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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MARY AND I ARE GLAD OUR SON WENT TO SPAIN Southern Father and Mother Tell How the Spanish People’s Fight for Democracy Belongs to Them By Pat Barr Southern Worker, Magazine of the Common People of the South, Vol. V, No. 16, July 1937. It was a happy group that gathered at the railroad...
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Keep ‘Em Rolling By Hy Chesler Originally published in The Volunteer for Liberty, Vol. II, No. 5, February 12, 1938. The work of the Transport units of the Republican Army is apt to be taken for granted, especially by volunteers who come from highly mechanized countries. It is hardly necessary, however, to point out...
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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....
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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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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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