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, 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 ‘Dad’s 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.
- Full-colour illustrated paperback edition reissued to coincide with release of the hotly anticipated new DAD's ARMY movie, in cinemas 5 February 2016.
- Author was himself a teenage Private in the Home Guard and was the same age as 'Pike'!
- 'Just how close the TV was to reality is amply demonstrated in Longmate's affectionate tribute to the real Dad's Army' THE MAIL ON SUNDAY.
- More praise: 'A fascinating history’ THE DAILY MAIL; ‘Wonderful’ THE DAILY MIRROR.
- Includes the reminiscences of veterans of the Home Guard.
- Reviews in the paperback review sections of national daily and Sunday newspapers, weeklies, and history magazines to include The Sun, The Mirror, BBC History Magazine and The Sunday Telegraph.
