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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 is an introduction to a special issue on the role played by veterans of the Spanish Civil War's International Brigades during the Second World War. It argues that the study of these veterans is worthwhile for three reasons: the extraordinary mobility that the antifascist struggle of the years 1936–45 enabled; the microcosm it provides for the assessment of what happens when ideologically fuelled concerns meet pragmatic wartime needs; and the relevance of how governments and military organizations have dealt with suspect returnees in the past for present-day dilemmas that several governments face. [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 article discusses the Canadian Foreign Enlistment Act of 1937 which prohibited recruiting and volunteering of Canadians to fight in the Spanish Civil War. It provides a historical context for the law and cities influences from British statutes. The article goes to examine the Foreign Enlistment Act's impact on future recruitment and enlistment practices in Canada.

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]

This essay discusses the uncanny parallels, paradoxes, and puzzles in the lives and careers of author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the famous George Orwell, and the virtually unknown French writer and political radical, Jean Malaquais. The striking affinities between Orwell and Malaquais, both of whom came to literary maturity in the 1930s, involve both their themes and genres. Both men fully engaged the issues of their times as independent leftists. Both also wrote political novels, documentary reportage, war diaries, and anti-utopias that addressed the conditions of the poor and working class (especially miners), the agonies of war-torn Europe, and the dangers of a totalitarian dystopia in the near future. Their remarkable affinities even extended to participation as volunteer soldiers in the same militia during the Spanish Civil War, the POUM (United Marxist Workers' Party). Yet no biographer or scholar has ever compared the two men or even noted their numerous, arresting similarities. The divergent 'afterlives' of Orwell and Malaquais raise large questions about cultural memory, the literary Zeitgeist, and Clio's caprice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article presents a report on a conference on fascism in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, held at the Freie Universität (Free University) of Berlin, Germany, from June 19-21, 2014. Topics of discussion included fascist propaganda, international participation in the Spanish Civil War, and antifascist movements.

About 2,800 volunteers of the American contingent of the International Brigades, generally known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, served in Spain from 1937 to 1939. After the fall of Barcelona at the end of January 1939 many ended up in French refugee camps. This article draws on first-hand eye-witness accounts to paint a picture not only of the withdrawal from Spain after the fall of Barcelona in January 1939 but also of conditions within the camps in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, myths and misconceptions have surrounded the International Brigades, the volunteers from around the world who came to the defence of the Spanish Republic. Their creation, composition, and role in the war itself have all been hotly debated, with critics arguing that the International Brigades were primarily a ‘Comintern Army’, a tool of Soviet expansionism, in which any form of dissent was ruthlessly eliminated. Therefore, the discipline problems and consequent heavy-handed responses from the I.B. leadership are often seen as politically rather than militarily driven, despite the manifestly demoralizing nature of the war. Yet while a small number of volunteers were undoubtedly brutally treated, there was a much greater tolerance in the Brigades—certainly within the English-speaking battalions—than has often been suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is the story of many who fought and some who died for Spain in the savage Civil War of 1936–1939. Their experiences are here retold from memoirs and other recollections as an inspiration for all who are connected physically or spiritually to an era which saw the agonía of freedom's defeat by a fascist dictatorship. It takes in the accounts of Spanish soldiers, international brigaders, nursing volunteers and others, and shows how in the midst of suffering and brutality it was still possible to live up to humane ideals and even to emerge with dignity. [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 present article attempts to expose and debunk some myths of the participation of the English-speaking volunteers in the XV International Brigade that have frequently been overlooked. Our assumptions are based on a wide range of archival and well documented sources. From the very beginning there were many elements that merged together to offer all kinds of exaggerations, legends and self-aggrandizing images. Journal reports, scholarly articles, posters, poems and symbols have been exploited with the purpose of turning a very harsh reality into an idealized, over-fantasized experience. Ernest Hemingway (a war correspondent) was perhaps the most conspicuous case, and Esmond Romilly and John Sommerfield (both fighting in the defence of Madrid) were the first to give a romantic vision of their war experiences. In contrast, George Orwell, Laurie Lee, Jason Gurney, William Herrick or Alvah Bessie are examples of volunteers who denounce the lack of organization, the scarce military training they received or even the excessive, in their opinion, control by their officers on their daily lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's observations regarding the political views of the 20th-century writer George Orwell on fascism. Details are given noting that despite how famous Orwell became for his anti-communist criticisms, his early anti-fascist comments were not particularly original or effective. Accounts are then given outlining how Orwell's political views formed in response to the Spanish Civil War and World War II. An overview of his anti-fascist views is then provided.

In recent years historians have broken years of silence on the brutal repression behind the lines that marked the Spanish Civil War. Despite this, we continue to know very little about British diplomatic efforts to put a stop to the repression carried out by the insurgents grouped around General Franco. By focusing on the understudied Chetwode Prisoner Exchange Commission, this article shows that the British, working alongside the International Committee for the Red Cross, and at times with significant support from the Republican government, did take steps to try and prevent Francoists executing prisoners of war and bring an end to a cycle of reprisals. However, these attempts largely came to naught because the insurgents refused to be swayed by humanitarian considerations and because the British, faced with an imminent Franco victory and pursuing national self interest, abandoned supporters of the Republic to their fate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Italian government gave firm cartographic support to the forces of General Francisco Franco. In the first phase, they undertook to engrave and print in Italy a significant collection of military maps urgently needed by the Francoist army. Later, from May 1937, the Italian High Command sent to Spain a cartographic unit, the Sezione Topocartografica, that eventually printed more than half a million maps at several different scales. The Italians effectively redesigned the Mapa topográfico de España at the 1:50 000 scale and selectively edited its topographical content to obtain the road map at the 1:200 000 scale. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article looks at a case of identity theft in which Soviet intelligence agencies made illegal use of a passport belonging to Polish Canadian citizen Ignacy Witczak to secure the passage of a Soviet espionage agent into the U.S. Witczak had surrendered the document for safekeeping during his service in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Soviet intelligence authorities incorrectly assumed that he had been killed in action and used the passport to settle a Soviet spy and his wife in Los Angeles, California. Details related to the discovery of the identity theft and to the subsequent uncovering of a Soviet espionage ring are presented. Witczak's interrogation by Canadian authorities about the case is also discussed.

The article examines the construction of a National Monument honoring the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of volunteer U.S. soldiers who fought in the Spanish Civil War for Spain's Republican forces, in San Francisco, California, with emphasis given to the meaning associated with the structure's erection by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB). Therefore, the author is broadly interested in the relationship between historical commemoration and collective memory. More specifically, the article investigates how members of the VALB interpret the Brigade's efforts as an aspect of American, and not necessarily international or Spanish, history, thereby employing varying notions of U.S. nationalism and Internationalism in discussions on the monument's importance.

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]

In recent years, and particularly around the time of his birth-centenary in 2003, George Orwell's reputation has come under a cloud. Both his unexampled honesty as a writer and his stainless political idealism have been brought into question. This article takes a further tentative step into this hitherto forbidden region by exploring the connections of Eric Blair and Eileen O'Shaughnessey with various espionage agents and intelligence networks in Barcelona in the spring of 1937. Although the argument is founded on a range of original contemporary documentation, as with many Spanish Civil War stories, facts are complicated and conclusions necessarily provisional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article offers the profile of several contributors of the periodical including Nir Arielli is associate professor of International History at the University of Leeds; Fraser Raeburn is a scholar specialising in the history of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War; and Christine Haynes is associate professor of European History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Rafael Alberti's Cantata de los heroes y la fraternidad de los pueblos was devised as one of several homages to the departing International Brigades as they left a Republican Spain facing certain defeat in November 1938. As critics have recently noted, this Cantata, blending Alberti's text with ‘musical illustrations’, has generally been neglected by commentators on Alberti's theatre. In a blend of at times unsubtle political commitment and the highly traditional use of allegory and symbolic characters, with Spain represented as divided, the piece both celebrates the heroism of those (Spaniards and foreigners) fighting for España, and in the face of heroic defeat utters a surprisingly traditional patriotic plea for the union of the two Spains. The article goes on to reflect how, decades after the Nationalist victory, the defeated republicans are now celebrated but in ways that evince a less black-and-white picture of the Civil War. Cercas's novel Soldados de Salamina offers a less ‘total’ and more personalized view of heroism yet can also be seen as a more problematized vision of the ‘Fraternidad’ celebrated in Alberti's Cantata. [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]

The article presents the May 29, 1999 Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture, delivered by critic Christopher Hitchens at Hay-on-Wye, England. The views of writers George Orwell and Raymond Williams in relation to the Spanish Civil War, the trials of non-Stalinist communists in Spain, and Williams's views on English culture.

Highlights the conclusions made by a committee that was appointed by the Board of Regents to investigate the life and death of Kansas college student, Don Henry. The student's death in the Spanish Civil War; Political change which Henry underwent at the University of Kansas; Henry's participation in peace rallies.