The Local Defence Volunteers become the Home Guard

On 23 July 1940 the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, answered a series of questions in the House of Commons about the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), a force created ten weeks earlier in case of a German landing. The MP Frederick Cocks asked outright whether the name “Local Defence Volunteers” would be changed to “Home Guard”. Eden confirmed it: the government intended to submit to the King for approval an Order in Council giving the force the title “The Home Guard”, and the armlets were to be altered to bear the letters “H.G.”. In a longer reply to a question from the Labour member Emanuel Shinwell, the minister was already using the new name throughout. There were, he said, more than 1.3 million volunteers – so many that the government had decided to suspend enrolment for the time being.

The change of name was the work of Winston Churchill. It came in the weeks when, after the fall of France, the British were seriously preparing to fight on their own soil: closing beaches, sowing them with mines and barbed wire, and pouring concrete for pillboxes and anti-tank lines inland. One of the first places where this could be seen with the naked eye was the seaside town of Brighton.

Brighton’s beaches closed (2 July)

At 5 p.m. on 2 July 1940 the beaches of Brighton, the most popular resort in southern England, lying less than a hundred kilometres from London, were closed to the public. Sappers laid mines on the shingle and stretched barbed-wire entanglements along the promenade. Sections of decking were removed from both of the great piers, the Palace Pier and the West Pier, so that the Germans could not use them as ready-made landing stages for troops and equipment. The town, to which children evacuated from the capital had been sent in the autumn of 1939, was no longer considered safe. According to local histories, some 30,000 people left it. The first bombs fell on Brighton in mid-July, and the beaches remained closed until 1945.

That day is sometimes recorded as an event in its own right, but Brighton was no exception. Beaches from the Wash to Kent and further west looked much the same at the time. According to the British official history, there were nearly 800 kilometres of beaches on the south and east coasts where armoured vehicles could get ashore. Barriers of scaffolding tubes (the so-called Admiralty scaffolding) were driven into them – several hundred kilometres had been erected by the autumn – anti-tank and anti-personnel mines were laid, and off some beaches the navy anchored floating net barriers in the water. Higher up, on the dunes and promenades, concrete pillboxes and machine-gun posts went up. To defend the ports and the most threatened stretches, more than 150 makeshift coastal batteries were built in 1940, often armed with guns taken from scrapped warships and sometimes supplied with no more than a dozen or so rounds.

The coast was emptying of people, too. According to the official history, by mid-July 127,000 people – nearly half the inhabitants – had left the coastal towns of East Anglia, and some 80,000, roughly two-fifths, had left the coastal towns of Kent. Departure was voluntary, but the authorities made it easier for children and the elderly, and many seaside resorts stopped admitting holidaymakers.

A country without signposts

Preparations had begun even before the Dunkirk evacuation was over. On 31 May the government ordered signposts to be taken down, milestones to be dug up or bricked over, and place names removed from railway stations, post offices and police stations, so that a German paratrooper or tank driver would not know where he was. On 13 June the ringing of church bells was banned. From then on they were to sound only on the orders of the army or the police, as a signal that an enemy landing had begun. The leaflet If the Invader Comes, delivered to households in June, told civilians to stay put, not to block the roads as refugees, not to believe rumours, and not to give the enemy food, fuel or maps.

From the end of May land defence was the responsibility of the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, General Edmund Ironside. He had at his disposal divisions that had returned from France without their heavy equipment, and units still in training. In mid-June there were 167 anti-tank guns in the whole country. The plan his staff put before the Cabinet on 25 June therefore relied on static defence. A thin “coastal crust” on the shore was to delay a landing; behind it lay a series of stop lines along rivers, canals and railway embankments; and further inland ran the most important of them, the GHQ Line. It ran from near Bristol along the Kennet and Avon Canal to Reading, curved south of London to the Medway valley, and then turned north through Essex. It was meant to shield the capital and the industrial heart of England. Along it anti-tank ditches were dug and concrete blocks, dragon’s teeth and thousands of pillboxes were built to standard designs drawn up in June by the War Office’s fortifications branch. Construction went on at a feverish pace. According to accepted estimates, some 18,000 pillboxes had been built by the end of September, and around 28,000 over the whole war.

Brooke replaces Ironside

Ironside’s plan was criticised for scattering the army along lines and beaches while leaving too few mobile reserves capable of quickly throwing a landing back into the sea. The Chiefs of Staff concluded that the defence relied too heavily on the thin coastal crust. Churchill, who wanted an offensive defence, spent the afternoon of 17 July with General Alan Brooke, who had commanded II Corps in Flanders, and two days later gave him command of Home Forces. Brooke took over on 20 July. Ironside retired and at the end of the summer received his field marshal’s baton. The new commander limited work on the stop lines to fortified “nodal points” at crossroads and in small towns, moved anti-tank guns closer to the beaches and began to build up mobile reserves. The defence of these nodal points and towns was largely entrusted to the Home Guard.

Churchill’s name

Churchill had disliked the name “Local Defence Volunteers” from the start. At the end of June, having read a War Office report on problems of discipline and morale in the new force, he wrote to Eden that the word “local” was uninspiring and that “Home Guard” would be better. Eden and his officials objected, since a million armlets bearing the letters “LDV” had already been printed and new ones would cost money. The Prime Minister did not give way. In his broadcast of 14 July, speaking of a “war of the unknown warriors”, he mentioned more than a million Local Defence Volunteers, “or, as they are much better called, the Home Guard”. The decision was announced on 22 July, and on 23 July Eden confirmed it in Parliament – which is why both dates appear in the literature as the day of the renaming. Formal approval of the name by royal order followed somewhat later.

The new name went hand in hand with a change in the character of the force. In his reply to Shinwell, Eden described the Home Guard as a voluntary, unpaid force made up of men following their normal civilian occupations. Its tasks were to defend its own locality, guard important sites and warn the army of enemy movements. The force came under the War Office, the operational command of Home Forces and the army’s structure of commands, zones, battalions, companies, platoons and sections. Battalion commanders were appointed by area commanders, and administrative matters were handled by the Territorial Army associations. At mines and factories works units were formed, whose members enrolled at their place of work. Eden admitted that in a force of more than 1.25 million men, raised together with its officers in little more than two months, unevenness was inevitable. Suspending enrolment was meant to allow those already accepted to be equipped. On 30 July the minister announced that the Home Guard would receive army boots as soon as stocks allowed.

Weapons were still scarce. After Dunkirk the army itself needed everything, and for the time being the Home Guard got sporting shotguns, old rifles and petrol bombs. The situation improved only with the arrival from the United States in the autumn of roughly half a million First World War rifles. In the same month of July the most trusted volunteers began to be quietly recruited into the secret Auxiliary Units, which were to carry out sabotage behind enemy lines after an invasion.

“Old men”?

According to the popular image, the Home Guard consisted of “older men and those deemed unfit for service in the regular armed forces”. That is only part of the truth. Men aged 17 to 65 were accepted, the age limits were not policed very strictly, and First World War veterans did indeed often take command of platoons and companies. But a great many volunteers were in the prime of life and worked in reserved occupations – in the mines, on the railways and in armaments factories – from which men were not called up. There were also boys below call-up age and men rejected by medical boards. It says a good deal that the questions asked in the Commons that same day concerned units in mines and works, not in old people’s homes. The image of a kindly, slightly comic “dad’s army” was fixed only by the BBC series “Dad’s Army”, broadcast from 1968 to 1977.

Place in the war

By the time Eden was answering MPs’ questions, fighters had for two weeks been battling German bombers attacking convoys over the English Channel – fighting the British regard as the beginning of the Battle of Britain. A week earlier Hitler had signed Directive No. 16 on preparations for a landing in Britain. The closed beaches and the renamed Home Guard were Britain’s answer to that threat, less military than political and psychological: a country that had just lost an ally and its army’s equipment was showing that it would defend every beach and every village, as Churchill had promised in his “We shall fight on the beaches” speech.

The invasion never came. Having failed to win air superiority, the Germans postponed Operation Sea Lion in September, and the following year turned against the Soviet Union. At its peak the Home Guard grew to some 1.7–1.8 million men; it took over the manning of some anti-aircraft and coastal guns and thereby released thousands of soldiers for other fronts. It was ceremonially stood down on 3 December 1944. Sappers were still clearing Brighton’s beaches of mines in 1944 and 1945; two of them were killed doing so on 10 July 1944. Of the tens of thousands of pillboxes built in the summer of 1940, thousands survive to this day in the fields, along the rivers and on the coastal cliffs of England – a trace of the weeks when Britain waited for the invader.