Home Guard smoke screens and improvised pillboxes

Improvised Home Guard defence plans combined explosions with smoke intended to conceal defenders as they closed with an invader. The discussion moves from surviving film of these schemes to locally constructed pillboxes. Some positions are described as having been built by Home Guard units without appearing in the government's standard plans. In this account, units deliberately kept those positions to themselves, so an enemy would need local observation to discover defences absent from official records. A personal observation from north Cornwall supplies an example of several nonstandard positions overlooking an approach. Their north-coast location is considered surprising because a seaborne attacker would have to approach from the Irish Sea. Their location and arrangement are interpreted as evidence of deliberate local planning. The example is observational; no unit record or construction document is identified.