demobilize

tr.v., -ized, -iz·ing, -iz·es.

1. To discharge from military service or use.
2. To disband (troops).

demobilization de·mo'bil·i·za'tion (-bə-lĭ-zā'shən) n.

verb

To release from military duty: discharge, muster out, separate. See free/unfree, keep/release.

v

Definition: disband
Antonyms: conscript

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Demobilization is the process of reintegrating servicemen into civilian society at the conclusion of hostilities. It has often been difficult. The disaffected ex-soldier, earning a living by plying his old trade, has long been a feature of history and literature: Macheath, the hero of John Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728), had been a captain in the army. However, the problem of demobilization reached an altogether new scale with the mass recruitment of manpower and other national resources that took place during the world wars of the 20th century. Combatant nations had to make an orderly transition from a society on war-footing back to a normal peacetime society. Above all, this meant filtering several million soldiers back into normal life and shifting industrial production back to civilian goods: in other words, ‘demobilizing’ the nation.

This problem first arose at the conclusion of WW I and was tackled differently by each nation. Some governments tried to control the process from the beginning, while others took no steps to regulate it. At the end of the war, the British had approximately 3, 750, 000 men under arms. The government was afraid that releasing the bulk of these men in a short period of time would mean that most would return home and face unemployment. To avoid this, they created a detailed demobilization plan before the end of hostilities. Under this plan, the soldiers were divided into different groups, each with different priorities for release. The first and smallest group were those men who would administer the process (so-called ‘demobilizers’). These men were generally civil servants. The second group came to be called ‘pivotal men’. These were soldiers whom the government believed would be able to help create jobs for others. The government took advice from industrial leaders as to which personnel should be chosen for these posts. Then came the so-called ‘slip men’. These were soldiers who had the promise of a job upon their return home. In order to qualify for this category, a soldier had to present a section of an employment form (the ‘slip’) filled out by the company which guaranteed to provide the soldier work. These men were to be ‘demobbed’ according to the importance of their job to the reconstruction of the civilian economy. The government created two further categories of soldiers: those who could expect to find employment rapidly upon returning to the UK and those who had little prospect of finding work. Regardless of category, the demobbed soldier would first be released on a 28-day furlough before being formally discharged. At one of the 26 ‘dispersal stations’ he would receive a ration book, pay covering his furlough, and either a clothing allowance to buy civilian clothes or a government-issue ‘demob suit’. He would also be allowed to keep his uniform and greatcoat. Further, the government would provide unemployment insurance for up to twenty weeks.

However, implementation of this seemingly logical plan revealed how unfair it was in practice. Soldiers who had served through most of the war found that men who had only recently joined the army (who consequently possessed closer contacts with potential employers) were being released before them. The result was protest from the troops. Some demonstrated in central London carrying signs which read, ‘We want Civvie Suits’, and ‘We Won the War, Give Us Our Tickets’; others refused to board ships returning them from leave to France. After the 1918 elections, the new government quickly took steps that, in essence, scrapped the detailed plan. Instead of men with good job prospects being discharged first, priority was now given to those who had served longest. Within ten weeks of the implementation of this new system, 56 per cent of officers and 78 per cent of men eligible for release were demobbed. During the height of the procedure, up to 14, 000 men were released daily and a year after the beginning of the process, the army stood at 380, 000 men. Even with the changes to the plan, prior planning allowed the British to limit the adverse impact of the influx of millions of soldiers back into civilian life.

Illustrating the opposite end of the scale, whatever the problems of the British system they paled in comparison with what happened in Germany. While German historians have pointed with pride to the fact that their units marched home from the front in good order, these same units practically disintegrated upon reaching their garrisons and the army authorities found it impossible to implement any planned demobilization. The troops returned to a homeland in chaos, with their families near starvation and the central and state governments dissolving in the face of revolution. With industry in disarray, these men had little prospect of employment. Consequently, many drifted into the myriad paramilitary groups in existence, further contributing to the nation's unrest. Without a doubt, the inability to organize a progressive demobilization of the German army in 1918 exacerbated an already volatile situation and demonstrated the pitfalls of rapidly releasing millions of soldiers back into civil society unprepared.

Demobilization after WW II raised many of the same issues. Britain, with the experience of dismantling a mass army after WW I behind her, was better able to cope than the USA, whose WW I mobilization had not been on the same scale. Getting troops back from distant theatres of war caused difficulties, and there were some lapses of discipline, notably amongst US forces in the Pacific. The Soviet Union, with its command economy, simply redirected labour, and in any case did not demobilize to the same extent as the West. The situation in Germany was exacerbated by the damage caused by bombing and the gradual return of POWs.

The shrinkage of armed forces since the end of the Cold War—there were some 6 million fewer personnel under arms in 1999 than in 1987—has seen large-scale demobilization which has caused some grief in western democracies and dissatisfaction on a far larger scale in the former Soviet Union. Its successful completion has been identified as a key feature in the ending of long-running conflicts in Asia, Africa, and Central America. A high proportion of the population of countries such as South Africa, Angola, and Mozambique became involved in war: many soldiers—government troops, or guerrillas from various factions—had been fighting for so long that they had been thoroughly socialized into the ways of the military and knew no other skills. Failure to integrate them into peacetime society raises the risk that they will use their weapons and combat skills simply to make a living. There is now widespread recognition that it is hard to end conflicts without addressing the future of those who prosecuted them.

Bibliography

• Bessel, Richard, Germany after the First World War (Oxford, 1993).
• DeGroot, Gerard J., Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (London, 1996).
• Graubard, S. R., ‘Military Demobilization in Great Britain following the First World War’, Journal of Modern History, 19 (1947)

— Robert Foley/Richard Holmes

is the release or “draw down” of wartime military forces as the nation resumes peacetime status following a war or major buildup. It is, then, the opposing process of mobilization, which is the assembling and organizing of troops, materiel, and equipment for active military service in time of war or other national emergency. The extent of the process of demobilization depends upon the mobilization that preceded it. Factors include the size, duration, and location of conflict, as well as the level of technology and state of the industrial base and degree of public support. These factors, in turn, determine the number of men mobilized, the duration of service, the distance they move, and the equipment they use. Demobilization is as tumultuous and as fraught with change as mobilization, for after mobilization, and after the conflict, while there can be a normalizing, there cannot be a return to normality. Over the course of American history, demobilization has been a largely haphazard and relatively unplanned process, reflecting a nation whose emphasis has been on peacetime pursuits while maintaining a small standing army.

For the United States, the history of demobilization begins, in modern terms, with the Civil War. Previous conflicts had involved forces small enough to make demobilization relatively invisible. Over the course of the Revolutionary War, for example, demobilization was a continual, and relatively informal, process. The Continental Congress had limited authority over the troops; soldiers were allowed to return home at the end of their enlistment, desertions were frequent, and men were often unceremoniously sent home after a campaign. With the cessation of hostilities, the Continental army was virtually disbanded. Men wandered home without medical examinations, outprocessing, written discharges, or pay.

The reasons for this are apparent after 200 years. The United States barely existed; the Continental Congress had little power; the army, composed of Continental troops and militia, was small and considered temporary; no bureaucracy existed to process or track either mobilization or demobilization. Significantly, there was strong distrust of standing armies during times of peace. That distrust was not only for the armed force itself, but the government that would control it. A standing force, it was felt, would contribute to a more centralized and more powerful government than many thought wise.

The War of 1812 and even the Mexican War changed this situation and sentiment very little. As during the Revolutionary War, men were continually inducted into service even as large numbers who had served out their enlistments were discharged. Terms of enlistment were short, from one to twenty months, and the total number of troops at any given time was relatively small for both conflicts. The Mexican War witnessed a movement to permanent enlistments, a precedent that would not be adopted again until the Spanish‐American War. At the end of each war, the army returned to a peacetime basis by disbanding all excess regiments and consolidating remaining ones with regiments in the active force. Demobilization could remain unorganized and informal because the forces were not large.

The Civil War changed the policy of demobilization, just as it changed warfare, public understanding of war, and almost everything else. True to tradition, prior to the end of the Civil War, little thought was given to how the war would end, much less to the processes of disbandment. As before, troops were continuously discharged after completing their terms of enlistment. With Lee's surrender in 1865, and a general public feeling that demobilization should be immediate, the Union faced the task of outprocessing over 1 million Federal troops. Demobilization directives were hastily drawn up and issued in May 1865.

The Union plan called for the movement of large units to rendezvous areas within the former Confederacy and the border states. This served both to facilitate the demobilization process and to position Union forces for reconstruction duties. Troops were marched to the rendezvous areas where they camped while muster rolls and payrolls were prepared. Units were mustered out of federal service and men were sent to their home state to be individually mustered out. Mustering out took time, and boredom and homesickness caused a mass of desertions. Payment for service was not uniform from state to state.

Meanwhile, Lee's Confederate army stacked its weapons, signed a pledge not to take up arms against the government, and marched home without pay. As word spread, many troops simply left without signing anything. Demilitarization of the South proceeded slowly and unevenly.

Because of the large numbers of troops who were recruited, fought, and were subsequently mustered out, America took some lessons on demobilization and applied them. The Spanish‐American War was a foreign war, which set it apart from the country's preceding experience; as in previous conflicts, the armed forces consisted of regulars and volunteers. No volunteer units were mustered out of the service during the conduct of operations. At war's end, most nonregular units were returned to their home state and demobilized. The federal government required that soldiers be transported to their respective state camps. There they were furloughed while their records were prepared. They returned for separation and pay. The exception was those units that were held over for occupation duty in the Philippines.

With the turn of the century, defense organization and legislation changed the face of the military establishment. The new Army General Staff lent the services a guiding structure; the Militia Act (1903) set the National Guard's relationship to the federal government. This represented a serious attempt to professionalize the military establishment. Each was intended to contribute to the ability of the services—and hence the nation—to mobilize for war and demobilize afterward.

The army that fought World War I was composed of regulars, National Guardsmen, and individual volunteers. Volunteer units were no longer called; most of the ranks were filled through conscription, which was passed in the summer of 1917. During this war, all troops under enlistment served for the duration of the conflict. Unfortunately, despite the existence of the General Staff, the end of the Great War found the United States as unprepared to demobilize as it had been to wage war. When Congress declared war in April 1917, the armed forces numbered almost 300,000. Nineteen months later, over 2 million men were serving in France, yet planning for demobilization began only a month before hostilities ceased. The army, relying on the draft, had greater problems with demobilization than the navy or Marines, of which most were volunteers.

The traditional unit demobilization began with the war's conclusion. Some units were still required to man the ports of debarkation, demobilization centers, supply depots, hospitals, and various garrisons. Due to strong public outcry, however, the War Department accelerated demobilization by discharging individuals, generally before deactivating their units. The discharge was carried out at demobilization centers throughout the country, where physical exams were conducted, financial claims made, and administrative details gathered. The centers were primarily designed to accommodate troops returning from overseas. Soldiers were discharged at camps closest to their homes; physical needs were attended to; coal miners, railroad employees, and railway mail clerks were discharged immediately. Units were demobilized according to plan, with replacement battalions first and combat divisions following. Because of the number of men under arms, the demobilization process affected society in general: communities with war industries experienced an immediate labor surplus when those industries closed down, and the large numbers of returning soldiers added to the unemployment problem.

In World War II, formal planning for demobilization began two years before the end of the war with Germany. For the first time in American history, demobilization was done primarily by individual rather than by unit. Demobilization by unit had previously been the standard for the army, and had worked well with small forces, for it allowed units to retain their integrity and combat effectiveness. The individual method, however, allowed for faster mustering out with acknowledgment paid to individual service—both of which were popular in American society. A service score plan was devised whereby individual soldiers were assigned points as credit for length of service, time spent overseas, time spent in combat, number of wounds sustained, and number of children at home. America began partial demobilization of its ground and air forces in May 1945 with over 8 million men under arms. The navy began demobilization on V‐J Day with a strength of approximately 4 million. Demobilization took from 1945 to 1947, and was characterized by upheaval, waste, and confusion. By June 1947, the total strength of the army was just over 900,000.

This immense demobilization affected all phases of American life. The army, after having been perhaps the most powerful military machine in Western history, dwindled to a state of near impotence, impairing national security and limiting the flexibility of foreign policy. Demobilization also adversely affected supply, maintenance, and storage of munitions; experts in those fields were normally in rear areas during fighting and among the first to leave the service. The army thus was left with not only an absence of manpower to tackle the job of organizing and mastering demobilization and reorganization but also a low level of expertise in many significant fields. Waste was incredibly high; thousands of items of equipment worth millions of dollars were left to rust in place. The mass exodus of men from units overseas caused a complete turnover in leadership. In some cases, whole units disappeared, to be replaced by untrained and untried fillers. Throughout the process, congressional criticism was intense, made particularly acute by upcoming congressional elections in which candidates demanded swift, if not immediate, dismantling of the military.

With the war's end, debate again resurfaced over the issue of universal military training. Late in 1945, President Harry S. Truman asked Congress for legislation requiring male citizens to undergo a year of military training. Proponents believed this would permit a quick expansion of the force when mobilization was necessary. Although this idea became the subject of extensive debate, American citizenry did not accept it, and reinforcement of the regular forces would continue to depend on the reserve forces. Interestingly, the draft, enacted in 1940, was maintained, although not without debate of its own, until 1973.

From the end of World War II until 1989, America was preoccupied by the Cold War, as a result of which it maintained a relatively large standing army for the first time in its history. Conscription was enforced until 1973 to ensure that strength was held at that high level. The draft ended in 1973; since then, all services have been filled by enlistments alone. Over the Cold War period, no large conflict erupted between the superpowers. The United States did participate in limited hostilities, however, including the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Both of these required the armed forces to be built up to fight on foreign soil; neither, however, resulted in mass mobilization or demobilization. During the Vietnam conflict, the United States returned to the earlier policy of “rolling” demobilization—recruits served in Vietnam for thirteen months (including one month of R&R) rather than for the duration, America's earlier pattern of demobilization.

[See also Militia and National Guard; Mobilization; Recruitment.]

Bibliography

• William A. Ganoe, History of the United States Army, 1936.
• Oliver L. Spaulding, The United States Army in War and Peace, 1937.
• Kent R. Greenfield, The Organization of Ground Combat Troops, 1947.
• John C. Sparrow, History of Personnel Demobilization in the United States Army, 1951.
• Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army, 1967

[dēܒmōbǝܖlīz]

dēˈmōbǝܖlīz v. 1. (usually be demobilized) take (troops) out of active service, typically at the end of a war: he was demobilized in February 1946.

2. cease military operations: Germany demanded that they demobilize within twelve hours.

demobilization n.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Demobilization, the dismissal of troops to civilian life and the winding down of a war industry at the cessation of a national emergency. Because American wars have relied predominantly on volunteers, militia, and drafted civilians, the sudden return of these service people to civilian life often has had the proportions of an avalanche, particularly since Americans paid little attention to this phase of warmaking—except following World War II.

In the first two American wars, the Revolution and the War of 1812, short-term enlistments and limitations of transportation and communication made demobilization a continuous process. Mustered-out troops often went unrecorded, sometimes unpaid, and always had to find their own way home.

In the Mexican-American War, Gen. Winfield Scott experienced a premature demobilization of 40 percent of his troops after the Battle of Cerro Gordo (18 April 1847) when their one-year enlistments expired. From then on, volunteers enlisted for the conflict's duration. At the end of the war, 41,000 men dispersed over the American southwest and Mexico before the military finally transported them to New Orleans by boat.

The problems of releasing 1,034,064 men after the Civil War dwarfed previous demobilization efforts but lacked a detailed demobilization plan. Corps and divisions were transferred to nine rendezvous areas, where officials prepared muster-out rolls and payrolls, released soldiers, and deactivated units. Demobilization took as long as eighteen months for volunteers, and even longer for regular troops.

The sudden victory of the United States in the Spanish-American War (1898) heralded the usual public outcry to bring the troops home, but changes to mustering-out procedures midway through demobilization caused much confusion. Some regiments were held in service until 1902 because of the continuing insurrection in the Philippines.

World War I ended with an abruptness that again caught American military planners unprepared. More than 3 million service people were eligible for discharge. Officials considered discharge by military unit the most equitable and least economically disruptive alternative, and, at the same time, provided an effective force for occupation and other contingencies. Thirty demobilization centers in the United States processed troops out of service as close to their homes as possible.

A special division began planning World War II demobilization in the last two years of the war. Even so, the sudden Japanese surrender and public pressure to return soldiers to civilian life released a deluge of veterans and caused concern among military strategists eyeing the threat of the Soviet Union to American security. Eight million soldiers—five million deployed abroad—had to be demobilized, and a four-year logistical buildup had to be liquidated. A point system governed the sequence of troop release by individual rather than by unit. The military released half of its 8 million service people by the end of 1945, but a slowdown early in 1946 prompted public outcry and even troop demonstrations. By June 1946, the army again halved its strength. This sudden reduction left the fully demobilized U.S. Army much weaker than its numbers implied.

After World War II, several factors altered the traditional problems of demobilization. The limited wars of this period used reserve call-ups and rotated drafted troops on an individual twelve-month basis, making demobilization continuous. Moreover, peace did not come unexpectedly and demobilization could be planned in advance.

Bibliography

Carroll, John M., and Colin F. Baxter, eds. The American Military Tradition: From Colonial Times to the Present. Wilmington, Del.: S. R. Books, 1993.

Matloff, Maurice, ed. American Military History: 1775–1902 (Vol. 1) and 1902–1996 (Vol. 2). Conshohocken, Pa.: Combined Publishing, 1996. Earlier publication: Washington, D.C., Office of the Chief of Military History, U.S. Army, 1969.

Sparrow, John C. History Of Personnel Demobilization in the United States Army. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1994. (Distributed to depository libraries in microfiche.) Originally published: Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1951.

—Don E. McLeod/C. W.

(DOD) The process of transitioning a conflict or wartime military establishment and defense-based civilian economy to a peacetime configuration while maintaining national security and economic vitality. See also mobilization.

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Dansk (Danish)
v. tr. - demobilisere, hjemsende

Nederlands (Dutch)
demobiliseren (ontslaan uit militaire dienst)

Français (French)
v. tr. - démobiliser

Deutsch (German)
v. - aus dem Militärdienst entlassen, demobilisieren, abrüsten

Ελληνική (Greek)
v. - αποστρατεύω

Italiano (Italian)
smobilitare

Português (Portuguese)
v. - desmobilizar

Русский (Russian)
демобилизовать

Español (Spanish)
v. tr. - desmovilizar, desbandar, dar de baja

Svenska (Swedish)
v. - demobilisera

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
使复员, 遣散, 使退伍

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
v. tr. - 使復員, 遣散, 使退伍

한국어 (Korean)
v. tr. - 군대를 해체하다, 전역 시키다

日本語 (Japanese)
v. - 動員を解く, 解隊する, 復員させる, 解散する

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(فعل) يسرح شخص من خدمه الجيش‏

עברית (Hebrew)
v. tr. - ‮שלח החיילים הביתה, שיחרר מהצבא‬

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