Word: wintringham
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Blimps or Reds? Godfather of this British phenomenon was a leftist-Tom Wintringham, who led the British Battalion of the International Brigade in Spain. Wintringham wanted to teach his countrymen, while there was yet time, the new war technique of infiltration and the organization of a people's army, which he had learned in Spain. Not until May 14, 1940 did he get any official backing. That day the earnest, professorial voice of the then War Secretary, Anthony Eden, appealed over the BBC for unpaid volunteers to prepare for action in the event of invasion. The Government expected...
...midst of these shouts, the Guard grew. Tom Wintringham gave it a training pattern in his guerrilla school at Osterley Park, the estate of the Earl of Jersey and his U.S. wife, onetime Cinemactress Virginia Cherrill. There in weekly batches Home Guard officers were trained in mak-ing hand grenades, using Molotov cocktails, wrecking tank treads. After a year of fighting for more armaments and more accent on guerrilla tactics, Wintringham resigned. The War Office, which suspected his politics, was glad to see him go. He was replaced by a safe man-Major General Viscount Bridgeman, the mild-mannered, sharp...
Singeing Adolf's Whiskers. As the Battles of Germany and Russia strung on, the British even began talking seriously of invading the Continent. Tom Wintringham, Spain-trained guerrilla artist who recently resigned his instructorship in the Home Guard because he considered the War Office too stodgy, wrote: "The British Army wants action. . . . We should hit Hitler now that he is busy." The News Chronicle headlined: TOO QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. The careful New Statesman and Nation editorialized: "If the invasion of the Continent is ever to be possible, today, when Germany's best fighters and bombers...
Recently, just as Hugh Slater, the International Brigade's Chief of Staff, was about to be gazetted Home Guard major, the Army conscripted him as a private. The Army also grabbed Surrealist Painter Roland Penrose, Tom Wintringham's star camouflage lecturer...
Wrote Guerrillista Wintringham, probably well aware that his fellow-traveling had done him no good with the brass hats: "The present policy of the War Office starves the Home Guard of manpower and materials and treats as relatively unimportant all those ideas of modern-training tactics that I have been advocating." He quit...