The End of Military Life
Under 29 January 1919, Greg’s War Office record of service showed him “placed on unemployed list”. Soon thereafter, he returned to civilian life – in his case, student life. Within a few months, 42 Squadron had disbanded.[1]
A Narrow Reprieve for the RAF
For some years after 1918 it seemed that the newly-created RAF might itself be abolished,[2] in the same way that peacetime saw the dissolution of the Machine Gun Corps (progressively from 1920 to 1922) and the amalgamation of traditional cavalry regiments of the British Army.[3] In the event, Hugh Trenchard’s re-appointment as Chief of the Air Staff (agreed in mid-February 1919) offered a reprieve because he was willing to comply with the government’s plans to reduce the RAF’s strength from 280 to just 28 squadrons. Further, he was soon able to demonstrate the cost effectiveness of airpower for Britain’s world-wide empire now desperately short of money, through the suppression of rebellion and disorder in Afghanistan (May–August 1919), Somaliland (January–February 1920) and Iraq (from May 1920). Nevertheless, “By the end of 1919, 26,000 of the 27,000 serving RAF officers had been discharged.”[4]
The Challenges of Reintegration
Daunting Numbers
Despite many complaints and in some instances even mutinies[5] among serving British soldiers (still subject to military discipline notwithstanding the ending of hostilities on the Western Front), the Armistice numbers of 4.9 million fighting men in Britain’s now-three armed services were reduced to under 800,000 by the end of 1919.[6] The political imperative to ‘bring the boys home’ took precedence over (almost) all other considerations. This was not, however, because of the wish or need politicians felt to ‘heed the voices of those who had fought and suffered’: the General Election of 1918 that confirmed Lloyd George as Prime Minister was not influenced by the votes of soldiers in the way that Churchill’s defeat at the polls in 1945 was to be. Rather, it reflected the urgency to cut government spending and to ‘return to normal’ as soon as possible in order to resist any incipient, Bolshevik-inspired, public unrest.
This was an extraordinary, unprecedented and breakneck speed of transformation in the identities of millions of men (and a much smaller number of women) from military personnel, back to civilians. In the history of the British Isles, the only period in which as great a proportion of the population had been under arms was during the Civil Wars of the 1640s, and large parts of those armed forces remained to be demobilised in 1660. Taking the 1911 census as the starting point, the population of the British Isles had been 45.3 million so that as a percentage of adult males, those to be demobilised may have accounted for more than 37%![7] In 1919, there was little or no preparation or training for these people about what the challenges of adjustment to civilian life might be. Regardless of how long or short the length of service – or the time away from home – that each person had experienced, there could never be a return to ‘things as they were’ whether in terms of personal relationships with families and friends, or in employment opportunities, or in interacting with the many millions of men (particularly) who for perfectly good reasons had not put on a uniform as their contribution to the War effort.
Difficulties on Both Sides
In some respects, these tensions were reflected during the 1920s by concerns about recorded crimes of violence and – less easy to quantify – incidents of domestic abuse.[8] Those soldiers who had fought on the Western Front during the Hundred Days leading to the Armistice had been exposed to levels of ferocity, horror, terror – and death – not seen there in the British army since 1916. The battles on and around the Somme had been regarded at the time as pointless slaughter but the comparable casualty rates of late 1918 were tolerated (by public opinion) because they accompanied victories.[9] Those victories may not have provided much comfort to all those new conscripts who witnessed and lived through – even if physically unscathed – the barbarities of the last weeks of fighting. Initially derided, ‘shell shock’ had eventually become generally accepted as a medical diagnosis for those soldiers who were overwhelmed by the psychological impact of war, but the absence of that diagnosis for so many of the millions demobilised in 1919 should not be taken as evidence that they were unaffected by their wartime experiences.
Nor was there any guidance or support on the side of those who would welcome them home. All through the years of fighting, servicemen had ventured home only briefly on leave such that the challenges of reintegration were not faced prior to the Armistice. Only those (perhaps 182,000) injured, wounded or sick who were invalided out of the armed forces while the fighting continued, were truly ‘returned’ before 1919. Inevitably, these people were more likely to be obviously physically impaired or disabled, and thus more likely to be treated very differently to the ways to which they had been accustomed before they joined the armed forces.
The New Normal
‘Returning to normal’ was made more unlikely in any case by the new prominence amongst the general workforce of women, whether in industries and factories and farms, or in public transport, as police officers and as civil servants. Of course, women had been prominent in the workforce before 1914: by 1919, what had changed were their numbers, class origins and the variety of their roles. Perhaps most strikingly, the numbers of Britons employed as domestic servants in the grand houses of the rich and aristocracy fell, although the challenges of employment for single women between the wars meant that the total numbers ‘in service’ were roughly comparable in the 1910s and 1930s. Their wartime wages had grown with inflation and the expectations of those people who had presumed, before 1914, that they would spend their lives in domestic service, had been fundamentally transformed. The era that gave rise to “Downton Abbey” was no more but many would continue to work in the much smaller-scale households of middle-class and professional families.
In material terms, all those millions returning to civilian life in 1919 had, at least to begin with, reasonable prospects. Not only were demobilised men paid their outstanding wages (unlike in most of Britain’s earlier wars) there was also a rapid de-regulation of the economy as the government ended wartime controls, a short-run ‘boom’ as businesses re-stocked for peacetime commerce, and no deterioration in the rate of economic growth (as experienced overall between 1899 and 1924). The length of the average working day fell to 8 hours, fulfilling a long-standing ambition of the trades unions and providing a means to create more jobs for the demobilised men, if not for the benefit of women workers. Wartime inflation had prompted organised labour to demand wage rises that governments had felt compelled to concede, but these rises also served to reduce the gap between the lowest and highest paid workers so that after 1918, fewer men in work were also in poverty. As we have said, initially the prospects for men returning to civilian life and work seemed good: only later would successive governments’ pre-occupations with maintaining a relatively high Bank Rate (7%) and returning to the Gold Standard at an unsustainable exchange rate ($4.86 to £1), add to the structural deficiencies of the economy to produce repeated slumps.
Hard Choices about Hardware
In addition to the demobilisation of these millions of men were the equally extraordinary disposals of matériel. Rifles, pistols, machineguns and their ammunition might be stockpiled for a rainy (!) day, along with bayonets, grenades (33 million Mills bombs were made during the War) but also battledress, caps, helmets, greatcoats… the list seems endless and many of these items were still available to be reissued for the Second World War, even if only to the Home Guard. The British government, however, committed itself to disposal of hardware on as great a scale as its demobilisation.
At the end of the War, the RAF had about 22,000 aircraft and the efforts made to dispose of approximately 20,000 of them included the ‘Imperial Gift’ of aircraft to each of the Dominions to enable them to establish their own air forces. The sudden abundance of aircraft of all types ‘in good working order, one careful owner’ (and often unused[10]) alongside the demobilisation of the men who knew how to fly and maintain them, might have been expected to launch civil aviation in Britain and the Empire. The high running costs of flying and the relatively small sizes of payload/numbers of passengers, however, meant that no real progress was made until the introduction of government subsidies, from 1922. Most aircraft therefore went to scrap, notwithstanding their potential use in civilian life.
Much other military hardware met a similar fate, but for more obvious reasons. Thousands of pieces of artillery from the 117 heavy and 401 siege batteries deployed by the end of the War and their vast stockpiles of millions of shells, unlike aircraft, had no conceivable peacetime use. Likewise, the 25 battalions of tanks in the British Army of December 1918 soon became only 4, within which in any case most of the vehicles were soon replaced by new designs. Even the Royal Navy, despite the imperative to maintain combat operations in a number of theatres after the Armistice and the requirements of imperial defence, saw substantial reductions in personnel and ships by the end of 1919.[11]
The ‘bonanza’ of military surplus equipment was immense and could extend to the livestock. Of the 130,000 horses – ‘Walers’ – that the Australian Imperial Forces took with them from home, all were ‘disposed of’ in theatre. These included many of the much-loved mounts of the Australian Light Horse stationed in the Middle East theatre that were (under veterinarian supervision) shot, shaved (for their horsehair), skinned (for tanning) and rendered (for glue).[12]
Peacetime Armour
In one major area, however, the abundant military equipment did have a ‘peacetime’ role. Armoured cars (often, in any case, a civilian chassis and engine with minimal modifications to carry armour plating and machine guns) began their long history as ‘dual purpose’ machines with which to impose order on civilians, not only on distant frontiers or in colonial settlements, but potentially on the city streets of Britain where it was feared Bolshevik-inspired insurrection was a real threat. Twenty companies of armoured cars were created in the early 1920s, which number included 8 in the Territorial Army. Indeed, the ‘Red Menace’ was enough to keep British personnel from all three services, including conscripts, on active duty in northern Russia until the autumn of 1919[13]. In addition, British military power ‘needed’ to be deployed in several ‘trouble spots’ as soon as the Armistice was secured. In Ireland, for example, demobbed soldiers provided trained auxiliaries to the police (the ‘Black & Tans’, nicknamed after their combination of army-surplus khaki uniform jackets and police uniform trousers). In India, the Amritsar Massacre (April 1919) demonstrated the readiness of at least some colonial authorities to use lethal force without regard to the consequences, either human or political. These challenges only grew in the interwar period.[14]
After Demobilisation
For those millions demobilised by the end of 1919, the inner turmoil of their responses to their experiences might continue for the rest of their lives. A few, unable or unwilling to let go of the challenges, risks or thrills of wartime, went out into the empire to create entirely new lives without even the veneer of a ‘return’:
…the British government launched a Free Passage Scheme to assist ex-soldiers who wanted to start a new life in the Dominions. The Empire Settlement Act of 1922 provided £3 million a year to encourage British emigration.[15]
Most, however, stayed in Britain, survived ‘Spanish flu’, struggled with the growing conflict between Labour and Capital exemplified in the General Strike, suffered in the slumps and then the Depression, and faced the rise of fascism at home as well as abroad. Many made homes and raised families that would stand firm in the face of an even greater challenge of another world war.
They served, whether voluntarily or as conscripts. They sacrificed, whether through their injuries or their lost youths or idealism. They triumphed.
Further reading
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/spotlights/demobilisation.htm provides an introduction from UK official sources with commentary and documents, although its statements about numbers are debatable.
The images below reproduce the Air Ministry pamphlet No C79846 M4b, dated 27 March 1919, which was issued to RAF ‘other ranks’ to explain the system (and its reasoning) for demobilisation. Click for enlargements.
https://www.longlongtrail.co.uk/soldiers/a-soldiers-life-1914-1918/demobilisation-and-discharge/ provides a helpful, summary account of procedures for the Army’s ‘other ranks’.
https://www.wlv.ac.uk/about-us/news-and-events/wlv-blog/2016/january-2016/the-great-war-demobilisation-and-civvy-clothes/ is a brief and engaging academic reflection on the experiences of changing back to civilian dress.
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/demobilization provides a wide-ranging, multinational account of the demobilisation experience across both victors and defeated.
https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/changing-lives-gender-expectations provides an interesting introduction to the subject of changing gender roles in and after the War.
References
[1] 26 June 1919
[2] 14 Jan 1919: “In combining the posts of Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air, Prime Minister Lloyd George aimed to facilitate the dissolution of the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a separate Service.” https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/research/history-of-aviation-timeline/interactive-aviation-timeline/british-military-aviation/1919.aspx
[3] 16 regiments were reduced to 8, with new names reflecting their joint heritage but leading to the label “the Fraction Cavalry” eg 17th/21st Lancers.
[4] http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/royal-air-force-personnel/
[5] Whilst there has been serious attention paid in recent years by historians to these instances (particularly around Folkestone/Dover and Calais in January, 1919) one should not discount the overwhelming evidence of orderly and disciplined demobilisation by the millions of servicemen returning to civilian life in 1919.
[6] The ‘game’ of counting the numbers of Britain’s armed forces at the Armistice is almost as engaging as all other arithmetic about the war. Having consulted a number of sources, both secondary (other historians) and some primary (archive) I suggest that my arithmetic is a reasonable estimate although I have seen statements that the number was as high as 6 million and as low as 4 million.
[7] It is not quite appropriate to take the numbers of males in the electorate of 1918 as the baseline because the voting age was 21 whereas recent conscripts were aged 18.5 years on joining the ranks, and the RN continued to have ‘boys’ amongst the seaborne personnel.
[8] For a scholarly discussion of the topic, see Clive Emsley ‘Violent crime in England in 1919: post-war anxieties and press narratives’ in Continuity and Change, vol 23(1) 2008, pp. 173–195. http://oro.open.ac.uk/10655/1/download.pdf
[9] For a recent account, see Peter Hart The Last Battle: Endgame on the Western Front, 1918 (Oxford, 2018).
[10] The sole remaining example of an RE8 in its original configuration is illustrative. This Daimler-built machine, serial no. F3556, was delivered to the RAF on Armistice Day. It had logged only 30 minutes flying time before it was transferred to the Imperial War Museum, who still have it: it is currently on display at Duxford. See https://gregswar.com/setting-scene-background-articles/the-royal-aircraft-factory-re8/ for more.
[11] The Admiralty’s ‘Estimates’ for 1919-1920 make interesting reading in their full text, for which see http://www.naval-history.net/WW1NavyBritishAdmiraltyEstimates1919.htm
[12] I still recall my astonishment when I first encountered a war memorial to the horses that served in WW1, in central Adelaide, SA, in 1989.
[13] Captain Gordon of B Flight, 42 Squadron was one RAF officer who was sent to Russia. See https://gregswar.com/2018/11/01/friday-1-november-1918-shoot-with-capt-gordon/
[14] For a scholarly discussion of the Colonial Office views on maintaining order, see Martin Thomas ‘‘Paying the butcher’s bill’: policing British colonial protest after 1918’ in Crime, History and Societies vol. 15, N°2 (2011) pp. 55-76. https://journals.openedition.org/chs/1288
[15] Jay Winter, ‘Migration, War and empire: the British case’, Annales de démographie historique, 1, No. 103 (2002), pp. 143-160. https://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-de-demographie-historique-2002-1-page-143.htm