The Local Defence Volunteers

On the evening of 14 May 1940, after the 9 p.m. news, the new Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, gave a short talk on the BBC that within a few days had hundreds of thousands of Britons on their feet. He called on men aged 17 to 65 who were not serving in the forces to report at police stations to enrol in a new body: the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV). It was to keep watch over its own districts, guard bridges, factories and airfields, and fight German paratroopers should they appear over the British Isles. Two months later the force was renamed the Home Guard, and under that name it lasted until the end of 1944.

Eden’s appeal was one of two steps by which Britain enlarged its land forces in the first days of the offensive in the west. Five days earlier, on 9 May, King George VI had signed a proclamation extending liability for military service to all men aged 19 to 36.

Conscription up to 36 (9 May)

Conscription had been introduced in Britain before the war. The Military Training Act of May 1939 applied to twenty-year-olds, and on 3 September, the day war was declared, Parliament passed the National Service (Armed Forces) Act as part of Britain’s preparations for war. The Act allowed men aged 18 to 41 to be called up, but did not make them liable automatically. It was the King who, by successive proclamations, specified which age groups were liable to be called up. The proclamations of 1 October 1939, 1 December 1939 and 1 January 1940 covered men from 19 to 27, almost two million people.

The King signed the proclamation of 9 May 1940 at Buckingham Palace on the day when, after the Norway Debate, the fate of Neville Chamberlain’s government hung in the balance. It was published the next day in The London Gazette. From then on, all British subjects in Great Britain (and also on the Isle of Man) who had reached the age of 19 but not yet 37 became liable to be called up. This also applied to those who arrived in the country later. Among those exempted were the clergy, serving soldiers, cadets of the military academies, the blind and the mentally ill, and the Act continued to protect men in reserved occupations, that is, in industries and farming important to the war effort. The proclamation did not mean an immediate call-up. The age groups were registered gradually over the following months, and the army summoned them as it needed them and could train them.

Brief summaries state that on 9 May “the conscription age was raised to 36”. In the text of the proclamation the limit is reaching the age of 37, so in practice it meant men up to and including 36. It also concerned the pool of men who could be called up, not actual enlistment. Three days after the proclamation, on 13 May, the Labour politician Ernest Bevin became Minister of Labour, and for the rest of the war it was he who directed conscription and the allocation of manpower. In December 1941, under a further Act, liability for service was extended to men up to 51 and also, for the first time, to unmarried women aged 20–30.

The fear of paratroopers

On 10 May Germany attacked the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. What most fired the British imagination were the reports of German paratroopers and glider landings: the capture of the Belgian Fort Eben-Emael, the bridges at Moerdijk and Rotterdam, and the airborne landing near The Hague, which was meant to capture the queen and the government. The press and rumour added a “fifth column” – traitors and disguised agents who were supposed to be helping the invader. After the defeat in Norway and the news from the Low Countries, an invasion of Britain no longer seemed a fantasy. On 12 May the internment began of German and Austrian men aged 16 to 60, starting with those living near the south and east coasts.

As early as the autumn of 1939 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had proposed forming a home guard of men over forty, but amid the calm of the Phoney War the idea came to nothing. In May 1940 it returned with a force the government could not ignore. Newspapers floated ideas such as arming rifle clubs, or even training golfers to shoot paratroopers, and in many places people began organising armed guards themselves, often at factories. The Home Office warned that a civilian who fired on German soldiers would very probably be shot by them. Above all, however, the authorities feared private bands over which the army would have no control.

On Sunday 12 May the War Office and General Walter Kirke’s Home Forces command compared their schemes. The command’s plan was chosen: loose local units raised with the help of the Lords Lieutenant of the counties. On 13 May the details were hurriedly worked out, without consulting other ministries, the Treasury or the Crown’s lawyers. Nobody knew where the weapons for the volunteers were to come from. The plan went to Eden, who had headed the War Office since 11 May in the government formed by Churchill on 10 May, and on the evening of 14 May he announced it on the radio.

Eden’s appeal

Eden began by recalling that since the outbreak of war the government had received countless inquiries from all over the Kingdom from men of every age who, for one reason or another, were not serving in the forces but wished to do something for the defence of their country. “Now is your opportunity,” he told them. The government needed large numbers of such men, British subjects aged 17 to 65, to come forward and, in a phrase borrowed from Macbeth, “make assurance doubly sure”. The new force was to be called the Local Defence Volunteers, a name that, as he put it, described its duties in three words. The minister explained that the purpose of parachute landings was to cause confusion and disorganisation, and the volunteers were to prevent this in their own localities. The most often quoted sentence concerned the terms of service: “You will not be paid, but you will receive uniforms and will be armed.” Volunteers were to give in their names at their local police station.

The response exceeded all expectations. The army had counted on perhaps half a million volunteers, roughly as many as it needed for the tasks envisaged. The first men were reporting at police stations that same evening, and in many places the police could not write down the names fast enough. According to some accounts, about 250,000 men came forward in the first week; according to others, as many did so within the first twenty-four hours. By July the number of volunteers had passed one and a half million. On 17 May the force was given a legal basis by an Order in Council. The volunteers were organised into sections, platoons and companies under leaders appointed from among their own number, who, however, held no officer’s rank and had no authority over soldiers of the regular army. In Northern Ireland the force was placed under the Royal Ulster Constabulary as the Ulster Defence Volunteers.

An armband instead of a uniform

Eden’s promise proved hard to keep. On 22 May the War Office announced that the volunteers would first receive 250,000 field caps and armbands bearing the letters “LDV”. Until these were manufactured, the armbands were often sewn by members of the Women’s Voluntary Service, and denim uniforms came only later. Weapons were in even shorter supply, as priority went to rebuilding and expanding the army, which was about to lose its equipment at Dunkirk. After a radio appeal on 23 May by Richard Law, the Financial Secretary to the War Office, citizens handed in their private shotguns and sporting rifles, and by July the LDV was using more than 50,000 civilian shotguns. Volunteers patrolled the roads with hunting guns, old revolvers and sometimes clubs and pikes. The War Office sent out instructions on how to make petrol bombs, and old rifles were ordered from Canada and the United States. Wags expanded the initials LDV as “Look, Duck and Vanish”.

There was also disagreement over the force’s role. The army saw the volunteers as a kind of armed police: they were to observe, report, man roadblocks and guard important sites. The volunteers, among whom there was no shortage of veterans of the Great War, wanted to hunt paratroopers and the “fifth column”. Some units patrolled on their own initiative, and in the first weeks overzealous sentries at roadblocks sometimes fired on drivers who failed to stop to be checked.

Who the volunteers were

It is often said that the LDV consisted “mainly of elderly men and pensioners”. This image was fixed above all by the BBC comedy series Dad’s Army (1968–1977), and it is only partly true. The age limits of 17 to 65 were loosely enforced, and among the volunteers there were indeed many veterans of 1914–1918, who often took command of platoons and companies. But men in the prime of life working in reserved occupations were also very numerous: miners, railwaymen, workers in munitions factories. Most units were in fact formed at workplaces. There were also boys not yet of call-up age and men rejected by medical boards. Research by historians such as Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird has shown a force much younger and more working-class than the one remembered by popular culture. Women were not admitted at first, and when they were allowed in, in 1943, it was only for auxiliary duties.

From the LDV to the Home Guard

Churchill disliked the name of the new force. At the end of June he concluded that it was one of the causes of the trouble with morale and proposed “Home Guard”. Eden and the officials objected, as a million armbands bearing the letters LDV had already been printed, but the prime minister did not give way. On 14 July he used the new name in a radio broadcast, and on 22 July (23 July according to some sources) the LDV was officially renamed the Home Guard. At the end of May General Edmund Ironside took over Home Forces, and in the summer the Home Guard became part of the plans for defence against the invasion the Germans were preparing as Operation Sea Lion. In July Tom Wintringham, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, opened a private school of guerrilla and anti-tank warfare at Osterley Park near London, which the army later took over. Members of the secret Auxiliary Units, intended for sabotage behind the invader’s lines, were also chosen from among the volunteers.

Place in the war

The invasion never came, and the Home Guard never had to defend English country towns against German tanks. Even so, it played a real part in the war. By the end of 1940 it numbered some 1,200 battalions and more than one and a half million men. It guarded coasts, airfields, factories and railway junctions, and during the Blitz it searched for unexploded bombs and secured bombed districts. From 1942 its members manned anti-aircraft guns and rocket batteries as well as coastal artillery, releasing regular soldiers for front-line service. At that time officer ranks and a limited element of compulsory service were also introduced. During the war 1,206 of its members were killed on duty, mainly by bombs, unexploded ordnance and V-1 flying bombs.

After the Allied landings in France the danger of invasion passed. On 3 December 1944 the Home Guard was formally stood down, and on 31 December 1945 it was officially disbanded. For Britain the appeal of 14 May 1940 became one of the symbols of that summer when, after the fall of France, the country expected to fight on its own soil. The extension of conscription on 9 May and the enrolment of volunteers five days later showed the same thing: a state that for twenty years had not wanted a large land army put millions of men under arms within a few weeks.