In Search of the Real Dad's Army

The Home Guard and the Defence of the United Kingdom, 1940–1944

Stephen M. Cullen

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781848842694
• eBook ISBN:
  9781844683864
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"A fascinating examination of one of the best-known British forces of the Second World War . . . An efficient and increasingly professional military unit." —History of War
 
What was the Home Guard? Who were the men and women who served in it? And what can be said of their real role and significance once the popular myths have been stripped away?
 
Despite the fame of the Home Guard—of Dad's Army—the true story of this wartime organization tends to be neglected. The myths obscure the reality. Stephen Cullen's aim in this thoroughgoing new study is to cut through the misunderstandings in order to reassess the Home Guard and its contribution to Britain's war effort—and to deepen our understanding of the men and women who were members of it.
 
He sets the Home Guard in the long historical context of domestic defense planning, then focuses on the preparations made before the outbreak of the Second World War. In detail he traces the changing role of the Home Guard during its wartime existence as it adapted to meet the multitude of challenges it faced—from civil defense and intelligence gathering to training for guerrilla warfare.
 
"This enjoyable and well-illustrated book covers the 'rags to riches' story of the Home Guard from the 1940 volunteer in civilian clothing, armed with a keepsake from an earlier war, to the fully trained and equipped part-time soldier." —The Armourer
 
"An interesting and accurate account of a force that was in fact a well drilled, well organised and by wars end, a very professional fighting unit by the time of its stand down in 1944." —WW2 Connection

Part I

Background

Chapter 1

Defending these Shores

The Shield Wall

One August morning in the year 991, an English army, under Ealdorman Byrthnoth, faced a large Viking raiding force on the causeway that links Northey Island in Essex to the mainland and the town of Maldon. The subsequent battle, which saw the defeat of the English army and the death of Byrthnoth, as well as the withdrawal of the invaders, not only marked the first English defeat of the Second Viking Age, but also gave English literature one of its great early poems – The Battle of Maldon.¹ It is this poem, probably written very soon after the event, which tells us:

There against the fierce ones stood ready
Byrhtnoth with his men. He commanded that with the shields
They form the shield wall, and that the company hold out
Firm against the fiends. Then the fight was near.²

Byrthnoth’s army which formed the shield wall, the bordweall, was made up of his aristocratic warrior comitatus drawn from a professional military elite, but also a host of other Englishmen – the fyrd. The fyrd was a part-time force, drawn from the towns and countryside, and designed to repel invaders and raiders. The parallels between the situation in Essex in 991 and Essex in 1941 are clear. In both years, a small professional army, supported by a part-time force of local men, faced invaders from the sea. There were, in fact, more than the obvious similarities, for, as one historian of early English warfare has argued, ‘the Anglo-Saxon’s preferred tactic for dealing with a raiding force […] was to pin it between a land and a naval force’.³ Nine centuries later, in a similar fashion, the Royal Navy was central to the defence of not only England, but also the United Kingdom. For example, in a War Cabinet discussion of 18 July 1940, Winston Churchill drew attention to the difficulties that would be faced by any German invasion force, and predicted that it would be trapped between British coastal craft, destroyer flotillas and the defenders on the beaches, both regular forces and the new Local Defence Volunteers, soon to be known as the Home Guard.⁴ Some things, clearly, had changed in the intervening centuries. The navy that Churchill put so much hope in during the summer of 1940 was supported by a military arm, the Royal Air Force, undreamed of by the Anglo-Saxons. Nonetheless, there were constants – invasion, the sea, and the volunteer or amateur tradition of defending the country’s shores, whether embodied in the fyrd of the tenth century, or the Home Guard of the twentieth century.

The Home Guard is of perennial interest, as is evidenced by the continued publication of local histories of the force. In recent years there have been some notable local and regional histories, such as David Orr’s excellent history of the Home Guard in Northern Ireland, and Austin Ruddy’s detailed account of the force in Leicestershire and Rutland.⁵ The popularity of local studies is of interest because it reflects the very local experience of Home Guard service. The force was, literally, a territorial force, designed to protect ‘hearth and home’, or workplace, or school. Members of the Home Guard paraded and trained in their own localities. Their great strength was their local knowledge; their key role, as it developed in 1940–41, was to provide area defence. Hence, the force is the natural focus for local, and regional, historians. However, there is also a wider, national, UK, story to be told. A number of contemporary accounts of the force were written, and were widely bought, if their frequent appearances in second-hand bookshops are anything to go by. In particular, Charles Graves’ valuable, The Home Guard of Britain (1943), John Brophy’s beautifully illustrated and elegiac, Britain’s Home Guard (1945), and John Radnor’s history of the military amateur in Britain, It All Happened Before (1945)⁶ all attempted the bigger picture. But it was not until 1995 that S P MacKenzie published ‘a military and political history’ of the Home Guard, one that is still a leading general history of the force.⁷ It is the intention of the current history, In Search of the Real Dad’s Army; the Home Guard and the Defence of the United Kingdom, to provide an overview of the force during the Second World War. This history will attempt to plug some of the gaps that are apparent, for example, in MacKenzie’s The Home Guard. For instance, MacKenzie made little note of some of the unique aspects of the Ulster Home Guard, while no previous work covers the force on the Isle of Man, which lay in a strategically important position in the ‘Western Approaches’ to Britain. Both of these areas are covered here. In addition, a variety of sources, held by The National Archives, the Imperial War Museum, and the National Army Museum, are used, providing both a ‘top-down’ view of the Home Guard, as seen at War Cabinet level, as well as a ‘bottom-up’ perspective, with reminiscences of individual Home Guards, and contemporary personal records from the period. Finally, it has been possible to draw on the emerging academic and archaeological interest in the Home Guard to cover new insights into such vital topics as the Fifth Column, and the Home Guard and the historical landscape in the UK. The intention of this opening chapter is to provide an account of the historical background to the Home Guard in the modern period, showing how the force had a strong volunteer, amateur military tradition behind it. This was a heritage that helped propel the volunteers to the defence of the country, when government preparations for war had overlooked the probable need to defend these shores.

‘They never charged anything but their glasses’⁸

In the modern period, Britain has periodically faced the possibility of large scale raids or invasion, and the volunteer tradition has waxed and waned with changing perceptions of the threat. The parallels between earlier volunteer movements and that of the Home Guard are often striking, and frequently highlight unreadiness on the part of government contrasted with popular demands for home defence to be supported by part-time, unpaid volunteers. In addition, many volunteers found that they were, at times, the butt of much popular humour aimed at their part-time and amateur status, but, occasionally, they discovered that the population’s hope of salvation rested upon them. This was the case for the various volunteer forces that were, in part, responsible for the defence of Britain during the long French Wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

At the start of the wars with France, the territorial defence of Britain was supposed, in part, to be in the hands of the militia, which the Militia Acts of 1782–3 had, in theory, revived and put on a firmer footing. However, this was far from being the case, and this element of the country’s defence was of limited value. In consequence, volunteers began to form Associations to help defend the country from external threat, and from those Britons who were deemed to be sympathetic to the French Revolution. The first such Association was formed in March 1794 for the Parish of St George’s, Hanover Square in west London.⁹ Within a few weeks, the government passed a new Act, empowering counties and cities to raise volunteers for local, and, if necessary, national defence. The spontaneous action of the St George’s Associators in 1794, had, as similar spontaneous action would in May 1940, provided the spur to government action designed to harness the enthusiasm of those who wished to defend the country at a time of crisis. And, in February 1797, it was Welsh Volunteers who played a famous role in defeating the French landings at Fishguard.

The French revolutionary government intended to mount simultaneous attacks on Ireland and Wales in December 1797, with the intention, at least, of distracting the British government from operations overseas. In addition, the French harboured hopes that sympathisers for the Revolutionary cause would aid French forces. In Ireland there was some hope of this, and the miscarried and ill-fated attempt at Bantry Bay, involved the famous Irish nationalist, Wolfe Tone, who hoped for a successful Irish rising against the British. The second prong of the French attack was aimed at mounting a large scale raid into south Wales, with the aim of destroying the docks in Bristol, before marching up the Welsh-English border and attacking Chester, then Liverpool. This large scale raid was led by an American named William Tate, who had fought against Britain and the Loyalists in the American Revolution, along with strongly Jacobin French officers who believed that Welshmen and women would rally to their political cause. Their army was made up of around 1,400 men released from French prisons and galleys. The force landed at Fishguard on 22 February 1797, and found themselves faced largely by Welsh volunteers, in particular, the Pembroke Fencibles, the Fishguard Fencibles, and local Yeomanry.¹⁰ The Fishguard landing was a confused, haphazard, and poorly executed affair, and neither the American Colonel Tate, nor the ex-prisoner army he led, appeared to be over enthusiastic invaders. In addition, there was no Revolutionary uprising by Welshmen or women. In fact, the women of Fishguard were to the fore in defending their homes, lining a headland, wearing red clothing, to give the French the impression of British troops ashore. Although there was no set piece battle, lives were lost, and the French surrendered. The Welsh volunteers, despite confused leadership, had defeated what was, potentially, a serious raid, and dealt French prestige a blow. For the British government, the whole affair provided evidence of the effectiveness of domestic defence arrangements, and the value of the volunteers:

The invasion had provided a massive test, under realistic conditions, of Pitt’s home defence measures and the results were highly reassuring. There had been an effective ‘closing up’ of forces from as far away as Hereford and Gloucester, and some impressive performances by individual units. The New Romney Fencible Cavalry covered 61 miles from Worcester to Brecon in 5 hours, the Brecon Volunteers marched 20 miles to Llandovery in four, double the official rate of three miles in an hour and a quarter. The speed of communications, too, exceeded expectation.¹¹

For the volunteers, the whole affair was an enormous boost to their morale and standing with the general public, and ‘recruits poured in to the Volunteer forces, so often mocked in the past’.¹²

If the threat from France was real in the late eighteenth century, it was fear of France that led to the next outpouring of patriotic defence enthusiasm, and the emergence of the famous Rifle Volunteer Movement. By the 1840s, there was concern in some military and political quarters that Britain was open to invasion as a result of changing naval technology, the small size of the Regular Army and its extensive imperial commitments, and, from December 1851, the fact that France was under the modernising dictatorship of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III. In addition, the British public seemed to be ‘peculiarly susceptible to the phenomena of the invasion panic’.¹³ This susceptibility was exploited by the press, with newspapers such as the Morning Star, Daily News, Examiner, and, above all, The Times, enthusiastically stoking fears that Britain was open to a rapid crossing of the Channel by French forces possessing temporary superiority in those narrow seas, and thereby able to land an army that would quickly overwhelm the defending British forces. Further, as would be the case later in the century, invasion fiction also played on fears of rampaging foreign soldiers destroying Britain and its place in the world. The fact that in 1850, for example, there were only some 37,000 regular soldiers stationed in Britain, whereas the French could call on 400,000 regulars and two million Garde Nationale,¹⁴ seemed to lend credence to these fears. Added to this was the knowledge that, unlike many of Europe’s main cities, London at that time was unprotected by fixed fortifications. This was the background to the invasion panics of 1846–47 and 1851–52. In both periods, there were calls for the creation of new volunteer forces that would defend the British homeland; calls that neither governments nor the military were keen to hear. However, the final invasion panic of the period was enhanced by new factors that did, finally, lead to the emergence of the great volunteer movement that would last for some fifty years.

In January 1857, Napoleon III appointed Dupuy de Lôme as the director of construction for the French navy. De Lôme was a renowned naval innovator, and, following the success of France’s armoured floating batteries in reducing the Russian fort of Kinburn at the mouth of the rivers Bug and Dnieper during the Crimean War, began a programme to create the first ironclad fleet. The initial French ironclad in the programme, La Gloire, was an armoured frigate, laid down at Toulon in March 1858. Its very design made it clear that this ship was not a blue water warship, for ‘its gunports were barely six feet above the waterline. This feature, and bunkers capable of carrying just 700 tons of coal, reflected the fact that the ship was designed not for traditional frigate duties but for line-of-battle service in European waters’.¹⁵ This was taken, not unreasonably, to represent a threat to Britain in its home waters. Further, an earlier attempt on Napoleon III’s life, by the Italian liberal nationalist, Felice Orsini, on 14 January 1858, in which eight people were killed and 142 were injured, led to popular outrage in France when it became clear that Orsini’s bombs had been made in Britain, where the plot was also hatched by the Italians. The French military, in particular, was incensed by the attack on Napoleon III, and by Britain’s harbouring of the terrorist and would-be assassin. The heightening of tension, and the threat posed by new naval technology, fed what became known as the ‘Third Panic’ in Britain, and finally brought success to the demands of the press and supporters of the volunteer cause.

The popular demands for the raising of volunteer corps for home defence were met on 12 May 1859, when the government authorised Lords Lieutenant to raise such units. Both government and the military were still largely unenthusiastic. Despite the government’s reservations, ‘the Volunteers had the over-riding advantage of satisfying public opinion at absolutely no cost to the Government’.¹⁶ The corps were supported financially by public donation and subscription, with Volunteers providing their own uniforms and equipment. The details of service, training, and the actual role of the Volunteers were, at first, unclear, but enthusiasm for the force was undoubted. Even before the official founding of the Volunteers, some 60,000 men had come forward. Three weeks after the official announcement, there were 134,000 Volunteers;¹⁷ and the movement was no flash in the pan. By 1863, for example, the Volunteers numbered 200,000 men,¹⁸ and the typically grey-clad Volunteers became a social and military fixture of the Victorian age. In addition to providing rifle corps, the Volunteers also provided cavalry and artillery units, manned coastal artillery, and were later quick to take to new technological innovations like the bicycle and automatic weapons such as the Gatling gun and the Nordenfelt machine gun. In tactical terms, the Volunteers were envisaged, at the outset, as light troops, benefitting, as the Home Guard was expected to eighty years later, from local knowledge, and enthusiasm to ‘hang with the most telling effect upon the flanks and communications of a hostile Army’.¹⁹

The Volunteer movement formed a popular and long-lived element in the Home Defence landscape of Britain. Further, Volunteers eventually saw action, but in Empire defence during the Boer War of 1899–1901, when Volunteer companies were raised for service in South Africa. This would prove to be the swansong of the movement, as the hard-earned lessons of the South African conflict led, eventually, to the military reforms of the Liberal government elected in 1906. The subsequent ‘Haldane reforms’ saw the passing of the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act, 1907, that brought into being the Territorial Force, which absorbed the Volunteers and the Yeomanry. This appeared to mark a new phase in the military history of the country:

The birth of the Territorial Force appeared to mark the demise of the amateur tradition. Instead of spontaneously generated local corps of men, quite willing to accept government aid when needed but nevertheless seeing themselves as essentially independent entities, there was from 1908 onward to be (in theory at least) a truly national and professionally administered part-time reserve force. The days of the volunteer corps, a more or less satisfactory method of local defence in time of emergency up to the mid-nineteenth century but now anachronistic, seemed over for good.²⁰

However, the long history of volunteer home defence, combined with intense, and often exaggerated, public fears of invasion and occupation that were not shared by government, kept the idea of popular mobilisation for defensive purposes alive.

One of the main factors that underpinned the volunteer movement was the influence of the press and fiction in maintaining the fear that Britain was open to sudden invasion. This was certainly a key factor in the ‘Three Panics’ over the intentions of Napoleon III and the French military. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this factor was, if anything, of even greater potency. Educational reforms in the late nineteenth century, largely driven by government fears that the United Kingdom was falling behind its industrial rivals in new areas of manufacturing like the chemical and electrical industries, created a newly literate population. The first of these reforms was the Education Act of 1870, which began the process of ensuring that a basic education was the norm for all Britons. This helped create a vast new market for newspapers, magazines, and popular fiction–and ‘invasion fiction’ had a nota...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Notes
• Sources
• Index