Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45. Duff Hart-Davis
on guerrilla warfare and sniping, who reckoned that the creation of the force had a marked effect on morale: quite apart from its practical use, it gave men a positive way of serving their country. To him it was ‘a marvellous organisation’, and did a tremendous amount of good. ‘I am sure it prolonged the life of many men, taking them away from a life of total sedentary [sic] and lack of healthy interest. Thousands of men discovered the delights of shooting for the first time.’
Among the part-time soldiers was Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984. Having failed an army medical, he joined the Home Guard and became a sergeant in the St John’s Wood platoon – only to be incensed by closer acquaintance with the army, and in particular by the futility of a lecture from some general:
These wretched old blimps, so obviously silly and senile, and so obviously degenerate in everything except physical courage, are merely pathetic in themselves, and one would feel rather sorry for them if they were not hanging round our necks like millstones … The time has almost arrived when one will only have to jump up on the platform and tell them [the rank and file] how they are being wasted and how the war is being lost, and by whom, for them to rise up and shovel the blimps into the dustbin.
Soon after the creation of the Home Guard – and as a protest against the exclusion of women – the Amazon Defence Corps was set up by ladies with hunting, shooting and deer-stalking experience. In Herefordshire the redoubtable Lady Helena Gleichen took the lead. British, but the daughter of Prince Viktor of Hohenlohe-Langeburg (and so a grand-niece of Queen Victoria), she had abandoned her German titles during the First World War and worked with distinction for the British Red Cross in Italy. Later she became a well-known painter, particularly good at depicting horses. Then in 1940, aged sixty-seven, she formed her estate workers and tenants into an unofficial observation corps, the Much Marcle Watchers, eighty-strong and armed with their own weapons. But when she applied to the Shropshire Light Infantry for rifles, ‘plus a couple of machine guns, if you have any’, she received a dusty answer.
Her initiative reflected the tension gripping England by the middle of May 1940: it seemed possible that the invasion might start at any moment. Hitler’s forces had stormed through France to the coast only twenty miles from Dover at such a speed that it was easy to imagine their momentum propelling them on across the Channel. Particularly in the country, where paratroops were most likely to land, everyone was on edge. Margery Allingham described how many people in her village were overcome not by any particular grief, but by cumulative emotional strain.
Government posters were plastered up everywhere: ‘Dig for Victory’, ‘Lend a hand on the land’, ‘Keep calm and carry on.’ ‘BEWARE’ shouted one of the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ series, with a crude caricature of half Hitler’s face in the top corner:
Whether alone or in a crowd
Never write or say aloud,
What you’re loading, whence you hail,
Where you’re bound for when you sail.
ABOVE ALL NEVER GIVE AWAY
THE MOVEMENTS OF H.M. SHIPS
Although most members of the Home Guard lived in towns, their real role was on the land, where they felt they were defending their own territory. As J. B. Priestley put it in one of his immensely popular Sunday evening Postscript broadcasts in June 1940, describing a night vigil:
Ours is a small and scattered village, but we’d had a fine response to the call for volunteers … I think the countryman knows, without being told, that we hold our lives here, as we hold our farms, upon certain terms. One of these terms is that while wars still continue, while one nation is ready to hurl its armed men at another, you must if necessary stand up and fight for your own … As we talked on our post on the hill-top, we watched the dusk deepen in the valleys below, where our women-folk listened to the news as they knitted by the hearth … I felt too up there a powerful and rewarding sense of community, and with it too a feeling of deep continuity. There we were, ploughman and parson, shepherd and clerk, turning out at night, as our fathers had often done before us, to keep watch and ward over the sleeping English hills and fields and homesteads.
Of course, rivalry sprang up between neighbouring units, each hell bent on defending its own patch, and reluctant to help anyone else. In Devon a man whom the poet Cecil Day-Lewis tried to recruit came back with the retort: ‘We don’t want to fight for they buggers at Axmouth, do us?’
Small detachments were posted to man lookouts, some of them on the tops of church towers; they struck aggressive poses when photographed, but, in spite of the all-round enthusiasm, recruits were often scared of their own weapons, and numerous accidental discharges took place. One man put an M 17 round through the flat roof of a golf clubhouse which had been identified as an ideal Home Guard observation point. The bullet tore a large exit hole in the roof, missing the watchman above by inches. Another stray round went through the driver’s door of an Austin Seven, deflated the cushions in both front seats and passed out through the passenger door, leaving a neat hole.
People supposed that if German parachutists landed they would try to hide in woods, where, at close range, a shotgun would be a handier weapon than a rifle. Unofficial experiments were therefore conducted to make shotguns more lethal – for instance, by opening up cartridges and pouring molten wax into the pellets to form a heavier and more solid single missile, with greater killing power. There was a risk that the procedure would bulge or even split the barrel of the gun; but its efficacy was proved when someone fired a doctored 12-bore cartridge at an old barn, and the whole door collapsed in a cloud of dust and splinters.
In their attempts to grow more corn, farmers were seriously impeded by military plans for protecting the countryside against the possibility of enemy airborne landings. All over the South East fields were disfigured by new defences. Anti-tank lines of reinforced concrete cubes, each weighing a ton or more and cast in situ, were strung out across fields, often two or three rows deep. Where firing lines were cleared through woodland, the trees were felled across each other and the stumps were left high.
In June the Ministry of Agriculture encouraged farmers to build their hayricks in the middle of fields – especially flat fields suitable for glider landings. All open spaces should be obstructed (the directive said), and some fields should be trenched diagonally. In Wiltshire and Gloucestershire broken telegraph poles were dug into the ground upright and festooned with networks of wires. In other fields trees were felled and laid across a glider’s most likely line of approach. To protect standing corn from incendiaries, farmers were advised to cut ten-yard-wide strips across any large field, aligning the firebreaks with the prevailing wind, while the crop was still green. The immature cut corn could be used as fodder or made into silage, and when harvest approached and the remaining crop was dry the danger of a major blaze would be reduced.
Along the coast entanglements of barbed wire, with one coil laid on top of two others, blocked the beaches, which were also protected by minefields and miles of anti-tank scaffolding. Some possible landing places were stocked with barrels of pitch, which could be set on fire to incinerate troops trying to come ashore, and in other bays oil was pumped out underwater so that it could be released to form pools on the surface, which could be ignited. Concrete pillboxes sprouted on the cliffs and vantage points, some sunk into the ground, some showing above it. Areas of Romney Marsh were flooded, in the expectation that they might be used for a landing, and thousands of sheep were driven inland to deny the enemy any chance of seizing them. Swarms of barrage balloons swung in the sky, not only above and on the outskirts of conurbations, but round individual factories.
In the rush to collect scrap metal for munitions, iron railings round parks disappeared. Churchyard gates and railings – many of them beautifully designed – went the same way. Metal objects – even hairpins and combs – vanished from the shops. To confuse enemy trying to travel by road, signposts were removed from junctions, railway crossings and stations. Old milestones with names carved on them were dug up and taken into safe keeping. If the names of towns and villages appeared on shop fronts, they were painted over. All this was irksome for country people and anyone trying to move around on legitimate business: if a motorist