Veterans’ fight goes on long after war

Observing the new intake of Westminster MPs following World War One, Conservative politician Stanley Baldwin remarked on "a lot of hard-faced men who looked as if they had done very well out of the war".

Nearly 100 years later, there are scoundrels still profiting from it.

After all the slaughter and injury, even the able-bodied had to face hardship. When the cenotaph to honour the fallen was unveiled in London’s Whitehall in 1920, unemployed veterans demonstrated with a banner saying — “We ask for Bread and you give us a Stone.”

16 years later, unemployed workers, great numbers of them veterans, marched from Tyneside to London demanding work or sustenance.

In 1924, the US Congress promised Great War veterans a bonus, redeemable in full on his birthday in 1945, if alive. If he died, payments went to his estate.

In 1932, some 17,000 of them, and their families, camped in Washington. They demanded to be paid while they were still living, with fatal results for many, including children, when police and troops led by General Douglas MacArthur shot at, and burned, their encampment.

In Ireland, many Great War veterans also suffered unemployment, as did IRA veterans of the ‘Tan War’.

IRA survivors on the losing side fared worst and thousands of them found refuge in the United States in the era of Prohibition.

Donal Kennedy

Palmers Green

London N13