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.)

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