The International Brigades

Author: Giles Tremlett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408854007
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 721

Book Description
** Shortlisted for the Military History Matters Book of the Year Award ** 'Magnificent. Narrative history at its vivid and compelling best' Fergal Keane The first major history of the International Brigades: a tale of blood, ideals and tragedy in the fight against fascism. The Spanish Civil War was the first armed battle in the fight against fascism, and a rallying cry for a generation. Over 35,000 volunteers from sixty-one countries around the world came to defend democracy against the troops of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. Ill-equipped and disorderly, yet fuelled by a shared sense of purpose and potential glory, these disparate groups of idealistic young men and women formed a volunteer army of a size and type unseen since the Crusades, known as the International Brigades. Were they heroes or fools? Saints or bloodthirsty adventurers? And what exactly did they achieve? In this magisterial history, Giles Tremlett tells – for the first time – the story of the Spanish Civil War through the experiences of this remarkable group. Drawing on the Brigades' archives in Moscow, as well as first-hand accounts, The International Brigades captures all the human drama of a historic mission to halt fascist expansion in Europe.

The Lincoln Brigade

Author: William Loren Katz
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1620329018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 105

Book Description
THE LINCOLN BRIGADE The day after Christmas in 1936, a group of ninety-six Americans sailed from New York to help Spain defend its democratic government against fascism. Ultimately, twenty-eight hundred United States volunteers reached Spain to become the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Few Lincolns had any military training. More than half were seriously wounded or died in battle. Most Lincolns were activists and idealists who had worked with and demonstrated for the homeless and unemployed during the Great Depression. They were poets and blue-collar workers, professors and students, seamen and journalists, lawyers and painters, Christians and Jews, blacks and whites. The Brigade was the first fully integrated United States army, and Oliver Law, an African American from Texas, was an early Lincoln commander. William Loren Katz and the late Marc Crawford twice traveled with the Brigade to Spain in the 1980s, interviewed surviving Lincolns on old battlefields, and obtained never-before-published documents and photographs for this book.

Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War

Author: Gerben Zaagsma
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472513797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War discusses the participation of volunteers of Jewish descent in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, focusing particularly on the establishment of the Naftali Botwin Company, a Jewish military unit that was created in the Polish Dombrowski Brigade. Gerben Zaagsma analyses the symbolic meaning of the participation of Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company both during and after the civil war. He puts this participation in the broader context of Jewish involvement in the left and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in the communist movement and beyond. To this end, the book examines representations of Jewish volunteers in the Parisian Yiddish press (both communist and non-communist). In addition, it analyses the various ways in which Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company have been commemorated after WWII, tracing how discourses about Jewish volunteers became decisively shaped by post-Holocaust debates on Jewish responses to fascism and Nazism, and discusses claims that Jewish volunteers can be seen as 'the first Jews to resist Hitler with arms'.

Comintern Army

Author: R. Dan Richardson
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813164370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
When Spain exploded into civil war in July 1936, a conflict whose roots were deep in the Spanish past became the arena for the violent political passions that divided Europe north of the Pyrenees. Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union intervened actively in the war, using Spain as a testing ground for their military equipment and techniques and their political ideologies. In this first in-depth study of the politics of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, R. Dan Richardson views the Brigades in the wider context of both the complex political-military alignments of Loyalist Spain and the broader Soviet-Comintern strategy during the Popular Front era. While not denying the generous impulse that led many young men the world over to enlist in the cause of the Spanish Republic, he sees the Brigades primarily as instruments of communist policy. He argues that the directing force behind the enlistment, training, and deployment of the Brigades was the international communist organization—a compelling example of how the ends of propaganda and politics took precedence over military objectives. Using a wide array of sources in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German, and a thorough analysis of the Brigades' own voluminous literary output, Richardson clearly shows that the Brigades were a significant political, ideological, and propaganda instrument, which was used effectively by the Comintern for its own purposes, not only in Spain but on the larger world stage.

Franco's International Brigades

Author: Christopher Othen
Publisher: Hurst & Company
ISBN: 9780231704250
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Foreign volunteers fought on behalf of General Franco and the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War for a right-wing cause whose aim was to smash democracy. These assorted adventurers, fascists, and Catholic crusaders were on the winning side, but their role has remained strangely hidden until now. Men from Portugal and Morocco signed on for money and adventure. General Eoin O'Duffy organised 700 Irishmen in a modern Crusade; 500 Catholic Frenchmen fought in the "Jeanne D'Arc" unit; and thirty British volunteers, including aristocrats and working-class fascists, also took up arms. Romanian Iron Guard extremists died at Majadahonda and an Indian volunteer fought in the fascist militia. There were Russians, Americans, Finns, Belgians, Greeks, Cubans, and many more. Goose-stepping alongside the volunteers were fascist conscripts from Germany and Italy, in training for the next world war. Foreigners, whether unknown individuals like British pilot Cecil Bebb or infamous figures like the German dictator Adolf Hitler, were essential to Franco's victory. Without Bebb--who flew General Francisco Franco from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco in 1936, a journey which was to precipitate the onset of the Spanish Civil War--the war would never have started; without Hitler, Franco would never have won.

Foreign volunteers and International Brigades in the Spanish civil war (1936-39)

Author: Bruno Mugnai
Publisher: Soldiershop Publishing
ISBN: 8893274523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
The International Brigades (Spanish: Brigadas Internacionales) were military units made up of volunteers from different countries, who traveled to Spain to fight for the Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939.The number of combatant volunteers has been estimated at between 32,000–35,000, though with no more than about 20,000 active at any one time. A further 10,000 people probably participated in non-combatant roles and about 3,000–5,000 foreigners were members of CNT or POUM.[1] They came from a claimed "53 nations" to fight against the Spanish Falangist forces led by General Francisco Franco who was assisted by German and Italian forces.

British Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War

Author: Richard Baxell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134345763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 almost 2,500 men and women left Britain to fight for the Spanish Republic. This book examines the role, experiences and contribution of the volunteers who fought in the British Battalion of the 15 International Brigadesasking: * Who were these volunteers? * Where did they come from? * Why did they go to Spain? * How much did they actually help the Spanish Republic? In contrast to recent revisionist interpretations, this work stresses the crucial importance of the war experience itself, rather than political ideology, in the understanding of the volunteers' role and experiences within the Spanish war. This book will be of essential interest to historians and those interested in the Spanish Civil War.

Fighting for Spain

Author: Alexander Clifford
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1526774399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
In the English-speaking world, the Spanish Civil War is perhaps best remembered through the exploits of thousands of foreign volunteers from across the globe who joined the International Brigades a force of communists, socialists and others who took their opposition to fascism to extraordinary lengths. Their passionate political commitment to Spains cause and determination in battle placed them among the crack troops of the Republics Peoples Army. Yet while much has been written about the political, social and cultural significance of the brigades and their experience in Spain, less has been said about their performance as front-line troops. It is this military history that Alexander Clifford focuses on in vivid detail in this highly illustrated new study. His account tells the story of the brigades as combat units, tracing the course of each major battle in which they fought and showing the drastic changes they underwent as the war progressed from an untrained militia in 1936, to the tried and tested shock troops of 1937, to a shadow of their former selves by 1938 after repeated maulings and the introduction of Spanish conscripts to fill their ranks.

Fallen Sparrows

Author: Michael W. Jackson
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
ISBN: 9780871692122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
Five sweet romantic stories delving into the world of Special Operations fromauthors whose family and friends are part of the military community.

Spain Betrayed

Author: Ronald Radosh
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300089813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 583

Book Description
"Spain Betrayed provides full documentation of the Soviets' activities during the Spanish Civil War. Documents in the book reveal that the Soviet Union not only swindled the Spanish Republic out of millions of dollars through arms deals but also sought to take over and run the Spanish economy, government, and armed forces in order to make Spain a Soviet possession, thereby effectively destroying the foundations of authentic Spanish antifascism. The documents also shed light on many other disputed episodes of the war: the timing of the Republican request for assistance from the Soviet Union; the rise and fall of the International Brigades; the internal workings of the Comintern and its influence on Spain; and much more."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved