On the march: The Home Guard in Hyde Park on the third anniversary of their formation

THE REAL DAD'S ARMY: THE WAR DIARIES OF COLONEL RODNEY FOSTER (Viking £16.99)

By John Harding

Often cited as the funniest TV sitcom ever made, Dad’s Army has so seeped into our national consciousness that it’s acquired the status of history.

Mention of the Home Guard brings to mind Captain Mainwaring and his hapless crew, rather than the brave men - too young, old or unfit for active service, or in protected vital occupations - who sacrificed years of their spare time and were ready to risk their lives in the event of a German invasion in World War II.

The reality has been more or less lost - until now, with the publication of these diaries of a real-life Mainwaring, Colonel Rodney Foster.

Discovered at an Exeter car boot sale and subsequently ...

Pink Spitfire PR XI

World War II marked a time of great innovation, which was sometimes practical and sometimes loony. Those two kinds of innovation came together when great military minds decided that to keep an airplane from being spotted, they needed to paint it pink. Find out why a pink aircraft can get lost in the sky.

The Spitfire is a much loved plane, even today. Built in the late 1930s, it has the look of a classic airplane, with an oblong, slightly rounded body, wings that look like a huge oval strapped to the plane, and a 'blister' of glass over the cockpit. Whenever someone steps out of a Spitfire they should have on leather flying gloves and an aviator's scarf blowing in the wind. That scarf, however, may be very tough to match with the plane. Spitfires went through extensive rounds of camouflage paint, from dark ...

WING COMMANDER 'MAX' AITKEN

601 Squadron RAF

We didn't think the Germans had a chance. We had fought them over France, over their own aerodromes. We knew that the Hurricane and Spitfire were as good as anything they had got, we knew our morale was as good or better than theirs and when it came to fighting over our own homeland, if we had to get out we'd be all right by parachute. And of course we had the biggest asset any Air Force ever had, which was radar. Radar really won the Battle of Britain because without it we would have been doing standing patrols and with the limited number of aircraft and limited number of pilots you couldn't have done it. As it was we could wait on the ground and then radar would watch and through various controls we'd be told to take ...

Heinkel He 111 P

The P-2

The P-2, like the later P-4, was given stronger armour and two MG 15 machine guns in "waist" mounts on either side of the fuselage and a MG 15 mounted in the Ikaria A Stand mount in the nose.

The P-2 was also given Rüstsatz "field equipment sets", to upgrade the weak defensive armament to four or five MG 15 machine guns.

The P-4

The armament consisted of three defensive MG 15 machine guns. But these were not sufficient, so a further six MG 15s and one MG 17 machine gun was added. Because of the increase in defensive firepower, the crew numbers increased from four to five.

Heinkel He 111

H-1

The He 111 H-1 was fitted with a standard set of three 7.92 mm (.312 in) MG 15.

The experiences during the Polish Campaign lead to an increase in defensive armament ...

A 12,000lb HC blockbuster pictured in the factory minus-tail unit.

A 12,000lb HC blockbuster being dropped.

Blockbuster or "cookie" was the name given to several of the largest conventional bombs used in World War II by the Royal Air Force (RAF). The term Blockbuster was originally a name coined by the press and referred to a bomb which had enough explosive power to destroy an entire city block.

The bombs then called Blockbusters were the RAF's 4,000 lb — also known as a cookie — 8,000 and 12,000 lb (1,800, 3,600 and 5,400 kg) HC (High Capacity) bombs. These bombs had especially thin casings that allowed them to contain approximately three-quarters of their weight in explosive, with the 4,000 pounder containing over 3,000 lb (1,360 kg) of Amatol. Most "normal" bombs (termed Medium Capacity — or MC — by the RAF) contained ...

The haunting new film, Resistance, released this week, is set in 1944 and invites that profound question: What would you have done during World War II?

By Robert Hardman

On a clear day, you can see 11 English and Welsh counties not to mention the Bristol Channel from this ridge. No wonder the men of ‘Jonah’ Patrol of 202 Battalion, Home Guard had their operational base up here in these Monmouthshire hills.

Their accommodation was less spectacular, though. And I am sitting in it. Six men would have squeezed into this damp chamber six feet below the forest floor.

It was so well-built that most of it is still here, unmarked and unvandalised. But the occupants would not have had to put up with it for long once it became operational. Because their life expectancy was less than a fortnight.

These were the men of the Auxiliary Units, volunteers equipped ...

Industrial buildings and the railway station are highlighted on the map.

Germany targeted Ipswich docks and the surrounding area for bombing raids during World War II, according to maps recently acquired by Ipswich Museum.

Industrial buildings such as Ransomes are highlighted, as is the town's railway station.

The two maps were part of a haul of intelligence about the UK exported from a Nazi library in Austria in 1946.

The family of Squadron Leader HCK Henderson, who led the mission, sold the maps at auction in August.

The maps were part of Operation Sea Lion, the name given to Germany's plan for the invasion of Britain.

Jayne Austin, collections manager at Ipswich Museum, said Britain feared the information would fall into the hands of the Russians unless they acted quickly.

She said memos from the time state that a 'train of about five ten ton box wagons' were ...

Supermarine Spitfire

Probably the most successful British fighter of World War II; placed in front-line service throughout the war. At least 22,759 Spitfire and Spitfire variants (photoreconnaissance aircraft and naval fighters) were built between March 1936 and March 1949 in 54 major marks (not counting variants in engine fit and prototypes).

The Spitfire was a pilot’s airplane—a very responsive aircraft with superb control harmony that gave the pilot plenty of feedback as manoeuvre limits were approached. The ability of the Spitfire’s airframe to accept progressively more powerful engines was a major factor in its continued success. Its only real fault was a relative lack of range on internal fuel (approximately 490 miles for a Mk.1, 660 miles for a Mk.VIII/IX with fuselage tank).

The Spitfire Mk.I was fitted with a Rolls-Royce Merlin III producing 990 bph using 87-octane fuel. It was armed ...

Knickebein transmitter ground station. Many were built along the coast of occupied Europe.

LORENZ

A prewar, civilian radio beam navigation system adapted as a bomber aid by both the RAF and Luftwaffe. It comprised a radio signal broadcast by the airfield and received passively by approaching aircraft. It had a limited range of about 20 miles. Its main importance was to aid wartime development of the Knickebein and X-Gerät beam systems.

KNICKEBEIN

A Luftwaffe electronic navigation aid for night bombers in which two directional radio beams were broadcast to intersect over a target in Britain. The bombers followed one beam—guided by Morse dots and dashes—until it met the second, then released their bomb load. It was an advance in both range and accuracy on the prewar Lorenz blind-landing system used by civil aviation. By July 1940, the RAF developed a counter, code-named “Aspirin,” which imposed a British beam ...

Mussolini decided to join Hitler's subjugation of England and formed this expeditionary force on 10th September 1940. However, the units proved relatively ineffective in the aerial campaign due to outdated aircraft and tactics. They were withdrawn by 15 April 1941, having made a few coastal raids and local fighter patrols.

Another waste of Italian lives and equipment was the stay in Belgium by the CAI during the tail end of the Battle of Britain. The nonplussed Germans were polite allies, but really had little use for pilots who had had no bad weather flying training. It should have been obvious that even if little could be done in the short term about the equipment of the RA, then there was a desperate need for properly structured training. Those Italians fortunate enough to be trained by the Luftwaffe had their chances of survival greatly enhanced-and were more use as airmen ...

A dedicated microsite, 1940: Britain’s Finest Hour (www.iwm.org.uk/1940), outlines the key events of 1940, featuring archive photographs and film to tell the story of this momentous year, and includes up-to-date information on the events and exhibitions that are happening to mark the anniversary as well as newly commissioned films and interactive features.

- The breathtaking Battle of Britain Air Show at IWM Duxford (4 & 5 September 2010)
- A re-enactment of Winston Churchill's famous ‘The Few’ speech, followed by a fly-past (20 August 2010)

Date: From July 10, 1940, to October 31, 1940

Definition: A series of aerial bombings made by the Germans over British cities during World War II.

Significance: The Battle of Britain, designed to completely demoralize the British by destroying the nation’s industrial and military infrastructure, was the first major battle to be fought almost entirely in the air.
 
Background

By the end of June, 1940, the German army had conquered almost every country that had opposed it. Only Great Britain, protected by the English Channel, remained in the fight, even though it had lost much of its army on the Continent in fruitless support of its allies. Thus, when German chancellor Adolf Hitler offered peace to Britain, much of the world thought his offer would be accepted. When Britain refused, Hitler issued orders for an invasion, a vital preliminary to which would be the elimination of the British Royal ...

By Jon Lake

Everyone 'knows' that the Battle of Britain marked a historic victory for the RAF, and a humiliating defeat for the Luftwaffe. This is, however, a dangerously simplistic conclusion. Long after the end of the Battle, German aircraft were able to operate over Britain, attacking targets with virtual impunity. The Luftwaffe had been unable to achieve the air supremacy required for an invasion, and admittedly failed to crush its enemy. But at the same time the RAF had similarly failed to destroy the Luftwaffe, and was unable to win complete control of its own airspace.

In the end, Fighter Command achieved its stated (and relatively modest) aim by surviving intact long enough to keep Britain in the war and to deny Hitler any chance of invading, while the Luftwaffe failed to achieve its more ambitious aims. In that sense, at least, the RAF 'won' the Battle. An official ...