Christopher Othen - Francos International Brigades: Adventurers, Fascists, and Christian Crusaders in the Spanish Civil War

Francos
International
Brigades

Adventurers, Fascists,
and Christian Crusaders
in the Spanish Civil War

Christopher Othen

All Rights Reserved

Copyright Christopher Othen 2013

First published 2013 by Hurst & Co.

This edition published in 2015 by:

Thistle Publishing
36 Great Smith Street
London
SW1P 3BU

www.thistlepublishing.co.uk

CONTENTS

1. Introduction

European Civil War

Karol Swierczewski was a true believer. Better known as 'General Walter', a nom de guerre inspired by his favourite Walther PP pistol, Swierczewski turned communist as a young exile in Moscow. He cheered on the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and joined the Red Army to defend the revolution. When the last of the reactionaries who threatened the Soviet dream had fled, Swierczewski requested a transfer west to join the Russian troops galloping through his native Poland in the name of the proletariat.

The Pole did not lose faith when his homeland fought off the Bolshevik invasion. Communism ran in his veins like blood. Not even the Soviet Unions mutation from revolutionary utopia to despotic tyranny could shake Swierczewskis devotion to Karl Marx and all his works.

In 1936 the seasoned Red Army commander, now a shaven-headed thirty-nine-year-old with rolls of fat around his neck, was sent to Spain. On 18 July that year General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde and his fellow Army officers had attempted to overthrow Spains left-wing Popular Front government. The Nationalist insurgents believed the country was speeding towards anarchy, atheism, and Communism under the Popular Front's rule. The government and its supporters saw the rising as a fascist assault on democracy.

On the side of the insurgents were conservatives, monarchists, devout Catholics, and the far-right. The Popular Front could count on liberals, Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists. Spain became an arena for opposing political ideologies to hack and slash at

For Koestler and others like him, Spain was a straight fight between democracy and fascism. Left-wingers across the world supported the beleaguered Spanish republic. Thirty-five thousand foreign volunteers from fifty countries joined the International Brigades to crush the rebellion.

The volunteers may have believed they were fighting for democracy but the guiding hand behind the Brigades was the oppressive dictatorship of Joseph Stalins Soviet Union, also the source of 1,000 advisers, pilots, and technicians, and millions of pounds worth of war material. 'General Walter' was one of the few senior Red Army figures judged ideologically trustworthy enough by the paranoid Soviet dictator to talk tactics with the Republic.

The Pole was cool under fire, ignoring the bullets that flew past his head on the front line. 'A splendid man and a splendid soldier', said the American writer Ernest Hemingway. He only ignored the bullets because he was too drunk to notice them, said his enemies.

And Swierczewski had a lot of enemies. When a division crumbled during the May 1937 assault on Segovia, north of Madrid, the Pole ordered his machine-gunners to shoot anyone who retreated. It was rumoured he used his Walther PP pistol to execute shell-shocked men who refused to return to the front. Not even those behind the lines were safe. When Republican soldiers died in hospital, Walter accused the medics of murder and talked about Trotskyite terrorist rings. Hemingway may have liked him but many of his own men would happily have seen him dead.

The Pole's ruthlessness and a deliberately low profile saved him from the fate of more popular advisors. His contemporary Manfred Stern was a superspy in Soviet Military Intelligence who had earned his stripes stealing top-secret American tank plans in New York and advising Chinese Communists in their struggle against Chaing Kai-Shek. In Spain he became General Klber. His brilliant leadership of the International Brigades saved Madrid from Franco's assault in the early months of the war.

At the peak of his battlefield fame, Stern was recalled to a Moscow. Stalin sensed a rival. A show trial handed down fifteen years hard labour. The Saviour of Madrid died in a Siberian gulag.

Swierczewskis belief in the Soviet cause was unaffected by Sterns fate. In 1938 his Moscow masters decided this devout communist and experienced soldier was the right man to write a confidential report on the International Brigades. For once, it was not a propaganda effort. The Soviet authorities wanted the truth on their foreign volunteers. Were they reliable? What were their attitudes to the Spanish? What did they think they were fighting for? The Pole opened a bottle of vodka and got to work.

Politburo apparatchiks looking for evidence of international solidarity found the report hard reading. According to Swierczewski, the International Brigades commanders knew the exact casualty figures for their foreigner volunteers but had no idea how many Spaniards died fighting alongside them in the same battle. The volunteers themselves did not seem to care which country they were in; they treated the land of Cervantes and El Greco as little more than scenery for their own ideological war. Some even thought

The International Brigades, the report concluded, saw themselves as soldiers in a European Civil War. Spains job was to provide the setting for a titanic battle to the death between Communism and fascism.

*

If a copy of the Swierczewski report had been blown from a Kremlin desk by an icy blast of wind and carried across Europe to General Franco at his headquarters in Burgos, much of it would have struck the Nationalist leader as unpleasantly familiar. He knew the foreign troops in his own forces shared the Brigaders view of Spain. They also saw his country as a sun-drenched arena for their personal battles.

Seventy-eight thousand Moroccans joined Francos army, many believing that he would grant their nation independence after victory, something the Nationalist leader had no intention of doing. Eight thousand Portuguese crossed the border to enlist in the Spanish Foreign Legion, among them ex-members of the Blue Shirts, a fascist group too extreme even for Portuguese ruler Dr Antnio de Oliveira Salazar who disbanded them after a 1935 attempted coup dtat. Some former Blue Shirts planned to use their military experience back in Lisbon when the fighting was over.

Over three thousand volunteers from other nations joined the Nationalist insurgents, few knowing or caring much about Spain. Oxford graduate and Law student Peter Kemp believed that Francos defeat would be a disaster for Christianity, justice, and the security of Britain but understood nothing about the causes of the war or Spanish history. The 250 Frenchmen who served in the Jeanne D'Arc company of the Foreign Legion had an escape clause written into their contracts that allowed them to leave immediately a civil war broke out in their home country, something they believed inevitable. Spain was their training ground. White Russian exiles from Communism planned to sharpen their military skills in Franco's army before marching off to Moscow. The one hundred Polish volunteers who joined the Nationalists saw it as a religious battle that would provide invaluable experience for future wars with Germany or Russia. General Eoin O'Duffy, a watery-eyed alcoholic, led 700 members of his Irish Brigade to Spain as part of a campaign to become dictator of Ireland.

Not all of Francos foreigners were volunteers. Thirty-five thousand German conscripts served in the Legion Condor of aircraft, naval, and tank units. The Third Reich sent them to assure a quick victory for Franco. When that failed the Nazi military saw the training potential of a long war.