Tom Wintringham

Tom Wintringham (born May 15, 1898 in Grimsby , † August 16, 1949 in Searby Manor , Lincolnshire ) was a British military historian , officer in the International Brigades , Marxist, journalist and politician.

biography

Wintringham was already inclined to socialism in his youth (after reading HG Wells , Jack London , Edward Bellamy , William Morris ), went to Gresham School in Norfolk and began to study history at Balliol College , Oxford on a scholarship , but interrupted it from 1916 to participate in the Royal Flying Corps as a volunteer in the First World War. His eyesight was insufficient to become a pilot, so he became a mechanic and balloon observer. After his discharge from the army in 1919, he continued his studies at Oxford and received his bachelor's degree in 1920. He then became a journalist specializing in the military and belonged to the left spectrum. He visited Moscow , where he met John Reed , founded The Left Review, and took part in protest marches of unemployed former soldiers in 1921. In 1921 he became a member of the Inner Temple ( attorney ). In 1922 he fell in love with Elizabeth Arkwright, a founding member of the British Communist Party , whom he married in 1923. He became a member of the British Communist Party in 1923, for which he edited the magazines Workers' Weekly and Labor Monthly, and was one of the organizers of the general strike in 1926, for which he (like several other members of the Communist Party) was briefly imprisoned (and for incitement to Mutiny was charged). In 1930 he became editor of the KP magazine The Daily Worker. In 1936 he first went into the Spanish Civil War as a journalist , but became militarily active there himself as the leader (from 1937) of the British division of the International Brigades, in the establishment of which he played a major role. During the Battle of Jarama in February 1937, the British division was trapped and suffered heavy losses. Wintringham was also wounded and was in the hospital. After his discharge he became a staff officer and was seriously wounded (shot in the shoulder) at Quinto ( Battle of Belchite ) in 1937, so that he had to return to England. In Spain he met the American journalist Kitty Bowler and married her in 1941. Since the CP was accused of being a Trotskyist and Wintringham refused to part with her, he was expelled from the CP (1938). Before that, however, he had alienated himself from the British Communist Party because of its submission to Moscow. Instead he worked for other magazines such as Picture Post, Daily Mirror (from 1940 as a military correspondent), Tribune, New Statesman.

As early as 1938 he was convinced of the danger of a German invasion of Great Britain and successfully suggested the construction of protective trenches in the cities in the cities. During the Second World War he founded a school for guerrilla warfare in Osterley Park in west London, where he passed on his experience from the Spanish Civil War in the training of the Home Guard (he trained around 5,000 volunteers). Wintringham also brought in Basque explosives specialists for training and wrote a book on guerrilla warfare (New Ways of War) that became a bestseller. For Wintringham, guerrilla war was the model of a people's war. In 1943 he stood for the Common Wealth Party in the elections for the parliamentary seat in the Tory stronghold of North Midlothian and only narrowly lost. In 1945 he ran again in the election for Aldershot and lost just short (he accused the Tory candidate of having been active for the metal company before the war). In the same year he published a book with Victor Gollancz, in which he analyzed in detail the attitudes of the Tory candidates before the war. In 1948 he moved to Edinburgh with his wife Kitty. He was from 1946 radio critic of the New Statesman, was a regular on The Critics program of the BBC and wrote for the Picture Post. He died of an aneurysm in 1949 while helping with the harvest on his sister's farm.

He also published poetry.

His uncle of the same name sat for the Liberals in the British Parliament (he died in 1921), whose wife was a leading suffragette and succeeded her husband in the Parliament (as the second woman in Great Britain to become a Member of Parliament).

literature

• Hugh Purcell: The last english revolutionary. A Biography of Tom Wintringham 1898-1949, 2004

Fonts

• War and the way to fight against it, Communist Party of Great Britain, London 1932
• Air raid warning. Why the Royal Air Force is to be doubled, London: Workers Bookshop 1934
• The coming world war, Wishart 1935
• Mutiny: A Survey of Mutinies from Spartacus to Invergordon, London: Stanley Nott 1936
• English Captain, Faber 1939 (Memories of the Spanish Civil War)
• New ways of war, Penguin special 1940
• Politics of Victory, Routledge 1941
• Freedom is our weapon. A policy of army reform, Kegan Paul 1941
• People`s War, Penguin special 1942
• Weapons and Tactics from Troy to Stalingrad, Boston 1943
• Your MP, Victor Gollancz 1945
• We're Going On - Collected Poems, Smokestack Books 2006

Web links

• CN Trueman: Tom Wintringham (History Learning Site)
• Biography at Spartacus Educational