Thomas Henry Wintringham (15 May 1898 – 16 August 1949) was a British soldier, military historian, journalist, poet, Marxist, politician and author.

In 1915 he was elected to a Brakenbury scholarship in History at Balliol,[1] but during the First World War postponed his university career to join the Royal Flying Corps, serving as a mechanic and motorcycle despatch rider.

As the party was 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.

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.

[2] At the start of the Spanish Civil War, Wintringham went to Barcelona as a journalist for the Daily Worker,[3] but he joined and eventually commanded the British Battalion[4] of the International Brigades.

Because of the appeasement policies of prime minister Neville Chamberlain, he also imagined the Tories to be Nazi sympathizers and wrote that they should be removed from office.

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 Fascists and Communists.

[6] In the 1945 general election he stood in the Aldershot constituency, the Labour Party candidate standing down to give him a clear race against the incumbent Conservative MP.

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 accepted that Stalin himself was complicit or responsible for them.

His later campaigns and writing were mainly centred on 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.

Tom Wintringham died on 16 August 1949, aged 51, after a massive heart attack while he was staying with his sister at her farm at Owmby, Lincolnshire.