Posted on 09/13/2001 9:49:31 AM PDT by Israel
They formed a rough arrow designed, he insisted, to guide German aircraft onto a local target. I was sceptical. "You ought to have a quiet word with the farmer," I suggested. "Can't do that," said the Home Guard man with immense satisfaction. "He's been nicked!"
I remained sceptical until later that year when we were stationed near Newcastle-under-Lyme. There I heard a similar story. Was there anything in it? During those fraught summer months of 1940 we never stayed anywhere long enough to make sure.
Yet the tale illustrates one virtue of the Home Guard and why they have a lasting place in this island's story. They were local. They knew their neighbourhoods. They would know the name of a farmer who laid out corn stooks in a peculiar way; and would have a pretty clear idea of whether he was a man likely to be helping the enemy.
Sixty years on from the formation of the Home Guard in July 1940, it is impossible to convey to those not then alive the mood in this island that sent thousands of men racing to defend it. The Low Countries had fallen with hardly a shot fired. The French seemed paralysed. With the Continent overrun by the Germans, there was a natural anxiety about what was likely to happen here combined with a fierce determination not to submit to the Nazis.
Until the early summer, I was stationed with our battalion in the Gunners' barracks at Woolwich. Our daily routine had been that of most soldiers during the phoney war. We had guard duties, did a bit of drilling. London was conveniently close for recreation. In the evenings, we gathered in the officers' mess after dinner to hear the BBC news.
The sun beat down day after day. A lovely English summer seemed to be going to waste. But it brought the only scintilla of good news. The British Expeditionary Force was being ferried back across the Channel in miraculously calm weather. Churchill later described it thus: "The sense of fear seemed entirely lacking in the people. Nothing moves an Englishman so much as the threat of invasion, the reality unknown for a thousand years. Vast numbers of people were resolved to conquer or die."
That conveys the spirit which led 250,000 men to join the Local Defence Volunteers, as they were at first called, within 24 hours of the War Secretary Anthony Eden broadcasting an appeal for them in June 1940.
It was Churchill who objected to their original name. On one of his visits round the country, he had spotted a party of middle-aged men in civilian clothes wearing armlets marked LDV "I don't think much of the name `Local Defence Volunteers' for your very large new force," he wrote to Eden on June 26, 1940. "The word `local' is uninspiring. Mr Herbert Morrison suggested to me today the title `Civil Guard' but I think `Home Guard' would be better."
NOBODY argued much with Churchill in those days, so Home Guard they became on July 24. By that time, 1.3 million men had joined the force and recruiting had been suspended.
"Local" might sound uninspiring but local ears and eyes were indispensable. Another Home Guard officer whom I encountered while in the Newcastle-under-Lyme region wrinkled his nose at the name of a local university don who was booked to give a lecture to our battalion. "Defeatist. He doesn't think we can win, and he talks like that in the officers' mess before the lecture."
A lot of people thought like the lecturer at that time, but as we were moving again - our battalion moved six times in seven months - I left a cautionary note for the regiment taking over from us. I thought no more about it until the end of the war when the lecturer in question turned up in the House of Commons as a Labour MP and ultimately became a fairly successful minister.
Nor would anyone who started the war in the Territorial Army, as I did, make light of the Home Guard's routine duties, for they eventually took over some of the chores that we had been doing, and that included holding watch over "vulnerable points".
My first "VP" early in September 1939 was Staines railway bridge, over which trains carrying naval supplies were said to run between Portsmouth and Scapa Flow. My second "VP" was an Admiralty radio mast at Northolt. It was autumn by then and cold at night, and the men had no greatcoats. Furthermore, it was a duty that ate up manpower.
Consider: a patrol of one man guarding for two hours with four hours off, requires a minimum of three men during daylight hours. When doubled at night, as patrols were, it needs six men, plus an NCO to move them round. I had to deploy four patrols at Staines and Northolt, which permanently occupied the whole of my platoon of 24, plus a corporal and a platoon sergeant.
After a week or so of this, the men got tired, but at least we were not doing anything else - and we got the King's shilling. Many of the Home Guard, who received no pay, had heavy civilian responsibilities on top of their guard duties.
My neighbour in our village of Aldington in Kent, Clive Boulden, was a farmer-a reserved occupation. "I joined the LDV early on," he says, "and our job was to guard the village telephone exchange. We shared a horse-drawn caravan, I seem to remember. I think I did one night in three. My day's work on the farm came on top of that."
After six months of guarding the telephone exchange, Clive was seconded to a special unit of the Home Guard and trained in the art of sabotage. Our village, looking across the Romney Marshes towards the English Channel, lies only a few miles from the stretch of coast on which the Germans were expected to land.
So Clive learned how to blast trees across a road and other ways of making life difficult for the Germans if they came. "When you look back on it," he said as we took an evening drink, together a few days ago, "you now that if the worst had come to the worst, you could never have survived."
Did you know the risks? "Yes, I suppose we did, but you had to do something. And we were all so much younger... "
Jimmy Perry, who with David Croft wrote the scripts for the much-loved television series Dad's Army, joined up for the same reason as did Boulden. Perry had joined the Home Guard at 15. Why? I asked him. "I couldn't wait. People in this country have no idea of the feeling there was at that time. You did it!"
He speaks movingly of the bank managers and others in reserved occupations, or those too old for active service-the model for Corporal Jones was a genuine veteran of Omdurman -who longed to get into the war. So he joined up just under the statutory age - "all young boys of 16 love to be armed to the teeth" - and stayed with the Home Guard for three and a half years. Eventually he was called up, on January 1, 1944, joined the Royal Artillery, went to the Far East and attained the rank of sergeant.
At the age of 15, though, he dreamed of holding a Thompson machine gun with a 50-round drum - but as things were he had to wait until September 1940 to get a rifle. "Two shiploads had just come in. By Christmas we were well armed." A year later, he got his machine gun, a water-cooled Vickers from the first World War.
His Dad's Army manages to convey the extraordinary spirit of those 1940 days, when thousands of men and boys without weapons rushed forward to fight the prospective German invaders. Our loss of arms and equipment at Dunkirk had been crippling. For a while it was difficult to find enough for our beleaguered Army, let alone the Dad's Army.
"The plight to which we were reduced... may be measured by the following incident," Churchill wrote. "I visited our beaches at St Margaret's Bay, near Dover. The Brigadier informed me that he had only three anti-tank guns in his brigade, covering four or five miles of this highly menaced coastline. He declared he had only six rounds of ammunition for each gun."
So in those long summer days of 1940, as we braced ourselves for invasion and the Home Guard scanned the skies for German parachutists, Dad's Army had to improvise its own weapons. Pikes and pitchforks, old shotguns and carving knives lashed onto poles were pressed into service.
There were strange encounters. The Daily Telegraph reported a Local Defence Volunteer in a lonely spot who cried "Halt!" to a man in a car. The driver halted. "Halt!" said the man again. "I have halted," said the motorist. "What do you want me to do next?" "I don't know," said the LDV "My orders are to say `Halt! three times and then shoot."
Though indelibly stamped by Dad's Army as comic characters, the Home Guard shared many of the soldier's hazards and all the risks of civilian life from bombing. Their gallantry earned two George Crosses, 13 George Medals, one OBE, 11 MBEs, six British Empire; medals and 58 commendations.
The Home Guard caught a singular mood in this country, when so many men were prepared to step forward to repel the invaders or die. But I have always seen more to it than that. In the closing months of 1940, a new resolve slowly ran through this country. We had more to do than defend ourselves against invasion: one day, we came to realise, we would have to fight our way back into Europe, for there was no other way to win the war.
FROM that point on, I saw the Home Guard as a gigantic shield, behind which we could safely leave our vulnerable points and other defensive duties and turn to training to attack.
The so-called phoney war was behind us. The Battle of Britain had held off the Luftwaffe and made us more secure. If German parachutists arrived, they would be accounted for by the Home Guard, by then organised into functioning military formations with proper weapons.
With the Home Guard on the defensive, our battalion moved to the moors of the North Riding. There, very slowly, an armoured division began to take shape that would eventually storm the beaches of Normandy.
Some of us were sent to battle schools, where we scaled cliffs, swam rivers in full equipment, and learned how to crawl under live machine gun fire. But it was a slow process: it was to be more than three years before the British Army crossed the Channel again.
So, in my book, Captain Mainwaring and his friends carry two battle honours. First, they constituted a crucial distinction between us and the Low Countries, where the invading Germans had encountered no civilian resistance. The swift fate of Holland stayed in all our minds.
Later, they relieved the Army of countless tasks in defence of this island, leaving us free to train for battle. Formed in a hurry while we were being pitched neck and crop out of Europe, Dad's Army gradually took over holding the fort and so helped to pave the way back.
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