartime labour policy. These groups consisted of those who had been accepted for duties as aircrew or as artificers on submarines and skilled men who were required by the forces for particular trades.9
Conscription during the Second World War was relatively uncontroversial. The government could afford to be generous in its attitude to conscientious objectors, partly because it knew that they would not be numerous. Some men who had initially objected to their call-up eventually changed their mind: at least one of them ended up as a highly decorated veteran of the Special Operations Executive. Desertion, mainly involving working-class soldiers, was quite common but never turned into a systematic political resistance to conscription. Some deserters rejoined the army under false names – one of them winning the Victoria Cross.
As the end of the war approached, generals and politicians began to discuss whether conscription should be continued after the return of peace. The abolition of conscription would have been difficult when British servicemen were all over the world. In the short term, troops would be required to police areas that the British occupied. In the longer term, it was unclear what kind of military obligations might fall on Britain – though politicians from both sides believed that Britain should remain a ‘great power’ with influence throughout the world. The loss of India, which seemed inevitable to many by the end of the war, meant that Britain would abandon some of its garrisons but it also meant that it would lose the use of Indian troops – many of whom had served outside the subcontinent. Various expedients were discussed. The British negotiated to maintain some Gurkha soldiers from Nepal; they used prisoners of war from Germany, Italy and Japan to provide labour for years after the end of fighting. Polish units remained with the British army until 1949, and the government contemplated creating a foreign legion, which would recruit from that substantial pool of young men in central Europe who had lost their homes and/or acquired a taste for fighting during the previous five years.10 People close to the army continued to advocate a British foreign legion in the 1950s.11 More seriously, the services recruited women – something that they had never previously done in peacetime. None of these expedients was sufficient to produce troops in the numbers required, but there was no formal decision about post-war conscription, perhaps just because ministers took it for granted. An official wrote in October 1946:
post-war planning in the Services … assumes that there will be a system of national service or conscription. It was hoped that a decision to this effect would have been taken by the Cabinet and announced by the end of the war. This did not occur, and with the break up of the Coalition Government, the matter lapsed.12
Between the surrender of Germany and that of Japan, the government changed. The general election of July 1945 increased the Labour party’s representation in the House of Commons from 154 seats to 393, giving it an absolute majority; the Conservative party lost 190 seats, almost half of all those that it had previously held. The result came as a shock to many Conservatives, especially officers in the smarter regiments of the army. The Coldstream Guards, stationed in Italy, organized a mock election to educate their troops. Almost all the officers, largely Etonians, took it for granted that everyone would vote for Churchill and they had to import a Wykehamist from the Scots Guards to try to make the case for Labour, but the other ranks (mainly young, working-class men from the north east) voted Labour.
Labour voters wanted change. This meant better housing, free medical care and no return to the unemployment of the 1930s. Military matters, however, barely featured in the election. Only one Labour candidate in ten, and a handful of Conservatives, mentioned conscription in their election addresses.13
Anti-militarism was less influential in the Labour party than it had been in the 1930s. Many of the younger MPs had served in the armed forces during the war and almost the whole party had regarded the war against fascism as worthwhile. Even the emphasis that party leaders still placed on ‘collective security’ and the United Nations was usually matched by a belief that Britain would need substantial armed forces and perhaps, indeed, that it would have to provide many of the troops that would be required for international ‘policing operations’.
Ernest Bevin did most to change the Labour party with regard to conscription. He was one of the most extraordinary figures in British politics. Born illegitimate and orphaned at eight, he had become a lorry driver and eventually leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. During the war, he was Minister of Labour and National Service and, in the Labour governments of 1945 to 1951, Foreign Secretary. If any coherent thinking underlay the British attitude to post-war military service, it would best be summed up as ‘Bevinism’ – though Bevin’s political outlook, even more than that of most politicians, was often a matter of instinct rather than clearly worked-out thought.
Bevinism meant fervent anti-Communism. As a trade union leader, Bevin had dealt with Communists since the 1920s and was consequently not prone to illusions about the future behaviour of the Soviet Union. Bevin also believed that Britain ought to be a great power and this meant, among other things, that it would have to maintain large forces.
Bevin’s position with regard to military service was odd. On the one hand, his personal links to the trade unions were closer than those of any other minister; on the other hand, as Minister of Labour and National Service, he had been closely associated during the war with the one thing that trade unions most disliked: the direction of industrial labour and, in particular, the conscription of young men for work in mines. After the war, he occasionally spoke as though he regretted that military service did not go with some broader project of social levelling. Addressing boys from Emanuel School in south London, which stood on the awkward frontier between grammar and public school as well as that between officers and other ranks, he said: ‘It must be as easy for the miner’s son to enter the professions as for the son of the middle-class home to enter the steel plate industry or go down the mines. The broadest possible view of national service must be taken by all.’14
However, the need to keep the goodwill of the unions limited the social impact of national service. Post-war military service was separated from the direction of civilian manpower, which the unions disliked. Effectively, military service was to be universal for young men, but all other forms of compulsory service, in factories or mines, for the rest of the population were to be abolished. There was little discussion of conscripting women for either military or civilian purposes once hostilities had ended. Even the Medical Corps, which required no conventional displays of virility from its recruits, did not call up women doctors.15
It was Bevin who secured the key decision by Labour leaders in favour of post-war conscription, when Attlee was attending the San Francisco conference which founded the United Nations. The day after German surrender, Bevin presided over a meeting of the tripartite committee that brought together representatives of the parliamentary Labour party, the National Executive of the Labour party and the TUC. He persuaded the committee to support conscription. He did so with several sleights of hand, pretending that conscription would not last for long after the war (he probably knew that it would), that service would limited to one year (he knew that the forces wanted at least eighteen months) and that it would contribute to collective security (he knew that a breach with the Soviet Union was likely and would undermine the effectiveness of the United Nations).
Labour attitudes, however, were complicated by an important minority of dissidents inside the parliamentary party and, perhaps more importantly, by the sense that the party was heir to anti-militarist and anti-conscription traditions – a sense that made some conscripts assume that a Labour election victory would be in their own interests.16 There were powerful men in the Cabinet who had opposed the maintenance of conscription when it was first discussed in 1945. A few Labour MPs criticized conscription on pacifist or anti-militarist grounds that sometimes harked back to the political debates of the pre-1939, or even pre-1914, period. Speaking on the subject in 1948, Ellis Smith, Labour MP for Stoke, referred to ‘Sidney Street, Antwerp, Gallipoli and the responsibility of Mr Churchill when he was a young man, sending forces to Liverpool and Salford because dockers were taking a stand on trade-union rights’.17
Most Labour MPs, however, did not regard conscription as a particularly important issue, and those who did often had complicated positions. James Callaghan, who had been a naval officer during the war, was the spokesman for ‘ordinary servicemen’ who resented those who gained exemption from service or received special treatment while they were in the forces. George Wigg, who had joined up as a private in the 1920s and eventually risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Educational Corps, defended conscription but attacked the privileges given to officers in some regiments; he attracted much derision from Tory MPs, who quickly discovered that he carried a chip as heavy as a rifle on his shoulder. Michael Foot was a rare example of a Labour MP who supported conscription, in the way that continental socialists did, because he believed that it would make the army a defender of democracy. Denunciation of government policy on conscription provided some MPs with a means of attacking Bevin’s foreign policy. Richard Crossman, in particular, argued that the Anglo-American entente would make war more likely rather than less, and that Britain was being made to adopt conscription in order to fit in with American interests.18
Outside the Labour party, conscription was opposed by the two Communist MPs – though the Communist party seems to have adopted a more qualified position in the 1950s (merely calling for a reduction in the term of service) and did not encourage its members to resist their own call-up. The Independent Labour party was the group that remained truest to the anti-militarist traditions of pre-war socialism, and it was the party that campaigned most explicitly against conscription,19 once putting up a candidate in a local election who was an army deserter.20 However, it had only three MPs in 1945 and, by 1948, all of these had defected to the Labour party. The Liberal party opposed conscription in parliament – though the Liberal party conference supported it and a number of ‘National Liberals’, including one who had been a fervent opponent of conscription in the First World War, were now, in effect, Conservatives.
Conservative MPs, with just one exception, voted in favour of conscription, and Labour leaders knew that they could override dissidents in their own party with Conservative support in the House of Commons, but they were reluctant to do so. Instead, they tried to justify military policies in non-militaristic terms and to ensure that their policy was supported by the widest possible section of the Labour movement, which included members of the party and the trade unions outside parliament.
The ministers in the new government who had most to do with the armed forces were Frederick Bellenger, who was Secretary of State for War from October 1946, and Albert Alexander, who served as Minister of Defence from December 1946. The latter post, which oversaw all the service ministries, had been created in 1940 and, until 1946, held by the Prime Minister. Emanuel Shinwell succeeded Bellenger at the War Office in October 1947 and then Alexander at Defence in February 1950. None of them were impressive ministers. They exemplified the contradictions of the party with regard to conscription and the military more generally. Bellenger and Alexander had served as officers in the First World War and the former, in particular, was generally seen as fairly deferential to military leaders – though he had opposed the long-term maintenance of conscription in 1945. Both men came from relatively humble backgrounds but neither had deep roots in the Labour party – they had begun life as, respectively, a Conservative and a Liberal. The result was that they often commanded respect from neither the service chiefs nor their own parliamentary colleagues. Shinwell – the most left-wing of the three and the one with the most anti-militarist past – was curiously more popular with senior officers than either of his colleagues.
At the end of the war, there was a period of uncertainty about Britain’s future military burdens. A report by the Armistice and Post-War Committee to the War Cabinet summed matters up in April 1945:
It would clearly have been desirable for the starting point of our examination to have been a comprehensive review of the post-war defence problem of the British Empire from which could be deduced the size of the forces to be maintained by the United Kingdom, both for the fulfilment of its obligations under the World Organisation and for its essential security tasks in different parts of the world. It is clear to us, however, that no such review is possible at the present time.21
In October 1945, Ian Jacob, military assistant to the Secretary of the War Cabinet, explained why the government would find it difficult to make an immediate decision about the future of conscription, but added:
New scientific developments, and in particular the atom bomb, have caused a feeling of uncertainty about the shape of our future armed forces.
It is evident that for some considerable time the size of the Armed Forces to be retained will be such that they can only be supported by the continuance of National Service on the present basis. The problem will be how to reduce the period spent in the forces by young men called up from something like six years to a reasonable period, say two years.22
Jacob anticipated three phases. The first, lasting eighteen months or two years, would bring the forces down to a level that could be sustained by two-year conscription. Then would come a second period, of three or four years, during which the forces would be maintained at the same level to meet ‘occupational duties on a large scale and other abnormal commitments’. A third period would begin after about five years, when the ‘abnormal commitments’ had been discharged but when ‘the atom bomb and other developments may be expected to begin to affect the lay-out of our forces’.
This uncertainty persisted for some time. A Ministry of Defence report of 1946 said that in the ‘unsettled condition of the world’ it was not possible to be sure what forces Britain would need, but that it had certain ‘inescapable’ commitments.23 These were the provision of garrisons in bases overseas, the preservation of law and order in overseas territory, the maintenance of a strategic reserve at home and overseas, the protection of lines of communication, the maintenance of air and coastal defences, and the provision of training and administration in the UK for forces throughout the world. The report added that another aim of British policy should be ‘showing the flag’. Conscription often fitted into a more general debate about Britain’s place in the world that did not necessarily depend on any rational calculation about how it might contribute to military power. The Foreign Office saw willingness to call up young men as a sign of national resolve that would show how Britain had broken with its policy in the 1930s when ‘our failure to maintain compulsory military service after the 1914–18 war’ gave ‘the impression that the British people had lost the will and self-discipline to protect themselves and enforce their voice in world affairs’.24
The big question, which was to some extent masked by talk of policing occupied territories and maintaining prestige, was: what power might pose a real threat to British interests after the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan? The Soviet Union was obviously the most dangerous military antagonist for Britain, but anticipating the particular kind of threat that it would pose, and the resources that Britain would have to respond to it, was hard. Uncertainty about the matter haunted British defence policy during the first few years after the Second World War. The result of this was that post-war conscription was built on the shifting sands of changing strategic assumptions.
The first uncertainty of post-war planning came from the fact that no one knew how soon the Soviet Union would be in a position to attack the West. It had been devastated by the Second World War, and early British planning was based on the belief that war with the Soviet Union was unlikely until 1957. The first long-term aim of post-war conscription was, therefore, to provide a large reserve of trained men, of the kind that Britain had so conspicuously lacked at the beginning of the previous two wars. In the First World War, the British had been able to shelter behind the French army during the two years that it took them to build up a large army of their own. In 1939 and 1940, the policy had failed and the failure had almost proved disastrous. Now the aim was to lay the basis of relatively quick mobilization by requiring all young men to undertake a period of full-time service with the armed forces. They would then spend six years undergoing less intensive training as reservists. This would allow them to be recalled in time of war. The policy gave little weight to commitments outside Europe and the Middle East. It rested on the assumption that the armed forces would have time to mobilize in the event of war and on the expectation that they would have years in which to build up reserves.
Projections that Britain would have time to train and then recall huge numbers of reservists in the event of war came to seem optimistic. This was partly because the Soviet threat suddenly seemed more imminent. Two events underlined this. In March 1948, the Communist party effectively took over Czechoslovakia. In June of the same year, the Soviet Union blocked land access to west Berlin, forcing the western powers to launch an airlift. The Cold War also meant that the British kept troops in Austria and Trieste for longer than originally anticipated and that, in 1948, they began fighting against Communist forces in Malaya. Britain no longer needed a large reserve that could be called up in the event of war. Rather it needed full-time soldiers who would be available for immediate deployment in the event of Soviet attack in Europe or who would actually be deployed to theatres of war outside Europe.
The second uncertainty concerned alliances and commitments. Immediately after the war, Bevin seemed to hope that Britain might, along with France, be part of a ‘third force’ that would stand between the United States and the Soviet Union.25 Even during this period, however, there was debate about, for example, whether Britain needed a military presence in the Middle East and, if it did, whether that presence should be based in Egypt or Palestine. Eventually, alliance with the United States and membership of NATO (founded in 1949) became the pillars of British defence policy, but, even before this, the British were keen to prevent America from retreating into her pre-war isolationism and sometimes saw conscription as a token of British good faith that would strengthen the hand of those in Washington who opposed such a retreat.26
The third uncertainty sprang from military technology. The means by which wars were fought – or might be fought – changed more quickly in the five years after the defeat of Nazi Germany than during the war itself and perhaps than during any other period in human history. In May 1945, the officials and officers responsible for post-war military planning did not know about the atomic bomb. In January 1947, the decision that Britain should develop a bomb was taken by a small group of ministers. It is possible to argue that the atom bomb made all other military technologies redundant and that there was something absurd about training men to use bolt-action rifles and bayonets at a time when a single plane could wipe out a city. A Labour MP told his party conference in June 1946 that ‘in an age of atomic and germicidal war, it would be better to train scientists’ than to maintain conscription.27 There was, though, no instant change in British military policy. The Soviet Union did not explode its own atom bomb until 1949, and even after that date British planners often discussed atomic bombs as though they were more terrible versions of conventional weapons rather than something entirely new. For example, they anticipated war in which an initial exchange of nuclear weapons might be followed by a period of conventional fighting. Some thought that fear of retaliation might prevent warring countries from using atom bombs at all, as such fears had, supposedly, prevented the use of poison gas in the Second World War.28 The fact that there had never been a war in which both parties possessed atomic weapons conferred an abstract quality on military planning.
Matters were made more complicated by the fact that the armed forces were really preparing for two different kinds of war. In the long term, they had to be ready for all-out war against the Soviet Union, which would involve the deployment of millions of men and the use of modern weapons. However, the end of the Second World War also meant that British troops were pinned down in all sorts of small-scale ‘police actions’, in which ‘heavy tanks and bombers and long-range projectiles for mass destruction’ would be useless.29
The fourth uncertainty concerned money. In the immediately post-war years, military planners gave relatively little consideration to how they might pay for the armed forces. The Treasury was not consulted about early schemes for conscription – advice about the economic consequences of such a policy came, if at all, from the Ministry of Labour or the Board of Trade. In an early report, a brief passage about economics was pasted on to the finished document as an apparent afterthought. Calculations about economic effects were skewed by the fact that the high unemployment of the pre-war years allowed officials to argue that, even with conscription, Britain would have more civilians at work in the late 1940s than it had had in 1939.
The war had been expensive: by 1945, Britain owed £3,000 million and was the world’s largest debtor. The peacetime projects of the Labour government elected in 1945 would also cost money. Keynesian thinking meant officials were less concerned to contain public spending than they would have been before 1939, but even Keynesians recognized that military spending was of less economic use than civilian spending and that, in particular, spending to maintain troops overseas would be economically damaging. Some Labour politicians tried to focus minds on the economic consequences of conscription and on the way in which economic failure might undermine military power. Douglas Jay, the Labour MP, wrote in April 1946 that if the chiefs of staff had their way ‘it would follow that the United Kingdom cannot carry out its military commitments and achieve economic recovery and independence’.30 Herbert Morrison put the arguments against an extensive and expensive form of conscription in terms of great power status: ‘Economic recovery is a matter of operational urgency and on a long view there may be little gain from maintaining large armed forces if the result is that in the economic field we become a second class power.’31
The gravity of Britain’s economic circumstances was exposed in 1947. In return for a loan in 1946, the US had insisted that sterling should be made convertible in July 1947. However, it quickly became clear that allowing the conversion of sterling to dollars would exhaust all Britain’s reserves of foreign currency, and convertibility was suspended two months after it had been introduced.32 This was also the year in which Hugh Dalton resigned as Chancellor and was replaced by the more austere Stafford Cripps, who had expressed doubts about the wisdom of long-term conscription.33
Alongside shifting military strategy went a changing attitude to conscription. Initially, the government simply continued the wartime policy of calling men up for ‘the duration of the emergency’. In May 1946, however, it was announced that, from January of the following year, men would be called up for a defined length of time, which would in the first instance be two years, and that the period served would be gradually shortened.
At the same time as it was tinkering with wartime arrangements, the government brought forward a new law to set post-war conscription on a secure footing. Legislation was first proposed in 1946 and was put before the House of Commons in early 1947. It was amended in 1948 and finally came into effect in January 1949. The greatest source of acrimony concerned the length of time men would be required to serve. The chiefs of staff would have liked the period to be set at two years, but settled for eighteen months. Some Labour backbenchers wanted an even shorter period of service. Faced with a revolt by some of its own MPs, in the spring of 1947 the government agreed that it should be reduced to one year. Attlee’s willingness to concede on this point may have owed something to the fact that Bevin, the most effective supporter of national service in the Labour party, was away at a conference in Moscow. The whole affair was so embarrassing that Attlee sent a personal telegram to George VI:
The vote against the Government on the Bill was rather heavier than was expected. Labour Members voting against were predominantly elderly members traditionally opposed to all forms of conscription and Members from Wales. Having regard to the past tradition of the Labour Party on this matter I am not disposed to take the adverse vote too seriously, though there may be some difficulties at the Committee Stage.34
However, national servicemen never did serve for just one year. Towards the end of 1948, before the National Service Act came into force, the government effected another volte-face and restored the length of service to eighteen months.
Justifying such rapid changes of policy involved politicians and officials in some uncomfortable contortions. The Secretary of State for War claimed that the initial reduction in the projected length of service sprang partly from discussions with industrialists and concern about the economic effects of calling men up for a longer period.35 When the length of service was increased again, he painted an implausible picture of the high hopes for international cooperation that he and his colleagues had, so he claimed, once entertained, and argued that these hopes had been dashed in the recent past. Such justifications aroused derision from the Conservative opposition and from journalists who believed that the change was rooted in the internal politics of the parliamentary Labour party rather than the international politics of the United Nations.36
In fact, the positions of almost all participants in the national service debates were riven with contradiction. The government had claimed that one year of service would be feasible in September 1948 when, as a response to the Berlin airlift, it had extended the service of all current conscripts by three months – which meant that some of them served for over two years. The position of the service chiefs was also odd because they had asked for longer service in 1947, at a time when they could not easily accommodate the conscripts that they were getting: 200,000 men were being registered for national service in a year when the forces could really take only 150,000.37 The ministry toyed with expedients that included lowering the length of service even further, creating a labour corps to take men who were not wanted for combatant service or exempting men whose service had been deferred. The forces themselves were pressed to take as many men as possible.
Matters were complicated by the type of conscripts the forces were getting, as well as their number. From early 1947, men were allowed to defer service in order to complete their education or to finish apprenticeships. In the long term, the services would get these men back when their deferments expired, which was usually three years after they had first been given. In the short term, however, deferments removed a large number of the most skilled men from the call-up. The effects of this process were at their worst just as post-war conscription was institutionalized. The army reckoned that it needed 10 per cent of recruits to be in the highest category – defined in terms of fitness, mental ability and education. In 1947, only 4 per cent of them reached this standard. The Adjutant General wrote: ‘At the moment … we are (I hope) at about the bottom of the trough in regard to average quality.’38
The army had the greatest need for conscripts and it was the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, i.e. the country’s most senior soldier, who intervened most in the matter. In June 1946, Bernard Montgomery succeeded Alan Brooke in this post. ‘Monty’ was an extraordinary figure: arrogant, vain and bitterly lonely. Churchill said that he was ‘in defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable’. Montgomery himself once began an answer to a journalist with the words: ‘As God once said, I think rightly …’ When Montgomery visited a camp in 1947, the conscripts were taught how to reply if he asked ‘Who am I?’ The correct answer was: ‘Sir! You are Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir!’39
Montgomery quarrelled with civilian politicians but the most damming remarks about him usually came from soldiers themselves. More than any other man, he seemed to epitomize the transition from the high drama of war to the low comedy of a peacetime army.40 Montgomery talked, with characteristic grandiloquence, of creating a ‘new model army’. This army was designed to conduct the large-scale training of reserves described above. However, Montgomery also believed that conscription should have a social function and that it should teach young men about matters such as wood craft. There was a touch of the head scout about Montgomery, and he took an interest in young boys that aroused comment even among those who did not suspect that there was a sexual element in his behaviour.
Montgomery’s interventions were almost entirely counter-productive. He exasperated politicians and his fellow chiefs of staff. He was easy to mock and the fact that national service was associated with him meant that, from the start, it was portrayed as laughable. The Labour MP Richard Crossman wrote that the ‘Great conscription muddle’ was ‘Monty’s pet idea, which he sold to Ernest Bevin. It was unnecessary and, without Monty at the head of the War Office, we should never have had it. But Monty thought a period in the forces should be a part of every boy’s education.’41 It was said that ‘Montgomery principles’ had turned ‘regimental officers … into a cohort of club-leaders and Rover-Scouts’.42 When Peter Nichols set out to write a play, based partly on his own experiences as a conscript just after the war, he ‘dipped into a couple of Montgomery’s books, Forward from Victory and The Path to Leadership, full of exhortations to his soldiers and, when there were none of them left to listen, to youth-leaders and Mothers’ Unions. Sad and frightening and funny all at once.’43
In spite of the fact that, or perhaps because, Montgomery’s name was so associated with conscription, its most vehement opponents were often those who regarded themselves as defenders of military efficiency.44 Basil Liddell Hart was the most vociferous of these. Born in 1895, he had been a regular officer and, invalided out after the First World War, he became a military writer, combining his pontifications on grand strategy with an endearing interest in women’s fashion. Though he had never held a military rank higher than that of captain, he regarded himself as being at least the equal of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff – ‘in pre-war years Monty frequently wrote to tell me how closely he followed my writings’45 – and perhaps the superior of other strategic thinkers: ‘Winston’s mind moves in old ruts. Even before the war he could not grasp that technical quality would discount the conscript army on which he counted.’46
Liddell Hart disliked conscription and campaigned against it, though he was disappointed that the government had not formally sought his advice: ‘it is not practicable to make detailed proposals for the streamlining of military service unless one is actually called in to investigate the matter and has all the official data placed at one’s disposal. I have a good deal of experience of such investigations in the past.’47
His argument was rooted partly in a belief that new technologies required professional soldiers to operate them and partly in a more historical vision – he despised the French army, which made so much of conscription, and he admired the wartime Wehrmacht, which had roots in the forced professionalization of the Weimar period. His most influential ally in this campaign was Giffard Le Quesne Martel – another apostle of armoured warfare – who had retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant general in 1945. Both men believed in small, highly trained and well-equipped armies.
Away from Whitehall and Westminster, national service was a matter that concerned almost every family with a boy under the age of twenty. Readers of newspaper articles might well have got the impression that peacetime conscription was almost universally unpopular. It was not surprising that the Daily Mirror – a left-wing newspaper with a tradition of criticizing the military – ran frequent articles on the hard lives of conscripts and the uselessness of the tasks they were compelled to undertake. However, attacks on conscription were also published in the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, all conservative papers.
One should not conclude from all this that national service was imposed on an unwilling country. Those who opposed post-war conscription were a significant and noisy minority. Ordinary people disliked it because of the disruption that it caused in the lives of their own sons; army officers disliked it, especially during the Montgomery years, because the emphasis on training often made their lives dull and repetitive and distracted them from what they regarded as ‘real soldiering’. However, there was a difference between disliking conscription and believing that it should be abolished or that there was any realistic alternative.
Few people in the late 1940s suggested that Britain could live without large armed forces. Officers argued that increased pay and esteem for regulars might produce enough recruits without the need for conscription but it was not, in fact, clear that service pay was particularly low by historical standards. The real problem of recruiting lay in the fact that, as far as working-class recruits were concerned, full employment made civilian life more attractive and, as far as officers were concerned, the declining fortunes of the gentry made it harder for them to subsidize young men in a profession where pay often failed to cover living costs. In purely military terms, the armed forces would certainly have been better off with a smaller number of recruits who would serve for longer.
The government did toy with schemes – modelled on the American pattern – that might have allowed men to be called up by ballot rather than by universal conscription, but it invariably decided that such schemes would be rendered unworkable by a public sense that they were unfair. Army officers complained about national service throughout the period in which it was in force, but the most senior officers never called for its abolition; indeed, they fought for its retention during the late 1950s. Similarly, the general population often grumbled about national service but public opinion polls in the late 1940s showed that the majority of people favoured its retention – even if that majority was smallest among the age groups that were actually likely to be affected by conscription. All discussion of conscription was rather abstract. The batches of white-faced eighteen-year-olds who turned up every two weeks for basic training did not care about the projections of British strategy years into the future. A national serviceman wrote in 1949: ‘Conscription debates in Parliament mean little to a conscript. Arguments about hypothetical needs, based on widely conflicting statistics of manpower, are remote from our personal problems, and the only thing that really interests us – demobilisation time – seems a foregone conclusion, unlikely to be brought nearer.’48