South London
First screened 10 February 2008

The Home Guard

They don't like it up 'em!
Corporal Jones and his catch phrase epitomises the common image of the Home Guard, but what was it really like?

The Home Guard: The last line of defence
Dad's Army, a cult comedy TV show in the 1960s and 1970s (see www.dadsarmy.co.uk), created a laughable image of the British Home Guard, but the reality was quite different – despite the best efforts of 'Privates' Phil Harding and Matt Williams, who were 'conscripted' into a recreated Home Guard for the Shooters Hill programme.

The outbreak of war in 1939 witnessed a storm that rapidly encompassed the whole of Europe and, in turn, the world. Within months nations fell to the apparently unstoppable German war machine. On the home front civilians watched newsreels every week showing the new German Blitzkrieg tactics sweeping through Poland, Holland, Belgium and France. The disaster for the British Army at Dunkirk in 1940 saw German troops poised to invade British soil. The situation couldn't have been more threatening. People slept at night literally lying in fear of enemy paratroopers landing in their back gardens. It was far from a funny situation.

In 1940 Winston Churchill set about changing the Local Defence Volunteers, which had been hurriedly established, into the Home Guard. In the early days the Home Guard were often poorly equipped and their members were mainly older men and boys, but those older men often came with real combat experience gained during the First World War. They may not have been as tough as freshly trained Royal Marine commandoes, and there are lots of old photographs of men marching up and down with broomsticks (before they were issued with rifles) but in truth they represented a last-line fighting force that could pack a punch.

There have been many accounts of the German 'Volkssturm' or 'peoples' Militia' (an equivalent similar to the British Home Guard) fighting extremely hard during the fall of Germany. It would have been no different if the Home Guard had been called on to fight on home soil against an invader. Split into regional commands, the Home Guard units were co-ordinated and managed within a national scheme for defence, designed to cope with numerous hypothetical invasion scenarios. If the Germans had fallen from the sky and hit our beaches directly following Dunkirk then Britain would certainly have been in trouble, but as the months moved on the Home Guard developed into a dependable force and one that was far removed from good old Captain Mainwaring and his bunch of misfits as depicted in Dad's Army.

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