New book on the Spanish Civil War

[john williams]

Osprey are set to release a new book on the SCW. It's about the British Battalion in the International Brigades at Jarama and is called They Shall not Pass. Looks like it might be interesting. Here's a blog from their website…

Over thirty-five thousand volunteers from fifty-two countries fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Two thousand five hundred of them were British. Whilst a handful of pioneers fought in units of mixed nationality in the opening months, the first British Battalion was formed in December 1936. The volunteers were an eclectic mix. Communists rubbed shoulders with socialists, republicans, adventurers and anti-fascists. Labourers and miners mixed with actors, writers, intellectuals and idealists. A handful were veterans of the Great War. Others had gained military experience in the Officer Training Corps or Territorial Army. Most, however, had never fired a rifle in anger in their lives.

After an initial assessment in the offices of the Communist Party of Great Britain, those that were accepted travelled by ferry to Dieppe, across France to the Spanish border at Perpignan and through a multifaceted Republican Spain. Catalonia was a blur of cheering crowds, Valencia was more subdued and Albacete, the sorting centre for the International Brigades, was chaotic. The British volunteers' final destination, the village of Madrigueras in Murcia, was inhabited by impoverished peasants who eked out a living on the windswept plains. After a few weeks of training, the battalion, six hundred strong and divided into four companies, was thrown into the battle of Jarama, a fascist offensive aimed at cutting Madrid's sole remaining lifeline, the Valencia Road. It would be the bloodiest encounter of the conflict so far, the like of which had not been seen in Europe since the Great War.

On the morning of the 12 February 1937, the volunteers, led by Captain Tom Wintringham, a Balliol graduate and Daily Worker journalist, left their forward base, an abandoned villa dubbed the cookhouse, crossed a plateau and advanced through well ordered olive groves. The men were in high spirits. They sang and joked as they marched. At midday the three rifle companies got their first sight of the enemy, Moroccan mercenaries and Franco's elite Foreign Legion. As per Wintringham's orders, they spread out over a line of low hills. For the next five hours the enemy infantry outflanked them, German machine guns swept their lines, Italian fighters strafed them and the nationalist artillery made the hilltops a living hell. There was little cover and the men were hopelessly exposed. One hundred were killed before the survivors withdrew to the second line at 5pm. Kit Conway, an IRA veteran of the Four Courts, was hit in the guts by a burst of heavy machine-gun fire. Tom Spiller's section were blown to smithereens and Clem Beckett, a speedway champion and pioneer of the Wall of Death, was killed by Moroccan Regulares hurling grenades whilst he was covering the retreat.

By dusk, the nationalists believed victory was theirs. The enemy on the hills had been routed and the second line appeared to consist of nothing more than a few dozen riflemen. Captain León of the 7th Tabor of Melilla formed his men up and ordered them to advance. Five hundred yards across the valley, Harry Fry, the Edinburgh born commander of the British machine gun company, was waiting for them. Despite a frustrating day, caused by a mix up of ammunition, his eight Maxims were finally ready. As León's Moors charged, Fry ordered his men to open fire. The guns cut them down in swathes. It was to be the last act of the opening day. Of the five hundred volunteers who had advanced through the groves six hours before, less than half remained.

The next morning, after a feverish night of false alarms and intermittent firing, a strange calm settled over the battlefield. Basking in the spring sunshine, the volunteers' thoughts turned to home. Wintringham pictured his wife and children and James Maley realised that if he were still in Glasgow he would have been going to watch Celtic at Parkhead that afternoon. By midday the firing had begun again and by the middle of the afternoon, the British lines were under heavy artillery bombardment. The increasing pressure took its toll. When a shell splinter wounded two of his men, Bert Overton, the ex-Welsh Guardsman commanding the 4th Company, fled his post on the right flank. The gap in the line was exploited by the legionaries of the 6th Bandera. Using the dead ground, they got behind Harry Fry's machine gun company. Before the Scot realised what was going on his position had been overrun. Twenty-seven of his men were taken prisoner. The rest were killed by grenades, bayonets and rifle butts in the first frantic moments of the assault. Minutes later Wintringham led a counter-attack from his reserve position in the Sunken Road. It was repulsed by a hail of fire. Twenty men died and dozens more were wounded. Wintringham was shot through the thigh and stretchered from the line.

That evening the situation in the British line was chaotic. Exhausted after a second sleepless night, the men began to imagine Moors coming at them out of the dark. When a Very light touched off the battalion's ammunition stores, Overton panicked again and ran to the rear. Half of the one hundred men remaining fled with him. The Battalion's Political Commissar, George Aitken, tried to hold the rest together, but his efforts were in vain. It was only at dawn on the third day with the arrival of Scot Cunningham, a charismatic Glaswegian who had fought in some of the earliest battles of the war, that the remaining officers managed to re-establish the line.

On the 14 February the fascists launched an offensive spearheaded by captured Russian T26 tanks. Rolling up from the left flank, their cannon and machine guns killed dozens and routed the rest. The nationalist infantry then swarmed into the Sunken Road and finished off the wounded. Back at the cookhouse all seemed lost. The survivors crammed into trucks and sped from the scene. Others followed on foot. Threatening them with pistols, their commissars tried to force them back into the fight. Once more it fell to Cunningham to take control. Within an hour, he had managed to rally a few dozen men. That night they marched back to the front singing the Internationale. Their numbers were swelled by stragglers as they advanced. In the fire-fight that followed, the fascists were caught by surprise. By dawn the British had retaken their old positions. The Valencia road remained open and the frontline would not significantly change for the rest of the war.
Following its baptism of fire, the British Battalion took part in several other key engagements. At Brunette, André Diamant, an Anglo Egyptian who had led the 1st Company at Jarama after Conway's death, was hit in the thigh by a bomb splinter. In the Aragon offensive, Harry Fry, who had been released by the fascists and had subsequently rejoined the battalion, was killed whilst leading his men into the attack. Five weeks later Jimmy Rutherford, another veteran of the machine gun company, who had been captured by the Spanish and then released after Jarama, was recaptured when Italian tanks ambushed the British at Calaceite. This time there would be no reprieve. The young Londoner was recognised by his interrogators and executed by firing squad.

After one last offensive at the Ebro in the summer of 1938, the International Brigades were disbanded and the British survivors returned home. Readjusting to civilian life proved difficult. John 'Bosco' Jones was a mass of nerves, Jason Gurney's career as a sculptor had been cut short by an explosive bullet and Walter Gregory had to face the mother of a comrade he had buried at the battle of Teruel. Ten months later the Second World War began. Although they had valuable experience, many of the veterans were not allowed to take part. Scot Cunningham was dismissed by the British Army as a 'Red' who could not be trusted, George Leeson's applications were simply ignored and Sam Wild was not even permitted to become an Air Raid Warden. Many of those who applied to the Royal Navy or Royal Air Force, on the other hand, were allowed to join up. Some, such as Albert Charlesworth, a metal polisher from Oldham, and David Crook, a former brigadier turned Soviet spy, served with distinction. Back in Britain, Captain Tom Wintringham found another way to contribute to the war effort. Setting up a guerrilla warfare school at Osterley Park, he helped train the Volunteer Defence Force, the predecessor of the Home Guard.

For many of the veterans the post war years were a period of disillusionment and depression. Following such coldly calculating examples of real politick as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the Soviet occupation of Hungary, the majority came to believe that the Communist Party had betrayed them. Throughout the fifties they left the organization in their droves. The ghosts of Jarama tortured others into an early grave. Giles Romilly took an overdose of pills in a lonely hotel room in America, Wintringham died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-one and Scot Cunningham ended his days as an anonymous figure tramping the streets of Britain. Nevertheless, the vast majority still believed they had made the right decision in going to Spain. As one would later write, 'you have to believe in something, in a cause that will make the world a better place, or you have wasted your life.' With the seventy-fifth anniversary of the battle approaching, the story of these men is fading into obscurity. They Shall not Pass! aims to cast a light on their actions and redress this imbalance.