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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