Britain's War by Daniel Todman

Author:Daniel Todman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241217009
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

A PEOPLE’S WAR?

One of the groups that Home Intelligence noted were being publicly criticized was ‘those in charge of the LDV’. The most widespread complaint among volunteers was the lack of equipment. Boyish enthusiasm only took them so far: if the Germans were coming they wanted to be properly armed. Throughout the summer, small arms remained in short supply and it was not until August that rifles were available in adequate numbers even for regular army units. The lack of equipment was held up as evidence of official incompetence.

The War Office had originally decided that the LDV should have no formal rank structure so that professional officers never found themselves under the command of amateurs. In practice, local LDV units were often set up by the sort of people who took charge of much of civic life: middle-class businessmen in the cities, landowners in the countryside. Before long, charges were being levelled that LDV groups were being run like golf clubs, with the wrong sort – Jews, Labour Party members, trade unionists – not allowed to join.121 When it came to picking area organizers, the War Office usually selected retired senior officers. Whatever their military views, they were easily caricatured as out-of-touch ‘Colonel Blimps’, demanding discipline, unquestioning obedience and eager to refight the last war.

For some commentators on the left, the flood of recruits to the LDV looked gratifyingly like the people rushing to the fight against Fascism. It also summoned memories of the militias of the Spanish Civil War. Foremost among them was Tom Wintringham. An RFC despatch rider in the last war, and a Communist since the 1920s, Wintringham had established himself as the radical left’s leading military expert in the 1930s. He had led the British battalion of the International Brigade in Spain, before being expelled from the CPGB. By mid-May 1940, Wintringham was a well-known and widely read writer – the military correspondent of the Daily Mirror and a contributor to the popular periodical Picture Post. A collection of his articles, rushed out in July as a Penguin Special, New Ways of War, sold 75,000 copies.122

Wintringham set out for readers the tactics for guerrilla fighting he had learned in Spain (including instructions on how to build a do-it-yourself grenade), demanded the democratization of the army and called for the fighting of a ‘people’s war’.123 This was not a comforting, all-in-it-together version of the conflict, but one run by ‘committees of public safety or councils of action’ formed out of an armed citizenry:

There are those who say that the idea of arming the people is a revolutionary idea. It certainly is … 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.124

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