On 4th June I joined Edward Ayers and Colin Carritt at St. Giles’ College to talk about the involvement of men and women from Oxfordshire in the Spanish Civil War. The event was held as part of a campaign to erect a new memorial in Bonn Square, a prestigious site in the city centre.
The men of the British Machine-Gun Company, captured at Jarama. Ed Ayres’ great-uncle, George Leeson, is fifth from right
As Colin and Edward explained, they both had relatives who volunteered for Spain. Colin’s father, Noel Carritt fought and was wounded at the battle of Jarama in February 1937, before joining the medical services at Huete hospital. His uncle, Tony, served as an ambulance driver. He was badly injured during the Brunete offensive of July 1937 and later died of his wounds in hospital.
Ed’s great uncle, George Leeson, fought alongside Noel Carritt at Jarama and was taken prisoner on 13 February 1937. He spend three months in a Francoist prisoner-of-war camp, before being released and repatriated back to Britain.
A Republican Advanced Dressing Station at the Battle of Brunete in July 1937. Colin’s father, Noel, is on the left of the picture
In the Q&A following the talks the audience, primarily undergraduates, demonstrated a wide knowledge not just of the civil war, but of the situation in contemporary Spain. Speaking personally, I thoroughly enjoyed it, as I did the event itself.
Since the charity’s inception in 2001, the International Brigade Memorial Trust has organised an annual lecture in memory of Dr. Len Crome, a Blackburn GP who went to serve as a medic in Republican Spain in December 1936, and whose inspirational leadership led him to become Chief of Medical Services for the 35th Division of the Spanish Army during the civil war of 1936-1939.
The Len Crome memorial lectures have featured renowned scholars from around the world including, among many others, Peter Carroll, Helen Graham, Paul Preston and Angel Viñas. In 2010, the first nine lectures were released in a volume, edited by Jim Jump, and published by Lawrence and Wishart: Looking Back at the Spanish Civil War. Two years ago, with London’s Imperial War Museum closed for renovation, the event moved to Manchester and took on a new format, with four speakers and a discussion, rather than one keynote speaker. Chaired by Professor Mary Vincent of the University of Sheffield, the first conference in 2013 looked at George Orwell and Spain, with last year’s examining the Spanish Civil War’s cultural and artistic legacy. This year, with Paul Preston back in the chair, the conference was centred on perhaps the most famous artwork of the twentieth Century, inspired by the Nationalists’ horrific destruction of a small Basque market town on 26 April 1937.
Over the course of the day, there were four lectures on the bombing of Guernica (Gernika) and its consequences. In the opening talk, the author of Telegram from Guernica and former BBC producer Nick Rankin, outlined the key role of Times journalist George Steer in bringing news of the destruction of the Basque town to Britain. Steer’s account of the bombing remains one of the most powerful and important pieces of reporting in English to have come out of the war. But, as Rankin explained, Steer went beyond the usual dispassionate role of a journalist, by wiring his report direct to the Labour M.P. Philip Noel Baker. This meant that news of the horrific destruction of Guernica could be raised in the House of Commons before it had even appeared on Britain’s streets. Steer, a determined supporter of the Basques during the civil war, was later honoured with a plaque in Bilbao and a statue in Guernica itself.
Gijs van Hensbergen, art historian and best-selling author, is a world expert on Gaudi and Picasso’s Guernica. His deconstruction of Picasso’s painting and his account of the artist’s life were fascinating and I suspect many of the audience will have been spurred to go on and read his book, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon. Gijs outlined how the iconic painting became a powerful weapon in the propaganda battle against Fascism.
Manuel Moreno discussing the Basque children in Britain
Basque historian Xabier Irujo brought the event back to the actual bombing itself. In a forensic examination of the events of 26 April 1937, he demonstrated how the Germans – and Italians – systematically destroyed the town with high explosive and incendiary bombs, while planes circled around it machine-gunning any poor victims who attempted to escape. As he showed, the destruction and high number of casualties was no accident; a foretaste of the Nazi’s deliberately murderous approach to war.
The final talk was by Manual Moreno, who introduced a personal account of the consequences of the bombing. The son of one of the 4000 Basque children who were evacuated to Britain in June 1937, Manuel outlined the efforts made by the people of Britain on behalf of the Basque refugees and the Spanish Republic itself. Nearly eighty years have passed since the war, yet it was clear from Manuel’s emotional speech, that while he remains grateful to the British people for their efforts in support of the Spanish Republic, he continues to feel incensed with the British Government for their refusal to do likewise.
A video of the event will be released by the IBMT in the coming weeks.
On Saturday 14 February 2015, I travelled down to England’s south coast to talk about two British artists who fought in the Spanish Civil War: Felicia Browne and Clive Branson. Both artists were featured in a wonderful exhibition, ‘Conscience and Conflict’, at Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery.
Two visitors take in Picasso’s preliminary sketch for his ‘Weeping Woman’, which also appears in the exhibition
As reviews in newspapers such as The Telegraph and The Guardian make abundantly clear, this is a very special exhibition. Intelligently and knowledgeably curated, it features an array of stunning artistic work, set alongside posters, artefacts and contemporary film, to give a powerful sense of the depth and power of the British artistic movement in support of the Spanish Republic.
For those unfortunate enough to have missed the exhibition at Chichester (it closed the day after my talk), it will be appearing at the Laing Gallery in Newcastle, from 7 March to 7 June, 2015.
Peter Day’s Franco’s Friends, published by Biteback in 2011
Recent reports of British nationals leaving these shores for a foreign civil conflict carry echoes of the past. Richard Baxell (Unlikely Warriors) and Peter Day (Franco’s Friends) discuss what drove Britons to join the war in Spain – both those who fought against Franco and the members of the establishment who secretly supported him.
The discussion, entitled ‘The Spanish Civil War: Divided Britain’, was held on Wednesday 8 Oct in Cheltenham Town Hall. A number of interesting questions arose from members of a large audience which had collected, despite wind and driving rain. I’m very grateful to all who braved the weather to attend. Here are a number of the questions, together with brief summaries of our responses:
What was the attitude in Britain to the volunteers?
While there was much popular support for the volunteers, particularly those in the International Brigades, official responses tended to range from disapproval to outright hostility. It’s perhaps not surprising that parts of the British government (particularly the Foreign Office and the Admiralty) were opposed, however even the leaders of the British Labour movement and Trade Unions initially supported the policy of non-intervention in the war.
Which countries did the volunteers come from?
The 35 000 or so volunteers came from as many as 53 countries around the world. The largest groups came from France and Italy, but volunteers came from as far away as India, South America and New Zealand.
What was Stalin’s role in the civil war?
In contrast to some commentators, who argue that Stalin’s involvement in the infamous suppression of the POUM was a major cause of the Republic’s downfall, I would argue that the huge amount of military materiel – including the International Brigades- supplied by the Soviet Union was the main reason the Republic was able to survive as long as it did. Of course, it must be remembered that Stalin supported the Spanish Republic for his own reasons, certainly non out of ‘international solidarity.’
Are there any similarities between the wars in Spain then and Syria and Iraq today?
As far as I am concerned, there is none between the volunteers for the International Brigades who volunteered to fight in Spain and the fundamentalist Islamic Jihadists now waging war in Syria and Iraq. It’s true that the hostile response of the British Government to the volunteers – especially those who want to return to the UK – is an interesting parallel, but I don’t think it should be overplayed.
And, finally, the shortest question I’ve ever been asked … ‘Anarchism?’
Upon further interrogation, it conspired that the questioner was interested in the internecine struggles among the left during the civil war. Anarchist anti-centralist beliefs meant that they and the Republicans were always likely to be uneasy bedfellows. The political amnesty before the elections of February 1936 and the military coup of July essentially forced them into each others arms. While I feel that the argument expounded by, amongst others, the Communists, that the revolution would have to wait until the war was won, made obvious sense (as, in fact did Orwell), it is certainly the case that it was used as a smokescreen to justify the brutal crushing of the Anarchists and the POUM.
Obviously 30 minutes is not enough time to cover every aspect of the Irish involvement in the British Battalion during the Spanish Civil War. Instead, I will try and to give you a general overview, highlighting events and issues of particular importance during the volunteers’ time in Spain. In the main, the experiences of the Irish members of the unit were no different to those of their comrades from around the world. And, considering the obstacles it faced (of which more later) and despite the impression one might get from some hostile commentators on the International Brigades, the battalion operated surprisingly effectively. However, there were times when the volunteers’ ‘disciplined anti-fascist unity’ came under strain; this was particularly evident during the period following the creation of the battalion. I shall return to this in detail shortly.
Totalitarian regimes in Europe in the 1930s
While the reasons that lay behind the decision to go to Spain were probably as diverse as the volunteers themselves, they all shared a determination to ensure that fascism would not triumph. For these anti-fascists, the military rising in Spain represented the latest manifestation of a phenomenon they had witnessed sweep across Europe. As the Liverpool Trade Unionist – and former International Brigade Memorial Trust president – Jack Jones declared, ‘This was Fascist progression. It was real and it had to be stopped.’ It is important to remember that the volunteers saw this not simply as a civil war within Spain, but as one more episode in a European war against fascism, which many of them had already participated in at home. This was a struggle that went beyond national boundaries, a perspective lucidly expressed by the sculptor from London, Jason Gurney:
The Spanish Civil war seemed to provide the chance for a single individual to take a positive and effective stand on an issue which appeared to be absolutely clear. Either you were opposed to the growth of Fascism and you went out to fight it, or you acquiesced in its crimes and were guilty of permitting its growth…for myself and many others like me it was a war of principle, and principles do not have a national boundary.
As you have already heard from other speakers, volunteers from Ireland saw the conflict in much the same way, as the Dublin volunteer Bob Doyle (portrayed on the introductory slide) explained:
The propaganda of the Catholic Church and the official press was 100 per cent in support of Franco’s military revolt. It was a tremendous campaign, preaching at Mass and the missions about the need to support Franco, a gallant Christian gentleman, defending the Catholic Church in Spain. We were very conscious that the Nazis had come to power in 1933 and that General O’Duffy was intending to follow in their footsteps…I thought there was a danger that Ireland would go fascist and that was one of the motivating factors in making up my mind to go to Spain. I didn’t know much about Spain, but I knew that every bullet I fired would be against the Dublin landlords and capitalists.
Consequently, a large group of Irish volunteers, approximately 80 in number, left Ireland on 11 December 1936, under the command of Frank Ryan, a prominent and long-standing member of the Irish Republican movement. The group left Dublin by boat and arrived in Spain on 14 December, where they joined the English-speaking company of the French 12th International Brigade. To the surprise of many, despite Ryan’s reputation, the International Brigade command did not chose him as the Irish group’s section leader. This honour fell, instead, to Chris ‘Kit’ Conway, another experienced IRA activist and fighter. The official reason given was that Ryan was deaf, and would therefore be a liability in combat. While this may be true, it is perhaps worth noting that, unlike Conway, Frank Ryan was not a member of the Communist Party.
In addition to Conway’s section, the company included a number of veterans from the fighting during November 1936, where they had played a vital role in defending Madrid against the advancing Nationalist army, led by General Franco and supported by the military might of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Led by a British army veteran, George Nathan, the English-speaking company was sent to fight on the Lopera front, near Cordoba in southern Spain.
Meanwhile, other new arrivals from Britain and Ireland were joined the 16th (British) Battalion of the 15th International Brigade, formed on 27 December 1936. The Battalion was based in the small village of Madrigueras, about 20 km north of the main International Brigades’ base at Albacete, roughly half-way between Valencia and Madrid.
While most of the volunteers in the battalion were from Britain, it also included volunteers from Ireland and others from as far away as Australia and New Zealand. So, despite its name, it was never really a British Battalion, which was, in fact, recognised at the time. Attempts were made to give it a more appropriate name and the name Saklatvala battalion was mooted, (after the Indian Communist MP for Battersea in London who had died from a heart attack in January 1936), but the name never caught on. It could actually have been even worse: Spaniards called it el batallon inglés, the English Battalion.
The military commander of the new battalion was a Scottish journalist and World War One veteran called Wilf McCartney, who had previously served 10 years in Parkhurst prison for spying for Russia. The battalion political commissar, in charge of the political development and welfare of the volunteers, was Dave Springhall, the secretary of the London district of the Communist Party.
Military and political command structure of the ‘British Battalion’
The battalion itself was divided up into four companies, one machine-gun company plus three of infantry. Military training, such as it was, was put into practice. Fortunately, a number of the volunteers had some form of military training; there was ‘a good proportion of ex-servicemen’ and a number had served in the Territorial Army or some other form of military organization.
However, there was a sizeable number who had not. It was later claimed ‘that in five weeks or so they had produced some very fair infantry,’ but in truth, five weeks of basic training was ‘absurdly short’. Undoubtedly, many of the problems with training were a result of the well-documented limitations of quantity and quality of Republican arms and ammunition, a result of the British and French governments’ policy of non-intervention. This prevented the legal Republic from buying arms, while turning a blind eye to the huge amount of arms and men flooding in to Franco from Germany & Italy.
However, a number of brand new Russian rifles did soon arrive, but as many volunteers were only allowed to practice with five bullets, the value of the training must be regarded as questionable at best. One volunteer’s summary of the situation in early 1937 was biting: ‘Many people writing on the International Brigades have described them as well-armed, highly disciplined and well-trained units. This we of the British Battalion were not.’
Despite the problems, by early 1937 there were 450 volunteers training at Madrigueras, a number approaching battalion strength. Unfortunately, however, the fledgling battalion suffered a major setback in the middle of the month, when a number of Irish members, apparently unhappy with British officers’ tendency not to make any distinction between British and Irish volunteers, discovered that two senior British figures in Spain – the commander of Number One Company currently serving at Lopera, George Nathan, and the Battalion commander, Wilf Macartney – were suspected to have played a role in British covert activities in Ireland. Both were alleged to have served in the Black and Tans or Auxiliaries in the 1920s; worse still, Nathan was rumoured to have been involved in a hit squad that murdered two prominent members of Sinn Fein in May 1921: George Clancy, the former Lord Mayor of Limerick and George O’Callaghan, the ex-mayor. Nathan’s rather chequered past gave rise to suspicions that he could be a Franco spy.
Major George Nathan
Nathan was not a member of the Communist Party and was directed, probably by André Marty, the French commander of the International Brigades in Spain, to explain himself to Frank Ryan and his Irish comrades. According to the Irish volunteer, Jim Prendergast, Nathan was in effect, put on trial for his life. Nathan vehemently denied that he was a spy, but admitted that he had indeed been an intelligence officer in the Auxiliaries in County Limerick. However, Nathan claimed that he was acting under orders whilst in Ireland and argued that, as a Jew, he was now a staunch anti-fascist, and that all the volunteers in Spain were now all on the same side.
According to Joe Monks, the meeting responded to the spirit of his speech and applauded him. It is probable that Nathan’s explanation was accepted because of widespread admiration of the military skills and courage that he demonstrated during the disastrous Lopera action. 8 of the 50 Irish volunteers had been killed and only the actions of Nathan, who coolly organized a retreat under fire, prevented further losses.
However, resentment continued to smoulder and was reignited by a tactless report in the British Communist paper, the Daily Worker in early January. The article recounted the actions at Lopera, but made no mention of the Irish volunteers, instead describing them all as British. A number of Irish training at Madrigueras were furious, and it became clear that an attempt needed to be made to resolve the simmering discontent.
A meeting was called on the 12th January by, it appears, Dave Springhall, the battalion commissar, which was attended by approximately 45 Irish members of the battalion. During a stormy session, a number demanded that the group leave the British dominated battalion, whilst others, who wished to remain, vigorously argued ‘that distinctions must be made between anti-fascist working-class comrades from Britain and British imperialism.’ At the end of the meeting, the Irish group voted by a ratio of two to one (26-11) to leave and join the Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion at nearby Villanueva de la Jara.
Many of the details surrounding the split are unclear, though Frank Ryan always argued that it was provoked by the British battalion and Communist Party leadership, who were determined to wreck any chance of forming a specific Irish unit, a ‘Connolly Column.’ It is certainly highly unlikely that the communists who controlled the British battalion in Spain would have been amenable to the creation of a unit under the command of Irish republicans. It is surely revealing that despite his IRA experience and the dire shortage of officers in the Republican army, Frank Ryan was never given a field command.
In, I think, the best analysis of the split, Emmet O’Connor argues that the significance of ‘chronic suspicion of Irish republicanism in the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain,’ should not be underestimated. He also suggests that, André Marty, famously paranoid, was suspicious of volunteers from Catholic Ireland as potential fifth-columnists and deliberately kept them divided.
An immediate casualty of the fall-out was the Dubliner Terry Flanagan, who was acting commander of the Irish group in Madrigueras at the time. He seems to have been made a scape-goat for much of the conflict and was charged with sabotage and imprisoned. Only the personal intervention of Frank Ryan secured his release.
The incorporation of the survivors of the English-speaking Company from Lopera (who returned on 24 January), together with new arrivals meant that numbers in the battalion reached approximately six hundred by the beginning of February. The battalion was now considered to be of sufficient strength of and readiness for front-line action despite, firstly, the loss of the Irish group and, secondly, the widely respected commander of Number One Company, Jock Cunningham, who was taken ill in early February. This was a major setback, for the veteran of the battle for Madrid ‘was the best soldier of the lot,’ in Tom Wintringham’s opinion. However Cunningham’s place was taken by another popular and experienced fighter, the leader of the Irish at Lopera, ‘Kit’ Conway.
Finally, on 8 February 1937, the Battalion prepared to leave Madrigueras for the front, which lay to the south-east of Madrid. Following the failure of his earlier attempts on the west of Spain’s capital, General Franco had prepared a new offensive to the south, aiming to cut the vital road that linked Madrid with Valencia, the seat of the Republican Government.
Spain in February 1937
The 600 odd members of the battalion made their way north by lorry to Chinchón, about 25 km from Madrid and 15 km south-east of the site of the rebel advance. Recent arrivals were given some hurried last-minute preparation. Early in the morning of the 12th February, the volunteers were moved up to the eastern edge of the heights and began climbing upwards to the plateau overlooking the Jarama River.
The Battle of Jarama, February 1937
They advanced over a ridge then began to descend into the valley of the Jarama River, which lay in front of them. When they found themselves coming under enemy fire, they quickly pulled back to the top of the ridge and took up defensive positions on what would later become known as ‘Suicide Hill’.
The battalion was then subjected to a terrifying three hour machine-gun and artillery barrage, before they were attacked by ‘at least three battalions’ of highly experienced Moroccan infantry, Franco’s crack troops, who were in their element advancing across the open terrain of the Jarama Valley. Under the ferocious Nationalist attack, the Franco-Belge Battalion further to the north of the British Battalion was forced to pull back, which brought the three infantry companies under lethal enfilading machine-gun fire, which swept across them from their right. They tried desperately to hold their ground, but were cut to pieces.
As the day progressed, the rapidly mounting casualties put them in an increasingly untenable position. The survivors were left with little option but to retreat from Suicide Hill back to the battalion headquarters on the plateau, dragging their wounded comrades with them. But, as one volunteer remembered sadly, ‘There weren’t many to go back.’ As the last remaining dispirited members of the battalion withdrew, Moroccan soldiers rushed forward over the ridge in order to occupy the positions relinquished by the retreating volunteers. However, at this point, the battalion experienced perhaps their only moment of good fortune that day. After a terribly frustrating day spent without ammunition for the machine-guns, the correct calibre bullets had, at last, arrived. Quickly, the guns were brought into operation and used with devastating effect on the Moroccan soldiers who, for once, were caught out in the open and totally unawares. The Moroccan troops either quickly dropped down out of sight and waited for the cover of darkness or, where they could, retreated out of range. This brought to an end the first day of the battle of Jarama.
Like other Republican units, the Battalion had endured seven hours of extremely heavy losses: ‘Out of the 400 men in the [three] rifle companies, only 125 were left. Altogether less than half the battalion remained.’ Amongst those killed that day was the Irish company commander Kit Conway.
The following two days were no less terrifying, as Nationalist forces pressed forwards. The Battalion soon found itself surrounded on three sides and with the Machine-Gun Company’s flank totally unprotected rebel forces quickly took advantage of the situation and surrounded them. As many as 30 members of the Company, including its commander and his assistant, were captured.
Members of the British Machine-Gun Company, captured on 13 February 1937
A desperate charge by 40 men in a forlorn attempt to retake the trenches recently occupied by the Machine-Gun Company ended in disaster when the Nationalists soldiers simply mowed them down with their own machine-guns. Only six of the 40 men made it back to their positions.
The third day of the battle, on the 14 February, brought a new assault on the battalion’s lines by a fresh Nationalist brigade, now supported by tanks. Under severe crossfire and without any specialised equipment to combat the tanks, Jock Cunningham, who had temporarily taken charge of the battalion, had little choice but to withdraw his men away from the sunken road. Frank Ryan later described their plight:
Dispirited by heavy casualties, by defeat, by lack of food, worn out by three days of gruelling fighting, our men appeared to have reached the end of their resistance.
Some were still straggling down the slopes from what had been, up to an hour ago, the front line. And now, there was no line, nothing between the Madrid road and the Fascists but disorganised groups of weary, war-wrecked men. After three days of terrific struggle, the superior numbers, the superior armaments of the Fascists had routed them. All, as they came back, had similar stories to tell: of comrades dead, of conditions that were more than flesh and blood could stand, of weariness they found hard to resist.
Frank Ryan and John Robinson
With the battalion’s machine-guns crushed underneath the Nationalist tanks, the weakened line finally broke and the volunteers retreated in small groups back down the slope towards the Chinchón road. But here they were stopped by Colonel ‘Gal’, the commander of the 15th International Brigade, who explained to them that they were the only troops between the rebels and the Valencia Road. Despite their physical and mental exhaustion, 140 volunteers turned around and marched back to try to recapture their lost positions.
Under no illusions about the situation they were walking into, led by Frank Ryan and Jock Cunningham, the volunteers marched back, singing the Internationale to bolster their spirits, picking up stragglers on the way. The Nationalist forces, fooled into believing that fresh reinforcements had been brought up to the front, retreated back to their earlier positions. As the historian Hugh Thomas admitted, ‘It was a brave performance.’ The volunteers held the line at a critical moment for the Republic.
Positions at the end of the battle of Jarama
During the night of 14 to 15 February, Spanish units were brought up, and the gap in the line was finally plugged. Both sides dug defensive fortifications and a stalemate ensued, which neither side was able to overcome. The positions remained virtually static for the rest of the war.
Celebrated as a great victory over the fascist army, the battle of Jarama was, like the earlier battles for Madrid in November and December 1936, really only successful in that it stemmed the rebels’ advance on the capital. And at great cost: the Republicans lost somewhere in the region of 10 000 soldiers, to the Nationalists 6 000. Of the 600 who had gone into battle with the British Battalion on 12 February, a conservative estimate would suggest that 136 were killed, a similar number wounded, with at least 50 deserting the front line, leaving less than half the battalion remaining. In total nineteen Irish were killed fighting with the British Battalion at Jarama, including Kit Conway and the Protestant Reverend Robert M Hilliard, known as ‘the boxing parson of Kilarney’. As the Brigade Commissar Peter Kerrigan later stated, ‘This battle has been reported on many occasions. Suffice it to say that it was the bloodiest of all the battles that the British Battalion was involved in, in Spain. There was none as deadly.’
Yet the battalion, bolstered with new recruits, managed to regroup and fight on in defence of the Spanish Republic for nearly 18 months.
In the full heat of the Spanish summer at Brunete in July 1937, where despite gaining territory, Franco’s superior numbers and complete air domination soon stemmed and pushed back the Republican advance. Events were repeated in Aragon during the autumn of 1937. The capture of Quinto in September bode well, though it was marred by the death of the popular Irish commander of the battalion, Peter Daly from Wexford. His place was taken by his fellow countryman, Paddy O’Daire. And in during Christmas 1937, in one of the worst Spanish winters for years, Republican supporters around the world viewed the capture of the remote provincial capital of Teruel as ‘the turn of the tide’.
The battle of Teruel, December 1937 – January 1938
That it may have been, but not in the manner they expected. Franco’s forces soon retook Teruel and Franco was able to use the success as a springboard for a colossal offensive in the spring of 1938. Back in Aragon, the battalion was at the forefront of a desperate – and ultimately unsuccessful – attempt to prevent Franco’s forces reaching the Mediterranean and splitting the Republic in two. In what became essentially a headlong retreat, Italian troops captured over 100 members of the battalion – including both Bob Doyle and Frank Ryan – in what was probably one of the battalion’s lowest points during the civil war in Spain.
Republican troops crossing the River Ebro in July 1938
Yet, somehow, the battalion and the Spanish Republic itself, managed to regroup and return to the battle. In the summer of 1938, the Republican army launched a huge offensive back across the River Ebro. The International Brigades were involved in the crucial battles around the Aragon town of Gandesa in July and August and in the mountains of the Sierra Caballs and Pandols in September.
It was during this time that one of the less savoury episodes occurred, involving British and Irish volunteers in Spain. During an attack on a hill strategically overlooking Gandesa, members of the battalion reported coming under machine-gun fire from their own side. As the Scottish volunteer, John Dunlop, recalled:
I was just at the edge of a small hill. Right above my head, just inches above my head, there was a long burst of machine gun fire but it was coming in the wrong direction. It wasn’t coming from in front of me, it was coming from behind me and it was just hitting the top of this ridge, just above my head. I looked back and I could see this gun, one of our own machine-guns, actually firing. It appeared to be firing on us, so that more or less ended our attack.
An investigation into the incident concluded that they had been fired on by a volunteer from Tipperary, called Maurice Ryan, who was alleged to have been ‘flaying drunk’. Ryan was charged with firing on his own comrades, and Divisional headquarters gave orders for him to be executed by members of the British Battalion. At the beginning of August 1938, Maurice Ryan was taken for a walk in the woods by battalion commander Sam Wild and his adjutant George Fletcher, and shot in the back of the head.
The final action of the battalion in Spain came on 23 September 1938, when the 337 remaining members of the unit moved up to the front for one last time. The day began with Franco’s forces subjecting them to a five-hour artillery barrage, before they were ‘attacked and attacked, again and again with his artillery, tanks, aircraft and infantry.’ No. 1. Company bore the brunt, remaining stubbornly in their positions until their trenches were overrun. Many volunteers were killed or captured in the brutal hand-to-hand fighting, including a number who had been in Spain ever since the battles of Madrid during the winter of 1936.
Eventually the order was given to retreat and at 1 a.m. on 24 September 1938 the 15th International Brigade were withdrawn from the line. In its final forty-eight hours’ fighting, some two hundred members of the battalion had been killed, wounded or missing. It was a tragic and heart-breaking end to their time in Spain, though, in many ways, a fitting final act. Despite their unquestionable bravery, the men in the British Battalion were simply outnumbered and outgunned. Raw courage and a belief in the essential ‘rightness’ of their cause ‘could not overcome inexperience, poor coordination and superior military force’.
The tough Scottish political commissar Peter Kerrigan described his shock at this terrible outcome of the last action:
I could give dozens of individual acts of heroism but what is the use. The list of citations which I enclose, tells in brief official terms of the acts of deathless glory which were played out against a background of the cutting to pieces of our very bravest. I saw what No. 1 Coy. came through at Córdoba and I will never forget when I was told what our casualties were in those first 3 days at Jarama. But nothing can compare with the end of our battalion.
On 28 October 1938 the surviving volunteers of the 15 International Brigades took their place in a huge farewell parade in Barcelona, renowned for the speech of ‘La Pasionaria’ in which she thanked them and promised: ‘We will not forget you’ she said, ‘and, when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves, entwined with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory, come back! Come back to us and here you will find a homeland.’
Capa’s famous photo taken at the October 1938 farewell to the International Brigades in Barcelona
But six months later, the beleaguered Spanish Republic finally collapsed and, with it, the hopes of the supporters of democratic Spain from around the world. It caused the French writer Albert Camus to write an embittered comment on the lessons on the Spanish Civil War and the sacrifice of the International Brigades:
‘It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense.’ ‘It is this which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.’
And why, of course, many people around the world continue to do so.
Organised and hosted by the Limerick International Brigade Memorial Trust, the weekend 0f 12-14 September 2014 saw three days of events related to the Spanish Civil War, culminating in the unveiling of a new memorial to the volunteers from Limerick who served in the International Brigades.
Friday evening began with the launch of an edited volume, From the Shannon to The Ebro at the Mechanic’s Institute in Limerick. The event proved to be hugely popular, with people spilling not just out of the reception room, but out of the building itself. The launch was followed by a screening of the musical GoodBye Barcelonawith a Q&A with myself and the producer, Karl Lewcowicz. While most of the questioners focused on the history of the Brigades and Spain, there was also an interesting philosophical discussion on the nature of good and evil in civil wars such as Spain and Syria. One contributor wryly noted that there had been no mention of the Irish volunteers for Franco, who outnumbered those for the Republic by more than two to one. I’m glad he did; while I personally believe that O’Duffy’s volunteers fought on the wrong side, I don’t doubt their commitment or bravery.
Saturday was taken up with a day of lectures and discussions on the civil war and the involvement of the foreign volunteers:
Cinta Ramblado: Because it matters: memory, citizenship and responsibility in contemporary Spain
Harry Owens: The social and political origins of the Spanish Civil War
Brian Hanley: Limerick in the 1930s
David Convery: The International Brigades and the fight against fascism in Spain
Emmet O’Connor: The Republican left and the Irish Labour movement
Richard Baxell: The Irish in the British Battalion of the 15th International Brigade
Manus O’Riordan: Frank Ryan, collaborator or patriot?
For many, I suspect, Sunday was the highlight of the weekend. Again, a huge number of supporters and well-wishers turned out for the unveiling of a memorial to the six volunteers from Limerick for the International Brigades: Paddy Brady, Gerard Doyle, Emmet Morris Ryan, Frank Ryan, Joe Ryan and Jim Woulfe. There is a full report of the unveiling in the Irish Times.
I’d like to thank the organisers from the Limerick International Brigade Memorial Trust, first, for inviting me to speak and, second, for all their hard work in making the weekend such a great success.
For the second year running, the International Brigade Memorial Trust’s Len Crome memorial Lecture was held in the Manchester Conference Centre. While last year’s event was an examination of the role of George Orwell in the war and its historiography, this year focused on the involvement of artists and writers in the Spanish Civil War. As before, there were four speakers, expertly chaired by Professor Mary Vincent from the University of Sheffield. Sadly, there was one other echo from the previous year: Professor Paul Preston of the London School of Economics was unable to attend due to illness. Professor Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English language and literature fellow of Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford, very generously agreed to take his place.
The event began with Royal Holloway’s Carl-Henrik Bjerstrom discussing Republican arts initiatives between 1931 and 1939. Arguing that they were an essential part of the Republic’s humanitarian and democratic programme of reforms, he presented an astonishing statistic from 1937: that the Republican Ministry of Fine Arts had a larger budget than the Ministry of War. Even when qualified by the observation that the Republic had deposited their gold reserves in Moscow, it is pretty amazing. ‘No wonder they lost’, commented one wag.
Carl’s forensic presentation was followed by an illustrated lecture by Dr Carmen Herrero, Principal Lecturer on Spanish Culture and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University, outlining recent portrayals of the International Brigades in cinema. One of her examples was Carlos Saura’s ¡Ay Carmela!– as Carmen pointed out, it’s a great shame that is so hard to get hold of, for it’s a terrific film. Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom was also raised – perhaps bravely- though it’s always interesting to hear how the much-admired director works. Whatever you think of the film, Ken Loach’s enthusiasm for allowing actors to ad-lib made the (long and convoluted) discussion over the issues of collectivisation in a small Spanish village extremely lifelike and convincing.
Signing pre-release paperback copies of Unlikely Warriors
During the lunch-break, the organisers kindly allowed me time to launch the paperback edition of Unlikely Warriors, due to be officially released on 1 April, 75 years to the day since the end of the Spanish Civil War. My thanks to all involved in the Manchester event for this.
The afternoon session opened with the writer and filmmaker Jane Rogoyska’s overview of the Gerda Taro’s contribution to the canon of photography of the civil war – both by taking photographs herself and by enabling her lover Robert Capa to do so. She explained how the identity of Robert Capa was a deliberate construction, a means by which the Hungarian Jewish migrant Andre Friedmann could overcome his background. Gerda Taro also changed her name (she was born Gerta Pohorylle), and the intelligent and multilingual Taro initially began by acting as Friedmann’s business manager. However, as the war progressed, and she moved from using a square-format Rolleiflex, to the 35mm Leica, her photographs became every bit as good as – and often indistinguishable from – those of Robert Capa.
The afternoon finished with a lecture on the ‘aestheticising of tragedy’ by Valentine Cunningham. Initially a bewildering barrage of names of the (mainly) English poets and artists who (mainly) supported the Spanish Republic, he moved on to a soaring and erudite discussion of the, perhaps understandably, elegiac nature of much of the writing. There was so much in the lecture to discuss, that I felt it would have been churlish to point out that there were in fact 35 000, not 60 000, volunteers for the International Brigades and though the English writer and poet Laurie Lee was undoubtedly one of them, to cite his A Moment of War as a reliable account is unwise, to put it mildly.
My thanks go out to the IBMT in general and the Manchester organisers in particular. The event was, I think, a great success.
On 28 October 1938, the emotional departure from Spain of the foreign volunteers was marked by a huge farewell parade in Barcelona. The remnants of the International Brigades, a few thousand in all, led by military bands, set off nine abreast from the bull ring at the end of Diagonal, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. The 15th International Brigade, the last to be established, brought up the rear.
At the end of the parade, a huge rally was held at which important Republican figures, including President Manuel Azaña and Prime Minister Juan Negrín, expressed their thanks to the Internationals. The volunteers’ sacrifices had earned the eternal gratitude of the Spanish Republicans, eloquently expressed by Dolores Ibárruri (the legendary orator from Asturias, known as La Pasionaria) at a huge farewell parade held in Barcelona on 28 October 1938. ‘We shall not forget you,’ she had assured them, promising that, one day, they would be welcomed back to a free, democratic Spain:
“Those of you who have no country will find one, those of you deprived of friendship will find friends and all of you will find the love, affection and gratitude of the whole of the Spanish People.”
Returning International Brigaders given a rousing welcome at Victoria on 7 December 1938
A month and a half later, on 7 December 1938, the surviving members of the British Battalion of the 15th International Brigade arrived back on British soil, having endured a very rough crossing from Dieppe to Newhaven. They hardly received a heroes’ welcome; instead they were met with an interrogation by customs and Foreign Office officials, as representatives of the British security services looked on. Put on a train to London, the exhausted soldiers, many of them heavily bandaged and a number on crutches, disembarked to find a very different welcome at Victoria Station. A vast crowd of family members, friends and supporters had assembled to welcome them home. Among the waving Union Jacks were flags bearing the names of British trade unions and left-wing political organisations. Others bore one simple phrase: ‘¡No pasarán!’
The evening began with Maxine Peake’s passionate rendition of La Pasionaria’s farewell speech to the International Brigades, followed by performances by poet Francesca Beard and singer Maddy Carty, both of whom had been commissioned to produce work specifically for this event.
I followed a typically ardent delivery from Bob Crow, the General Secretary of the RMT. Not an easy task. Fortunately, I was able to begin by showing film of the British volunteers returing from Spain in 1938, which the BFI had generously digitised especially for the event (a low resolution version of the film can be found online). The film is without a soundtrack, but on IBMT Secretary Jim Jump’s suggestion, the Philosophy Football team added an entirely appropriate score: the first movement of Benjamin Britten’s ‘Ballad of Heroes’, which was composed in honour of the volunteers who died in Spain. The combination of the film and music was absolutely electrifying. When it was first performed in April 1939, the music was accompanied by the words of poet Randall Swingler and I felt it was entirely appropriate to precede my talk by reading them:
You who stand at your doors, wiping hands on aprons,
You who lean at the corner saying ‘We have done our best’,
You who shrug your shoulders and you who smile
To conceal your life’s despair and its evil taste,
To you we speak, you numberless Englishmen,
To remind you of the greatness still among you
Created by these men who go from your towns
To fight for peace, for liberty, and for you.
They were men who hated death and loved life,
Who were afraid, and fought against their fear.
Men who wish’d to create and not to destroy,
But knew the time must come to destroy the destroyer.
For they have restored your power and pride,
Your life is yours, for which they died.
Panel discussion chaired by Philosophy Football’s Mark Perryman
My (occasionally bleak) account on the experiences of the British fighting fascism between 1932 and 1945 in Britain, Spain and Europe followed, leading in to a brief discussion with writers Paul Mason and Daniel Trilling, Stop the War campaigner Salma Yaqoob and Olga Abasolo from Spain’s Los Indignados movement.
After the interval, comedian Mark Steel‘s set took well-aimed and often very funny pot-shots at Margaret Thatcher, north Londoners and Chelsea supporters (amongst others), all neatly linked by a diatribe on the difficulty of adapting to change. Socialist R’n’B band Thee Faction and a DJ set from PanditG completed what was, by all accounts, a very successful and highly enjoyable night.
The following lecture was delived at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, as part of an event to commemorate the centenary of Jack Jones’ birth.
Jack Jones and the Spanish Civil War
Seventy-five years ago, a young trade unionist and Labour councillor from Liverpool took the momentous decision to leave his home and family to fight in a war in a country he had never seen. The young man was, of course, Jack Jones. To some contemporary audiences, this can seem an astonishing thing to do, yet for those who volunteered to fight at the time, it was often a simple and straight-forward decision. The issue was put starkly by the English poet, Stephen Spender, for whom the war in Spain was ‘an absolute choice between good and evil.’ The 1930s, wrote a volunteer from Wembley (John Bassett), were ‘a time of hope, when a man with a rifle had some power to divert the tide of human affairs.’
The reasons that lay behind the decision of some 2500 men and women from Britain and Ireland to go to Spain had more to do with events outside the country than within. While the vast majority of the volunteers from Britain knew little of Spanish politics, they certainly had personal experience of the powerful forces engulfing Europe in the 1930s, which had encouraged many to shift politically to the left. First had come the Great Depression, the catastrophic economic crisis that followed the stock market crash of 1929 and put over two million Britons out of work by 1930.
Hunger marchers in the 1930s
Alongside the economic turmoil came a political storm, one that had been growing since the end of the First World War and now swept across Europe. The birth of Mussolini’s fascist state in 1922 was followed by the establishment of other European dictatorships, most significantly in Germany following Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship in 1933. By the mid-1930s, essentially constitutional states such as France were themselves seemingly under threat. And, of course, fascism was not just a continental phenomenon. In Britain, Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (known as the Blackshirts) which had been founded in October 1932, appeared to present a similar threat to democracy. Mosley’ Blackshirt thugs were involved in vicious attacks on opponents, in particular in Jewish neighbourhoods such as Cheetham in Manchester and London’s east-end.
So, when on 17 July 1936, a military uprising was launched in Spain in order to overthrow the democratically elected government, Spain appeared to be the latest country about to succumb. However, while the rising scored some initial successes, it failed to capture significant parts of Spain, including the cities of Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Bilbao. Here opponents of the rising took to the streets, erected barricades and confronted the insurgents under the rallying cry ¡No pasarán! (They shall not pass).
Madrid, 1936: ¡No pasarán!
Faced with determined opposition, the generals saw that their rebellion was in real danger of being defeated. With their best soldiers, Franco’s elite Army of Africa, trapped in Morocco, the Rebel officers turned to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany for assistance. After some hesitation, both Hitler and Mussolini sent help, providing vital aircraft to ferry Franco’s troops across the Strait of Gibraltar onto the peninsula, where they were able to head rapidly north, leaving a trail of slaughter and destruction in their wake.
Desperate pleas for assistance from the Spanish Republican government, initially regarded with sympathy by France, met with firm opposition from Stanley Baldwin’s national government in Britain. Determined to avoid a wider European conflagration, and maintaining that appeasement of Germany and Italy was the best means of preventing it, the European democracies chose not to come to the Republic’s aid. Instead a ‘non-intervention agreement’ was created, to which Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and the USSR all signed up – in writing at least.
Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that the agreement strongly favoured the Rebels, who continued to receive covert assistance from Germany and Italy. Indeed, for many supporters of the Spanish government, the non-intervention pact was the real villain of the story, and George Orwell later argued that the fate of the Republic ‘was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin – at any rate not in Spain’.
So for Jack and other supporters of the Spanish Republic the war was never seen as a domestic conflict. The view is often expressed in interviews with brigaders, that ‘Although the war was fought exclusively on Spanish soil, I never saw it as a domestic conflict.’ To the volunteers, Spain’s struggle transcended national boundaries, a perspective lucidly expressed by the sculptor, Jason Gurney from London, who arrived in Spain in December 1936:
“The Spanish Civil war seemed to provide the chance for a single individual to take a positive and effective stand on an issue which appeared to be absolutely clear. Either you were opposed to the growth of Fascism and you went out to fight it, or you acquiesced in its crimes and were guilty of permitting its growth…for myself and many others like me it was a war of principle, and principles do not have a national boundary.” (Jason Gurney, Crusade in Spain, p.36.)
Therefore fighting fascism in Spain would help the fight against fascism across Europe: conversely a victory for Franco was seen, by extension, as a victory for Hitler. The rapid and determined support for the Spanish Rebels by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy provided anti-fascists with convincing evidence for a connection between the regimes.
Around the world supporters of the Spanish Republic held meetings and demonstrations, collected food, money and medical supplies. However, some felt that sending help and money was not enough. Spain needed arms, as one young Spaniard argued: ‘We Spaniards are greatly thankful for your charity and your lint and your ointments which you send us to repair Don Quixote’s wounds; but we would be much more thankful if you were to outfit him with a new lance and an up-to-date shield.’
Some anti-fascists agreed and took the decision to volunteer to go to Spain, determined to seize this opportunity to halt the spread of authoritarian right-wing regimes across Europe. As Jack explained:
“The awful realisation that black fascism was on the march right across Europe created a strong desire to act. The march had started with Mussolini and had gained terrible momentum with Hitler and was being carried forward by Franco. For most young people there was a feeling of frustration, but some determined to do anything that seemed possible, even if it meant death, to try to stop the spread of fascism…This was Fascist progression. It was real and it had to be stopped.” (Introduction by Jack Jones in Judith Cook, Apprentices of Freedom, pp.vii-ix.)
The first volunteers consisted mainly of German and Italian anti-fascists, plus some British, French and Polish left-wingers. Sprinkled among the Spanish defenders at the rate of one to four, the brigaders both boosted their morale and trained them in the use of weapons such as machine-guns. The arrival of a well-disciplined group of soldiers provided an important psychological boost to the Republican forces. To many observers’ surprise, the defenders of Madrid managed to halt the advance of General Franco’s forces at the gates of the Spanish capital.
Yet when Jack first approached the Aid Spain Office in Liverpool’s Haymarket in order to offer his services to the Spanish Republic, he was turned down, despite having experience in the Territorial Army. Instead, he was told that he would be of more use staying in Britain and working on behalf of the Spanish Republic, including helping to recruit volunteers for the International Brigades.
However, after several requests, in early 1938 Jack’s efforts to volunteer were finally rewarded and permission was granted for him to go. However, it was not easy to get to Spain, for volunteering for the Spanish war had been made illegal in Britain, so the journey had to be undertaken in secret. Jack’s organisational experience meant that he was sufficiently trusted to be put in charge of a group of British volunteers. They followed the by now well-trodden route: from London by train and boat to the main recruiting centre for the International Brigades in Paris and then on by train once again to Perpignan in southern France.
Jack Jones’ route to Spain in March 1938
With the border between France and Spain closed, volunteers were forced to undertake an exhausting nine hour climb over the Pyrenees to get into Spain – carried out at night to avoid the patrols set up to catch them. Jack’s group arrived in Spain in March 1938. Upon his arrival he was given some brief training in the fort at Figueras in northern Catalonia, before being allowed to carry on to Barcelona to deliver a letter he was carrying from Ernest Bevin to representatives of the socialist trade union, the UGT. After delivering the letter, Jack briefly joined a UGT unit fighting on Aragon front [near Lerida], an experience he later described in his autobiography, Union Man:
“My character was hardened by many experiences at that time but one incident stands out vividly in my memory. ‘Yo lucha para Libertad! (‘I fight for liberty’) shouted the old Spaniard, digging in alongside me. The ground was hard and stony and with the aid of a trenching tool it was possible to dig only a shallow strip and use what natural cover was available. Laying his trenching tool on the ground, he picked up his rifle to fire at the opposing force. We faced a hail of rifle and machine-gun fire and shells came flying over at the same time. I looked at the unlikely soldier by my side and marvelled at his courage. He had a gnarled bronze face, a heavy body, and was wearing the cap and overalls of a working man. He was afraid of nothing. It turned out that he was an anarchist, but he typified for me the resolve of so many Spaniards who hated the idea of a Fascist take-over. [But] in his courage he was reckless, a recklessness which did for him, for he was killed within minutes of his picking up his rifle and firing a few shots.” (Jack Jones, Union Man, 2008, p. 68.)
Despite choosing to wear a black leather jacket – he later admitted it was not exactly the most effective form of camouflage – Jack survived a period of service with the Spanish UGT unit, before rejoining his compatriots. Jack Jones from Liverpool became volunteer number 1788 of the British Battalion of the 15 International Brigade.
Probably due more to his political, than military experience, he was appointed as political commissar to the No. 1 Major Atlee Company. Jack described his role as ‘a combination of welfare advisor and political advisor’; but he would have been unusual if he had not been informed that he should both keep watch over – and a watch on – the men in his company. Based primarily on the model of the Soviet Red Army, the political commissars operated as a parallel command structure to the military and were responsible for both morale and discipline within the Communist-dominated International Brigades.
Jack Jones in Spain (to the left of photo, in beret and leather jacket)
In many ways it was not an auspicious time to join the International Brigades. The appalling number of casualties in the battles of Jarama and Brunete around Madrid the previous year, meant that those who arrived in 1938 could have no illusions of the danger they faced. Furthermore, the massive offensive in Aragon launched by Franco at the end of February 1938 had ended with his soldiers dancing triumphantly in the Mediterranean at Viñaroz, splitting the Republican zone in two.
During the chaotic retreats at least 100 members of the British Battalion were killed and many more wounded. A similar number were captured and imprisoned in prisoner of war camps. The following photograph was taken of the defiant British survivors responding to a story in a pro-Franco British newspaper which had triumphantly announced the annihilation of the International Brigades.
Yet, when Jack joined the battalion in the summer of 1938, he found the men in training at Fontanella, a pretty valley surrounded by rugged hills and mountains near the Catalonian village of Marsa. The volunteers christened it ‘Chabola Valley’ after the small rough shelters they constructed under the hazelnut bushes that proliferated in the barrancos, the small dried up river gullies.
The volunteers were kept busy with ‘training, marching or rifle practice’ and ‘the procedures for crossing rivers’, while at night one of the volunteers who was a particularly strong swimmer (Lewis Clive) swam clandestinely across the Ebro to reconnoitre the Nationalist positions. Benefiting from regular food and sleep, and safe from the daily risk of death, some came to see this as one of their most pleasant periods in Spain, as one Scottish member of the battalion described: ‘In this happy existence, which was really enjoyable, we were out in the fresh air and we were sleeping under the open sky. The weather was fairly good and we were getting plenty of exercise and plenty of food.’
On 8 July the battalion was visited by a travelling van fitted out with hot showers. Many volunteers also took the opportunity to lose themselves in a book. Their ranks included a number of voracious readers and they had amassed a huge library of English books; these were stored at a nearby hacienda, where they managed to rig up electric lighting and could read long into the night. ‘It was a strange, argumentative army of thinkers,’ remembered one young Briton. Jack described his time at Chavola Valley to the historian Max Arthur:
“Life wasn’t easy, but a good spirit prevailed in the ranks. Food was short; our main meals consisted of beans, lentils and chickpeas, sometimes beans with dried fish in a stew, or beans with mule meat or old goat, stewed and topped off with rough – very rough – red wine. Some of the lads visited an old chap in a nearby village who, allegedly, made stew from mice, but nobody would admit to having tasted it. Needless to say, there were no cats or dogs around!” (Interview with Jack Jones in Max Arthur, The Real Band of Brothers, p. 137.)
Towards the end of July 1938, the period of training finally came to an end. Now promoted to Commissar of Number Four Company, Jack and his comrades in the International Brigades were to be part of a huge – and ambitious – Republican offensive back across the River Ebro.
The British Battalion advance during the Ebro offensive of July 1938
During the nights of 23 and 24 July 1938, the British Battalion marched nearly thirty kilometres to their crossing point over the river near Ascó. Early the following morning, the British followed the Canadian battalion over the river, most of them taken over in small rowing boats, while others crossed on pontoon bridges rapidly erected during the morning by Republican engineers.
Republican pontoon bridge across the River Ebro
Initially, the Republican soldiers found the Nationalists unprepared and they were able to advance rapidly. By the afternoon of 25 July, Jack and the other British volunteers were within two kilometres of the village of Corbera, that lay between them and their principal target, the small town of Gandesa, the key to the Ebro offensive.
However, within two hours of the first troops crossing, Nationalist aeroplanes had begun attacking the temporary bridges over the river. A lack of supplies, especially food and water, were becoming problematic as the battalion’s supply line became dangerously over-extended. Nevertheless, in increasingly difficult conditions, the battalion pressed on towards Gandesa. As Spanish forces battered the town itself, the British Battalion was ordered to capture a hill, just over a kilometre to the east, nicknamed ‘The Pimple’ by the British. The Pimple (Hill 481) overlooked Gandesa, and though not the highest hill in the vicinity, its capture was vital if the attack on the town was to stand any chance of success. Unfortunately, Franco had by now brought up reinforcements and the attacking Republican forces met with extremely fierce resistance, particularly aircraft and artillery fire. The volunteers in the battalion faced what one described as ‘a withering, murderous reply of shells, rifle and machine gun fire’ from the resolute defenders on Hill 481 and from Nationalist positions on the surrounding heights and on top of high buildings within Gandesa itself. Between 27 July and 3 August, in searing heat, the battalion launched increasingly desperate assaults on the hill, but all were repulsed, as Jack sadly recalled, ‘at great cost’.
Even for men hardened to the brutal realities of warfare, the number of casualties sustained on Hill 481 was deeply shocking. Many of them were popular, long-standing members of the battalion, who had fought in Spain since the very creation of the battalion eighteen months earlier. One of many casualties of the first day’s fighting on the hill was Jack himself, as he describes:
“Once more I had clambered up the hill with my comrades, taking cover where we could and firing at the enemy wherever he appeared. The bullets of the snipers whizzed over, grenades and shells were striking the ground, throwing up earth and dust and showering us with shrapnel. Suddenly my shoulder and right arm went numb. Blood gushed from my shoulder and I couldn’t lift my rifle. I could do nothing but lie where I was. Near me a comrade had been killed and I could hear the cries of others, complaining of their wounds. While I was lying there, to make things worse, a spray of shrapnel hit my right arm. The stretcher bearers were doing their best but could hardly keep up with the number of casualties. As night fell I made my own way, crawling to the bottom of the hill. I was taken with other wounded men down the line to an emergency field hospital at Mora del Ebro where I was given an anti-tetanus injection. The place was like an abbatoir; there was blood and the smell of blood everywhere.” (Jack Jones, Union Man, 1986, pp. 75–6.)
Transferred from hospital to hospital, it soon became clear that Jack’s wounds were not going to recover easily and the decision was taken to send him home. Jack was finally repatriated on 14 September 1938, and he left Spain accompanied by his friend and former company commander, the Irishman, Paddy O’Daire. Back home he was reunited with his fiancée Evelyn, the widow of his friend, George Brown, who had been killed whilst serving as the British Battalion’s political commissar at Brunete in July 1937. Jack & Evelyn married the following month, in October 1938.
Jack & Evelyn Jones, October 1938
His wounds healed, Jack returned, as he put it, to ‘the world of ships and cargoes and the human problems of the waterfront.’ But he continued to work for Spain and campaigned to bring an end to the western democracies’ policy of non-intervention. After the final defeat of the Republic in March 1939, Spanish seamen stranded in British seaports who did not want to return to Franco’s Spain sought – and secured – Jack’s help. His connections arranged their transportation to Argentina to begin new lives. He also kept in clandestine contact with the illegal trade union movement in Spain and provided help and legal assistance to those imprisoned by the Franco dictatorship. Following Franco’s death in 1975, Jack lent his support to the re-establishment of independent trade unions in Spain.
As Jack declared in the postscript to the 2008 edition of his autobiography, the cause of democracy in Spain and the contribution of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War remained important to him throughout his life. When Jack died in 2009, he was the President of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, a position he had held since its inception in 2001.
The following 2 minute video clip is of Jack Jones talking about his time in Spain, from his participation in the battle on Hill 481 near Gandesa, to his rather sobering assessment of the legacy of the Spanish war. The interviews are from David Leach’s Voices from a Mountain, 2001.
James Larkin ‘Jack’ Jones, 29 March 1913 – 21 April 2009.
In July 1938 the Spanish Republican Army confounded many around the world – not least those in Franco’s Spain – who considered it a spent force, by launching a huge and ambitious attack back across the River Ebro. Fighting alongside the Spanish soldiers of the 80 000 strong Republican Army of the Ebro were a number of English-speaking volunteers, within the 15 International Brigade. Drawn mainly from Britain, the USA and Canada, the brigade also included volunteers from Ireland, Australia and from a number of other countries around the world.
Fighting in the full, glaring heat of the Spanish summer, lacking food and water and severely outgunned and outnumbered, the members of the British Battalion of the 15 International Brigade fought in a number of vicious battles between July and September 1938. On Hill 481 near Gandesa, on Hill 666 in the Sierra Pandols and Hill 356 in the Sierra Caballs, the British were bombed, shelled and attacked remorselessly by Franco’s forces and his German and Italian allies. On 23 September 1938 on the battalion’s final action on the road just north of the village of Corbera d’Ebre, the last remaining members of the battalion were virtually overrun.
At 1 a.m. the following morning the order finally arrived withdrawing the foreign volunteers of the International Brigades from the line. In its final forty-eight hours’ fighting, some two hundred members of the British Battalion were killed, wounded or missing. It was a tragic and heart-breaking end to their time in Spain, though, in many ways, a fitting final act. Despite their unquestionable bravery, the men in the British Battalion were simply outnumbered and outgunned. Raw courage and a belief in the essential ‘rightness’ of their cause ‘could not overcome inexperience, poor coordination and superior military force’.
Map of British involvement in the Ebro offensive, 25 July to 23 September 1938
The tough Scottish political commissar Peter Kerrigan later described his shock at this terrible outcome of the last action:
“I could give dozens of individual acts of heroism but what is the use. The list of citations which I enclose, tells in brief official terms of the acts of deathless glory which were played out against a background of the cutting to pieces of our very bravest. I saw what No. 1 Coy. came through at Córdoba and I will never forget when I was told what our casualties were in those first 3 days at Jarama. But nothing can compare with the end of our battalion.”
In September 2013 a group of friends and families of the International Brigades returned to Catalonia to remember the sacrifices made all those years ago. The trip was organised by Duncan Longstaff, a trustee of the International Brigades Memorial Trust assisted by Almudena Cros, Severiano Montero and Vicente González of AABI, the Spanish Friends of the International Brigades. While IBMT members from the UK made up the majority of the group, there were also participants from Ireland, the United States, Australia, Canada and Puerto Rico.
Besides visiting battle sites of particular significance to the English-speaking 15 International Brigade, the trip to Catalonia also included the unveiling of two memorials to the volunteers and the laying of flowers and a wreath at the site of the British Battalion’s final action in Spain.
Representatives of the IBMT with past and present mayors of La Bisbal de Falset in front of the new plaque
The first memorial to be unveiled was a new plaque dedicated to the British members of the medical services who worked in the former cave hospital in La Bisbal de Falset during the summer of 1938. Here, British members of the Republican medical services struggled in almost impossible conditions to treat those wounded in the bitter fighting. During the Ebro offensive everything had to be carried across pontoon bridges by lorry, or ferried across in boats during the night, so the facilities were necessarily limited. Serious casualties had to be taken back across the river to the improvised cave hospital set up by Dr. Len Crome, the commander of the medical services for the Republican 35 Division, in Falset. British doctors and nurses, such as Len Saxton and Patience Darton, worked around the clock, with the desperate shortages of materials forcing them to improvise and develop innovative treatments. Allied soldiers fighting in the Second World War would benefit greatly from lessons learned in Spain in areas such as casualty management, blood transfusions and the treatment of fractures.
The second unveiling was of a new memorial dedicated to those killed in the final last action of the British Battalion in Spain. The plaque is situated in the old village of Corbera d’Ebre, which remains virtually in the condition it was at the end of the civil war. In amongst the ruins lies the village’s former church, now converted into a dramatic space for gatherings, exhibitions and commemorations. At the time of the ceremony held on 24 September 2013, the former church was hosting a strikingly poignant art installation comprised of suspended roof tiles, caught as if at the moment of an explosion. Behind the artwork, further within the building, lay the IBMT Antifascistas exhibition, shown for the first time in Spain. The exhibition will remain in the church until November 2013.
After a ceremony held within the church came the final event of the day and, for many, of the trip itself, with the laying of flowers and wreath at the position of the battalion’s final stand, some 4 kilometres north of Corbera.
Memorial wreaths and flowers laid at the site of the 15 International Brigade’s last action in Spain on 23 September 1938
