History UsefulNotes / TheHomeFront

In December of 1939, with U-boats again on the prowl, Parliament commissioned a study to see if the population of the home islands could survive entirely on the food produced locally. Dietitian Elsie Widdowson and paediatrition Alex McCance used harvest data from 1938 to design and then test a hypothetical food program for every citizen of the isles. The good news: the home isles could produce enough food to feed the entire population of the United Kingdom and prevent hunger and starvation! The bad news: Due to the reliance on unlimited potatoes, vegetables, and whole grain breads, [[{{Fartillery}}people would need to get used to some unpleasant trips on the tube every morning.]] With the results of the study in hand, Britain introduced rationing in January of 1940 since 70% of its foodstuffs were imported and the Germans were attempting to implement a blockade of their own. All of Europe, including the neutral countries, followed and implemented rationing for the duration of the war. The severity of rationing varied greatly: Germany, for example, imposed a strict but very generous rationing law until 1943, in order to keep up civilian morale, until losses on the Eastern front finally convinced them to belatedly mobilize all of their economic resources for war.

In January 1940 Britain introduced rationing, since 70% of its foodstuffs were imported and the Germans were attempting to implement a blockade of their own. All of Europe, including the neutral countries, implemented rationing for the duration of the war. The severity of rationing varied greatly: Germany, for example, imposed a strict but very generous rationing law until 1943, in order to keep up civilian morale, until losses on the Eastern front finally convinced them to belatedly mobilize all of their economic resources for war.

Once France fell the eyes of the Nazi War Mare-with-panje-cart[[note]] 'War Machine' is the popular term, but the horse was just as if not more important to the German military than was the steam-locomotive. Germany invaded the Soviet Union with 120,000 automobiles and more than ''600,000'' horses. Even the British had a more motorised (proportionally) military force than Germany did throughout the war despite their relative lack of strategic materials. [[/note]] turned to Italy's new enemy of Greece, the ally-turned enemy of Yugoslavia (which had suffered a British-backed coup), and Britain itself. After Dunkirk, the British army was in tatters, although if it had failed to evacuate as many troops from France, things would have been even worse. During the first year of the Battle of Britain the only adequately-armed (with machine guns, mortars, artillery, trucks, and radios) division in Britain was Canadian, the British forces having abandoned eight divisions' (120,000 combat troops) worth of heavy-weapons and machinery in the retreat. A galling and at the time much-noted consequence was that the lorries and motor vehicles, as well as some tanks abandoned in France, were refurbished and used to equip German 'third-rate' and anti-partisan units. Many saw action as far as Belgrade and Minsk under their new drivers (because they used such unorthodox parts and were worse than useless against contemporary Soviet armoured vehicles, they were used to massacre civilians and kill partisans). When the cream of the Wehrmacht's armoured forces were destroyed in the western Ukraine in 1943-44, some of these British tanks were actually put back into front-line usage... to little effect.

Typical weekly food rations for a British family of four in April 1945 were:
* Bacon and Ham - 1lb (454g).
* Meat - [[Usefulnotes/OldBritishMoney 4/8]] (24p) worth, which bought around 4lb 12oz (2.15kg) depending on the cut.
* [[BritsLoveTea Tea]] - 8oz (227g); that's around 100 cups worth or 3-4 cups per person per day.
* Sugar - 2lb (907g).
* Butter - 8oz (227g).
* Lard - 8oz (227g).
* Margarine - 1lb (454g).
* Cheese - 8oz (227g); vegetarian families could trade in their meat and bacon ration for an additional 12oz (340g).

Fortunately for Britain (though unfortunately for Japan) the Americans had...[[NukeEm other]] ideas on how to deal with the Pacific Theatre, but [[UsefulNotes/AtomicBombingsOfHiroshimaAndNagasaki that's another story...]]

They could be shot down by radar-guided anti-aircraft fire using proximity fuses or intercepted by fighters, with one Spitfire pilot reportedly flipping one over with his wing, though reports of this becoming a standard tactic were greatly exaggerated.[[labelnote:*]] This is referenced in ''Series/TheUnit'', when Bob tries it on a plane carrying a chemical weapon. It doesn't work.[[/labelnote]] Eventually London was protected by a nearly impenetrable three-ring defense, with an outer ring of the fastest long-range fighters (Tempests, Mustangs, and later the Gloster Meteor, the first jet fighter to enter service) an middle ring of short ranged Spitfires and and inner ring of AA guns that collectively accounted for nearly 80% of the V1s launched towards the end of the campaign.

It was during this period that King George VI and his queen, UsefulNotes/ElizabethI, supposedly won the enduring devotion of their people; the King vowed to remain in London "[[InItsHourOfNeed for the duration]]," and, despite his stutter, made a series of wartime broadcasts that helped keep morale up even as bombs rained over southern England. Buckingham Palace was bombed at the height of the Blitz, and the Queen Mother cemented her place in the hearts of the British people forever with the quote, "Finally. Now I can look the [heavily bombed] East End in the face." She also said, when asked why the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were not sent to the relative safety of the Commonwealth -- after all, the Dutch royals-in-exile had sent their Queen and princesses to Canada -- that "The children won't go without me. I won't leave the King. And the King will never leave."

It was during this period that King George VI and his queen, Elizabeth (no, [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen not that one]], though then-Princess Elizabeth was well-loved in her own right), supposedly won the enduring devotion of their people; the King vowed to remain in London "[[InItsHourOfNeed for the duration]]," and, despite his stutter, made a series of wartime broadcasts that helped keep morale up even as bombs rained over southern England. Buckingham Palace was bombed at the height of the Blitz, and the Queen Mother cemented her place in the hearts of the British people forever with the quote, "Finally. Now I can look the [heavily bombed] East End in the face." She also said, when asked why the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were not sent to the relative safety of the Commonwealth -- after all, the Dutch royals-in-exile had sent their Queen and princesses to Canada -- that "The children won't go without me. I won't leave the King. And the King will never leave."

* Another operation (Called [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat Operation Mincemeat]]) involving disguising a dead tramp as a British soldier; the corpse was set to wash up on a Spanish beach with papers that suggested the Allies were not going to attack Sicily (the obvious target) but were actually only going to use Sicily as a distraction for a two-pronged assault, Sardinia on one side, the Grecian islands and the Balkans on the other. The deception was so successful that Sicily was taken with minimal Allied casualties. This incident was later immortalized in book and film as ''Film/TheManWhoNeverWas''.

* [[SpotOfTea Tea]] - 8oz (227g); that's around 100 cups worth or 3-4 cups per person per day.

Once France fell the eyes of the Nazi War Mare-with-panje-cart[[note]] 'War Machine' is the popular term, but the horse was just as if not more important to the German military than was the steam-locomotive. Germany invaded the Soviet Union with 120,000 automobiles and more than ''600,000'' horses. Even the British had a more motorised (proportionally) military force than Germany did throughout the war despite their relative lack of strategic materials. [[/note]] turned to Italy's new enemy of Greece, the ally-turned enemy of Yugoslavia (which had suffered a British-backed coup), and Britain itself. After Dunkirk the British army was in tatters, although if it had failed to evacuate as many troops from France things would have been even worse. During the first year of the battle of Britain the only adequately-armed (with machine guns, mortars, artillery, trucks, and radios) division in Britain was Canadian, the British forces having abandoned eight divisions' (120,000 combat troops) worth of heavy-weapons and machinery in the retreat. A galling and at the time much-noted consequence was that the lorries and motor vehicles, as well as some tanks abandoned in France, were refurbished and used to equip German 'third-rate' and anti-partisan units. Many saw action as far as Belgrade and Minsk under their new drivers (because they used such unorthodox parts and were worse than useless against contemporary Soviet armoured vehicles, they were used to massacre civilians and kill partisans). When the cream of the Wehrmacht's armoured forces were destroyed in the western Ukraine in 1943-44, some of these British tanks were actually put back into front-line usage... to little effect.

This would have been very difficult. Britain could replace planes and pilots faster than Germany could, with the added bonus that an RAF pilot who bailed out could be returned to the fray, whereas a Luftwaffe one was permanently lost to the Germans. Even if the Luftwaffe had gained aerial superiority, it would have been likely to be a fleeting victory and its capacity for attacking the Home Fleet (which, by itself, was still comfortably more powerful than the entire German Navy - and that's even before any reinforcements could be drawn from the Atlantic or Mediterranean fleets) was totally abysmal, something cemented by the scuttling of the French Fleet at Toulon in 1942. However, the disabling of runways (by making large holes in them with bombs, for example) could easily have led to a downward spiral: fewer runways means fewer planes in the air, meaning more bombers get through to destroy runways, until you run out of runways and the remaining planes start getting destroyed on the ground.

The pride of the Royal Air Force was the [[CoolPlane Supermarine Spitfire]], indisputably the most iconic British fighter of the war (perhaps most iconic fighter plane full-stop), and arguably the best. Faster than the vast majority of its competitors thanks to its signature elliptical wing shape, it was more than a match for the German Messerschmitt 109, and later versions went toe to toe with the Messerschmidt 262, one of the first fighter jets to see combat. Modified versions used their speed to serve on photo-reconnaissance missions. While media both at the time and since focused on the glamorous Spitfire, the more numerous fighter was the Hawker Hurricane - not as fast and agile as the Spitfire, but rugged, dependable and just as loved by its pilots. In a case of BoringYetPractical, the Hurricane's stability in flight, which made it less suited for dogfighting, made it far more capable when it came to the business of taking on German bombers; the Spitfires drew the glory, ideally keeping the German fighter escorts occupied, but the Hurricanes almost certainly saved more lives on the ground.

It was during this period that King George VI and his queen, Elizabeth (no, [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen not that one]], though then-Princess Elizabeth was well-loved in her own right), supposedly won the enduring devotion of their people; the King vowed to remain in London "[[InItsHourOfNeed for the duration]]," and, despite his stutter, made a series of wartime broadcasts that helped keep morale up even as bombs rained over southern England. Buckingham Palace was bombed at the height of the Blitz, and the Queen Mother cemented her place in the hearts of the British people forever with the quote, "Finally. Now I can look the [heavily bombed] East End in the face." She also said, when asked why the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were not sent to the relative safety of the Commonwealth -- after all, the Dutch royals-in-exile had sent their Queen and princesses to Canada -- that "The girls cannot go without me; I cannot go without the King; and the King will never leave his country."

Despite all the destruction deaths and wounds were not as high as expected, mostly because pre-war projections for this kind of attack bordered on the insanely fatalistic. Most families with a garden had an Anderson shelter, a mostly underground bomb shelter. In London, despite instructions to the contrary, people used UsefulNotes/TheLondonUnderground as a shelter, and seeing as you could buy a platform ticket and stay as long as you liked anyway, no one could do anything about it - the government, despite initial attempts to stop it, ended up shrugging and going with it. People without bomb shelters were told to crouch under the table.

There was some further bombing by German aircraft in 1942 (the "Baedeker Blitz"), which targeted tourist cities without any military reason. (o be fair, these were in retaliation for RAF bombing of similar German cities, such as Lubeck. Both were partly motivated also because these cities were poorly defended and burned easily, and it has been suggested, for revenge, something noted by RAF Air Marshal 'Bomber' Harris when he famously said, [[RoaringRampageOfRevenge "They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind"]], and the largely ineffective raids of 1943/4.

'''Turn Out That Light! The Blackout'''

The V-2 was the first ballistic missile and first man-made object launched into space, the progenitor of all modern rockets. Over 3,000 V-2s were launched by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets in World War II. Unlike the V-1, they were completely impossible to stop[[labelnote:Although...]]A system ''was'' proposed, by General Frederick Alfred Pile of Anti-Aircraft Command, to destroy V-2s in flight by saturating their descent paths with massed AA fire. This idea was first brought up as early as August 1944 (_before_ the first V-2 was fired in anger), but the vast numbers of AA shells required (over 300,000 per V-2) meant that more damage would have been caused by unexploded shells falling back onto London than the V-2 itself would have inflicted, and the idea was shelved. It was brought up again in January 1945, this time using only a few hundred to a few thousand shells per missile (which would be carefully aimed to explode along the V-2's flightpath, as opposed to the original proposal to basically put as much AA fire as possible into the air and hope for the best), equipped with new fuzes which would greatly reduce the number of shells that failed to explode, but was put on hold until incoming V-2s could be tracked well enough to allow accurate gun laying; vast improvements in the ability to predict the V-2s' trajectories allowed the Pile system to finally be approved for use in late March 1945, but Allied military advances in the Low Countries and northern France pushed the V-2's available launch sites out of range of London before it could become operational.[[/labelnote]][[labelnote:more]]One V-2 ''was'' successfully destroyed in flight; it had the bad luck to be launched just as a squadron of American bombers returning to base passed overhead, and an alert machine-gunner fired at, and hit, the missile, shooting it down.[[/labelnote]]; luckily, their accuracy left much to be desired, which Britain's Doublecross system worked hard to make worse with disinformation of the missiles' impact locations.

More people died making it (French and particularly Soviet POWs were used as slave-labourers) than were killed by it.

This would have been very difficult. Britain could replace planes and pilots faster than Germany could, with the added bonus that an RAF pilot who bailed out could be returned to the fray, whereas a Luftwaffe one was permanently lost to the Germans. Even if the Luftwaffe had gained aerial superiority, it would have been likely to be a fleeting victory and its capacity for attacking the Home Fleet - still comfortably more powerful than the German Navy - was totally abysmal. However, the disabling of runways (by making large holes in them with bombs, for example) could easily have led to a downward spiral: fewer runways means fewer planes in the air, meaning more bombers get through to destroy runways, until you run out of runways and the remaining planes start getting destroyed on the ground.

Britain, however, had a few tricks up its sleeve. One of these their large and relatively advanced CHAIN HOME network of long frequency RDF ("Radio Distance Finding") stations - a technology better known today by the American acronym RADAR ([=RAdio=] Detection And Ranging).[[note]] The RDF designation was specifically chosen prewar to disguise their intentions as was already in common use for "radio direction finding. [[/note]] While most of the world's military powers, such as France and the USSR, had just a few sets Britain had invested in creating several dozen. These gave them near-total coverage of the eastern approaches to their entire (admittedly relatively small) country. Though primitive, these early long-wave stations had more than twice the detection range as sound detecting devices and could also determine range and altitude with a fair degree of accuracy, something no sound-based device could do.[[note]] The CHAIN HOME stations were backed by an extensive network of ground observers equipped with optical tracking equipment and later reinforced by a high-frequency radar network called CHAIN HOME LOW that covered the low altitudes that CHAIN HOME couldn't see.[[/note]]

It was during this period that King George VI and his queen, Elizabeth (no, [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen not that one]], though then-Princess Elizabeth was well-loved in her own right), supposedly won the enduring devotion of their people; the King vowed to remain in London "[[InItsHourOfNeed for the duration]]," and, despite his stutter, made a series of wartime broadcasts that helped keep morale up even as bombs rained over southern England. Buckingham Palace was bombed at the height of the Blitz, and the Queen Mother cemented her place in the hearts of the British people forever with the quote, "Finally. Now I can look the [heavily bombed] East End in the face." She also said, when asked why the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were not sent to the relative safety of the Commonwealth -- after all, the Dutch royals-in-exile had sent their Queen and princesses to Canada -- that "The girls cannot go without me; I cannot go without the King; and the King will never leave his country." Churchill made sure the nation heard that comment when he angrily overruled the censors trying to hush the strike up; after all, the population would not be complaining about enduring the bombs as much if the Royal Family has to dodge them too. Elizabeth and Margaret would remain in Buckingham Palace or nearby Windsor Castle for the duration, and HRH Elizabeth joined up with the Women's Auxiliaries as a driver and auto mechanic during the final months of the war. She remains both the only female member in the history of the British Crown to hold a military title in her own right[[note]]she rose to the rank of Junior Commander[[/note]] and the last living sovereign to be a veteran of the Second World War.

One of the most famous raids was on the industrial city Coventry on 14 November 1940, which killed at least 568 people and devastated much of the city, including destroying the ancient cathedral - it is sometimes claimed to have inspired the infamous Firebombing of Dresden. In any case, because of the devastation both cities suffered, they ended up in a twin-city arrangement after the war. The common theory is that ULTRA decrypts identified Coventry as a target, but the city could not be warned without alerting the Germans that the British were reading their messages, so the bombing was allowed to occur. RV Jones, a wartime scientist, however, says that the relevant message was not decrypted in time. He also pointed out that the Germans were using radio navigation beacons to find their targets, and on 14 November the British jammers were set to the wrong frequency and did precisely nothing.

There was some further bombing by German aircraft in 1942 (the "Baedeker Blitz"), which targeted tourist cities without any military reason. (To be fair, these were in retaliation for RAF bombing of similar German cities, such as Lubeck. Both were partly motivated also because these cities were poorly defended and burned easily.) and the largely ineffective raids of 1943/4.

Answer: The Local Defence Volunteers, later re-named The Home Guard. Unpaid and initially badly trained and equipped, these units were given army surplus and hand-me-downs when they became available but often had to make do with whatever they could scrounge up; the majority of Home Guard platoons were in rural areas, where there were at least plenty of privately owned shotguns and small-game rifles to go around, but members going on patrol with nothing but pitchforks or axe handles was not unheard of. They were often the butt of jokes and many did not take them seriously[[note]]One story goes that the reason that the Local Defense Volunteers were renamed as The Home Guard was because the initals "LDV" could also be read as "Look, Duck, and Vanish."[[/note]]. Hitler himself thought they were a cover for something else, and was [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_Units partly right]]. But they did valuable work, such as fire-watching, emergency work and assisting in training exercises. Their primary function was to act as an anti-paratrooper force.

We will never know how effective they would have been, but one thing is for sure, they were keen and inventive. As one army officer running an explosives training course was heard to say, dangerously keen and terrifyingly inventive. Most famous these days as the setting for the comedy ''Series/DadsArmy''. The show depicts a lot of elements quite faithfully.

Britain's full mobilization also extended to the arts and sciences. Unlike FascistButInefficient Germany, where the research efforts were often uncoordinated and scattered amongst various competing interests, England mobilized Academia for the duration. Their first task, a comprehensive review of old lab notebooks to see if anything useful had been overlooked, produced penicillin -- the original experiment being written off in the 1920s as a failure. Anything promising was promptly re-investigated; Promising research they lacked the time or resources to follow up on was sent to the United States -- national survival trumping national interest for the duration. The brilliant codebreakers at Bletchley Park are justly famous: less well known but no less important were the brilliant scientists of the Meteorological Office, whose weather forecasting gave the Western Allies a huge advantage throughout the entire war. Their crowning achievement came when they identified the narrow lull between two storm fronts that allowed the D-Day landings to proceed. Radar was rapidly developed from meter to centimeter and ultimately millimeter bands, allowing allied aircraft to go from spotting submarines to periscopes, ASDIC (soon re-christened with the more descriptive acronym [=SONAR=]) installations were made better, smaller, and more reliable. A huge range of weapons, from effective to wacky, were designed and tested. One of the best examples came shortly after D-Day, when it was found that the dust from dirt airfields in France was damaging the powerful Napier Sabre engines on Hawker Typhoon fighter bombers, a collection of aerodymamicists and engineers, designed, tested, and fielded an effective cyclonic air filter in just 24 hours. But perhaps their greatest achievement was the "Wizard War", where British radio and radar specialists engaged their German counterparts in an ever-escalating battle of spoofing, jamming, counter-jamming and other electronic countermeasures and soundly defeated them at virtually every turn.

* The [[UsefulNotes/{{SOE}} Special Operations Executive]] a.k.a. 'the Baker Street Irregulars' a.k.a. the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, created by Churchill and part set up by Chamberlain while he was in the war cabinet, with the mandate to "Set Europe Ablaze" with every last act of sabotage and dirty trickery that the trainers could think of. Trained and dropped spies over Europe to help the resistance groups, ordinary men and women risking life and limb sending secrets back the British Government. They were also responsible for Operation ANTHROPOID, training and inserting the two Czechoslovakian nationals who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SS and major architect of the Holocaust. Former Agents include Creator/IanFleming, [[Series/DoctorWho Jon Pertwee a.k.a the 3rd Doctor (who notably favoured a more secret agent style and gadget based approach]], and Creator/ChristopherLee, with Fleming apparently basing ''Franchise/JamesBond'' on both of the latter. We won't know the full story of what they did and where until after all of their agents are dead as the files are sealed until then.

Music wise, the era is remembered for the GlamorousWartimeSinger Music/VeraLynn, aka "The Forces' Sweetheart", who is still alive today, although long retired from singing - though as recently as 2009, at the age of 92, her 'Best Of' album topped the UK Album Charts. "We'll Meet Again" or "The White Cliffs of Dover" is a StandardSnippet for a British war movie. The period was also enriched by the more proletarian Gracie Fields, a [[OOpNorth northern]] chanteuse who could be described as the Hurricane to Dame Vera's Spitfire. Buck-toothed comedian and ukelele-accompanied singer George Formby is also remembered with great affection.

There were a more than a few embarrassing instances when they where deployed as opponents in training exercises against the regular army. They had a lot of men from [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI the previous war]] in their ranks and a very good understanding of local terrain, leading to a nasty habit of winning.

* ''Film/HenryV'', the Olivier version.

* ''In Which We Serve''

They did however suck resources and money away from the army. Well done, Vergeltungswaffe.

Britain during the UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. That had such a massive impact on British history, it's usually referred to simply as "The War".

Once France fell the eyes of the Nazi War Mare-with-panje-cart[[note]] 'War Machine' is the popular term, but the horse was just as if not more important to the German military than was the steam-locomotive. Germany invaded the Soviet Union with 120,000 automobiles and more than ''600,000'' horses. Even the British had a more motorised (proportionally) military force than Germany did throughout the war despite their relative lack of strategic materials. [[/note]] turned to Italy's new enemy of Greece, the ally-turned enemy of Yugoslavia (which had suffered a British-backed coup), and Britain itself. After Dunkirk the British army was in tatters, although if it had failed to evacuate as many troops from France things would have been even worse. During the first year of the battle of Britain the only adequately-armed (wih machine guns, mortars, artillery, trucks, and radios) division in Britain was Canadian, the British forces having abandoned eight divisions' (120,000 combat troops) worth of heavy-weapons and machinery in the retreat. A galling and at the time much-noted consequence was that the lorries and motor vehicles, as well as some tanks abandoned in France, were refurbished and used to equip German 'third-rate' and anti-partisan units. Many saw action as far as Belgrade and Minsk under their new drivers (because they used such unorthodox parts and were worse than useless against contemporary Soviet armoured vehicles, they were used to massacre civilians and kill partisans). When the cream of the Wehrmacht's armoured forces were destroyed in the western Ukraine in 1943-44, some of these British tanks were actually put back into front-line usage... to little effect.

It was during this period that King George VI and his queen, Elizabeth (no, [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen not that one]], though then-Princess Elizabeth was well-loved in her own right), supposedly won the enduring devotion of their people; the King vowed to remain in London "[[InItsHourOfNeed for the duration]]," and, despite his stutter, made a series of wartime broadcasts that helped keep morale up even as bombs rained over southern England. Buckingham Palace was bombed at the height of the Blitz, and the Queen Mother cemented her place in the hearts of the British people forever with the quote, "Finally. Now I can look the [heavily bombed] East End in the face." She also said, when asked why the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were not sent to the relative safety of the Commonwealth -- after all, the Dutch royals-in-exile had sent their Queen and princesses to Canada -- that "The girls cannot go without me; I cannot go without the King; and the King will never leave his country." Elizabeth and Margaret would remain in Buckingham Palace or nearby Windsor Castle for the duration, and HRH Elizabeth joined up with the Women's Auxiliaries as a driver and auto mechanic during the final months of the war. She remains both the only female member in the history of the British Crown to hold a military title in her own right[[note]]she rose to the rank of Junior Commander[[/note]] and the last living sovereign to be a veteran of the Second World War.

As a result of all these efforts: all there was of course grumbling about the state of food during the war, analysis of the situation concluded it was on the whole a resounding ''success'' with Britons having a better quality diet during the duration.