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Despite decades of scholarship, historians have struggled to explain the decision made by the tens of thousands of volunteers who joined the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Recent methodological innovations, particularly the embrace of transnational perspectives, have led to richer appreciations of complex individual motives and circumstances, but have done less to advance general explanations of the phenomenon. Drawing on a Scottish case study, this account argues that while motives may indeed have been highly individual, the context for the decision to enlist was not, with most volunteers coming from within well-defined social and political spheres. The density of recruitment among particular Communist Party networks suggests that far from being an internalised choice, the decision was made alongside and influenced by friends, family and colleagues. The communal nature of this process offers a useful explanation of the scale of recruitment for Spain across contexts, and suggests several specific factors that enabled the international communist movement to mobilise itself on such a large scale compared to other historical contingents of foreign fighters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the trajectories of a small group of Albanian veterans of the Spanish Civil War after leaving Spain, in early 1939. By focusing on the way in which Albanian veterans reached the European resistance movements between 1941 and 1943, we both enhance and problematize our understanding of the European resistance movement as a transnational phenomenon with its roots in the Spanish Civil War. This article aims to contribute further to a better understanding of the longue durée of the anti-fascist fight between 1936 and the end of the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About 700 Dutchmen joined the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) to fight Franco specifically and fascism generally. After 1945, both surviving veterans and those writing their histories agreed that after their return, they continued their fight against fascism in Nazi-occupied Holland. This article presents a microhistory of the trajectory of three Dutchmen, and finds the links between Spain and resistance in these three cases neither obvious nor very strong. In doing so, this article highlights not only the wide varieties of anti-fascist experiences, but also emphasizes the twists in turns in how these were subsequently refashioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “true book” Robert Jordan intends to write is, self-reflexively, the one his creator does write, including truths Hemingway would not reveal in his wartime journalism. These truths undermine a two-dimensional view of the war (Loyalists good, fascists evil). They reveal Stalinist terror, cynicism, lies and corruption that challenge Jordan’s purpose. The truths dramatize Loyalist atrocities and puncture the myths surrounding Loyalist “saints” and heroes. More important, they express moral dilemmas Jordan experiences in fulfilling his duty, quandaries which again undermine any right-wrong understanding of action in wartime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the core issues and different doctrinal positions present in the international legal debates triggered by the Spanish Civil War. It pays particular attention to the contributions of the first two British judges at the International Court of Justice, A. D. McNair (1946-1955) and H. Lauterpacht (1955-1960) to these debates. Their writings can be seen as respectively representative of the two stages through which British international lawyers went in the international legal debates on the Spanish Civil War. The article concludes with an analysis of the case for British "benevolent neutrality to the Nationalists" in the Spanish Civil War, reviewing the underlying motives which historians have highlighted as lurking behind the British-led nonintervention policy in the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great deal is now known about the age, social class, occupation, and political affiliation of the roughly 2,500 British volunteers in the International Brigades. Far less, however, is known about their personal motivations. This article explores the narratives that have framed our understanding of the British Battalion, and asks how these narratives match up to the complexity of individual volunteers' lives, before, during, and after the Spanish Civil War. The article focuses on a number of particular volunteers such as Ralph Fox, George Nathan, and Wilfred Macartney, and shows how the study of their supposedly well-known lives can still yield surprising new insights. Above all, these stories warn against any temptation to romanticize the war in Spain and the role of the volunteers: a temptation that has often proved all too irresistible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the early months of the Spanish civil war (1936–9) the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the American Quakers’ central service organization, was engaged in a large-scale relief operation on both sides of the front line. While Quaker aid workers on the ground were running hospitals, orphanages and child feeding stations on the Republican and Nationalist side, the operation triggered a sometimes heated debate at home. Quakers had to bridge the tension between the universalist ethos of a transnationally connected and internationally active religious group whose individual parts, in turn, closely integrated into, and were largely dependent on a national framework of action consisting of governments, the media and national-based groups of donors and supporters. Against this backdrop the article will reflect on the complex and shifting meaning of humanitarian neutrality. In the article the author will show how the claim to neutrality, always contested and precarious, could work as a gate opener for humanitarian aid vis-à-vis state and non-state actors alike, as a platform for co-operation with international institutions as well as a deliberately used capital on an increasingly competitive ‘humanitarian market place’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite making up over ten per cent of the British volunteers in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (1936-9), Scots from Glasgow and the surrounding districts have been overlooked in many accounts of the British involvement in the conflict. In seeking to explain the disproportionate numbers of volunteers from this region, the influence of factors such as economic conditions, political structures and institutions, ideology and community are examined with reference to individuals' decisions to volunteer in Spain. It is argued that as well as the more severe impact of the inter-war slump in the region, it was Glasgow's distinctive working-class cultures, which placed great importance on grassroots political communities, with an emphasis on social as well as political connections, that led to Communist Party recruitment efforts being especially successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1930s the Spanish Civil War captured the international imagination to an extraordinary degree. As in other countries British men and women were moved to intervene directly and the memory of the war, and of British participation in it, has held an enduring appeal in the UK. The Civil War was also notable for its use of the visual as a weapon of propaganda, and the Spanish Republican Government deployed visual imagery to great effect as an instrument through which it exhibited its progressive educational and welfare reforms to an international audience. This article focuses on the visual and textual representations of displaced children in Republican educational colonies in Spain that are preserved in British archive collections. Taking as its starting point a series of photographs of children in colonies gathered together as part of the International Brigade Memorial Archive in London, the paper will consider the construction, use, and circulation of these images and associated texts by British and American political and humanitarian networks and their subsequent collection and preservation in British archival institutions. The paper will assess the effectiveness of the images and texts as pedagogical and political agents and explore how their meaning shifted as they travelled through a range of performative spaces on a journey from their construction as artefacts designed initially to record and communicate the Spanish Republic’s progressive educational project, to commemorative objects in the archive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The moral and military aspects of the International Brigades’ record in Spain (1936—8) remain subjects of scholarly investigation and wider debate. Popular fascination was exemplified by the selection of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls as a favourite novel by both main candidates during the US presidential elections of 2008. Postwar Francoist propaganda vilified Brigaders as criminals and cowards, but a counter-legend of the left venerated them as idealists and heroes. Whilst the one campaign has long since passed into oblivion, the other still marches on in the ceaseless commemorative work of veterans’ associations. Although few now question the ubiquitous role of the Comintern in the Brigades’ foundation, organization and command, the practical effects of this control on the environmental conditions and daily lives of the ‘volunteers for liberty’ — despite a plethora of published testimony by those involved — has tended to be overlooked. This article attempts to survey and assess the relevant experiences of the Brigades’ main English-speaking units, based on a wide range of archival and other sources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Thousands of men and women from all around the world flocked to join the International Brigades believing that to fight for the Spanish Republic was to fight for the very survival of democracy and civilisation against the assault of fascism. And alongside the regular troops sent by Hitler and Mussolini to support Franco and the military rebels, a smaller number of volunteers also went to fight for what they perceived as the cause of Catholicism and anti-Communism. A similar range of sentiments can be found among the nearly one thousand newspaper correspondents who went to Spain. Along with the hardened professional war correspondents, and others still to win their spurs, came some of the world's most prominent literary figures. This article shows how, as a result of what they saw, even some of those who arrived without commitment came to embrace the cause of the beleaguered Republic. Underlying their conversion was a deep admiration for the stoicism with which the Republican population resisted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most impressive, lasting and least known features of the International Brigades was the contribution of their medical services. Impressive, because not all health professionals take their Hippocratic oath seriously, and the doctors and nurses of the International Brigades not only made the same gestures of courage and solidarity as the other volunteers but also left behind them professional careers that were unforgiving of long absences. Lasting, because the contributions of the various Spanish and foreign doctors, from the Catalans Josep Trueta and Moisès Broggi, the famous Canadian Norman Bethune, the New Zealander Douglas Jolly and the Englishmen Len Crome and Reggie Saxton, were of a colossal importance in the later development of traumatalogical medicine in both war and peacetime. Unknown, for the obvious reason that the tireless abnegation, behind the lines, of ambulance drivers, nurses and doctors have attracted far less attention from journalists, writers and historians than the struggle of front-line combatants. In recent times, there has been a growth of interest in this aspect of the history of the International Brigades, and what follows – a study of two doctors whose work in Spain had a later impact during the Second World War – aims to make a small contribution to that history. Although of widely differing origins, Crome from Russia, Saxton from imperial Britain, they were both typical of volunteers within the Brigades medical services. Their similarities were even more typical – their selfless dedication to the struggle against fascism and their later service in the Second World War. Like other doctors in the Spanish Civil War, Broggi, Trueta, Bethune, Jolly, both made medical advances that would be of considerable use thereafter. This could have been the story of other doctors who were equally courageous, idealistic and professional in their service with the International Brigades. Nonetheless, these two men were both exemplary and representative of so many others. Their stories go some way to giving some notion of the dedication and sacrifice that characterized the men and women of the International Brigades medical services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]