The Volunteer for Liberty, V.2, No. 35, November 7, 1938. Nick Myers, Commissar of Co. 1, Mac-Pap Battalion was wounded in the attack on Asco by the same shell that laid out Lionel Edwards the Company Commander. “I heard it coming” he says “but I was in a hurry and kept going. I ran...
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Ukes and Finns of the Mac-Paps, The Volunteer For Liberty, v. 2, No. 29, August 13, 1938. Our battalion has them too. We mean the Ukes and the Finns. They come from Canada too, but most of them have not only experienced the class struggle in Canada but have received an even more adequate...
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Notre Combat, Journal de la 15ème Brigade Internationale, No. 32, August 19, 1937, p. 7. Dimitrov Heroes by Ivan Gosnjak The First Section of the Matija Gubec Company of the Dimitrov Battalion is almost wholly composed of comrades coming from Canada. These comrades are, in the main, Croats who were compelled by economic circumstances...
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The 80th anniversary Ebro commemorative tour organised this May by FIBI – Friends of the International Brigades in Ireland – coincided with Memorial Weekend in the USA. At the grave of Lincoln Battalion Ebro casualty John Cookson (killed in action, September 1938), located near Marçà in Catalunya, Nancy Wallach, ALBA Board member and daughter...
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Bennett Jeffries Doty, Soldier of Fortune, attorney and author died April 4, 1938 in an unidentified hospital near Gandesa, Spain. Doty was born to Lemuel Humphries Doty (1866-1962) and Margaret “Mell” Jeffries Doty on August 16, 1900 in Faunsdale, Hale County, Alabama. Doty, who had an adventurous streak, joined the Tennessee Army National...
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From the third minute of this video, Friends of the International Brigades in Ireland are shown on their May 26 visit to the battlefield outside Corbera d’Ebre, where Kerry born Lincoln Battalion volunteer Thomas O’Flaherty had been among those brigadistas killed in action in September 1938, and whose nephew, Kerry Flaherty, carries an Abraham...
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THE VOLUNTEER Volume 2, January 15, 1938 No other International volunteer in Spain has been in so unique a position as Dr. Jack Klein, the American dentist with a roving commission. Ever-busy, ever smiling he has covered all the fronts, travelling over 10,000 miles in his dental truck, and treated about 3,000 persons, including...
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After seven years of work, a new PBS documentary on the international quest to bring Francoist officials to justice is making the festival rounds. An interview with the filmmakers. When I visited Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar in their Madrid apartment last November, they seemed prey to a peculiar mix of exhaustion, expectation, and...
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Alexander Sauermilch was one of more than seventy American volunteers who boarded the Ciudad de Barcelona (City of Barcelona) docked in port of Marseille, France on the night of May 30, 1937. The following afternoon as the Ciudad de Barcelona, hugged the coast approaching Malaga she was sighted by a Nationalist submarine. The General...
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Fred Williams in Spain Twenty-one-year old Fred Williams was living in St. Louis Missouri when he volunteered to serve in the International Brigades. He sailed for France on October 23, 1937 aboard the SS Champlain and crossed into Spain arriving in Figueres on November 5, 1937. Williams arrived in Tarazona the American training...
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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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