HOME GUARD
Derek Barnard has provided the
following light-hearted look at the Home Guard with a promise of more to
come.
I was recently given a book which
had been published in 1945 as a tribute to the men who, during the Second
World War, served in the Home Guard. Never before had an unpaid army of two
million men stood to arms for four and a half years, guarding every corner of
the country; each man having to do his soldiering after long, hard working
hours and other wartime duties. It was an army which, in the author's words
'was never called on to fight but helped to win one of the most decisive
battles of world history'.
Because of the Home Guard,
Britain was able to release men to all the other theatres of war and to
initially train young men who went on to join the regular army when old
enough. It came into being as the Local Defence Volunteers in May 1940 in an
attempt to combat the new mobile method of warfare that the Germans had
introduced. They were there; they were told, to fight the parachutists and
Fifth Columnists of Hitler's war strategy.
In the early days, weapons were
scarce, just a few shotguns, old rifles and 'Molotov Cocktails'; there were
not even enough armbands to wear. Over half of the one million who enrolled on
the first six weeks were ex-servicemen of the First War, all over forty years
old. By the late summer of 1940 America had sent 800,000 rifles and by the end
of 1941 the arrival of the cheap, unattractive but effective British sten-gun
made the, by then trained soldiers, a force to be reckoned with.
Enclosed in the book was a booklet, costing 1s/6d,
called 'Home Guard Humour'. We are used to laughing at this force because they
laughed at themselves. Every member had tales to tell of inefficiency and
mistakes - these are the funny stories and my father told a few. He was based
at Beacon Hill above Upnor where they had a rocket launcher which fired
sixteen rockets. It was surrounded by a cinder track and a chestnut fence.
Having on numerous occasions fallen-in ready to fire and been stood down, the
night it was actually fired was a shock to them all as the back blast cleared
the cinders and soldiers alike. When they next paraded the whole launcher had
been removed. They had caused more damage to Faversham than to enemy aircraft.
