Los brigadistas en “la Pallisa”. En el centro, con un bastón, Milton Wolff, comandante del batallón Lincoln.
A unit of American volunteers that fought in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1938. In February 1936, the Spanish people elected, by an extremely slim majority, a coalition of representatives from the Popular Front to their government, the Cortes. This was a group of people of mixed political standing, favoring democracy, socialism, communism, and anarchy. Although the coalition was probably too disorganized to rule effectively, the conservatives in Spain were horrified and convinced that stable government was about to come to an end. This seemed to be confirmed as the government began to make friendly overtures to the Soviet Union. Many members of the army began to plot a coup, gathering around the leadership of General Francisco Franco. Referred to as Nationalists, Franco and his supporters were based in Spanish Morocco. However, with the assistance of Adolph Hitler, they were airlifted into Spain and in July 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out. More than 30,000 soldiers in the regular army remained loyal to the government, but equal that number in Spain, reinforced by another 30,000 from Morocco, gave Franco a potent force. This potency was augmented by Hitler, who provided aircraft, and by Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini, who provided troops, aircraft, and heavy weapons.
Members of the elected Spanish government (who came to be called Republicans) sought aid from other countries, but few were willing to assist. Through the League of Nations, most said that the conflict in Spain was an internal matter and therefore not something with which the international community should become involved. Thus, while Franco received much military assistance, only the Soviet Union offered any aid to the Republicans—and the Soviets offered this at high prices. Any other aid that came to the Republicans was from volunteers, which included young intellectuals from around the world who saw the civil war as the first attempt to stop the spread of fascism. In North America and western Europe, volunteers joined Republican recruiters to go to Spain and fight for freedom and democracy. Almost all of the recruiters were communists, but they called for volunteers under a variety of names, mostly popular fronts of one stripe or another. In the United States, the primary recruiting bureau was the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. Although the organizers were communists, the number of volunteers who actually believed in Marxism is impossible to determine. However, it was almost certainly more than half.
Approximately 3,000 Americans responded to the call, of which about 600 were seamen and 500 were college students. Only about 100 of them had any military training. The oldest was 54, but most were in their twenties. They formed three units: the Washington Battalion, the Lincoln Battalion, and the American-Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. Owing to high casualties, the Washington Battalion was absorbed into the Lincoln Battalion fairly early in the conflict. In order to give the impression of a larger American interest, the Spanish always referred to the unit as the Lincoln Brigade, but it was actually part of the Fifteenth International Brigade, made up of the three North American battalions joined with battalions from Britain, France, and Yugoslavia. The troops were commanded by a Yugoslav, Colonel Vladimir Copic.
Because both British and French governments had officially discouraged volunteers, neither country cared to have Americans pass through on their way to Spain. The French, although they occasionally arrested an American, for the most part turned a blind eye to the volunteers, who sneaked across the Franco-Spanish border and joined the Republicans at Tarazona, west of the Mediterranean coastal city of Valencia. There they received—at first, at any rate—only rudimentary training before being thrown into combat in Madrid. There, in February 1937, the International Brigade assisted in beating back a Nationalist attack on the capital.
Although the volunteers gained only slight experience during this battle, their divisional commander ordered the International Brigade to follow the Nationalists and dislodge them from a very strong position on Pingarron Hill in the Jarama River Valley. The Lincoln Battalion was given the key position in the attack, but the entire plan was faulty and the assault doomed. Promised air, armor, and artillery support never materialized, and the Americans (after a protest by their commander) attacked into a hail of Nationalist fire that inflicted 65 percent casualties. The brigade and divisional commanders should never have ordered this attack, but to the American survivors it was their own battalion commander, Robert Merriman, who received the blame for following orders he knew to be suicidal. The Battle of Jarama was the Lincoln Battalion’s baptism of fire, and a costly one.
The Americans’ second battle took place four months later. Franco’s forces had kept up a steady artillery bombardment of Madrid, and the Republicans hoped a diversionary attack would ease the pressure on the capital. They sent 85,000 men, including the Americans, toward the village of Brunete, 20 miles west of Madrid. The Lincoln and Washington Battalions were to bypass the village and secure the high ground, the Mosquito Crest. This time, armor was there for support, but it was badly deployed. The tanks sped ahead of the infantry, and the Americans were easy targets for the Nationalists on the hilltop. The result was almost as bad as Jarama had been. The battalion’s new commander, Oliver Law, was killed in the battle. Law was an African-American veteran of the U.S. Army. His place was taken by Commissar Steve Nelson, a Croatian- American communist from Pittsburgh. The commissar acted as second-in-command, as well as being the political, morale, and liaison officer. The battle ended in a stalemate, but as Franco diverted large numbers of his men to recapture Brunete, it did ease the Nationalist siege of Madrid.
The Republican cause scored a few successes, but they were always overturned by superior Nationalist fire power in Franco’s counteroffensives. Meanwhile, the Republican cause was further harmed by political infighting between rival leaders in the Republican command structure. This went so far as to result in combat between anarchists and communists in Barcelona in May 1937. Political struggles within the American ranks have also been reported. Unconfirmed reports tell of executions not only for desertion, but also for spreading anti-Stalinist propaganda. Even if executions were rare and only for desertion, other reports claim that unpopular political statements often resulted in assignments to the most dangerous areas of the battle. Despite this, the major political arguments took place at the highest levels and the Americans did not seem to have been involved, or even to have taken much notice of them.
The Lincoln Battalion fought in the battles of Aragon and Teurel in late 1937 and early 1938. It performed well in the conquest of Zaragoza, the capital of Aragon, capturing the village of Quito and 1,000 Nationalist prisoners. Franco’s counterattack, however, forced the Americans out. After Republican forces captured the town of Teurel around Christmas, the Lincoln Battalion was sent into defensive positions there. When Franco launched a massive offensive to retake the town in March 1938, the Lincoln Battalion was virtually wiped out. Pounded by air and artillery, they could do little but cower under what protection they could find. They finally split into two groups to attempt to return to Republican positions. The Americans found themselves behind Nationalist lines and spent weeks roaming the hills in small bands. When they finally returned to Republican lines on the Ebro River, they numbered no more than 100.
Although the few remaining men fought in a last battle along the Ebro in the summer of 1938, they were no longer a real unit. The International Brigade had by this time become predominantly Spanish owing to the large number of replacements brought in over the course of the war. In September 1938, Spanish Prime Minister Juan Negrin announced the withdrawal of all foreign soldiers fighting for the Republican cause. It has been argued that he did this on Stalin’s orders, because the Soviet leader then had no more hope of shaming western democracies into action. It is also possible Negrin hoped that a public withdrawal of his foreign troops would pres- sure Franco to do the same. By that time, the Lincoln Battalion was made up of 200 Spaniards and 80 Americans. They marched through Barcelona in a farewell parade in October. Spanish communist leader Dolores Ibarruri told them: “You can go proudly. You are history. You are the heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality. We shall not forget you, and, when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves again, mingled with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory— come back” (Meisler, 1995). Not until Franco died and his dictatorship came to an end in the 1970s were any of these veterans able to return.
The Americans who returned to their country in 1938 were for a time treated as heroes by the public, and many fought for the United States in World War II a few years later. However, in the anticommunist hysteria of the McCarthy era, these veterans were branded as communists. Some of their number were arrested under the Smith Act, which prohibited advocacy of the violent overthrow of the government. One of the arrested veterans, Alvah Bessie, was a member of the famous Hollywood Ten jailed for contempt of Congress in 1954. Many former volunteers in the Spanish Civil War fled the United States to escape political repression. How many of them were communists, either before or after the Spanish Civil War, is difficult to tell, but McCarthy’s broad brush tarred them all. Communist or not, the members of the Lincoln Battalion did fight for a cause they believed in: to halt the spread of fascism. It was a cause much of the world was obliged to embrace not long after the members of the Lincoln Battalion did.
References: Eby, Cecil, Between the Bullet and the Lie (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1969); Lawson, Don, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1989); Meisler, Stanley, “The Lincoln Battalion,” in Military History Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 1 (Autumn, 1995); Rosenstone, Robert, Crusade of the Left (New York: Pegasus, 1969).
