The greatest battle of World War
II may still be fought on English soil. If it is, one of many reasons
that Hitler may be beaten will be the new and growing British People's
Army opposing him: Brit ain's Home Guard. And one of the many obscure
heroes responsible for Hitler's defeat will be the most urgent of
Britain's advocates for a People's Army: Thomas H. Wintringham. Tom Wintringham is no Sandhurst diehard, but his dope on warfare is from
the inside. At 18 he joined the Royal Flying Corps and served in France
as air gunner, dispatch rider, machine-gunner. At 38 he went to Spain
to cover the civil war as a Leftist newspaperman. He had the face of a
public-school don, but his heart was made of soldiering stuff. In spare
time he boned up on automatic weapons, began instructing International
brigadiers how to use them, wound up as commander of the British
battalion. He was cool as a glass of iced manzanilla. At Jarama he led
the puny British left wing's machine-gun crew through pitch night to a
hill looking down on whole tribes of Moors. At dawn his guns nearly wiped
out the boxed-in Moors. Late in the action he got a bullet in his knee, next
day got typhoid. He recovered, fought again and was wounded again, on the
Aragon front. Since everyone but the British Army seemed to realize that the Spanish
War was a test-tube war for Germany and Italy, Tom Wintringham began
pointing some lessons for Britain's military future. In a book published recently in both Great Britain and the U. S.,* he
made great good sense not only about ingenious ways of war but of
democracy and democratic armies. Britain's Army was never as big as France's, and
France's Army fell. Furthermore, Britain's Army lost plenty in
Flanders. Britain's small reformed Army would have more than it could
handle in the face of a full-dress Blitzkrieg. The only way to beat the
Blitz, argued Wintringham, was for 4,000,000 civilians to teach
themselves how to fight democratically, efficiently and freed of the
myths and snobbery of military convention. The only way to meet total
attack is total defense. Britain must fight now not to the last
Frenchman, not to the last British soldier, but to the last courageous
Briton. Peoples' Armies, free men conscious of equality and fighting for dear
things, have advantages over mechanical, driven armies. Tiny Greek
citizen armies defeated huge Persian armies of slaves. The unarmored
English longbowmen of Crecy and Agincourt beat the armored French
knights who were “their liege lord's men.” Washington's
burning militia trounced the paid Hessians of George III.
“Cromwell's New Model Army,” said Wintringham, “is still
the best model for British fighting men.” But can a People's Army
stop modern motorcycle troops, whose guns can cut a man in half in two
seconds at 100 yards, planes with their nerve-raveling noises?
Wintringham thinks so. His book tells how. In person at the official
training school for Britain's Home Guard, Tom Wintringham was last week
showing the People's Army how.
