His Majesty's Respectables

Last week, as it must to all revolutionary ideas, respectability came at last to Britain's Home Guard.

The Home Guard had not always been respectable. It rose like a garish, un-British emanation from the bomb rubble of 1940's blitz. In those days its members practiced slitting throats with cheese cutters on gloomy Sunday mornings, reached out eager hands for nonexistent tommy guns, concocted tin-can explosives in the basement and took a desperate delight in the macabre techniques of Spanish Civil War guerrillas. But by last week the Home Guard had dressed ranks and counted off: on its second birthday, King George VI himself, the trade-mark of British character, became the Home Guard's Colonel-in-Chief.

Children of desperation, the Home Guardsmen could well receive a pat on their collective head for the way they had grown up. They numbered 1,600,000 men and boys, with a backlog of hundreds of thousands of others who were not so useful (American: good) at drilling but were well prepared to drop their garden tools for hand grenades when the whistle blew.

At Every Hedgerow. Not likely to be confused with the Grenadier Guards, on their regular Sunday drill the Home Guards nevertheless looked like able fighting men. A two-year scrounge for armament had equipped them all with firearms, even if some were ancient fowling pieces. Most of them had uniforms and steel helmets; in the most dangerous invasion zones they had Bofors guns, machine guns, light mobile Smith guns and a thing called the Blacker Bombard, which lobs 14-or 20-pound high explosive shells at moving targets (the Home Guard practiced with old baby carriages) with startling accuracy at 300 yards' range.

The British public no longer laughs at this last line of defense. In the opinion of many an expert, the Home Guard has made Britain almost invulnerable to attack. On the northern moors countrymen patrol day & night. Golf courses in Kent and Surrey are littered with Home Guard barricades to prevent plane landings. At all strategic crossroads Home Guardsmen man pillboxes, road blocks or well-placed tank traps. Behind every hedgerow, at every cottage sill, at every parish well stands a little body of men who believe not only in England but in themselves.

Blimps or Reds? Godfather of this British phenomenon was a leftist--Tom Wintringham, who led the British Battalion of the International Brigade in Spain. Wintringham wanted to teach his countrymen, while there was yet time, the new war technique of infiltration and the organization of a people's army, which he had learned in Spain. Not until May 14, 1940 did he get any official backing. That day the earnest, professorial voice of the then War Secretary, Anthony Eden, appealed over the BBC for unpaid volunteers to prepare for action in the event of invasion. The Government expected 250,000 volunteers, got 1,000,000.

Immediately there arose a hue & cry that Colonel Blimps and toffs with swagger sticks were trying to run the people's army. Others, just as alarmed, shouted that the revolution had come. One Peer of the Realm cried out: "You know, all they plan to do is cut our throats one night."

In the midst of these shouts, the Guard grew. Tom Wintringham gave it a training pattern in his guerrilla school at Osterley Park, the estate of the Earl of Jersey and his U.S. wife, onetime Cinemactress Virginia Cherrill. There in weekly batches Home Guard officers were trained in mak-ing hand grenades, using Molotov cocktails, wrecking tank treads. After a year of fighting for more armaments and more accent on guerrilla tactics, Wintringham resigned. The War Office, which suspected his politics, was glad to see him go. He was replaced by a safe man--Major General Viscount Bridgeman, the mild-mannered, sharp-eyed Etonian who organized the defense around Dunkirk.

Home Is The Place. In the second year the Home Guard achieved tighter organization, closer liaison with the Army and cooperation with the War Office, which was impressed by the caliber of Commandomen graduated from the Home Guard. These things gave the Guard a new role that no one dreamed of two years ago. The use of the Home Guard on coastal anti-aircraft guns, in troop transport and in joint field maneuvers indicated what the Government had in mind: shifting the burden of the defense of Britain on to the Home Guard, so that an army of 3,000,000 regular troops could be released for an invasion of the Continent. How great a trust the Government will put on the grown-up Home Guard, or when, only time and the course of war can tell.

The Home Guard is now scrounging around for something besides weapons. Respectable, serious men, who joined up to fight for their homes, they want action.

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