Tom Wintringham





 

 

 


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Tom Wintringham was born in Grimsby in 1898. He abandoned his studies at Balliol College, Oxford to join the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. Wintringham served on the Western Front and left the armed forces in 1919.

Wintringham became a journalist specializing in military affairs. He wrote for several newspapers and established the journal the Left Review. In 1923 Wintringham joined the Communist Party. Two years later he was jailed for sedition and inciting soldiers to mutiny.

In 1935 Wintringham published The Coming World War. The following year he went to Spain to cover the Civil War. He stayed on and eventually became the commander of the British Battalion of the International Brigade. His wife, Kitty Wintringham, appealed to Harry Pollitt, to send her husband home. He told her to "tell him to get out of Barcelona, go up to the front line, get himself killed to give us a headline."

Wintringham led his men at Jarama before being seriously wounded at Quinto in August 1937 and was forced to return to England. He later wrote English Captain (1941), a book about his experiences in the war.

When he returned to England Tom Hopkinson recruited Wintringham to work for the Picture Post. During the Second World War he was employed to train members of the Home Guard. He also wrote several books about military matters and politics including New Ways of War (1940), Freedom is Our Weapon (1941), Politics of Victory (1941) and People's War (1942).

Some members of the left disapproved of the electoral truce between the main political parties during the Second World War and on 26th July 1941 members of the 1941 Committee led by Wintringham, Richard Acland, Vernon Bartlett and J. B. Priestley established the socialist Common Wealth Party. The party advocated the three principles of Common Ownership, Vital Democracy and Morality in Politics. The party favoured public ownership of land and Acland gave away his Devon family estate of 19,000 acres (8,097 hectares) to the National Trust.

Tom Wintringham died on his sister's farm in Lincolnshire in 1949.

 

 


 

(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.

 

 

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