In one of the best-remembered episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour, the sage of Railway Cuttings organises a get-together for his old army pals from the 3rd East Cheam Light Horse. But although Hancock looks forward to rekindling the “deep everlasting friendship that time will never erase”, the party is a profound disappointment. The hellraiser “Ginger” Johnson is now bald and short-sighted, “Chalky” White has forgotten all his dirty jokes and “Smudger” Smith, once “up to here in Chianti and women”, has become a teetotal, vegetarian bank clerk. “Fifteen years is a long time,” Sid James says sadly. “You cannot bring back the past.”

In many ways Alan Allport’s portrait of the men who came home after the second world war, like that Hancock episode, is a study in disillusionment. Most histories of the war end in May 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany, or in August with the surrender of imperial Japan. But Allport’s wonderfully insightful study asks us to rethink the conventional chronology. For most fighting men, the wartime experience did not end until months later. As late as January 1946, four out of five British servicemen were still waiting to come home to parents, wives and children they had not seen for years. It was, Allport argues, a “national moment rich in joy and relief, certainly, sanguine and self-confident for many, but also one full of doubts, frustrations, sadnesses and private defeats”.

Even before Germany’s surrender, the writer JL Hodson predicted that “many a homecoming will be unhappy and ugly and fearful”, and thought that “many folk must dread the end of the war and the trials it will bring”. The Daily Mirror had so many letters from ­servicemen worried about the reunion with their wives that it ran a special feature assuaging their fears under the provocative headline: “Scared of your wife, soldier?” But they were right to be anxious. Many couples, married in a passionate hurry under the pressure of wartime, found that they were basically incompatible. The divorce rate went through the roof: in 1935, 4,100 divorces had been granted in England and Wales, but by 1945 the equivalent figure was 15,600, and by 1947 it had reached a staggering 60,300. The nation was suffering, one vicar wrote in the army newspaper John Bull, from a “modern matrimonial landslide”.

And there was a darker side to the heroes’ homecoming. Almost every Sunday in the late 1940s the News of the World carried lurid ­stories of former servicemen murdering their wives, from the Burma veteran who strangled his spouse after finding her with an artillery gunner, to the Royal Engineers sergeant who shot his wife and himself in front of her parents. In the most notorious case, Private Cyril Patmore stabbed his heavily pregnant wife, who had cheated on him with an Italian PoW, to death in their home in Harlesden. Yet when the case came to court in September 1945 the jury acquitted him of murder, and he served just five years for manslaughter. As one appalled reader wrote to his Sunday paper, it seemed that “the unfaithful wife of a serviceman is an outlaw, with no benefit of law whatsoever. She may be murdered with impunity”.

What ran through the experience of demobilisation, Allport argues, was a thread of unease about Britain’s economic exhaustion, the state of the family and the moral condition of the nation’s fighting men, brutalised by years of slaughter. As he points out, Britain in the immediate aftermath of the war was a dingy, dirty place, much poorer and greyer than it had been in the late 1930s, the parks stripped of railings, the shop fronts shabby and peeling, the headlines dominated by fears of crime. In 1938 there had been 58,000 violent crimes in England and Wales; in 1948 there were 130,000, while the number of sexual offences rose almost threefold. Cinematic thrillers such as They Made Me a Fugitive and The Flamingo Affair painted an angry picture of former servicemen haunted by memories of wartime and frustrated at the shabby compromises of peace. And even Biggles’s creator, Captain WE Johns, turned his pen to the anxieties of peacetime, introducing readers to Commando Captain Gimlet, a cold and humourless veteran who reflected the wider sense of disappointment and depression.

Although Allport’s book began life as a doctoral dissertation, it is not only refreshingly free of jargon but remarkably moving. If all academic history were written this way, popular historians would be out of a job. The human details linger in the mind: the repentant wife’s plaintive letter to her ­husband, begging for forgiveness after she cheated while he was away; the artilleryman, traumatised by combat, who could never cross the road or sit on the top deck of a bus; the Eighth Army driver who came home after six years to find his wife out, a note on the kitchen table and a tin of pilchards in the larder. If nothing else, this book is an eloquent plea for our own servicemen to get a much better welcome home.

Demobbed by Alan Allport
Yale £20 pp265

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