The Observer, 9 MAY 1943
Late in 1941 Cyril Connolly suggested to David Astor (1912–2001) that he ask Orwell if he would be interested in writing for the distinguished Sunday newspaper, The Observer, at the time owned by Astor’s father. The paper’s left-wing bent appealed to Orwell and he not only accepted but Astor and Orwell became close friends. Astor told the editor that contrary to common belief Orwell was a very amusing companion with a fine sense of humour. Indeed, he told the editor that, if he, Astor, were depressed, he would telephone Orwell and persuade him to meet him for a drink because he knew he would quickly cheer him up. Astor served in the Royal Marines, 1940–45, was foreign editor of the paper, 1946–48, and editor, 1948–75. He arranged for Orwell to be buried at All Saints church, Sutton Courtney, Berkshire (see ‘Orwell’s Death’).
It is close on three years since the eager amateurs of the L.D.V.1 doctored shotgun cartridges with candle-grease and practised grenade-throwing with lumps of concrete, and the value of the Home Guard as a fighting force can now be fairly accurately estimated.
Although it has never fought, its achievement has not been negligible. In the early days the Germans, to judge by their broadcasts, took the Home Guard more seriously than it took itself, and it must at all times have been part of the reason for their failure to invade Britain. If it were even five per cent. of the reason it would not have done so badly for a part-time and unpaid army.
The Home Guard has passed through three fairly well-defined phases. The first was frankly chaotic, not only because in the summer of 1940 the Home Guard had few weapons and no uniforms, but because it was enormously larger than anyone had expected.
An appeal over the radio, probably intended to produce fifty thousand volunteers, produced a million within a few weeks, and the new force had to organise itself almost unhelped. Since opinions differed about the probable form of a German invasion, it organised itself in innumerable different ways.
By the middle of 1941 the Home Guard was a coherent and standardised force, seriously interested in street-fighting and camouflage, and reasonably well armed with rifles and machine-guns. By 1942 it had Sten guns and sub-artillery as well, and was beginning to take over some of the antiaircraft defences. This third phase, in which the Home Guard is definitely integrated with both the regular Army and Civil Defence, has its own problems, some not easily soluble.
During the past year it has been assumed that if the Continent is invaded the Home Guard will partly replace the Regular forces in these islands, and the result has been the tendency to train it for mobile warfare. This has been made easier by the fall in the average age of the Home Guard. But in some ways the results have not been happy. With a parttime and frequently-changing personnel, it is doubtful wisdom to imitate the training of Regular soldiers, and, in any case, the Home Guard could not be made fully mobile even if transport existed for it.
Most of its members are also workers, and even in the case of invasion the economic life would have to be carried on in any area where fighting was not actually happening.
If Britain is ever invaded the Home Guard will in practice fight only in its own areas and in smallish units. The steady tightening of discipline and the increasing contact with the Regular Army have been enormous advantages; but as a strategic plan it would probably have been better to stick to the original idea of purely local defence, and thus make use of the only advantage the amateur soldier has over the professional—that is, intimate knowledge of the ground he is fighting on.
But though the Home Guard has come to look and to be much more like an army than it was, its early days have left their mark on it. The training schools started by Tom Wintringham and others in the summer of 1940 did invaluable work in spreading an understanding of the nature of total war and an imaginative attitude towards military problems.
Even the then lack of weapons had its advantages, for it led to much experimenting in garages and machine shops, and several of the anti-tank weapons now in use are partly the result of Home Guard researches.
Socially, the Home Guard is not quite what it was at the beginning. Membership has changed rapidly with the call-up, and its tendency has been to settle into the accepted English class pattern. This was perhaps inevitable in an unpaid army in which it is difficult to do the work of an officer without having a car and a telephone.
But if its internal atmosphere is not truly democratic, at least it is friendly. And it is very typical of Britain that this vast organisation, now three years old, has had no conscious political development whatever. It has neither developed into a People’s Army like the Spanish Government militias, as some hoped at the beginning, nor into an S.A., as others feared or professed to fear. It has been held together not by any political creed, but simply by inarticulate patriotism.
Its mere existence—the fact that in the moment of crisis it could be called into being by a few words over the air, the fact that somewhere near two million men have rifles in their bedrooms and the authorities contemplate this without dismay—is the sign of a stability unequalled in any other country of the world.