REMEMBER ME TO MY COMRADES : LETTERS AND DIARIES OF THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADE

By Michael Crowley

Barnthorn Publishing. 307 pages. £16.99. ISBN 978-1-917120-60-9

Reviewed by Jim Burns

There was a time when the English-language literature of the Spanish Civil War was relatively sparse. There were some general histories and a few memoirs, with the latter mostly written by middle-class volunteers. One or two other books looked at the lives and deaths of, again, middle-class participants in the war. Without wanting in any way to diminish the contributions made by such people it is a fact that the great majority of the 2,500 or so members of the British Battalion of the Fifteenth International Brigade were drawn from the working class. They came from the factories, mines, docks, and the ranks of the unemployed. And when the survivors returned to Britain only a handful of them sat down to write a record of what they had experienced. Of those that did, their accounts were often relatively short and came out under the imprints of small, local publishers. As a consequence they frequently had only a limited circulation.  

Things did improve in more-recent years with the publication of, for example, Richard Baxell’s Unlikely Warriors (Aurum Press,2012) and Remembering Spain : Essays, Memoirs and Poems on the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War (Clapton Press, 2023), edited by Joshua Newmark. To add to them we now have Remember Me to My Comrades, in which Michael Crowley provides a guide to the major events of the Civil War and illustrates it with excerpts from memoirs, letters, diaries, interviews and other relevant material. From the point of view of throwing light on working class-members of the Brigade, several of them from the North West of England, it’s a useful book. We learn why they went, how they were recruited, and in some cases what happened to them when they left Spain.

Crowley opens his book with a brisk history of the incidents leading up to General Franco’s decision to launch an attack on the newly-elected Republican Popular Front government. With Moorish troops, the Spanish Foreign Legion, and substantial backing from Italy and Germany in terms of troops, aircraft, artillery and equipment, the Nationalists (as Franco’s supporters were called) were in a strong position to oppose what forces the Republicans could muster. Some elements of the army, and many members of the Assault Guards and Civil Guards, had remained loyal to the government, there were militia units usually linked to trade unions, and political groups like the anarchists. The government, reluctantly at first, distributed guns to the workers. Russia and Mexico offered support to the Republicans, but countries like Britain, France and the United States signed a non-intervention agreement which was supposedly also agreed to, though never practised, by Germany and Italy. In order to aid the Republic it was decided, as a matter of communist policy, to form a volunteer force known as the International Brigades. I don’t want to say too much about the overall nature of this organisation. The British contingent belonged to the Fifteenth International Brigade, which was ostensibly made up of volunteers from Britain, Ireland, Canada, the USA, and other countries where English was spoken. However, because casualty rates were high, and the number of new volunteers slowed down, units were brought up to strength with Spanish troops.

Very few of the British volunteers had any military training. Crowley says that “Bernard McKenna from Chorlton, Manchester, was candid about his lack of military experience or aptitude but was determined to go nonetheless”. Kenneth Bradbury, “a typesetter from Oldham”, wrote to a friend: “The worst of the war, without any shadow of doubt, is bombing from the air”. Charles Armtrong, “a boot repairer from Failsworth” observed the effects of an air raid, and told his mother, “I hope you at home don’t ever have to experience it”.  It was something mostly new in warfare, the deliberate bombing of civilian targets, and was essentially a practice run for the German and Italian pilots in advance of their tactics in the Second World War. Guernica was the most extreme example of it.   

David Crook, reminiscing about his first time under fire, told how grateful he was to be with someone more experienced when things went wrong: “Luckily, I was with my pal Sam Wild. We took up a position at the right brow of the hill, threw ourselves down, and I started firing light-heartedly at those puffs of white smoke. Not Sam. First, he clawed the soil and reached for stones to build a parapet. Sam had been brought up in an orphanage, served on a merchant navy training ship, been unemployed. He knew how to fight for survival. My life had been softer, more sheltered. Without his example, I’d never have survived the murderous fire on what came to be known as suicide hill. Very few did”. Crook also recalled that one of the things he abandoned, when the order to withdraw came, was “my leather-bound volume of Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Whatever possessed me to take that to Spain and into battle?”.

Crook got some things wrong about Wild, who had actually spent eleven years in the Royal Navy, where he had learned about various kinds of small arms. His training, and his courage under fire, which impressed many people, soon got him promoted. He was wounded several times during the course of the war, but always returned to the front line as soon as he could. In time he became the commander of the British Battalion. Crowley understandably devotes several pages to him. When the International Brigades were withdrawn in late-1938, Wild returned to Manchester and found himself unemployable because of his service in Spain. Like others who had been there he was kept under surveillance by the police. Interestingly, despite his record in Spain, it would appear that he was not considered suitable for a position working for the Communist Party in Britain. Crowley refers to his “unwavering anti-authoritarianism”. And, according to his son, he often said that “the people he most identified with in Spain were the anarchists”. He did eventually obtain work as a steel erector, joined the union, and became an efficient union shop steward.

Crook’s inexperience of war, and military conditions generally, was typical of most members of the British Brigade. A handful had been in the Territorial Army, a few had seen action in the Great War. But firing a gun was something new to many volunteers, and to make matters worse they were given little instruction about what to do before being sent into action. It was not unusual to press a finger on a trigger for the first time when under enemy fire. And it’s worth noting that the rifles issued to Brigaders were sometimes old and unreliable and frequently jammed. This was particularly true in the early stages of the war and before new rifles arrived from Russia.

It was a jammed machine-gun that led to the deaths of Christopher Caudwell and Clem Beckett, who had formed what was considered an unlikely friendship while in Spain. Caudwell, an intellectual with novels, poetry, and other books to his credit, and Beckett, “a tough working-class type” and “a speedway rider of international repute”, were covering the retreat of some British volunteers at one point during the battle of Jarama when, in Crowley’s words, “their machine-gun jammed and they were killed”. Beckett was from Oldham, and Crowley notes that, of the ten men from that town who went to Spain, only four returned.

Maurice Levine, a waterproof garment worker from Cheetham, was present when Ralph Fox and John Cornford were killed. Levine was an early volunteer and fought in the Battle of Lopera in December 1936. He had joined the Communist Party in 1931 and taken part in street fights against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts when they paraded through the Jewish parts of Manchester. With regard to Lopera, he recalled: “We were bombarded from the air…..Later that afternoon, after holding the crest of a hill, we received the order to retire. Ralph Fox, the Company Commissar, along with many others, lost his life on that hill. When we regrouped in the olive grove, someone said that Fox had been left behind, wounded. John Cornford, a young Cambridge student, ran back to help Fox. He never returned”. Levine was wounded twice, the second time at Brunete, considering himself “lucky” because “about 300 went into action, and 20  days later, when the offensive was halted, only 45 remained”.  

Remember Me to My Comrades is a fascinating book, largely because it focuses mostly on people who haven’t been written about in any sort of detail. And it makes one think about all the others who returned from Spain and simply went back, when they could, to what they had been doing before they joined the International Brigades. Some did serve in the British Army, others joined the Merchant Navy. We know too little about the majority of them. The book has notes, a short bibliography, and illustrations. Some people might wonder about the inclusion of a chapter on Orwell, who was in Spain but served with the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, branded as Trotskyists by the Communist Party) militia, and not the International Brigades, but the information about him is of interest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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