Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Rank. Are we to salute or not? Whom shall we salute? If, for example, a tradesman with no military prestige … has in his unit an Admiral and a couple of Generals, the question they ask is ‘Who salutes whom?’ My answer is clear. If I am a Volunteer in a section or a patrol commanded by a General or a Blacksmith or my own Gardener, I do what he orders to the best of my ability. And on parade I salute him.

  Stirred up by General Green and others, many countrymen handed in their shotguns for use by the Home Guard, and these were tested by experts for their ability to fire single-ball ammunition. Later the volunteers were properly armed with British .303 rifles and American P17 .300 Springfields, and they quickly became less of a joke then than now. Captain Mainwaring and his ramshackle crew provoked great hilarity in the television audiences of another generation, but it is easy to forget that 1600 members of the Home Guard were killed on duty during the war.

  Many absurd incidents did take place. One moonlit night there was a call-out in Shropshire, when somebody claimed to have seen a parachute descending. Norman Sharpe, gamekeeper on the Apley Hall estate, remembered how he and his fellow volunteers rapidly took up prearranged positions:

  The night wore slowly on, with everyone becoming increasingly bored and tired. Suddenly a shot rang out! Action at last! Everyone was electrified. Complete with escort, the Company Commander strode away in the direction of the shot.

  A sentry had been posted along a narrow lane, and he was asked, ‘Did you fire that shot?’

  ‘Yes Sir.’

  ‘What at?’

  ‘A rabbit, Sir.’

  ‘You absolute so-and-so.’

  ‘Yes Sir. But I did as you instructed. I said halt but he came on. I said halt again and he took a few more hops forward. I challenged a third time and still he came on, so I shot him.’

  Much of the recruits’ time was spent training. Nineteen-year-old Charles Bond, at forestry school in the Forest of Dean, beyond the Severn in Gloucestershire, was actively involved, and many an entry in his diary recorded Home Guard activities: ‘HG exercise in morning … HG parade … rifle range drill, distance judging … HG lecture on Sten gun, practice at moving in extended order through woods … Posting night sentries.’ But a questionnaire issued by headquarters in Inverness to all Zone Commanders, Group Commanders and Battalion Commanders, and kept under lock and key, suggests that in March 1941 instruction was still at an early stage: ‘How do you distinguish between enemy and friendly (a) parachutists (b) troop carriers? … Do you and your men understand map references? Have you a map? … Have you fired your rifle? If so, what result?’

  The amateur soldiers studied maps, gave orders to the platoon in drill halls and went on exercises at weekends, often in pairs, guarding railway lines and bridges, and defending beaches against practice attacks by units of the regular army. Indoors, they stripped their rifles with the lights on and reassembled them in the dark. For live firing on the ranges, they were supervised by regular soldiers. At first ammunition was so scarce that men were allowed to fire only five rounds a day. All the same, target practice took place not just on designated ranges but also in old quarries and chalkpits, where any vertical wall or cliff-face served as a stop-butt and minimized the chance of casualties among the local population.

  For country boys on the loose, such places were a delight, for they yielded treasures such as empty cartridge cases, fragments of grenades and even the occasional live round. Spent .22 bullets were highly prized, even if crumpled up by impact on metal or stone, for they could be melted down, fashioned into arrow-heads and fitted to home-made shafts of hazel or willow. Better trophies still were intact heavy-calibre machine-gun bullets found dumped, presumably because they had failed to fire; and thunderflashes, which simulated grenade explosions. Sometimes these big, thick fireworks were accidentally dropped during night exercises and could be found lying about in the morning – but they needed careful handling, for a premature detonation could easily blow off fingers. Even bits of bomb casing were much valued.

  Ian Hacon and Peter Lucas, two boys who lived near Ipswich, were much given to riding around the countryside on their bikes. When they discovered an ammunition dump which was guarded during the day but not at night, they several times climbed over the barbed wire and helped themselves to cartridges, which they sold to school friends for 2d each. Schools, of course, made it illegal to collect such desirable souvenirs, and boys found secreting them were punished, usually with the cane; nevertheless, collectors keenly swapped and traded items, not least the silver paper dropped by enemy aircraft to confuse radar.

  In the words of the historian Geoffrey Cousins, ‘Although defence was the stated object of the exercise, every man who answered the appeal [to join the Home Guard] was captivated by the idea of being on the offensive.’ That opinion was seconded by Captain Clifford Shore, an expert 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 pulled up at a crossroads to ask for directions, locals were forbidden to answer his questions. As the American Vincent Sheean remarked, ‘The barricading of roads was going on all through the country, and you did not have to travel far down any one of them to see the sudden feverish construction of tank traps and airplane obstacles … The threat of invasion had suddenly risen like a dark cloud over the whole island.’

  The aim was not so much to stop an enemy advance as to delay it until strong British forces could muster further inland, and ships of the Royal Navy could steam down from Scapa Flow, where they had been sheltering, to knock out the German fleet in the Channel and cut off the invaders’ supplies of fuel, ammunition and food.

  On shore, the general plan was to move vital assets away to the west, as far as possible from likely landing points and lines of advance. The King and Queen – the jewels in the crown – were furnished with a personal bodyguard consisting of one company of the Coldstream Guards, known, after its commander, Lieutenant Colonel J. S. Coats, as the Coats Mission. With their four armoured cars and some civilian buses, the little force stood by to whisk the royal family out of danger, particularly in the event of an airborne landing by enemy forces.

  Their initial rendezvous would have been Madresfield Court, a huge, redbrick house, part-Jacobean, part-Victorian Gothic, with more than 130 rooms, standing out in the plain at the foot of the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. The home of the Lygon family for eight centuries, the house is now inextricably associated with Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, which was inspired by his fascination with the Lygon girls, Lettice, Maimie, Coote and Sibell, with their brother Hugh, whom he knew at Oxford, and their notorious father, the homosexual Lord Beauchamp, whose excesses eventually forced him to live abroad (his brother-in law, the Duke of Westminster, who loathed him, referred to him as ‘my bugger-in-law’).

  Brideshead and its landscape, as Waugh described them in 1945 – the house set in a valley above a lake, among rolling hills – bore no physical resemblance to ‘Mad’ and its pancake surroundings; but the author had been entranced by another immense house, Castle Howard, near York, and made that his model for the home of the Flyte family. On that and his love of the Lygons he built a dream world, and there is no doubt about the twin sources of his inspiration: Brideshead is a version of Castle Howard, but Sebastian Flyte, the central figure in the novel, is Hugh Lygon in all but name.

  In 1940 Madresfield, with its sixty acres of gardens, its carp-haunted moat and four glorious avenues, would never have been remotely defensible, furnished though it was with a token guard force. Nevertheless, large quantities of non-perishable food were imported and stored in the basement, and much of Worcestershire was fortified as a kind of redoubt. The Severn, Avon and Teme rivers were designated ‘stop lines’, with crossing points defended by camouflaged gun emplacements, tanks parked in copses,
pillboxes, road blocks and lines of trenches. Worcester itself, Kidderminster and Redditch were marked out as anti-tank islands, to act as centres of resistance, and the aim was to retard any German advance until regular home forces could regroup.

  On the eastern side of Worcester another great house – Spetchley Park – was earmarked as a refuge for Churchill and his Cabinet if the invasion took place or London became too dangerous. The grand Palladian building belonged (and still belongs) to the Berkeley family, and before the war was a haunt of the composer Edward Elgar, who often stayed in the Garden Cottage and told his hosts that parts of The Dream of Gerontius were inspired by pine trees in the park.

  If the Germans had landed, the transfer to the west would have taken place in two phases: in Yellow Move, non-essential staff from Whitehall would have led the way, followed, in Black Move, by the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and the royal household. The city of Worcester would have been invaded by armies of civil servants, and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon would have housed Parliament. Luckily for the owners, in the event neither Madresfield nor Spetchley was needed for senior evacuees from London; but later in the war the US Eighth Air Force took Spetchley over as a recuperation centre for pilots, and added to its amenities by building a squash court.

  Two other grand houses, further north, were also considered as possible royal retreats. One was Pitchford Hall in the wilds of Shropshire, a wonderfully romantic, black and white Tudor mansion in which the King and Queen had stayed (while Duke and Duchess of York) in 1935. The other was Newby Hall, home of the Compton family, an eighteenth-century redbrick house set in splendid gardens at Skelton-on-Ure in North Yorkshire.