The Home Guard

Book excerpt: BL Reveals for the first time the real political importance of the Home Guard BL Based on original research, particularly among recently available War Office files Today we laugh at `Dad's Army', but in 1940 the threat of a German invasion of Britain was a very real one. S. P. MacKenzie's detailed and readable history of the Home Guard offers a new perspective on the men who took up the challenge. The book shows how the Home Guard, often aslarge as the wartime army, became an astonishingly strong political force in its own right.