4

The Experience of Conscription, 1945–1949

Post-war conscription became associated with regularity, predictability and a certain brutal order. By the early 1950s, most boys approaching their eighteenth birthday knew that they would have to serve in the forces and knew how long they were going to serve. The shrewder among them could probably also hazard a good guess at what rank they would hold and what unit they would serve in. This order, however, did not spring into existence with the end of fighting in 1945. The first peacetime conscripts were called up in circumstances that still owed more to the chaos of war than the bureaucracy of peace.

The Second World War had had a messy end for the British. The intense fighting in northern Europe that had begun with the Normandy landings in June 1944 finished with German surrender on 8 May 1945. There were casualties until the last moment. Those lucky enough to survive unscathed marked the day with drunken celebrations. Alan Sillitoe, trying to get himself recruited into the Fleet Air Arm, recalled that his father got so drunk that he vomited his false teeth into a Nottingham gutter; fortunately the family, which had done well from wartime munitions work, could afford to replace them.¹ A private in the Sherwood Foresters in Italy woke up thinking that he had literally lost his sight; it turned out that he had fallen down some steps and that an equally drunk sergeant, trying to treat his injuries, had put bandages across his eyes.²

The end of the war in Europe, however, did not mean an end to fighting. Very few knew that the Americans had tested an atom bomb; most soldiers thought it would take an assault on the home islands to defeat Japan. It was reckoned that taking Malaya alone would involve landing 182,000 British troops.³ In August 1945, just before the destruction of Hiroshima, British commanders still anticipated months of fighting and hundreds of thousands of further casualties. Further down the chain of command, well-informed officers such as Michael Howard and Denis Healey thought that they might have years of war in the Pacific ahead of them.⁴

The armed forces had been turned upside down by the war. There were 4,653,000 British people in uniform by 1945. Nine tenths of them were men and the great majority were conscripts: 2,920,000 were in the army, 950,000 in the air force and 783,000 in the navy.⁵ The experience of servicemen varied hugely. There were men who had not set foot on British soil since 1939 and had spent much of the intervening time on active service, but most servicemen did not leave the British Isles until the summer of 1944 and a million of them had still not done so by the summer of 1945.

The War Office graphs reproduced overleaf reflect the transition from the small and all-regular services of 1938 to the very large and predominantly conscript forces of 1946 and then to the more stable period of peacetime national service in the 1950s, by which time conscripts made up about a third of the services and constituted only a slight majority in the army.

Relations between the various services had changed during the war. The army was still larger than the navy or air force, but it did not have the near monopoly of fighting that it had enjoyed in the First World War. Indeed, between the fall of France and the D-Day landings, there were long periods when most soldiers had little to do except cleaning kit. The RAF, by contrast, had become more important during the war. After soldiers dragged themselves home from Dunkirk, British survival seemed to depend on a small number of fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain and then, after 1940, on the aircrew of Bomber Command who took the war to the Germans. The RAF endured horrifying casualties and its war was one of sudden violence and individual combat, very different from the slogging battles of the army.

The RAF went with a different kind of social order. It was not classless – one of the most celebrated novels about class in post-war Britain, John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), revolves around the sexual rivalry between two former airmen, one a sergeant and one a squadron leader. Class distinctions in the RAF were, however, less rigid than those in the other services. Only a minority of airmen actually flew but that minority had an influence over the culture of the whole service and flying in wartime fostered a comradeship that partly transcended social origins. One post-war conscript from a working-class family said that the atmosphere of the RAF called his ‘mental map of class boundaries’ into question: ‘Being shot up over Düsseldorf and seeing your mates die night after night didn’t leave any taste for affectation.’⁶ Pilots who had their hands on the controls of an aircraft did not worry about the issues of authority that haunted army officers. The RAF, unlike the army, did not issue orders that officers and other ranks should not frequent the same pubs. Flying, or maintaining aircraft, required technical skill that sometimes cut across the distinction between officers and other ranks.⁷ Other ranks in the air force were better educated than their counterparts in the army; officers were less likely to have the public school education that was traditionally associated with army officers. The social basis of the air force became an obsession for Winston Churchill, a fact reported by his aide and fellow Harrovian John Colville,⁸ who felt inspired to overcome the handicaps of his own patrician background and become a fighter pilot.

Regulars (male), Conscrips (male) and Women in the Three Armed Services, 1938–1954 (in thousands)

Source: WO 384/16, ‘Abstract of Army Statistics’, 1955

The air force kept some of its prestige after 1945, but this played a surprisingly small role in the minds of post-war conscripts. Almost all men who served in the RAF had put it down as their first choice among the services; few said that its wartime reputation played a part in their desire to serve with it. The very fact that the air force had had a ‘good war’ contributed to a decline in morale when peace came. A report of 1949 commented on the depressing ‘mental adjustment’ required as officers moved from a ‘life of constant risk, demanding the exercise of high skill and courage’, to ground-based desk jobs.

In May 1947, when this investigation began, such cases of depression were very common, especially among junior officers, and their effect on the morale of stations as a whole was profound. Upon individual NS recruits, however, it appeared to be wholly indirect … But a milder, more general gloom is still spread from the lack of opportunity to fly, learn how to fly, or to make direct contact with aeroplanes, which is believed to be characteristic of National Service in the post-war RAF.⁹

The war also brought changes in the army. For most soldiers before 1939, the regiment had been their world. A second lieutenant was supposed to think, or at least to pretend, that nothing was more desirable than commanding a battalion of his own regiment as a lieutenant colonel. One officer going to Sandhurst in 1934 had been advised by his uncle, a regular soldier, ‘Don’t get ambitious – it’s fatal.’¹⁰ Regiments mattered less in the war. New units were created that had no history and, in some cases, no future beyond the current conflict. Men were moved around as, and when, their services were needed. From 1943 onwards, most army recruits were recruited into the General Service Corps and were only subsequently posted to regiments.

Before 1939 there had been a sharp gulf between officers and other ranks in the army. The military academies at Woolwich, for engineers and gunners, and at Sandhurst, for other cadets, were fee-paying institutions recruiting mainly boys from public schools. Promotion from the ranks to commissioned status was unusual. Andrew Man, who was to command a battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, joined up as a private and was eventually sent to Sandhurst. But Man was an exception that proved the rule. He was a public school boy whose family had fallen on hard times. Among his Sandhurst contemporaries, the number of Etonians was greater than the number of men promoted from the ranks.¹¹

The outbreak of war in 1939 meant the rapid expansion of the officer corps. Men were commissioned from outside the traditional officer class and, eventually, it was decreed that all officers should begin in the ranks. Greater formality was brought to the process of commissioning, which was, increasingly, removed from the control of regimental commanding officers. War Office Selection Boards (WOSBs) were established, partly to mimic aspects of the officer selection exercises used in the German army. Psychiatrists were eventually appointed to selection boards and this ‘scientific’ selection aroused bitter resentment among some who regarded themselves as defenders of the social order.¹²

War sped promotion. In peace, it had been common for men not to reach the rank of major until they were forty; by 1945, it was reckoned that the average age of majors in fighting units was twenty-eight.¹³ The greatest beneficiaries of wartime promotion were not those who had been commissioned during the war (who rarely rose above the rank of captain), but men who had already been regular officers before the war and who were now promoted much faster than would have been normal. Halfway through the war, three quarters of those who held the rank of lieutenant colonel or above had been regular officers or reservists before the war.¹⁴ What marked the successful men out was that they were tough, energetic and possessed of the quality that had been most derided in the officers’ mess during the 1930s: ambition. Officers who rose in the Second World War were to dominate the British army for a long time. When he became Secretary of State for Defence in 1964, Denis Healey, himself a wartime major, gathered around him a group of senior officers – Cecil Blacker, Michael Carver, Walter Walker – who had first shown their capacities when commanding battalions in the Second World War and who were, one suspects, similar to the tough lieutenant colonel (known as ‘Basil the bastard’) who had commanded Healey himself in 1944.¹⁵

The British armed forces did not return to ‘normal’ as soon as the Second World War was over. Between Japanese surrender (in August 1945) and Indian independence (in August 1947), they were subject to a unique set of pressures. Britain retained almost all of the imperial possessions that it had held in the nineteenth century. It also held the mandates that the League of Nations had awarded after the First World War and had acquired de facto responsibility for areas into which British troops had advanced during the war. The other imperial powers – France, Holland and, for that matter, Japan – were all weak and this created vacuums into which the British were often sucked. Finally, the United States sought to scale down its forces and bring its troops home until fear of Soviet expansion caused President Truman to reverse this policy in 1947.

Nationalists all over Asia, mobilized by participation in the Japanese war effort, as in Burma, or opposition to the Japanese occupation, as in Malaya, did not want European rule. The British began to suppress nationalist discontent and this sometimes meant that they ended up fighting in places, such as Indochina, that had never been part of their empire. Soon the British were present in an area that extended ‘from the Persian railhead at Zahedan to New Guinea and the Australian seas’.¹⁶ When the Dutch East Indies were placed under the aegis of Louis Mountbatten, just after the Japanese surrender, Britain acquired responsibility for an area of half a million square miles with 80 million inhabitants. There were also British troops in much of Europe. In Greece, they were sent to suppress Communist insurrection in 1946. In Italy, they tried to contain forces of Yugoslav partisans and they were to remain in the disputed city of Trieste until 1954.

Mike Calvert was the kind of officer who bounced around the periphery of the ramshackle British empire after the war. He had fought with the Chindits in Burma before being invalided to India and was posted to Trieste in 1945. He then moved to China, where he spied, and Malaya, where he helped reconstitute the Special Air Service. He did not adjust well to the atmosphere of a peacetime army and his military career came to an end in the 1950s after he had, among other things, urinated on the billiard table in the governor’s residence in Malaya – an incident that he disarmingly described as ‘one of those deeds that lost the empire’. He recalled the immediately post-war period in these terms: ‘We had a million troops in Abyssinia, Eritrea, Austria, Germany, Indonesia (quite a lot), Indochina, Madagascar (not handed back [to the French]), Iran and Iraq … We were the kingpins with no money to do this.’¹⁷

Under these circumstances, servicemen could not simply be released as soon as the fighting stopped. The Minister of Labour had announced a plan for demobilization before the war had ended. Most conscripts were released according to a formula that took account of their age and length of service. Each was given a number that defined his position in the queue to be demobilized. Between 18 June 1945 and 28 February 1946 a total of 2,082,950 servicemen were demobilized, of whom 1,374,460 came from the army, 414,230 from the RAF and 294,260 from the navy.¹⁸ However, plenty of wartime conscripts still remained in uniform in 1947.

Demobilization was a source of much bitterness.¹⁹ The insistence on equity meant that men were released in accordance with their demobilization number but without regard to where they happened to be. This meant that a man might be retained doing nothing in a camp down the road from his own home because men with higher demobilization numbers were still in the Far East. Soldiers who had put up with things during the war felt differently when the fighting was over and when some of their comrades were going home. Men were piled into overcrowded bases and often separated from the officers under whom they had fought and who might still have commanded their respect. An army report of 1946 spoke about soldiers in the Far East thus: ‘Drafts of men roam about the country like droves of armed sheep, but more articulate – the Transit Camp, that slaughterhouse of hope, looming menacingly before them.’²⁰

The armed forces in the year or two after Japanese surrender had an improvised and temporary feel. No one was sure what was about to happen and many men had no concern except to extract themselves. As an officer in Burma recalled: ‘everything was concerned with running down’.²¹ James Notley, a regular officer who had served in India, North Africa and Italy, found himself commanding a holding battalion in Clacton: some of the men were former prisoners of war on their way to demobilization and some were young conscripts called up since the end of the war, whom Notley considered ‘nothing like as good as soldiers in Italy’.²² Edward Grey, an NCO with the Durham Light Infantry, recalled the petty futility of military life immediately after the war. He was in Greece where his regiment began to take in the first group of reluctant post-war conscripts. He thought that, better handled, they could have become good soldiers but nothing seemed to work out. He tried to improve the literacy of his soldiers and asked the Educational Corps for materials, but none were sent. Later he built a tennis court, which was promptly taken over by the officers. Grey was relieved to be demobbed in 1946.²³

Mutinies and ‘strikes’ broke out in overseas bases, particularly those of the RAF – the Red Air Force, as one colonial governor labelled it. Disturbances started at Jodhpur in India in October 1945 and spread to twenty-two bases by early 1946.²⁴ It was reckoned that, at one point, around 50,000 airmen across the Near and Far East were involved in a coordinated movement of protest.²⁵ The fact that airmen were often responsible for webs of communication helped spread rebellion. Demob numbers were illicitly relayed in Morse code from RAF Uxbridge via Gibraltar, Egypt, Karachi, Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore to bases in Malaya.²⁶

John Saville was a university graduate from a working-class Jewish family who finished the war as a sergeant in the Royal Artillery. He was also a Communist but had disregarded the party’s order that its members should seek commissions. In 1945, he was serving in India and witnessed a protest at an RAF base near Karachi. He attributed this partly to the fact that airmen ‘were often of a more skilled kind with membership of a trade union much more common than the average infantryman or gunner’. Saville’s own rebellion came when a captain with white knees (a sign of a man recently posted from England) ordered him to organize training for the men. ‘My war is over … and you can go and fuck yourself,’ Saville replied.²⁷

An RAF base in the Far East could give the first post-war conscripts an interesting perspective on military discipline. Peter Nichols arrived at such a base, in Bengal, in early 1946. He was greeted by a ‘brown, case-hardened’ corporal:

You billet orderly, Corp? I asked.

Don’t Corp me. I’m Stan, all right? And there’s no orderly. Ram [the Indian bearer] takes care of the basha.

You off duty then?

I’ve finished son. We’ve all finished, we’ve been here long enough. We’ve told them we’re not working again till our number’s up.²⁸

Ray Self was not called up into the air force until October 1950 but he believed that ‘they’ were still haunted by the memory of 1946 and the fear of ‘another mutiny’.²⁹ Self appears to have been unusual among post-war conscripts in knowing about the upheavals of 1946, and the enquiries that the RAF conducted into conscript morale during the late 1940s did not unearth mutinous feelings – though perhaps the fact that such enquiries were conducted at all shows that ‘they’ were indeed frightened by the prospect of disorder.

Three places epitomized the mood of uncertainty that marked the British armed forces during the late 1940s: India, Germany and Palestine. Between them they accounted for roughly half of the 476,000 troops posted abroad in April 1947, of whom 100,000 were in Germany (this number had halved since the previous year), 72,000 in Palestine and 58,000 in India.³⁰

India had been a scene of British military endeavour since the eighteenth century and a stepping-stone in the career of officers from Arthur Wellesley to Bernard Montgomery. After 1945, however, it was obvious to many that the Raj was dead, and Indian independence was granted on 15 August 1947. This was accompanied by the end of the India that British soldiers had known. What had been a single unit ruled from Delhi was now split into two. Pakistan (itself divided between two non-contiguous geographical areas, one in the north and one in Bengal) was, by the time of independence, almost exclusively Muslim. India comprised the remainder of the subcontinent and had a mixed population, with a Hindu majority.

The Indian army had been separate from the British army but its officers had been almost entirely British. The last years of British India had gone, in an odd way, with the apotheosis of the British-officered Indian army. It had provided much of the manpower with which Britain pursued the Second World War in Asia and the Middle East. British officers had been trained in India during the war – by its end, 290 cadets were being sent to India every four weeks.³¹ After the war, however, the Indian army began to change. Indian troops had to be shipped back from places such as Malaya. The Gurkhas, recruited from Nepal, were divided between the British and Indian armies. The Indian army itself was split as troops were divided between India and Pakistan. British soldiers were usually passive spectators to the savage inter-communal riots and massacres that preceded the partition of India.

Some British officers served the new states, particularly Pakistan,³² for a time and a few British officers were commissioned into the Indian army as late as 1946.³³ However, the number of officer cadets sent to India declined and few of them stayed. Post-war conscript officers would undertake the long sea voyage to Bombay, and then go to Bangalore, where they lived for a few months in a luxury that would have been unimaginable in Attlee’s Britain, before being shipped back to serve in British regiments.

Most British officers in the Indian army transferred to whatever positions they could find. Edward Pickard moved from the Frontier Force Rifles to a searchlight regiment of the Royal Artillery. Used to commanding tough Peshwari tribesmen, he was now in charge of a regiment that contained only three regular officers and a few regular NCOs. He recorded in his diary: ‘The remainder are mere children … It is a very much changed army to the one I knew pre-war’ – though he added sportingly, ‘I think it is going to be fun.’³⁴

Men who had spent their whole lives under the blazing sun in regiments with a marked sense of their own history now found that they were making do as best they could at squalid camps in Oswestry or Aldershot. Harold Perkin, called up in 1948, served as an education officer in the air force. Three of his fellow officers were refugees from the Indian army: ‘bewhiskered old soaks with fiery red cheeks and Edwardian manners’. One of them was serving with the rank of flight lieutenant (equivalent to the rank of captain in the army) but had, apparently, been a full colonel and occasionally appeared at mess nights in the uniform of the Bengal Lancers.³⁵

P. J. Wilkinson spent his early years in India, where his father was a civil servant, before going to boarding school in England and to Sandhurst. In 1933 he was commissioned into the 19th Lancers of the Indian army. Like many of his comrades, he was a good linguist who learned Urdu and Hindi. He served in the war against Japan and commanded his regiment for a time before, much to his chagrin, being replaced by a more senior officer who had ‘spent the whole war in the India Office and did not know one end of a tank from the other’. As the partition of India approached, his regiment was split, with Hindus being sent to India while he remained in what was now Pakistan. Sikh squadrons were driven away in tears under armed guard. It was, as he recalled laconically, ‘a bit of a wrench’. His brother officers were ‘concerned’ but none committed ‘an act of ill-discipline’.

Wilkinson chose to return to the UK rather than serve the Pakistani state. He moved from the cavalry to the artillery and was, initially, posted to the least prestigious element of this, an anti-aircraft unit. Eventually, he persuaded his superiors that his skills and experience might at least warrant posting to a field artillery unit and he was sent to Germany in 1949 – he discovered that his new regimental commander could not even be bothered to learn German.³⁶

There was a tragi-comic aspect to the British army’s last days in India. In 1946, at a time when some of the most experienced India hands were desperately seeking new jobs in Europe, the authorities took Major D’Arcy John Mander from his office in the control commission in Berlin and sent him to Calcutta, apparently to try to deal with the ‘awful slaughter’. Mander was a gallant soldier who had escaped from an Italian prison camp and set up a spy ring in Rome. He spoke fluent German, but had no experience of India.³⁷

Fresh-faced conscripts witnessed the twilight of British rule on the subcontinent. John Nye was conscripted into the RAF in 1945 and kitted out at Padgate: ‘what a dump it is organization is practically non existent … you can imagine conditions when I say 300 pass through every week’. He was sent out to Karachi in June 1946, moved to Bombay and then (in March 1947) on to Ceylon before being brought back to Britain in August 1948. As a member of the RAF police Nye spent much of his time conducting fruitless investigations into how RAF stores so frequently came to be on sale in Indian civilian markets, and attempting to suppress riots in Bombay: ‘as usual with RAF organization, no one knows what we are doing here’.³⁸

Germany also epitomized the confusions of the first two post-war years. The British Army of the Rhine was formed in August 1945. Later it would become a by-word for comfortable, and mind-numbingly dull, postings. Immediately after the war, things were different. The fixed lines of the Cold War had not yet been seared into the German landscape. British troops were still there as occupiers rather than as defenders of the Germans. Technically British troops would remain an occupying force until they were put under NATO command in 1952. In practice the Berlin airlift of 1948–9 probably marked the point at which British relations with the Germans changed for the better. The airlift illustrated the uncertain and often improvised quality of British military life in the period. The Soviet Union cut all land access to West Berlin, which was an island of western influence at the heart of Communist-ruled East Germany. For a moment, it seemed as though there might be a real danger of war. The western allies responded by flying all commodities, including coal, into the city.

In the first few years of occupation, British troops were often regarded with hostility by the local population. Germany was in chaos. Cities had been bombed to an extent that shocked even soldiers from London or Coventry. The country was desperately poor and, until 1948, did not even have a functioning currency of its own. Large numbers of German men were still prisoners of war in Russia and some German prisoners provided labour for British forces in Africa and the Middle East as late as 1947. British conscripts in a Hamburg NAAFI lost all appetite when they saw starving children pressing their faces against the window;³⁹ others remembered ‘Germans scrabbling for cigarette ends that we dropped in the gutter’.⁴⁰ German women, desperately poor, often resorted to prostitution. Venereal disease in Germany was seen as a particular problem.⁴¹

Roger Alford was called up in November 1944 and commissioned, in October 1946, into the 7th Queen’s Own Hussars; the fact that a man who had spent almost two years in the ranks could be an officer in a smart regiment said much about how the army had changed in the previous five years. He was sent to Germany and remembered that ‘I had never really considered what life would be like in a regiment which was well trained but did not have a war to fight.’ As it turned out, the answer was partly what it would always have been for a peacetime cavalry officer: ‘horses, dogs and sport’. However, discipline was difficult because men convicted of offences would have their date for demobilization set back, so the army was left with wartime conscripts who could not be sent home until they had managed to serve a certain period without getting into trouble. One solution was to put persistent offenders in a special unit – the ‘Woodpeckers’ – who were set to heavy forestry work in the hopes that they would then be too tired to get into fights.⁴²

The single posting that best incarnated the frustrations of the British military in this period was Palestine. The British had held the country as a League of Nations mandate since 1919, while also committed by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to create an independent Jewish state there. An Arab uprising in 1936 had been suppressed with brutality and Jewish guerrillas also attacked British forces. During the war, though, some Jews fought with the British army and Britain was able to use parts of Palestine, notably the Port of Haifa, as military bases. One result of this was that quite large numbers of the men posted to Palestine after 1945 belonged to unglamorous units that were charged with looking after stores and were not well prepared for being shot at. Simply guarding equipment was a problem when so many Jews and Arabs were keen to get their hands on weapons.

After 1945, Jewish emigration increased sharply as survivors from Nazi concentration camps left Europe. In 1947, the United Nations recommended the partition of Palestine. The British were reluctant to enforce a policy that was opposed by the Arabs and announced that they would consider their mandate at an end on 15 May 1948. However, from 1945 until their final departure, British troops were attacked. Jewish resistance groups, notably Menachem Begin’s Irgun, became more violent. On 22 July 1946, the King David hotel in Jerusalem was bombed, with the loss of ninety-one lives. In December of the same year, a group of British soldiers was kidnapped and beaten and, in July 1947, two British sergeants were captured and hanged, apparently in retaliation for the hanging of members of Irgun.

The British intervention in post-war Palestine was brief and, in that the British always knew they were going to leave, futile. The last-minute scuttle out of Palestine, as Arab and Jewish forces attacked each other, looked undignified. Matters were made particularly awkward by the fact that so much equipment had been stored in Palestine and had, therefore, to be moved out at short notice.

There was an anti-Semitic strain to some discussion of Palestine in British military circles.⁴³ However, this was not universal. Indeed the confusion of British experience in Palestine came partly from the fact that the army itself was divided. Sometimes this was a matter of unit. Drivers from the Royal Army Service Corps said that paratroopers had behaved ‘like Nazis’⁴⁴ when exacting revenge for Jewish attacks. Sometimes it was a matter of location. Attacks by Jews on the British army were most common in the north of the country but one conscript officer recalled: ‘We were in the south where the Arabs were tremendously on top, and we saw the absolute best of the Jewish side there.’⁴⁵ Men who had served in Europe during the war were sometimes sympathetic to the Jews because of what they knew of Nazi persecution – though men who had served in the war against Germany were often also particularly resentful of Jewish attacks. Some British conscripts were sympathetic to the Jews because they saw them as more ‘European’ or more ‘civilized’ than the Arabs.

Post-war British conscripts often found it hard to fit their experience into the wider political framework and this was especially true of those who came up against the complicated animosities of Palestine. John Watson was called up into the RAF just after the war and sent first to Egypt and then to Palestine. He became strongly pro-Jewish – partly because he was horrified by the conditions on the refugee ships that brought Jews from Europe and partly because he came to dislike the ‘Herrenvolk’ attitude of some of his fellow servicemen. However, he also detested socialism and blamed the Attlee government for British policy in Palestine. His life took a sudden turn for the worse when he lost his rifle – it had, apparently, been stolen by one of the Arab guards at his barracks. Now this colonel’s son from Wiltshire was charged and put in military prison – where he seems to have endured some harsh treatment. Even this, though, did not make him left-wing in any conventional sense. The worst thing that he could say about the military authorities was that they had behaved like the Soviets.⁴⁶

Most of all, conscripts recalled Palestine as a place where they were shot at by both sides and where there was real uncertainty about who the enemy might be. Jim Parrit was called up in 1946 and sent to Palestine with the Royal Artillery. Arriving in Haifa to escort a train, he was told that it was too dangerous to leave the station but that he and his men could sleep in a NAAFI hut. During the night, Arabs stole their Bren gun; the following morning, the train on which they were travelling was blown up by Jews.⁴⁷ Kenneth Lee, who was a gunner in Palestine, talked of ‘a stab in the back war’ and said that soldiers attacked in the night sometimes did not know whether they were fighting Jews or Arabs.⁴⁸

Service in Palestine aroused a degree of resentment among British conscripts that was only, perhaps, paralleled by that felt for service around the Suez Canal during the undeclared war of the early 1950s. The Palestine Pals and the Palestine Veterans Association were formed in 1997–8 and seem, at least in part, to have been designed as a riposte to ‘Israel’s boastful Golden jubilee’.⁴⁹

The two or three years after the end of the war were marked by the blurring of all sorts of divisions. Wartime conscripts served alongside men who had been called up after the Japanese surrender. Until 1946, the wartime system of calling men up ‘for the duration of the Emergency’ persisted. Irate fathers wrote to newspapers complaining that their sons were unable to make plans about their education or careers.⁵⁰ In the army, everyone except guardsmen still joined up in the General Service Corps rather than in a specific regiment. ‘Potential leaders’ were sent to training battalions – notably that at Hollywood in Northern Ireland – but these were designed to prepare men to be both officers and NCOs and the length of service in them was usually six months, so that potential officers were separated from their comrades only after they had spent a substantial period in the ranks.

It was also often unclear where the first post-war conscripts would be sent or what they would be required to do. Failing to call men up when so many wartime conscripts remained in uniform would have been politically impossible. However, a huge military machine, which had just come to the end of a world war, did not always benefit from an influx of untrained men. Indeed, in the short term, the need to train and organize new recruits, at a time when the forces were also trying to maintain a complicated range of military enterprises and to demobilize large numbers of troops, created problems rather than solving them. One officer recalled his service in Egypt in the autumn of 1946 thus: ‘The war time conscripts, still awaiting demobilization, were bored with playing soldiers in the desert … while the recent arrivals needed convincing that their stint in uniform was necessary.’⁵¹

Those called up at the end of the Second World War or immediately after it felt, even more than the great bulk of national servicemen who were to come later, that there was something incongruous about their military experience. David Price joined the RAF in January 1946, having been an apprentice in a reserved occupation during the war. He thought that his military service was a waste of everyone’s time: ‘the war was over and things were running down – the regulars did not want us and I wanted to earn money and progress’. He was sent with two other men to keep ‘squatters’ away from a deserted base.⁵²

Born in 1926, Godfrey Raper was called up when the war was almost over. He took a short course at Oxford designed to prepare men for commissions and then reported to a training unit during the Indian summer of 1945, but he considered it ‘little more than a joke’ because ‘the war was over’. He then attended a succession of courses in a succession of bases, all of which were being closed down. He recalled a brief interlude at a deserted airfield in Lincolnshire that felt like a grounded Marie Celeste. It was full of poignant relics of the life that had until recently been lived there: a programme for the film club still fluttered on a notice board.

After almost getting his men killed in an exercise with live ammunition, Raper saw that he would never make a good officer and began the oddly difficult business of getting himself reduced to the ranks. He was sent to a unit in Croydon to be ‘deofficered’; it was full of ‘headcases’, including one who had thrown down his rifle at battle school and said ‘I will soldier no more.’ Raper was then posted to a holding battalion, apparently designed to make men so miserable that they would welcome overseas postings. Finally, he joined the Educational Corps and went to Palestine in November 1946.⁵³

A few quick-witted, cynical and well-connected men were able to exploit the chaos of the post-war army. Alan Clark, the future Conservative MP, was the most notorious of these. He later claimed that he had joined up at the age of seventeen, just before the end of the war, and endured the Brigade Squad for men who sought commissions in the Household Division. Actually, he seems to have spent a single day in the Household Cavalry before moving to the army reserve. When called up after graduating from Oxford, he persuaded the authorities that he had fulfilled his military obligations.⁵⁴

The novelist Simon Raven took a more favourable and enterprising view of military service. Born in 1927, he was conscripted in 1945, after having been expelled from Charterhouse for homosexuality:

There followed a happy time in the rough and ready army of the immediately post-war period. Since the war was too recently concluded for people to worry much about morality, my disgrace at Charterhouse did not prevent my being sent to India as a Cadet and then duly sent back again with a commission in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, a regiment of sound if hardly brilliant social standing. I was consequently forgiven by the authorities at Charterhouse and allowed to join the old boys’ association.⁵⁵

Raven’s contemporaries at Charterhouse illustrated the ‘rough and ready’ element in post-war conscription. William Rees-Mogg had gone up to Balliol but the master of the college ‘decided to give my place … to a demobilized ex-serviceman’. His undergraduate career interrupted, Rees-Mogg was called up and hurled into the chaos of RAF Padgate. He escaped to become an education sergeant – a comfortable posting but not quite the kind of military service associated with a future editor of The Times. When he was discharged, his commanding officer provided him with a testimonial: ‘Sergeant Rees-Mogg is capable of performing routine tasks under close supervision.’⁵⁶

James Prior, later a Tory cabinet minister, went into the army under the impression that he would be commissioned into the smart ‘60th Rifles’, but he was sent to a depot in Derby ‘that had no regimental attachments at all’, before being trained, with Raven, in India. Prior was glad to become an officer in the Royal Norfolk Regiment. He remembered the whole experience as marked by ‘an extraordinary mixture of grim reality and peacetime frivolity’.⁵⁷

Many men, even if they were not as cynical as Simon Raven, seem to have had a more interesting experience of military service in the mid to late 1940s than they might have had a few years later when the armed forces had established routines for dealing with national servicemen, and when the chaos of the post-war world had subsided. Jeremy Morse had ‘officer material’ stamped all over him. He had been head boy at Winchester, his father had served with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, and he himself won the Belt of Honour during his officer training. By the mid 1950s, such a man would have been called up into his father’s old regiment, put in a potential officers’ platoon after two weeks and commissioned after about six months. He would then have spent eighteen months serving with other young men from grand public schools before going up to Oxford. As it was, Morse was called up at the beginning of 1947. He was initially recruited into the General Service Corps and did not begin to wear the badge of his father’s regiment until well into his service. He also joined at a time when all conscripts were expected to serve a long period in the ranks, and did not become an officer until he had been in the army for eleven months. He was posted to Palestine, where he got to know the tough Jewish settlers at the local kibbutz: once, out of sheer perversity, he drove down a road that they had mined. At the age of nineteen, he watched British troops move out of southern Palestine just before the Arabs attacked.

Morse was then, along with three other conscript second lieutenants and 180 riflemen, attached to the Royal Army Service Corps – at the opposite end of the military hierarchy from his own regiment – and made responsible for moving supplies out of Egypt: ‘I learnt a lot about human nature there, probably more than if I had stayed with my somewhat crack battalion.’ His demobilization was delayed by the Berlin airlift and he finally escaped from the army after twenty-five months of service. He did not regret the chaotic circumstances of his military career. He thought it better than ‘sitting around on some airfield’ and that ‘If you’re nineteen and you go to Palestine and you go to Egypt and there’s a little bit of fighting and nobody gets killed, it’s almost perfect, isn’t it?’⁵⁸

John Quinton came from a humbler background than Morse, had been educated at a grammar school and was called up in May 1948 before he went to Cambridge. Like Morse he served an extra few months because of the Berlin airlift. Not wanting to be an officer, he joined the Intelligence Corps and became a sergeant. Quinton’s service seemed more The Third Man than The Virgin Soldiers. He was sent to Trieste, where he interrogated refugees from Croatia and Slovenia in primitive Italian. Aged nineteen, he set up a smuggling ring that moved contraband and information across the Yugoslav frontier. One day, a member of the gang staggered into his office leaving a trail of blood. It was, as Quinton recalled fifty years later with the calculated understatement of a successful banker, ‘somewhat tragic that ultimately, because of a mistake by my commanding officer, all except one of them were shot dead on the frontier’.⁵⁹

Between 1945 and 1949, the hierarchies and rigid divisions of the armed forces were slowly resurrected. In 1946, psychiatrists were dropped from the officer selection boards. The regimental system, which had been weakened during the war, was restored to much of its former importance and recruitment through the General Service Corps was abolished in 1948.

Divisions between officers and other ranks became, once again, sharply marked after the war. At first, all soldiers were still required to serve a period in the ranks. However, this became an increasingly empty formality. During the war, men had moved up and down the ranks and many officers were promoted after acquiring substantial experience as NCOs. After the war, the qualities regarded as desirable in an NCO were separated from those regarded as desirable in an officer. In 1948 the training battalions that had mixed potential officers with potential NCOs were abolished. From then on, men regarded as potential officers were sent straight from basic training to Officer Cadet Training Units.

During the war, training at Sandhurst and Woolwich had been suspended. All officers passed through one of the Officer Cadet Training Units. By 1945, there were dozens of such institutions scattered around the country and often accommodated in hotels or boarding houses. After 1945, the War Office concentrated the training of conscript army officers at Eaton Hall in Cheshire, and Mons barracks in Aldershot.

Separate training establishments for regular officers were restored. The Britannia Naval College at Dartmouth was reopened for potential naval officers. It continued, for the first few years after the Second World War, to function as a boarding school, taking boys from the age of thirteen, though increasing numbers of cadets were admitted at the age of sixteen or eighteen. Cranwell became, once again, the officer training academy for the Royal Air Force. Sandhurst was reopened in 1946 as the academy for all regular army officers. The abolition of the academy at Woolwich implied that distinctions between technical branches of the army and the more socially prestigious infantry and cavalry units were to be abolished. Sandhurst also ceased to be a fee-paying institution and was, in theory, now open to all boys who could pass a test that was pitched below the level required for university entrance.

In practice, the democratization of the regular officer corps after 1945 was limited. An RAF officer noted that: ‘Many people used to regard – and still do regard – the Army as a refuge of the dull-witted sons of the upper class who were quite incapable of any other profession.’⁶⁰ The abolition of the Woolwich academy meant a decline in the intellectual quality of the technical arms rather than a rise of that in the infantry and cavalry. The standard of mathematics among Sandhurst students in the post-war period was notoriously low.⁶¹

The abolition of fees at Sandhurst did not mean that it started to recruit large numbers of boys from state schools. Almost half of its intake came from 150 schools represented at the Headmasters’ Conference and a third of them came from twelve schools – Wellington, Eton, Winchester, Haileybury, Rugby, Cheltenham, Charterhouse, Sherbourne, Bedford, Radley, Marlborough and Blundell’s.⁶²

Some army officers, or former officers, campaigned for the army to become less democratic after 1945. One wrote: ‘There is scarcely any doubt that practically every officer who has spent the normal short period in the ranks is the worse for it.’ He argued that such service eroded the capacity to give orders. He believed that the pre-1914 public schools had produced ‘the finest body of regimental officers the World has ever seen’, but that their quality had declined because they now instilled ‘comradeship rather than leadership’.⁶³

A sense of the mood in the British army is given by the fact that some senior officers disliked the change of nomenclature at Sandhurst that involved calling students ‘officer-cadets’ rather than ‘gentlemen-cadets’.⁶⁴ Sandhurst did not restore the title ‘gentlemen’ to its cadets but it did instil a gentlemanly ethos and some of its post-war graduates were more conscious of this ethos than men who had been through the war. Alberic Stacpoole illustrated some features of the new/old officer values. His mixture of snobbery, altruism and institutional loyalty would eventually find its outlet when he became a Benedictine monk. When he was called up for national service, he applied for a regular commission and went to Sandhurst. He was initially disappointed to be commissioned into the Duke of Wellington’s, a relatively humble infantry regiment, but ‘they grew on me’.⁶⁵ In Korea he fought gallantly, winning the Military Cross, but his definition of gallantry was different from that of more senior officers. On one occasion he noticed his company commander – a veteran of the Second World War – running across an area of open ground, where he risked exposure to enemy fire. Stacpoole rang the commander, a man two ranks senior to himself and possessed of much more military experience, on a field telephone, and complained that running ‘was not really an officerly thing to do’.⁶⁶

The careers of many regular officers had been shaken up by the war and the effects of this were still visible for years after 1945. Michael Forrester went up the ladders of wartime promotion and down the snakes of peacetime retrenchment. Born in 1917, he obtained a regular commission in 1938. During the war he fought in Crete, where he rallied soldiers and locals to attack the Germans before escaping in a small boat (he won a bar to the Military Cross that he had been awarded in Palestine) and was then wounded at El Alamein. He became an acting lieutenant colonel and commanded a battalion that landed at Salerno, where he won the Distinguished Service Order. He took his men to Normandy, where he was wounded again, and then became military assistant to Field Marshal Alexander. After the war, he was posted as military attaché in Washington and retained his acting rank for a year, but was reduced to being a ‘local’ lieutenant colonel and then to a simple major. He did not much mind the demotion – his rise had been so fast that he had never commanded a company, the task usually given to majors. At the age of thirty-three and with German shrapnel in his leg, he pushed himself through the ferocious training required of paratroopers, was posted to the Parachute Regiment and eventually rose to the rank of major general.⁶⁷

The war created divisions among regulars officers. Rapid promotion meant that some served under men who had once been their juniors. Officers who had spent years in prisoner of war camps returned to find their regiments being run by tough young men who had made their reputations in 1944. The stoical discipline of officers who had led their soldiers into captivity at Dunkirk or Singapore had nothing in common with the ruthless determination of those who had fought their way out of Arnhem.

National servicemen – national service officers in particular – understood how the fortunes of war had divided their own superiors. James Kennaway and John Hollands, both post-war conscripts, wrote novels that described the bitter, sometimes deadly, animosities between wartime officers.⁶⁸ Kennaway and Hollands were writing works of fiction, but their characters had real-life counterparts. A lieutenant colonel of the Northamptonshire Regiment was a ‘fierce, bitter man’ but one who had commanded a battalion in the Italian campaign, ‘knew his profession’ and extracted a high standard of work from his sergeants and subalterns, having apparently ‘given up’ on the majors and captains who had themselves been through the war. Part of the bitterness between the lieutenant colonel and his brother officers seems to have sprung from the fact that he had commanded a company of the regiment in the retreat to Dunkirk and got them out ‘more or less unscathed whereas a lot of Northamptons had been put in the bag’.⁶⁹

Peter Holmes was a national service officer with the Royal Leicestershire Regiment in Korea. He too sensed the tension between the officers who had served in the war and particularly the resentment that some felt for the ‘glamour’ that attached to Bernard Briggs, who had won the Military Cross at Arnhem.⁷⁰

The war was always a point of reference for post-war national servicemen and strangely it acquired a more clear-cut significance as time went on. Eventually, many peacetime conscripts came to contrast the well-ordered pointlessness of their own military service with what they believed had been the rough-and-ready efficiency of the wartime forces. The war, however, left darker legacies. Some soldiers never reconciled themselves to the violence they endured in the war or the loss of acting rank they suffered at its end. Court martials and enquiries into brutality give occasional glimpses of the ways in which wartime soldiers took out their frustrations on post-war conscripts or the inhabitants of the countries to which they were posted.⁷¹