The Real Dad''s Army: The Story of the Home Guard

The enduring popularity of the BBC TV series Dads 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, himself a Home Guard veteran 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. Longmate, ex-Private F Company, 3rd Sussex Battalion, Home Guard, joined Dads Army at the same age as the fictional character Pike, and to this day he contends that the much-loved sitcom was remarkably accurate in its portrayal of life in the Home Guard. See more