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National Service by Richard Vinen review – a strange social experiment
A fascinating look at the life of the postwar conscript, from spud-bashing to policing the colonies
I have always been confident that, had I been around at the time, I would have enlisted in the armed forces for the second world war. After all, Hitler would have wanted me dead at least four times over. However, I suspect I would have done almost anything to get out of National Service after the war. Having read this book, that suspicion has been confirmed in spades. As has another: that anyone calling for the institution’s reintroduction is – and I’m afraid there’s no way round this – a fool.
National Service meant compulsory conscription into the armed forces – usually the army or the RAF, but mostly the former – for 18 months, a term increased to two years after the Korean war. It ran between the end of the war and 1960 (the last recruit being demobbed three years later), and made young men aged mostly between 18 and 20 subject to gruelling military discipline and privation.
As Richard Vinen points out, until 1961 the borders between western and Warsaw Pact countries were often little more than a painted white line, whereas a conscript would have to brave barbed wire and Alsatians if he wanted to nip out for a bag of chips in his own country. There was a total loss of privacy – except in the lavatories, the chains of which were used as nooses for many of the frequent suicides – and the kind of weird social inversions that result when people are divided into officers and privates. (Apparently John Peel’s sister’s fiance, an officer, made Peel, a private, call him “Sir” at family gatherings.)
There were worse possibilities: that of being sent to police one of the colonial “emergencies” that arose in the postwar period, most significantly in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus. (The British did not send many conscripts to Korea. Those who did go could count themselves unfortunate, and the chapter dealing with that war is particularly harrowing.) In these arenas, hitherto innocent young men found themselves either witnesses to, or perpetrators of, the kind of violence that we associate more these days with the excesses of American troops in Vietnam. Naturally, because it was easier to think of Malay or Kenyan tribespeople as “savages”, it was against them that most atrocities were committed. One Major Gerry Griffiths, who jabbed a hole in a Mau Mau guide’s ear with a bayonet and threaded wire through it so he could be led like a dog, was at least eventually court martialled, but generally, shooting the defenceless “while trying to escape” went unpunished.
Most servicemen’s experience, though, was more mundane. The vast majority were stationed in England and although many learned to drive a car, a tank or, if they were very lucky, a plane, what they all did was learn to swear. A corporal who saw a private in church with his beret on shouted at him: “Oi! You take your hat off in the house of the Lord, cunt!”
Some people enjoyed the experience of National Service; most did not. The army regulars weren’t in favour: it meant an endless round of training recruits, rather than “real soldiering”. And it was not conceived as a means of instilling discipline in unruly young men. Often, the authorities saw, it could make unruly young men even worse. “Glaswegians seem to have had particular problems with the army,” writes Vinen, “or it had particular problems with them.” (Glasgow, in those days, was a particularly violent city.)
I can’t recall ever having read so unexpectedly fascinating a book. You might have thought that a 600-page work, including appendices and notes, on national service would be as compelling as a spell of spud-bashing in the barracks (younger readers: peeling potatoes as punishment), but every single page has something of great interest on it, and all without any rhetorical dishonesty or authorial side. With a vast number of personal recollections, as well as a judicious use of official sources, the book doesn’t just tell us about the strange and (I very much hope) unrepeatable social experiment that was National Service. It tells us about this country, its social divisions, its attitudes to everything from authority to romantic love to male friendship; it is even larger than the sum of its parts.
National Service meant compulsory conscription into the armed forces – usually the army or the RAF, but mostly the former – for 18 months, a term increased to two years after the Korean war. It ran between the end of the war and 1960 (the last recruit being demobbed three years later), and made young men aged mostly between 18 and 20 subject to gruelling military discipline and privation.
As Richard Vinen points out, until 1961 the borders between western and Warsaw Pact countries were often little more than a painted white line, whereas a conscript would have to brave barbed wire and Alsatians if he wanted to nip out for a bag of chips in his own country. There was a total loss of privacy – except in the lavatories, the chains of which were used as nooses for many of the frequent suicides – and the kind of weird social inversions that result when people are divided into officers and privates. (Apparently John Peel’s sister’s fiance, an officer, made Peel, a private, call him “Sir” at family gatherings.)
There were worse possibilities: that of being sent to police one of the colonial “emergencies” that arose in the postwar period, most significantly in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus. (The British did not send many conscripts to Korea. Those who did go could count themselves unfortunate, and the chapter dealing with that war is particularly harrowing.) In these arenas, hitherto innocent young men found themselves either witnesses to, or perpetrators of, the kind of violence that we associate more these days with the excesses of American troops in Vietnam. Naturally, because it was easier to think of Malay or Kenyan tribespeople as “savages”, it was against them that most atrocities were committed. One Major Gerry Griffiths, who jabbed a hole in a Mau Mau guide’s ear with a bayonet and threaded wire through it so he could be led like a dog, was at least eventually court martialled, but generally, shooting the defenceless “while trying to escape” went unpunished.
Most servicemen’s experience, though, was more mundane. The vast majority were stationed in England and although many learned to drive a car, a tank or, if they were very lucky, a plane, what they all did was learn to swear. A corporal who saw a private in church with his beret on shouted at him: “Oi! You take your hat off in the house of the Lord, cunt!”
Some people enjoyed the experience of National Service; most did not. The army regulars weren’t in favour: it meant an endless round of training recruits, rather than “real soldiering”. And it was not conceived as a means of instilling discipline in unruly young men. Often, the authorities saw, it could make unruly young men even worse. “Glaswegians seem to have had particular problems with the army,” writes Vinen, “or it had particular problems with them.” (Glasgow, in those days, was a particularly violent city.)
I can’t recall ever having read so unexpectedly fascinating a book. You might have thought that a 600-page work, including appendices and notes, on national service would be as compelling as a spell of spud-bashing in the barracks (younger readers: peeling potatoes as punishment), but every single page has something of great interest on it, and all without any rhetorical dishonesty or authorial side. With a vast number of personal recollections, as well as a judicious use of official sources, the book doesn’t just tell us about the strange and (I very much hope) unrepeatable social experiment that was National Service. It tells us about this country, its social divisions, its attitudes to everything from authority to romantic love to male friendship; it is even larger than the sum of its parts.
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