The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and The Spanish Civil War
by Giles Tremlett, Bloomsbury £30.00
 

TO AVOID constant reference to the book’s main map, readers of Giles Tremlett’s voluminous, blow-by-blow account of the contribution of the estimated 38,000 volunteers from over 60 countries who fought to defend Republican Spain from Franco’s fascist coup, should equip themselves with a large map of the country Auden described as “that fragment nipped off from Africa… soldered on to inventive Europe.”

Tremlett’s book could have benefitted from an introductory dramatis personae as in classical novels – War and Peace perhaps –to keep the reader in touch with the innumerable characters we meet, often confusingly sporting noms de guerre, in what has been described by a major historian of the period as “a magnificent narrative history.”

To be fair, military history is usually beset with communicating the confusing complexities of warfare. Here shifting fronts, a virtual Tower of Babel of languages, national cultures and factional political differences between communists, socialists and anarchists, coupled with the fact that most of the volunteers had little or no military training, posed a labyrinth to negotiate.

The one constant factor in this apocalyptic confrontation was that the largely working-class Brigaders, uniquely for a fighting force, understood exactly what they were fighting for – the need to stop fascism in its tracks.

Organised by the Comintern working through national communist parties, thousands of young men and women either escaped countries already under fascist control or defied Western governments to face what Tremlett’s exhaustively researched accounts of their heroic attempts to stem the tide reveal to have been a living hell.

Franco’s Army of Africa, composed of Moroccan troops flown in by German planes, joined with thousands of Italian army “volunteers,” together with a constant supply of arms and airpower from Hitler and Mussolini, increasingly outnumbered the amateur International Brigades, who found themselves from the beginning fighting as “shock troops,” first to defend Madrid, then through a series of increasingly savage, renowned battles - Jarama, Guadalajara, Brunete, Belchete, Teruel - to the “nightmare retreat from the |Aragon front” and finally the tragedy of the Ebro.

Tremlett calls upon a range of recorded personal experiences and memories of many who took part, capturing the resilience, courage and incredible hardship of men facing an enemy whom they knew summarily executed most Brigader prisoners. Their numbers depleted day by day, and often betrayed by inexperienced and unco-ordinated leadership, they nevertheless acquired a reputation that survives in the words of La Pasionaria’s famous farewell speech to the Brigades upon their withdrawal from Spain in October 1938 – “You are a  legend… the heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality in the face of the vile and accommodating spirit of those…with their eyes on hordes of wealth or corporate shares which they want to safeguard from all risks.”

All historians inevitably reveal their ideological position and, Tremlett, a Guardian Contributing Editor, while making the case against the shameful British led non-interventionists  – Neville Chamberlain informing George VI that Britain and nazi Germany were “the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against communism” – and noting that Soviet aid both in supplying logistics and air and tank crews, at first offsetting the Axis Powers’ huge involvement, presents the controlling influence of the communists  in a largely negative light.

This is underlined by a final chapter summing up the post WWII fortunes of the ex-Brigaders from various countries whereby, unlike the shabby treatment faced by Western returnees, a number of those from the Soviet bloc countries were treated as heroes who achieved leadership positions.

If this latest in the vast library of books on the Spanish Civil War adds little new, it fleshes out detail with fascinating nuggets of incidental information such as the Lincoln Brigade after the slaughter at Jarama being led by Oliver Law, “the first black American commander to lead white troops into battle.”

Although Tremlett holds interest through novelistic and journalistic colouring with numerous personal stories of many involved, his book commendably carries none of the common romantic glossing of that momentous war, but conveys the admiration due to the international volunteers who lived and died for a cause as important to us all now as it was to them.