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Abstract
Ever since the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, myths and misconceptions have surrounded the International Brigades, the volunteers from around the world who came to the defence of the Spanish Republic. Their creation, composition, and role in the war itself have all been hotly debated, with critics arguing that the International Brigades were primarily a ‘Comintern Army’, a tool of Soviet expansionism, in which any form of dissent was ruthlessly eliminated. Therefore, the discipline problems and consequent heavy-handed responses from the I.B. leadership are often seen as politically rather than militarily driven, despite the manifestly demoralizing nature of the war. Yet while a small number of volunteers were undoubtedly brutally treated, there was a much greater tolerance in the Brigades—certainly within the English-speaking battalions—than has often been suggested.
Notes
1 National Archives (NA) Kew. KV5/112.
2 Richard Baxell, ‘Have We Underestimated the Number of Volunteers?’ International Brigade Memorial Trust Newsletter, 30 (Autumn 2011), 9, and Tom Buchanan, ‘The Secret History of Britain's Spanish Civil War Volunteers’, The Guardian, 28 June 2011, <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jun/28/mi5-spanish-civil-war-britain?CMP = twt_gu> (accessed 24 April 2009).
3 Arthur F. Loveday, World War in Spain (London: John Murray, 1939), 134.
4 Report by General Walter, International Brigade Collection, Moscow 35082/1/95, cited in Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, ed. Ronald Radosh, Mary M. Habeck and Grigory Sevostianov (London: Yale U. P. 2001), 452.
5 ‘Stalin's decision [to support the creation of brigades of international volunteers] was eventually reached apparently as a result of a visit to Moscow on September 21 by Thorez, the French Communist leader’ (Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War [London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1961], 295).
6 ‘The idea of the International Brigade arose spontaneously in the minds of men who, up to July 1936, were engaged in peaceful pursuits, and were probably taking but little interest in the affairs of Spain’ (Bill Rust, Britons in Spain [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1939], 4).
7 Interview with George Aitken, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, London (IWMSA) 10357, reel 1.
8 Boris Volodarsky, ‘Soviet Intelligence Services in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939’, PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2010.
9 Ángel Viñas, ‘September 1936: Stalin's Decision to Support the Spanish Republic’, in Looking Back at the Spanish Civil War, ed. Jim Jump (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010), 129–55 (p. 134).
10 Review by Helen Graham of Antonio Elorza and Marta Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas. La Internacional Comunista y España 1919–1939 (Barcelona: Planeta, 1999), The Volunteer, 23:5 (Winter 2001), 17–19.
11 Don Watson and John Corcoran, An Inspiring Example: The North East of England and the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (Newcastle: McGuffin, 1996), 66.
12 About two-thirds of the British, American and Canadian volunteers were Communist Party members; see Richard Baxell, British Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War: The British Battalion in the International Brigades, 1936–1939 (Pontypool: Warren and Pell, in collaboration with the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies, 2007 [1st ed. London: Routledge, 2004]), 14–15; and Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1994), 19.
13 John Angus, With the International Brigade in Spain (Loughborough: Loughborough Univ., 1983), 3.
14 During the Civil War in Spain these two belief systems were, more or less, able to co-exist, but the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939 and the Communist Party's opposition to what they argued was an ‘imperialist war’ would shatter the peaceful coexistence between the two viewpoints.
15 The Brigades, ‘standard-bearers of the USSR's international prestige […] were agents of the Kremlin first and soldiers of the Spanish Republic only second’, argues Robert Stradling in ‘English-speaking Units of the International Brigades: War, Politics and Discipline’, Journal of Contemporary History, 45:4 (2010), 744–67 (pp. 752–53).
16 James Hopkins, Into the Heart of the Fire: The British in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1998), 151.
17 Graham, review of Elorza and Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas, 17.
18 Geoffrey Cox, The Defence of Madrid (London: Gollancz, 1937), 172–73.
19 Tom Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1997), 127.
20 ‘Britons Lured to Red Front’, Daily Mail, 18 February 1937, p. 13.
21 Douglas Hyde, I Believed (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1950), 60.
22 Interview with Will Paynter, IWMSA 10359, reel 2.
23 ‘Records in London—Observations’ enclosed in Marty to Pollitt, 22 December 1937, International Brigade Collection, Moscow 545/6/87, pp. 39–40.
24 Fred Thomas, To Tilt at Windmills: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War (East Lansing: State Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996), 4.
25 K. W. Watkins, Britain Divided: The Effect of the Spanish Civil War on British Political Opinion (London: Nelson, 1963), 168.
26 See, for example, Tom Wintringham, English Captain (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 330.
27 Bill Alexander, British Volunteers for Liberty (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982), 30–31.
28 Jason Gurney, Crusade in Spain (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 36.
29 Interview with Sam Wild, in The Road to Spain: Anti Fascists at War 1936–1939, ed. David Corkill and Stuart J. Rawnsley (Dunfermline: Borderline, 1981), 18–19.
30 A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1992), 395.
31 Some critics, somewhat anachronistically, situate the Brigades within Soviet history, post-Spain, comparing the commissars in Spain to those at Stalingrad and referring to the role of Spanish veterans in Eastern bloc regimes.
32 International Brigade Collection, Moscow 545/2/262, pp. 107, 109.
33 Senior British commissars who had attended the Lenin School included George Aitken, Bob Cooney, George Coyle, Thomas Degnan, Harry Dobson, Peter Kerrigan, Will Paynter and Walter Tapsell. See John Halstead and Barry McLoughlin, ‘British and Irish Students at the International Lenin School, Moscow, 1926–37’, Conference paper given at the University of Manchester, April 2001.
34 Gurney, Crusade in Spain, 62.
35 International Brigade Collection, Moscow 545/3/479, p. 22.
36 Volodarsky, ‘Soviet Intelligence Services in the Spanish Civil War’, 297.
37 Anon., In Spain with the International Brigade: A Personal Narrative (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1938), 8.
38 See Volodarsky, ‘Soviet Intelligence Services in the Spanish Civil War’, 173–74.
39 Daniel Kowalsky, Stalin and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Columbia U. P., 2004), 448.
40 Kowalsky, Stalin and the Spanish Civil War, 448.
41 Gabriel Jackson, Juan Negrín (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press/Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies, 2010).
42 The group responsible for the murder of Nin included the senior NKVD operative in Spain, Alexander Orlov, and the operation was led by NKVD assassin Iosif Grigulevich, a close associate of senior members of the Spanish Communist Party (see Volodarsky, ‘Soviet Intelligence Services in the Spanish Civil War’, 249–50).
43 Copeman was ‘not developed politically’, Sam Wild and Malcolm Dunbar were both ‘weak politically’, Jock Cunningham was ‘theoretically absolutely crude’ (International Brigade Collection, Moscow 545/6/118, p. 63; 545/6/215 p. 3; 545/6/126, p. 29; 545/6/121, p. 46).
44 Yet, despite the awkwardness it could cause, volunteers were repatriated, although some of them had committed misdemeanours during their time in Spain (International Brigade Collection, Moscow 545/6/156 p. 19; IBA MML Box 21, File B/2i).
45 Cyril Sexton, ‘Memories of the Spanish Civil War’, International Brigade Archive, Marx Memorial Library, London, p. 43.
46 For example, one commander of the British Battalion claimed that he was told by the commander of the Franco-Belge Battalion that ‘he had improved the discipline of the battalion since three of its members had been shot’ (in Fred Copeman, Reason in Revolt [London: Blandford Press, 1948], 108).
47 Interview with Bob Cooney in The Road to Spain: Anti Fascists at War 1936–1939, ed. Corkill and Rawnsley, 121.
48 International Brigade Collection, Moscow 545/6/99.
49 Interview with Tom Murray, in Voices from the Spanish Civil War: Personal Recollections of Scottish Volunteers in Republican Spain, 1936–1939, ed. Ian MacDougall (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1986), 324.
50 Interview with John Dunlop, IWMSA 11355, reel 10.
51 Jill Edwards, The British Government and the Spanish Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1979), 38.
52 Richard Baxell, ‘General Franco's British Foes’, The Spectator, 29 August 2012, <http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/books/2012/08/general-francos-british-foes/> (accessed 24 January 2013).
53 Baxell, ‘General Franco's British Foes’.
54 See, for example, Herbert Romerstein's Heroic Victims: Stalin's Foreign Legion in the Spanish Civil War (Washington D.C.: Council for the Defense of Freedom, 1994); Harvey Klehr, John E. Haynes and Fridrikh I. Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 1995) and, more recently, Spain Betrayed, ed. Radosh, Habeck and Sevostianov.
55 ‘The Ishmaels of Europe’, in the British pro-Franco magazine Spain, 1:19 (February 1938), 8.
56 I am grateful to Dr Freddie Shaw for this information.