I don't know. I think el-Caudillo killed quite a few of them. Obviously, I wish he would have wiped out the stalinist abraham lincoln brigade. They were a bunch of totalitarian loving, criminals.
Posted on 07/17/2006 6:29:12 AM PDT by BerlinStrausbaugh
The men of the International Brigade failed in their mission, but they still bask in the memory of a just cause, writes our correspondent.
TOURISTS on the London Eye this morning may wonder why the rousing strains of the Internationale, the anthem of world socialism, are drifting skywards from the South Bank far below.
The date — the 70th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War — will probably escape them. But in the pantheon of the political Left it remains one of the highest causes for which they went to fight — and lost.
Around a memorial in Jubilee Gardens, beneath the Eye, a handful of frail survivors will gather to remember in particular the 2,400 Britons who volunteered to join the International Brigades in support of Spain’s democratically elected Republican Government against the rebel Fascist forces of General Francisco Franco.
There are 24 remaining and the youngest is 90. Between 1936 and 1938 they lost 526 comrades on the Iberian battlefields. To have been there is still a badge of honour among socialists, communists and trade unionists. For them it was when the working class took up arms in a noble cause: to stop the encroaching menace of Fascism and thereby prevent the looming Second World War. But idealism was not enough to halt Panzer tanks and the overweening ambitions of the Third Reich.
Through the International Brigade Memorial Trust, the survivors hold a small ceremony every year — and today for the first time an official representative of the Spanish Government will attend. Carlos Miranda, Madrid’s Ambassador to London, will lay a wreath.
There will be readings, a new book of brigaders’ poems, and an appearance by the best-known surviving brigader — Jack Jones, the former general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, who is the trust’s president. Mr Jones, 93, was wounded in the shoulder in 1938 and sent home.
“I felt an obligation to fight for freedom and liberation,” he said. “The awful realisation that black Fascism was on the march right across Europe created a strong desire to act. The march had started with Mussolini, had gained terrible momentum with Hitler, and was being carried forward by Franco.”
Marlene Sidaway, secretary of the trust, which now has some 700 members including veterans, veterans’ families, friends and interested academics, said: “The Spanish Civil War has been largely forgotten. People felt then that if they stopped fascism in Spain, they would prevent the Second World War. But the last battle of the first war was more or less the first battle of the second.”
More than 35,000 volunteers from 50 countries flocked to Spain, including a galaxy of writers and intellectuals: Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Cecil Day-Lewis. There were aristocratic young adventurers such as Jessica Mitford, who eloped to Spain with her distant cousin Esmond Romilly, having asked him while he was on home leave to take her with him when he returned.
Also in Spain were young men later to make a mark in British politics: Clement Attlee, who visited Republican forces with fellow British Labour MPs; a young Edward Heath, part of a student delegation invited by the Republicans; and one Marxist member of the brigades, Alfred Sherman, who subsequently modified his views to the extent that he became a guru of Margaret Thatcher.
But most of the British volunteers were ordinary working men who left the factory or the dole queue in search of excitement as well as honour.
Many of the Irish volunteers were unwilling to take orders from former members of the British Army who provided some of the brigade officers: they went off and fought alongside the American volunteers.
Despite some military successes, the Republicans and their international supporters never really stood a chance. Franco’s forces were better trained and equipped: Mr Jones’s military experience had consisted of basic training with the Territorial Army. Germany flew tough units of the Spanish rebel army back from Morocco, and provided the bombers for the world’s first deliberate air raid on civilians at Guernica.
To this day brigaders blame the inaction of Stanley Baldwin and his successor at No 10, Neville Chamberlain, and that of other European leaders who turned a blind eye, refusing to supply the democratic government with arms lest it upset the Nazi regime in Berlin.
But there is another side to it all. Terry Charman, an historian and a specialist on the subject at the Imperial War Museum, said: “For all his very many faults, Franco kept Spain out of the Second World War. He took control of an exhausted country which had lost one million citizens, and was more than a match for Hitler who wanted Spain as an ally in the crusade to control Europe. Franco even had the bottle to keep Hitler waiting at a planned meeting, much to the Führer’s fury.”
Mr Charman added: “If the Republican side had won, there is no guarantee whatsoever that the Panzer divisions would have stopped at the Pyrenees.”
Some historians believe that the Spanish Civil War is too often seen through the romantic prism of Hemingway and his like, rather as Byron saw Greece set upon by Turkey.
“The Spanish Civil War was just that — a Spanish civil war between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction. It was the old Spain versus the new, and the old temporarily won,” Mr Charman said.
The most distinguished chronicler of international solidarity with Spain was Orwell. In Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938, when the Republicans looked like losing the fight, he wrote: “I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards. They have a generosity, a species of nobility, that really do not belong to the twentieth century. It is this that makes one hope that in Spain even Fascism may take a comparatively loose and bearable form. Few Spaniards possess the damnable efficiency and consistency that a modern totalitarian state needs.”
Spain had to wait another 37 years before Franco died and democracy was restored, by King Juan Carlos, in 1975 — and was subsequently defended against an abortive coup. The men of the International Brigade failed in their mission, but they still bask in the memory of a just cause.
BATTLES FOUGHT AND LIVES LOST
13th July 1936: opposition leader Calvo Sotelo killed, providing a casus belli for rebellious generals.
50,000 killed in the opening days, from both sides of the conflict.
3 years of fighting ensue between left-wing Republicans and General Franco’s right-wing Nationalists.
60,000 Italian troops sent by Mussolini to aid Franco.
2,000 Russian soldiers deployed on the Republican side.
40,000 foreign volunteers fought in the International Brigades.
1/2 million or more people died, mostly in mass executions on both sides.
12 bishops, 283 nuns 2,365 monks and 4,184 priests were also killed.
1st April 1939: victory declared by the Nationalists, after Valencia falls
36 years of dictatorship follow until Franco’s death in 1975
500 bodies have so far been exhumed from 67 mass graves
As Tom Lehrer once sung:
"They might have won all the battles, but we had all the good songs."
The Communists butchered priests and religious in Spain, along with anyone who supported them. They tried to kill the centuries-old culture, and now they're doing their best to kill the last vestiges of it now.
It's much more like "mob" than "commie/nazi" stuff.
"500 bodies have so far been exhumed from 67 mass graves"
Makes one wonder how many would have come from those graves had the Communists prevailed in 1939. This was just just forms of total statism wrestling for the prize, with the people the losers.
Hasn't there been a recent discovery of documents in Russian archives outlining how the "progressive" side of the Civil War was backed and instigated by the USSR?
Franco may be dead, but the Spanish are still being Franked..........
The only thing wrong about Franco is he didn't do a thorough enough job. There are too many Commies who escaped in Spain.
The 'duly elected republican government' was vicious, brutal, and bent on eliminating any form of opposition - religious or political.
Their one great assets were the socialist majority among western authors, reporters and educators, and the still socialist control over western unions.
The false myths created by such as Orwell and Hemingway will NEVER go away.
The Spanish Civil War was the origin of the term "Fifth Column." Seems appropriate these days, when that institution is the sole vestige of that discredited ideology.
Franco also imported Moroccan troops to commit atrocities.
The only good guys in the Spanish Civil War were a portion of the Republicans at the outset of the war who indeed wanted a middle-of-the-road democracy. Unfortunately they were soon shoved aside by the Communists and Anarcho-Syndicalists and assorted other nutcases among the Republicans who took over.
I admire the Carlists as well.
I don't know. I think el-Caudillo killed quite a few of them. Obviously, I wish he would have wiped out the stalinist abraham lincoln brigade. They were a bunch of totalitarian loving, criminals.
Spain needs Franco now, before it's too late to save the country. Open immigration and liberalism is the death knell of Western countries.
Hitler sent the Condor Legion which terror bombed Spanish cities and Mussolini sent an entire army. Why was it wrong to fight them? Sure, Russia sent aid but if the West had intervened, it could have influenced the government to be less Leftist and remember the government had been duly elected.
"Sure, Russia sent aid"
In point of fact, Russia did more than just send aid. If you get a chance, read Ronald Rasdosh's "Spain Betrayed, The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War." Here is a synopsis:
The Spanish Civil War has long been the stuff of legend. Thousands of brave young men from all over the Western world, most of them organized by their local Communist parties, rushed to Spain to support the democratic Republic against right-wing forces led by rebellious generals in the Spanish officer corps. Although the Republic was eventually defeated, some observers believed that the effort to defend it was a selfless undertaking of the international Communist movement and the Soviet Union -- a noble crusade against Hitler, Mussolini, and their Spanish puppet Franco.
This book presents a very different view of the role of the Soviet Union in this war. Based on previously unavailable Moscow archives, it provides the first full documentation of that country's duplicitous and self-serving activities. Documents in the book reveal that the Soviet Union not only swindled the Spanish Republic out of millions of dollars through arms deals but also sought to take over and run the Spanish economy, government, and armed forces in order to make Spain a Soviet possession, thereby effectively destroying the foundations of authentic Spanish antifascism. The documents also shed light on many other disputed episodes of the war: the timing of the Republican request for assistance from the Soviet Union; the rise and fall of the International Brigades; the internal workings of the Comintern and its influence on Spain; and much more.
Authoritative and startling in the new information it offers, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in Soviet foreign policy or the Spanish Civil War.
Veterans of the commie "Abraham Lincoln Brigade" were recently featured on American TV as heroes!!!
They were a bunch of Stalinist scum, but then the U.S. government in WW2 was riddled with Stalinists or Stalinophiles from FDR on down.
Franco laid out the welcome mat for "Odessa".
All manner of Nazi war criminals eluded justice thanks
to Franco.
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