BATTLE OF BRITAIN: To Beat the Blitz

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 (now 1,500,000) 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.

To his Home Guard School flocks a growing army of minute men — traveling salesmen, shop clerks, coal miners, navvies, the raw material of democracy — for just two days of instruction. After that they go home and practice on the front lawn and in the neighbor’s meadow. The school was originally not recognized by the War Office, though the Home Guards men (then called Local Defense Volunteers) were. Backed by Publisher Edward G. W. Hulton (Picture Post), the Home Guard learned its first lessons at Osterley Park, the estate of Earl of Jersey (see cuts, p. 29}. But the War Office soon recognized the importance of the country’s amateur army, and endowed the Home Guard with a larger camp (whereabouts a military secret) on which huge armories for winter training were built.

Tom Wintringham’s methods are anything but orthodox. Drill he considers as vestigial as the human appendix: it just teaches men how to stand up, walk stiffly and be shot. At the Home Guard School he and his fellow teachers show men how to make themselves fit by swimming, dodging from bush to bush, playing soccer and American football, which he considers the most warlike of all games. The bayonet is also a useless antique. Though the British Army manual still shows how to Biff the Bloody Boche in the Belly with the Bayonet, even in the Russo-Japanese war bayonets and sabres accounted for only 1.7% of Russian casualties, 3% of Japanese. Tom Wintringham prefers to teach men how to use more effective antique — as well as modern — weapons which can kill in today’s war: any old rifle, pistol, shotgun which is at hand. At his school he shows how two men can have rifle practice without wasting a single round of ammunition — one of them sights the rifle, the other sights through the target into the rifle.

He teaches the minute men how to take cover, how to throw grenades from prostrate position, how to dig themselves in while lying on their bellies, how to lie face down when planes are overhead. He teaches the modern military doctrine that “attack is fire that advances, defense is fire that counter-attacks” — a far cry from the tragic Maginot psychology. He shows how a brave man can stop tanks with homemade grenades or crowbars or lengths of rail to spike the bogie wheels. He teaches the technique of road mines. He trains men to lob grenades at moving targets by having cyclists tow battered baby carriages back & forth while the grenadiers lob bricks. He shows how to render service-station gasoline pumps useless to German mechanized forces by crippling the machinery, setting fire to the gas, or putting sugar or linseed oil in it. He diagrams deep trenches in which men are quite safe from ground strafing by airplanes. He shows how to hold up motorcycle forces by merely stringing blanket blinds across a street—beyond which the motorcyclists cannot venture without exposing themselves to sniping; or by rigging up boards full of nails and strewing glass. He teaches how to blow up bridges, a vital operation which was not completed often enough in the Lowlands and France.

Above all Tom Wintringham explains.

Commands are not enough. He says: “You do not make a People’s War by ordering people to do things. You do it by convincing, arousing, letting loose their strength.”

* NEW WAYS OF WAR—Penguin Books (25¢at newsstands).