Dad's Army E-Book

David Carroll

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Immortalised by 'Dad's Army' - this is the true story of the men who manned the British frontline.

Das E-Book Dad's Army wird angeboten von The History Press und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
the home guard 1940 - 1944, Nazi invasion, the home front, untrained, part-time, volunteers, home defence force, local defence volunteers, ww2, wwii, world war 2, world war two, world war ii, second world war

Leseprobe

DAD’S ARMY

THE HOME GUARD 1940–1944

DAVID CARROLL

For Sam

First published in 2002

This edition first published in 2009

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© David Carroll, 2002, 2009, 2013

The right of David Carroll to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9989 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword

1

Alexander’s Rag-Time Army?

2

Look, Duck and Vanish

3

All the Bells in Paradise

4

Playing at Soldiers?

5

Arms and the Men

6

Shoot Them Down Yourself

7

Dad’s Diverse Army

8

Dad’s Daughter’s Army

9

Dad’s ‘Secret Army’

10

Last Orders

11

Time, Gentlemen, Please – A Postscript

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to everyone who shared their Home Guard memories with me, and whose personal recollections form such a vital part of this book.

Frank and Joan Shaw have been extremely generous in allowing me to draw without hindrance from their splendid volume We Remember the Home Guard. I am also indebted to the individual contributors to that book who have permitted me to quote from their respective accounts. Chris Blount of BBC Radio Cornwall has given me access to his 1991 oral documentary on the subject from which I have drawn on Rex Davey’s memories and Eric Higgs’s account of the events surrounding 7 September 1940. Bill Grifïin, of the Choughs Association at Newquay, supplied me with a great deal of information and literature relating to the Home Guard in his part of the world, including Captain W.A. Owen’s vivid eye-witness account of the London Stand Down parade (contained in the Choughs Annual Register of 1944). I am indebted to the many – and mainly unknown – authors of various Home Guard Battalion histories, a large number of which were printed and circulated privately. They all proved invaluable to me in my research. My chapter about Britain’s ‘Secret Army’ would not have been possible without the help of David Lampe’s definitive account of the subject, The Last Ditch, from which source much of the background information was drawn. Equally vital was the personal memoir written by Frederick J. Simpson of Dorset, which describes in detail his experiences as a member of Auxiliary Units. I am most grateful to him for allowing me to quote from it at such length. Bombers & Mash:The Domestic Front 1939–1945 by Raynes Minns yielded valuable background information for my chapter about women in the Home Guard.

I should like to thank the following for the use of copyright material:

The Phoney War (Michael Joseph, London, 1961), E.S. Turner and reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.; The Last Ditch (1968), David Lampe and Cassell plc; From Dusk Till Dawn (1945), A.G. Street, Cassell plc and Blandford Press; Please You Draw Near (1969), Ernest Raymond and Cassell plc; The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume Two: My Country Right or Left (1968), A.M. Heath & Co. Ltd. on behalf of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.; The Home Guard of Britain by Charles Graves (Hutchinson 1943), reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd.; The Real Dad’s Army by Norman Longmate (Hutchinson 1974), David Bolt Associates; four lines from ‘Watching Post’ from the Complete Poems of C. Day Lewis (Sinclair-Stevenson 1992), the Estate of C. Day Lewis; Civilians at War: Journals 1938–1946 (1984), George Beardmore and John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.; Hare Joins the Home Guard (Wm. Collins 1941), the Trustees of the Alison Uttley Literary Property Trust; Memoirs of the Forties by Julian Maclaren-Ross (Sphere Books Ltd. edn., MacDonald & Co. 1991), the late Alan Ross; Further Particulars (1987), C.H. Rolph, Oxford University Press and David Higham Associates; extracts from messages and broadcasts by King George VI, the Registrar of the Royal Archives; various letters, documents and publications issued by the War Office, extracts from Sir Edward Grigg’s speech to the House of Commons and Sir Winston Churchill’s third anniversary message to the Home Guard, the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. The originals of the documents from which many of the contemporary extracts in this book are taken are held in the Public Record Office. I have made every effort to contact all copyright holders. Any omissions are entirely unintentional, and I would be pleased to rectify them (upon notification) in any subsequent edition of this work.

Lastly, my greatest thanks go to Jonathan Falconer at Sutton Publishing for guiding me through this project, Bernadette Walsh for her support and Bill Pertwee for generously contributing a Foreword.

FOREWORD

Memories of the actual Local Defence Volunteers, later the Home Guard, came flooding back to me during the day of the first rehearsal of television’s Dad’s Army (and my role as Chief Air Raid Warden Hodges).

In June 1940, my mother and I were staying with my aunt and uncle at Belvedere in Kent. On the night of Anthony Eden’s broadcast asking for volunteers to help fight a possible German invasion force, my uncle went straight down to the local police station to enlist. Uncle Bill Tobin was a strapping great Irishman of 6 ft 3 in who had been through the First World War; in fact he was a boy bugler in the Boer War. In one encounter with the Germans during the First World War he had single-handedly silenced an enemy machine-gun crew by, believe it or not, strangling them! So you can see he was slightly eccentric and pretty courageous. Just the sort of man Anthony Eden hoped would answer his call. On the night in question Uncle Bill said to the police sergeant on duty at the station, ‘I’m Captain Tobin (his rank in the First World War) and I’m taking command of the local volunteers’. Apparently, so we heard afterwards, the police sergeant hadn’t listened to Eden’s broadcast and thought that here was some lunatic playing games. He proceeded to try and calm my uncle. Rather like the great radio comedian of the day, Robb Wilton, he started shuffling some papers about on his desk and licking his pencil. My uncle told him he’d be back when he had pulled himself together. He then went home and, using his obvious strength, started taking the large furniture – table, chairs, sideboard, bookcases, etc. – out of the house and laying it across the road like a barricade. My aunt, who was Brazilian like my mother, just laughed at anything her husband did, and filling up the road with her furniture was just another one of his eccentric acts. My uncle’s final remark on the matter seemed even more eccentric. ‘Well, they won’t get through tonight.’ You can imagine my astonishment when I first read Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s script for the Columbia feature film of Dad’s Army that we did in the early 1970s. Here was Captain Mainwaring assembling a roadblock of household furniture at Walmington-on-Sea. When I told the writers about my uncle’s antics they too were astonished, as they had seriously thought of cutting out the furniture scene from the script because it seemed just too ridiculous. Fact certainly is stranger than fiction as they say.

This was only one of the incidents I remember from those strange days of 1940. Soon after the episode concerning my uncle, my mother and I moved into a bungalow on Dartford Heath, also in Kent. There, we were not only a mile or so from a huge gathering of anti-aircraft guns based on the heath but we were also directly under, or so it seemed, the majority of air battles being fought out in the summer skies between the fighters and bombers of the Luftwaffe and our own Spitfires and Hurricanes. During these battles there were several instances that concerned the Home Guard. I remember a Heinkel bomber coming over very low one afternoon as I was walking up the road from the bus-stop after my college studies. The plane seemed to be dropping all sorts of things on to the surrounding area to lighten its load on its way back to Germany. In fact, it was so low I could see the front gunner in his turret. I dived into a ditch soiling my blazer in the process. When I got home I told my mother what had happened. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Mr Stewart next door is in the Home Guard. He’ll sort it out.’ That remark typified what nearly everyone thought about the Home Guard. They were the guardians of the civilian population, and this feeling had developed very quickly. The Home Guard, of course, were among us all every day of the week because most of them worked in jobs and services that were a part of our everyday lives.

One morning, on looking into the field adjoining our bungalow, a German airman could be seen floating to earth on his parachute. He was neatly folding his ’chute when suddenly two Home Guardsmen cycling along the road threw down their bikes, scrambled through the hedge and, waving some sort of implement, started dancing round him while shouting and using threatening gestures. I saw the German take off his sleeveless flying jacket and hand it to one of the Guards, displaying his full pilot’s tunic, while the Home Guardsmen continued dancing around him. I went out into the garden just as a policeman arrived on the scene. He took out his notebook and quite obviously asked the Guards for their names. Then he ushered them to one side and started talking to the pilot, who kept silent and looked completely bewildered. The policeman and Home Guardsmen then marched him off towards the main gate of the field, with the policeman still writing in his notebook. My immature imagination began to wonder if the policeman was asking him where he came from and what was he doing in the field at 11.02 on a Saturday morning? Well, I thought, Robb Wilton would have asked those kinds of questions in his radio comedy monologues. My mother had apparently been watching this event from the bungalow. When I got in she said, ‘You shouldn’t interfere. It’s nothing to do with you and, anyway, he’s some mother’s son.’ A strange observation in wartime but I suppose she was right. (The saying very much came back to us in 1941 when my brother was killed in the Air Force.)

There is absolutely no doubt at all that if the Germans had invaded our island the Home Guard would have given their lives in what would have been a courageous and brave struggle against huge odds which it would have been nigh-on impossible to overcome. They were the guardians of the people and proud of the duty they had been asked to fulfil. The Captain Mainwarings and Corporal Joneses were in evidence in almost every Home Guard platoon in the country. The Sergeant Wilsons would probably have treated matters slightly more casually, and perhaps used that well-known phrase of his when annoyed with someone, ‘Why don’t you just clear off?’

This book really tells it all in great detail, and David Carroll certainly deserves a pat on the back for reminding us of that momentous period in our history, and for recalling those who were prepared to give everything of themselves in order to protect their civilian brothers and sisters who slept more peacefully in their beds because of the presence of the Home Guard.

CHAPTER 1

ALEXANDER’S RAG-TIME ARMY?

There is an affecting little song which has proved to be extremely popular in recent years and whose laconic opening line proclaims that ‘. . . it started with a kiss’. Well, needless to say, the Home Guard did not begin in that way at all, although its origins were arguably almost as spontaneous; barely more than a brief flurry of hastily-convened meetings held at the War Office during that warm, unique and – for anyone who lived through it – never to be forgotten spring of 1940. It was a time, of course, when Britain lay vulnerable, seemingly defenceless and dauntingly ripe for the taking by Hitler’s massive War Machine. By this time, after all, the German army had already occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia; Poland, Holland and Belgium had suffered the same fate and, with the imminent surrender of France, the narrow English Channel would be all that separated Britain from the unthinkable prospect of Nazi domination.