Post-Blogging the British Demobilisation Experience: June 1945 - June 1946 - click for latest entries
Alan Allport
Yale University Press
October 2009
"A wonderfully insightful study ... remarkably moving" - Dominic Sandbrook (Never Had It So Good), The Sunday Times
"A special and powerful book. It brims with scholarship, insight, detail, and compassion ... Alan Allport does full justice to a forgotten part of a great generation" - Peter Hennessy (Never Again: Britain 1945-51)
"A masterful study ... though the research behind the book has clearly been prodigious, it nonetheless manages to wear its erudition lightly" - Roger Moorhouse (Killing Hitler), BBC History Magazine
"A powerful tale, wonderfully told" - Peter Stansky (The First Day of the Blitz)
"Fascinating and disturbing ... a powerful and pioneering study" - Richard Overy (Why the Allies Won; 1939: Countdown to War) , The Literary Review
"Wonderfully researched, sensitively written and often very moving, Demobbed tells an important, underappreciated story that still resonates today" - David Kynaston (Austerity Britain, 1945-1951)
"Wry, humane, and eloquent ... Alan Allport shows how demobilised troops sought a return to normalcy and at the same time realized that life would never be the same again. Their stories linger with us still" - Peter Mandler (The English National Character)
"A highly impressive debut, demonstrating great scholarship ... the most insightful text on the 1940s to have appeared this year" - Ian Cawood, Times Literary Supplement
"A compelling, sobering, and thought-provoking picture" - Juliet Gardiner (Wartime: Britain 1939-1945)
Snapshots of gaiety and celebration - the street parties, the victory speeches - are how some people today think of Britain in 1945. But the years following the end of World War II were far from a 'golden age' of pride and self-confidence. The country was troubled though triumphant, subject to continued rationing and political change. Wracked by social disorder, austerity and disillusion, Britain was exhausted - and it was the return of those men who had fought for their country who seemed to be a root cause of the trouble. Demobbed is the real story of what happened when millions of ex-servicemen returned home. Most had been absent for years, and the joy of arrival was often clouded with ambivalence, regrets and fears. Returning soldiers faced both practical and psychological problems, from reasserting their place in the family home to rejoining a much-altered labour force. Civilians worried that their homecoming heroes had been barbarized by their experiences and would bring crime and violence back from the battlefield. 'Problem veterans' preoccupied the entire country. Alan Allport draws on their personal letters and diaries, on newspapers, reports, novels and films to illuminate the darker side of the homecoming experience for ex-servicemen, their families and society at large - a gripping story that's in danger of being lost to national memory.
Reviews and Features (NEW: 9th November)
Recent Comments