What was dad army ww2

May 14, , is considered the day the Home Guard started. This was the date when the Secretary of War, Anthony Eden, broadcast an appeal to the nation. The appeal was put out on the radio and called for all men between the ages of 17 and 65 to enroll in the Local Defence Volunteers LDV.

The government had not shown much enthusiasm for a volunteer force in the past. They did not want to allow ordinary citizens to take matters into their own hands and out of the authority of the Army and police. However, along the coast of England, militias were starting to form which led them to rethink their policy.

By the end of July , over one million men had volunteered for the LDV. In the first 24 hours, , men alone registered their interest.

With the large numbers signing up, the name of the LDV was changed to something more inspiring: the Home Guard. The men volunteering for the Home Guard were those unable to join the regular army. They were either too young, too old, or working in reserved occupations.

While the age for the volunteers was meant to be 17 to 65, this was not strongly enforced with many older soldiers joining. The initial Home Guard was a disorganized militia. The LDV was launched without any support personnel, funds or a building from which to operate. I knew there was a story to be told as, among the thousand or so letters I received while researching How We lived Then, were many reminiscences from veterans of the outfit that was originally known as the Local Defence Volunteers.

Written to a two-month deadline, it had had to be concise. As in all my wartime books, my intention was to show the impact of extraordinary events on ordinary people, and my research confirmed that the much-loved sitcom was strikingly accurate in its portrayal of the Home Guard.

As I recount in my autobiography, The Shaping Season, there were echoes of Private Pike in my own experience, when, aged 17, I was enrolled in the school Home Guard, clad in a borrowed uniform and steel helmet, both far too large for me. While most men in the regular forces waited to be called up, and answered the summons with reluctance, the response to the launch of the LDV was overwhelming: it got , volunteers in 24 hours, and 1. There was a distinctly egalitarian streak in the Home Guard, which generally escaped the rank-consciousness that was so rife in the army.

Until November , there were no ranks or salutes, and even when this changed, relations between the members of a unit remained, by army standards, remarkably free and easy.

By the end of July this number had risen to over a million. Many of the men who joined the Home Guard were those who could not join the regular army because their day time jobs were necessary to keep the country running.

They included farm workers, bakers, teachers, grocers, bank staff and railway workers. The men were given military style training and, at first, they had no uniforms and little equipment. The public were invited to give their shotguns and pistols to the Home Guard and within a few months over 20, weapons were handed in. Many of the men made their own weapons too. Photograph showing the back of a homeguard. The Home Guard defended key targets like factories, explosive stores, beaches and sea fronts.

At night they patrolled fields in which the enemy gliders or paratroops might land. No one expected them to beat well-trained German soldiers. Their job was to slow them down until the army arrived.