Clive Emsley may be the most eminent historian of British policing today. Thus, readers should welcome his new work on the wartime experience of British policemen called up to, or volunteering to serve in, the (British Army) Corps of Military Police. Exporting British Policing during the Second World War complements his recent work on criminality within the British armed forces in the twentieth century, published as Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief: Crime in the British Armed Services since 1914 (2013). While about three thousand members of the corps undertook the military equivalent of civilian police work, Emsley's focus is on the further one thousand military policemen who were members of the detective branch (Special Investigation Branch, or SIB) or of the Civil Affairs Officer (CAO) branch. While the tasks of the five hundred military detectives are self-explanatory, the five hundred men who formed the latter branch were responsible in the first instance for restoring law and order and civilian institutions and governance in liberated or in just-conquered territories. While training courses had commenced as early as January 1940 in order to prepare liaison officers for the British occupation of territory liberated from the Nazis, Emsley notes that the tasks that the members of the SIB and the CAO branch undertook during the war were far beyond the previous peacetime experience of those personnel. For rebuilding administrative and governmental structures and essential services in wartime was scarcely familiar territory for civilian policemen now recruited to wartime Civilian Affairs, while the wartime criminal activities to be tackled by military detectives encompassed conduct such as black-market trading, currency frauds, and desertion, which they were unlikely to have encountered in peacetime.
Emsley's profiles of the new cohorts of military police and military detectives and account of their specialist training is of some interest, perhaps more to police historians than to military historians, insofar as he plots the career paths of many SIB and CAO branch personnel from their prewar civilian roles to their wartime military police experience. Thus, his chapters on the creation of training programs for the SIB after its creation in 1940 (the Hatherill Report itself in 1940 and the reasons for its production have already been written about widely) and on planning for Civil Affairs policing are useful. As to theaters of operations, Emsley is especially enlightening on Italy, where military deserters roamed in criminal gangs and where Mafia and Camorra influences had to be countered. The military police experience in other theatres of war, especially France, Benelux, Trieste, and Greece, where the Allies might be perceived as liberators, is more cursorily discussed.
Given the focus on military policing during the war, Emsley's coverage of Germany (and, to a lesser extent, of Austria) ends around mid-1946, following the Nazi defeat. In consequence, the broader relationship between the SIB and the CAO branch, on the one hand, and the policing of all those living in the territory of the Control Commission Germany (British Zone), is only touched upon. Thus, while British military personnel within the Control Commission Germany might still be subject to military police and SIB attentions, Emsley, for the most part, eschews seeking to determine how British civilians, Germans, displaced persons, and others in the Control Commission Germany were policed.
It is clear that while British administrators and policy makers reposed ideological faith in the theory that the British tradition of policing by consent, as characterized by the friendly “Bobby on the beat,” could be translated to reconstructed indigenous police forces in liberated and conquered territories, their touching belief was misplaced. European police adhered to different traditions so that the “exporting” (in Emsley's book title) had little long-term traction. In any case, even within the British sphere, attempts to reconcile military police values with civilian police values must confront the subtle differences between civilian police conflict resolution (or “policing by consent”) and (military police) operational effectiveness. In short, “exporting” might not be the most felicitous description of British wartime and postwar police practice, though Emsley is well aware of the difficulty in imposing the cultural, policing, and crime standards of one society on another.
Emsley concludes by noting that with the disbandment, after the war, of the Civil Affairs branch of the Corps of Military Police (it became the Royal Military Police in 1946) there was an accompanying loss of institutional memory. And tragically, as we have now come to realize, this would later have disastrous consequences for the policing of Iraq some two generations later.
Finally, one has to state that this book is marred by too many typographical and grammatical errors. They irritate the reader and cast a poor light on a publisher that has nonetheless chosen to set an exorbitant book price, no doubt to the author's chagrin. Nonetheless, Exporting British Policing during the Second World War makes an important contribution to its field.
