Keeping the Vehicles Rolling By Marion Noble Originally published in The Volunteer, Volume XI, No. 2, December 1989. Dear Ben, Enclosed is my story about Spain while I was there. It seems that all too little has been said about those of us who did the best we could to keep the vehicles rolling....
Read more »

Three pairs of fathers and sons chose war over peace when they volunteered to be among the 2,800 Americans who served with the International Brigades in Spain. They came from varied pasts and with divergent motivations. One father followed his son to Spain while each of the other fathers volunteered together with their sons....
Read more »

This article was first published in The Volunteer, v. XI, n. 2, December 1989 and is a continuation of Rosenberg‘s The First Day. cb It was the second day of the Brunete Offensive, and the Lincolns, the British, and the Washingtons, supposedly at rest, were busy burying their dead, replenishing their supplies, and doing...
Read more »

By John C. Blair, The Volunteer, Volume 6, Number 3, October 1984 (Our comrade John Blair, died in 1982. This account of prison life, forwarded to us by his widow, Harriet, was written the year before he died. “He had other stories planned,” said Harriet Blair in her letter to us, “but after typing...
Read more »

John Tisa, The Volunteer. Volume 4, Number 2, 1982. Dr. Pike and I drove together to Madrid in the early morning of 18 May 1937 – he for medical supplies, and I with a stack of unedited materials for the Volunteer for Liberty, our new front line tabloid. Here is a story he told...
Read more »

Vernon Snow was killed in action at Fuentes de Ebro during a Nationalist air raid on October 18, 1937.  Snow was serving in the Lincoln-Washington Transmissions section when he was killed.  Pat Read his section leader recalled Snow as “a comrade with a loveable personality, calm courage and plenty of ability. (“A Life for Every...
Read more »

  The University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections completed a project on October 31, 2017 to digitize the run of the Commonwealth College Fortnightly online. The issues begin with volume 2, number 1 (January 1, 1926) and end with volume 14, number 5 (March 15, 1938).  The paper was written, edited, typeset and printed...
Read more »

Rob Waters kindly allowed The Volunteer blog to reprint his interview with Reuben Barr, originally published in The Tenderloin Times, June 1984, v. 8, no. 5, pp. 4 and 8. When Reuben Barr was, as he says, “pinched” last summer blockading outside the Lawrence Livermore Lab, it was not his first brush with the...
Read more »

                  Shortly after the publication of the blog post Seven American Volunteers Refused Permission to Land in France, Paul Hofmann the son of volunteer Albert Hofmann, sent an email correcting and clarifying some of the information in the article. The most important correction was to the...
Read more »

The Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History records on U.S. and Canadian volunteers deepens the available insight into the organization and employment of the International Brigades (IB) during the Spanish Civil War.  From these records, it is evident that the IB Command was interested in documenting the background of the volunteers. Two documents prepared...
Read more »