War and Society in Britain 1899-1948

Rex Pope

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138837409
• eBook ISBN: 9781317900795
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Rex Pope reassesses the impact of war on the political and social structures of British society during the first half of the twentieth century, and introduces the reader to current debates about the relationship between war and change.

Part One: The Background

1 War and Twentieth-Century Britain

During the twentieth century, Britain has been engaged in numerous military conflicts, not all of them acknowledged as war. Many of these conflicts have been, in the context of British resources, small scale. Most have involved territory under British rule, much of it (but not all) far from Great Britain herself. The impact of such conflicts on individuals or communities may have been acute; the effect on British society as a whole, in many instances, minimal. This book considers the effects of just three wars, all recognised as such: the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the First World War (1914–18) and the Second World War (1939–45).

The wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45 have sometimes been described as total wars, unlimited conflicts involving attempts to utilise the full economic, social and political as well as military resources of the states involved. Though this definition, and the implied contrast with other wars, are misleading (4, 6, Marwick in 17), it is the case that all three wars focused attention on British social, political and economic institutions. All, it has been argued, led to changes in British society. In addition, the two major conflicts of 1914–18 and 1939–45 have been seen as leading to significant changes in the British system of political economy. It is these supposed political, social and economic changes, their extent, nature and degree of permanency, and the debates among historians concerning their importance and their relationship to war, that form the subject matter of the greater part of this volume.

The century opened with Britain at war in South Africa. By the standards of the great confrontations of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this was not a major conflict. Nonetheless it did, from start to finish, involve 450,000 British troops, including a quarter of a million regulars. In spite of early British reverses (notably at Colenso and Spion Kop), the main Boer army was quickly defeated and the sieges of Ladysmith and Mafeking raised. The main objective, the re-annexation of the Transvaal, was achieved by October 1990. Even the brilliant guerrilla campaign to which the Boers then resorted was eventually crushed by overwhelming military force and the harsh but effective policy of compartmentalising the country, using barbed wire and blockhouses, and systematically destroying farms and sweeping non-combatant inhabitants into concentration camps. In these camps, incompetent administration contributed to the deaths of between 20,000 and 40,000 Boers and black Africans. In March 1902, the Boers accepted an armistice and May of that year saw the quite generous Peace of Vereeniging.

British war casualties were not insignificant (5,774 killed in action, 22,529 wounded, 16,000 deaths from disease) but other consequences of the war had a more marked social impact. Revelations about the numbers of volunteers unable to meet the standards required by the army (one in three overall, three out of five in a city like Manchester) reinforced concern about the condition of the imperial race and the consequences of urban life. The outcome was the establishment of the Select Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (37, 41, 54, doc. 2).

The war of 1914–18 was on an altogether greater scale. Moreover, although shopkeepers proclaimed ‘business as usual’, the demands of war were, up to a point, apparent from the start. During August 1914, Parliament accepted the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) permitting government by regulation, while Kitchener (brought into the Cabinet as Secretary of State for War), recognising that the war would last for years rather than months and that the British would have to fight on land, called for a New Army of seventy divisions. By the end of 1914, the trenches had been established and the first Battle of Ypres had given an indication of the scale of casualties to be expected. 1915 saw the beginning of a U-boat blockade of Britain and continued heavy losses on the western front, particularly in the Battles of Neuve Chapelle, Second Ypres, Aubers Ridge and Loos. A further 200,000 British and Anzac casualties resulted from the disastrous attempt to force Turkey out of the war by the landings at Gallipoli. 1916–17 brought battles and casualties, on an even larger scale but to little effect, on the Somme (60,000 British casualties on the first day, 450,000 in all) and at Passchendaele (Third Ypres) where there were 270,000 British victims. 1917 also saw a dramatic increase in the efforts made by the Germans to cut Britain’s sea supply lines. Between February and July, unrestricted attacks by U-boats sank 3.75 million tons of British, allied and neutral shipping and damaged much more. However, from May the convoy system was increasingly adopted and though losses remained heavy they were on a declining trend and were supportable. By the end of 1917, too, revolution had forced Russia out of the war while the United States had entered it, and the allied counter-blockade of the central powers was inflicting severe hardships on their civilian populations. 1918 saw the restoration of a war of movement. The German advance of the spring was halted at the Second Battle of the Marne. From August to November, the German armies were forced back, suffering a series of crushing defeats. The collapse of Germany’s allies, Turkey and Austria-Hungary, and the demoralisation of civilians and military alike, culminating in the sailors’ mutiny at Kiel, the abdication of the Kaiser and anti-war and pro-Bolshevik disturbances in late October and early November, forced the Germans to the armistice of 11 November 1918 (45, 60, 68, 73).

At the outbreak of war, the British army had a regimental strength of less than a quarter of a million men. By 1918, 5.2 million men had served in the army, over half as volunteers. Of the male population of England and Wales aged fifteen to forty-nine at the time of the 1911 census, 46.3 per cent had been recruited for the army. The figure for Scotland was 41.5 per cent and for Ireland, where the Home Rule issue led to the authorities treading warily, 12.3 per cent. In addition, over 640,000 had served in the Royal Navy and allied services and 291,000 in the Royal Flying Corps/Royal Air Force. Of the total participating, 723,000 (11.76 per cent) were killed and a further 1.7 million (22.27 per cent) wounded. Most of the dead (93 per cent) and wounded (98 per cent) had served in the army where trench warfare took a terrible toll. 15,000 merchant seamen and fishermen were also killed (72).

Military mortality was naturally concentrated among young men. Over half a million men aged under thirty were killed in the war, including, in England and Wales, more than one in seven of the age group twenty to twenty-four. Officers, predominantly drawn from the middle and upper classes, suffered higher casualties (15.2 per cent of those who served in the army being killed) than other ranks (12.9 per cent killed). Common sense and contemporary opinion, but not, unfortunately, adequate statistical evidence, suggests that these losses were concentrated among junior officers serving with their men in the trenches (72).

The main military impact of the war on civilians was through the threat or actuality of death or injury to relatives, friends or neighbours. The huge casualty lists of the newspapers left no one untouched. In south-east England there was, too, the sound of the guns, heard sixty miles inland at the time of the bombardment that preceded the Battle of the Somme. The war also brought precursors of the direct civilian involvement that characterised the Second World War. Towns on the east coast such as Sunderland, Scarborough, Whitby and the Hartlepools were shelled by German naval vessels. From 1915, London, Norwich and other towns, including some in the west Midlands, were subjected to bombing from Zeppelin airships. From 1917, Gotha and Reisen Giant aircraft were used to bomb London. Casualties, by contemporary or later standards, were slight (1,266 killed in all) but the impact on a vulnerable civilian population was substantial, leading to outbursts of anti-alien hysteria and to experiences and responses more commonly associated with the conflict of 1939–45: blackout, taking shelter in tube stations, spontaneous migration from London (45, 68, 77).

Once again, war brought a reminder of the low physical standards of much of the population. Even the cursory five-minute medical inspections, conducted under the aegis of the Local Government Board in 1917–18 (responsibility having been taken away from the War Office), placed 41 per cent of those inspected in Categories C and D (i.e. not likely to be used for combat duties) and considered 10 per cent quite unfit for any form of military service (72).

The resource needs of war led to attention, too, to the civilian labour force. The early months of uncontrolled volunteering had cost important war industries like chemicals, explosives and electrical engineering a quarter of their workforces; the metals and mining industries had fared almost as badly, losing one in five of their workers. Vickers’ use of ‘badging’ to protect its skilled workers was one answer. New working arrangements, allowing the breaking down of engineering processes and the employment of semi-skilled labour (dilution) was another. This was agreed with the relevant trade unions and incorporated in the Munitions of War Act (1915). Dilution turned to substitution when, after pressure to volunteer and attesting (1915) had failed to deliver the men the army wanted, conscription was introduced. The Military Service Acts led to increased numbers of men being replaced in the civilian labour force by women. By 1918, the total number of women in paid occupations stood at 7.3 million, a 22.5 per cent increase on the 1914 figure. The numbers in munitions manufacture had multiplied four-fold to 947,000; those in transport six-fold to 117,200. Nearly half a million were in national or local government jobs, a 75 per cent increase on the 1914 figure (29, 40, 45, 47, 67).

The Second World War imposed itself even more on the British population. This imposition did not take the form of even larger-scale military forces, though their make-up – including 500,000 women auxiliaries and over one million men in the RAF – was different. Some 6.5 million and women served in the armed and auxiliary services during the course of the war and the strength of these services in 1945 (5.1 million) differed little from the size of Britain’s armed forces in 1918. Military casualties, at 264,000 dead and 277,000 wounded, were much lighter and, in the absence of trench warfare, the army’s death toll (144,000 out of 3.8 million, i.e. 3.8 per cent) was proportionately less than that of either the RAF (70,000 dead, 5.9 per cent) or the Royal Navy (51,000 dead, 5.5 per cent). The greater impact on the population as a whole was in the extent to which the labour force was mobilised and regulated, in the sheer duration of the conflict, and in the much greater exposure of civilians to bombing and rocket attack, leading to 60,000 deaths and more than 80,000 persons being seriously wounded (Winter in 121).

Memories of 1914–18 and the anticipated consequences of bombing contributed to a sombre response to the declaration of war in September 1939. There was a realistic, even exaggerated awareness of the hardship that the war would bring. In fact, following the collapse of Poland, little happened on land until the spring of 1940. Then Hitler occupied Denmark and Norway, following this in May with an attack on the Low Countries and France. In less than a month, the British were forced to evacuate 225,000 of their troops (and over 100,000 French) from Dunkirk. By the end of June, the French government had signed an armistice with the Germans (90, 127). The threat of an invasion of Britain was real. In the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe sought, as a prelude to a seaborne attack, to destroy British air defences in the Battle of Britain. In late August and early September the Germans came close to success before, in retaliation for RAF raids on Berlin, their attention was turned from the destruction of aircraft, aerodromes and radar installations to the bombing of cities. The blitz was the manifestation of the terror bombing which had been feared. But although in 1940–41 over 2 million houses were damaged or destroyed and 43,000 civilians killed, the burden proved bearable and, as important, the change of German tactics freed Britain from the threat of invasion (89).

During 1941, the German armies advanced into south-east Europe and deep into the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, U-boat attacks on British shipping, particularly in the Atlantic, were building up, threatening food and other supplies. Between June 1940 and December 1941, one-third of Britain’s merchant tonnage was sunk, three times as much as the country was able to replace from its own yards. The burden in merchant seamen’s lives was also a heavy one, 30,000 being killed in the course of the war (89, 90).

1942–43 saw the tide turn. The attack on the Soviet Union absorbed the greater part of German military manpower and equipment. Though fortunes on the Eastern Front fluctuated, German losses were heavy and the outcomes of the Battles of Stalingrad (November 1942–February 1943) and Kursk (July 1943) decisive. The aftermath of Pearl Harbor (December 1941) brought the USA, by far the greatest economic power in the world, into formal conflict with Germany, adding to the considerable assistance she had already been able to give Britain through ‘Lend Lease’ and other means. The Americans managed to halt the Japanese advance in the Pacific, while in North Africa victory at El Alamein and the Anglo-American landings in Morocco (October and November 1942 respectively) were the first steps on the road to the defeat of Germany.

In the Atlantic, German U-boats continued to try and break the supply lines between the United States and Britain. This led to mounting losses of seamen and shipping. In each of the worst months (March, June and November 1942) over 800,000 tons of allied or neutral shipping were sunk. However, by the end of 1942 American yards could build ships faster than the Germans could sink them, and improved allied intelligence, weaponry and tactics were making U-boat losses intolerable. In May 1943, the German Admiral Doenitz abandoned the attempt to conquer the Atlantic. In addition, 1942–43 saw mounting RAF and USAAF bombing raids on German cities and installations. By late 1943, the Russians were moving remorselessly westward. Island-hopping was taking US forces ever closer to Tokyo, and the allied invasion of Sicily and then mainland Italy had led to the Italians’ surrender (89, 90, 127).

By this time victory was assured, but it was slow in arriving and there were still setbacks and suffering to come. German defences in Italy proved obdurate. There were heavy casualties in the Battle of Normandy following the D-Day landings (June–August 1944). The failure at Arnhem (September 1944) was followed by the German counter-attack in the Ardennes (December). South-east England, and in particular London, was subject to attack by flying bomb (VI) from June 1944 and by rocket (V2) from September, killing over 6,500 people and injuring a further 22,000. Victory in Europe was not achieved until May 1945; victory over Japan (with the help of atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) followed in August (89, 90).

Second World War governments had the experience of 1914–18 to learn from. Thus Chamberlain’s government instituted a Military Training Act (May 1939), replacing it, when war broke out in September, with a National Service Act which imposed eligibility for military service on all men aged eighteen to forty-one. In order to protect key industries, it also introduced a Schedule of Reserved Occupations and a (largely ineffectual) Control of Engagement Order. The real achievements of mobilisation were, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
• Part One: The Background
• Part Two: War and Social Change in Britain
• Part Three: Assessment
• Part Four: Documents
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX