Book review Fighting for Spain: The International Brigades in the Civil War, 1936–1939, by Alexander Clifford. Pen and the Sword Military, 2020. 264pp. The People’s Army in the Spanish Civil War: A Military History of the Republic and International Brigades, 1936-1939, by Alexander Clifford. Pen and the Sword Military, 2020. 414pp.
Reviewed by Richard Baxell
Campesino, was passed a map of the Brunete battlefield: “Without looking at it, El Campesino spread it out on the table, face down, to serve as a tablecloth.” Clifford’s assessment of the subsequent fighting in Aragon and Teruel is just as critical. Both saw a disastrous loss of troops, matériel, and morale—a loss that Franco was able to capitalize on in the spring of 1938, fatally cleaving the Republic in two. While The People’s Army limits itself to one year of the war, Fighting for Spain follows a more established format, tracing the experiences of the foreign volunteers through the course of the conflict. It begins with a familiar overview of the composition of the Brigades and what lay behind the volunteers’ decisions to go to Spain, before turning to an evaluation of their performance as soldiers. Clifford pushes back against some recent criticisms, reiterating that the 11 and 15 International Brigades in particular (together with General Lister’s famed Communist troops) were not only the finest units in the Republican Army but, at their best, equal to any of Franco’s troops. Yes, the Internationals suffered horrendous casualties—but this was not because they were ineffective or because they were sacrificed as “cannon fodder,” but because they were used as shock troops, thrown into the heart of battle.
Nonetheless, Clifford is surely right that the Republican People’s Army “will not go down in the annals of history as one of the world’s great fighting forces.” As Peter Carroll has observed, raw courage and a belief in the essential “rightness” of the cause “could not overcome inexperience, poor coordination, and superior military force.” Yet the Republicans managed to fight on for nearly three years, even though many observers had written off their chances during the first months of the war. Why did the Republic manage to hold on, when so much was against it? Franco’s conservative tactics and obsession with the capture and control of territory certainly played a part, but, Clifford argues, so did the fact that the Republican Army was actually a better fighting force ew people will look back on 2020 with much fondness, than some historians believe. Despite all the obstacles it faced, he but the year did at least provide some solace for those writes, “the Republic developed from being defended by peasants with an interest in the Spanish Civil War. Giles Tremlett’s armed with swords and shotguns to having a regular fighting comprehensive account of the International Brigades was force capable of launching bold combined-arms offensives using published in November, followed shortly afterwards by Emmet modern military hardware and infiltration tactics.” O’Connor and Barry McLoughlin’s study of the Irish volunteers. His insightful assessment of the Republic’s military capacity Pipping them both to the finishing line, though, were two is likely to be of interest not just to military historians. His studies of the Republican Army by Alexander Clifford. Both are analysis of the shortcomings of the brigadas mixtas, on which essentially military histories; the first, The People’s Army in the the Republican army was based, is particularly illuminating. Spanish Civil War is a study of the army as a whole, while the Nevertheless, both these volumes are essentially popular military second, Fighting for Spain, zooms in on the International Brigades. history books, not academic studies. Though the author makes I imagine most readers will go for one or the other, rather than some use of memoir material (in English) and refers to the both, for there is inevitably some degree of overlap. Nonetheless, RGASPI files cited in Ronald Radosh’s controversial Spain they are different books in terms of content and approach. Betrayed, he nonetheless relies primarily on secondary sources. The drawback with this approach is that errors or oversights in The People’s Army analyzes the role of the Republican army during previous works can slip through unchallenged. In this instance, three offensives in 1937: the battle of Brunete in July, the attack Clifford greatly overstates the number of Internationals shot for on Belchite during the Aragon offensive of the autumn, and the desertion. He also repeats the longstanding—and unfounded— attack on the remote provincial capital of Teruel in the winter. For assertion that the French Communist and Commander of the Clifford, the crucial exchange was at Brunete when, he suggests, International Brigades, André Marty, was personally responsible “the war stood at a crossroads.” Clifford’s summary of what went for the execution of five hundred volunteers. Fortunately, he wrong during the battle chimes with other studies, blaming avoids some of the more obvious pitfalls, such as parroting the “inadequate training, a poorly executed plan and a lack of tactical cold-war denunciation of Republican Spain as a Soviet puppet success and timing from commanders.” As a telling example of the state. As he writes, “it is self-evident that the volunteers’ fight in shortcomings of the military commanders, the author recounts Spain was an attempt to preserve Republican democracy rather how the Republican General Valentine González, known as El than establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
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September 2021 THE VOLUNTEER 19
