Homecoming Heroes: An Account of the Re-assimiliation of British Military Personnel into Civilian Life

By Peter Reese

It is a sad and shaming but indisputable fact that the reception according to British soldiers on returning to civilian life has for centuries been little short of disgraceful, and even in this more enlightened age compares unfavourably with that of many other countries. In Homecoming Heroes Peter Reese ex-amines the lot of British veteran (often still quite a young man) on leaving the Armed Forces and assesses the chances of finding suitable employment after his discharge. His survey covers a wide canvas, going back to the earliest days of the British Army and reveals a sorry tale in which neglect was often the only alternative to downright hostility. It is not a story to swell the British breast with pride. The efforts of Charles II, founder of Chelsea Royal Hospital, and later those of the benevolent Marquis of Granby notwithstanding, it was not until the later part of the 19th century that an awakening of social conscience stirred certain philanthropic individuals into action. Ironically Government reaction was not to the veterans advantage: 'If the matter is now in private hands' they argues, 'why should we interfere?' Mass conscription in two world wars has helped considerable to help break down this uncaring viewpoint, but much, as Peter Reese forcefully points out, remains to be done. Let us hope that this timely book will help ameliorate the lot of those about to be cast upon a shrinking job market as a result of the recently announced defence cuts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 31, 1992
• ISBN: 9781473815315

Peter Reese

Peter Reese is well known as a military historian with a particular interest in Scottish military history. He concentrated on war-related studies whilst a student at King's College London and served in the army for twenty-nine years. His other books include a biography of William Wallace and a study of the Battle of Bannockburn. He lives in Aldershot.

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HOMECOMING HEROES

By the same author:

OUR SERGEANT:

The Story of the

Corps of Commissionaires

HOMECOMING

HEROES

__________________

An Account of

the Reassimilation of

British Military Personnel

into Civilian Life

________________

by

PETER REESE

LEO COOPER

LONDON

To my grandson

Henry Peter Reese.

May he too have the courage

and humanity of so many who went to war

First published in Great Britain in 1992 by L C

190 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8JL

an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd.

47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorks S70 2AS

copyright © Peter Reese, 1992

A CIP catalogue of this book is available

from the British Library

ISBN: 0 85052 329 X

Printed in Great Britain by:

Redwood Press Limited, Melksham, Wiltshire

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book, the result of an abiding interest, has been long a’ coming. That it has been completed at all owes much to the kindness and generosity of many people. Most notable are my wife Barbara who over the years has taken on a plethora of responsibilities which should have been mine and my publisher, Leo Cooper, who is willing to take up projects he considers might have some inherent virtue although they are unlikely to bring major financial rewards.

As for the writing itself, despite his many other concerns, General Sir Edward Burgess gave me priceless time and encouragement when it was sorely needed and subsequently made most telling observations on the script; my valued friend and mentor Dr Leslie Wayper was there, as before, for me to bounce my unformed ideas upon and give me his unparalleled powers of analysis (he then corrected serious factual errors in the script); another long-time friend, Mrs Jennifer Prophet, magically reduced the original solecisms and assisted with the index. The early draft was also read with immense care by Lord Haig and Colonel Mike Wellings who both made valuable observations. Finally it was given the editorial treatment by Tom Hartman.

As one would expect, the great voluntary institutions concerned with veterans gave major assistance; among these were The Royal Hospital Chelsea, The Royal British Legion (both North and South of the border), SSAFA, The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Help Society, the American Legion, The Royal Star and Garter Home, St Dunstan’s and the Regular Forces Employment Association. In all cases I was privileged to find the controllers (or their equivalent) eager to help, but particular assistance ‘on the ground’ was given by Jeremy Lillies and Denis Yorke (RBL), David Lawson and George Smith (RBL Scotland), Mike Wellings (SSAFA), Ella Linder and Anne Finley (SSHS), Joe Hovish and John Hanson (The American Legion), Ian Lashbrooke (The Royal Star and Garter Home), David Castleton (St Dunstan’s) and at many times in past years General Pat Claxton and Mollie Tew (RFEA).

Among the sources held by academic institutions, those in the Department of Sound Records of the Imperial War Museum were vital, as were the Haig Papers held in the National Library of Scotland.

Most of the actual writing was done in the unique location of the Prince Consort’s Library, Aldershot. Its two librarians, Paul Vickers and Tim Ward, have given endless help. From daily acquaintance all its staff have become part of my extended family and, I hope, in some way I am now part of theirs.

Writing this book has been a remarkable experience. As I might have expected, I have found veterans and their sponsoring organizations generous, warm-hearted, unafraid either of expressing emotion or voicing their fierce patriotism, people of inexpressible courage and humour. In this respect it is difficult to think one could have chosen a better subject, but, despite the great help, when trying to cover such a wide canvas in relatively few pages there must be some inexcusable omissions and errors. Responsibility for these rest with the author alone.

CHAPTER ONE

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Gone for a Soldier

---

"Our God and soldiers we alike adore

Ev’n at the brink of danger; not before;

After deliverance, both alike requited,

Our God’s forgotten,

and our soldiers slighted."

Francis Quarks, 1592–1644

DURING the recent military operation to recapture the Falkland Islands, many classic lessons of war were relearned by Britain’s latest generation of fighting men. Among them was the demonstration of what has become increasingly appreciated by both ordinary observers and medical experts alike, namely the shock experienced by men in combat.

Sergeant Peter Naya, talking of the bombing of the Sir Galahad, expressed the emotions of all front-line soldiers who have faced death: I feel humble, and lucky, that I survived. But it still comes back, it plays on your mind, especially at night. You see the experience was so traumatic that it hurts to talk about it, so I just clammed up. I couldn’t talk about it to anyone.¹ Other participants in that war expressed other traditional soldiers’ reactions. One was relief after screwing up one’s resolution. As Flight-Lieutenant David Morgan said, And when we came back home … we were all standing, lining the deck and everyone had tears streaming down their faces. At long last we could actually let it all go. For another officer, Captain Samuel Drennan, the relief was in the fact that they had come through morally intact: I don’t want to do it again but I’ve looked inside myself to see what was there and I wasn’t too ashamed of what I found.

All realized they were changed; some saw themselves as more mature, others expressed it as valuing their lives and families more than previously. There was the same feeling of pride in the more thoughtful Army of the 1980s as in the earlier ones. Captain Ian Gardiner analysed it in the following way: I believe I have had a glimpse of the sort of moral strength that made our forbears continue despite knowing the chances were poor, while Major John Kiszely exclaimed that Courage caught on – it was absolutely contagious, attributing it to the great filial traditions of the foot guards. It was that same resolution which Lord Moran in his book on courage has talked of in terms of a man’s will-power as a finite quality. If it is used up he is finished … The call on the bank may be only the daily drain of the front line or it may be a sudden draft which threatens to close the account.²

Fittingly, it fell to Major Chris Keeble, who had assumed command of 2 Para at a crucial stage after its Commander had been killed, to express his belief in the great counterpoint to fear, the unique sense of comradeship born of adversity which comes to the best units, together with the eternal regret of the soldier that it is a transient thing: I miss the brotherhood of that gang of folk who were called 2 Para who are now dispersed to the four winds.³ Particularly for men who have consciously faced death, but probably, in a lesser degree, for all those who have been members of the British armed forces, however safe their billet might have been, there is a common consciousness. Like Shane in Jack Schaefer’s great Western of that name, they will always be apart from those who have never had to stand up and be counted.

The separation of serving men from their own societies represents a clear historical pattern. The extreme case in modern memory of fighting men being separated from normal society surely applied to infantry soldiers in World War One, when, returning home on leave from that awesome and violent demiworld of the trenches, they found society at home virtually untouched by war. An ex-school mistress, Becca Macauly, speaking of the irrevocable changes brought by the Great War to the men from a small Highland township, said that, while many young men did not come back, those who did were not the same. They had seen things we could not believe and therefore would not tell us about.⁴ The unique bonds which had existed within such Highland communities were broken and, in their new rootlessness, many men turned subsequently to seek the wider pastures of the colonies, particularly Canada and New Zealand. In the Second World War there were soldiers who, after serving in the Far East for over three years, virtually lost touch with affairs in their mother country.

Exceptionally with nations in arms like ancient Sparta or modern Israel no separation between soldier and civilian occurs. All male Spartans were imbued with martial values from birth and were potential soldiers; all able-bodied Israelis, both men and women, stand ready to answer the call to arms. This has hardly been the pattern with most western states, either when a war has been fought by their regular armies or when it required further mobilization of manpower. The traditional lot of fighting men through the ages, not just those battle-broken in body or spirit, is not only for them to be separated from normal society but to experience major difficulties when they attempt to rejoin that greater community of citizens they are pledged to protect. In this respect British ex-servicemen, especially soldiers, have been no exception. Quite the opposite, for British ex-soldiers have traditionally received less official help than those of any other major European nation.

Apart from Sparta, the Greek states kept their fighting men apart. More than four centuries before Christ they used mercenary soldiers to conduct their wars, leaving their citizens free to use their talents and energies on what they did best, conducting the administrative and commercial affairs of normal life. During the Peloponnesian war most citizens were soldiers, but after the defeat of Athens by the Persian King, Cyrus the Younger, he sought to control the Greek States by replacing them with mercenaries. These came to know nothing but war and became virtually incapable of being reassimilated into normal society. The rough régime of the camp and the fighting line, the excitement, danger and above all the comradeship of military life marked them irrevocably. When they laid down their arms special arrangements were therefore needed to help them settle down, as far as possible with their comrades of many campaigns beside them.

Ancient Greece demonstrated another perennial problem for men trained in war, namely the fears which national leaders always harbour for standing armies once the threat to their state has diminished. In the Anabasis Xenophon wrote about a Greek mercenary army, ten thousand strong, bereft of its great king-leader, Cyrus. Its sufferings are graphically described. Repeated attempts to find a new national leader failed as it passed through different but universally hostile regions where it was feared by all. Shiftless and lacking purpose, its members too often found themselves betrayed by those who no longer had a use for their swords.

After close on 1000 years of feudalism, the emergence of the nation state in the fifteenth century led to the redevelopment of professional armies in the modern world. The political tradition of each state directly affected both the structure and use of these armed forces and its relationships with them. For most civilians, though, their attitudes to the military have not been without a certain amount of apprehension.

Unsurprisingly, the experiences of Cyrus’s veterans have been repeated in the annals of later regular armies, including the British after the French Revolutionary Wars, for instance, or at the end of the First World War. The main danger over, they found that state and society had other priorities and rewarded them by cutting their establishments to the bone and starving them of funds.

They tended in consequence to stagnate militarily. Like all victors, confidence in their past successes inclined them to reject novel tactics and financial restrictions led to delays in receiving the latest weapons. As a result it has been the pattern of British military history that at the start of major wars those regulars who have been deprived of resources during the balmy days of peace have to pay an initially high and disproportionate price in blood and debilitating exertion until larger forces have been raised and new weapons and tactics are adopted.

As for those discharged, both the regulars and those recruited for the duration of wars which traditionally prove more protracted than most expected, their fate has been to rejoin a hostile and adverse environment bedevilled by the economic and social convulsions which follow major conflicts. The services of the soldier are then forgotten, but the suspicion in which he has traditionally been held is not, and retiring veterans have been at a perennial disadvantage. This was particularly serious for those discarded in ‘extra’ cutbacks soon after the main ones. For all such veterans, their military exploits favoured them little and they had to readjust to a changed world or suffer the penalties of the ‘outsider’.

Apart from a lack of experience of contemporary developments in civilian society and the different values of military life, British soldiers in general have tended to suffer from fear on the part of civilians both of their chosen calling and their continued potential to use force. The figure of Cromwell, regicide and national leader of a fearsome and dedicated army, who brought fire and sword to a country not accustomed to such an experience, still overshadows British attitudes to its military. Since Cromwell soldiers have been seen as potential agents provocateurs, men with the capability and, if thwarted, the desire to take power into their own hands. After the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, in 1819, ex-soldiers were reported to be drilling working men and one of the Six Acts passed to preserve public order during that year expressly banned the practice. Over fifty years later men who had completed short-service engagements experienced major difficulties in finding civilian jobs because of their continued liability for reserve training and their possible embodiment at times of crisis. Employers’ apprehensions were not confined to their annual absences at the fortnightly training camp or to the possibility of losing them in time of war but, in part, because such men continued to preserve their military values and skills. At the end of the First World War demonstrations by soldiers disgruntled with the chaos of demobilization arrangements, although quickly put down, led an alarmed Government to make rapid adjustments.

After all wars the classic civilian reaction is that soldiers need to be brought back to the realities of life. At the end of the First World War there was a universal feeling, captured by Lloyd George’s rhetoric, that the time for fighting was over and national reconstruction should be the first priority. After a war, politicians, intent on new objectives, can always cite the Christian attitude to the different states of peace and war. The famous text from Ecclesiastes that there is A time to kill and a time to heal … a time of war and a time of peace⁵ is regularly dusted down and quoted. And in Britain, an island nation enjoying that extra security given by the sea and relying on international trade for survival, the need to resume business as usual within the shortest possible time has tended to put her retiring veterans at an even greater disadvantage.

Different national attitudes can be seen in the subsequent treatment of great wartime leaders, men who captured the public imagination in wartime. In the circumstances they must frequently represent a potential or actual challenge to the current hierarchy, as their humble followers do when they return expecting to get their jobs back. Apart from his strong personal antipathy to Haig, who stood for so many things which Lloyd George opposed, it was, after all, only traditional political tactics for Lloyd George to diminish him after the Great War. Such actions are not, of course, confined to leaders of Liberal Democratic states. In Communist Russia after the Second World War, where the Party leadership was intent on preserving power, Marshal Zhukov personified victory to most Russian citizens and was second only in public veneration to Stalin himself. By July, 1946, though, he found himself transferred to Odessa Military District. There he took up a relatively minor military post and was expelled from the Central Committee of the Supreme Soviet. Zhukov was subsequently transferred to even greater obscurity, a post in the Ural Mountains, before his partial re-emergence in 1952.⁶

In Germany, on the other hand, with its more militaristic tradition, the old Field-Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was elected President of the Republic in 1925, and no civilian leaders, including others on the National Resistance Council (or for that matter the President of the United States), could stop the progression of General Charles de Gaulle in 1944 from gaining supreme power in France. Nor did the average Frenchman want it otherwise. While in the United States, where the careful checks and balances imposed by its constitution reduce fears about control by ex-military men, the progression in 1953 of Dwight Eisenhower, ex-Supreme Commander during the Second World War, to the Presidency was directly in line with the tradition set by America’s first soldier President, George Washington, and continued by Jackson and Grant.

In Britain, with the unique position of its monarchy after the Restoration, the tradition has always been different. Since Oliver Cromwell, the accession of a senior military leader to a high political position has proved repugnant, the exception being the Duke of Wellington. But his short term as Prime Minister of a high Tory administration thirteen years after the Napoleonic Wars constituted no threat whatever of a military takeover. In any case, by the mid-Victorian Age the combined strength of Parliament and the British constitutional monarchy made the chances of an ex-soldier again becoming titular head of state virtually negligible. The showering of honours on Britain’s military leaders at the end of wars has usually presaged their neutering as far as political power is concerned. The partial exception in recent years was the royal sailor Earl Mountbatten, but his major political responsibilities were in British India rather than in the United Kingdom.

Opinions vary as to how much the election of wartime leaders to the highest offices of state benefits their veterans. Yet the veterans’ organizations in France, Germany and the United States have developed quite differently from those of the United Kingdom and have always tended to exercise more political power. Much, therefore, depends on the nature of a state’s military tradition, and more attention will be paid to Britain’s unique tradition subsequently, but the difficulties experienced by her veterans at the end of great wars and at other times is an indisputable and inglorious legacy of it.

In fairness it must be said that the problems encountered by British veterans have not always been due to blind civilian bias against ex-soldiers. In the past such men tended to be held in low esteem by reasons of their background. Unlike their officers, they were deliberately recruited from the lowest stratum of the population. The Duke of Wellington, comparing the British and French armies in 1835, said, The officers of the French Army live a good deal more with their men than ours do: they are the same class of persons to a greater degree. As an Army raised by conscription, the French contained men of all classes but British soldiers are taken entirely from the lowest orders of society.⁷ This was not all. When such men took the Queen’s shilling and joined that hard-drinking, hard-swearing brotherhood in arms, many humble families felt it was the crowning disgrace. Even when first engagements were reduced in length and men returned to civilian life relatively young, the image was largely unchanged. Tim Carew, writing of the pre-1914 ‘Regular’, said that, "like the archetype Tommy before him he frequently joined for economic, alcoholic or amatory reasons. Work was scarce in the early 20th century and not infrequently men could say, ‘I joined to get three square meals a day and a pair of trousers with an arse in them’. Others, often men of greater education, joined to escape from the Police or other members of the establishment.⁸ Out of such unpromising material some men rose to be outstanding leaders and to perform remarkable feats across a worldwide Empire. The young Wullie Robertson, who, by 1915, had become Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was one of these. But when he joined as a trooper of 17 in 1875 his mother was scandalized and wrote to him, What cause can you have for such a low life? I shall name it to no one for I am ashamed to think of it … I would rather bury you than see you in a red coat."⁹

This low opinion of the military does not apply to the soldiers of the two World Wars, when a true cross-section of young men joined the colours. In the case of these veterans, or those from post-1945 military engagements, what happened during their service was surely more important than their early background. It was probably equally important for the Tommies who served in earlier times.

Much is due to the fact that fighting men bow to the yoke of military discipline, the instant obedience which is vital to retain cohesion in the face of ultimate danger when facing stresses unknown to civilians. More than any citizen, including those in the Second World War, servicemen consciously place their very lives in pawn. To offset the common danger, though, they achieve a degree of comradeship and exclusiveness impossible in normal life, based, as Russell Braddon put it, on, the knowledge that their courage and physical grandeur can rise above any physical stress.¹⁰ One has only to witness reunions of the Desert Rats, the 14th Army or the Falklands veterans to see the accuracy of this statement.

During military service all men are obliged to adopt military ethics, some of which are antipathetic to civilian ones. Soldiers are compelled to lose touch with civilian life by the very nature of their calling. Uprooted from former associations and cast into an entirely new environment, they can view things from a wider perspective and with more critical eyes. With the likely prospect of death or injury before them, they often take the opportunity of discussing with men from different backgrounds the basic issues, including questions about how to eliminate the deficiencies as well as recognizing the advantages of their former existence. This rough university, the free interchange of thoughts and opinions during barrack-room debates, applied just as much to successive intakes of National Servicemen. Inevitably such discussions help to change attitudes and arguably none are unaffected. Thus changed, they return to a society also changed.

In certain men the flaring of the human spirit in the face of death has tempered their subsequent ambition and self-assurance. Possibly the ‘grit’ in Harold Macmillan’s oyster which fed his determination and led him on the ruthless path to the Premiership owed as much to his wartime experiences as to his later marital difficulties. Others lack such stoicism. Like Henry Williamson after the First World War, they find themselves unable to reconcile their patriotic duty with the grotesqueness, suffering and illogicality of war. His battle experiences led Williamson to pacifism. Desperately clutching any unlikely straw for peace, even when Germany was patently re-arming, he described Hitler as the great man across the Rhine whose life symbol is the happy child.¹¹ For many who were neither noticeably inspired nor repelled by such experiences there was a sense of anticlimax on their return. Captain John Wedderburn-Maxwell, looking back 70 years to the end of the Great War, said that his and other officers’ reaction was of being absolutely lost. Our main thing in life up to then had been killing Germans … Our reaction may seem strange but I heard afterwards that others had felt the same sense of bewildered depression. It was a puzzle.¹² Just 20 at the start of the war, he was 24 at its close. Never again, though, would any cause during the succeeding years of his long life be pursued with such intensity of purpose.

The problems are not confined to those who returned at the end of great wars nor to those Tommies of past centuries who returned after long years abroad to a society which had long ago written them off. After the Second World War the Korean and Malayan conflicts went largely unregarded, as did the lesser conflicts associated with the ending of Empire until the re-emergence of the Northern Ireland question from 1969 onwards. Today soldiers injured by terrorist action might justly feel that more compassion and publicity is given by contemporary society to student protesters in China or even to animal victims of medical research campaigns than to themselves. Second-Lieutenant D. J. Hollands, a National Serviceman who subsequently wrote a novel about his service in Korea, expressed the age-old attitudes which still applied to those civilian soldiers who fought there:

For a day they might be the heroes of the Hook, but they were not heroes – the heroes of the nation were a bunch of men who had climbed Everest, or sportsmen, or film stars; they were simply the latest edition of Tommy Atkins, the men who in time of peace were treated as the scum of the land, laughed at, sneered at, and generally held in ridicule by the public and who in time of war were taken for granted.¹³

Servicemen returning from the Falklands, although warmed by their delirious reception, were subsequently bewildered to witness the political wrangling about the advisability of conducting the war at all and the endless furore about the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser, General Belgrano.

For those demobilized in the late 1980s, men who in many cases returned to civilian life with more universally recognized qualifications than any previous generation, there were still major difficulties of reintegration in civilian society. It is difficult, whatever technical qualifications you may possess, to explain to a potential employer that your past role was to kill people.

The recent hero of so many British citizens, Mikhail Gorbachev, was admired partly because he preached disarmament and troop reductions. This charismatic leader of a faltering Empire, whose fundamental power base was still the largest military machine ever assembled, caused many Britons, particularly those who were not involved in the great conflicts earlier in the century, to question their own soldiers’ role in Western deterrent strategy and even the use of force in any circumstances whatever.

It goes without saying that for one class of men in particular retiring from war, the maimed and injured, there have always been particular and grievous problems. Largely unregarded in terms of their subsequent employability until the end of the nineteenth century, such men returned in unparalleled numbers after the two World Wars; a lesser, although continuous stream still emerge today to face the additional hazards of civilian life due to their injuries. These, in justice, require special assistance, traditionally given late, sparingly and grudgingly by the state. Happily in this century better arrangements are available and the service charities continue both to protect them and to press their cause. A proportion of them suffer from mental breakdowns and here sympathy from society at large has always been noticeably absent. To many, the warrior whose spirit has been broken by his experiences is a contradiction and embarrassment. Most difficult of all are those with ‘delicate nerves’ who, with misplaced shame, are reluctant to seek help in their later years.

Too often disregarded in the past have been the widows of fighting men, including those still surviving from the First World War whose lives were blighted irretrievably by the early loss of their husbands. The long neglect of First World War widows by respective Governments has been a cause for shame and frustration on the part of the ex-servicemen’s organizations which has only recently been removed.

The special difficulties facing British ex-servicemen, particularly soldiers, both at the point of retirement and subsequently, have been long recognized and, in the British way, limited official provisions have been supplemented by a number of relatively longstanding, proud, voluntary organizations. For the most part these were set up by ex-officers concerned about the deleterious effect which impoverished ex-soldiers and their families would have on the military image. Some were established to help one particular group, like the disabled, while the British Legion from its foundation assumed a broader role. Today these many bodies, while retaining their independence, form a loose partnership where common interests are concerned. Together they act with the Ministry of Defence, which itself has a number of departments with partial responsibility for ex-servicemen, and with other departments of central Government.

This book is concerned with the traumatic and sombre story of the British ex-serviceman through the ages, his neglect and many sufferings and the evolution of that particular diffuse and overlapping system created