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The Intervention of the International Brigades: The Answer to a False Agreement of Non-Intervention

2.1. The World-Wide Political Scenario

The decade of the 1930s endured an economic depression preceded by the strain of the First World War. The scenario of disenchantment and social marginalization, that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929, created the beginning of the ten-year Great Depression that generated huge rates of unemployment. It penetrated into the most unfortunate classes and caused the loss of property and capital in the upper and middle classes.

A couple of years before the beginning of the Spanish war, Edna St. Vincent Millay stated her pessimism about the social conditions and the political situation of those years in her poem “Apostrophe to a Man”:

In 1934, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote Apostrophe to Man, a poem of unmitigated pessimism and scorn. Her line Put death on the market, echoed the anger after World War I at the so-called war profiteers who had supplied shoddy materials to armies at vast profit. Millay’s disgust with the false patriotism used to promote war reflected her desire for radical reform along with many of the intellectuals and artists in America, especially in her Greenwich Village political and cultural circles. Their ideas for social changes will result in their strong support for the Republican side in the coming war in Spain (Sheldon, 1999: 78).

Consequently, poverty and hunger helped to spread fascism and racism in Europe as well as in the United States. Then, the social impact of the Depression of the thirties turned left political movements towards Communism, a doctrine that was seen as a new social model which could develop a more equalitarian society; its principles were based on Marxism, a political ideology that also exerted its literary influence on new leftist poetry.

The point was that Capitalism versus Marxism put the reality of that hungry and angry decade into words. The left-wing poetry of the thirties found new inspiration in the labour problems, as well as racism did in the United States. Richard Wright was a black communist American poet, who belonged to the Chicago Black Renaissance. Wright joined the Chicago branch of the John Reed Club ¹in 1933 and in 1937 he published a manifesto, Blueprint for Negro Writing. In Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance Butler states (2011: 349):

Blueprint for Negro Writing calls for a radically new form of Black American literature, which is centered on the actual experiences of the masses of black people using “channels of racial wisdom,” black folk art as it is expressed in the blues, spirituals and folktales. The essay also called for an end to the isolation of the earlier African American writers replacing it with a deeply social and political consciousness embedded in the responsibility to express “a collective sense of Negro life in America.”

Meanwhile in Great Britain, the inhabitants of the town Jarrow were enduring the consequences of the economic crisis of 1929. There were no jobs for coal and shipyard workers; therefore, they embarked on a great march against hunger, the Jarrow March. Two hundred unemployed workers from Jarrow, in County Durham, gathered in a crowd and took the road to London. Since the beginning of the crisis, a number of similar marches were held, but that of Jarrow has remained the most memorable in history; it became known as the Jarrow Crusade. The proletarian movements strongly influenced the poetry which was later written by the brigadists and the poets, who supported loyalist Spain from abroad, because the Spanish Republic had become a symbol of the class struggle.

At that time the United Kingdom was the first imperialist world power; half the world was ruled under the slavery of colonization. The next colonizing power was France. Therefore, these countries could not support the Spanish democracy; they could not support the freedom which they themselves denied to their colonies.

Langston Hughes, an American writer and war correspondent who worked for the Baltimore Afro-American, narrates in his memories I Wonder as I Wander, the encounter he had with a young negro at the beach of Valencia:

He was an African from Guinea on the west Coast, who had come to study in Spain before the war. He had enlisted in the People’s Army, he told me, but having been a university student, he was assigned to the officers’ school in Valencia to study for a commission. I asked this young African what he thought about the war. He said, “I hope the government wins because the new Republic stands for a liberal colonial policy with a chance for my people in Africa to become educated. On Franco’s side are the old dukes and counts and traders who had exploited the colonies so long, never giving us schools or anything else. (1993: 329).

Regarding Germany, after the Nazi party won the elections in 1933, the country massively extended its rearmament; the Nazi army occupied the Rhineland strip in March 1936. This remilitarization violated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles (Whitaker, 1943: 4). Conversely, Great Britain was doing the same as well, in spite of its politics of appeasement, among other things because it was not prepared to defend itself. As a colonial empire, it possessed a huge merchant fleet. However, the United Kingdom needed to gain time in order to manufacture modern weapons, such as aircraft bombers, antiaircraft batteries, surface ships, submarines and so on. The appeasement policy was the strategy which Great Britain followed, while Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. The same year, on September 30, the Munich Agreement reached by Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy, permitted Germany to annex the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia.

In this sense, the Field Marshal, the Viscount of Alanbrooke, wrote an autobiographical diary where he traced on paper what the situation of Great Britain was in September 1939:

When on September 3rd, 1939, Britain, carrying with her a deeply-divided and hesitant France, met Hitler’s invasion of Poland by war, the bulk of her Battle Fleet had been rearmed against air attack […] her Metropolitan Air Force, though still only a third of the size of the Luftwaffe, offered, in its small but superlative trained Fighter Command, some answer to the trump card of unopposed bombing with which for the past eighteen months Hitler had blackmailed Europe. For the first time, too, as a result of the rapid build-up of Anti-Aircraft Command, London and the principal ports and factory towns had some rudimentary ground defence against day bombardment from the air. (Bryant and Brooke, 1958: 41)

2.2. The Diplomatic Trench

At the beginning of the 1930s, the majority of the Spanish diplomacy, as well as that in other European countries, was represented by the aristocracy. However, with the arrival of the first Spanish Republic in 1931, the diplomatic career began to be professionalized. After the coup d’état conducted by the rebel generals, most of the Spanish diplomats sided with them, betraying their loyalty to the Spanish Republic. The answer of the Spanish Foreign Office was to defend the integrity and interests of the Spanish Republic in the trenches of diplomacy against the false agreement of non-intervention and its violation by Germany and Italy. According to Casanova (2010: 86-87):

To replace the disaffected diplomacy, it used distinguished intellectuals and university staff, almost all of them from the Socialist Party: the jurist Fernando de los Ríos, who had been a minister in the Republic between April 1931 and September 1933, was sent as ambassador to Washington; Doctor Marcelino Pascua to Moscow; the journalist Luis Araquistain to Paris; and Pablo de Azcárate, the only one who really had any experience in international diplomacy, was put in charge of the embassy in London.

Pablo de Azcárate was former Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations, Jurist consultant and Historian, and he had no political linkage to the Communist party. Azcárate served as ambassador of the Spanish Republic in London during the Spanish Civil War; he demonstrated with facts how the Nazi military intervention was not a mere drill of its weaponry; it occupied Spain by war and its alliance with the rebels gave them the victory against the Spanish Republic:

And on the 22^nd of that same month the German Under-Secretary of State summed up the situation in a memorandum, referring to the petition that General Franco had sent to the German government at the beginning of October, for a significant amount of new war material (dealing with 50,000 rifles, 1,500 light machine guns, 500 heavy machine guns and 100 75mm tank gun pedestals), “do we want to try and help Franco until his final victory? Then he will need an even more important and superior military help than he is asking us for now. Does this deal with trying to keep Franco as equally supplied as the reds? In this case our help will also be necessary and the material that he asks for can be of great use. If our help to Franco is only going to be limited to the Condor legion, he will be able to intend another thing than any compromise with the reds.” (2012: 258, the translation is ours).

2.3. Let Who is Free of Sin Throw the First Stone

According to George Orwell, the fate of the Spanish Civil War was decided in London, Paris, Rome and Berlin, but, by no means, in Spain (Muste, 1966: 173). Orwell emphasized that the Spanish Republic was tied hands and feet because the agreement of non-intervention was a real intervention. By subjecting loyalist Spain to an arms embargo, the Spanish Republic was defenceless against the fascist powers which supplied everything that the rebel army asked for. The declaration of Herman Goering at the trial of Nuremberg illustrates this issue perfectly:

I urged Hitler to give support under all circumstances, firstly in order to prevent the further spread of Communism in that theatre and, secondly, to test my young Luftwaffe at this opportunity in this or that technical respect. With the permission of the Führer, I sent a large part of my transport fleet and a number of experimental fighter units, bombers and anti-aircraft guns; and in that way I had the opportunity to ascertain, under combat conditions, whether the material was equal to the task. In order that the personnel, too, might gather a certain amount of experience, I saw to it that there was a continuous flow, that is, that new people were constantly being sent and others recalled (Mombeek, Smith and Creek, 2001: 2).

The republican government had no other choice than to buy weapons from Russia, that did not begin to supply them until the middle of October 1936. The government had received rifles and machines guns from Mexico from the time of the revolution of Zapata, and they were not very useful, except as antiques.

In October 1936, the socialist Deputy of the Spanish Parliament, Luis Jiménez de Asúa, attended the Labour Party Conference in Edinburg. The title of his speech was “The Agony of Spain: Socialist Appeal to British Democracy”:²

In the papers this morning you will have read that there has been a terrible air bombardment by heavy bombers of the villages around Madrid. We could not stop that bombardment. Why? Because we had not the fighting aircraft to do it, because the Pact of Non-intervention has prevented us from getting them. What does it mean, the Pact of Non-Intervention? On the legal side-I’m a lawyer; I speak as a lawyer- on the legal side the Pact of Non-Intervention is a monstrosity. It has become the most powerful of interventions against the Government of Spain.

The excuse for which the European powers sustained the arms embargo on Spain was that the Republican Government of the Popular Front was responsible for religious prosecutions, Calvo Sotelo’s death and that Communism would convert Spain into Stalin’s satellite. Nevertheless, in spite of the invasion by Italian and German troops and the indiscriminate bombings of the civilian population and their direct participation in all the battles, the invaders never declared war on the legal Spanish Government.

Another testimony is offered by the North American reporter John Whitaker, who transcribes an interview between the American ambassador in Madrid, Claude G. Bowers, and the Count of Romanones:

The rebellion? We planned it the day we lost the election, he said. Having laid their plans, the reactionaries decided, in the first place, to get in touch with the German and Italian governments and, in the second place, to create incidents and spread terrorism which was answered in kind, not by the Popular Front government, but by the more radical elements outside the government. The right murdered a popular leftist leader,[³] and the left retorted in swift reprisal. They struck down Calvo Sotelo, the ablest politician among the rightist plotters. This murder was used to set off the military coup d’etat. There was a military rising in Morocco on July 16 and it became nationwide on July 18, 1936.

The press was muzzled in the participating countries of the policy of appeasement; the majority of the articles were about the bombings of the civil population and the rebels’ crimes were denounced, slanted or directly rejected. Luis Delaprée, from Paris Soire, who was now fed up with the censorship that his work underwent, decided to return to Paris to personally complain to his director. Unfortunately, he never arrived. According to Martin Minchom (2009: 64-65), the same day the newspaper announced his death, 12 of December 1936, Pierre Lazarev, the editor in chief, paid a personal tribute to his colleague on the front page of the newspaper:

At the Spanish war fronts and on both sides of the barricades, you have been not only the most possibly objective, but also, the least indifferent witness, the one who rebelled the most against the atrocious fighting. At the beginning of 1937 Lazarus speaks about the very complicated conditions that the correspondents have to work in and their disillusion because their reports do not fit in the newspaper (the translation is ours).

During the Spanish Civil War, the Condor Legion, the Aviazione Legionaria and their submarines, not only sank Spanish military and civilian ships, but also, targeted any ship that was within range. On the contrary, the submarines of the Regia Marina were careful not to be identified. Cargo ships, sailing under other nations’ flags, with non-intervention control committee certificates were not respected and many were attacked and sunk. Most of this aggressions happened while entering the harbour or while docking. Some cargo ships were attacked at the same time as the bombers blitzed large cities, such as Barcelona, Castellón, Valencia, Alicante, Gandia and so on. As an illustration, the sinking of the cargo ship Woodford on September 1st, 1937, off the coast of The Columbretes Islands, east of the coast of Castellón, pushed Anthony Eden, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the United Kingdom, to propose an agreement of marine vigilance in the Mediterranean by which some protected ways were created, so that ships were escorted in case of threats by pirates:

The agreement of Nyon caused the British and French to locate part of their floats near the Spanish coasts, but also on the high sea with the mission of enforcing the blockage, but with instructions to sink pirate submarines, actually Italians, who acted against their ships (Martínez Reverte, 2009: 215).

Great Britain, seriously worried by the frequency of the attacks on its ships, the majority being cargo ships coming from the colonies, made reclamations to the Italian Government. In those claims, Chamberlain explained what was happening with the cargo and told the Italians that, besides the material losses, there had also been many human losses. Finally, France and England convened the European powers to an agreement in Nyon to put an end to the pirate attacks. A few days later, on the seventeenth of September 1937, Chamberlain read a speech in Geneva about the agreements which were reached in Nyon. Anthony Eden referred to these circumstances in the following terms:

You may perhaps ask why a conference was necessary. The reason is that we wished to mark clearly the horror which surely must be felt by all civilized people at the barbarous methods employed in these submarine attacks. Moreover, the size of the Mediterranean and the consequent extent of the problem made it certain that unorganized efforts would result in overlapping and confusion and might, in consequence, fail of their purpose (1939: 216).

Following this international situation, on 20th February, 1938, Mr Eden sent his resignation to the office of the Foreign Secretary to the Prime Minister at N°.10 Downing Street. A few months later, June 1938, at Hasley Manor, Mr Eden referred to the foreign affairs and the international situation (Eden, 1939: 259). In the chapter “A WARNING OF DANGERS AHEAD,” from his book FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Anthony Eden states:

We have heard much in the last few days of the most recent developments in the Spanish War, and they have gravely troubled the conscience of the nation. The Government are deeply concerned, and rightly so, at the growth of bombing of civilians, the loss of life, the loss even of British lives and ships that has taken place. We must all share their concern, for it is indeed impossible to close our eyes to such events or to ignore their effect upon international relations and upon the feelings of the British people. (1939: 285).

It is surprising that Great Britain, France, and other affected countries did not protest against, nor claim damages from, the nations responsible for these attacks, mainly Italy and Germany, after the Spanish Civil War and even the Second World War had ended. When some of those ships were refloated and repaired during the dictator Francisco Franco’s rule and renamed with Spanish names, there was no claim for them. Then, those ships sailed under the flag of a country that was not recognized as a democracy by the United Nations Organization.

2.4. The International Brigades Stand Up for the Spanish Republic: The Answer to a Farce

The Spanish Civil War began with un unjustified cruelty by the rebel army, sustained by the close collaboration of the European totalitarian regimes represented by Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and Salazar in Portugal.

When war broke out, the commander Vicente Rojo remained loyal to the Republic; in October 1936 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and was named Head of the Junta de Defensa in Madrid. In March 1937 he was promoted to colonel, and in May, after the formation of the new government of Dr Juan Negrín, Vicente Rojo was named Head of the General Command Staff of the Armed Forces and Head of the General Staff of the Ground Forces. In September he was ascended to general. According to Martínez Reverte (2009: 24-25), General Vicente Rojo described the first moments of the rebellion like this:

From its conception and its beginning, the coup d’état is a movement with a bloody character with enormous violence, from the beginning that violence is directed against the rebels’ own colleagues, the death penalty is immediately applied to those who show loyalty to the Republican oath and to those who hesitated to support the coup d’état, without having any simulation of trail. The first victims of the civil war are military men, those loyal to the Government, with whom the rebels had shared dining room and office until the moment of the coup. (the translation is ours).

In the opinion of A. Rodríguez Celada, González de la Aleja and Pastor Garcia (2006: 9-10) the genealogy of the foreign answer regarding the civil war begins with the proposal of the agreement of non-intervention, and with the creation of the Committee of Non-Intervention in August 1936. Between the 2^nd and 4^th of this month, Great Britain and France agreed to keep themselves outside the conflict. On the 8th of August, Italy and Germany joined the treaty and France closed its border. On the 19^th of August, Anthony Eden, the British Minister of the Foreign Office, announced the blockage of weapon supplies to Spain. The USSR joined the agreement, but it had already begun to send pilots in October.

Nevertheless, from the first day of the coup d’état, before the signing of this agreement and also after it, the rebels had support from the fascist powers and from Portugal. Without the logistic help of the Savoia and Junker 52 planes, Franco would not have been able to carry out a manoeuvre which he would later boast about: the first air bridge of troops in history.

This agreement of non-intervention was the spark which provoked thousands of volunteers from all over the world to go and help the Spanish Republic. Some were already in Spain, not as brigadists, but as political refugees, when the coup d’état took place. On one hand, many Germans and Italians, who had fled from their dictator-ruled countries, had found refuge in Spain.

On the other hand, in answer to the anti-Semitic Nazi Olympics in 1936, in which Nuremberg’s racial laws forbade Jews to participate, the event of Anti-Fascist games had been projected in Barcelona. On the 18 of July 1936, a day before the Anti-Fascist Olympic games of Barcelona were inaugurated, the coup d’état occurred and many athletes were evacuated. However, athletes from 22 countries joined the defenders of the city. The first columns of brigadists that marched to the front in Aragón had many of these athletes with them. Finally, others, such as Felicia Brown, were in Spain for other reasons. The first two English people who intervened in that war were in Barcelona in July 1936:

One was the sculptor and painter Felicia Brown, who arrived here because of her work and at the age of thirty-two, she joined the columns that marched to Aragón, dying on the 28^th of August. The other one was the poet John Cornford, who, without being a Trotskyist and together with his friend from Trinity College, Richard Benet, enlisted in the militias of the POUM in the Stalin column, headed by the Italian Russo, who went to Huesca (Wintringham, 2009: 28-33, the translation is ours).

2.5. Knowing the XV Brigade: Who were they?

As I knew little about the XV Brigade, the writer and history professor, Severiano Montero, explained what the role of the brigadists had been while being in Spain. The International Brigades participated in the defence of the Spanish Republic, fighting as shock forces integrated in the Popular Army. They did not stay in the same place a long time, because this kind of troop was characterised by its mobility and the high amount of casualties.

Figures vary according to the sources, but it can be established that the most repeated is the amount of 35,000 brigadists (Casanova, 2010, p.96) coming from 50 countries. The biggest contingent of brigadists came from France, followed by British, Irish, Americans, Canadians, Germans, Italian, Argentineans, Mexicans and so on. The presence of Jews from all over the world in the International Brigades was remarkable; it is estimated that at least 25% of the brigadists were Jews.⁴ Since the rise of Hitler to power in 1933, the construction of concentration camps to imprison the “enemies” of Nazi Germany began. The racial laws of Nuremberg, which were approved in 1935, removed the Jews’ civil rights as German citizens. This was extended to the countries which the Nazis had occupied: Austria and Czechoslovakia. This led to the tragic Holocaust which finished with the lives of 6,000,000 European Jews. Although they were distributed in different brigades, the Jews finally had their own unit and edited The Volunteer for Liberty in Yiddish.

Approximately 2,300 volunteers left the Commonwealth; five hundred lost their lives. The majority of the brigadists came from the working class and from highly industrialised cities, such as Glasgow or Manchester, and from mining centres, such as Wales. The first ones to arrive in September 1936 joined the English speaking unit, called Tom Mann Centuria, in Barcelona. Afterwards they were transferred to the base in Albacete and there they joined the Thälmann Battalion of the XII Brigade. In November of that same year they participated in the defence of Madrid.

Two months before Christmas the rest of the battalion was transferred to Boadilla del Monte and practically all of them were annihilated there. Other Englishmen joined the Batallion of the Commune of Paris and fought in several places in the capital at the beginning of November. La Casa de Campo and the Facultad de Filosofia y Letras at the Complutense University, the new campus that was going to be inaugurated in September, were crucial places to stop the rebel troops that were about to break into Madrid.

The British brigadist, Bernard Knox, recalled how he had fought alongside Cornford in Spain in his memoires of the events published in the biography of John Cornford, edited by Pat Sloan in 1938.

Aravaca was a costly failure – the only apparent result was the loss of the University to the Fascists in our absence. We were withdrawn immediately to retake it. And with its capture began a period when we were as happy as I think men can possibly be in the front line of a modern war. We were under cover from the deadly cold that so far had been our worst enemy, we had leisure to talk and smoke in physical comfort, and, greatest pleasure of all, it was safe to take our boots off at night. (Sloan, 1938: 190).

The brigadists barricaded themselves there with brand new books from the library and desks removed from the classrooms. A large number of these brigadists died or were wounded.

Soon after, in December 1936, the English speaking company of 150 men formed the Company Number One, which was attached to the XIV International Brigade, La Marseillaise. On Christmas Eve, the company was destined to the battlefront at Córdoba in order to liberate the city of Lopera. Since most of its members had not had military training, and many machine guns were useless, there were many casualties. It was a tragic day for the English speaking company. The writer Ralph Fox, in whose memory the hospital in Benicàssim was dedicated, and John Cornford, a graduate in History, poet and writer who tried to rescue Fox, died. According to Medina Casado (2011), in Creación de la 1ª Compañía de Brigadistas de Habla Inglesa en 1936. Escritores ingleses en la Batalla de Lopera y en otros pueblos de Jaén:

It is a fact that among the volunteers who came to Spain during the war, although most of them belonged to the working class, there were also prominent intellectuals and writers… This is the case of the English poets W.H. Auden, who wrote the poem “Spain,” the best known poem published about the war, and Julian Bell…Other writers were fighting at the frontline of combat, as George Orwell, wounded at the Aragón front, or the literary critic Christopher Caudwell, who died fighting in the Jarama Battle… (2011: 34-35, the translation is ours).

The constitution of the XV International Brigade is recorded in The Book of The XV International Brigade: Records of British, American, Canadian and Irish Volunteers (1938):

When the XV Brigade was organised at Albacete in January 1937, there were cadres in each of its units that had already experienced war in Spain, groups of nationalities which between September and January had fought in other International Brigades and even in militia formations. This leavening of men with a brief but practical front-line experience was invaluable in stiffening the hastily trained volunteers who comprised the majority in each Battalion. (Graham: 1938 [1975]: 24)

The XV Brigade was composed among other battalions, by the British Battalion, the Franco-Belge, the Dimitrov (mainly formed by politic refugees from Croatia, Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and so on), the Lincoln Battalion, the Canadian volunteers (known as the Mac-Pacs), and the Irish Unit.

In January 1937 the English company located at the base in Albacete had 450 men; nevertheless, many Irish men preferred to join the American contingency for political reasons. At the beginning of February, the first British Battalion, with 500 volunteers, was formed. They had to defend the road from Valencia to Madrid during the first great battle of the Civil War, that of Jarama; this was a vital point to sustain the city with food, war material and other logistic services.

Since its formation, the XV Brigade did not stop fighting in all fronts as shock forces: Jarama, Brunete, in the campaign of Aragón with the taking of Quinto, Codo, Belchite, Teruel, in the Retreats and, finally, in the longest battle of the war, the Battle of the Ebro.

2.6. After the Battle: The Withdrawal of the Volunteers

In Negrín, Moradiellos (2015) brings light to the biography of the last president of the Republic who made resistance his flag, waiting for the outbreak of World War II and hoping that the Nazi and fascist troops would leave Spain, and thus fail to support the rebels. The military superiority provided by Mussolini and Hitler to their ally General Franco was much higher compared to that of the brigadists and the Republic, who were exhausted and had an irregular flow of arms, due to the stifling agreement of non-intervention.

Meanwhile, the situation of the Spanish Republic was critical. Dr Negrín proposed the withdrawal of foreign troops from Spain at the meeting of the League of Nations:

On September 21, with a blow of magistral effect, by surprise in Geneva, before the annual Assembly of the Society of Nations, Negrín announced the immediate and unilateral retreat of the International Brigades. He only asked that an official commission be named to control its fulfilment and verify that the republican army was formed and directed exclusively by Spaniards. After all, no country could object to that petition to put in practice the longest debated and desired purpose of the collective policy of Non-Intervention. And, in this way, Negrín made a virtue of the necessity for the retreats, given that the retreat had already been studied for months before, due to the scarce number of drafted volunteers and to the progressive mitigation of Stalin’s military commitment to the republican cause. (Moradiellos, 2015: 393, the translation is ours).

The day after the speech of the Prime Minister of Spain, D. Juan Negrín at Geneva, the XV Brigade fought its last combat at the Ebro River. There were numerous casualties in the British Battalion and from this moment on the brigade was basically constituted by Spanish soldiers.

Not long after returning to Great Britain in November, 1938 and because war was at the doors of Europe, many British brigadists joined the army to fight in World War II, such as Clive Branson, who died in Burma, or Esmond Romilly, Churchill’s nephew whose plane was hit and sunk in the North Sea. Some of them regretted their participation in the brigades, as is the case of Stephen Spender, who enlisted as a fire fighter in London. Although there was rejection in some professions, as for example, teaching, because many of the brigadists were communists, they were generally well received and some homages were prepared. The situation was similar in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Due to obligatory enlistments for the war, many jobs had to be covered, so some brigadists found work without many problems.

However, things were different in the United States, since war was not declared on Japan until 1943, after the bombing of the naval base in Pearl Harbour. As J. Yates narrates, the first people to know discrimination were the Negro brigadists, in spite of having received a warm homage upon arriving in New York:

Several of the men had signed for their rooms, but when my turn came the clerk didn’t even seem to look at me. “Sorry,” he said. “No vacancy.”

One of the organizers stepped forward, frowning.

“But thought you had plenty of rooms.” The clerk still looked straight through me. “No vacancy,” he repeated.

No vacancy? Or is it that you don’t rent to Negroes?” […] So soon? I had hardly left the boat and here it was. After having experienced being welcomed in cafes and hotels in Spain and France, I was doubly shocked to be hit so quickly. The pain went as deeply as any bullet could have done. I had the dizzy feeling I was back in the trenches again. But this was another front. I was home (1989: 160).

After World War II, American brigadists were persecuted for their Communist ideology. This governmental persecution, led by the republican senator Arthur McCarthy, is well known and receives the name of “The Witch Hunt.” Edwin Rolfe, as well as other brigadists, was spied on by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Alvah Bessie and nine other film writers from Hollywood were questioned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and did not answer whether they were Communists or not. They did not choose the Fifth Amendment, which is the right not to declare in order not to incriminate oneself, as a defence to prevent possible penalties, because maybe they did not want to seem guilty. Instead their defence was based on the First Amendment, the right to freedom of speech. Consequently, these ten people were found guilty and all of them were sentenced to one year in prison in 1950 and they were also blacklisted by Hollywood film makers. Alvah Bessie was denied work, and finally he could only find jobs as a stagehand in some film studios, in spite of being an acknowledged dramaturge, novelist and film writer. Neither was Langston Hughes free from this persecution; nevertheless, he escaped punishment by publicly renouncing his ideology, because he was disillusioned with the Munich Agreement signed by Stalin and Hitler in September, 1938. Hughes never denounced any comrades or friends in the public trial which he was submitted to by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953.

Vincent Sheean, an American war correspondent in Spain, wrote his memories, Not Peace but a Sword, a dedication to the Lincoln and Washington Battalions who fought in the XV Brigade:

…But knowing their story, on paper or by hearsay, was not at all the same thing as seeing them there as they returned from the catastrophe, […] A certain number of them had been, of course, dispirited by such a succession of calamities, and there was plenty of grumbling to be heard here and there, as well of some evidences of shell shock and demoralization. There had been (or so I heard) some desertions. […] I had been in Pennsylvania only a few weeks before, and had visited Valley Forge on a day of thick white snow when it was easy to imagine what the state of the Continental army must have been in the winter of 1777-78. These boys made me think of Washington’s words inscribed on the national arch at Valley Forge:

“Naked and starving as they are, we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldierly.” (Sheenan, 1939: 68).

1 Radical intellectuals of the 1930’s first discovered a collective identity in the Communist party’s John Reed Clubs, which had been founded in 1929. Inviting “writers, artists, sculptors, musicians, and dancers of revolutionary tendencies,” the organization planned, so the party stated, “to assist in the development of a proletarian culture to inspire the workers, to interpret and publicize the events of the class struggle, to take part in the assault upon capitalism” (Carrol, 1994: 79).

2 Spanish Envoys Tell the Facts, The Labour Party. Transport House, Smith Square, London, s.w.I. October 1936.

3 Undoubtedly Calvo Sotelo was much involved the forthcoming coup d’état. Herr von Goss, who was the representative of the German Official News Agency (D.N B.) in Madrid before the war, has written since Germany made her participation clear in Die Wehrmach! special issue on the war in Spain published in June 1939: ‘Calvo Sotelo was the man who had the mission of organising and utilising the forces of Falange to the best needs of the nation.’ But I think there is no doubt that his death was decided on the spur of the moment by the furious policemen who gathered around the corpse of Lieutenant Castillo who was murdered in such a cold-blooded way by the gunmen of the Right (Buckley, 1988: 312-313).

4 For further information, consult: <https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/spanjews.pdf/02>.