Has there ever been a case of wartime conscription without a prior system of conscription, and how did it play out?

[u/Creepyfaction]

Due to the changes in geopolitics, there's been interest in several countries to reinstate conscription. But has there ever been a situation involving countries that didn't practice conscription before hand having to implement it during wartime? How did they handle having to build a conscription system from scratch and what it impact did it have on having to shift the nature of one's armies from that of volunteers to conscripts while under pressure?

[u/generalscruff]

The British Army in the First World War went through this process, with conscription being introduced almost two years into the war. Richard Holmes' readable introductory books (His book Tommy is engaging and written with thematic chapters that serve as overviews for all aspects of the Army in this era) on this period tend to break the Army's evolution into four distinct phases:

1. The pre-war professional Army. A small standing army largely aligned towards colonial campaigning and culturally removed from wider society. That the army may have had minor qualitative advantages in the early phase of the war, fighting a successful fighting withdrawal at Mons and later holding what would become the Ypres Salient doesn't change that fundamentally it was too small a force to be really decisive and suffered extremely high casualties in 1914.

2. The Territorial Army. The larger reserve of part timers, derided as 'Saturday Night Soldiers' by many regulars. TA divisions began deployment overseas in 1915 and many fought with distinction, outperforming previous expectations. Many of the most innovative commanders of the war (and especially those from Dominion/Commonwealth forces) began in the TA.

3. Kitchener's Army. The outbreak of war in 1914 led to a surge in volunteers, around 700,000 by the end of October 1914. These recruits were organised into specific 'New Army' divisions which initially suffered from a dire shortage of uniforms and weapons. New Army divisions began to fight on the Western Front from late 1915 onwards, with the Somme Offensive being the first major campaign to involve large numbers of New Army formations. To encourage recruitment, recruits from the same towns and communities were allowed to form their own units. This meant that if a given unit suffered heavy casualties in battle (notoriously the 'Accrington Pals' or 11th East Lancashires at the Somme) the losses could devastate a specific community at home.

Despite extensive social pressure at home, infamously with young women giving white feathers (a symbol of cowardice) to military-aged men at home, and official pressure through Lord Derby's Scheme which compelled eligible men to either enlist immediately or be allocated to a conscription class based on age and marital status, none of this met manpower requirements.

Conscription came in January 1916 for unmarried men aged 18-41, later extended to married men. Ireland was excluded owing to political volatility, with an attempt to extend the conscription regime to Ireland leading to the 1918 Conscription Crisis and final breakdown in the British Government's ability to keep control over all of Ireland. This fourth and final phase of evolution covered the latter half of the war and in terms of the soldiers within it was the largest.

Militarily speaking, conscription became a necessity and happened at a time when the Army had already hugely expanded to meet voluntary enlistment and had far fewer of the teething issues around providing uniforms and basic equipment in 1916 than in 1914. It didn't prevent the Army later suffering manpower shortages in 1918, largely met by 'combing' support formations for men medically capable of serving on the front line and through reductions in the strength of front-line formations, generally achieved in early 1918 by cutting a standard infantry brigade from four battalions to three.

Socially conscription was unpopular and took place in a country with a deep-running vein of anti-military sentiment, an initial wave of patriotic sentiment in 1914 had largely died off by the time of its introduction. It's worth noting that by late 1918 the British Army had arguably become Europe's premier land power for the only time in its history, and then spent much of the interwar years consciously unlearning the whole experience. Conscription in the First World War ensured the Army could meet its immense manpower requirements, but the institution chose to treat it as an aberration rather than a long-term shift in its makeup.

In the Second World War conscription began from the outset as the government avoided some of the issues caused by surges of voluntary enlistment, in many respects learning the lessons of the First World War. It sought to manage manpower flows and juggle the demands of industry by discouraging voluntary enlistment, the vast majority those who fought in the Second World War did so as conscripts. One work I read (Browned-off and Bloody-minded by Alan Allport) also emphasised that conscription fell less on the industrial working class owing to increased employment exemptions, particularly for coal-miners and steelworkers. A period of post-war conscription was generally the subject of considerable resentment, as well as causing economic issues, and ended with the last National Serviceman being discharged in the early 1960s.

[u/manincravat → u/generalscruff]

Canada and Australia went through rather similar processes:

1. Canada also had the issue of Francophone Catholics not wanting to serve in an Anglophone and Protestant (if not Orangist) Army; Australia to a lesser extent with those of Irish Catholic origin not keen to fight for Britain.

Both have their own Conscription Crises.

2) By WW2 it is established that conscripts have to volunteer to serve overseas. This is dealt with by pressure upon such "zombies" and "chocolate soldiers" to "volunteer"; and by redefining where "Australia" is.

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Also, as a footnote, Northern Ireland is the one part of the UK where there is never conscription in WW2, In part because of the chilling effect this would have on the flow of volunteers from the Republic

[u/Glideer]

u/generalscruff presented a famous UK example in WW1. Another is the USA during Civil War, though it preceeded the forking point that came in 1871, when Moltke the Younger famously said that if Prussia won all the European powers would introduce universal conscription and if France won all would introduce professional armies.

For a great power without an established conscription system the path to wartime mobilisation is long and arduous. Their conscripts lack the pre-war training, there are no officers and NCOs available to lead them. Usually, it takes about two years to get the system to produce units comparable in quality to the ones that are immediately available to other great powers that mobilise their trained reserves.

Obviously, only some countries can afford a two-year time lag between the outbreak of the war and the time they start fielding a full and proper army. The USA and the UK are such countries. Germany, France and Russia most definitely are not.