The culture shock of coming home after war

I have a general goal of reading Alan Allport's Demobbed:  Coming Home After World War II and Julie Summers' Stranger in the House in a close enough time frame to each other that I can get both the soldier POV and the home front POV and compare and contrast the two.  I've now read the first book, so just need to get myself together enough to read Stranger in the House within the next few months.

I've had Demobbed on my shelf for a couple of years now, having purchased it when I was on a kick about learning more about the after-effects of WWII on people's lives.  Some time ago, I read and really enjoyed Soldier from the War Returning, which focuses on American men coming home after WWII.  Demobbed focuses on British soldiers and their families attempting to return to civilian life after six years of war.  It talks through the whole demobilization plan, the efforts to get everyone employed, and the difficulty of picking up a life that had been on pause for so long.


It has a ton of information about Britain during the war, the way people remember the war, and the way people reacted after the war.  I am very glad to have read it because, just based on watching Dr Who and Call the Midwife, I feel like Britons have this huge cultural pride in surviving the Battle of Britain, and this book really puts that into context.  I'm happy to know that Americans are not the only people in the world to remember how brave they were in the past and just erase the more injurious events from collective memory.

In general, I would say that I preferred Soldier from the War Returning to Demobbed.  This is mostly because what I really love and crave about historical accounts is the first-person narrative.  Demobbed has a lot of letters and journal entries and statistics, but Soldier from the War Returning focused entirely on three families.  I really liked becoming immersed in the everyday lives of people I felt I knew well and intimately, through the awkwardness of coming home, the struggles with PTSD, and the difficulties of becoming a family again.  In Demobbed, I missed that because there were so many small anecdotes and situations shared from so many different people.  I didn't feel attached to any of them, though I felt a great deal of empathy towards them all.

Demobbed also spends time talking about society as a whole and the way it reacted to the soldiers coming home.  Many times, the soldiers didn't actually feel welcome because most civilians thought that they had suffered much more during the war than the soldiers had.  Also, soldiers were demobilized over such a long period that by the time the later groups came home, there wasn't a lot of fanfare to welcome them.  And they all built up and fantasized about their homecomings so much that it was hard for them not to be let down.

Another interesting thing the book talked about was the breakdown in the camaraderie between people who had shared experiences together.  After coming home, many men who had spent months upon months on end with each other hardly saw each other again as everyone dealt with getting back into their lives.  And then, if they did have reunions later on, they'd find everyone else so changed and drastically different that they had not much to talk about, leading them to feel even more isolated.

Really, all of these books on the experience of war and coming home after the war make clear one thing more than anything else - that war has far-reaching psychological consequences for the individuals who lived through it, and those consequences can have a massive impact on not just those people but on a society as a whole.  Britain after the war lost its confidence along with its empire, lost a family structure that had survived for hundreds of years, and really struggled to assimilate people who had gone through so much to work and live together.

Demobbed is a truly informative and eye-opening account of returning to civilian life after war.  However, if you want an in-depth and personal narrative, I would recommend Soldier from the War Returning over this one.