South Yorkshire Times, December 2nd 1944
A Well Kept Watch
On Sunday the Home Guard formally “stands down.” In the critical days which followed the Dunkirk evacuation, even the best informed of our leaders can have had little idea of the circumstances under which this force, so hastily called to arms, would be relieved of the heavy responsibility placed upon its shoulders. Most of us had visions of bloody, desperate skirmishes in English lanes and quiet country villages, not to mention savage street fighting among the factories and houses of our towns.
The Home Guard trained grimly, more conscious than any one of the inadequacies in type and quantity of the early weapons doled out to them from arsenal’s swept clean by the losses inflicted on the first British Expeditionary Force. Those were the days of informal armleted patrols, accoutred more like a gang of poachers than a military unit; of grim jokes, and still grimmer thoughts. But time passed, or rather the gallant few of R.A.F. fighter command won it, by a magnificent combination of skill and daring, from an enemy eager for the kill. Shotguns and bottles filled with petrol gave way to Sten guns, sticky bombs, mortars and other light mobile artillery.
Men of the Home Guard, smartly clad in khaki, put away their armlets; breathed rather more freely as they found the odds less heavily stacked against them. But all the time, with or without adequate weapons, ill-equipped or well-equipped it was a question for them of hard, unremitting training. Night after night, Sunday after Sunday, they conned their signalling, their administrational accounts, their field tactics, or whatever else this part-time soldiering demanded of them. They lived notorious days. Many who had long ago foregone ambitious physical activity found themselves route marching, scrambling through cross country exercises, negotiating strenuous battle courses, and generally hardening off into a new toughness; surprising themselves by the scope of these exacting endeavours.
Authority was probably no less astonished at all that was achieved. Certainly, the War Office never doubted that the right spirit was there to be called out, but it remains open to question whether they cherished sufficient optimism to envisage the magnificent reserve army which the Home Guard became in its latter days. What was the secret of its success? Probably one of the most important single factors was the considerable available nucleus of ex-servicemen. With a valuable foundation of experience gained in the Great War, Officers and rankers formed staunch cadres which were quickly filled in with younger blood which made up in keenness what it lacked in experience. Essentially a democratic organisation, the Home Guard let native merit find its own way to the top. And these new comers both to military ways and commissioned and non-commissioned rank conceded nothing either in keenness or competence to their colleagues of the older school.
Then came the call for the Home Guard to take over a considerable portion of the country’s anti-aircraft defences. The rocket gunners mastered the technique of handling their unorthodox new weapons with the same zest and speed with which they had discharged earlier tasks, though this, too, had to be fitted into a weekly routine in which there was no relaxation of daily work, but only that same encroachment on scant leisure which nearly all Home Guard training entailed. The whole force certainly learned the meaning of the sweat and toil of the famous Churchillian invocation.
At home the women vote patiently endured an alien routine which cut right across the quiet week-end joys of conventional domesticity. There were, of course, compensations; the comradeship, the sense of worthwhile service, the keen sensation of satisfaction when D-Day dawned, and it was realised that by their assiduous concentration on the task of home defences the Home Guard had played a material part in enabling the mightiest blow in history to be unleashed from these islands. These, and other thoughts, will be much in mind within and without the ranks during Sunday’s parades. It is only right that they should be.