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 Kitty Bowler 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 Soviet Union and Comintern. Back in England, Tom Hopkinson recruited him to work for the magazine "Picture Post". On returning from Spain, Wintringham began to call for an armed civilian guard to repel any Axis invasion, and as early as 1938 he had begun campaigning for what would become the Home Guard. He taught the troops tactics of guerrilla warfare, including a movement known as the 'Monkey Crawl'. They were also taught how to deal with dive bombers. At the outbreak of the Second World War, 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 10 July, he opened the private Home Guard training school at Osterley Park, London.