US anti-fascist fighters struggled to save Spain

The barbarity of the Spanish Civil War is brought graphically into focus by author Adam Hochschild.

Republicans battling for the Alcazar in Toledo during the Spanish Civil War. Picture: AFP

The barbarity of the Spanish Civil War, in which both Republican and Nationalist (fascist) forces committed widespread atrocities, is brought graphically into focus by author Adam Hochschild in a discussion of the fate of Republican women captured by General Francisco Franco’s troops.

Rape was employed as a weapon of war by the fascists, with officers especially encouraging their Moorish troops. Hochschild writes about an incident witnessed and reported by John T. Whitaker, a correspondent with the New York Herald Tribune. Whitaker was with Nationalist troops at a crossroads on the main road to Madrid. Two teenage girls were brought before a major. Their only crime: one of them, a textile factory worker, was carrying a union card.

After interrogating them, the major “had them taken into a small schoolhouse where some 40 Moorish soldiers were resting. As they reached the doorway an ululating cry rose from the Moors within’’.

Whitaker “stood horrified in helpless anger”. When he protested, the major replied, “Oh, they’ll not live more than four hours.”

On the Republican side, brutal killings of real and perceived enemies were routine in the months following Franco’s military revolt on July 17, 1936, against the democratic government in Madrid, a left-wing coalition under the umbrella of the Popular Front. In particular, Spanish anarchists, a prominent political force in Catalonia, were known for violence.

“The people targeted in these early months were Nationalist supporters of all sorts: landowners, shopkeepers, businessmen — particularly those known for acting harshly toward the poor,’’ Hochschild writes.

“As in the French Revolution, the Catholic clergy was also a prime target … The Church was seen as a hand-maiden of the big employers and landlords, promising abundance in the next world to workers denied their fair share in this one. Altogether, nearly 7000 clergy were put to death, one of the largest such massacres in modern times”.

It was to this brutal conflict that thousands of young men and women from around the world were irresistibly drawn. Most declared for the reformist Spanish Republic, with its radical programs of nationalisation and redistribution, including several dozen Australians, who are commemorated in a small monument by the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra.

It is with the American volunteers, who made up the Abraham Lincoln and George Washington battalions of the XV International Brigade, that Hochschild is mostly concerned in Spain in Our Hearts.

The author teaches journalism at the University of California and has written on subjects as diverse as colonialism in Africa (King Leopold’s Ghost) and Russian memories of Joseph Stalin (The Unquiet Ghost).

His writing usually focuses on human rights issues. He is clearly impressed with the idealism of the early American warriors in Spain. But his sentiment does not overwhelm his analysis. Hochschild writes of the US volunteers, largely organised by the Communist Party of the USA:

None had the political perspicacity of someone like George Orwell, and the future writers among them were not the equals of volunteers like him or Andre Malraux. The Americans in Spain win a place in history not for who they were or what they wrote but for what they did. By the end there would be men from 46 states and all walks of life fighting there, but if there was a prototypical volunteer, he was a New Yorker, a communist, an immigrant or the son of immigrants, a trade unionist, and a member of a group that has almost vanished from the US today, working-class Jews.

One conclusion many of the Americans did draw, demonstrating accurate perceptions of the future, was that they were not merely fighting the unimpressive, anti-Semitic Franco but also the truly dangerous Adolf Hitler. Spain was the precursor to World War II, politically and militarily.

It was for this reason that Orwell was pleased by the outbreak of civil war, for it demonstrated the gloves had finally been taken off in the war against fascism. Alas, sometimes the defenders of the Republic, especially the Communist Party, spent more time arresting, torturing and murdering internal opponents than in combat duty at the front.

For the principal supporter of the Spanish Republic was the Soviet Union, under Stalin, already beginning to reel under the weight of the dictator’s paranoia, with denunciations, purges, show trials and executions. Stalin’s mania reached Spain, setting off frantic searches for Trotskyites that gutted Spanish anarchism and the POUM militia, in which Orwell was serving and which nearly cost the young English socialist his life, as recorded eloquently in Homage to Catalonia.

Aside from the Soviet Union, only Mexico and, briefly, France supplied significant military aid to the Republic. The Western democracies — Britain, France and the US — fearing communism more than fascism, ignored Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s massive military assistance to Franco and embraced the diplomatic fallacy of non-intervention. This prevented Republican Spain from even acquiring the means to defend itself.

US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, despite the urgings of Americans as diverse as his wife, Eleanor, and emerging novelist Ernest Hemingway, refused to authorise even clandestine assistance. Too late, FDR recognised his error, as did French prime minister Leon Blum, who headed a Popular Front government in Paris.

The Spanish Republic was doomed in its isolation, despite its democratic legitimacy, collapsing in March 1939. It was defeated despite the heroism of its defenders, Spanish as well as foreign, including the Americans.

Heroes, complete with flaws, emerge convincingly in Spain in Our Hearts, the most famous being Robert Hale Merriman, professor of economics at Berkeley (where the author teaches) and commander of the XV Internationals.

Merriman was dedicated to his cause and his comrades and brave in action, if a little wooden as a field commander. But he understood, given the time he spent in Moscow with his wife Marion, the nature of Soviet communism. Moreover, Nationalist officers captured by the Internationals were considered irredeemable fascists and routinely executed.

Villains, well beyond Franco’s cabal of conceited generals, also mark the pages of this book. The most nefarious is Texaco boss Torkild Rieber, whose oil (on credit!) not only kept Franco’s forces mobile but whose intelligence briefings allowed Italian submarines and German bombers to play havoc with Republican fuel supplies.

Hochschild has written an excellent account of the American volunteers in their quixotic quest. Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War (1961) may not have been bettered in its evaluations of the conflict but Hochschild broadens and deepens our understanding of the players. He highlights incidents such as Hemingway’s very real research behind fascist lines in writing For Whom the Bell Tolls; he emphasises the significance of captain Oliver Law, the first African American to command American troops in battle; he settles definitively how Merriman met his end.

The Spanish Civil War was an immense tragedy that produced magnificent works of art, from Picasso’s Guernica to Martha Gellhorn’s This Spanish Earth to Andre Malraux’s Days of Hope, all born of a defiant sense of liberty, confronted by armed tyranny.

Hochschild contributes thoughtfully to a clearer understanding of what motivated thousands of young people to fight and die for a Spanish Republic that, for all its manifest failures, stood resolutely in the path of a malignant fascism. Their hearts were for Spain, which is why so many lie buried there.

Stephen Loosley is a former federal president of the ALP and author of Machine Rules: A Political Primer.

Spain In Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

By Adam Hochschild

Macmillan, 352pp, $34.99