Who do you think you are kidding, Mr. Hitler?
If you think we’re on the run?
We are the boys who will stop your little game,
We are the boys who will make you think again!
‘Cause who do you think you are kidding Mr. Hitler?
If you think old England’s done?
Mr. Brown goes off to town on the 8:21,
But he comes home each evenin’ and he’s ready with his gun!
So watch out Mr Hitler, you have met your match in us,
If you think you can crush us,
We’re afraid you’ve missed the bus
‘Cause who do you think you are kidding Mr. Hitler?
If you think we’re on the run,
We are the boys who will stop your little game,
We are the boys who will make you think again,
‘Cause who do you think are kidding Mr. Hitler?
If you think old England’s done!
Behold the original 1940s theme-song of the British Home Guard!
Okay, no, not really.
‘Who Do You Think You are Kidding Mr. Hitler‘ was the theme-song to the popular 1970s TV show “Dad’s Army”, that chronicled the activities of a fictional Home Guard unit during the Second World War. The song was actually written in 1968 and sung by famous music-hall veteran Bud Flanagan. Flanagan came out of retirement to record the theme-song as a special favour to the show’s creators, who were avid fans. They wanted the show’s theme-song to be sung by a real wartime singer (which Flanagan was), and they got lucky when he agreed. Really lucky! Flanagan died less than a year later!
“Dad’s Army” was one of the great television comedies of the 70s. But it’s scary to think that fiction mirrored reality in so many ways! A lot of the jokes in the show (weapons-shortages, no uniforms, poor training, old codgers thinking they could fight off the Luftwaffe) were actually real problems faced by the real Home Guard back in the 1940s! This is the true story of Britain’s citizen army – The Home Guard.
Local Defence Volunteers
With the fall of France, the British were terrified that the Germans might turn their sights on England and attempt to invade them sometime in 1940 or 1941. Fearing that they might not have enough fulltime soldiers to defend the British Isles, on the 14th of May, 1940, the British Government established the Local Defence Volunteers, a ‘citizen army’ who could fight off the Germans and secure the Isles until soldiers from other parts of the Empire could arrive to provide backup.
The L.D.V was expected to be made up of about 150,000 carefully-chosen men who would be Britain’s first line of defence against a German invasion. Within 24 hours of the original radio broadcast made by Anthony Eden, 250,000 men had signed up! To give you an idea of how many that is, the entire British Army was 250,000 men before the war started! By 1943, the Local Defence Volunteers numbered nearly two million (1.8 mil, precisely), and never fell below 1,000,000 for the rest of the war.
Dad’s Army – The Home Guard
The L.D.V. was renamed the “Home Guard” by order of Winston Churchill in August of 1940. It sounded better and was easier to write down. This proud fighting force of patriotic British men would stave off impending doom from a Nazi invasion of their treasured homeland!…or not. We’ll never know, because Britain was never invaded, but the British Government and Army were determined to be ready for any eventuality.
Signing up for Duty
The Home Guard officially recruited men and boys ranging from 17-65 years in age. Recruits were men who were too young to fight in the regular army, too old to fight in the regular army, who were excused from regular combat due to medical issues or who were excused from enlistment due to being in a ‘reserved occupation’ (having a job that was essential to the war-effort…like baking bread…and no, I’m not kidding. Bakers were exempt from joining the army).
In the flurry of activity to join the newly formed Home Guard, the rules were only loosely followed. Children as young as fifteen and sixteen joined the Home Guard and grown men as old as seventy joined up! The oldest guardsman was Alexander Taylor. He first bore arms for king and country back during the Mahdist War of 1881! When he signed up for the Home Guard, he was well over eighty years old!
Approximately 40% of the Home Guard were made up of former soldiers, most of them veterans of the Great War of 1914 (ahem, the First World War to you and me).
Because the majority of the guardsmen were of advanced age, the Home Guard was given the popular nickname: “Dad’s Army”.
Training the Guard
Training for the Home Guard was rudimentary. Because such a sizeable number of the men (as well as their commanding officers), were all veterans of former wars (the Great War, the Boer War, the Second Afghan War of the 1880s and so-on), they felt that they didn’t need any training. They were soldiers already! Or they were…once upon a time…and they were ready to do it again!
As noble and patriotic and romantic and well-meaning as all these sentiments were, they all overlooked the fact that many of these men fought back in the days of cannons, horse-cavalry charges, bayonets and single-shot rifles! Their training didn’t prepare them for a modern, 20th century war! So like it or not, they all had to be trained from the ground up…all over again. Some officers were allowed to keep the ranks that they’d earned during previous conflicts, however.
Arming the Guards! (The Bullet is not for firing!)
It’s just as well for the people of Britain that their homeland was never invaded. The Home Guard had nothing to fight with!
See, during the war, all the best weapons were required by the regular army. They got all the up-to-date machine-guns, mortars, knives, daggers, small-arms and rifles. The Home Guard had to make-do with whatever crap they could find that was left over! The wartime mantra of “Make do and Mend” was never more true!
The Home Guard was woefully under-equipped. They didn’t even have proper uniforms until halfway through the war! Just armbands that they wore on their sleeves. And weapons…oh boy.
To give you an idea of how ill-equipped the guardsmen were, they used to do rifle-drills with almost anything BUT a rifle. They used billiard-cues, broomsticks, walking-sticks, crutches, umbrellas, cricket-bats, pitchforks, hoes…anything!
What firearms they could find were usually what they brought from home. Their revolvers, their heirloom duelling-pistols, Uncle Jack’s hunting-rifle, double-barreled sawn-off shotguns, break-open long-barrel shotguns, handguns…they didn’t have a single rifle between them!
The shortage of arms for the Home Guard was so severe that they even broke into museums to find them! Cannons, muskets, blunderbusses, musketoons…even old cavalry swords! Everything was requisitioned by the Home Guard for the defence of the realm. And I don’t mean that they knocked on a museum door, spoke the curator, got him to sign a piece of paper and then helped themselves to the guns…I mean they literally broke in! Smashing glass display-cases and making off with the guns!
Winston Churchill recognised this shortage of firearms and he wrote a letter to the War Office in June of 1941 which read:
“Every man must have a weapon of some kind, be it only a mace or a pike!“
You can guess what happened next.
What Churchill REALLY meant was that the Home Guard should be equipped with whatever weapons were available and that every effort should be made to give them the best firearms that the British Army could spare!
Unfortunately for Churchill, the War Office took his message a little too literally. In 1942, they finally finished producing 250,000 pikes.
Yes.
Pikes.
Long, pointy sticks that go stabby-poke.
Exactly what Churchill said when the War Office told him that his order of pikes was ready for dispersement, isn’t recorded. But it was probably an impressive array of profanities.
Needless to say, the ludicrous pikes were never used. Most of them were never even unpacked and removed from storage! The guardsmen refused to use them, anyway.
Eventually, the Home Guard did get proper rifles. They were the old Lee-Enfield rifles used during the Great War. This was probably beneficial to a certain extent. Nearly half the guardsmen were Great War veterans and would’ve been familiar with the rifles. The only problem was, these rifles were now over twenty years old!
Americans and Canadians tried to help out their British friends. They collected and donated all their old rifles that they didn’t use anymore, and sent them to England. So at least the Home Guard had proper rifles now…even if they were outdated vintage ones!
While they might have had rifles (and might have also had ammunition), the guardsmen didn’t have much else. They had to improvise most of their weapons, such as grenades. They learned how to make rudimentary firebomb-grenades out of old bottles, flammable liquids and old rags. These homemade grenades were copied from the originals invented by the Finnish in 1939. They were called “Molotov Cocktails”, and were named for Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister.
Grenades weren’t the only things that the guardsmen had to make for themselves. They even produced their own mortars! A particular model (called the Northover Projector) was essentially a rudimentary grenade-launcher/mortar that fired grenades into the air. Blackpowder (not used since the American Civil War of the 1860s!) was poured down the barrel, then a grenade was forced down the barrel after it.
The powder was ignited using a toy precussion-cap (those little things that you stick in children’s play-guns that go ‘Bang!’) and was operated by a two-man crew. The Northover Projector was cheap, easy to use…but hardly effective. Half the time it could misfire, or even worse, explode in the breech, blowing the thing apart and injuring the crew.
Although the Northover Projector was manufactured commercially, many people made their own, homemade versions. It was often called the “Drainpipe Mortar” because of its long, slim shape.
The Duties of the Guard
Because Britain was never invaded, it’s widely believed that the Home Guard didn’t do anything. This wasn’t exactly true.
The Guard was employed in various activities throughout the war. They patrolled harbours and ports, they guarded ammo-dumps and important military installations and storage facilities, and they manned anti-aircraft cannons during the Blitz. Over a thousand guardsmen died in combat during the war.
The guardsmen also arrested and rounded up downed German pilots, they helped the wounded, cleared rubble from air-raids and rescued the trapped who were stuck in their collapsed houses. In 1941, the Guard was even allowed to guard Buckingham Palace! Churchill proudly declared that if London was invaded, the Home Guard would fight a bloody war with the Germans for every single city block.
The End of the Home Guard
The Home Guard was stood down in late 1944, when it was pretty certain that the Germans wouldn’t be doing any fighting against the British on their home soil anytime soon. It was formally disbanded on the 31st of December, 1945.
70th Anniversary of the Home Guard