Imagine turning eighteen in Britain in 1943, expecting a uniform and a rifle, and instead being handed a pickaxe and steel-capped boots and sent down a coal mine. That was the fate of nearly 48,000 young men known as the Bevin Boys, conscripted for civilian labour in the pits rather than the armed forces. This episode draws on Ministry of Labour records, personal diaries, and 1940s economic data to explain how Britain, entirely dependent on coal for steel, railways, shipping, and the electrical grid, crippled its own energy supply by drafting its youngest miners into the army and found itself 36,000 workers short by mid-1943, with absenteeism above 14 percent and strikes spreading.

With volunteers virtually nonexistent, Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin introduced mandatory conscription in December 1943, selected by a secretary drawing a sing ...