Read Online If Britain Had Fallen by Norman Longmate - Free Book Online

though at first with only ten rounds of ammunition apiece, made an enormous difference, and 20,000 more revolvers and shotguns trickled in as a result of the appeal which had already attracted Dr Goebbels’s amused attention. If, as the British feared, the Germans planned to drop marauding parties of parachutists far inland it might go badly with the Home Guard for weapons. Away from the coast not merely in the Home Guard but in the Army weapons were still desperately few. In the South-Eastern counties, however, few men, whether regular soldiers or Home Guards, whatever their other deficiencies of training and equipment, would have had to confront their country’s enemies totally unarmed.
    Already by September the original conception of the Home Guard as a small force of part-timers, concentrated in rural areas and designed only to deal with lightly armed airborne troops, had been forgotten. It was now far larger than the government had at first intended, much of its strength lay in built-up areas, and it might well have had to cope not merely with motor-cyclists and parachutists but with enemy tanks. Since there were far too few anti-tank weapons to equip even regular units with them, the Home Guards had to do the best they could from their own resources, and many entered eagerly into the manufacture of Molotov cocktails, which consisted of bottles filled with petrol, with a wick through the cork, lighted just before the bottle was thrown. The value of this dangerous device was highly questionable and one veteran of the Spanish Civil War considered that ‘if lobbed on the top of a tank… they merely warm it slightly’, but any weapon to halt the Panzers seemed better than none. A captain in one Kent company toured his village one Sunday morning with a farm cart collecting several hundred whisky and soft-drink bottles – beer bottles were considered too hard to break easily—and then set up his own private filling plant in a wood, where a mixture of warm tar and petrol was poured lovingly into each container, the wives of his men obligingly making canvas carriers for the bottles from old mattresscovers and sackcloth. Other devices had an even more desperate air. The news that one inventor had converted an ARP stirrup pump into a flamethrower, discharging inflammable dry-cleaning fluid, and that a Hampshire unit was equipped with its own cannon, consisting of a metal tube filled with gunpowder, fired by hitting it with a hammer, was more likely to have struck joy into Doctor Goebbels’s heart than terror in Field Marshal Keitel’s.
    The loyal Englishman could buy at the station bookstall on his way home that summer a variety of books on irregular warfare, written by experts who had already fought the Germans in Spain, and much of the advice given was sound and easily followed. One author recommended that men manning roadblocks should be posted ‘all on one side of the road, in case they fire on each other at moments of excitement’, and there was a simple way of dealing with a dive-bomber: It is said to be a good idea to swear at it; even if you cannot hear what you say, you know the meaning of the words and thus get psychological relief.’ Although still warning against clergy and - inevitably—nuns who were parachutists in disguise and even, a new tenor, ‘adolescent enemy agents … dropped in the uniforms of Boy Scouts or Sea Scouts’, the writer urged a reasonable measure of caution, which had rarely been mentioned in the first hectic days back in May: ‘The business of the Home Guard is to be soldiers first and heroes afterwards and … live heroes are usually better than dead ones.’
    Another booklet published that summer admitted that the keen Home Guard was also up against a difficulty not encountered in less peaceful lands: ‘Unfortunately our history, having been very different from that of the Spanish, gives us very little information on the tactics of street fighting. In Spain almost any villager