Peak Warming Man said:

He was in the real dads army then

As Mr. Ridley’s history suggests, the members of ‘Dad’s Army’ should no be lightly dismissed.

A great many of them were, like William, veterans of WW1 and of the trench fighting of that war, the brutality and savagery of which would be incomprehensible to most of us. Few of them were strangers to a bayonet.

If it came down to the wire, they would not necessarily have been push-overs.