Spanish Civil War: The International Brigades
v.1.0 May 26, 2002

Source: Marcus Wendel The Spanish Civil War Fact Book  http://www.skalman.nu/spanish/int-brigader.htm

Please note battalion assignments to brigades were changed several times.  For details, consult the website.

Suggested background reading: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/9820/spain.html

Note
Ravi Rikhye

Today its hard to believe there was a time just sixty years ago when the intellectuals of the west went off to fight in a civil war. Idealism has, since the years of the Vietnam War, been associated with pacifism, or at least a refusal to fight in a particular war. During the Spanish Civil War, idealism meant putting your life on the line by going to war.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. The relentless slaughter of World War I arose from the idealism of millions.  By 1916, the war had become a grim issue of survival, but – for example – the British battalions that attacked along the Somme on July 1, 1916, were composed of volunteers.  Poets, scientists, actors, writers, and musicians died like just like common men in the trenches of World War I: the notion that an intellectual was special would have seemed beyond comprehension to them.

Of course, by the time World War II rolled around, European idealism was exhausted.  This was a war for survival.  The idealism was left to the Americans, and their idealism died in Korea.

The Spanish Civil War is famous in western history because of the unceasing atrocities towards civilians. We did not see such a degree of targeting civilians till the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s. True that in Cambodia in the 1970s we saw the worst civil genocide in modern history, taken as a percentage of the population. But this was in the east; westerners were not supposed to indulge in this level of violence against their own people. And while Yugoslavia was a horrible case, it was an ethnic war, and – it can be argued – Yugoslavs are not quite western.

In Spain the war was about ideology, not about ethnicity or territorial issues. Foreigners are sometimes startled at the violence of the Spanish Civil War.  Again, however, perhaps we should not be surprised given the nature of the Spanish people and their internal disputes – even a cursory reading of Spanish history will show that bad as it was, the violence against civilians was part and parcel of who the Spanish were.

For those fascinated by World War II, the Spanish Civil War was the laboratory for the German military. The Germans practiced, experimented, and validated their ideas about war in the mechanized age.  In a way, the Spanish Civil War was the Vietnam of Europe, in that several powerful foreign actors took sides, providing men and material for the war.

The intellectuals of the International Brigades believed their cause was just, socialism versus Franco’s fascism. Yet, the briefest look at the war shows that when it came to crimes against humanity, the socialists could claim little moral superiority. As John Keegan has said, this was a war in which you were killed simply for being who you were, not for what you did.

It is well to remember this was not just a war between socialists and fascists, but also a war between anarchists and socialists. There is something ironical about the Soviet Union claiming to be fighting for democracy, and the irony becomes near unbearable when one considers the ferocity with which Communists, led and aided by Soviet commissars and cadres, fought to liquidate the anarchists, who had a different view of democracy.

Forty-five thousand volunteers from 50 countries participated in the Spanish Civil War; sixteen thousand died. Three thousand volunteers came from the United States, 1300 from Canada. Only 35 returned to Canada from the 500-strong Canadian battalion. The following sums up well the viewpoint of the volunteers:

In the mid-1930s, the great threat to Western democracies was the expansion of fascism, already on display in Germany and Italy.

Fearing the same fate for Spain, volunteers from more than 50 countries came to fight. The International Brigades were disbanded and allowed to leave Spain when Franco's forces, supported heavily by Germany and Italy, were on the verge of victory.

"That was a very sad and bitter moment," said Clare Forester, 81, who left Minneapolis at age 22 to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. "But we know now that what we did was right. People wanted democracy, not fascism. We can be proud to have fought."

Reference: http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/spain-reunion.html

Some years ago, the Spanish Government granted citizenship to the surviving foreign volunteers, and Spain is a true democracy. So the idealist intellectuals seem to have won, even if it took fifty years.

(Please note that the Canadian Battalion, nicknamed the Mac-Paps, which fought under the Lincoln Brigade, is not included in Mr. Welden’s list.)

11th Brigade (Thalmann)	Also called Hans Beimler. Raised October 1936
Edgar Andre Battalion	Germany
Commune de Paris Battalion	France and Belgium
Dombrowski	Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia
12th Brigade (Garibaldi)	Raised November 1936
Thalmann Battalion	Germany
Garibaldi Battalion	Italy
Andre Marty Battalion	France and Belgium
13th Brigade	Raised December 1936
Louise Michel Battalion	France and Belgium
Chapiaey	Yugoslavia
Henri Vuillemin	France
Mickiewicz	Poland
14th Brigade (Marseillaise)	Raised December 1936
Nionationsbataljonen	France
Domingo Germinal	France and Spain
Henri Barbusse	France
Pireer Brechet	France
15th Brigade (Lincoln-Washington)	Raised February 1937
Dimitrov	Yugoslavia
UK Battalion	UK
Lincoln-Washington	USA
6th February	France
129th Brigade
Mazaryk	Czechoslovakia
Dajakovich	Bulgaria
Dimitrov	Yugoslavia and Albania
150th Brigade	Raised June 1937
Rakosi Battalion	Hungary