Crusade of the Left

The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War

Robert Rosenstone

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351524797
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: History
• Thema: World History

Between 1936 and 1938, some 3, 000 young Americans sailed to France and crossed the Pyrenees to take part in the brutal civil war raging in Spain. Virtually all joined the International Brigades, formed under the auspices of the Soviet-led Comintern and largely directed by Communists. Yet a large number were not Communists; their activism was inspired by domestic and international crises of the 1930s, and colored by idealism.The men who went to Spain came out of a radical subculture that emerged from the Depression and the New Deal. Th is radicalism was a native plant, but it was nourished from abroad. In the thirties the menace of fascism seemed to be spreading like cancer across Europe, giving an international aspect to many domestic problems in the United States. To intellectuals, students, unionists, liberals, and leftists, the threat of fascism was so real that many came to believe that if it was not stopped in Spain, eventually they would have to take up arms against fascism at home.To understand the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War it is necessary to bury some of the shibboleths of cold war years. Dissidence in the United States occurs in response to perceptions of reality on this side of the Atlantic, not because of the wishes of men in the Soviet Union. Th e members of the Lincoln Battalion were genuine products of America, and their story is properly a page in American military and political history. From them, one can learn much about the world of the 1930s and perhaps even something about the potential of modern man for thought and action in time of crisis.

One Madrid Is the Heart

On November 8, 1936, Madrid was in chaos.

Its citizens awoke in the cold, predawn morning to the booming of artillery and the harsh noise of loudspeakers and radios crackling out messages announcing total mobilization of the population. The streets were filled with workers in blue monos, alone and in groups, some shouldering rifles and many without them, some hurrying on foot, others riding in trucks or cars with the initials of labor unions painted in large letters on the sides. There were children in the streets helping to tear up cobblestones and erect barricades, and taxis racing back and forth bearing military officers and messages. The city echoed with the shouted slogans, "No pasarán" and "Madrid sera la tumba del fascismo," and everywhere, above the noise and confusion of men preparing for battle, loudspeakers were blaring with the voice of La Pasionaria, the Spanish Communist leader, calling on the Spanish women to resist their enemy to the death, saying: "It is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward." At 6:30 A.M., Madrid's transportation system began to function as usual, and more than one worker on that crisp fall morning kissed his family goodbye and mounted a streetcar as he did every day. Only on November 8, 1936, he was calmly riding to the front lines and to war.

For the Madrileños were preparing to resist what the outside world had already accepted as inevitable, the fall of the Spanish capital to the armies of the insurgent generals led by Francisco Franco, Newspaper correspondents had flashed dispatches around the globe the night before saying that Madrid was as good as lost. General Franco had already announced that the "liberation" of the capital was near, and Radio Lisbon had broadcast a description of him entering Madrid on a white charger and being greeted by joyous crowds. The preceding day insurgent troops had fought their way into the city, entering the Casa de Campo park on the west of Madrid, capturing the high point named Mount Garabitas.

There was little reason to suppose Madrid would not fall. The African armies of the rebel generals had in three months swept virtually unopposed from Seville north to Madrid, brushing aside the ill-organized Loyalist militia, stopping long enough to raise the siege of the Toledo Alcazar, and then moving easily onward to the outskirts of the Spanish capital. Loyalist counterattacks south of Madrid had slowed down the insurgent advance during the last week of October, but had not halted the rebel approach to the western gates of the city. General Emilio Mola had long since told newspaper reporters who asked which of his four military columns would take Madrid that it was the fifth column of supporters inside the capital that would do the job, and indeed rebel partisans were disrupting the city by firing from hidden windows and by hurling homemade hand grenades into crowds. Unknown to the world, but well known to the rebel generals was the fact that Nazi Germany's Condor Legion, totaling 100 fighters and bombers, 32 tanks, and 6,000 military men, was almost completely assembled at Seville and ready to go into full-scale action on behalf of the rebels. For the last two weeks, German Junker bombers had flown low-altitude bombing raids over Madrid, which contained no antiaircraft guns. The Spanish Loyalist government of Francisco Largo Caballero seemed itself to have given up the fight by fleeing the capital with ail its officials, records, and files on the evening of November 6, leaving the city under control of a defense junta headed by General José Miaja.

Daylight on November 8 found rebel artillery battering the buildings of the University of Madrid, just inside the city, and the Moroccan troops and foreign legionnaires of the rebels pushing slowly through the Casa de Campo and into the streets of the city against stubborn resistance, when the first units of foreigners that were to become known to the world as the International Brigades marched through the Spanish capital. They were tough-looking men, French and Germans, English, Belgians, and Poles, clad in corduroy uniforms, wearing steel helmets, their rifles gleaming dully in the light of day. They marched from the railroad station along the tree-lined Paseo de Prado and urned left up the hill to the Gran Via, while the people or the city, thinking the Soviet Union had intervened at last, hung from the balconies and windows overlooking the boulevards, crowded the sidewalks, and cheered until the streets echoed with the cries, "Vivan los rusos!" Past the noisy crowds they swung, down the sloping boulevard west to the Plaza de España, and then on to the Casa de Campo.

By evening the 2,000 men of the XIth International Brigade were in position, some in University City, most under the trees of the great park, spread out among the militia. The park roared with the sounds of battle that night as the Internationals fought and died to help hold the enemy back from Madrid. For the first time in the war, rebel troops met soldiers equipped with good machine guns, soldiers who entrenched well and fired accurately and would not budge, and by early afternoon on November 9, rebel commanders found that their forces had run into a stone wall. That evening the Internationals fixed bayonets and mounted an offensive through the north end of the Casa de Campo, breaking through the ranks of the Moroccan troops and foreign legionnaires, taking a heavy toll of casualties as they pushed the insurgents back until Mount Garabitas was the only point in the Casa de Campo left to them. By then, one third of the Internationals were already dead, but the rebel assault through the park was at an end.

Two days later the XIIth International Brigade of Germans, Frenchmen, and Italians went into action at Madrid, and on November 15 the foreigners were called into the bloody battle of University City, where "The marching songs of the German Communists brought to the crumbling masonry of the laboratories and lecture halls a wild Teutonic sadness," and some men gave their lives defending a city they had never seen. For a week the battle raged through the university campus, from building to building, from floor to floor, and in hand-to-hand combat from room to room. Men built barricades out of library books, and one young Englishman found that those made out of volumes of Indian metaphysics and German philosophy "were quite bullet-proof." November 23 saw both exhausted armies digging trenches and building fortifications, The troops of the rebels had been halted, and Franco and Mola had been forced to call off the assault upon Madrid.¹

There is no doubt that the International Brigades did not alone save the Spanish capital. Most of the troops committed in the battles of Casa de Campo and University City were Spaniards, militia of all parties, tough fighters from Madrid's Communist Fifth Regiment, and some 3,000 Anarchists who had marched in from Catalonia. Yet the 5,000 foreigners played a crucial role in helping to break the back of the rebel attempt to storm the capital. Arriving at a moment when Loyalist lines seemed stretched to the breaking point, fighting almost to the last man to maintain untenable positions, they had bolstered the ranks and morale of the Spaniards. Once the Internationals had arrived, the Madrileños knew that they were no longer alone in their struggle, and from the examples of the foreigners they learned to fight without giving ground and then to take the offensive in counterattacks. Whether the victory belonged to the populace of Madrid or to the foreigners remains debatable, but when the news of the battle of Madrid was reported, the International Brigades had so much caught the fancy of the correspondents that a Spanish censorship official grumbled, "The International Brigades figured in the press dispatches as though they were the sole saviours of Madrid.... I found it unjust that the people of Madrid . . . were forgotten. . .''² Beneath towering headlines, the exploits of the foreigners in Madrid flashed through the newspapers of the Western world.

The population of the outside world already knew what was happening in Spain, already had been touched by the struggle of the Loyalist government, already had chosen which side to support in the conflict that from its very beginning symbolized so much of the crisis of the 1930's, From the outset of the war, intervention on the rebel side by Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy was a secret shared by most of the world. As early as July 30, two weeks after the rising of the generals against the Spanish Republic, three Italian Savoia bombers on their way from Sardinia to Spanish Morocco were forced to land in French Morocco, where investigation clearly established they were part of an expedition to aid the insurgent cause. On August 1, the New York Times reported the arrival of 18 Italian aircraft in the Spanish Moroccan city of Melilla, and two days later it carried a story about the bombing of a Republican cruiser by an Italian airplane. In following weeks, Italian aircraft and pilots began to arrive on the mainland in the rebel stronghold of Seville. Meanwhile, in late July, 20 German heavy transport planes were engaged in an airlift that ferried the 15,000 African troops of the Spanish Army over the heads of the Republican Navy from Morocco to Seville. When the Loyalist cruiser Jaime Primero used its anti-aircraft guns to interfere with the operation, it was put out of commission by bombs from a German Junker.³

At the outset of the conflict, the French Popular Front government of Léon Blum reacted positively to Spanish Prime Minister José Giral's July 20 plea for military aid. By the first week of August, Air Minister Pierre Cot had sent some 50 airplanes—all of them obsolete by 1936 standards—across the border. But Blum, whose cabinet was split over aid to Spain, who did not wish to weaken France militarily in view of increasing German rearmament, and who was afraid that the strong French right wing might itself foment civil strife, was quickly forced to retreat under English pressure. For the Conservative British government of Stanley Baldwin, instinctively favorable to the Spanish right wing, warned Blum that England would not come to France's defense if involvement in Spain led to war with Germany. Faced with this prospect, Blum proposed non-intervention of the European powers in the affairs of Spain, hoping that all the governments would agree and the war would quickly end for lack of armaments. Even before his idea was everywhere accepted, he closed the frontier on August 8, at a time when Germany and Italy were stepping up aid to the rebels. By the end of the month, 27 European nations had committed themselves to the Non-intervention Agreement—which kept the Spanish government from buying arms on the world's markets, as it was legally entitled to do—the small democracies of the continent tamely following the lead of the big powers. Soon a Non-intervention Committee was meeting regularly in London. Yet in spite of their adherence to the pact, Italy and Germany continued their military aid to Franco.

When the generals rose against the Spanish Republic on July 18, large segments of the population of the Western countries were immediately pro-Republican. In France, both Socialist and Communist labor unions demanded that their government support Spain with arms, while the French liberal middle classes who had supported the separation of Church and State, and who could still remember the Dreyfus Affair, looked askance at the alliance of the Church and the military that Franco represented. In England, Labour was pro-Republic, though its pacifist leaders acquiesced in nonintervention in the sincere hope—soon to be shattered—that it would be observed and peace would be restored.⁴ As the Republic fought back against the uprising, the anti-fascists of the continent felt, according to George Orwell, "a thrill of hope. For here at last, apparently, was democracy standing up to fascism." And though Orwell quickly recognized that Franco was not comparable to Hitler and Mussolini, that his uprising represented the traditional forces of Church, aristocracy, and military, the thrill did not fade. For the principles of democracy and liberalism, insofar as they were embodied in the governments of the world and the League of Nations, had taken too many beatings in recent years: the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Hitler's takeover of Germany, Dolifuss's crushing of Austrian social democracy, Mussolini's brutal war against the helpless Ethiopians. With the resistance of the Republic in Spain, "It seemed—perhaps it was—the turning of the tide."⁵

With the news of Italian and German intervention in Spain, all people in the Western countries who did not like fascism, Nazism, and the sort of world order they envisaged, who did not like the bombing of synagogues, the concentration camp, the tramp of boots, and the knock on the door in the middle of the night, began to support the Spanish Republic. Long before the broadcast of Radio Madrid on November 8, many people in the Western countries agreed with the sentiments of the Spanish Republican deputy, who proclaimed, "Madrid is the universal frontier that separates liberty and slavery. It is here that two incompatible civilizations undertake their great struggle: love against hate, peace against war, the fraternity of Christ against the tyranny of the Church.... It is fighting for Spain, for Humanity, for Justice, and, with the mantle of its blood, it shelters all human beings!"⁶

Enthusiasm for the cause of Loyalist Spain took many forms in the cities of Europe, from the newspaper editorial to the soapbox oration to the mass meeting, with demands for an end to Italo-German intervention and for aid to the Republican government. Yet among the many liberals and left-wingers in the countries of the West—England, France, and Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, and Belgium—there were men too committed to the ideals of the Popular Front against fascism, too impatient or too wise to stay at home and work for a change in their country's nonintervention policy. In these countries there also resided a large number of political exiles from Eastern lands that specialized in ignoring the voice of the people or in silencing it, refugees from Germany and Italy, Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. For these activists, who had lived through a right-wing takeover in their own country or had watched the right sweep over much of Europe, the rising in Spain provided a conflict where they could confront their enemy with rifle in hand for the first time. By fighting in Spain, many of the exiled hoped to find the road back to their own homelands. As one Italian said, he wanted to show his own countrymen living under Mussolini that "one could and should die for liberty."⁷ If enough men did so, the regimes of the right might everywhere be toppled.

So the Eastern exiles and their Western comrades went to Spain. The last two weeks in July, hundreds of volunteers poured over the Franco-Spanish border to Barcelona, where they enlisted in various militia units. There were Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, and Republicans among these first volunteers, and in early August they marched out into Aragon with Catalan troops who occupied town after town, but were stalled short of their main objective, Zaragoza. Soon the foreigners formed their own centuria, military columns of a hundred men or more. Each had a distinctive name: "Thaelmann" for the Germans, "Gastone-Sozzi" for the Italians, "Paris" for the French and Belgians, with Slavs and Englishmen scattered in all the groups. By late August there were enough English to form their own centuria, and a second Italian unit, composed largely of Anarchists, was in the field.

Across Spain, in the Basque country, in late August rebel troops closed in upon Irun to cut the Loyalists off from the French border. Here a large number of Poles, French, Belgians, and Czechs threw themselves into a bitter battle which was watched by spectators from the French side of the border, the foreigners being among the last troops to retreat across the frontier. Soon these same volunteers were back in Spain, with the foreign centuria in Catalonia. In September, as the Army of Africa raced toward Madrid, some of the centuria left Catalonia to join the Communist Fifth Regiment near the capital. On September 11, the Gastone-Sozzi column was wildly cheered as it marched through Madrid, and soon it was fighting with Spanish militia units in several ill-fated attempts to stop the rebel thrust at the Spanish capital.⁸ So it is obvious that long before Soviet Russia approved the formation of International Brigades, long before the first group of Frenchmen under the sponsorship of the Comintern arrived in the provincial capital of Albacete in mid-October, and long before French Communist Andre Marty assumed control of the International base there, foreigners were crossing the Spanish border and offering their lives to defend the cause of the Spanish Republic.

The appeal of Spain to the liberals and left-wingers of the world has nowhere been better described than by W. H. Auden, in his poem "Spain, 1937." Here is a picture of the call to arms being heard in the remote corners of the globe, on "sleepy plains" and in the "corrupt" hearts of cities. And then comes the response of the volunteers, answering the call, clinging to trains, floating across oceans, and hiking through mountain passes to defend Spain. As Auden put it, "Madrid is the heart," the heart of a civilization, of a world, and of an ideal, that 35,000 men from 53 foreign lands would put their lives on the line to protect.⁹

Across the Atlantic Ocean, over which so many volunteers were to journey to Spain, the United States lay still sunk in the worst economic depression in its history, its political leaders grappling with domestic issues, largely oblivious of the world beyond. And although no European war ever seemed quite real to the people of the United States, at least until they were in it, this war had already touched them more than most, and some looked upon Loyalist Spain as "a beacon of hope in a continent darkened by increasingly ominous clouds."¹⁰ For American writers, artists, intellectuals, or simple democrats, sensiti...