Comrades and Commissars
by Cecil D. Eby
Chapter 1
Getting There
After six months of war, parades and demonstrations barely ruffled the surface of downtown Barcelona. Whenever bands and cheering crowds occupied the Plaza de Cataluña and lightly shook the surrounding windows with anthems and vivas, only sporadic clerks at the United States consulate abandoned their desks. The reason for these disturbances was ever the same: International volunteers arriving from France or Catalan outfits departing for the front. But on January 6, 1937, Mahlon F. Perkins, the consul general, spotted from his window a sight never seen before in marches and rallies. Up the broad avenue came the Stars and Stripes, and behind it ambled about sixty men in an assortment of 1918 doughboy uniforms. They were lined up in four-front squads with their leader out in front, a .45 automatic strapped to his hip. Perkins watched in puzzlement as the group halted under his window and began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They probably sang as badly as they marched, but they knew the words to the second, and even to the third, stanzas. The specter that had haunted the Department of State for the past three months had materialized under Perkins’s window. Despite “the most scrupulous policy of nonintervention” in the Spanish cockpit, a policy spelled out by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and underlined, many times, by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the first group of American volunteers had surreptitiously slipped into Spain.
A clerk dispatched to screen the paramilitary band returned with the news that they were in Spain to “fight for their principles.” Some claimed to be veterans of the World War; others were callow youths barely out of high school. As they marched off, one of them shouted, “We’re just the beginning!” Consul Perkins had reason to recall this challenge on the following day when sixteen more Americans appeared, these carrying a blazing red banner marked “AMERICAN BATTALION.” A day later the consul counted twenty new arrivals, these carrying a red banner marked “ABRAHAM LINCOLN BATTALION.”
As yet, only a trickle of American volunteers was spilling across the French frontier. Hopeful that the leak could be plugged and caulked, Perkins cabled Washington, which on January 20 ordered consular representatives in France to board each incoming liner and to stamp U.S. passports “NOT VALID FOR TRAVEL TO SPAIN.”* It became evident, however, that bureaucrats brandishing rubber stamps would not intimidate men prepared to expose their flesh to Fascist bullets. When, for instance, Samuel A. Wiley, the consul at Le Havre, warned sixty-five suspected volunteers arriving on the S.S. Paris that according to a 1909 statute, Americans who fought in a foreign war were liable to fines, prison terms, and possible loss of citizenship, some of the miscreants laughed disrespectfully and someone at the rear gave him the Bronx cheer.* Even before these volunteers had disembarked, an anonymous bard commemorated this confrontation:
“The frontier’s closed! You can’t get through!”
Were the words of the U.S. Consul.
But all of us laughed, because we knew
He was only flapping his tonsils.
Powerless to dissuade them, Consul Perkins in Barcelona could do nothing more than count them as they trooped through the city, singing and laughing in their sheepskin jackets. These innocents were not privy to information available to Perkins, who had learned that hundreds of French volunteers had deserted and descended upon Valencia and Barcelona, where they were demanding sanctuary from their consuls. Earlier, the Republican authorities had looked the other way when Internationals attempted to flee from Spain, but recently they had threatened to punish foreign deserters exactly like their own. So far as Perkins knew, the State Department had not formulated a policy to cover American volunteers: Should they be accorded diplomatic protection, or had they forfeited this privilege when they agreed to serve a foreign power? With remarkable prescience, he summarized his views in a cable to Washington. “In view of the hardships which they will soon undergo, I am apprehensive that some of them will be calling for assistance in the not distant future. I should be glad to be informed of the Department’s general attitude toward the question of expatriation and loss of the right of protection of American citizens enlisting in the Loyalist armies.” Secretary Hull’s response, on February 1, was unequivocal: protection should not be extended to United States citizens who fought in Spain. Though the State Department had no power to prevent Americans from traveling wherever they wanted to go, it had no obligation whatsoever to protect those who violated the terms of their passports. Did this mean, Perkins inquired, that American volunteers were not to use the consulate as a mailing address? They most certainly were not. That was that. In time this policy would bring grief to both disenchanted volunteers and overzealous consuls. By the end of January, three hundred Americans had crossed into Spain.
This hegira, which eventually drew more than thirty thousand volunteers from all over the world—about twenty-eight hundred of them Americans-—was inspired by the events of November 1936. The army of General Francisco Franco had pushed into the outer barrios of Madrid and seemed on the verge of a final thrust that would carry it into the heart of the city and deal a death-blow to the Second Spanish Republic. Neutral journalists took refuge in their embassies and predicted Madrid was doomed. General Emilio Mola, second-in-command of the besieging army, announced that while four Nationalist columns converged upon the capital from outside, a “Fifth Column” of armed provocateurs prepared to strike from within. On November 7, 1936, Mundo Obrero, the Communist Party daily of Madrid, printed in red ink these headlines:
ALL OUT TO THE BARRICADES
THE ENEMY IS ACROSS THE RIVER
But in the days that followed, newspapers reported that a phalanx of foreigners had strengthened the trenches and barricades of the city. Forming well-disciplined lines, they buttressed Loyalist units hurling back Nationalist attacks in Carabanchel, the Casa del Campo, and University City. The XIth International Brigade (their numbering system began with XI, not I), consisting of volunteers recruited by Comintern (Communist International) agencies in a dozen European countries, had come to the aid of Madrid, and despite repeated attempts by the Nationalists to break the defensive ring, the city held.
Fascism, rampant elsewhere in Europe and Asia, seemed blocked at the gates of Madrid. For anti-Fascists everywhere the moment was galvanic, the mood contagious. In the United States the question arose: What could one do to assist the Republic? The answer was simple and the apparatus ready—contribute to the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. (Not, of course, to the National Spanish Relief Association, created to support Franco’s Catholic fiefdom.) Youths chafing for a more active role in defending Spanish liberty could enlist in the International Brigades, provided they had access to the right people in leftist political or trade-union organizations. No mere adventurers—or “romantics” as Party regulars disparagingly called them—need apply; nor, at this stage, were bourgeois hot-bloods welcomed. (Only later, after horrific losses, did the Party open recruitment gates for political “unreliables.”) At this stage, the ideal recruit was a youngish man with a proved—or at least promising—record in the Communist Party (CPUSA) or Young Communist League (YCL), but, on the other hand, not so promising that his death in Spain would be a major loss to the Party. What the volunteers possessed, beyond ordinary men, was an unusual willingness to sacrifice personal ambition for a political ideal. Many were deceived about what they would find in Spain—and how difficult it would become to return home—but none were shanghaied into going. (The Soviet Union, on the other hand, “encouraged five or six hundred Eastern Europeans to join the International Brigades with the implicit understanding that good work in Spain might result in eventual Soviet citizenship. This consideration carried no weight for Americans.) And the volunteers were so ideologically distant from mercenaries that nearly all of them expressed surprise, in Spain, when they learned that they would receive regular military pay—ten pesetas per diem (the average daily wage for a Spanish worker was only three pesetas). By contrast, the dozen Americans who flew in the Republican Air Force—none of them members of the International Brigades—received $1,000 per month with bonuses for enemy planes destroyed.
The Comintern provided the unifying structure for the International Brigades, ostensibly a militant wing of the Popular Front movement, which had been organized to draw in anti-Fascists in Western democracies—especially in France and England—as buffers against Nazi Germany. Initially Stalin was lukewarm about intervention in Spain. If Fascists and Republicans cut each others’ throats fighting for a moribund “democracy,” so much the better. What he did not want was a victory by any radical leftist faction, like the Trotskyists or Anarchists, because their revolutionary programs would be sure to unsettle the Western Powers and give them second thoughts about supporting the Popular Front. Within the first week of the war, Moscow sent a directive to “preserve at any cost” the Popular Front façade and join the bourgeois government of the Republic. Georgi Dimitrov, who headed the Comintern, applied his rubber stamp but suggested ulterior motives: “We must act in the guise of defending the Republic. . . . When our positions have been strengthened, then we can go further.”* At the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in August he made it clear that the real purpose of the Popular Front was defense of the USSR, but its policy of exporting revolution had been shelved.* It would support the Spanish Republican army, but not the workers’ militia, which would be difficult to control because it backed revolutionary policies. In the same month, Alexander Orlov arrived to set up the NKVD apparatus charged with purging revolutionary Marxist opposition.
In late July, only two weeks after the Franco coup, the Comintern and Profintern met in Prague with Dimitrov in the chair and set aside a thousand million francs in order to form and arm a brigade of five thousand men to fight under their umbrella in Spain, the funds to come from donations from anti-Fascists in the world at large. Volunteers would assemble in Paris, where the Communist Party of France (CPF) would make arrangements for transportation to Spain. Within weeks of the call, the first volunteers began to arrive, eager to join the fight against Fascism, even though the Spanish Republic had not been informed of this unexpected windfall. (A small number of foreigners like George Orwell arrived under the auspices of other left-wing organizations, but only as isolated free agents, not as members of a powerful international bloc like the Communist Party.) Eventually men from fifty-three countries passed through the Maison des Sindicates in the Batignolles quarter on their way to Spain.
Responsibility for organizing the International Brigades from the ground up fell to Luigi Longo (nom de guerre—“El Gallo”), a Comintern heavy-hitter from Italy destined to become its inspector general.* (In the 1960s he would serve five years as the secretary- general of the Communist Party of Italy [CPI].) In early October, while André Marty, the head of the International Brigades, thrashed out details with the CPF, Longo set off for Spain. His mission was to inform the Republic that the Comintern had sponsored an army and to arrange for a permanent base. At Figueras, a fortress town near the frontier, he found hundreds of volunteers milling about unsupervised and restless. Each train brought new recruits. The local authorities allowed them to camp in the dungeons of the fortress but refused to feed them. In Barcelona the Partido Socialista de Unificación Cataluña (PSUC)—a Communist splinter—offered Longo assistance but only on condition that the men join Catalan units and not continue on to Madrid. Because Barcelona was a hotbed of the quasi-Trotskyist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) and the Anarchist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), this was out of the question. The Comintern had no intention of abetting the regional fragmentation already evident in Spain with formation of autonomous republics in both Catalonia and the Basque Country. Longo raced on to Madrid, which offered him even less. Largo Caballero, the Socialist prime minister, distrusted Communists and shuttled him from office to office in a pointless bureaucratic game. The government seemed riddled with apathy and defeatism even though the sounds of approaching artillery fire clearly charted the advance of Franco’s Army of Africa, whose Tercios de Extranjeros (Spanish Foreign Legion) and Fuerza Regulares Indígenos (Moroccans) easily outflanked makeshift roadblocks thrown up by milicianos and sent them flooding to the rear. (It was said that the milicianos never saw the backs of the Moors until the Internationals arrived.) The mood of the Republic was characterized by the minister of war, who opined that Madrid, a city of nearly a million inhabitants, was more easily attacked than defended, a ludicrous theory since the highest estimate of Franco’s strength stood at fewer than twenty-four thousand men.
By all odds the most disciplined and effective fighting unit in the Republican Army was the so-called Fifth Regiment, recruited by the Communist Party of Spain (CPE). It quickly outgrew its regimental size and by the end of the year contained more than forty thousand men. This regiment had a local base at Albacete and offered it to Longo, who had been informed on October 10th that five hundred volunteers chafed at Figueras, and another five hundred were coming by boat from Marseilles. At 4 a.m. on October 12, Longo reported to the headquarters in Albacete, where a sentinel refused to admit him because his officers never rose until nine. Once aroused, however, they moved efficiently. Two days later the first volunteers arrived by train and on average two hundred more reported every day thereafter. Without the assistance of the Fifth Regiment the International Brigades would have been stillborn.
Longo faced a nearly impossible task. Facilities in Albacete were nearly nonexistent. There was no water for washing, no blankets or mattresses, though the nights were bitterly cold. The first volunteers slept in the plaza de toros, huddling together to conserve body heat. They spent all day in lines waiting for food and had to share plate and spoon with two other comrades. By the time a man finished breakfast he joined another line for dinner. Longo’s entire auto-park consisted of three motorcycles and a couple of autos belonging to individual volunteers. Somehow he had to organize and classify “thousands of men diverse in temperament, customs, attitudes and political orientation.” Adding to his problems was a babel of tongues. At group meetings the national commissars sat according to language, all facing an interpreter. With the keynote speaker and a dozen interpreters all talking at once, the room became a gibbering madhouse. In this sea of faces it was impossible to identify qualified commanders. After one volunteer pulled from his satchel the uniform of an Albanian colonel, he became a company commander until exposed as a mere tailor from Lyon. At Albacete the volunteers had no uniforms, no weapons, no evidence that they were soldiers. Finally Madrid sent down piles of surplus Tercio uniforms, but when the volunteers realized their “Fascist” provenance, they refused to wear them and they had to be sent back.
Longo devised a master plan calling for five hours of military instruction every day, but he admitted this was impossible to achieve. (It included two-and-a-half hours of “political theory” and collective work.) He had to listen to men grousing—“What are we doing here? I came to fight Fascists, not to walk the streets of Albacete.” They were not an army but a mob. In Valencia two hundred new arrivals were denied permission to make a triumphal march through the city on the grounds that the nonintervention policy would forbid it, although the real reason was that they looked like a mob of ragged derelicts, not proud liberators. The worst cases were in the French contingent (15 percent had to be were rejected), which included men over fifty and children under sixteen, the sweepings of shelters and orphanages. Judges often gave suspended sentences to defendants who agreed to go to Spain, and TB cases were told that their health would improve under the Spanish sun. The incidence of drunkards was always higher among the French, apologists blamed it on the daily ration of Spanish wine, which contained 4 percent more alcohol than back home.
Longo installed a draconian police system designed not only to maintain order but also to counteract “sabotage and sedition.”* He deplored the attitude held by many volunteers that decisions came from below, not from above. To his amazement, men overruled the decisions of their superiors and insisted on settling difficulties by voting! In his view, “Military discipline differed from democratic discipline.”* Any competent military leader would have agreed, but Longo’s recipe went further. On October 16—only two days after the first arrivals at the base, he created the commissar system. (As a sop to anti-Communists in the government they were called, at this juncture, “commissars of war” not “political commissars.”) Commissars outranked military commanders, who were only “technocrats.” While their avowed purpose was to inculcate liberal values, their real purpose was political indoctrination. In his own words—the commissar had to be “an apostle of strong discipline, rigorous, serious, capable of uncovering the work of enemy spies.” One surefire way of identifying spies was to finger anyone who sowed confusion by questioning what they were doing there, encouraging men to transfer into Anarchist or Trotskyist units, or—the paramount crime—talking about “Communist terror” in Spain or the USSR.
By the first of November 1936, André Marty, the commander of the International Brigades, could report to Stalin that the Albacete Base had collected three thousand men—80 percent of them Communists or Socialists. Earlier he had denounced the Anarchists in Spain, who were appropriating raw materials in factories for their private use; the engineers at the factories dared not intervene, fearing denunciation as Fascists. Marty had his solution to the Anarchist problem: “After victory we will get even with them, all the more so since at that point we will have a strong army.”
Despite this pandemonium, in less than one month Longo cobbled together four battalions, each loosely based on national lines, which became the seedbed of the XIth International Brigade. Beginning on October 22 the battalions were farmed out to different villages for basic military instruction. Then ten days later they received their first weapons—rifles of different makes and calibers, along with some machine guns predating the World War. But this grubstake training program ended abruptly on November 5, when orders arrived to move all available Internationals, with or without training, to Madrid, where the Nationalists were pushing into the southern barrios. A day later the government abandoned the capital to a Junta of Defense and fled to the safety of Valencia. Leaving the Italian battalion behind as a nucleus for new arrivals, the XIth Brigade, commanded by “General” Emil Kléber (Lazar Stern), a Red Army officer, rushed to the defense of Madrid. To arouse civilian morale, he marched his Internationals along the Gran Via, where crowds hallooed “Rusia! Rusia!” Soon the leftist press began to attribute the successful defense of Madrid to the International Brigade. The XIth Brigade fought well and hard, but the worldwide publicity campaign to attribute the successful defense of Madrid to a single unit nettled Spanish commands whose efforts and sacrifice were greater but not publicized. Ultimately Kléber’s success backfired, for it led to his being branded as an “adventurer” and, after several later failed operations, to his recall to Moscow and his execution.
Just as the Comintern had organized the International Brigades and set up an International Control Committee in Paris, so the CPUSA founded the Abraham Lincoln Battalion as its contribution to the fight against Fascism shaping up in Spain. The Party had no intention of dipping into its coffers to finance the battalion. Instead, money would be raised through “front” organizations like the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, whose members in most cases would not know that they were supporting the battalion, much less that the CPUSA was whistling the tune that both of them danced to. It was a well-oiled mechanism: the Party would provide an apparatus for shipping men to Spain and would, in the end, take all the credit, provided there was credit to take. In the name of anti-Fascist fervor, the “sympathizers” picked up the tab.
Because November 1936 was a month of strikes along the New York waterfront and among the garment workers, a large percentage of the first American volunteers came from these trades. Recruitment was a hush-hush affair. A second-generation Communist named Bill Harvey (Horwitz), who worked as a furrier, happened to be talking with his union boss about Spain and burst out with “Boy, would I love to be there!” He forgot about it until a week or so later, when he received a letter in a plain envelope. Inside was an onionskin, without address or signature, which read: “Please appear on the Ninth Floor”—adding a date. The “Ninth Floor” was the headquarters of the Central Committee of the CPUSA on East 13th Street—“an inner sanctum, a holy place.” At the appointed time Harvey faced a screening battery of five men. The leader seemed to be Fred Brown (Alpi), a former Italo-Austrian who had attended the Lenin Institute in Moscow (where he worked with Bela Kun, the deposed Hungarian Soviet leader) and who now served as the Comintern’s representative to the CPUSA. Brown, a hearty bear of a man with a goatee trimmed in cosmopolitan style, exuded the urbane charm of an old-world aristocrat, which he was not. Beside him sat a dour figure wearing rimless spectacles who peered intently from a prune-face bearing the scars of an ancient acne battleground. This was the military adviser, Captain Allan Johnson (McNeil), a former U.S. Army officer with overseas service (as a payroll officer in the Philippines). Next in line was Charles Krumbein of the Political Committee, a prime mover in the Party. The other two were easily forgettable functionaries—little Osrics with high-sounding titles like “Secretary of the New York Committee of the Communist Party of the United States of America” and the like. They queried Harvey politely, making notes at suitable moments. Then Captain Johnson shot a question at him, “Have your ever fired a rifle?” “I have,” Harvey replied, recalling a shooting gallery at Coney Island. A few days later he was thrilled when a message arrived, once again on unsigned onionskin, telling him that he had been accepted. Morris Mickenberg (Maken) another interviewee, remembered that when he told the committee about his brief service in a Brooklyn unit of the National Guard, the captain leaped up and barked out “Attention! . . . Left Face!” and other commands for the edification of the committee, which promptly approved him. “That demonstrated I had real professional military experience.”*
Every night for several weeks the chosen few drilled at the Ukrainian Hall down on East Third Street. Guards at the door told them to keep their mouths shut. During rest periods, Party hammers like Earl Browder, the secretary-general, and Jack Stachel, director of the maritime section, made brief speeches explaining how they were the vanguard of an American working-class army privileged to open their war against World Fascism on the battlefields of Spain. A special treat was the arrival of Ralph Bates, an English novelist and IB commissar, who alone among the visitors had actually been to Spain. Clad in a resplendent Republican uniform (which he surely did not wear on the streets of New York), Bates was a spellbinder. “He looked like he was ten feet tall,” recalled one recruit. “He almost made us feel that we were being strafed by a Fiat and bombed by Capronis.” The theme of his speech was that the Fascists were cowards and ran away. He told them that in Spain they must not say they were Communists. “From now on,” and he winked at them, “you are all just Anti-Fascists.” This puzzled some of the regulars.” Why conceal it? We thought we ought to proclaim it.”*
One night their leaders were introduced, both selected by higher-ups in the Party. Phil Bard, political commissar, would be in charge of the group until they reached Spain and began training, at which time James Harris, military commander, would take over. Bard was a cartoonist for the Young Worker, the official newspaper of the YCL, a position somehow more suitable for this quiet man in his late twenties than leader of revolutionaries shipping out to war. Pale, thin, and asthmatic, Bard was a pushover for volunteers cast from rougher molds. One of the seamen later complained that the world of Phil Bard was bounded “by a subway ride from the Bronx to Union Square, with an occasional trip to Brooklyn.” Not quite true, for Bard had once worked as a CP organizer in the Ohio National Guard. (The Party had censured him when he refused to distribute some antimilitarist leaflets demanding that corporal punishment be abolished in the three-week summer camp, despite his protests that no such punishment existed.) His masterpiece was a five-hundred-square-foot mural at the Daily Worker office titled “Capitalism in the USA.” (He was against it.)
By contrast, James Harris (Jackson) was a Polish-American seaman rumored to be an ex-Marine sergeant who had fought in China as an adviser to the People’s Army. He was solidly built, sandy-haired, unassuming, and almost inarticulate. To the seamen he seemed like a bona fide proletarian—not a bookish Union Square radical. He gave instruction in about-face and parade-arms to the original cadre, mainly seamen like himself, each day leavened by breadless youths from the Bronx YCL eager to learn how to kill Fascists. Out-of-towners began to arrive, largely from Boston and Philadelphia. They were put up at the Sloane YMCA on 34th Street and given $1.50 per diem maintenance allowance. Shortly before Christmas, about a hundred of the most promising men were separated from the others and informed that they would sail in a few days on the Normandie. The hall erupted in a melee of thumping, stamping, and cheering. They were divided into ten squads. Absolute secrecy had to be maintained. Men could not communicate with their families or volunteers in other squads, and only squad leaders were permitted to speak with Commissar Bard. And above all, there was to be no drinking! They were issued ten-dollar bills and instructed how to purchase passports. (The Party arranged for men without U.S. birth certificates to obtain Spanish passports.) They invented fanciful reasons for traveling out of the country—visiting an uncle in South Africa, completing art work in Poland, studying theology in Palestine. Mentioning Spain was an absolute no-no. Noms de guerre were common but by no means universal; many young men just wanted to keep parents from finding where they were going.
Following a timetable designed to space them at wide intervals—to throw off Federal “spies”—an “old man in his late thirties” named Akalaitis led different groups to an Army-Navy store under the Third Avenue El, near 14th Street, to purchase fifty dollars’ worth of equipment per man from the store owner, a Party sympathizer not unwilling to mix profit with politics. In identical black cardboard suitcases, bound with yellow straps, the recruits packed away a random collection of army surplus—khaki-twill shirts, overseas caps, pants with roll-up puttees, woolen mittens, and fleece-lined jackets. With their own money, some bought sheath knives and even long-tubed gas masks, musty with the smell of dead rubber. (Morris Mickenberg had his first doubts about the “much vaunted efficiency of the Communist Party,” when he observed that everybody in his “secret” group carried identical black suitcases.) Back at the hall they tried on their uniforms, and most threw away their leggings, which unraveled down to the ankles. “I could not imagine myself on the battlefield advancing with rifle in one hand and holding up my leggings with the other.” A few brazen souls went uptown and opened charge accounts at fancy men’s stores. “The better the store, the more gullible they were,” remembered a ringleader of this raiding party. The theory was that they would worry about paying when they returned, and if they failed to return, how could they be sued? A pair of boots from Abercrombie and Fitch lasted one volunteer the whole war.
They were to sail on December 26. Party chieftains held a clandestine bon voyage celebration (sans alcohol) in the Second Avenue Yiddish Theater near CP headquarters a few hours before they embarked. Each man got a parcel containing a carton of Lucky Strikes (favored by the Party because of the “strike” nuance), a Gillette razor, two cakes of Palmolive soap, and a tin—little white stars on a navy blue background—of G. Washington coffee (an early “instant”). They were handed third-class tickets issued by World Tourists, Inc., a Manhattan outfit specializing in trips to the Soviet Union. (No one asked who paid for their passage because everyone knew.) Further, each man received a ten-dollar bill to cover shipboard expenses—no drinking!—including tipping, a repugnant bourgeois affectation but necessary to buttress the fiction that they were just tourists. Before arriving at Le Havre they were to receive fifteen dollars apiece to prove to port authorities they were not vagrants—but this money had to be returned to Commissar Bard as soon as they cleared customs. As a symbol of his authority, James Harris packed away an Army .45 automatic, but no one else was permitted weapons. If they were asked where they were going in France, they should say they were bound for the Paris Exposition. (It apparently occurred to no one that the exposition would not open until that summer.) They signed no agreement or contract about how long they would serve in Spain—an oversight that would plague many of them later.
Like parachutists bailing out of airplanes, they left the theater one by one at regular intervals. Earl Browder, a cigar clamped in his jaws, stood near the door and shook each man’s hand. One volunteer recalled his surprise at finding that Browder’s hand was soft, warm, a little gummy—not the hand of a workingman. They went off to war on the uptown subway, the nickel coming from their own funds. No family or friends waited at the pier to see these tourists off on their Grand Tour. At the last minute, four men changed their minds, dropping their number to ninety-six. There were no roistering send-offs or political speeches. The men obeyed their instructions—to be as inconspicuous as possible. It was ironic that in order to risk ones’ life for a noble cause, one had to be careful not to run afoul of the law.
With the thermometer steady at sixty-two degrees, it was winter-cruise weather as the Normandie cast off its lines at 3 p.m. on December 26, 1936, carrying the first group of American volunteers to the Spanish civil war. It was Saturday, the city seemed empty and quiet except for the bells of Trinity Church on Wall Street. Their backgrounds defy generalization. Aboard were a Negro county-fair wrestler and fisherman from Provincetown, a Japanese-American cook from the West Coast, a New York furrier, a Daily Worker columnist, an Armenian carpet-salesman, a City College soccer star, a U.S. Army deserter, a Texas redneck, a Russian-American stowaway, and a self-pitying Greenwich Village aesthete who told everyone he expected to die. (Despite propaganda written by Franco’s journalists, their ranks included no “members of the old Capone mob.”) Yet this summary suggests only where they had come from, not what they believed. Far from being the dregs of the lumpenproletariat, these men comprised an activist elite—the sort who had grown up taking by instinct the side of the runt in schoolyard fights. Without exception this first contingent were all members of the CPUSA or the YCL, united in their hatred of Fascism in all its myriad forms—whether resulting from politics, economics, or racism. As a black volunteer in the next shipload put it, “I wanted to go to Ethiopia and fight Mussolini. . . . This ain’t Ethiopia, but it’ll do.”
Many had been to sea as sailors, but passenger experiences were a novelty. (An exception was a later volunteer, Sam Levinger, a rabbi’s son from Ohio, who at the age of fourteen had visited Hitler’s Brown House wearing a Boy Scout uniform.) About a third of them were a hard-core group from maritime unions, all of them fiercely loyal to each other and somewhat condescending to “the snot-noses of Union Square,” who got their revolutionary fervor out of books. On board were some of the longshoremen who had torn down the Nazi flag of the Bremen while it was docked in New York. In that ruckus they had taken—and shed—blood in the fight against Fascism. A handful or so had acquired some military training in the lazy peacetime army of the National Guard. Douglas Seacord, said to have taught gunnery at West Point, had drilled them in bayonet technique back at the Ukrainian Hall using broomsticks. Joe Gordon (Mendelowitz), a man’s man and a Communist’s Communist, had learned more about fighting as a youth in the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn than in the U.S. Horse Artillery, from which he had recently deserted after the Party decided he would be more valuable as a soldier in Spain than as an organizer at Fort Meade. The national guardsmen among them consisted of CP infiltrators like Tony DeMaio, a sullen hard-wire from Hartford. A few had taken courses at the Workers’ School, downstairs in Party headquarters, on how to organize Communist Party cells in the U.S. armed forces. One graduate, a seaman named Robert Gladnick, had been a mole at Randolph Field in Texas. Though he had never had military training, at least he had an osmotic taste of military environment.
Compared with these warriors, the Jewish college students and intellectuals aboard the Nomandie were abysmally green sprouts. All had done their stint on picket lines and were up on Party theory, but few had ever fired a rifle. A major reason they gave for volunteering was “to take a crack at Hitler.” They had been told—and had read over and over in the Daily Worker—that German storm troopers reinforced Franco’s army. This racial dimension of the war was lost upon the contingent from Boston, Irishmen like the Flahertys and their friend Paul Burns, a labor writer pushing middle age. For them Fascism was simply a reactionary political movement bent upon destroying the hard-won gains of the working class. It had to be eradicated in Spain before it spread like a virus through the soft-rot of the Western democracies. They were weary—and wary—of ballot boxes and picket lines; they wanted to confront the enemy head-on, with steel. The war in Spain offered a special taste for each palate. Most would have echoed the explanation of one volunteer, “Going was as natural as eating.”*
A winter crossing in a Depression year: they pretty well had the boat to themselves. The ex-sailors and longshoremen, having just left the NMU kitchens of the New York waterfront, where they had dined on leftovers from the Fulton and Washington fish markets, reveled in the French cuisine aboard the ship. Defying Bard’s strictures against drinking, they put away bottles of wine at meals and argued that teetotalers made lousy soldiers. Moreover, in scouting the ship they discovered that statuesque girls of the Folies Bergères were aboard. Despite Bard’s admonition that these girls were bourgeois parasites—hadn’t Lenin warned against “drinking from a public cup”?—the seamen stormed second class. More than one among this waterfront crowd had served time in the “Rough Riders Ward”—the VD clinic of the Marine Hospital on Staten Island. A dose was a dose was a dose. They had no money but soon established mutual interests among the Folies girls, many of whom reminisced about ancestors buried in the Communard cemetery. The seamen, if their tales contained even a grain of truth, broke sexual records with the girls on their crossing. Probably this was one of the few times in history when French girls bought drinks for American soldiers.
Even though it must have been perfectly clear to everyone aboard who they were and where they were going, Commissar Bard continued to behave as though the ship were infiltrated with spies. Whenever the men gathered together in groups of more than five, he dispatched Bobby Pieck, his eighteen-year-old assistant, to whisper commands to disperse. (Pieck was the nephew of Julius Deutsch, once commander of the private Austrian Socialist Army, the Schutzbund.) The men whiled away their hours at poker—playing for matches, not money, because gambling was a capitalist vice—at muscle-building exercises, and in thumbing dog-eared ROTC manuals (which explained how to shoot down an airplane with a rifle). In a crowded, tiny cabin deep in the bowels of the ship, “Robert Raven drove us nuts when he insisted on practicing his close-order drill in the room.” Some joker dreamed up stories to needle Bard. He told him that the French had a 300 percent duty on new shoes: this meant that the four-dollar brogans would be taxed twelve dollars each at Le Havre. “With the ten bucks we got, that puts us two in the hole.” Bard ordered the men to break in their shoes “so they will look second-hand when we go through customs.” On the next day nearly a hundred men in business suits tramped the decks of the Normandie shod in identical army boots. The Folies girls thought it was hilarious.
Yet halfway across, the purser posted a newsflash for their benefit: Chairman McReynolds of the House Foreign Affairs Committee had declared he would urge the Department of Justice to apply the section of the Criminal Code providing a $3,000 fine or a year in prison for enlistment of Americans in a foreign war. Bard’s face wore a strained “I told you so” expression. To be arrested at Le Havre and extradited would be an ignominious defeat for the International Brigades and the Party. Infantry manuals and other incriminating documents went out of portholes.
At Le Havre, customs officers in pillbox caps winked at the volunteers and passed them through without looking into their identical black suitcases. Some even whispered “Vive la Republique!” It was New Year’s Eve, and the Americans wondered how big a time they could have in Paris on a couple of dollars. To their disappointment, they were scattered to boarding houses and dingy hotels in the port area for two days because earlier arrivals had swamped the facilities of the Paris Control Committee. They pored over American newspapers left behind by the crew of the Washington, just sailed—there was the “sit-down” strike in Michigan, where thirty-four thousand workers occupied seven General Motors plants and defied the capitalists to evict them. Later they got an introduction to international trade-unionism when some seamen led them into the red-light district, where “women of all dimensions in fish-net robes and nothing else on”* picked coins off tables with their labia and later showed them that they, too, possessed union cards. Some distributed calling cards like “Mme Rose—Specialties.” (In the second shipload of Americans, some men contracted VD and were deported from Spain—which probably saved their lives.) Fifteen Americans missed the Paris train on January 2. Vahram Kevorkian, a French-speaking Armenian who had once hawked “oriental” rugs of Belgian manufacture to bargain-hunters in Paris, stayed behind to round up the stragglers, while Commissar Bard shepherded the main body to Paris.
There was no hoped-for Paris leave. After a free meal—bad enough to be commented on at the time and good enough to be recalled in the lean months ahead—they were shunted across the city to the Gare de Lyon by an irascible guide whose only English seemed to be “Americans! Shut up!” and boarded #77, the night train to Perpignan, popularly called “le chemin de fer des Brigades International,” or, more locally, “The Red Express.” (A month later, when French frontier posts closed and volunteers had to reach Spain by hiking over the Pyrenees, railroad routes for volunteers were changed frequently to evade police surveillance.) The third-class compartments were crammed with hundreds of International volunteers: factory worker from Milan, purse-lipped refugees from Germany, cement-jawed Slavs, blonds with rucksacks from the Baltics. For many of them everything they possessed after half a lifetime of labor lay wrapped in small paper parcels held between their knees. The babel of strange languages spilled over onto the platforms outside, where hundreds of cheerful French well-wishers saw them off. It was a heady moment. A foreign volunteer asked Joe Gordon his nationality. “Juif,” he replied. Robert Gladnik, a natural polyglot who spoke Russian by birthright and English from American schools, was already conversing in Italian and Polish to the foreign volunteers. As the train pulled from the station men were singing “The International” in a dozen languages. The words were different but the melody and the message were universal. French men and women ran alongside the train to grab their hands, throwing kisses and wishing them luck and victory. The volunteers were the wave of the future, drops in the tide of international unity. When Gordon began to sing the Zionist anthem, “Hatikvah,” he was joined by hundreds of voices from all the cars of the train, despite the anti-Zionist plank of the CP. As the train rolled south in the dark, long sausages strung from luggage racks like a line of hanged men wobbled from side to side.
At daybreak a vast river, the Rhone, appeared out of mist. In the frost-rimed fields, workers in blue jackets and black berets pruned dark vines rising like claws from the red earth. Bonfires of vineyard cuttings lighted the way to Spain. Beyond Valence, they felt the nearness of the Mediterranean as the train glided past honey-colored villas on terraced hillsides and spiky palmettos dotting village squares. Leaning from open windows and basking in the warm sun, volunteers raised the Popular Front fist to bicyclists waiting at crossings as they clattered past. Avignon was a fleeting glimpse of a saw-toothed castle and a broken bridge. Béziers was a working-class town on a steep hill like Wilkes-Barre, where they bought bottles of red wine and huge sandwiches stuffed with an oleaginous substance that looked like raw ham but tasted like raw bacon. Beyond Narbonne the tracks ran across salt flats beside the sea, and a lookout called from the window. “Hey, I see the Pyrenees!” In this region, the populace, accustomed to volunteers and bored by the tangled webs of Spanish politics, seldom bothered to wave back. From the railroad yard at Perpignan a French guide led them into a high-walled enclosure and told them to shut up and keep out of sight. A doctor gave them a short-arm inspection. (One American flunked and was turned back.) They were dirty, tired, and hungry. Some sneaked out and brought back long loaves of bread, but no real food, while others carved their names on trees in the enclosure. “Some day if I am still alive, I’ll get back to see if I can find my name on one of those trees.”
After nightfall they were loaded into battered school buses, which bumped for several hours over a rutted road climbing toward a gap in the looming mountains. Beyond the French frontier station, shut down for the night, their headlights illuminated a band of armed men wearing blankets. From a hut hung a red and black banner—the party flag of the Spanish Anarchists. Somebody on the bus shouted, “Viva la República!” but an Anarchist called back, “No, Viva la Revolución Proletaria!” Both gave their official salute, the Anarchists clasping hands overhead as a symbol of brotherhood and unity. A jolt of international solidarity swept through the buses like an electric charge as they lurched across the frontier into Spain. By this time they were sick unto death of “The International,” sung on the train countless times in a dozen languages, but they sang it again. None of them knew the national anthem of the Republic which they had crossed an ocean to save.
It was January 3, 1937. Their first massacre was fifty-one days away.
Dropping down off the mountains, they debussed on the parade ground inside the Castillo de San Fernando, a massive fortress, complete with wide moat and six-meter-thick walls, crowning the height of Figueras. Assigned a section of straw within a dark subterranean casemate, they hung their suitcases on saddle hooks jutting from the wall. Hundreds of volunteers milled about the castle—Germans who had escaped from concentration camps and swum the Rhine, Austrians in ski suits who had skied down from Alpine ranges, and even a few Swiss women with disheveled blond hair who hoped to enlist. The walls were painted with exhortations like “PROLETARIER ALLER LÄNDER, VEREINIGT EUCH!” in a dozen languages. Now safe over the frontier, the Americans could cast off their civvies and don their khaki uniforms. “Our international comrades stared at us in astonishment. We looked so superior. Little did they know. . . . Most of us had never held a gun.”* All were keen to know whether more Americans would be coming and whether the United States would supply material aid. To his unruly cohorts, Commissar Bard spelled out the law: breaches in discipline would no longer be tolerated—especially drinking. “We are an army of the People, not an army of drunks!” Putting teeth in Bard’s spiel, Harris piped in, “That means all you guys!” In a cavernous room lined with plank tables and lit by two weak light bulbs, they were served goat chops from a skillet twenty-five feet wide and beans from steaming washtubs. Although there was no water on the table, the men gamely pushed aside the long-necked glass purones of wine. An Anarchist officer came over to teach them how to drink. Seizing the flask, he flourished it above his head and poured a thin stream directly into his mouth. The Americans complimented his skill but still refused to drink. The mess officer had glasses and cups brought for them. Again they refused. The puzzled officer rapped the table for attention and delivered a plaintive speech: “American comrades, we Catalans are a poor people. We know our wine is a poor country product. We do not have the fine vineyards of your country. America is a rich country, and we know that the wines of Scranton and Pittsburgh are among the best in the world. This we know. But we beg you not to insult the poor products of Cataluña.” Daniel Zorat, Bard’s interpreter, tried to explain that the Americans refused to drink on moral grounds, not because they had contempt for Spanish wine, but the long-faced comandante shook his head in disbelief. These extranjeros lacked respect for Spanish ways. A few days before he had placed under arrest an English leader who spat out a mouthful of oily beans and demanded that his men be served decent food. With mounting irritation he said that in Spain a man who did not drink was not a real man. What were these Americans? Bard found himself in a dilemma: Party discipline required that an order, once given, had to be obeyed, and at the same time he had been warned of the Anarchists’ hostility. It was the hard-boiled Harris who cut through the dialectical impasse. Grabbing a purón, he shouted, “Okay. Guys. Drink—as guests!” With yells of jubilation, the Americans proved to the Catalans that they were real men.
It was the custom at Figueras to assemble recent arrivals on the parade ground, and following a few perfunctory words about the dangers lying ahead, to give them the option of returning to France, but it took a very unusual man to turn tail and endure the contempt of his comrades. (Later in the war, when the stream of foreign volunteers was drying up, turning back at Figueras was forbidden.) Once they had entered the fortress, leaving it was problematical. For no stated reason, guards sometimes permitted men to pass through the immense gateway and stroll down to the town center—at other times not. The Americans arrived at a permissive phase. One American remembered that he dawdled behind his group out of curiosity, to visit a Trotskyist recruiting office he had noticed when they arrived in town. He reviled them as political devils incarnate but was burning with curiosity to examine their pitch. He walked up and down past their office, like an adolescent boy in front of a whorehouse, but each time he prepared to duck inside he spotted a shipmate and, fearing denunciation, dared not enter.
A few days later all the International volunteers, marched down to the railroad station, led by the Americans, who were alphabetically first. As they passed through the streets of Figueras, townspeople lined the curbs, calling them “compañeros!” and bombarding them with almonds. The Americans got a heady draught of revolutionary fervor. The Balkans sang “The International,” and the Americans replied with “Solidarity.” The streets were festooned with Republican flags and political banners, although stalwarts grimaced when they passed placards marked POUM—reputed to be the hated Trotskyites. They boarded a local train, camouflaged with crazy zigzags of green and yellow paint and most of the windows broken or boarded up, which seated on wooden slabs six men on one side and two on the other. “We got flat wheels on this train,” went the joke.* It moved at a snail’s pace, so they could, or so it was said, jump through the windows if the train was strafed. They had already picked up two plagues which remained with them to the end—lice and dysentery.
It was midafternoon when they marched from Barcelona’s North Station to the Plaza de Cataluña. At this early stage of the war the city was “a bloody marvelous madhouse.” They passed through a great mob yelling “Hermanos! Hermanos! Brothers!” Women pulled sticky fists from babies’ mouths to make the clenched fist salute of proletarian brotherhood. Men would stop them on the Ramblas to give them a chorus of “The International.” Men here and there in immaculate suits wore no ties, to show their commitment to the working class. “It was like being on top of a mountain.” Bill Harvey, a second-generation Communist, found himself crying. ”A million people loving us up and we’re loving them up too. . . . We’re going to make a new world where there’ll be no poor and no wise bastards who think they own the whole goddam place. We all own it . . . and we’re goin’ to fight for it.”*
Following this high came their shenanigans under the window of Consul General Mahlon F. Perkins. After they had sung “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a band burst forth with “Himno de Riego,” the Republican anthem. The Americans began to laugh. The tune sounded to them like one they knew in the States as “Here Comes Barnum and Bailey—the Circus Is Coming to Town.” They joined in, laughing and shouting the “Barnum and Bailey” refrain. At the finale, the crowd surged forward to congratulate the Americanos, who alone among the foreigners appreciated their anthem. A guide escorted them to the Lenin Barracks for a banquet. Once inside they discovered it belonged to the POUM. Under pictures of Trotsky, Phil Bard looked ashen, but it was too late to turn back. Yet instead of having their faces kicked in, they received a sumptuous meal served by a friendly band of Trotskyists who didn’t seem like bad guys at all. Still, there were complaints, and thereafter International volunteers messed only at the Karl Marx Barracks, an exclusively Communist preserve.
Dawn found them south of Tarragona, the tracks running beside the Mediterranean or sweeping through hamlets—“unreal, like Hollywood villages.” They sang “The International,” “La Marseillaise,” “Casey Jones,” “Over There,” and even “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On the south-facing slopes almond trees were already in pink blossom. Spaniards working in the fields clenched their right fists and called “Salud!” A lookout at the window shouted, “Hey, guys, I see orange trees!” Thereafter at every station, leather-faced campesinos and children with thin arms and legs tossed in oranges as the volunteers threw back cigarettes and loaves of bread. (The major granaries were in the Nationalist zone.) One man, who insisted on paying for his fruit, found himself charged the equivalent of one penny for two dozen. For hours they gorged, tossing the skins and pulp at dozing comrades. In Valencia, capital of the Republic since the government had fled Madrid, they ate in the big plaza de toros, across from the station, and emitted mock groans when they saw their dessert—two oranges per man. Bullfight posters flapped in the wind. Since the outbreak of war no bulls worth mention had been fought in Republican Spain because most matadors gravitated to the wealthier Nationalists. Besides, Spaniards of both sides had taken up a different blood sport.
That night the train wound up between the jagged peaks of the coastal sierrasto the Levantine meseta, an arid upland plateau beaten by winter winds that whistled down from Aragon. They stuffed holes with bundles of clothing and newspapers. (They quickly learned that in Spain it was always either too hot or too cold.) In springless carriages the wooden-slat benches grew harder. Some tried to sleep on the benches; others curled up in the aisles or under the seats. The train halted frequently to clear trees and obstructions from the rails—the work of saboteurs, it was said. At a long viaduct crossing a three-hundred-foot ravine, guards walked ahead examining the rails and signaling the engineer. In the blacked-out train, lit only by a few blue-painted bulbs, four anonymous Americans and two Canadians composed what they hoped would become the “official” marching song of the Lincoln Battalion. The tune was based on a yet-to-be-identified college ditty; the words, a conglomerate of collegiate hoopla and proletarian cliché:
We march, Americans!
To defend our working class,
To uphold democracy
And mow the Fascists down like grass;
We’re marching to vic-to-ry,
Our hearts are set, our fists are clenched,
A cause like ours can’t help but win,
The Fascists’ steel will bend like tin.
We give our word, they shall not pass,
(shouted) No Pasarán!
(again) WE GIVE OUR WORD THEY SHALL NOT PASS!
With a few changes here and there—not so many, really—Fordham could have borrowed it for a football rally. The composers sent it to New Masses, which published it, of course. Most of the seamen and furriers laughed at it. They preferred “The Caissons Go Rolling Along” and other military chanties from imperialist nations. (After meeting Fascist steel in their first battle, no veteran ever sang the “Marching Song” again, unless sardonically. Strictly political pabulum for the crowds back home.)
At gray dawn they looked through grubby eyes across a tabletop plain with an African cast to it. There were fields where nothing was growing and random villages where nothing was moving. Whenever the train halted at a huddle of roofs, small boys raced to the platform, not to shower them with oranges and almonds, but to beg tobacco, bread, money. Romantic Spain was behind them. This was the real Spain. Americans had come to reclaim these miserable villages and to liberate these squalid lives. If their hearts were fuller than their pockets, there was nevertheless always something to pass through the window.
At ten o’clock in the morning of January 8, the first American volunteers arrived in Albacete, saffron emporium and headquarters of the International Brigades. A band heavy on percussion welcomed them with its repertoire of United Front anthems, including “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Save the King.” Pasted on the walls of the railroad station were posters plugging the International Brigades, one featuring a trio of heads—Caucasian, Negroid, and Oriental—wearing French poilu helmets of World War vintage. “It looked like a town in a movie—a cowboy movie,” recalled one volunteer. They marched behind their band up the short Calle de Alfonso XII (the tabooed monarchist name had not yet been changed), past the blue-tiled pleasure domes of the Gran Hotel in the Plaza de Altozano, and then through the narrow streets of the barrio chino, where shack rats with meaty arms leered at them from open windows. (Since Marty’s crowd had decided that a “Fifth Column” was lurking in Albacete, each group of new arrivals was paraded ostentatiously through the town.) Suddenly down the street came an awesome file of German volunteers marching with perfect alignment and singing in chorus the “The Song of the United Front” in exact time to their stamping feet. This was a platoon of Thaelmanns, men of the famous XIth Brigade, among the heroic cadre of Internationals celebrated for saving Madrid in the bitter fighting back in November. Fierce in battle and fanatical about discipline (as the other brigades were not), they carefully tended flowerbeds in their bivouacs. The newcomers continued to the former Guardia Civil barracks near the bullring, which reminded one volunteer of a desert fort in a cheap movie with a courtyard half concrete and half mud where hundreds of men milled about. The whole place stank, for there was no sewer connection, only pits, emptied by IB prisoners who carted away offal in dripping pushcarts. Inside twenty volunteers crowded into each room designed for four—two men for each cot, latecomers on the floor.
Needing more space, the volunteers wanted to bunk in the unoccupied left wing on the ground floor but were hustled out. This was forbidden territory. Although no one told them why, the blood stains on the walls of the lavatory conveyed a story of mass executions as vividly as any good cave painting spoke of animal slaughter. These first traces of war absorbed the newcomers, who examined them minutely. They aired two theories: either Nationalists had massacred Republican hostages or Republicans had slaughtered Nationalist prisoners. No one in Albacete wanted to talk about it. The fact was that during the first days of the war 150 members of the Guardia Civil had taken refuge in the barracks with some right-wing civilians and held out for eight days against eight thousand militia until forced to surrender. The officers had been led into the lavatory and executed on the spot, along with some of the civilians. Six months had passed and the bloody walls remained. There was a shortage of barrack space but not of soap, water, and swabs, but the authorities had no doubt decided that the walls should be left as a reminder of what an anti-Fascist war entailed. On the roof of the building were prison sheds containing civilians suspected of harboring Fascist attitudes. A later arrival among the Americans pulled guard duty up there and reported to the commandant that a prisoner who identified himself as the Count of Chinchón had offered to deposit a hundred thousand pounds sterling in the Bank of England in return for helping him escape. The American was outraged. “I told him that I had come to Spain to fight against the likes of him. I told him to shut up or I would send a bullet through the door and kill him.” The commandant laughed: that loco had offered him even more money.
Food awaited men who had not eaten since Valencia, but only after speeches. They lined up in the barracks courtyard, a concrete well ringed with iron balconies like a prison block. Cheers of instant recognition greeted the arrival with Luigi Longo of a walrus-looking Frenchman wearing an enormous beret that “hung down like a soggy black flapjack.” This was André Marty, a member of the executive committee of the Comintern, one of the founding fathers of the International Brigades, and a revolutionary icon. He became a hero in his own time for his leadership of the French Black Sea mutiny in 1919, which had prevented the French navy from supporting the White Russian armies. As a man who had refused to take up arms against the Soviet Union, he found favor with Josef V. Stalin and became not only a dedicated but also a fanatical Communist. In his welcome speech Marty compared the arrivals with the arrival of the Yanks under Pershing twenty years before “to save Europe from barbaric Huns.” This ethnic slur did not sit well with some stalwarts, who recalled that the great Lenin himself had denounced the World War as an imperialist conspiracy. “It was a shocker,” mused one man. “Were the Thaelmanns, those superb men who had just passed us and who had saved Madrid, nothing but a bunch of Huns?” Nor did their surprise end there. Marty exposed his raw nerve—a paranoid obsession with spies. In his foghorn voice, he warned them to identify and to purge from their ranks all Trotskyites and other “political deviates.” This diatribe seemed to pass over the heads of most of those enthralled by the idea of being “Popular Front” warriors, but some of the old guard knew exactly what he meant by “purge.” All of Marty’s energy served his mistrust—“his spy-disease, that Russian syphilis,” wrote Gustav Regler, a revolutionary who knew him well. (He liked to throw a stranger off guard by nonchalantly asking to see his POUM card.) Later, it would be claimed that Marty always demonstrated more zeal in exterminating imaginary Trotskyites than in prosecuting a war against real Fascists, but he had not yet earned his nickname, “Le Boucher d’Albacete.”
On the next morning the men reported to the plaza de toros on the edge of town, a structure that looked like it had been squeezed from a confectioner’s tube. Here each volunteer was photographed for his livre militar and filled out a long questionnaire. Those listing their political party as “Communist” had to change it to “Anti-Fascist” to accord with the Popular Front fiction. Marty chastised French volunteers wearing red bandannas. “You don’t wear those things if you’re going into battle. You are temporarily not communists, and you don’t hang red flags around your neck for Fascist snipers.” From a warehouse they received uniforms assembled from hand-me-downs of half a dozen armies—mainly French—though some shirts carried the brass eagle buttons of the U.S. Army. They laughed and cursed as enormous men tried to shoehorn into dwarfish garments while five-footers draped themselves in coats designed for giants. To their disappointment, they received no weapons. Albacete had barely enough for base personnel. The Americans were shamed when volunteers from other countries pointed scornfully at their doughboy uniforms. Why had they come to free Spain from Fascism wearing uniforms of the most capitalistic country in the world? A few sensitive souls stuffed their conspicuous fleece-lined jackets into garbage cans as proof of their international fervor, only to be shocked, on the following day, to see them on the backs of grinning French volunteers.
Officers collected their passports, ostensibly for “safekeeping” at the base, although the real reason was to minimize desertion by making flight from Spain nearly impossible. Many of these passports made their way to Soviet military intelligence at The Hague and performed valuable service in Soviet espionage activities in years to come. (The man who killed Trotsky in Mexico City was carrying the passport of a dead North American volunteer.) Some men, smelling a rat, stuffed their passports in shoes and claimed they had been lost. Each man was interrogated about his special qualifications. An American identified as Joe said that in the States he ran speedboats. “Excellent, Comrade,” replied his questioner. “You will fit into the infantry.”
For a few days the recruits drilled in the bullring, although French officers using French jargon barked commands that not even the French recruits seemed to understand. During a rest period a Detroit auto-worker smudged a swastika onto his handkerchief and played matador to John Lenthier, a Boston actor, who snorted and tore the cloth to shreds amid cheers. On their time off, the Americans prowled the city, which turned into a sea of mud at the slightest drizzle; they sampled the local coñac, which has been described as a blend of equal parts rancid olive oil and low-octane gasoline; and they bought the local specialty, jackknives with handsome mother-of-pearl handless but worthless tin blades. There was little else to do for these city boys, unless one wanted to queue up outside a door in the barrio chino—but the female wares, recalled a volunteer, were “pretty awful,” particularly after the whores of Le Havre. In Albacete, the IB hierarchy billeted at the Gran Hotel held droit de seigneur over every girl with either beauty or spunk. There was even a rumor that André Marty had a private harem in a villa outside town. Nobody seemed to believe it, but they enjoyed thinking about it. Posted in shop windows was a ubiquitous sign reading “NO HAY TABAC,” which meant “There’s no tobacco,” though one American comrade remarked, with deep disgust, “Well, if they make cigarettes out of hay over here, I wouldn’t wanta smoke ’em.” They soon learned to hoard butt ends for rerolling later and not to pass a pack around. Some CP zealots believed that the authorities ought to prohibit Internationals from panhandling the new arrivals for cigarettes and from picking up butts off the street, like Bowery bums. The Circulo Mercantil, or Casino, had been requisitioned by a military committee after the local gentry had either been shot or run out of town, but it still featured billiard tables and some fossils of a bygone era—a starved-looking string orchestra in tails.
Certainly the most depressing place in town was the Plaza de Altozano. The municipal and provincial buildings had been taken over by IB bureaucrats—pouter pigeons in swank uniforms. There were fleeting glimpses of Marty himself, popping in and out of his chauffeured limousine decked with tiny flags. Always hovering about him were his next-in-powers, section heads and jefes of something-or-other, bundled up in shaggy coats. These were long-striding fellows with lopes “that made them seem like wolves in sheep’s clothing.” If an officer ranked high enough, his wife could join him in Albacete. (Madame Marty was there. Gustav Regler visited her room privately to examine the collection of automatic pistols that she proudly spread out on her bed.) The Gran Hotel might have reminded someone of the Ritz, but a union hall, never. Guards with machine guns stood at the revolving door and turned away those without special passes. In Albacete only one man cast a vote—André Marty, Soviet-nurtured czar and grand marshal. Ironically, he had risen to power in the French Communist Party on a platform of antimilitarism.
The Americans had little time to study the intricacies of rearguard politicking
and in-fighting. During the second week of January they left for their training
© 2006 The Penn State University