Instant Arsenal – Six Bizarre Impromptu Weapons of Britain’s WW2 Home Guard

Britain's citizen army, the Home Guard, helped shore up the nation's defences during the early years of the Second World War.
Britain’s citizen army, the Home Guard, helped shore up the nation’s defences during the early years of the Second World War.

“Although Germany would eventually abandon all plans of landing troops on British soil, the Home Guard (and its oddball arsenal) continued to hold the line until the very end of the war.”

AS THE RAF and the Luftwaffe battled for control of the skies over England throughout the summer and fall of 1940, on the ground Britons of all stripes hurriedly prepared for an all out Axis invasion of the United Kingdom.

To meet the threat, the War Office hastily established the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) or Home Guard to augment the under-strength national army battalions that were manning the defences along England’s southern coast.

Comprised of middle-aged ‘citizen soldiers,’ Home Guard brigades were issued an assortment of ad hoc weaponry, much of which had been rushed into production.

Although Germany would eventually abandon all plans of landing troops on British soil, the Home Guard (and its oddball arsenal) continued to hold the line until the very end of the war. Here’s a glimpse at some of their more outlandish weaponry.

The Blacker Bombard. (Image source: WikiCommons)

Blacker Bombard

Britain left more than 400 tanks and 2,400 heavy guns on the beaches of Dunkirk in June of 1940. So if Hitler’s Panzers did cross the channel later in the fall, the job of stopping them would fall to the Home Guard and their the 29-mm Spigot “Blacker Bombard” anti-tank mortars. Designed by a 53-year old lieutenant-colonel-turned-inventor named Stewart Blacker, the weapon was cheap, simple to manufacturer and easy to operate. The 300-pound, smoothbore gun could lob a 20-pound anti-tank bomb about 100 yards. The whole system was built to be carried onto the battlefield and deployed by a crew of five. It could even fixed into a concrete fighting position. While widely celebrated in the civilian press as an example of good old British pluck and ingenuity, Blacker Bombard crews were far less than enthusiastic about the weapon. Not only was it terribly inaccurate, its high-explosive projectile — which wasn’t even capable of penetrating a tank’s armour — tended to spray shell fragments back at the crew when used on targets at close range. Despite this, more than 22,000 were manufactured between 1940 and 1941. The weapon wasn’t a total bust however — the design would go onto inform the development of the British Army’s PIAT anti-tank gun and even the Royal Navy’s highly effective anti-submarine weapon known as the Hedgehog.

A Smith Gun. (Image source: WikiCommons)

Smith Gun

While the Blacker Bombard was dangerous for its crews, the Smith Gun could be downright deadly to those operating it. Another ad-hoc smoothbore, light anti-tank weapon, the system, which was introduced in 1941, fired a 3-inch shell up to 300 yards. Unfortunately, its ammunition had a tendency to detonate in the tube when fired injuring or killing its crews.

A diagram of a "Sticky Bomb".
A diagram of a “Sticky Bomb”.

Sticky Bombs

Even more hazardous for Home Guardsmen was the No. 74 ST Grenade or “Sticky Bomb.” The adhesive-coated explosive, which was designed to bond to the side of a tank before exploding, could just as easily attach itself to the soldier throwing it, with predictably fatal consequences. More than 2.5 million of the one-pound grenades were manufactured between 1940 and 1943. Both the spherical charge and its industrial-strength gooey coating were housed in a light casing that could be cracked open just prior to use. Although the glue was certainly powerful enough to unintentionally gum the five-second delayed fuse bomb to a hapless user’s hand, pant leg or sleeve, the weapon would often fail to attach to damp or grimy surfaces, like a mud-covered tank. Despite its shortcomings, the weapon did see service in North Africa, the Mediterranean and even the Far East.

The Beaverette was a pint-sized armoured car that was actually slower than a tank.
The Beaverette  — a pint-sized armoured car that was actually slower than a tank.

The Beaverette

Britain’s Home Guard even had its own armoured vehicle… sort of. The Beaverette was first manufactured in late 1940 by the Standard Motor Co. on orders of the Minister of Aircraft Production, William Maxwell Aitken, formally known as Lord Beaverbrook (hence the machine’s name). Less of a fighting vehicle than an armoured civilian car, the three-man Beaverette was shrouded with 1/3-inch (11 mm) steel plates, which were reinforced by heavy wooden planks. Initial production models were inadequately armed, packing just a single Bren gun; subsequent variants featured twin Vickers machine guns — a marginal improvement. Critically underpowered by a four-cylinder, 46-hp engine, the two-ton clunker topped out at an unimpressive 24 mph (38 km/h). By way of comparison, a 25-ton Panzer IV had a maximum speed of 26 mph (42 km/h). By the time production ceased in 1942, nearly 3,000 Beaverettes had rolled off British assembly lines. Only a handful exist today as museum pieces.

Northover Projector used old-school gunpowder and musket percussion caps.
Northover Projector used old-school gunpowder and musket percussion caps to lob incendiary grenades.

Northover Projector

By 1940, black powder weaponry had been obsolete for nearly a century. But that didn’t stop one LDV officer by the name of Robert Northover from engineering a small field gun that used old-style gunpowder along with vintage musket percussion caps. The 2.5-Inch Northover Projector was an ordinary length of metal pipe, sealed at one end, and fitted onto a tripod. Its three-man crew could use the weapon to fire cylindrical glass grenades loaded with highly volatile white phosphorous up to 150 yards. Unfortunately, the shock of the blast inside the barrel sometimes shattered the shells scorching the gun’s crew. Nearly 19,000 of the oversized muskets were developed between 1940 and 1943. Each cost approximately £10 to manufacture.

Pikes were useful weapons in the Middle Ages, but not so much in the 20th Century.
Pikes were useful weapons in the Middle Ages, but not so much in the 20th Century.

Croft’s Pikes

And if you thought black powder was antiquated, get a load of this: Small arms were in such short supply following the Dunkirk evacuation, up to 40 percent of the Home Guard’s 1.6 million volunteers had to make do without rifles. So when the British prime minister Winston Churchill demanded that each LDV soldier be armed with something (anything), the government requisitioned a quarter-million Medieval-style steel pikes. Members of the guard and the wider population were understandably outraged when details of the project were revealed. The minister in charge of the War Office, Lord Henry Page Croft, tried to defend the move by pointing out that the ancient weaponry might still prove effective in close quarters battle, particularly in urban areas. It was a position that was roundly blasted by the opposition in Parliament. Accordingly, the weapons, which were never actually issued, became known sardonically as “Croft’s Pikes”. Eventually, increased weapons production remedied the shortage of rifles and sub-machine guns and all Home Guardsmen were soon more effectively armed. 

(Originally published in MilitaryHistoryNow.com on March 30, 2014)

SOURCES
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/home_guard.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacker_Bombard
http://www.nam.ac.uk/exhibitions/permanent-galleries/world-wars-1905-1947/gallery-highlights/dont-panic
http://www.military-history.org/articles/back-to-the-drawing-board-beaverette-armoured-car.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Beaverette
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Guard_(United_Kingdom)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northover_Projector
http://www.guns.com/2013/02/25/northover-projector-wwii/

6 thoughts on “Instant Arsenal – Six Bizarre Impromptu Weapons of Britain’s WW2 Home Guard

  1. Re Crofts Pikes. These were not requisitioned medieval weapons but surplus bayonets welded to steel pipes and they were issued and used on duty. Soon withdrawn, the bayonets cut off and reused as bayonets.

    The Beaverette was not a Home Guard vehicle, even if some devolved to them. It was a quick substitute for the Field Force etc. Soon relegated to second line use.

    On the SE coast improvised weapons were the exception. My grandfather’s, on the SE coast, Home Guard Company in 1940 had service rifles, 2 Vickers MMG, service grenades and artillery support from a Field Force artillery battery and a variety of mines and explosive obstacles.

  2. 74 grenade in storage and initial handling had thin steel or thin Bakelite hemispherical covers held closed by a clip – these contained a few tiny rubber prongs to prevent adhesion to the explosive vessel . In attack the clip was undone, the covers shaken off , the safety pin pulled out whilst firmly holding the firing lever closed, the adhesive coated knitted sock surrounding the glass vessel was smashed against the armour to increase the area of adhesive contact and to explosively couple the charge to the armour. The explosive content was of nitroglycerine desensitised with dinitrophenol and made into a gel to limit escape through any rent in the sock as this could reduce the effect and contaminate the operator. Instructors would teach that the most effective deployment was to wait in a slit trench until an enemy tank passed over when the operator would smash the primed grenade onto the underbelly and let go in the hope that the vehicle would carry the explosion out of range of the soldier. I doubt if this was ever achieved but it may have been in the desperate days of the Eighth Army.

  3. The anti-personnel round for the Smith gun consisted of a sheet steel cordite filled cartridge with percussion cap screwed onto a cast iron TNT filled bomb (no driving band hence not a shell) fitted with an ‘always fuze’ (fuse is for electricians). The fuze had a small lead ball between invert conical anvils fixed to a striking pin held off the detonator cap by a light spring and secured by a safety pin attached to a linen tape at the end of which was fixed a little lead weight. The tape was wound round the body of the fuze then covered by a screwed on Bakelite cap. In action the gunner would remove the cap, load the round into and close the breech and fire. The gun being smooth-bore ( no rifling) imparted no stabilising spin to the bomb so in flight it tumbled over such that a direct action fuze could be ineffective hence the ‘always fuze’ would initiate which ever way it was knocked..

    1. Further to mine about the 3-inch smooth-bore round I was inspecting a round that had been mishandled and damaged in the field and returned to my depot. To my discomfort when I passed it from one hand to the other the broken cap fell away allowing the stuffed in tape and weight to fall and pull out the pin so there I was with a sensitised bomb in my hot little hand – one knock and yours truly would have been shredded. I carried it so carefully to the demolition ground where I set it down very slowly for the Pioneers to surround it with sandbags and the nice IOO officer to blow it up for me using a one pound slab of TNT, a PETN primer, a det. and a length of slow fuze ignited with his cig lighter. ( light the blue touch paper and retire to a safe distance behind a blast wall. BANG – game over

  4. It was Churchill who referred to bayonets as pikes. My grandfather, Lord Croft, wasn’t seriously advocating the use of medieval pikes with six-foot long poles. He had the unenviable task of equipping the Home Guard which was short of armaments and he ordered guns from the USA. He had sleepless nights worrying if the shipment would arrive or be torpedoed. His critics didn’t have these worries and clearly didn’t know that bayonets were often referred to as pikes.

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