In May 1940 Wintringham was writing vigorously not just for Tribune and the New Statesman but also for the Daily Mirror and Picture Post, which were read by millions. His slogan for an article in the Daily Mirror addressed to the newly appointed Edmund Ironside, was ‘An Aroused People, An Angry People, An Armed People’: he was preaching popular guerrilla warfare. ‘How to Deal with Parachute Troops’ filled a page of The War Weekly on 7 June and was soon followed by two more long pieces for Picture Post: ‘Against Invasion’ and ‘Arm the Citizens’. The War Office printed 100,000 copies of the second article and distributed them to Local Defence Volunteer units. His biographer Hugh Purcell says in The Last English Revolutionary that his pieces
gave practical instructions for a people’s war based on his experience in Spain: how to destroy tanks and bridges, capture or kill German parachutists, fortify a village, make and throw hand grenades, engage in street fighting.
All Wintringham’s articles were worked together into a longer text, New Ways of War, published as a Penguin Special in July 1940, which sold 75,000 copies in a few months. In it he points out that German ‘Blitzkrieg’ evolved to escape trench deadlock, giving a certain amount of autonomy to front-line soldiers, and that the German tactic of ‘infiltration’ also worked through individual initiative. He criticises snobbish and rigid military thinking in Britain and says what is needed is ‘an army of free men’ who can think for themselves. Scanning history to find ‘democratic’ forces who prevailed against more powerful autocratic societies, Wintringham looks to, among others, ancient Greeks against Persians, the Roman republic versus Carthage, and the bowmen of Crécy and Agincourt against French knights. For examples of a ‘People’s War’, he cites the Dutch Republic, Garibaldi’s Italy, Japanese-occupied China and the old native Anglo-Saxon tradition of the fyrd, the freemen’s shire militia. New Ways of War is a rousing piece of propaganda that mixes bomb-making tips, guerrilla tactics and battle lore with his radical argument for a ‘People’s War’:
There are those who say that the idea of arming the people is a revolutionary idea. It certainly is. And after what we have seen of the efficiency and patriotism of those who ruled us until recently, most of us can find plenty of room in this country for some sort of revolution, for a change that will sweep away the muck of the past.
Picture Post, a pioneering illustrated magazine from the moment it first appeared on 1 October 1938, strongly supported Wintringham’s ideas. The most popular news magazine ever published in Britain, it was later imitated by Signal in Germany, LIFE in the USA, Paris-Match in France, Drum in South Africa. The proprietor was the Conservative Edward Hulton, the son and grandson of newspaper proprietors, and in June 1940 the left-leaning Tom Hopkinson became its editor. Hopkinson was dining with Wintringham at Hulton’s one night in late June, talking about the frustrations of the LDVs having to do drill with broomsticks when they were itching to learn to fight. On 20 June, in the Secret Session of the House of Commons, hadn’t Winston Churchill said that ‘the essence of the defence of Britain is to attack the landed enemy at once, leap at his throat and keep the grip until the life is out of him’? Then the idea clicked. Why couldn’t Picture Post help provide the training?
It was all set up by midnight. Hulton rang a friend, the Earl of Jersey, who came round straight away. He owned a large mansion to the west of London set in the spacious grounds of Osterley Park. Jersey was happy to allow the grounds to be used for a training course, but said he’d rather the house wasn’t blown up, as it had been in the family for some time. ‘Can we dig weapon pits? Loose off mines? Throw hand grenades? Set fire to old lorries in the grounds?’ asked Wintringham. ‘Certainly. Anything you think useful.’
Wintringham became Director of Training at Osterley Park School which started its first course on 10 July. By now Churchill was overruling Eden and insisting on changing the name ‘Local Defence Volunteers’ to ‘Home Guard’. Churchill found ‘Local’, as in ‘Local Government’ uninspiring, and he absolutely hated the name ‘Communal Feeding Centres’, telling the Ministry of Food: ‘It is an odious expression, suggestive of Communism and the workhouse. I suggest you call them “British Restaurants”. Everybody associates the word “restaurant” with a good meal, and they may as well have the name if they cannot get anything else.’
Members of the Home Guard came to Osterley from all over the country for two-day courses in irregular warfare at Hulton’s expense. Every week there were three courses with sixty men on each. By the end of July there were a hundred men on every course and more clamouring to get in. In August 1940 over 2,000 attended. Picture Post appealed to the USA for private citizens to donate weapons: they sent a serviceable shipload to Liverpool, including six-shooters, buffalo guns, hunting rifles and.45 calibre gangsters’ ‘Tommy guns’ which were duly distributed to the Home Guard. Picture Post also showed how to manufacture heavier weapons in the garage. ‘Make Your Own Mortar for 38/6d’ was one feature, with instructions for milling home-made black powder. This sort of thing perturbed the conventional authorities.
The Communist Party of Great Britain had not been proscribed nor the Daily Worker banned at this time. Their line of ‘revolutionary defeatism’, which had emerged from the peculiar contortions of having to explain the Nazi–Soviet pact in Marxist–Leninist terms, had now evolved into shouting loudly for the conscription of all wealth, the arming of the workers and a new government. The hard-line Security Executive was worried by CPGB propaganda and suggested in July that the Home Office frame a new defence regulation making it an offence ‘to attempt to subvert duly constituted authority’. The Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office, Sir Alexander Maxwell, resisted this in an admirable minute, dated 6 September 1940:
There would be widespread opposition to such a regulation as inconsistent with English liberty. Our tradition is that while orders issued by the duly constituted authority must be obeyed, every civilian is at liberty to show, if he can, that such orders are silly or mischievous and the duly constituted authorities are composed of fools or rogues … Accordingly we do not regard activities which are designed to bring the duly constituted authorities into contempt as necessarily subversive; they are only subversive if they are calculated to incite persons to disobey the law, or to change the Government by unconstitutional means. This doctrine gives, of course, great and indeed dangerous liberty to persons who desire revolution, or desire to impede the war effort … but the readiness to take this risk is the cardinal distinction between democracy and totalitarianism.
Wintringham’s ‘The Home Guard Can Fight’, spread across several pages of Picture Post on 21 September 1940, was probably the apogee of the revolutionary militia idea, before the War Office and GHQ Home Forces began taking Osterley Park’s staff and facilities under their control. The article shows the Home Guard shooting at model aircraft, stalking, sniping, attacking behind smokescreens and blowing up vehicles with mines. Pictures of the staff include a moustached surrealist poet, painter and art collector who was teaching camouflage, Captain Roland Penrose.
When Penrose’s Home Guard Manual of Camouflage was published by Routledge in October 1941, he was described as ‘Lecturer to the War Office School for Instructors to the Home Guard, formerly lecturer at the Osterley Park School for Training of the Home Guard’. Penrose, former leading light in the British Surrealist movement, was now working full-time at the South Eastern Command Fieldcraft School at Burwash in Sussex. The course, near Kipling’s home, Bateman’s, at Burwash taught men to use the countryside for cover and camouflage when dealing with German parachutists:
Your fieldcraft training can be summed up as being a way of learning by practice many of the things which animals do by instinct … We have forgotten to do these things largely because we live in civilized communities, where custom, law, and policemen have put a padded cushion between us and the raw struggle for existence. When the Nazis come the cushion will be removed. The nearer we are to animals, the better we shall be prepared:
but we can only regain the wisdom of animals through our brains, through thinking, learning and practising.
The study of hedges and ditches, woods and roads, fields and streams, how cattle behave when someone is in their vicinity, what cock pheasants, wood pigeons, magpies, jays, lapwings and blackbirds do when disturbed, how to move silently or under fire, how to freeze, how to become inconspicuous, how to bivouac, the dangers of shape, shine, shadow and silhouette, the power of Nazi field glasses, the best way to use your ears, eyes and nose at night, reconnaissance and message carrying were all part of the Burwash syllabus. Like Osterley, Burwash pioneered some of what later army battle-schools would do, teaching platoon skills that would be useful when the British were fighting in Normandy hedgerows in 1944.
At Burwash, Roland Penrose’s lantern slides certainly caught the eye of his Home Guard students. Some were from Cott’s Adaptive Coloration in Animals, but one that flashed up was a colour photo of his beautiful wife Lee Miller, daubed in light green camouflage paint, lying naked on a lawn under a soft-fruit net and some tufts of raffia. Solomon J. Solomon would have appreciated Penrose’s Manual of Camouflage which assimilates every hard-earned point from WW1, and begins with the need for surprise in defending Britain.
To an old soldier, the idea of hiding from your enemy and the use of deception may possibly be repulsive. He may feel that it is not brave and not cricket. But that matters very little to our enemies, who are ruthlessly exploiting every means of deception at the present time to gain their spectacular victories. They can only be stopped by new methods, however revolutionary these may appear …
Penrose’s first point is the need to escape observation from all angles. A parachutist can land behind you, the enemy pilot can spot you from the air. ‘From directly above there is no dead ground, and trenches, wire and tracks show up as though drawn on the map.’ The Home Guard would have to learn to conceal their fixed positions, quarters and transport by fitting in with the patterns of the landscape, using nets and screens or tarred sandbags covered with earth and rubbish. It is all very much in the tradition of Hesketh Prichard’s disguised loopholes and sniper suits cut out and stitched from panels of hessian sacking in WW1, but what was then an obscure art was now becoming part of accepted military thinking. Penrose made the Home Guard conscious of their black shadows and white faces when taking cover, and taught the usefulness of cow dung. The aim was not just concealment:
Deception is the active counterpart and is of great importance in counter-attack and guerrilla warfare … By using decoys and dummies we shall be able to draw the enemy’s attention away from our vital points … [while] by the use of camouflage and smoke screens our real positions and movements can be hidden from him.
The British were rallying after the German victories across Europe, knowing they were underdogs. Penrose saw that the whole point of camouflage was to make the weaker party stronger. ‘It is useless in warfare to be merely brave, if bravery means presenting oneself as a useless target to the enemy. It is far better to employ intelligence and concealment, so as to induce him to present a target.’
Camoufleurs were getting into their stride all over the country, with plenty to conceal. To stop the invader getting a foothold, arrays of defences were being engineered around the south-east English coast, many of them guarded by seaward-facing gun batteries salvaged from ageing ships and obsolescent tanks. Metal scaffolding was erected in the sea, hundreds of mines were buried in beaches, there were miles and miles of coiling barbed wire, thousands of concrete pillboxes for machine guns and hefty anti-tank blocks. More defences were erected inland along ‘stop lines’ designed to slow down enemy armoured forces pushing towards London. In Norfolk, for example, the stop-lines ran along the courses of the rivers Ant, Bure, Wensum, Yare and Ouse, whose bridges were rigged with explosives, and there were 30,000 men wearing the brassard of the Local Defence Volunteers (‘Look, Duck and Vanish’), mostly with bicycles, whose role was to observe, patrol and protect, as well as help obstruct. Anti-tank obstacles included ditches, deepened canals, slots in the road into which iron girders were socketed, and dragon’s teeth of concrete blocks, at least five feet high. Open fields had carts put in them to prevent planes landing, or poles put up to rip the wings off gliders.
Every village had its ‘strong post’ to defend and eight different kinds of concrete pillbox could be erected at key spots. Some of these were hideously prominent, poorly designed deathtraps. Other pillboxes conformed better to the cliffs, fields or hedges and were camouflaged afterwards with earth and undergrowth. The best were built into existing structures – barns, haystacks, lighthouses, medieval ruins, sheds, windmills, yacht clubs – so as not to be seen straight away. As the war went on, subsequent camoufleurs competed with ingenious disguises for strongholds: beach huts, bookstalls, bungalows, bus stops, cafés, chalets, garages, ice-cream parlours, Regency pavilions, railway signal boxes, gentlemen’s toilets, half-timbered Tudor tea-shoppes and twee thatched cottages. The camoufleurs did their best, but it did not alter the fact that there were no tanks available to fight the Germans if they invaded, and no armour-piercing anti-tank weapons. Ironside’s plan was that householders would drop homemade Molotov cocktails from upper windows on to enemy vehicles.
They were certainly ready to have a go. The LDV managed to shoot and kill their first four motorists, none of them Germans, in separate locations on the night of 2/3 June, and there were more fatal accidents to come. Battle of Britain pilots who ejected over England faced a real danger of being riddled with bullets by their own countrymen as suspected German parachutists. In the summer of 1941, the Home Guard was organised into battalions affiliated to county regiments, with military ranks, but some people did not take them seriously. A. J. P. Taylor wrote in English History 1914–1945 that
The Home Guard harassed innocent citizens for their identity cards; put up primitive road-blocks, the traces of which may delight future archaeologists; and sometimes made bombs out of petrol tins. In a serious invasion, its members would presumably have been massacred if they had managed to assemble at all. Their spirit was willing though their equipment was scanty.
This is the line also followed by the affectionate and popular BBC TV comedy series Dad’s Army, which ran for ten years from 1968, written by David Croft and Jimmy Perry. It was in keeping with wartime skits by comedians like Robb Wilton, and other contemporaneous jokes. ‘And what steps would you take if the Germans invaded, my man?’ asks the inspecting officer. ‘Big long ’uns, sir!’
And yet perhaps the Home Guard and the camoufleurs, in their determined efforts against as yet unrealised enemies, were taking part in a huge effort of psychological warfare. John Colville’s diary, The Fringes of Power, records a dinner at Chequers on Friday, 12 July, with Generals Paget, Auchinleck, and Ismay as well as Duncan Sandys at the table. The day before, Churchill had toured the defences in Kent, inspecting pillboxes and troops from Dover to Whitstable. The discussion turned to invasion. There was ‘an argument about encouraging the populace to fight. If they meet the invader with scythes and brickbats they will be massacred.’ Churchill pointed out that ‘here we want every citizen to fight and they will do so the more if they know the alternative is massacre. The L.D.V must be armed and prepared…’ According to Colville, Churchill thought the invasion scare was ‘keeping every man and woman tuned to a high pitch of readiness. He does not wish the scare to abate therefore, and although personally he doubts whether invasion is a serious menace he intends to give that impression, and to talk about long and dangerous vigils, etc., when he broadcasts on Sunday.’
In that talk on 14 July 1940 Churchill said that the war would be long and hard, but he also delivered a magnificent morale-boosting piece of rhetoric that praised both the armed forces and the British Home Guard:
Behind these soldiers of the regular Army, as a means of destruction for parachutists, air-borne invaders, and any traitors that may be found in our midst … we have more than a million of the L
ocal Defence Volunteers, or, as they are much better called, the ‘Home Guard’. These officers and men, a large proportion of whom have been through the last War, have the strongest desire to attack and come to close quarters with the enemy wherever he may appear. Should the invader come to Britain, there will be no placid lying down of the people in submission before him as we have seen, alas, in other countries. We shall defend every village, every town, and every city … we would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes than … tamely and abjectly enslaved …
This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambitions; it is a War of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers not only in this island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this War, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors …
The Home Guard, like so many things in WW2, was not actually all that it seemed. Its great secret was camouflaging the Auxiliary Units, one of Britain’s nine wartime secret services. The Auxiliary Units wore ordinary Home Guard uniforms but were actually guerrilla cells. They had been set up by Lawrence Grand’s secret organisation Section D, who supplied weapons and explosives, acting in unison with MI (R), whose field was guerrilla warfare. The Auxiliary Units’ job would only begin after the ‘stop lines’ and fixed positions had been overrun. They were the ‘stay-behind parties’ that Major General Thorne had requested of the War Office, when he was in command of XII Corps, whose job was defending Sussex and Kent against the first thrust of the imminently expected German invasion, code-named Seelöwe or SEALION. General Ironside had then tasked his former ADC, Colonel Colin Gubbins, the professional soldier who had just been in Norway with the Independent Companies, to organise this resistance. Gubbins chose other enterprising officers to set up cells of Auxiliary Units all around the British coast.
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