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The Journal of Military History 68.1 (2004) 293-295



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Fighting Fascism in Europe: The World War II Letters of an American Veteran of the Spanish Civil War. By Lawrence Cane. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8232-2251-9. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Appendixes. Notes. Index. Pp. xxxvii, 268. $27.00. [End Page 293]

Letters may convey the epic of a vast war by intimate moments. So it is with the over three hundred letters of Lawrence Cane written from 1942 to 1945 to his wife Grace. They reveal a keenly intelligent and morally sensitive, deeply perceptive yet innocently naïve, and highly articulate citizen-soldier. With Eastern European Jewish immigrant backgrounds in Depression-era New York City, the Canes were drawn to the Communist Party, but in practice were hopeful Americans who supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a broad agenda for social equality and economic justice.

After college, Cane volunteered in 1937 to fight the rising fascist tide in the Spanish Civil War, where he served in the International Brigades in intense combat in every major battle from August 1937 to September 1938 and was wounded in action. Throughout his life, Cane identified most closely with fellow International Brigade veterans, "that pitifully small band of men who were the conscience of the world" (p. 58).

As the global sequel to the Spanish war came home to America in December 1941, Cane ached to return to the fight. Despite poor eyesight, his constant pleas gained him a place with combat engineers in action in the Normandy invasion, the breakout, the Bulge, the assault across the Rhine, and the drive into Germany, earning him a Silver Star and the rank of captain. Cane was immensely proud of fighting in both the Spanish and global wars, "from Madrid to Berlin" (p. 191), one necessary struggle "shaping the world's destiny with guns" (p. 57).

Three powerful motivations pervade Cane's letters. First is his deep love for his wife and unseen son, his profound loneliness at their prolonged separation, and a keen sense that he is fighting for their future. Second is his abiding hatred of "fascism," the forces of oppression that threatened to blanket the world. This loathing and a deep urge to avenge suffering Spanish Republicans and European Jews fed his warrior spirit physically to crush Nazism. His bitterness at times made him feel like destroying the entire German people, but he always pulled himself back from that extreme. Third is Cane's rather innocent vision of a better world of peace, freedom, and justice. His vision could be acute. The Morgenthau Plan for an agriculturalized Germany, he concluded, would fail in the long run, for only a German people reeducated to democracy could secure a stable Germany. His segregated Black unit, of whom he became intensely proud, experiencing nonprejudiced British society, would "come home with a lot of new ideas when this is over" (p. 67). Yet naively he anticipated an abiding friendship between the United States and the Soviet Union, which he idealized until 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolt led Cane to cut ties with the Communist Party.

Love, hate, and hope gave Lawrence Cane strength and determination through the intense trials of two wars. These driving forces should also capture the imagination of the reader at any level to experience vicariously the emotions and dangers of war as this ordinary yet singular soldier did in reality, [End Page 294] and might bequeath meaning to any reader with a jaded view of "the good war."



Willard C. Frank, Jr
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, Virginia

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