By the summer of 1938, Franco’s army was advancing rapidly on Madrid, which was something of a republican stronghold. As they moved eastwards towards Valencia, it became clear that the nationalists intended to encircle the Spanish capital. The response of the republican high command was to instigate an audacious raid back southwards over the River Ebro and into nationalist territory.
On 21 July the British Battalion were informed that they would be among an army of 80,000 republicans undertaking this forward surge. Their own aim was to assist in capturing the town of Gandesa, a strategically important settlement in the southwest of Catalonia. Over the subsequent days, Battalion members were divided into groups and transported by truck towards the banks of the Ebro. The final leg of their journey was to be completed on foot, though for some of the men this proved to be a somewhat trying task, as Tom Murray later recollected:
We were marching up a road during the night. Suddenly a blooming bomb went off, and this was Eddie Brown, who was overloaded with belts of ammunition, carrying a light machine-gun on his shoulder, and he had several hand grenades laced on his belt. He had laced one of them by the loop of the safety pin, and walking up there the blooming thing came out and dropped down and exploded. There were about 13 men injured. I was coming up a good distance back, then came this explosion. Some of them came running down and I says, ‘fascists? We’re at the wrong side of the Ebro for the fascists. It’s some of our own people. It’s a load of nonsense. There’s been an accident of some kind.’ But Eddie Brown walked on, he walked straight on, and this blooming thing was sizzling behind him and he was clear of the danger.27
Brown, Murray and their comrades lived to later laugh at the incident, though it had been a close call. On 25 July, republican troops began their mass-crossing of the Ebro on a fleet of small boats organised by the American Lincoln-Washington Battalion. As the soldiers moved stealthily towards the boats, they came under a barrage of fire from above. John Dunlop explained:
Members of the British Battalion offer a defiant salute at Marsa one month ahead of their participation in the crossing of the River Ebro. They are led by Bob Cooney of Aberdeen, now Battalion Commissar.
By the time we got down, the crossing was in full swing. We came down towards the Ebro through a dry watercourse with thick reed beds alongside it. We kept in close to the reed beds because we were under constant attack from one or two enemy aircraft. They were huge silver beasts and they were swooping down and machine-gunning anywhere they thought we might be.28
Despite this peril, the crossing of the Ebro was a monumental success. The precision and professionalism of the operation reflected the fact that Spain’s republican army, still with a large quotient of volunteer members, had come of age. That the British Battalion had played a part in the crossing and indeed in that coming of age made it all the sweeter for men like Eddie Brown, John Dunlop and Tom Murray. Also present at the Ebro was George Murray, who became convinced that the crossing represented a watershed in the war. He announced in a letter home:
The effect of our advance over the Ebro should be great for it certainly constitutes one of the biggest smashes in the eye that Mussolini and his company ever got and proves the vitality and capacity of the truly magnificent Spanish people. Two years of bitter front line fighting and wanton slaughter in the rear by Italian–German aviation have failed to destroy not only their spirit but also their resourcefulness and initiative.
His brother Tom was similarly glowing:
We have had the glorious privilege of participating in the remarkable victory of the crossing of the Ebro. I am sitting on a hill about 20 kilometres inside what was until a fortnight ago fascist territory. You may take it that the advance we have made is merely a prelude of more to come, although of course we are well aware that fascism will throw still more materiel and men into the struggle in the hope that by doing so this position will be retrieved. We have no illusions that the victory will be an easy one but on the other hand the recent success confirms with tremendous emphasis the power of the Spanish Republic and sends the morale of all lovers of freedom and justice shooting up to great heights.
An air of optimism now pervaded the British Battalion, though they had very little time to ruminate for too long on their achievements; from the moment the first crossers stepped onto the north bank of the Ebro, the nationalists unleashed an almighty volley of gunfire upon them. Steve Fullarton sketched out the chaotic, darkly comic scenes that ensued:
On arrival we came under fire and one of our number was wounded in the foot. He started calling for the enfermo but it was difficult to reach him without risk, when our sergeant called to him to ‘be quiet or you will give your position away’, the wounded man called back: ‘Well, if I haven’t already given my position away, then some bastard must’ve told them where I am.’
A day after their safe passage over the Ebro, the Battalion were back in offensive action as part of the republican section attempting to capture Hill 481, adjacent to Gandesa. Here they became stymied by a determined nationalist defensive operation and British casualties in particular quickly mounted during six days of intensive fighting in the mainland summer swelter of Spain. Dunlop spoke of the ill-fated storming of 481:
I can’t remember how many days we spent on the opposing hillside. We had to keep down below the skyline during the day. We were attacking across the valley and up the hill on the other side. Their position was very well defended and our attacks were continually being broken up not so much by fire that they were raining on us but the whole place was littered with grenades and trip wires in the undergrowth. I remember one occasion like that when these explosions started up. I threw myself on the ground and I was lifted bodily by the explosion of a grenade just a few feet in front of my nose. I was extremely lucky that I got no other damage apart from some scratches to my legs and ankles. It really was a hellish place to be. I think that was just about the time when I felt the lowest in all my life.
As well as facing danger when on manoeuvres, at Hill 481 Brigaders were afflicted by the constant menace of nationalist fire even when static. Having been wounded and hospitalised, Steve Fullarton wrote from his sickbed with a description of nightly events:
Steady fighting was carried on all the time. Each night there would be some fun. The fascists would think they saw or heard something and fire at it. Then someone else would fire where the shot came from. The machine-guns would open up, then the trench mortars, then the artillery, all over nothing. Sometimes it would happen two or three times in one night, usually lasting one hour.
The action frequently took a less remote course; Fullarton continued with an account of the paralysing personal and collective effects of fierce hill-to-hill combat:
As the battle calmed down, I got up to our lieutenant who had been wounded with shrapnel in the leg and a bullet through the arm. I put a tourniquet on his arm and he told me to find cover until dark and then get him back to our position. I saw a shell hole close by and was just getting into it when I got it in the stomach. Things were quietening down now and many were calling for the ‘sanituro’ and their ‘madre’. The fascists were answering them and kidding them, if not by mouth with machine-guns. When I saw this was happening, after I got hit I lay still and kept quiet so as not to give my position away. While I lay there waiting for darkness to come I kept alert in case the Moors would come out to bayonet the wounded.
Convinced he would not last the night, Fullarton pulled the pins from his final two grenades, ‘one for them, and one for me – I preferred it that way rather than let them get me.’ Somehow, though, he managed to stay conscious and crawl his way back to company base. ‘The bullet made an ugly hole,’ he wrote from hospital, ‘but I will soon be OK again.’
Fullarton was one of the lucky ones. Tom Murray was witness to the appalling after effects of an incident in which three Scottish Brigaders were pummelled by a round of anti-tank fire:
I found George Jackson lying stretched out. George came fr
om Cowdenbeath and I think he was one of the recruits that I got to go with me when I went out there. Charlie McLeod of Aberdeen was lying with his head on George Jackson’s chest. And Malcolm Smith was lying about a yard or so away. All were dead by the blast of this anti-tank shell.29
In their grief, Charlie McLeod’s family contacted Murray demonstrating typical support for the cause: ‘We are proud of our son and brother, he gave his life for what he believed in. We only hope his sacrifice was not in vain.’ Murray replied in stirring terms, stating that McLeod was one of many Brigaders who had left him emboldened rather than deflated by what he had witnessed. He declared:
I returned from Spain feeling that I had seen demonstrated the finest qualities that human beings possess, and have more respect than ever for the majesty of the human being.
In spite of the hardships faced, morale among the members of the British Battalion remained fairly high in this, their final summer in Spain. Prior to his hospitalisation, Steve Fullarton had enjoyed aspects of his time next to and around the River Ebro. There, strength and even joy were knitted out of adversity. In 2008, he was still particularly proud of the bivouacs (named ‘Chabolas’ after their location) he and his fellow Scottish Brigaders constructed ahead of their crossing the river:
We stopped at Chabola Valley. When we were told we’d be staying there for a few days, Dusty Miller wasted no time in cutting down a tree to make a Chabola. He cut this tree down and made a Chabola with the leaves and the earth: I’ve an idea that it’s still there yet, still existing, because it was ‘Clyde Built’, more or less.
It was in this Chabola community that Fullarton’s friend Jimmy Glavin, of Govan, caused a stir when dispatched to collect supplies:
At night time before we went to the Ebro, we used to have a fire and singsong at that place. They would get a big jar of wine from the village at the end – Torre de Fontana Bella – so somebody would have to go for it and a bag of nuts, hazelnuts. It came to Jimmy’s turn to go into the village one night with somebody else. Jimmy and the other man, off they went to the village. They took a long time to get back, we were getting anxious about them. Eventually he came back, drunk as can be. Somebody got on to him, ‘Where have you been?’ ‘I’ve been in the village for wine and nuts.’ By this time, we’d picked up the jar. ‘You’ve been drinking it!’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it was heavy!’
As the campaign at Hill 481 continued, such revelry receded as the besieged British Battalion were forced backwards, eventually settling on 1 August at the ominously-named Hill 666, on the Sierra Pandols mountain range. There, they were put into reserve, and could do nothing about a nationalist onslaught that finally put paid to any remaining hopes the republican army had of capturing Gandesa. On 24 August, the British relieved the fatigued Abraham Lincoln Battalion in action on 666, which proved to be another ruinous sweep of engagements with the enemy. On 9 September, the Battalion was transferred to Hill 356, close to Sandesco, which, incredibly, given the decimation in the ranks, it managed to capture. In a letter to his wife Janet, Tom Murray detailed the surroundings in which the British found themselves at Hill 666, though his words were applicable to all three of the battle mounds they operated on in this period:
Tom Murray, Labour Councillor in Edinburgh, Commissar of the British Battalion’s machine-gun company in Spain, pauses pensively amidst the ‘monotonous rattle of avion’ at Hill 666.
It may interest you if I mention some of the things seen, heard and felt by me as I sit on this hilltop. First of all, the noise. Machine-guns with incessant rattle, the monotonous rattle of avion, deafening explosions, some close by and some distant, or aerial bombs, the sharp explosion of trench mortar bombs and the terrific explosions of heavy artillery shells, the whole racket becoming a blend. The area is pitted with shell holes. Along to my immediate left is the new grave of an English comrade we buried this morning. To my right a group of comrades are calmly opening fish and meat tins for their midday meals, laughing and joking in the most normal manner, though well aware of the most exceptional circumstances in which they are located. In a little valley in front of me lie three wounded comrades on stretchers awaiting evacuation to the clearing station at the foot of the hill. They require water and we gladly part with our meagre supply for their succour. Wafted up from no-man’s-land is the stench from the bodies of dead fascists.
Though the Battalion’s tenure on Hill 666 was largely a defensive one, they did launch one injurious assault upon the nationalists, as John Dunlop recalled:
We made this disastrous night attack and we were driven back. It was just because we didn’t know what the devil we were supposed to be doing. There wasn’t a sufficient preparation for the thing beforehand. The bombs started exploding all around us and it was a bewildering experience.
Dunlop felt that this was the moment when the nationalists’ superior military training and equipment proved decisive. The ravaged British Battalion could do very little against the technologically advanced German weaponry.
Their subsequent victory at Sandesco on 7 September represented an astonishing triumph of will. With renewed confidence the Battalion, or what remained of it, moved on to replace the desolated Polish Dombrowski Brigade at nearby Sierra Lavall de la Torre. In the third week of September, as the soldiers of the Battalion anxiously awaited directives on what their role was to be, news filtered through that republican prime minister Juan Negrin had announced to the League of Nations that all foreign volunteers in the Spanish army were to be withdrawn. His hope was that the League would accordingly pressurise Franco, Hitler and Mussolini into similar action.
At Sierra Lavall, the British Battalion were asked to perform one final task a day after Negrin’s proclamation of 21 September, as Tommy Bloomfield explained:
When the Battalion was withdrawn from the Ebro for repatriation, Sam Wild paraded us and called for volunteers to go back up to the fighting line for 48 hours to give the republican forces time to bring up fresh troops. Needless to say, all the lads went back in. That was a hard decision to make knowing it meant you could die instead of going home.
The Battalion was overpowered at Sierra Lavall, and many of Bloomfield’s comrades were never to make that trip home, the tragedy of their deaths magnified by the fact that they were in touching distance of peace and safety. The men were placed in a location that invited swaths of lethal crossfire, and their trenches were eventually overrun, though many Brigaders remained in place to the last. Over the three days of fighting around the time of Negrin’s announcement, more than 200 members of the British Battalion were killed, wounded or reported missing. It was a brutally sour note with which to go out on for this most intrepid of Battalions. After a gallant and dogged resistance, the Spanish-only republican army was subsequently pushed backwards towards Madrid, and their eventual defeat began to appear inevitable. The optimism of the days following the crossing of the Ebro seemed a very distant memory indeed.
CHAPTER 15
Far from Perfect?
Criticism and Dissent
I can say from personal knowledge and experience that any member of the Brigade who was unaware that the International Brigades had been organised by the comintern and were Communist-directed from beginning to end must have been singularly unperceptive.
Hamish Fraser, Saltcoats
WHETHER IN CONTEMPORARY allegations made by the Independent Labour Party and United Socialist Movement, or in post-conflict analyses, questions have been raised over the popular image of the International Brigades as heroic and innocent defenders of democracy and freedom. Central to this is the level of influence upon the Brigades of the Soviet Union; the ILP, USM and many others have portrayed the Brigades as a mere army of the comintern, their every move dictated by Moscow. Indeed, it was a decree by the comintern on 26 July 1936 that led to the formation of the Brigades. Additionally, the Soviet supply of materiel did buy Moscow substantial sway upon Spain’s republican administration, and through its hold on the Brigades the Communist
Party was able to achieve a level of importance it did not possess at the start of the war.
What could be perceived as manifestations of this influence were detectable in the undertakings of several Scottish Brigaders, though most of them were already committed communists before travelling to Spain; that is, their stated beliefs were not the slavish responses of Muscovite puppets, but rather the independent conclusions drawn by intelligent men. If anything, the influence of Moscow on Scottish Brigaders was greater before they arrived in Spain. Indeed six volunteers (George Aitken, Bob Cooney, Thomas Duncan, James Hyndman, Peter Kerrigan and James Marshall) had, between 1926 and 1937, attended the prestigious Lenin School in the city, and three of the men were to become political commissars in Spain.
Once in Spain, Brigaders frequently espoused positive opinions of the USSR, though again, these were usually views they carried with them from Scotland rather than adopted under pressure once abroad. There was, too, a clearly pro-Soviet, or at least anti-POUM, groundswell of opinion following the disturbances in Barcelona of May 1937.
Tom Murray, who labelled the ussr ‘the greatest friend of the Spanish people’, referred to the POUM as ‘provocateurs’ guilty of ‘nefarious intrigues and treasonable conduct.’ Peter Kerrigan was outraged when he caught wind of a rumour that poum figures involved in the Barcelona fighting would be exonerated, writing to Harry Pollitt: ‘I have found that there is a likelihood of them being tried in secret with a view to the acquittal of the accused. I cannot believe it and am pursuing the matter.’
This ire was extended to the ILP, who were viewed as accessories to the crimes of the POUM. Maryhill Brigader Walter Gregory summarised the thoughts of many Brigaders when he wrote to Kerrigan that ‘the only actions the ILP ever did was to engineer along with the POUM the rising in our rear at Barcelona.’ It is difficult to argue that Communist Brigaders were not swayed in their views on this issue by the official Party line.
Homage to Caledonia Page 19