Volunteers against fascism
The legendary International Brigades were the shock troops defending the Spanish Second Republic against the rebellion of General Franco, who was supported by the soldiers, weapons and planes of Mussolini and Hitler
It was a unique, modern crusade. Thirty-five thousand volunteers from 65 nations fought for the beleaguered Republic in all the major battles of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Remarkably, no full, definitive history of the International Brigades had been published until Tremlett’s book, 82 years after their formal withdrawal in November 1938. Previous Brigade histories and memoirs were hampered by fierce loyalty that obscured an objective view. I remember reviewing a recent exception that confirmed the rule, James Jump’s magnificent The Fighter Fell in Love (Catalonia Today, May 2021). Jump did not publish it in his lifetime because he did not want to hurt IB survivors by his comments on the shooting of deserters and supposed ‘Trotskyists’, on homosexuality or on the demoralisation caused by paranoia about spies and sabotage. Another factor was directly political: criticism was unacceptable to the usually Stalinist-dominated International Brigade Associations. It’s no accident that such a comprehensive account as Tremlett’s has had to wait until all the Brigade survivors have died. The other factor that makes the book so rich is that Tremlett has been able to consult Moscow archives on the brigades.
Front-line fighters
The International Brigades’ losses were very high: about 30% of the brigadistes were killed and around 50% of the survivors were wounded, many maimed for life. Though the Brigades have often been depicted as consisting of artists and writers, the vast majority of volunteers were working class. Most but not all were communists, as it was the Communist International that organised the brigades. Though often ill-equipped and undertrained, they were used in the front line in all parts of the Spanish state: from Madrid where they helped halt Franco’s army in the outskirts of the city in November 1936, Lopera in Andalusia, the Jarama river to stop Franco encircling Madrid, Guadalajara where Italian brigadistes routed Mussolini’s Italians, Brunete to the west of Madrid, where the Republican army attempted and narrowly failed to encircle Franco’s forces, to the last great battles around the Ebre (Ebro) from July to November 1938.
The Battle of the Ebre was the Republic’s last desperate hope. It had lost Teruel in February. In early April Franco’s armies had smashed through the lines in Aragon with vastly superior manpower, armament and aviation. Reaching Vinaròs on the coast on 15 April 1938, they cut off Catalonia from València and Madrid. In this ‘Blitzkrieg’, forerunner of German tactics in World War 2, several Brigade battalions were overrun. So high were the casualties that by the Battle of the Ebre, most of the International Brigades’ soldiers were Spanish conscripts.
The Ebre battle was based on a political consideration: to try to extend the Civil War until the start of a Second Europe-wide War that almost everyone (except Neville Chamberlain) saw coming. Around 7,000 international volunteers were among the army that crossed the river on the night of 24 July. After the first days’ surprise advance, planes and artillery pinned down the Republican troops on bare hills with no cover around Corbera, held by Franco’s forces. In his final chapters Tremlett evokes this terrible battle brilliantly:
“Intense barrages of shrapnel bombs and mortars kicked up a fog of dust, laced with spinning shreds of steel, while the ground shook and the continual blasts left many concussed. Water, again, was scarce. Uniforms turned to rags. Boots were shredded…” (p.486).
The cries of the wounded, dying on the sun-baked slopes, and the stench of unburied corpses were unavoidable nightmares. Franco’s army also suffered huge casualties, but could continually replace its dead with conscripts drafted from occupied Spain and Morocco. The International Brigades, often filled with troops as young as 16, conscripted from Catalonia’s farms and towns, resisted courageously in this hell, but there was little chance of success against a superior army. After four months the Republican forces were driven back across the river. Many brigadistes were missing or captured – and capture usually meant summary execution. The lines were broken and Franco’s army marched rapidly north, abusing and slaughtering those unruly Catalans who had dared to be autonomous and who had attempted a revolution in 1936.
Proud withdrawal
During 1938, the Soviet Union’s support for the Republic began to wane: the war looked lost and the democracies were not prepared to form an alliance to oppose fascism. In a last forlorn attempt to convince these same democracies of the “national” character of their war, the Republican government withdrew the c.12,000 foreign fighters still present. In a famous rally in Barcelona on 28 November they marched in farewell to mass acclaim despite the hunger and demoralisation of a city swollen by homeless, starving refugees. La Pasionaria made a famous speech (“You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend”) and the surviving brigadistes were overcome with emotion, many weeping. They wanted to go home, but hated to abandon the fight against fascism. Despite the dissolution of the Brigades, around six thousand foreign volunteers, in particular Germans, Italians and Poles, remained behind, unable to return to their countries. With the last desperate retreat towards the French border in February 1939, many of them re-enlisted.
Tremlett’s book has several strengths. Its documentation is deep and wide. Its use of memoir and anecdote makes a long narrative that could easily be a boring recital of battles extremely readable. Politically he is clearly sympathetic to the brigadistes’ antifascist values, but does not fall into the omissions and exaggerations common to Stalin-influenced memoirs. One surprisingly weak chapter (32) fails to grasp the revolutionary politics of the POUM (the anti-Stalinist party based in Catalonia) or the anarchists. Overall, though, he is rigorously objective: where appropriate, he praises anarchists as fighters, reports conflict within the Brigades or criticises Stalin. Tremlett’s book must be the definitive history of the International Brigades. It is unlikely to be bettered.
book review
Giles Tremlett
From 2001 to 2013, Giles Tremlett (born 1962) was the Guardian correspondent in Madrid, where he has lived since the early 1990s. Both journalist and historian, his first book was Ghosts of Spain, subtitled Travels through a Country’s Hidden Past (2006), a serious survey of contemporary Spain, that focused on the victims of Franco buried in ditches or mass graves and the dictatorship that few talked about.
This was followed by two books on Spain’s famous queens, the first wife of Henry VIII Catherine of Aragon (2010) and her mother Isabella of Castile (2017). The latter won the 2018 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. Despite his interest in these queens, he is no Spanish centralist. A Brief History of Spain (2022) emphasises that the state’s lack of a homogenous identity is its defining trait.