EVEN now, it is a song that might be considered as an alternative National Anthem. The jaunty melody and the sentiment of ‘Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr Hitler?’ – the theme tune to the BBC comedy Dad’s Army – is at once self-deprecating and steely.
‘We are the boys who would make you think again,’ croons Bud Flanagan, summoning images of Private Godfrey in a baggy uniform tottering under the weight of his rifle. It is a song about courage worn lightly, mingled with a touch of absurdity. Like the series itself, it is affectionate, funny and moving.
It also plays upon misconceptions of the Home Guard that were current even throughout World War Two. When we think of that immortal Walmington-on-Sea platoon, led by Captain Mainwaring, we envisage grey-haired slapstick, accompanied by cries of ‘don’t panic!’. In real life, the Home Guard – which was first formed in 1940 – was rather more proficient. And had rather deadlier potential too.
In all the countless studies of the war, the story of the Home Guard has received less attention, possibly because of its associations with comedy. Yet its history makes us look afresh at the entire Home Front, from the point of view of men and women alike. For all the affectionate laughter, there was serious hazard too.
The idea for a national defence force composed entirely of civilians had an unexpected source: an uncompromising Leninist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Tom Wintringham – bald and bespectacled and looking a little like Captain Mainwaring, though existing in quite another political dimension – was a lifelong radical: a lawyer and a brilliant writer and a warrior in his soul.
That conflict in Spain – bloody violence combined with political paranoia – had, he saw, become Total War: civilians drawn helplessly into battles.
Wintringham had a powerful sense of the wider war to come: a war where there would no longer be the distinction between military battlefields and civilian life. A war where civilians, and not men in uniform, would be the targets of fascist bombing raids. In Spain, Wintringham, who had fought with the International Brigades, was injured on two occasions. When he finally returned to England, he began his campaign to start training civilians for guerilla conflict so that they might defend themselves.
Elsewhere, Winston Churchill – then a plain MP in his Wilderness Years – was coming to very similar conclusions.
There was thunder in London on the night of 2nd September 1939: Robert Pepperall, who was to join the Hampton Court Home Guard, recalled that it sounded like the gods of war. It was on the following morning that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made his grave radio announcement: almost instantly the air raid sirens started their eerie banshee wail. But in all the national adrenaline rush – the gas masks, the evacuated children, the British Expeditionary Force joining their French allies – this was also the start of a curious period of stasis.
It took the shock of the German invasion of France in May 1940, and of the harrowing retreat from Dunkirk, to catalyse home defence. War Minister Anthony Eden took to the radio to announce the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers. He was barely halfway through the broadcast when queues of men began forming outside police stations up and down the land to sign up. In the first few days, over a quarter of a million men presented themselves for duty.
And as Churchill replaced Chamberlain, and as the country faced up to the prospect of German invasion, it was the new Prime Minister – ever the poet as well as the fighter – who suggested that the LDV be renamed the Home Guard: words with far greater resonance.
Although Tom Wintringham was regarded by many in the Conservative establishment with horror, he had a huge success establishing a Home Guard training camp in the grounds of Osterley Park in West London. Here men were taught the principles of hand-to-hand combat and attacking tanks with Molotov cocktails. The camp was so successful that the government grabbed the idea and established an even larger base in Dorking, Surrey.
And while our collective image of Dad’s Army is still influenced by the elderly cast of the TV series, the average age of the Home Guard was in fact 38. Volunteers were men working in protected occupations, either in industry or agriculture. They worked full hours, then donned their uniform (initially, this was denim, as regular khaki was in short supply) for volunteer parades and night patrols. Weaponry in those early days was primitive. With rifles initially in short supply, men bore everything from Napoleonic arquebuses to golf clubs.
Of course there were elderly recruits too. The upper age limit was supposed to be 65. Huge numbers in their 70s joined up none the less. Many gave gleeful newspaper interviews. One 77-year-old of the Abingdon Home Guard was introduced to the King. Similarly, the youngest recruits were supposed to be 17 – but there were a great many 15-year-olds who managed to inveigle their way into platoons, lured by the prospect of guns and grenades.
Almost immediately, there were cartoons in newspapers and magazines showing the Home Guard having to deal with satirical schoolchildren. But their role was lethally serious. A Nazi invasion was expected to start with para-troopers, followed by amphibious landings. And it was the Home Guard who were intended to stand on the front line. Special booklets gave rural platoons instructions on setting up roadblocks, and turning key buildings into makeshift fortresses. The archetypal chocolate-box English village was re-imagined as a kind of bloody apocalypse.
They would be expected to be the first to meet the invaders’ bullets and fire; they would be expected to forestall the Germans until the regular army could get there. From the start, it was understood that these civilian volunteers would be facing the prospect of serious jeopardy – and of making the ultimate sacrifice.
That seriousness extended beyond invasion preparation. The Home Guard night patrols – especially those in the industrial cities in the stygian darkness of black-out – were also trained to watch out for saboteurs and spies. The official instruction booklets at the time now summon a lost, forgotten landscape of gasworks and railway marshalling yards, vast factories and busy working canals. These booklets gave advice on everything from cigarettes (the glowing tip could be seen in the dark from startling distances, so the advice was: don’t smoke) to the correct stance when throwing a grenade.
There was pride and there was bonding. One young Sussex teenager recalled going to the pub after an exercise with his older Home Guard comrades. Two had been grievously wounded in the Great War. The young lad listened to their stories while admiring the way that one – who had lost a hand – could none the less roll cigarettes at speed. Conversely, some of the older men were telling their Great War stories for the first time: experiences that were not for sharing at home could be quietly alluded to over beer.
And from the start, there were famous recruits: from the writer/broadcaster JB Priestley, to CS Lewis (his Chronicles of Narnia as yet unwritten) to AA Milne (who patrolled the same woods in which dwelt his creations Winnie the Pooh and Piglet) to George Orwell.
Orwell, like Tom Wintringham, had been wounded in the Spanish Civil War. Ill-health and age precluded conscription for the regular military. He joined the St Johns Wood platoon of the Home Guard. Initially, the structure and flavour of the force generally had been at odds with his socialist sensibilities. Orwell regarded it as being run by whiskery old right-wing Brigadiers, and dominated by the upper classes, with the working classes subordinated as privates.
As the war went on, Orwell’s view would evolve: for here was a force where the working classes actually did have a voice. He began to be enthusiastic about this civilian army where a working man might be able to keep a rifle on his wall at home.
There were signs up and down the land that the Home Guard was the manifestation of a more meritocratic future. Industrial platoons – from steel works to munitions factories – marched proudly. Women were extremely keen to join – not just to perform secretarial roles and make tea, as was expected, but to be taught the use of fire-arms. An MP called Dr Edith Summerskill led this campaign. Her argument was that, in the Blitz, Hitler’s bombs were not making the fine distinction between civilian men and women: they were killing all equally. So why should women not have the chance to defend themselves? Unofficial corps sprang up: the Amazon Defence Corps anticipated 1960s karate-kicking heroine Emma Peel by teaching women martial arts.
And the Home Guard was there amid the most terrible moments of crisis, standing alongside the other brave civilian volunteers such as the Air Raid wardens. Throughout the Blitz, they were helping people out of shattered buildings and bomb-watching. As the war progressed, they were placed in key positions of coastal defence and anti-aircraft gun duties. Though the threat of invasion had become a far distant possibility after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Home Guard was being prepared for the day when the regular army would be launching its counter-invasion of Europe: from that point, they would once more be the front-line defenders of the realm.
One key moment illustrated the way that the Home Guard had become every bit the equal of the regular army. In the late spring of 1941, the crash of a lone Messerschmitt fighter in the Scottish Lowlands heralded the arrival of the most unexpected Nazi: Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess. He claimed to have been flying in on a mission to make contact with the Duke of Hamilton.
While it was the Observer and Signals Corps who were the first to track his plane, and find him outside a farm, it was the local Home Guard who took over custody of this amazing prisoner (who initially claimed that he was ‘Captain Alfred Horn’).
The Home Guard – holding their prisoner at first in the kitchen of a local farm – soon deduced who he was (the heavy eyebrows and the intense gaze gave it away – corroboration was found via an old copy of Picture Post). The prisoner in turn gave some Home Guards small souvenirs – items from his plane. He was transported to their local HQ in Busby and held there until being picked up by the regular military (and thence to a series of well appointed prisons). But the essential point was this: his encounter with the Home Guard had shown him an entirely professional group of men – well-armed, well-disciplined, calm, good-humoured and utterly assured. The most senior Nazi to land in Britain had had a glimpse of the nation’s admirably orderly civilian army.
For this and many other reasons, the Home Guard earned the respect of the regular army: and how could it not? So many of its volunteers were ex-servicemen who had tasted battle in the trenches. The regular army and the Home Guard engaged in war games. In one such, in the City of London, the regular army considered they had the advantage of youth. But they were beaten to their objective by the older volunteers. How? Dark cunning: these men had simply tricked their opponents by opening manholes, plunging down into the sewers and making their way under the City unseen.
Across the nation, amazingly detailed archives tell of this and hundreds of other often very funny stories. Decades later, as the BBC hit comedy was at its height, many of those men who had worn Home Guard uniform remembered, laughing, that Mainwaring and his platoon captured an essential truth about the force. In moments of crisis, it was a wholly serious (and often dangerous) proposition. But it was underscored by fantastic good humour, by post-training exercise sessions in local village pubs, and by powerful friendships forged over moments of absurdity, such as the government issuing them with pikes. These really were ‘the boys to stop Hitler’s little game’.
Sinclair McKay is a critic, historian and the bestselling author of Dad’s Army: The Glorious True Story of the Home Guard in WW2.
