The real Dad's Army

A narrative history of the Home Guard from its creation in May 1940 to the end of the Second World War. The enduring popularity of the BBC TV series Dad's Army has focused attention on one of the strangest and least military armies ever formed - The British Home Guard. What started as an improvised band of volunteers had grown by 1942 into a conscripted, disciplined and well-equipped force with a strength of nearly two million men. Norman Longmate, an ex-member of the Home Guard and an authority on wartime Britain, has collected together a wealth of hilarious anecdotes as well as all the unlikely facts to produce the first popular history of the Home Guard to be written since the war.