Discussion:Home Guard

Article connexe à initier : Organisation défensive du Royaume-Uni pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale

Voir en:British anti-invasion preparations of World War II Thib Phil (d) 15 septembre 2010 à 13:36 (CEST)

Paratrooper defence

The use of German paratroopers in Rotterdam, where Fallschirmjäger landed in a football stadium and then hijacked private transport to make their way to the city centre, demonstrated that nowhere was safe. Worse still, the airborne abduction attempt of the Dutch Royal family had failed only because the Dutch had possessed detailed plans of the operation well in advance. To counter the threat of an airborne assault, the Home Guard manned observation posts where soldiers spent every night until almost the end of the war continuously watching the skies, and initially armed with shotguns.

To spread word in the event of an invasion, the Home Guard set up a relatively simple code to warn their compatriots. For instance, the word 'Cromwell' indicated that a paratrooper invasion was imminent, and 'Oliver' meant that the invasion had commenced. Additionally, the Home Guard arranged to use church bells as a call-to-arms for the rest of the LDV. This led to a series of complex rules governing who had keys to bell towers, and the ringing of church bells was forbidden at all other times.

Anti-aircraft defences

The first line of defence against the Luftwaffe was detecting incoming raids. Even before the war, Britain had invested much time and resources in the construction of the Chain Home radar line. The CH system which dotted the English coastline operated on a 24-hour schedule, and could detect incoming aircraft from over seventy miles away. To locate low-flying planes, which could avoid detection at less than 500 ft (152 m), the British also operated the narrow wavelength "Chain-Home: Low" system, which detected planes travelling low yet still over five hundred feet. These gave the British sufficient warning to allow their fighters to reach the necessary altitude before arrival of the bombers.

Once inland, the movements of German aircraft were visually tracked and reported by the Royal Observer Corps, a volunteer civil unit formed in 1925 administered by the Royal Air Force. It eventually grew to over 40,000 men and women and 1,500 observation posts nationwide, their work allowing the RAF to know the strength as well as location and direction of the enemy, permitting them to predict the target and defend against it with minimum fuel consumption.

Enemy aircraft proved to be a menace throughout the war. Operating in both day and night raids, the defence against the Luftwaffe required huge amounts of anti-aircraft construction. For the British, heavy anti-aircraft weaponry was in no short supply. With over a thousand HAA guns divided across seven divisions under Anti-Aircraft Command, the British troops had guns in a quantity rivalled only by variety. In the early months of the war Great Britain still used Great War surplus armaments in the form of a truck-mounted 3-inch gun which provided more enthusiasm than fire-power. The next largest was the QF 3.7-inch gun, which shared some of the anti-armour capabilities of the German 88 mm gun. The largest guns were the 4.5-inch and the enormous 5.25-inch similar to guns used aboard some Royal Navy warships which were mounted in two different types of turret. Though the Royal Artillery handled most of the shells physically, the men of the Home Guard often filled in as replacements. From April 1942, Home Guard Anti-Aircraft units were formed, and by 1944 these units had taken over many anti-aircraft batteries, operating artillery from the light to heavy guns and also the semi-secret rocket batteries (also known as "Z-batteries").

The aiming and management of communication was the sole domain of women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). On the Wirral Peninsula, Cheshire, the shortage of men, who were guarding the beaches, required women to operate the town's single AA battery alone.

The HAA stations could stop a high-flying bomber but not the fast-moving escort fighters and the dreaded Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers which came with them. The Light Anti Aircraft was in dire shortage thanks to a lack of direction and planning. In the 1930s, the British had expected to use their own Vickers 2 pounder "pom-pom", but with complex multiple gun mounts weighing 800 lb (363 kg) it was limited to Royal Navy use. Therefore they turned to foreign sources.

In 1937, the British Army had ordered one hundred of the Swedish Bofors 40 mm gun. The Bofors had attracted international attention as a quality weapon. Britain had evaluated the gun and arranged licensed UK production. With engineering revision and reduction, the British produced it twice as fast at half the cost. Production steadily increased to 200 or more per month by mid 1940 but production was not expected to match requirements until 1942.

In 1939, the only other supply of LAA was a hastily conceived plan to purchase Breda 20mm guns from Italy. The Tripartite Pact ended that possibility.

Even with the impressive series of anti-aircraft defences which spread across the island over the next four years, emergency precautions were taken to reduce the danger to civilians. The Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Civil Defence Service was controlled by the Home Office. Men and women alike offered their services as fire fighters in the Auxiliary Fire Service, but 'fire watching' (reporting of fires in commercial buildings and dealing with individual incendiary bombs) was compulsory for all civilians in towns. Early warning observers were used during the V-1 campaign. All of these jobs served to relieve the local population.

Coastal defence

Despite a history of coastal defences stretching back to the days of Henry VIII, the British had not extensively fortified their coast, but had concentrated on what were considered 'vulnerable points'. The result was a series of ports guarded by 6-inch and 9-inch guns; a number of 9.2-, 13.5- and 18-inch railway guns and howitzers (the 18-inch howitzer being nicknamed "Bosch Buster") were deployed to various parts of the coast immediately after the Dunkirk evacuation; surrounded by open undefended beach with nothing but sand to block a landing army.

To remedy this, the Home Guard was tasked with guarding the beaches as well. The Home Guard peppered the coastline with unarmoured gun emplacements, equipped with old First World War naval guns. Some of the LDV manning these positions were untrained and armed with little more than shotguns. Others, such as Robert Neal, had rifles dating from the 1880s, and wrote in his diary, "I don't know what they expect me to do, I can't even use my own gun, much less this enormous contraption next to me." In the event of an invasion at that time, the beaches would almost certainly have fallen to German forces.

It was never the intention for coastal defences to halt an invasion such as Germany's planned Operation Sealion. The coastal defences were only intended to delay an invasion, and combined with Stop Lines, slow down an attack in order that naval forces could be deployed to cut off supply lines, and troops moved into appropriate locations. This strategy was borne out in war games conducted at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, in which a combination of the Coastal Defences, Stop Lines and a naval deployment from Scapa Flow to halt Axis naval forces effected a surrender of the invading forces.