Tom Wintringham Thomas Henry ( Tom ) Wintringham ( 15 May 1898 — 16 August 1949 ) was a British soldier , military historian , journalist , poet , Marxist , politician and author . He was an important figure in the formation of the Home Guard during World War II and was one of the founders of the Common Wealth Party . Biography . Early life . Tom Wintringham was born 1898 in Grimsby , Lincolnshire . He was educated at Gresham ' s School , Holt , Norfolk and Balliol College , Oxford . In 1915 he was elected to a Brakenbury scholarship in History at Balliol , but during the First World War he postponed his university career to join the Royal Flying Corps , serving as a mechanic and motorcycle despatch rider . At the end of the war he was involved in a brief barracks mutiny , one of many minor insurrections which went unnoticed in the period . He returned to Oxford , and in a long vacation made a visit of some months to Moscow , after which he returned to England and formed a group of students aiming to establish a British section of the Third International : a Communist Party . As the party formed , Wintringham graduated from Oxford and moved to London , ostensibly to study for the bar at the Temple , but in fact to work full - time in politics . Political career and the Spanish Civil War . In 1923 , Wintringham joined the recently formed Communist Party of Great Britain . In 1925 , he was one of the twelve CPGB officials imprisoned for seditious libel and incitement to mutiny . In 1930 , he helped to found the Communist newspaper , the " Daily Worker " , and was one of the few named writers to publish articles in it . In writing for the Communist party ' s theoretic journal " Labour Monthly " , he established himself as the party ' s military expert . In " LM " articles and in booklets on the subject , Wintringham formed the arguments against Air Assault and called for ARP precautions several years before Guernica . His arguments were the basis for the most successful of the Communist Party ' s wartime campaigns , that for ARP provision , and shaped government policy on the issue in the years leading up to the war . Although at the centre of the CPGB organisation , he was often at odds with Party policy , believing in a communism of alliance and co - operation , rather than the dominant Comintern ideology of " class against class " . Wintringham ' s ideas became party dogma when the Comintern announced the ' Popular Front ' , a form of communism Wintringham was prepared to fight for . In 1934 , he became the founder , editor and major contributor of " Left Review " , the first British literary journal with a stated Marxist intent . Although published by Wintringham and funded by the CPGB , it embraced writers of all shades of socialism , regardless of their party affiliations . The journal established a pattern for what was to become " cultural studies " . At the start of the Spanish Civil War , Wintringham went to Barcelona as a journalist for the " Daily Worker " , but he joined and eventually commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigades . Some socialist commentators have credited him with the whole idea of " international " brigades . He also had an affair with a US journalist , Kitty Bowler , whom he later married . In February 1937 he was wounded in the Battle of Jarama . While injured in Spain he became friends with Ernest Hemingway who based one of his characters upon him . He spent some months as a machine gun instructor . When he returned to the battalion the next summer he contracted typhoid , was again wounded at Quinto in August 1937 and was repatriated in October . His later book " English Captain " is based on these experiences . In 1938 , the Communist Party condemned his wife as a Trotskyist spy but he refused to leave her : he quit the party instead . He came to mistrust the party ' s subservience to Joseph Stalin ' s Russia and Comintern . Back in England , Tom Hopkinson recruited him to work for the newspaper " Picture Post " . World War II . On returning from Spain Wintringham began to call for an armed civilian guard to repel any fascist invasion , and as early as 1938 had begun campaigning for what would become the Home Guard . He taught the troops tactics of Guerrilla Warfare , including a move known as the ' Monkey Crawl ' . They were also taught how to deal with a dive bombers . At the outbreak of World War II , Wintringham applied for an army officer ' s commission but was rejected . When the Communist Party promulgated its policy of staying out of the war due to the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact , he strongly condemned their policies . Because of the appeasement policies of prime minister Neville Chamberlain , he also regarded the Tories as Nazi sympathizers and wrote that they should be removed from office . He wrote for " Picture Post " , the " Daily Mirror " , and wrote columns for " Tribune " and the " New Statesman " . In May 1940 , after the escape from Dunkirk , Wintringham began to write in support of the Local Defence Volunteers , the forerunner of the Home Guard . On July 10 , he opened the private Home Guard training school at Osterley Park , London . Wintringham ' s training methods were mainly based on his experience in Spain . He even had veterans who had fought alongside him in Spain who trained volunteers in anti - tank warfare and demolitions . He also taught street fighting and guerrilla warfare . He wrote many articles in " Picture Post " and the " Daily Mirror " propagating his views about the Home Guard with the motto " a people ' s war for a people ' s peace " . The British Army still did not dare trust Wintringham because of his communist past . After September 1940 , the army began to take charge of the Home Guard training in Osterley and Wintringham and his comrades were gradually sidelined . Wintringham resigned in April 1941 . Ironically , despite his activities in support of the Home Guard , Wintringham was never allowed to join the organisation itself because of a policy barring membership to Communists and Fascists . In 1942 , Wintringham proceeded to found a Common Wealth Party with Vernon Bartlett , Sir Richard Acland and J . B . Priestley . He received 48 % of the vote in at the Midlothian and Peeblesshire by - election in February 1943 , previously a safe Tory seat . In the 1945 general election he stood in the UK Parliament constituency , the Labour Party candidate standing down to give him a clear race against the incumbent Conservative MP . His wife Kitty stood in the same Mid - Lothian constituency that he had come so close to winning two years earlier , but neither were elected . After the war Wintringham and many of the founders of Common Wealth left and joined the Labour Party suggesting the dissolving of CW . Later life . In his later years he worked mainly in radio and film , both producing documentary and critical programmes and writing criticism . He continued to write about military history , opposing the use and development of atomic weapons and championing Mao ' s China and Tito ' s Yugoslavia over the monolithic bureaucracy of the Soviet Union . While he recognised and opposed the purges and repression that marred the achievements of the Soviet Union , he never understood that Stalin himself was complicit or responsible for them . His later campaigns and writing were mainly centred around the formation of a ' World Guard ' a neutral volunteer force ( initially ) to police Palestine and the partitioned India , and to be at the disposal of the United Nations , which Christopher Hitchens credits as the genesis of the UN Peacekeeping forces . Tom Wintringham died on 16 August 1949 , after a massive heart attack while he was staying with his sister at her farm at Owmby , Lincolnshire References . Purcell and Smith " The Last English Revolutionary : Enlarged , Revised and Updated edition " Sussex Academic Press , 2012 .