volunteers flooding to Spain to bolster the democratic government’s efforts to stave off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Some 2,800 Americans went to Spain as volunteers in the fight against fascism, and nearly a quarter of them perished there. The Americans were known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. After two-and-a-half years of fighting, the fascists were able to declare victory on April 1st, 1939. World War II began shortly afterwards.
Adam Hochschild talking:
I had always been interested in the Spanish Civil War. When I was in my twenties, one of my first jobs was as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and, as it happened, there were two other reporters on the newspaper, each 30 or 40 years older than me, who were veterans of the American—of the Spanish Civil War. They were Americans who had volunteered to fight there. And when times were slow in the newsroom, I used to ask them about their experiences. Later, of course, I read Ernest Hemingway, I read George Orwell, visited Spain, grew more fascinated by the war and, a few years ago, finally decided, well, it’s time to write a book about this. And I discovered all kinds of things that—some of which I think had not been well known before. I had just a fascinating time doing it.
The title comes from a quotation from Albert Camus, which I should know by heart by now but don’t. But it goes something like—he said it some nine or 10 years after the war: “Men of my generation have always had Spain in our hearts. There we learned that you could be right but still be defeated, that courage was not its own reward.” And it goes on like that.
Roll back the clock for a moment to the mid-1930s. Fascism is on the rise everywhere. Mussolini has just conquered Ethiopia. Hitler is making noises about taking over Eastern Europe. He clearly has his eyes set on capturing a big slice of Russia. This is an aggressive movement. All of a sudden, in Western Europe, in a democracy, Spain, which had had an elected government since 1931, there is a rising of right-wing generals, from whom a leader quickly emerges, a tough-talking young general, Francisco Franco. And they try to take over the country. And they clearly want to impose a regime that will suppress all trappings of democracy—free trade union, free press, none of that. And it was very clear who their friends were, because immediately Hitler and Mussolini began sending large quantities of help—airplanes, pilots, tanks, tank drivers, artillery, military advisers, equipment of all kinds. And Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops, as well. So, from all over the world, people began coming to Spain as volunteers to fight to defend the republic.
From the United States, some 2,800 Americans went, before long—the largest number of Americans who have ever gone to fight in somebody else’s civil war. And I think they went, above all, because of the danger of fascism. One young New Yorker, Maury Colow, said later, “For us, it was never about Franco. It was always about Hitler.” Another young American, Hyman Katz, who was actually a 23-year-old rabbi, wrote to his mother from Spain shortly before he was killed, saying if he hadn’t come to Spain, he said, “for the rest of my life, I never could have forgiven myself for not waking up when the alarm clock rang.”
close to half of all the American volunteers were Jewish. A think a couple of things. Above all, the fact that Hitler was rapidly rising. He had come to power in Germany in 1933, was making no secret that life was going to be very, very tough for the Jews. The full extent of the Holocaust, of course, nobody could imagine at that time, but it was clear terrible things were coming. Jews were also heavily overrepresented in the left wing in the United States. And the organization of most of these volunteers who went to Spain was orchestrated by the Communist Party, in this country and in the other countries the volunteers came from. Not all of them, though, were communists. Many came from other strains of the left, as well.
A moving story about Clarence Kailin. When he enlisted to fight in Spain, he went to Spain together with a schoolmate of his from Wisconsin, a man named John Cookson. Cookson, who was a physics instructor at the University of Wisconsin, was killed, one of the last Americans killed in Spain in the late summer of 1938, and was buried there. And Cookson’s grave is the only known grave of an international volunteer in Spain that survived destruction under Franco and his nationalists during the long period of Franco’s rule. It was hidden by Spanish villagers behind some bushes in a little town called Marsa. It was moved at one point, so I’m not sure the gravestone is actually where the body is right now. But it was kept, tended, flowers put there, carefully hidden for decades afterwards. Clarence Kailin went back several times in later years to visit his friend’s grave and asked that when he died, he be buried next to it. So, today, you can find these two gravestones side by side.
Clarence Kailin speaking in 2007, “We were fighting against fascism. And we were political enough to understand that, so it wasn’t for an adventure, and it wasn’t for money. It was—it was fighting against Italy and Italian fascism and German Nazism, is what it was about. And we felt that if we lost the war, that World War II was pretty much inevitable, which is what happened. And it happened because Britain and France and the United States refused to give us any help at all. And so, we fought barehanded at times.”
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Adam Hochschild
professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley. He co-founded Mother Jones magazine. He is the author of eight books, including King Leopold’s Ghost and To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. His new book is called Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.
— source democracynow.org