Fighting For Franco

During the Spanish Civil War many groups on the European right were galvanised by the Nationalist cause. This book recounts the experiences of a number of foreign volunteers, all of whom saw their engagement in Spain as a means of promoting their own political causes at home.

As a general rule, Keene (European studies, U. of Sydney) finds that volunteers from other countries to fight for the fascists spoke no Spanish before they arrived, and came only for the adventure. The ideologues among them, however, interpreted the Spanish Civil War in terms of struggles in their home countries and so had little inkling of conditions in Spain. The Nationalists, for their part. did not welcome foreigners, especially those with little to offer to the military effort. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

One of the enduring myths of the Franco state was that the Nationalist forces that won the Civil War consisted of patriotic Spaniards, while the Republic was defended by a rag tag army of foreign Reds. During the Spanish civil war, however, many groups on the European right were galvanised by the Nationalist cause. European fascists, conservative Catholics and those uneasy with liberal democracy in general rallied to the figure of Franco, who appeared to be holding the line against secularism, modernism and Bolshevism. This book recounts the experiences of a number of foreign volunteers, including the brigades of White Russians, Romanians, Irish and the French volunteers in the Jeanne d'Arc battalion, all of whom saw their engagement in Spain as a means of promoting their own political causes at home.

Foreign volunteers fought on behalf of General Franco and the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War for a right-wing cause whose aim was to smash democracy. These assorted adventurers, fascists, and Catholic crusaders were on the winning side, but their role has remained strangely hidden until now. Men from Portugal and Morocco signed on for money and adventure. General Eoin O'Duffy organised 700 Irishmen in a modern Crusade; 500 Catholic Frenchmen fought in the "Jeanne D'Arc" unit; and thirty British volunteers, including aristocrats and working-class fascists, also took up arms. Romanian Iron Guard extremists died at Majadahonda and an Indian volunteer fought in the fascist militia. There were Russians, Americans, Finns, Belgians, Greeks, Cubans, and many more. Goose-stepping alongside the volunteers were fascist conscripts from Germany and Italy, in training for the next world war. Foreigners, whether unknown individuals like British pilot Cecil Bebb or infamous figures like the German dictator Adolf Hitler, were essential to Franco's victory. Without Bebb--who flew General Francisco Franco from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco in 1936, a journey which was to precipitate the onset of the Spanish Civil War--the war would never have started; without Hitler, Franco would never have won.

Introduction / McLoughlin and O'Connor -- Ireland and the SCW: the setting, Spain and Europe in 1936, clericalism and anti-clericalism in Spain and Ireland, politics in Ireland / O'Connor -- Northern Ireland and the SCW: contrasting perspectives of Unionists and nationalists on Spain / O'Connor -- First actions: Madrid, Lopera, and the defection of the Irish from the British battalion to the Lincoln battalion in January 1936 / O'Connor -- Blood and Boredom at the Jarama: February-June 1937 / McLoughlin -- Frank Ryan and the politics of the SCW in Ireland / O'Connor -- Republican offensives (I): Pozoblanco, Brunete / McLoughlin -- Republican Offensives (II): Aragón, Teruel / McLoughlin -- Retreat and Capture, March 1938: Irish POWs / McLoughlin -- Frank Ryan's trial and imprisonment, 1938-1939 / McLoughlin -- Attempts to Frank Ryan Released, 1939-1940 / McLoughlin -- The Irish volunteers: discipline, desertion and punishment / McLoughlin and O'Connor -- Over the Ebro: Last battle of the Internationals, July-September 1938 / McLoughlin -- Withdrawal, homecoming, and the politics of commemoration / O'Connor -- Conclusion / McLoughlin and O'Connor.

** Shortlisted for the Military History Matters Book of the Year Award ** 'Magnificent. Narrative history at its vivid and compelling best' Fergal Keane The first major history of the International Brigades: a tale of blood, ideals and tragedy in the fight against fascism. The Spanish Civil War was the first armed battle in the fight against fascism, and a rallying cry for a generation. Over 35,000 volunteers from sixty-one countries around the world came to defend democracy against the troops of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. Ill-equipped and disorderly, yet fuelled by a shared sense of purpose and potential glory, these disparate groups of idealistic young men and women formed a volunteer army of a size and type unseen since the Crusades, known as the International Brigades. Were they heroes or fools? Saints or bloodthirsty adventurers? And what exactly did they achieve? In this magisterial history, Giles Tremlett tells – for the first time – the story of the Spanish Civil War through the experiences of this remarkable group. Drawing on the Brigades' archives in Moscow, as well as first-hand accounts, The International Brigades captures all the human drama of a historic mission to halt fascist expansion in Europe.

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations fighting for the POUM militia of the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War. The war was one of the defining events of his political outlook and a significant part of what led him to write in 1946, "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism, as I understand it." The first edition was published in the United Kingdom in 1938. The book was not published in the United States until February 1952, when it appeared with an influential preface by Lionel Trilling. The only translation published in Orwell's lifetime was into Italian, in December 1948. A French translation by Yvonne Davet-with whom Orwell corresponded, commenting on her translation and providing explanatory notes-in 1938-39, was not published until five years after Orwell's death. Book Summary: Orwell served as a private, a corporal (cabo) and-when the informal command structure of the militia gave way to a conventional hierarchy in May 1937-as a lieutenant, on a provisional basis, in Catalonia and Aragon from December 1936 until June 1937. In June 1937, the leftist political party with whose militia he served (the POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, an anti-Stalinist communist party) was declared an illegal organisation, and Orwell was consequently forced to flee. Having arrived in Barcelona on 26 December 1936, Orwell told John McNair, the Independent Labour Party's (ILP) representative there, that he had "come to Spain to join the militia to fight against Fascism." He also told McNair that "he would like to write about the situation and endeavour to stir working class opinion in Britain and France." McNair took him to the POUM barracks, where Orwell immediately enlisted. "Orwell did not know that two months before he arrived in Spain, the [Soviet law enforcement agency] NKVD's resident in Spain, Aleksandr Orlov, had assured NKVD Headquarters, 'the Trotskyist organisation POUM can easily be liquidated'-by those, the Communists, whom Orwell took to be allies in the fight against Franco."

THE LINCOLN BRIGADE The day after Christmas in 1936, a group of ninety-six Americans sailed from New York to help Spain defend its democratic government against fascism. Ultimately, twenty-eight hundred United States volunteers reached Spain to become the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Few Lincolns had any military training. More than half were seriously wounded or died in battle. Most Lincolns were activists and idealists who had worked with and demonstrated for the homeless and unemployed during the Great Depression. They were poets and blue-collar workers, professors and students, seamen and journalists, lawyers and painters, Christians and Jews, blacks and whites. The Brigade was the first fully integrated United States army, and Oliver Law, an African American from Texas, was an early Lincoln commander. William Loren Katz and the late Marc Crawford twice traveled with the Brigade to Spain in the 1980s, interviewed surviving Lincolns on old battlefields, and obtained never-before-published documents and photographs for this book.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. A sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through a dozen characters, including Hemingway and George Orwell: A tale of idealism, heartbreaking suffering, and a noble cause that failed. For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa’s photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war: a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman who went to wartime Spain on her honeymoon, a Swarthmore College senior who was the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid, a pair of fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposites sides, and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil — at reduced prices, and on credit. It was in many ways the opening battle of World War II, and we still have much to learn from it. Spain in Our Hearts is Adam Hochschild at his very best. “With all due respect to Orwell, Spain in Our Hearts should supplant Homage to Catalonia as the best introduction to the conflict written in English. A humane and moving book."—New Republic “Excellent and involving . . . What makes [Hochschild’s] book so intimate and moving is its human scale.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times

"The International Brigades who fought for the Republican Government in the Spanish Civil War received a hero's welcome when they returned home. But the 90,000 foreign volunteers, including 15,000 Germans and 70,000 Italians, who fought for General Franco - three times the number who joined the International Brigades - crept home in silence." "Franco, who dared not admit he had needed foreigners to help win his patriotric crusade, erased them from history." "American adventurers, British aristocrats, Peruvian poets, Finnish film stars, Irish Catholics, White Russions, Romanian fascists, French monarchists and Moroccan nationalists were all drawn to Spain to fight for an extraordinary variety of causes that often had little to do with the fate of the Spanish people. Christopher Othen gives a crucial insight into a divided and confused continent on the brink of world war."--BOOK JACKET.