Conscientious objectors

I thought that mining was considered a rserved occupation. However, many miners joined the services voluntarily, which left jobs available for the "Bevan Boys"

Girlracer "Why would ANYONE go to war" I would suggest its to stand up to psychopaths like Hitler. A conflict that could probably be defined as a necessary war.

My Dad was working in the British United Shoe Machinery works in Leicester just before the war and stayed there as a reserved occupation during the war doing this stuff.

WW2 saw a much higher percentage of BUSM’s precision engineering capacity switched to manufacturing arms than in WW1. Products included Naval gun sights and the technically very demanding precision cast wheelhouse for the Rolls-Royce Merlin aero engine.

My dad eventually qualified as a mechanical engineer and went into teaching maths type things.

During the war he also had to do first aid and fire watching duties if he was not working. The noise of the rivet punching machines did damage his hearing. "They also serve."

My Dad never served in the army during WW11 I did wonder if he might of been a CO, he told me that he drove in conveys in and out of the docks in London delivering 'stuff' all over England. My mum said she never knew exactly what he did after he'd died.

Oh! I have just echoed Greatnan

Another echo for Nellie and Greatnan. I must have been a trial for my father as a teenager when I constantly argued that wars could always be avoided if people only talked to each other. He was a marine in WW2 and like most others of his generation didn't talk about the horrors he must have experienced. He would patiently explain to me, over and over, that it just isn't possible to negotiate with psychopaths like Hitler. He always told us he'd been lucky, and avoided the fighting. He was on the Mediterranean fleet, and said he'd arrived in various Greek islands, Tunisia, Alexandria and Italy just in time to miss any fighting. After he died, we found letters from the adult children of men he'd served with. These made clear he'd been involved in the battle of Sicily, where hand to hand fighting took place. The older I get, the more I admire those who served their country in this war. I was anti Vietnam, etc, and marched (futile) against the invasion of Iraq. The day before the vote in the HoC, I wrote to my MP to ask him to oppose any bombing of Syria. I wish we could use diplomacy effectively in every situation, we can't. I hope it works in the Syrian conflict though - so many people suffering and dying horrific deaths.

We had a neighbour who had been in a Japanese POW camp for three years. He was very quiet and withdrawn and had empty eyes. I think now he would be diagnosed as having PTSD.
My own father was born in 1899 and had just been called up in 1918 when the war ended. He was 41 in 1940 and joined the RAF but he had a cushy war, helping to repair damaged aircraft at Coningsby, Lincolnshire. He left my mother with four children living close to Manchester docks, but she found a little cottage in the countryside near Bury where we lived until 1945. My mother's younger brother was lost at sea on one of the Atlantic convoys. I don't think the men of the Merchant Navy got the recognition they deserved.
I can't watch films about WW1- even Blackadder made me weep. I read the war poets and think of all those young men who had been conned into thinking they were saving Britain, rather than making money for the armaments industry. WW2 was completely different (but there were still a lot of people who made money out of it). Having sown the seeds for the rise of Nazism, the Allies had no choice but to deal with the outcome.