(1) Tom Wintringham, New Ways of War (1940)
I was born in 1898 in a house of solid Victorian brick in a town of solid Victorian prosperity. The prosperity was not elegant; in fact, it stank a bit of fish. I absorbed from my parents, nonconformists in religion, liberal in their outlook on life, a tradition of non-political radicalism.
(2) Bill Alexander, British Volunteers for Liberty (1992)
Eleven men in all commanded the British Battalion in actual battle: Wilfred McCartney (writer, who had to return before any fighting), Tom Wintringham (journalist), Jock Cunningham (labourer), Fred Copeman (ex-navy), Joe Hinks (army reservist), Peter Daly (labourer), Paddy O'Daire (labourer), Harold Fry (shoe repairer), Bill Alexander (industrial chemist), Sam Wild (labourer), and George Fletcher (newspaper canvasser). All except Wintringham had the opportunity of showing their abilities in action before being given leadership. All of them had been involved in working-class, anti-fascist activities at home, and had been influenced by Communist ideas and activity, although only Wintringham had held responsible positions in the Communist Party itself. In Spain their beliefs were reinforced by struggle and experience. The majority had been manual workers, having left school at fourteen - the usual lot of most in those days, no matter how intelligent or able. Only McCartney, Wintringham and Alexander had been to university; all had experienced the difficulties and frustration of finding work in a period of heavy unemployment. Their anti-fascism was anchored in hatred of the class and social system in Britain.
(3) Frank Ryan, The Fifteenth Brigade (1938)
In Spain since August 1936, his first assignment was machine-gun instructor. Later he was appointed in command of the British Battalion and led it at Jarama. Wounded on his second day in the field, he was just convalescent when typhoid put him back for another a few months. After a period as instructor at an Officers' Training Camp, he rejoined the XV Brigade in August, as a staff-officer, only to be again wounded on his second day in action, during street-fighting in Quinto. To the regret of all with whom he has worked, and of all he has led, his wound incapacitates him from active service for an indefinite period.
(4) Tom Hopkinson, Of This Our Time (1982)
At Picture Post we had come to know Tom Wintringham, who had gained experience of German methods of warfare while fighting for the International Brigade in Spain. He was also an excellent writer with a clear style and a vigorous outlook, and in a series of articles during May and June had established himself as the mouthpiece of new ideas and methods of guerrilla warfare. Since these depended little on square-bashing or highly organized staff work - and much on adaptability, local knowledge and ability to live off the country - they made a strong appeal to the freebooting spirit of the day and to the general determination to 'get stuck into things' without waiting for someone in Whitehall to issue permits in triplicate.
One evening in the summer of 1940 Wintringham and I were having dinner with Edward Hulton at his house in Hill Street, and we talked of the frustration in the LDV- recently renamed the Home Guard - over the fact that all they were getting was practice in forming fours when they wanted to learn how to fight, and the question came up, 'Why don't we ourselves provide the training?'
Between dinner and midnight everything was organized. Hulton had a friend, the Earl of Jersey, who owned Osterley Park, a mansion with lavish grounds just outside London. Hulton phoned him, and he came round at once. Yes, of course, we could have his ground for a training course; he hoped we wouldn't blow the house up as it was one of the country's showplaces and had been in the family for some time.
(5) Tom Wintringham, Picture Post (21st September, 1940)
As I was watching yesterday 250 men of the Home Guard take their places for a lecture at the Osterley Park Training School an air-raid siren sounded, and a dozen men with rifles moved to their prearranged positions as a defence unit against low-flying aircraft.
The lecturer began to talk of scouting, stalking and patrolling. And as I watched and listened I realized that I was taking part in something so new and strange as to be almost revolutionary - the growth of an "army of the people" in Britain - and, at the same time, something that is older than Britain, almost as old as England - a gathering of the "men of the counties able to bear arms."
The men at Osterley were being taught confidence and cunning, the use of shadow and of cover, by a man who learned field-craft from Baden-Powell, the most original irregular soldier in modern history (with the possible exception of Lawrence of Arabia). And in an hour or two they would be hearing of the experience, hard bought with lives and wounds, won by an army very like their own, the army that for year after year held up Fascism's flood-tide towards world power, in that Spanish fighting which was the prelude and the signal for the present struggle. I could not help thinking how like these two armies were: the Home Guard of Britain and the Militia of Republican Spain. Superficially alike in mixture of uniforms and half-uniforms, in shortage of weapons and ammunition, in hasty and incomplete organization and in lack of modem training, they seemed to me more fundamentally alike in their serious eagerness to learn, their resolve to meet and defeat all the difficulties in their way, their certainty that despite shortage of time and gear they could fight and fight effectively.
The school that they were attending had in a way been made by themselves. Two or three months ago, when this newest army in the world was first proposed, I wrote two articles in Picture Post on ways to meet invasion, on the experiences of Spain, and on the first rough steps to be taken for the training of a new force. So many queries piled into the offices of Picture Post, so many requests for more teaching and more detail, that it was natural for Mr. Edward Hulton to think of the idea of a school for the Home Guard - or, as they were then, the L.D.V. Osterley was a Picture Post idea, and Osterley has given free training to over 3,000 of the Home Guard at Edward Hulton's expense. The same evening that he decided to go ahead with the idea, he got in touch with Lord Jersey, who permitted us to use the grounds of his famous park at Osterley.
On July 10 the first course was given at the school. Our aim was then to give 60 members of the Home Guard two days' training three times a week. By the end of July over 100 men were attending each course, 300 a week. The numbers rose sharply in August; during the week when this was written one of the courses included 270 men.
Those attending the school in July were nearly a thousand; those attending in August over 2,000; the September figures will probably be around 3,000. We could not keep them away with bayonets - if we had any.
But all was not plain sailing; there were prejudices to be broken down. Soon after the school was founded an officer high up in the command of the L.D.V. requested Mr. Hulton and myself to close the school down, because the sort of training we were giving was "not needed." This officer explained to us with engaging frankness that the Home Guard did not have to do "any of this crawling round; all they have to do is to sit in a pill-box and shoot straight." The "sit in a pillbox" idea, a remnant of the Maginot Line folly not yet rooted out of the British Army, met us on other occasions.
(6) Tom Wintringham, New Ways of War(1940)
One thing admitted by all observers of the German attacks is that they use most of their bombers as a flying artillery. The second thing that enters into the German formula of warfare, all observers agree, is the use of heavy tanks, so powerfully armoured that they are not vulnerable to light anti-tank weapons.
The third main factor in the success of the German tactics and strategy is that they have employed and developed the tactics known as "deep infiltration." This means that their army does not attack strung but in a line, and maintaining contact all the time between its advanced units and its main forces. It does not hit like a fist, but like long probing fingers with armoured finger-nails. Each separate claw seeks a weak spot; if it can drive through this weak spot, it does not worry about its flanks, or about continuous communications with the forces following it. It relies for safety upon surprise, upon the disorganisation of its opponents due to the fact that it has broken through to the rear of their position.
(7) Tom Wintringham, New Ways of War(1940)
Blitzkrieg tactics and strategy are almost entirely developed with the idea of escaping from the trench deadlock that held the armies between August, 1914, and March, 1918, and held them again from September, 1939, to April, 1940. We can only grasp the essence of the Blitzkrieg if we realise that it is an opposite to, a reaction against, the war of trenches that otherwise condemns armies to practical uselessness.
From October, 1914, to March, 1917, on the Western Front, position warfare became more and more rigid, immovable, and futile. To "attack" meant to lose twice or three times as many men as your opponent, with no considerable gain in ground, and no decisive effect on anything except, your own cannon-fodder. The armies were locked in solid and continuous lines of trenches, in which they were pounded and obliterated by an even heavier hail of shells.
From March, 1917, to March, 1918, position warfare was in full flower, but some of the factors that must lead to its partial decay, its change into a new shape, became apparent. One factor was the tank; another, more important, was a new method of defence - which inevitably developed into its opposite, a new tactical method for infantry advance. The defensive method was known as "elastic defence" or "defence in depth"; the second developed from it, and adopted because it was a success, was called the tactic of "infiltration in attack."
(8) Tom Wintringham, New Ways of War(1940)
If we are to meet the new Nazi tactics, we must do the following:
1. Understand the tactics of infiltration and train our troops in them, and in methods of meeting them.
2. Realise the connection between these tactics and the trench deadlock; for defensive purposes realise that these tactics make linear defence and passive defence no longer valuable, and make counter-attack the only basis for successful defence.
3. Clear out of our army the remnants of the past - ideas, methods of training and organisation and the men who cannot change - and revive in the army the qualities necessary for carrying out and meeting infiltration: qualities of initiative, independence, the spirit of attack and counter- attack.
(9) Tom Wintringham, Freedom is Our Weapon (1941)
This war can be won. But it cannot be won by endurance only, by the power to " stick it", by remaining unchanged. We must change to win it, and we must change the war as well as ourselves. If this war is to be won it must cease to be one in which the conservative British Empire attempts to defend its possessions from German attack. It must become a war for the liberation of Europe and the world from Nazi and Fascist domination and aggression.
It will be argued in some circles that if the changes proposed here, and if privilege and profiteering were swept out of our lives, and a revolutionary democracy took over the army and other forces, finance and the factories, education and the land, shaping these things to the needs of the nation and not to the rights of owners - if these changes were tried, some say, the nation would be divided and our military force would thus be diminished. It is not true. It is true that some profiteers, if prevented from profiteering, might hope and work for a Nazi victory. But by profiteering they are already working for that victory, and working effectively even if they pretend to themselves that they are not traitors.
(10) Tom Wintringham, Freedom is Our Weapon (1941)
A conservative ruling class is incapable of fighting modern war effectively because war is changing very rapidly. And Conservatives do not admit change. They do not understand it. They cannot take advantage of it.
In our own last great war we won in the end, not by the brains of great generals or the "organising skill" of financiers, but by the employment of a strange new machine invented by journalists and engineers and pushed towards completion by a crank at the Admiralty. We won by the tank, more than by anything else.
The Germans admitted it. And the Germans learned from it, as they have shown more recently. We, on the other hand, do not seem to have learned quite so much.
Haig and other British generals, to whom each change in war was an unpleasant surprise, had been trained as great gentlemen are, not to notice unpleasant surprises, not to admit that they exist. He persisted with perfectly futile attacks, at enormous cost in lives, simply because he was too conservative to give up a method which clearly was failing, and attempt another. He had to be kicked and forced and harried into giving the tanks any chance of a large-scale battle suited to their new and strange technique. He avoided it for years on end. When at last he could avoid it no longer, it was the battle that more than any other won the war for us the attack of August 8, 1918.
This is only the first reason why the Conservative sections of our ruling class blundered in the last war, and in the present war so far have done worse than blunder. War changes and they do not; this is the first thing and the worst. There are others. War changes in a particular way, and one of the ways in which it has changed recently makes the initiative of very small groups of soldiers, their self-control and their power to lead themselves, a most valuable factor in battle.
(11) Tom Wintringham, Freedom is Our Weapon (1941)
Having seen much of the Home Guard, and knowing something of the defensive capacity of troops whose training has not been completed I believe that it ought to be possible by the summer of 1941 for the Home Guard and the training units to take over the major part of the work of defence in Britain, though they will always need a minimum of fully trained and fully -equipped regular divisions to assist them. By the summer of 1941 this minimum might be ten such divisions, and by September 1941 it might be cut down to seven, including one fully armoured division. But this will only be possible if the Home Guard is allowed to expand considerably. Recruiting for it is still severely restricted, and no effort has been made to run a recruiting campaign. The number of rifles available is necessarily limited ; but other weapons can be made available and it is no longer essential that every member of an infantry force should carry a rifle. The rifle has become a somewhat out-of- date weapon for many purposes; the other weapons can be made relatively quickly and cheaply.
I believe that a strengthening of the Home Guard in numbers, equipment and training is necessary, such as will enable the training of the rest of our army to be undertaken practically without reference to the defence of Britain. And since Britain, with its hedges and ditches, its many good roads and many built-up areas, is from a tactical point of view a peculiar and unusual country, the training of our Regulars should aim at adapting them to quite other countrysides.
(12) Tom Wintringham, Picture Post (20th December 1941)
We have an army that is very good. As Churchill has told us, it began this job with equality on the ground and superiority in the air. Can Mr. Churchill find leaders for it who will understand what Rommel was being taught from 1935? Can we find a staff worthy of the fighting men and commanders? That is the key question raised by the fighting in Libya, and what we know as yet of how that important battle has gone.
(13) Tom Wintringham, Politics of Victory (1941)
Marxism is a method of thought by which men understand the world and a method of action by which men change the world. Today for many millions of people war brings inexplicable disasters, and their need both to understand and change the world has never been so great. Yet among the many books about various aspects of this war there are very few that claim to be Marxist. This book does make that claim; it is an attempt to apply something that I believe to be an incomplete, growing science of human society to something that I know to be a complicated mess: the world of the Second World War.
Marxism starts from simple propositions such as this: that the way groups of men get their living determines the way these men live. And the way men live has a dominating influence on the way they think and feel. From the way men get their living, and think and feel and live, are derived their institutions and governments. These institutions and governments do not often change at the same pace as the changes that happen in the ways men get their living, and in men's thoughts and feelings. Men are divided into classes by the ways they get their living, and institutions and governments do not change easily and at once to reflect the changes in the strength of these classes (strength to understand the world and change it). Therefore sometimes it becomes necessary, if men are to go forward to new powers and towards new hopes, for institutions and governments to be broken and new ones built. These breakings and rebuildings are revolutions.
(14) Hugh Purcell, Tom Wintringham (2004)
At present Tom Wintringham is an historical footnote in several standard histories of Britain covering the first half of the last century. My aim is to elevate him to the main text as a unique English revolutionary, perhaps the last. His papers, now available for study in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, show that his place in history is merited for four reasons:
1) He was the only significant Marxist military expert of his time. His books and pamphlets defined a Marxist way to revolution adapted to the reality of Britain and the world in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. In 1926 he was one of the Communist planners of the General Strike, the last time a revolution was feasible in Britain, for which he served a prison sentence for "sedition". (He had joined the C.P.G.B. in 1923, one of its few bourgeois recruits at that time, and remained in the Party until 1938). In the 1930s he argued in his books The Coming World War and Mutiny that an essential war against fascism should lead to a revolution in Britain because Britain was becoming a fascist state. He argued that in any modern war the anti-Fascists, that is the Communist-led skilled working class of civilians in munitions factories and soldiers and sailors in action, held revolutionary power in their hands. In the 1940s he turned his attention to guerrilla war against the occupying Nazis in Europe and Japanese in the Far East. He saw guerrilla war as a "people's war" for freedom and socialism and in the short term history proved him right.
2) He was one of the pioneers of the International Brigades that fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War between 1936-1938. Arguably, though it is not possible to prove, the actual idea for an "international legion" came from Wintringham. He was the first commander of the British Battalion in conflict, at the bloody Battle of Jarama in February 1937. Here in the first two days fighting the British lost 150 men, one third of their fatalities in the entire war. Wintringham was wounded at Jarama but survived this and also near fatal typhoid to return to the Battalion in the summer of 1937. Once again he was wounded and this time repatriated. His autobiographical account English Captain is considered one of the few classics of the war written in English. His war poetry too was published.
In Spain Wintringham had an affair with an American journalist Kitty Bowler, whom he later married. She was condemned unjustly as a Trotskyite spy and Wintringham was expelled from the Communist Party in 1938 for refusing to leave her. His Spanish experience, however, had already disillusioned him about the C.P.G.B.'s subservience to Moscow and this became a key issue in his revolutionary development.
3) He inspired the formation of the Home Guard. In particular he led the campaign in the summer of 1940 to make it an effective fighting force, through his many articles in the Picture Post and Daily Mirror such as Arm the Citizens and The Home Guard Can Fight and his best selling book on guerrilla war New Ways of War. This was dubbed a do-it-yourself guide to killing people and fitted the desperate do-or-die spirit of the time. In particular he founded the Osterley Park Training School in Irregular Warfare where over 5,000 soldiers from the Regular Army as well as Local Defence Volunteers were taught the rudiments of street-fighting and guerrilla warfare. Despite his undoubted patriotism Wintringham's nickname was still "the Red Revolutionary" and he was eased out of his post by the War Office which was suspicious of his politics.
4) Wintringham was "the last English revolutionary". Since 1935 when he wrote a seminal essay Who is for Liberty? for the Communist run Left Review, which he edited, Wintringham argued for an English revolution based on our revolutionary heritage and the politics of the popular front. He disliked increasingly the subservience of the C.P.G.B. (Communist Party of Great Britain) to the Comintern, in effect to Russian foreign policy, and he became vitriolic when the Party stayed out of World War Two after Stalin's peace pact with Hitler in the summer of 1939.
Wintringham became one of a group dubbed by George Orwell as "revolutionary patriots". His experience in Spain had taught him that if people were going to die for their country it had to be a country worth dying for, and this meant a socialist Britain: so Wintringham campaigned for a Marxist state while playing a leading part in the "people's war" to resist Fascism. Had the Tory Government under Prime Minister Chamberlain made a deal with Hitler the "revolutionary patriots" might well have instigated revolt. As it was Wintringham dubbed the Tory Establishment as Nazi sympathisers or "Fifth Columnists" and wrote that they should be chucked out of office.
