TOURISTS on the London Eye this morning may wonder why the rousing strains of the
Internationale, the anthem of world socialism, are drifting skywards from the South Bank far below.
The date — the 70th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War — will probably escape them. But in the pantheon of the political Left it remains one of the highest causes for which they went to fight — and lost.
Around a memorial in Jubilee Gardens, beneath the Eye, a handful of frail survivors will gather to remember in particular the 2,400 Britons who volunteered to join the International Brigades in support of Spain’s democratically elected Republican Government against the rebel Fascist forces of General Francisco Franco.
There are 24 remaining and the youngest is 90. Between 1936 and 1938 they lost 526 comrades on the Iberian battlefields. To have been there is still a badge of honour among socialists, communists and trade unionists. For them it was when the working class took up arms in a noble cause: to stop the encroaching menace of Fascism and thereby prevent the looming Second World War. But idealism was not enough to halt Panzer tanks and the overweening ambitions of the Third Reich.
Through the International Brigade Memorial Trust, the survivors hold a small ceremony every year — and today for the first time an official representative of the Spanish Government will attend. Carlos Miranda, Madrid’s Ambassador to London, will lay a wreath.
There will be readings, a new book of brigaders’ poems, and an appearance by the best-known surviving brigader — Jack Jones, the former general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, who is the trust’s president. Mr Jones, 93, was wounded in the shoulder in 1938 and sent home.
“I felt an obligation to fight for freedom and liberation,” he said. “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, had gained terrible momentum with Hitler, and was being carried forward by Franco.”
Marlene Sidaway, secretary of the trust, which now has some 700 members including veterans, veterans’ families, friends and interested academics, said: “The Spanish Civil War has been largely forgotten. People felt then that if they stopped fascism in Spain, they would prevent the Second World War. But the last battle of the first war was more or less the first battle of the second.”
More than 35,000 volunteers from 50 countries flocked to Spain, including a galaxy of writers and intellectuals: Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Cecil Day-Lewis. There were aristocratic young adventurers such as Jessica Mitford, who eloped to Spain with her distant cousin Esmond Romilly, having asked him while he was on home leave to take her with him when he returned.
Also in Spain were young men later to make a mark in British politics: Clement Attlee, who visited Republican forces with fellow British Labour MPs; a young Edward Heath, part of a student delegation invited by the Republicans; and one Marxist member of the brigades, Alfred Sherman, who subsequently modified his views to the extent that he became a guru of Margaret Thatcher.
But most of the British volunteers were ordinary working men who left the factory or the dole queue in search of excitement as well as honour.
Many of the Irish volunteers were unwilling to take orders from former members of the British Army who provided some of the brigade officers: they went off and fought alongside the American volunteers.
Despite some military successes, the Republicans and their international supporters never really stood a chance. Franco’s forces were better trained and equipped: Mr Jones’s military experience had consisted of basic training with the Territorial Army. Germany flew tough units of the Spanish rebel army back from Morocco, and provided the bombers for the world’s first deliberate air raid on civilians at Guernica.
To this day brigaders blame the inaction of Stanley Baldwin and his successor at No 10, Neville Chamberlain, and that of other European leaders who turned a blind eye, refusing to supply the democratic government with arms lest it upset the Nazi regime in Berlin.
But there is another side to it all. Terry Charman, an historian and a specialist on the subject at the Imperial War Museum, said: “For all his very many faults, Franco kept Spain out of the Second World War. He took control of an exhausted country which had lost one million citizens, and was more than a match for Hitler who wanted Spain as an ally in the crusade to control Europe. Franco even had the bottle to keep Hitler waiting at a planned meeting, much to the Führer’s fury.”
Mr Charman added: “If the Republican side had won, there is no guarantee whatsoever that the Panzer divisions would have stopped at the Pyrenees.”
Some historians believe that the Spanish Civil War is too often seen through the romantic prism of Hemingway and his like, rather as Byron saw Greece set upon by Turkey.
“The Spanish Civil War was just that — a Spanish civil war between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction. It was the old Spain versus the new, and the old temporarily won,” Mr Charman said.
The most distinguished chronicler of international solidarity with Spain was Orwell. In Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938, when the Republicans looked like losing the fight, he wrote: “I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards. They have a generosity, a species of nobility, that really do not belong to the twentieth century. It is this that makes one hope that in Spain even Fascism may take a comparatively loose and bearable form. Few Spaniards possess the damnable efficiency and consistency that a modern totalitarian state needs.”
Spain had to wait another 37 years before Franco died and democracy was restored, by King Juan Carlos, in 1975 — and was subsequently defended against an abortive coup. The men of the International Brigade failed in their mission, but they still bask in the memory of a just cause.
BATTLES FOUGHT AND LIVES LOST
13th July 1936: opposition leader Calvo Sotelo killed, providing a casus belli for rebellious generals.
50,000 killed in the opening days, from both sides of the conflict.
3 years of fighting ensue between left-wing Republicans and General Franco’s right-wing Nationalists.
60,000 Italian troops sent by Mussolini to aid Franco.
2,000 Russian soldiers deployed on the Republican side.
40,000 foreign volunteers fought in the International Brigades.
1/2 million or more people died, mostly in mass executions on both sides.
12 bishops, 283 nuns 2,365 monks and 4,184 priests were also killed.
1st April 1939: victory declared by the Nationalists, after Valencia falls
36 years of dictatorship follow until Franco’s death in 1975
500 bodies have so far been exhumed from 67 mass graves
