Britain's Final Defence

Arming the Home Guard 1940-1944

Dale Clarke

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780750967310
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750969703
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Known affectionately as 'Dad's Army', the Home Guard was Britain's very serious attempt to protect our shores from invasion by Nazi Germany in the Second World War. In the 'Spitfire summer' of 1940, all that the 1 million unpaid, untrained part-timers of the Local Defence Volunteers (as the organisation was originally called) wanted was a service rifle for each man, but even that was too much for a country threatened by defeat to provide.

Britain's Final Defence is the first book to explore the efforts made to arm the home defence force between 1940 and 1944 and describe the full range of weaponry available for Britain's last stand against invading Axis forces.

1

THE THREAT

The Home Guard was born of a spontaneous reaction by the British public to the twin threats of invasion and subversion. In order to place the organisation, and its equipment and tactics, in context, it is necessary to explore those threats. During the First World War, large numbers of troops had been earmarked for Home Defence, and defences prepared along England’s East Coast. The bombardment of coastal towns by the German Imperial Navy in December 1914 served to further heighten the possibility of invasion, or large-scale raids or landings. These never happened, but bombardment continued, using German Army or navy airships and bomber aircraft. Although the subsequent civilian casualties failed to break the will of the British civilians at home and soldiers overseas, indiscriminate ‘terror bombing’ became established as a strategic option. The Spanish Civil War demonstrated what could be achieved using modern bombers against the civilian population – famously at Guernica – and aerial bombardment clearly represented a significant threat to the UK mainland in the event of another European war. The danger of public morale collapsing under the torrent of bombs from bombers that would ‘always get through’¹ seemed a very real one. The threat to the UK of invasion, however, diminished in the minds of both the public and military planners, who briefly examined the possibility in 1939, and discounted it. When Great Britain declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939, the obstacles presented by the Maginot Line, the French Army, and the Royal Navy, meant that an invasion by German troops was not regarded as a serious possibility. Just eight months later that view was completely reversed, following the German advances into Scandinavia on 9 April 1940, and on the Western Front a month later. From 10 May 1940, the day Churchill became prime minister, the British watched with growing horror and alarm as the apparently unstoppable German Army sliced through Western Europe. The invasion threat had suddenly become real, and if one single factor seized the public imagination, it was the German use of parachute troops, an innovation that seemed to render the Royal Navy, England’s traditional bulwark against invasion, impotent.

The possibility of airborne assault on the United Kingdom had been discussed since the first tentative ascents in hot air balloons, but in truth, air-landings had been the stuff of science fiction. That was entirely changed by the German assault on Norway; the effective use of parachute and air-landing troops there, and subsequently in the Low Countries, added instantaneous and ubiquitous invasion to the now well-established aerial threat. Importantly, the British public’s response to this new threat was not to flee, or demand that the government sue for peace, but rather to insist that the population be assisted to take up arms. This happened first unofficially as vigilante groups – the so-called ‘Parashots’ – spontaneously formed, and then, following a radio broadcast on the evening of 14 May 1940 by Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, as officially sanctioned ‘Local Defence Volunteers’. In his broadcast Eden outlined the new threat posed by German parachute troops, and asked for volunteers to report to their local police stations:

Since the war began the Government have received countless enquiries from all over the Kingdom from men of all ages who are for one reason or another not at present engaged in military service, and who wish to do something for the defence of the country.

Now is your opportunity. We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain who are British subjects, between the ages of 17 and 65, to come forward and offer their services in order to make assurance doubly sure. The name of the new force which is now to be raised will be the ‘Local Defence Volunteers’. This name, Local Defence Volunteers, describes its duties in three words.²

However, the German threat, which seemed so real and immediate with enemy troops just across the English Channel, became rather less tangible when subjected to close scrutiny. This is reflected in the first of the unofficial LDV handbooks, Rifle Training for War, published in July 1940. The editor struggles with the fact that, whilst in broad terms, the raison d’être of the LDV was obvious, its actual role was far from clear:

At the time of writing, the precise duties of the L.D.V. have not been defined. They can, however, be guessed at and whatever they have to do they will surely find a knowledge of the rifle useful. The author wishes the best of luck to all his readers. They have answered the appeal to ‘repel boarders’, whether they come by sea or air. (Robinson and King, 1940, p. xii)

As envisaged in Rifle Training for War, the operational role of the LDV appeared to consist of small numbers of concerned citizens stalking and killing equally small numbers of Nazi paratroopers, preferably before they landed:

For instance a Volunteer [sic] or a pair of volunteers may see two or three parachutes dropping. If the volunteer is alone and is a good shot and near enough to open fire – say within two or three hundred yards of the nearest – he may decide to attempt to get one or two, or perhaps all of them, before they land. If two volunteers are on the watch in such a situation one may go back to report whilst the better shot remains to watch and shoot if he gets the chance. (Robinson and King, 1940, p. 2)

It is not apparent what purpose it would serve the enemy to drop such small numbers of parachutists, but it is abundantly clear why downed RAF aircrew ran a serious risk of being shot by their own countrymen.

Parachutist hysteria, and a persistent willingness to credit the Germans with extraordinary military capacities, led contemporary authorities to some unfortunate overestimations of German capabilities. In dismissing these exaggerations historians can also dismiss the threat. MacKenzie, for instance, after explaining that the Under Secretary of State for War, Lord Croft, believed in the summer of 1940 that the Germans could land up to 10,000 paratroops, points out: ‘the German armed forces had only 7,000 fully trained paratroopers in the spring of 1940, and had suffered quite severe losses in men and transports during operations in Holland’ (MacKenzie, 1996, p. 23). Writing in Invasion 1940 Derek Robinson puts the German parachute force still lower, 4,500 men at the start of Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), the invasion of France and the Low Countries, many of whom became casualties, particularly in the airborne set piece ‘Battle for the Hague’ (Robinson, 2006, p. 116). Although the Fallschirmjäger captured by the Dutch were released when Holland capitulated on 14 May, Robinson makes the point that the losses of Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft in the campaign (213 out of 475) were crippling. Nevertheless, he estimates that in June 1940, Germany could have launched a lift of a maximum of 3,000 paratroops to England (Robinson, 2006, p. 112). Fleming, writing just sixteen years after the events he was describing, suggests that, pulling out all the stops, the parachute force might have amounted to between 6,000 and 7,000 Fallschirmjäger, with airlift capacity for a follow-on air-landing force of 15,000 – which as he points out, was smaller than the force that narrowly secured the rather thinly defended island of Crete in 1941 (Fleming, 1957, p. 70).³

Whether undertaken by 7,000 Fallschirmjäger or 3,000, this airborne assault could only be the overture for the main thrust, which would have to be an amphibious landing by conventional troops, bringing with them artillery and armour. Indeed, the German plan was to use parachute troops to secure the beachheads, much as the Allies would do in 1944. German plans for cross-Channel invasion have suffered from being measured against the Allied Normandy landings of June 1944 – but the Allies’ Operation OVERLORD was an entirely different undertaking, if only because of the scale and preparedness of the defences. German preparations in the summer of 1940, and their chances of success, need to be measured against previous joint operations. It is instructive to consider Churchill’s summation of the German assault on Norway:

Surprise, ruthlessness, and precision were the characteristics of the onslaught … Nowhere did the initial landing forces exceed two thousand men. Seven army divisions were employed … Three divisions were used in the assault phase, and four supported them through Oslo and Trondheim. Eight hundred operational aircraft and 250 to 300 transport planes were the salient and vital feature of the design. Within forty-eight hours all the main ports of Norway were in the German grip. (Churchill, 1954a, p. 473)

Even 3,000 fully trained, equipped and combat-tested paratroops were considerably more than any other combatant nation could field in the summer of 1940, and they were backed by the world’s most modern air force, undefeated in the recent campaigns in Poland and Western Europe. ‘Speed, ruthlessness and determination to advance at all costs’ might well have got German troops across the Channel before a shocked, demoralised and largely disarmed Britain could properly organise itself, and at that stage in the war it was impossible to believe that such a determined and capable enemy would let the opportunity slip through his fingers.

Periodical Notes on the German Army No. 28 (published by the War Office on 27 June 1940) explained: ‘From the time when the German Army overthrew the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, the offensive spirit has been stressed in all training. The result of this teaching, an offensive, violent both in speed and ruthlessness, has already been well illustrated in the campaigns in Poland and on the Western Front.’⁴ The British public was never quite able to accept that such an army would fail to take any sort of direct action against the UK mainland. Writing in 1945, John Brophy put the popular view of Germany’s missed opportunity:

The probability is that it lay beyond the German imagination to conceive the state of defencelessness into which Britain had been allowed to lapse by her former rulers. Had they guessed how few tanks, guns, machine-guns, supplied with what scanty stocks of ammunition, lay between them and the greatest conquest they could hope for, they would certainly have launched their invading fleets, and reckoned any losses at sea and in the air a small price to pay. (Brophy, 1945, p. 18)

In Invasion 1940, Derek Robinson seeks to draw attention to a key factor in examining the practicality, or otherwise, of a German invasion of England in 1940 – the presence of the vastly superior British navy. It was this, he insists, not the Battle of Britain, and the pilots of Fighter Command, which prevented a German invasion (Robinson, 2006, p. 5): ‘Historians themselves have perpetuated one mistaken belief about what happened in 1940: the myth that “The Few” alone saved Britain from invasion.’ Robinson’s argument about the neglected importance of the Royal Navy is well made, but it misses the point that perceptions count, and it was not the old threat of a surface invasion that really galvanised the British at the time, but the entirely new threat of airborne envelopment.⁵ The counters to this apparently ubiquitous threat were Fighter Command in the air, and the Local Defence Volunteers on the ground – and that is the contemporary context in which the establishment of LDV/Home Guard must be viewed.

Periodical Notes on the German Army, No. 30, published by War Office intelligence department MI14 in August 1940, contains two sections: ‘Lessons of the Battle of France’ and ‘Possible German Tactics in an Attack on Great Britain’. The British General Staff’s viewpoint at the time is made perfectly clear:

In operations in the United Kingdom the German forces will be inferior in numbers to our own, are likely to be less well supplied with tanks and heavier supporting weapons and will also be handicapped by long and uncertain lines of communications across a sea dominated by the British Navy, and, it may be hoped, after the first 48 hours, by a shortage of food, ammunition and petrol.⁶

MI14 thus allows Robinson his point, but then (proceeding in the anticipated order of arrival in the UK) goes straight on to discuss parachute troops. After a general description of organisation and training the notes continue:

These troops might be employed against this country:-

(a) To prepare the way for the landing of air-borne troops. For this purpose they would land near areas (in open flat ground, not necessarily aerodromes) su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Threat
• 2 The Carriage of Arms
• 3 The Rifle Crisis
• 4 Improvisation
• 5 Pistols and Automatic Weapons
• 6 Sten Guns, Petroleum Warfare and Grenades
• 7 Sub-Artillery
• 8 Artillery
• 9 Auxiliary Units
• 10 The Matter of Perspective
• Notes
• Bibliography