Barr’s marker at Arlington.

There is one war whose close to 800 American victims are not formally recognized at Arlington: the fight against international fascism in Spain.

Most Americans are familiar with Arlington National Cemetery and its endless rows of white marble headstones extending through the rolling hills of northern Virginia overlooking Washington DC. Situated on land expropriated from the slavocrat Lee family after the Civil War, it is the largest burial ground for American veterans of all wars fought since independence.

There is one war, however, whose close to 800 American victims are not formally recognized at Arlington: The Spanish fight against international fascism. If some of them lie in Arlington’s hallowed grounds, it is only because they served in the US armed forces during World War II. Among them are Charles Alfred Barr, Theodore Cogswell, Gerald Cook, Edithe M. Dyer, Irving Goff, Louis Gordon, Burt E. Jackson, Vincent Lossowski, Harry Schoenberg, Kenneth Shaker, Robert G. Thompson, Vincent Usera, Harry Haywood, and Edward A. Carter Jr.

These men represent a diverse crop of Brigadistas. They include three of the eighty-one Black volunteers: Jackson, Haywood, and Carter. Haywood, who served in the Merchant Marine during World War II, was a prominent leader in the CPUSA and the author of the “Black Belt Thesis,” which articulated Black Liberation with a Marxist-Leninist focus. Carter, who served in the US Army in the 56^th Armored Infantry Battalion of the 12^th Armored Division, won a DCS and posthumous Medal of Honor for his service. Other prominent veterans buried at Arlington served in intelligence roles with G2 or OSS. Goff and Lossowski, for example, fought with the OSS in North Africa and then helped coordinate with the Italian resistance.

Robert Thomson in 1946. Tamiment Library, PHOTOS.223.001. Public domain.

The first Lincoln volunteer to be buried in Arlington Cemetery was Robert G. Thompson, a war hero of both Spain and the Pacific who earned the rank of 2^nd Lt. and a DCS for his service in the New Guinea Campaign. After Thompson’s death in 1965, Congress and the US military tried to prevent Thompson’s internment in Arlington. “The Arlington Case” made national headlines as Thompson’s wife, Sylvia, won her appeal at the US Court of Appeals in DC. Notably, no such controversy occurred in the case of Larry Thorne, a Finnish reactionary who served as a Captain in the Nazi SS and then with special forces in the Vietnam War. In other words, a Nazi mercenary was given a free pass to Arlington—but an American hero of two wars against fascism, not so much.

The fact that only fourteen Brigadistas lie buried in Arlington underscores the intentional repression and erasure of the legacy of these American heroes. All US members of the International Brigades should be officially recognized as veterans of an American conflict. The Spanish War, after all, was also an American War.

Maxwell Hiznay is a historian and educator specializing in the Lincoln Brigade in World War II, the Spanish Transition, and American Communist History. He is a graduate of the University of Mary Washington and a recipient of the 2026 Joseph Carroll Vance Award for Excellence in Historical Research for his work on the Brigade Veterans and their service in OSS during WWII. He is also the current director of the ALB National Cemetery Memorial Group, an organization dedicated to the caretaking, education, and preservation of the historical memory of members of the Lincoln Brigade buried in Arlington Cemetery. More at https://sites.google.com/view/albnationalcemmemorialgroup/home