To Tilt at Windmills: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War

Notes

Notes The Fifteenth International Brigade Throughout his tour of duty in Spain, Fred Thomas served with the XVth International Brigade, one of five such formations organized to support the beleagured Republic of Spain. The designation "International" signified that the rank and file and their officers were, indeed, not Spaniards but volunteers from abroad. The first of these brigades, the XIth, called the Thaelmann and the XIIth, the Garibaldi, appeared in the Battle of Madrid in October and November, 1936. By the end of that year, the XIIIth, Dombrowski and the XIVth, La Marseillaise, had come into the line. Each brigade comprised three to five or six infantry battalions which were themselves recruited along ethnic/national compositions. Of this quartet, the Thaelmann carried the reputation of the most aggressive with its high percentage of German anti-Naziis. On or about 1 February 1937,the XVth International Brigade entered the war. The senior component was the British Battalion, mustered on 26 December 1936, its No.1 company quickly taken from training and sent into action by the New Year. Subsequently, the American force called the Abraham Lincoln Battalion joinedthe brigade as did its brother,the George Washington Battalion, which took such casualties in its first campaign, the Battle of Brunete, that its survivors transferred into the Lincolns. Another early recruit was the Sixth of February Battalion, a truly hybrid collection of Algerians, Greeks, Morrocans, Americans, Syrians, Hungarians and Israelis. Still another was the 24th (Spanish) Battalion composed of Latin-American,Cuban and Mexican volunteers. There was the Dimitrov Battalion, whose members came from the Balkans, Czechoslavakia, Poland, Austria and Italy. And there was the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, inspired by the presence of hundreds of Canadians. All of these battalions comprised the XVth International Brigade. 171 172 To TILT AT WINDMILLS The British Anti-tank Battery which Thomas joined was a Brigade force, subject to orders given by Brigade headquarters. Notes 1. Oswald Mosley, once a promising member of traditional British politics, organized the British Union of Fascists in the early 1930s and quickly established himself as an anti-semite, anti-communist, pro-Nazi demagogue. 2. Labour declined to argue against non-intervention and so aroused considerable wrath among supporters of the Spanish Republic. 3. The lines are the first stanza of John Galsworthy's "Errantry" published in his 1934 Collected Poems. 4. The "farce of nonintervention" is a reference to the Non Intervention Agreement orchestrated by Great Britain and France and involving two dozen other European nations. In an effort to prevent the civil war from spreading, these powers effectively ruined the cause of the Republic. S. There were three Welsh sea-captains, all named Jones: "Potato,""Corn Cob," and "Ham and Eggs," whose ships were ordered by Whitehall to wait in St. Jean de Luz for orders regarding further passage to blockaded Bilbao. "Potato" Jones spoke saltily with the press about a proposed breakthrough but, after all, took his cargo to Valencia. The Seven Seas Spray under a Captain Roberts did make a successful voyage to Bilbao. 6. For the details concerning Spanish refugees in Great Britain, see Jim Fyrth's The Signal Was SPain (New York: St. Martins Press, 1986). 7. Coordinator of the recruitment of British volunteers was R. W. Robson, formerly National Organiser for the Party. His office was 1 Litchfield St, also the address of the I. B. Dependents' Aid Fund. 8. The British Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870 was invoked in January, 1937, as the government sought to intimidate prospective volunteers. In its original form, the act forbade enlistment by British nationals in the armed forces of a foreign state at war with a friendly (i.e. to Great Britain) foreign state. Penalties included imprisonment and and a fine. 9. Charlotte Haldane's account of her service in Paris is in her memoir, Truth Will Out (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1950). 10. Most volunteers were sent to Perpignan and from there were led by Spanish and French smugglers up and down devious paths over the Pyrenees Mountains and finally into Spain. On 29 May 1937, the Ciudad de Barcelona carrying several dozen Internationals, was torpedoed by an Italian submarine and sunk within sight of landfall. A number of volunteers died in the incident. NOTES 173 11. The "Anarchist trouble in Barcelona" was the uprising of the Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista CP.O.U.M.) and anarchist elements against the Republic. The quarrel...