The British Home Guard started off as the brain child of General Walter Kirke. General Kirke founded the Local Defence Volunteers in February 1940. Initially devised as a means to defend the critical port of Dover, the ranks swelled quickly with local volunteers, too old to enlist but eager to fight. Though not yet acknowledged by the British government, they began training to operate the batteries of four-, six-, and nine-inch artillery pieces which defended the port. Trained seaward to repel naval bombardment, these gun emplacements doubled in number with emergency positions which were being assembled even as the British Expeditionary Force left for Europe. While the coastal guns and the LDV stayed behind, the BEF marched to the borders of France and into battle.

Secretary of State for War Anthony Eden announced the creation of the LDV in a radio broadcast on 14 May 1940 and asked for volunteers, four days after the German Blitzkrieg started in France and the Low countries.

We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain who are British subjects, between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five, to come forward now and offer their services in order to make assurance [that any invasion would fail] doubly sure. The name of the new force which is now to be raised will be the Local Defence Volunteers. This name describes its duties in three words. You will not be paid, but you will receive uniforms and will be armed. In order to volunteer, what you have to do is give your name at your local police station, and then, when we want you, we will let you know...

The announcement met with near-universal enthusiasm and over a quarter of a million men tried to sign up within the next 24 hours. The government had expected 150,000 men to volunteer in total, but by the end of the first month 750,000 men had volunteered. By the end of June 1940, there were nearly 1.5 million volunteers and the number never fell below a million for the rest of the organisation's existence although the peak was 1.8 million in March 1943.

On 17 May 1940, the Defence (Local Defence Volunteers) Regulations 1940 was passed, which officially brought the LDV into existence. Within ten days, the BEF had been pushed back and surrounded at Dunkirk.

The Home Guard also served as a cover for the Auxiliary Units, a force of more highly trained volunteer troops that would function as guerilla units if the UK was invaded.

 

After Dunkirk

In the rushed evacuation from Europe, the British Expeditionary Force left much of its heavy equipment behind on or around the beaches of Dunkirk. Included among this were 40,000 assorted vehicles (including tanks), 400 anti-tank guns and most of its artillery pieces. Lighter equipment was also lost and many troops returned even without their rifles. One soldier wrote in his diary, "we arrived armed only with shoulders, we didn't even have cigarettes."

Thirty days after the surrender of France, Hitler issued Fuhrer directive no. 16. This order laid out the plans and preparations for the invasion of Britain, Operation Sealion (Unternehmen Seelöwe). Although the details were not known to the British, it proposed that the invasion would proceed not as a concentrated thrust, but as a 40 mile wide landing, starting at Ramsgate and extending to the Isle of Wight.

The British had been able to observe the invasions of Poland and later Norway and experience fighting in France had provided advanced warning of their own inadequacy in battle. Finally, and most important of all, they had witnessed the full range of German tactics. In Poland, the Axis had shown themselves capable of mounting a swift and effective surprise attack. In Warsaw, Germans revealed their methods for urban combat. In Norway and the Netherlands, paratroopers landed ahead of the invasion to cause chaos well beyond what became the front lines. In France, the German Panzer divisions simply went around the Maginot line and operated a sickle shaped charge towards Paris.

Weapons and training

Initially the Home Guard were very poorly armed, since the regular forces had priority for the weapons and equipment available. As the Local Defence Volunteers, their original role had largely been to observe and report enemy movements but it swiftly changed to a more aggressive role. Nevertheless they would have been expected to fight well-trained and equipped troops with negligible training and weapons such as pitchforks and shotguns or firearms that belonged in a museum. Patrols were carried out on foot, by bicycle, even on horseback, and often without uniforms - although all volunteers wore an armband that said "LDV".

Ex-Communist and Spanish Civil War veteran Tom Wintringham, a journalist and key advocate of the LDV and later Home Guard, opened a private training camp for the LDV at Osterley Park, outside London, in early July 1940. Wintringham's training methods were mainly based on his experience in the International Brigades in Spain. He had trainers who had fought alongside him in Spain who trained volunteers in anti-tank warfare and demolitions.

On 23 July 1940, the LDV was renamed the 'Home Guard', a name suggested by the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Within a few months they started to be issued with proper uniforms and equipment as the immediate needs of the regular forces were satisfied. After September 1940 the army began to take charge of the Home Guard training in Osterley and Wintringham and his comrades were gradually sidelined.

Paratrooper defence

The use of German Paratroopers in Rotterdam, where Fallschirmjäger landed in a football stadium and then hijacked private transport to make their way to the city center, demonstrated that nowhere was safe. Worse still, the airborne abduction attempt of the Dutch Royal family had failed only because the Dutch had possessed detailed plans of the operation well in advance. To counter the threat of an airborne assault, the Home Guard manned observation posts where soldiers spent every night until almost the end of the war continuously watching the skies, and initially armed with a shotgun.

To spread word in the event of an invasion, the Home Guard set up a relatively simple code to warn their compatriots. For instance, the word 'Cromwell' indicated that a paratrooper invasion was imminent, and 'Oliver' meant that said invasion had commenced. Additionally, the Home Guard arranged to use church bells as a call-to-arms for the rest of the LDV. This inevitably led to a series of complex rules governing who had keys to belltowers, also the ringing of church bells was forbidden at all other times. The British defence relied heavily on improvisation and ingenuity.

The Auxiliary Units (or Auxunits) were specially trained highly secret units created with the aim of resisting the expected invasion of the British Isles by Nazi Germany during World War II. Britain was the only country during the war to create such a resistance movement in advance of an invasion. Such stay-behind organisations were generalised by the Allies after WWII. The units (occasionally known as the British Resistance Organisation) were initiated by Winston Churchill, who appointed Major Colin Gubbins (an expert in guerrilla warfare who would later head up the Special Operations Executive), to found them, attached to GHQ Home Forces. They were concealed within the Home Guard. Approximately 5000 units were formed, consisting of Special Duty Sections, Signals and Operational Patrols.

The units were stood down only in 1944. Several of their members subsequently joined the Special Air Service and saw action in France in late 1944. The units' existence did not generally become known by the public until the 1990s.

Special Duty Sections and Signals

The Special Duty Sections were largely recruited from the civilian population, with around 4,000 members. They had been trained to identify vehicles, high-ranking officers and military units, and were to gather intelligence and leave reports in dead letter drops. The reports would be collected by runners and taken to one of over 200 secret radio transmitters operated by trained civilian Signals staff.

Operational Patrols

Operational Patrols consisted of between 4 and 8 men, often farmers or landowners and usually recruited from the most able members of the Home Guard, who also needed an excellent local knowledge and the ability to live off the land. As cover, the men were allocated to "Home Guard" battalions 201 (Scotland), 202 (northern England), or 203 (southern England) and provided with Home Guard uniforms, though they were not actually Home Guard units.

Around 3500 such men were trained on weekend courses at Coleshill House near Highworth, Wiltshire, in the arts of guerrilla warfare including assassination, unarmed combat, demolition and sabotage. Recruits for Coleshill reported to the Highworth post office, from where the postmistress Mabel Stranks arranged for their collection.

Each Patrol was a self-contained cell, expected to be self-sufficient and operationally autonomous in the case of invasion, generally operating within a 15-mile radius. They were provided with a concealed underground Operational Base, usually built by the Royal Engineers in a local woodland, with a camouflaged entrance and emergency escape tunnel; it is thought that 400 to 500 such OBs were constructed. Some Patrols had an additional concealed Observation Post. Patrols were also provided with a selection of the latest weapons including a silenced pistol or Sten and Fairbairn-Sykes "commando" knives, quantities of plastic explosive, incendiary devices, and food to last for two weeks. It was not expected that they would survive for longer. Members anticipated being shot if they were captured, and were expected to shoot themselves first rather than be taken alive.

The mission of the units was to attack invading forces from behind their own lines while conventional forces fell back to the last-ditch GHQ Line. Aircraft, fuel dumps, railway lines, and depots were high on the list of targets, as were senior German officers. Patrols secretly reconnoitred local country houses, which might be used by German officers, in preparation.