THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES

A longtime chronicler of Spanish affairs offers a new history of that country’s civil war.

In 1936, when Spain’s generals rose in revolt, the country resembled a banana republic, although it was actually a parliamentary democracy in which many parties shared popular left-wing beliefs. While the government dithered, workers, activists, and even visitors fought the rebels in many areas, especially the large cities. No historian can definitively explain why these events became a rallying cry for the battle between democracy and fascism, but Guardian contributor Tremlett, a skilled researcher and solid writer who has lived in Spain for two decades, delivers a fine history. Answering an appeal, Hitler dispatched 15,000 rebel troops from Africa. “This single action,” writes the author, “together with the constant flow of arms and ammunition that both Hitler and Mussolini now provided, saved the generals.” Still preoccupied with appeasement, Britain’s government proposed a nonintervention agreement; though other governments signed, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin “openly flouted it.” Assembling, transporting, training, and arming perhaps 40,000 volunteers required more organization than any movement except communism possessed, so it played an outsized role in what became the International Brigades. However, the mixture of ideologues, laborers, adventurers, exiles, and migrants did not pledge allegiance to the communist cause, and Stalin paid as much attention to eliminating rival left-wing Spanish parties as in fighting Franco. Tremlett delivers an expert, squirm-inducing account of their minimal training, inadequate equipment, sometimes incompetent leadership, and performance, which ranged from suicidally brave to cowardly. Most of the book consists of a nuts-and-bolts description of two years of fighting, a steady stream of names, places, movements, and small-unit actions that may overwhelm general readers. In September 1938, in the forlorn hope of shaming the rebels into doing the same, the Loyalist government announced that all foreign troops would be sent home. No nation, including the Soviet Union, welcomed them back, and Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland did not change official opinion that these volunteers were “premature anti-fascists.”

An iconic war receives a definitive if painful history.