Headscratchers / Dad's Army

• Fridge Logic or possibly Fridge Horror: If Number One Section are Mainwaring's most trusted and responsible men, what are the rest of them like?
  • Probably not that interesting, otherwise the series would be about them.
• What does Wilson see in Mrs Pike? She's quite ghastly on every level!
  • That we see. If I recall correctly, most of her screen time is when the rest of the platoon are around, and I don't think she'd be the sort of person to like that both her lover and son were in the Home Guard. So probably when we see her her dander's up and she's being hysterical. At home she could be a lovely woman. Or, maybe Wilson is a bit of a masochist.
  • I've always assumed that ~18 years prior Wilson was just playing around, seeing what he could catch. Had an affair with a (most probably then married) Mrs. Pike on a whim. After the birth of his son Frank (verified as his son by the great Croft himself in an interview) and Mr. Pike's probable death, he probably stayed with Mrs. Pike out of a sense of duty (remember the episode where his daughter from a previous marriage came to visit and he said he got her into a good school). Wilson does feel duty to the children he has had even though he's been a bit of a player.
  • Or, looked at another way, it's no more a headscratcher than any other sitcom relationship. Relationships - at least amongst adults and not young starry-eyes lovers - generally get portrayed as fairly joyless affairs on British TV of this era. Middle-aged women are generally the henpecking ball-and-chain there to make the men look all the more funnily ineffectual by emasculating and belittling them with their dominance (just look at Captain Mainwaring). So it's not that Wilson has masochistically chosen to have an affair with a tyrant, but that this is just what women are like in that world.
  • Also, she's... not that ghastly. She's a bit shrill and tends to nag, certainly, but she's not the worst woman in the world.
• In The Deadly Attachment, why did Mainwaring allow the U-boat captain to take them prisoner? Even with Hodges as a hostage the Germans were still in a weak position.
• I'm always wondering what would have happened if a German invasion had occurred and the platoon had to rely on the Chinese rocket gun they 'requisitioned' from the museum in "Museum Piece". Would it really be so out of date as to be ineffective against infantry, or at least cause a bit of trouble?
  • Or, for that matter, Colonel Square's antiquated rifles? (We can ignore the horses.)
  • Assuming a successful German landing (Operation Sealion was actually an incredibly flawed plan even on paper and most historians and military experts believe it didn't actually have any kind of realistic chance of success, though of course the British wouldn't necessarily have known that at the time nor taken that chance), realistically the antiquated weapons would have likely caused only superficial damage to the invaders. Even infantry was a lot more heavily armoured and protected against what were basically muskets and a fifteenth century Hwatcha in 1940. They might have caused a handful of casualties but would have almost certainly been quickly overrun even by infantry or paratroopers, never mind any kind of armoured units. Acquiring them was more of a morale boost than any serious kind of defences, and deep down everyone probably knows it.
    • The Home Guard's job was to die in place in order to waste Nazi resources killing them, and to buy time for the real military to regroup and counterattack. Nobody expected them to last more than a couple of hours, if that, in actual combat. They were to be a nuisance to the invading Nazis, but not a serious impediment to them.
    • That seems a bit overly cynical. I've always understood that the idea was for the Home Guard to form the core of a partisan resistance effort, attacking supply lines and soft targets, that sort of thing.
    • It sort of depends on precisely when we're discussing the matter, since their role evolved over time. In the very early days of the Local Defence Volunteers (as they were then-known), there was a certain cynically (or, perhaps more favourably, desperately) pragmatic element to them as mentioned above; for the first few months following the fall of France (say, around May-September), there were genuine fears that a German invasion of Britain was imminent, and most of the regular forces were depleted and lacking in weaponry following the Dunkirk evacuation. At that point, while there might have been some idea or hope of them acting as a partisan force, in practice the idea pretty much was that they were bodies to throw at the enemy to keep them occupied until the regular forces could mobilise, since realistically they wouldn't have had time to organise or train for anything else (it should also be noted that many of the men who initially signed up did so in the expectation, or at least suspicion, that this would be the case). Then, when fears cooled a bit and it became clear that an invasion was not going to happen in the immediate term and that the British had some breathing space, they became a kind of auxiliary force intended to pose a more robust front-line defence in support of the regular army, coupled with training for this kind of partisan warfare; this is when they were essentially rebadged as the Home Guard. And then, as the war went on and it became increasingly clear that the Germans weren't going to invade, while they kept up this role in theory (since, as mentioned above, no one wanted to risk being proven wrong) in practice they became a kind of auxiliary civil defence force supplementing the police and local authorities (guarding bombed banks and manning checkpoints, that kind of thing).

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