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Abstract
This article is the story of many who fought and some who died for Spain in the savage Civil War of 1936–1939. Their experiences are here retold from memoirs and other recollections as an inspiration for all who are connected physically or spiritually to an era which saw the agonía of freedom's defeat by a fascist dictatorship. It takes in the accounts of Spanish soldiers, international brigaders, nursing volunteers and others, and shows how in the midst of suffering and brutality it was still possible to live up to humane ideals and even to emerge with dignity.
Notes
1 Carl Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight: the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1986), 84–85.
2 Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 77–78.
3 Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 44–45.
4 Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 70, 75. From 1 to 9 April, 1938, captured brigaders were kept alive to exchange for Italians captured by the Republic.
5 Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 47.
6 Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 164.
7 Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 199.
8 Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 56.
9 Joan Llarch, Batallones de trabajadores, Series Manantial 95 (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1978 [1st ed. 1975]), 38, 39, 44.
10 Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 39–40.
11 Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 144, 147.
12 Llarch, Batallones de trabajadores, 133–38.
13 George Wheeler, To Make the People Smile Again: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War (Newcastle upon Tyne: Zymurgy, 2003), 119–22.
14 Angela Jackson, At the Margins of Mayhem: Prologue and Epilogue to the Last Great Battle of the Spanish Civil War (Abersychan: Warren & Pell, 2008), 104.
15 Angela Jackson, Beyond the Battlefield: Testimony, Memory, and Remembrance of a Cave Hospital in the Spanish Civil War (Abersychan: Warren & Pell, 2005), 27.
16 Jackson, Beyond the Battlefield, 29.
17 Gervasio Puerta, interview with author, October 2009.
18 Michael O'Riordan, Connolly Column: The Story of the Irishmen Who Fought in the Ranks of the International Brigades in the National-Revolutionary War of the Spanish People (Abersychan: Warren & Pell, 2005), 126.
19 Puerta, interview, 2009.
20 Julio Álvarez del Vayo, Freedom's Battle, trans. E .E. Brooke (London: Heinemann, 1940), 243.
21 Vincent Sheean, Not Peace But a Sword (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939), 261.
22 Jack Jones, Union Man: The Autobiography of Jack Jones (Abersychan: Warren & Pell, 2008 [1st ed. 1986]), 68, 76.
23 Bob Doyle, in a radio interview attended by the author, Derry/Londonderry, 2006.
24 Wheeler, To Make the People Smile Again, 132.
25 Sheean, Not Peace But a Sword, 267.
26 Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 68.
27 Alfred Lent, ‘The Blond Moors are Coming’, in The Distant Drum: Reflexions on the Spanish Civil War, ed. Philip Toynbee (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1976), 95–104 (p. 100).
28 Henry W. Buckley and Ramón Buckley, Vida y muerte de la República española (Madrid: Pozuelo de Alarcón, 2004), 332.
29 O'Riordan, Connolly Column, 128.
30 Puerta, interview, 2009.
31 Puerta, interview, 2009.
32 Edwin Greening, From Aberdare to Albacete, a Welsh International Brigader's Memoirs (Abersychan: Warren & Pell, 2006), 83.
33 Senén Fernández, ‘Noviembre 1938’, in VV.AA. La Guerra Civil Española mes a mes, 36 vols (Madrid: Unidad Editorial Biblioteca El Mundo, 2005), XXXI, 138.
34 Alun Menai Williams, From the Rhondda to the Ebro: The Story of a Young Life and Its Survival in the First Half of the 20 th Century (Abersychan: Warren & Pell, 2004), 177.
35 Jackson, Beyond the Battlefield, 24–26.
36 Jackson, Beyond the Battlefield, 35–36.
37 Jackson, Beyond the Battlefield, 38.
38 Jackson, Beyond the Battlefield, 44–45.
39 Jim Firth and Sally Alexander, Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991), 76.
40 Constancia de la Mora, In Place of Splendour. The Autobiography of a Spanish Woman (London: Michael Joseph, 1940), 369, 370.
41 Sheean, Not Peace But a Sword, 232–33.
42 Michael Economides, in conversation with the author, May 1991.
43 Bob Doyle and Harry Owens, Brigadista: An Irishman's Fight against Fascism (Blackrock, Dublin: Currach, 2006), 80.
44 Jones, Union Man, 79, 80.
45 Firth and Alexander, Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War, 234.
46 Firth and Alexander, Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War, 297, 298.
47 Sheean, Not Peace But a Sword, 332, 333, 328.
48 Puerta, interview, 2009.
49 Fernández, ‘Noviembre 1938’, in La Guerra Civil Española mes a mes, XXXI, 172, 173.
50 Conrad Fisher, interviews with Graham Balaban 2004–2006. Also Fisher's unpublished text about his life up to the end of World War II, accessed at Heathlands retirement home in the UK in 2004–2005, pp. 12, 16. Conrad was a veteran I first met in Barcelona in 1988.
51 Jackson, Beyond the Battlefield, 48, 49, 63.
52 Wheeler, To Make the People Smile, 147, 155, 149.
53 Christine Diger, Un otoño para salvar Madrid: historia de Théo, combatiente por la libertad (Madrid: AABI, 2007), 113, 114
54 Pablo Casals Defillo and Albert Eugene Kahn, Joys and Sorrows: Reflections by Pablo Casals, As told to Albert E. Kahn (London: Macdonald, 1970), 227.
55 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 710–11.
56 Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 766.
57 Sheean, Not Peace But a Sword, 345, 346.
58 Firth and Alexander, Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War, 228, 229.
59 De la Mora, In Place of Splendour, 376.
60 De la Mora, In Place of Splendour, 378–80.
61 Firth and Alexander, Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War, 235.
62 Puerta, interview, 2009.
63 Sheean, Not Peace But a Sword, 353.
64 Sheean, Not Peace But a Sword, 351–52.
65 Sheean, Not Peace But a Sword, 359.
66 Sheean, Not Peace But a Sword, 358.
67 Fisher, interviews and unpublished text.
68 De la Mora, In Place of Splendour, 390.
69 De la Mora, In Place of Splendour, 393, 408.
70 Puerta, interview, 2009.
71 Juan Miguel de Mora, La libertad, Sancho … Testimonio de un soldado de las Brigadas Internacionales (México D.F.: Libros Para Todos, 2006), 192, 194, 195, 197.
72 Isabel de Palencia, Smouldering Freedom: The Story of the Spanish Republicans in Exile (London: Gollancz, 1946), 37.
73 Buckley and Buckley, Vida y muerte de la República española, 356, 357.
74 Stephen Spender, World within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender (London: Reader's Union, 1953), 227.
75 Firth and Alexander, Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War, 331, 332.
76 De Palencia, Smouldering Freedom, 39, 40.
77 De la Mora, In Place of Splendour, 415.
78 De la Mora, In Place of Splendour, 425.
79 De la Mora, In Place of Splendour, 426.
80 De la Mora, In Place of Splendour, 426.
81 Vincent Sheean, Between the Thunder and the Sun (London: Macmillan, 1943), 97, 98.
82 Álvarez del Vayo, Freedom's Battle, 303.
83 Arturo Barea, The Forging of a Rebel (London: Granta Books, 2001 [1st ed. 1946]), 727–28.
84 Barea, The Forging of a Rebel, 729.
85 Barea, The Forging of a Rebel, 734.
86 Barea, The Forging of a Rebel, 740–41.
87 Barea, The Forging of a Rebel, 743.
88 Barea, The Forging of a Rebel, 749.
89 Barea, The Forging of a Rebel, 750–51.
90 Lilian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (London: Quartet, 1977), 90, 96.
91 Jorge Semprún, The Cattle Truck (London: Serif, 1993 [1st ed. 1964]), 102–03.
92 Semprún, The Cattle Truck, 130.
93 Semprún, The Cattle Truck, 104.
94 Enrique Marco Nadal, in conversation with the author, October 1986.
95 Llarch, Batallones de trabajadores, 159.
96 Llarch, Batallones de trabajadores, 162, 165, 167.
97 Llarch, Batallones de trabajadores, 171.
98 Ángel Aguilera Gómez, La tragedia olvidada (Alicante: A. Aguilera, 1993), 50, 53, 60, 61.
99 Boletín Oficial de Estado, 43, 13 de febrero de 1939.
100 Peter Beaumont, commenting on his book The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict (London: Harvill Secker, 2009) in The Observer, 26 April 2009, p. 6.
101 Doyle and Owens, Brigadista, 126–28.
102 Nancy MacDonald, Homage to the Spanish Exiles: Voices from the Spanish Civil War (New York: Insight, 1987), 46–51.
103 Gustav Regler, The Owl of Minerva (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1959), 334.
104 Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 205.
105 Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 199.
106 MacDonald, Homage to the Spanish Exiles, 104–05.
107 MacDonald, Homage to the Spanish Exiles, 107, 109.
108 Donald Downes, The Scarlet Thread: Adventures in Wartime Espionage (London: D. Verschoyle, 1953), 108, 112, 124–25.
109 Downes, The Scarlet Thread, 103.
110 MacDonald, Homage to the Spanish Exiles, 85.
111 Paul Philippou Strongos, Spanish Thermopylae: Cypriot Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39 (Barcelona: Warren & Pell, 2009), 245.
112 Diger, Un otoño para salvar Madrid, 128.
113 Nadal, in conversation.
114 Antonio Arévalo, La guerra en singular (Madrid: El Cruce, 2004). 92.
115 Semprún, The Cattle Truck, 109–11.
116 Semprún, The Cattle Truck, 43.
117 Firth and Alexander, Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War, 343, 344.
118 Enrique Marco Nadal, Todos contra Franco, la alianza nacional de fuerzas democráticas 1944–1947 (Madrid: Queimada, 1982), 220, 221.
119 MacDonald, Homage to the Spanish Exiles, 112, 113, 121, 129.
120 MacDonald, Homage to the Spanish Exiles, 144, 148–50.
121 MacDonald, Homage to the Spanish Exiles, 89, 91.
122 De Palencia, Smouldering Freedom, 173.
123 MacDonald, Homage to the Spanish Exiles, 335.
124 Casals Defillo and Kahn, Joys and Sorrows, 228.
125 Sheean, Not Peace But a Sword, 105.
126 Hugh Thomas, in ‘Part I, Reflection and Reinterpretation’, in The Distant Drum, ed. Philip Toynbee (London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1976), 28–42 (p. 42).
127 Llarch, Batallones de trabajadores, 9.
128 Pierre Vilar, La guerra civil española, trans. José Martínez Gázquez (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1986), 145.
129 Vilar, La guerra civil española, 92.
130 ‘I cannot allow myself to believe that Franco will survive in a world of the victorious democracies’ (in conversation with Donald Downes about 1941–42 during the period following the Allied landings in French North Africa) (Donald Downes, The Scarlet Thread: Adventures in Wartime Espionage [London: Derek Verachoyle, 1953], 122).
131 Sheean, Between the Thunder and the Sun, 98.