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Adrian Pole, "Making Antifascist War: The International Brigades' Transnational Encounters with Civil-War Spain, 1936-1939" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
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Dr. Adrian Pohl
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Dr. Adrian Pohl
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:30]
Ryan Tripp
Welcome everyone. This is Ryan Tripp. I'm your host today for new books in military history. On the show we have Adrian Pohl. Dr. Adrian Pohl, author of Making Anti Fascist the International Brigades Transnational Encounters with Civil War Spain, 1936-1939. The book is published by University of Cambridge Press. Dr. Hull is currently a teacher in international relations, politics and history at the University of Libre. Dr. Pohl, welcome to the show.
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Dr. Adrian Pohl
Many thanks for having me, Ryan. And congratulations on your pronunciation of one of the harder English cities to pronounce. The University of Lou.
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Ryan Tripp
Yes, in away from the phonetics. Okay, so first off, tell us a little bit about yourself and your path to research and researching and writing this book. I thought it compelling that you're treating the International Brigades as travelers. And we have organizations like the Commissariat the Right in the International with the International Brigades. I thought it was pretty compelling.
- [02:51]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
Well, it seems to me, Ryan that travel and war go hand in hand. And they really always have. I mean, you can go back as far as the historical record itself, ancient poems, stories, right up to cult classics like one of my favourite TV shows, Bit of a Guilty Pleasure Shop, starring Sean Bean, in which travel and war are really companions. And what makes war interesting for the viewers and consumers of these products is the fact that the through these soldiers, they get to experience new cultures, new people, new religions, new ideas. And what better place to explore this relationship between fighting and traveling, between waging war and encountering new places, than Spain during its Civil War of 1936-1939. It's probably surprising, therefore, that many of the books written about the International Brigades, this famous fighting force, perhaps the most famous foreign fighting force in history, don't really consider Spain all that much. You've got people all over the world coming into contact with the Spanish Civil War for the first time through the International Brigade. Yet the books they're reading and the documentaries they're watching really treat this country as a backdrop to the far more important business of fighting fascism on foreign shores. These foreign fighters, all 35,000 of them who came from over 50 different states, are treated like foreign islands operating into themselves in this country, Spain, which was at war with itself. So what I wanted to do was put Spain back in the picture of the great and familiar, perhaps too familiar, anti fascist epic of the International Brigades, rather than treating Spain as a backdrop, treat it as absolutely intrinsic to their experience of war, rather than treating their encounters with the people, places and politics of Spain as an interesting, if incidental, sideshow to their anti fascist war, treating it again as incidental to their experience of that war.
- [04:47]
Ryan Tripp
Okay, so let's get in the book, shall we? How and why did the International Brigades establish, and this is quoting you, political unity, military discipline and a centralized command structure. Didn't language and translation pose difficulties?
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Dr. Adrian Pohl
So this is something that my supervisor, since this book came out of, my PhD, pulled me up on quite a lot, is we really have to be careful who we're talking about when we talk about the International Brigades. Often when we talk about the International Brigades, what we're really talking about are those 35,000 anti fascist soldiers. But just as often, we should perhaps be talking about the commissars. The commissars were sort of political leaders in the International Brigades. They have their commanders who are responsible for teaching them the art of war. But the commissars were kind of there to teach them the art of anti fascists, fascist wars. Specifically Making sure that they retained morale, knew what they were fighting for, how they were fighting it. The commissars were there to constantly remind the volunteers themselves of who they are and what they were doing in Spain. What was their reason for fighting in Spain. Now, most of the work done on the Insatian Brigade implies that the most important thing the Insatia brigades did was fight on the front lines. Battles like Jaraman, Guadarrama, the Ebro. Yet as a matter of fact, within months of them coming into existence, the Incas brigade's rationale was quite more significant than that, quite more ambitious than that. The commissars of the Incas brigades saw their responsibility as not simply putting men on the front lines, but teaching Spaniards the art of war as well, acting as a role model for the loyalist war effort, which was fighting, of course, against a nationalist rebel insurgency led by General Francisco Franco. More than being foreign bodies on the front lines, there were foreign bodies who could demonstrate the art of fighting a modern war, the kind of war necessary to defeat the industrial warfare being waged by General Franco, supported of course, by the Condor Legion, that is pilots sent over by Hitler and by around 70,000 Italian troops sent, courtesy of Benito Mussolini. So the international gaze like to differentiate themselves as being particularly unified and particularly disciplined. Now, historians might dispute the extent to which that was the case, but certainly that was their rationale for existing. And as fewer and fewer foreign volunteers actually arrived to Spanish shores, that additional rationale for being in Spain, for remaining in service, became all the more important. Language and translation perhaps posed some difficulties, but the Intas brigades had a really vibrant print culture. So almost every battalion, in some cases companies, had their own newspapers. Again, really instilling the troops with this message about discipline, about remaining unified politically and militarily, often inspired by transnational communism. Iconography of bare breasted soldiers, for example, launching towards the enemy in unison, thrusting their bayonets into the flabby chest of personified fascist ogres. So my main contention is that when we talk about the International brigades, we should really be talking about them as not just men thrown together arbitrarily on the front lines, but men who really felt they had something unique to contribute to the loyalist war effort.
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Ryan Tripp
Okay, so you not really alluded to, but explicitly address the print culture and also sort of a transnational communist culture. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? In the context of music, lectures, et cetera. And that despite volunteer nationalist sentiments, how did this transnational communist culture cast these goals as positive developments in the formation of the Popular army, or what was called the Copy Army.
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Dr. Adrian Pohl
Sure, sure. I think the Communist connection can't be understated. Having said that, it's sometimes been overstated, but perhaps the general public like to think of the International Brigades as ordinary men. Sometimes historians explicitly describe them as such, but they weren't all that ordinary. I mean, they might have been 36, around 36,000 in number, and they might have come from, as I said, Over 50 different states, but they had an awful lot in common. They were all men, most obviously, many of them were workers, were proletarians, but above all, most of them, not all of them, but most of them were communists. And they were bound by shared assumptions about the world, shared assumptions about war, shared assumptions about revolution. Some of them had been to the Lenin School in Moscow, where they were trained again in all of these communist precepts about discipline and where they would have already been familiar with that iconography I mentioned, emphasizing the importance of martial unity and discipline, precepts, of course, advanced by Trotsky and Russia's own civil war. So I think that Communist connection is really important to keep in mind because it reminds us that the Inter Brigades, again, weren't ordinary and weren't random. They were unified by certain assumptions about the world and certain assumptions about how the war war in Spain should be waged. Assumptions which often saw them straw manning other people fighting the Loyalist war effort, like anarchists. They saw in the anarchists chaos, a lack of discipline. Which tells you more about them, the International Brigades and the people they were describing their own love of discipline and order and the belief that they were bringing these to Spain in particular.
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Ryan Tripp
Okay, what were. Why were there strange, very kind of, I guess, strained relations between the International Brigades and what you describe as, like, libertarian in quotes, our anarchists and Trotskyite allies. You already alluded to this, but if you could elaborate.
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Dr. Adrian Pohl
My temptation, right, is to say, because it was a civil war. And I think this is all too easily forgotten in looking at the International Brigades. The International Brigade saw the Spanish Civil War not as a civil war at all. In fact, a famous social scientist said that civil wars in general don't like to speak their own names. And the testimonies of the International Brigades are really good evidence of that. The Spanish Civil War wasn't, as the International Brigade, quite as clear cut as the Spanish people, quote, unquote, fighting a fascist invasion. I mean, there are elements of that, I won't deny it, but it was much more complicated than that. The Loyalist Coalition contained all sorts of people with all sorts of ideas about how the war should be fought on the one hand and what it should be fought for on the other hand. And the International Brigades were really just one group amongst many who have their own vision of the Spanish Civil War and their own answer to those two questions which almost automatically brought them into conflict, at least ideologically, with some of the very same groups and people they were fighting alongside to defeat what they saw as the fascist, the fascist menace. Most obvious amongst those groups were the anarchists who I mentioned already. Most of the volunteers of the International Gays didn't meet many anarchists yet they all had very strong opinions about the anarchists, strong and not entirely fair opinions about the anarchists. The anarchists prided themselves on taking a sort of bottom up approach to the war that was easily characterized by the Integral Regades as a reflection of Spaniards sort of natural childishness, an anarchic character. I think the anarchists themselves would have seen it as an important and novel approach to war, a war that they saw as a war of the people which should be fought from the bottom up. But the intash brigades often saw it differently. And again, I think those generalizations tell you as much about the intash brigades as the people they were commenting on. Their own view that the Spanish people desperately needed their help, their expertise, in the view of volunteers from Britain, for example, all the more so because Spaniards hadn't participated in the First World War. So there was always the potential for tensions to arise. Crucially, however, I think the commissars were always very, very keen to make sure that those tensions didn't get out of hand because if they did it would deplete morale. They encouraged the volunteers of the International Brigades to involve anarchists in their anti fascist war effort. After all, a key communist message at this period was that unity would win the war. But let's not forget that was always to be unity on the communists own terms and certainly on the International Brigade's own terms. So many of the volunteers continued to see the anarchists as perhaps dreamers, as perhaps impractical. And many anarchists in Spain were aware of this and were equally suspicious of the International Brigade in turn who they associated with communism and sometimes even a communist plot to take over the war effort.
- [13:36]
Ryan Tripp
This is a question how did the ideological and material cultural integration of inexperienced Spanish civilians into the International Brigades, how did it transform these civilian conscripts into citizen soldiers? And I think the reason I'm. One of the reasons I'm asking this question is that there seemed to be a Lot of uncertainty and skepticism in your book Commissars and the Foreign Volunteers as to whether this, again, this could be accomplished.
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Dr. Adrian Pohl
I think the question of how successful the interrogates integrated conscripts is an important and relevant and potentially contentious and controversial one. But I think it's worth pointing out before that just how little has been said or written about those conscripts. Everyone loves to talk about the International Brigades, but when they do so, are they really talking about the International Brigades or are they talking about the foreign volunteers within the ranks of the International Brigade? Some people might see this as nitpicking, but as a matter of fact, Spaniards, both conscripts and volunteers, made up the majority of individuals within the ranks of the International Brigades by 1937. Don't forget, they were only brought into being in late 1936. By 1938, when the volunteers still had over half a year of warfare ahead of them, only 30% of the international Brigades were actually foreign. I think it's important to remember the presence of those Spaniards, not only because of their numbers, but because of their importance to the Ansacho Brigades in the eyes of its own leaders. As fewer and fewer volunteers came from abroad again, the commissars and the leaders and commanders of the International Brigades had to continue making a case for why they should exist at all. So they reinvent themselves. They say we're not just here to put foreign manpower on the front lines, but we're here actually to operate as a gigantic anti fascist training school for the Spanish people in arms. They converted themselves from a force for the Spanish people into a force of the Spanish people. Now, regardless of how successful we might conclude they were in this mission, I think that mission itself is really quite striking, not the least because it's been almost entirely forgotten by historians. How did they try to achieve this sort of anti fascist civilizing mission? Well, they used speeches, they used literacy classes, they taught these predominantly peasant conscripts how to write and encouraged them to write letters explaining in their own terms what it meant to belong to the Insatia Brigades, what it meant to be an anti fascist, what it meant to fight alongside these foreign volunteers. That was the aspiration. What was the outcome? Well, there's not a great deal of testimony from these Spanish conscripts. They're not quite as romantic or interesting to historians or the public as the foreign volunteers. They didn't choose to participate in a great anti fascist epic. They didn't choose to participate in another country's war. The testimonies really are very, very Scarce, but there's enough of them to show that there were varied responses from these Spaniards. The lesson to be learned here is don't assume anything. Don't assume that because they were conscripts, they really didn't identify with their new military unit. But also don't assume really that they were unenthusiastic. Enthusiastic gets really quite complicated. I can give you a specific example, Ryan, of a fellow called Jose Garcia Anton. He was a young Spaniard, an upper class Spaniard living in the equally upper class district of Salamanca in Madrid. When the Spanish Civil War broke out. Madrid was quickly taken by the loyalists. And him recognizing that he was outwardly a bourgeois and inwardly a self declared fascist, he was at great risk. So he barricaded himself up in his uncle and his aunt's house. Eventually though, he was lo and behold conscripted into the International Brigades. His reaction to this is really, really surprising though, because he ended up identifying with his new military unit. He ended up being promoted to a interpreter and later a commissar, which seems extraordinary considering that most of the commissars were foreign communists. And here again we have a self declared fascist. His comrades loved him as well. They called him Commissario Pepe. He was a hit with the foreigners. Of course, they didn't know that he perhaps sympathized politically more with the other side. I think it's an important, if small, if anecdotal reminder of the really complicated and varied responses we can probably expect from the Spanish conscripts who were so fundamental to the incessant brigade's image and ability to fight on the front lines, and yet have been perhaps slightly unceremoniously forgotten by historians and the wider public alike.
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Ryan Tripp
So to tack onto that question, and this is a very, very potentially probably brief question, can you address one, mixed battalions and then two, you deploy kind of a concept of emulation? I mean, you already kind of addressed identification, but if you could just elaborate just a little bit on those two.
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Dr. Adrian Pohl
Yeah, sure. Well, if the incest brigades were going to be a school for the anti fascist nation in arms or the anti fascist people in ar, it needed teachers. And those teachers were going to be the foreign volunteers themselves, who were increasingly referred to as veterans, even though very often they'd only had a few months of military experience behind them. Emulation isn't my word. It was a word used in the print culture of the Intash brigades at the time to explain the new relationship that the commissars expected to emerge between these Spanish conscripts and Sometimes volunteers and their foreign counterparts. Their foreign counterparts were to quite literally explain the art of anti fascist war, both in its literal techniques and also in its politics of anti fascist unity. Anti fascist discipline. Pen portraits of Spanish conscripts began to appear in the International Brigade's press in order to convey this sense that the Spaniards were willing to learn the art of anti fascist war and sending the not too subtle message to the foreign volunteers that they might well get frustrated with the lack of experience from the Spaniards, but they shouldn't give up trying to teach them the art of anti fascist war. I can actually read out, perhaps Ryan, some of these pen portraits. And the reason I'm keen to do so is because the names of the Spaniards are so often forgotten. I think it's really important and valuable to just remind ourselves that they did exist. We're told by one publication, for example, about comrades who gave an example. I quote, now through their conduct and discipline in the cavalry unit we have Mariano Jop, I quote, an observant and disciplined worker, the essential and necessary base for the good organization of our young army, Blas Kinones, whose conscience of an anti fascist fighter is quite high, and Juan Ortiz, who carries out orders because he knows that again I quote, it is not the time to dispute them, but rather execute them and get to work on them. So again we're seeing how the military culture and values of the International Brigades are being conveyed to these Spaniards and to the foreign volunteers alike. Waging antifascist war once again meant more than putting men on the line. It meant creating a sense of unity, a sense of discipline, a sense of inspiration and purpose for these Spanish conscripts in particular.
- [20:56]
Ryan Tripp
All right.
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Dr. Adrian Pohl
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- [21:40]
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- [21:45]
Ryan Tripp
International Brigades conceptions of the causes and I guess the direct you mentioned direct action, the conduct of the war against, I guess, the, quote, global fascist offensive, and this kind of the war against the violent reactionary invasion. How did this all contribute to. You mentioned solidarity at one point and then abstract solidarity. We can address that later. But how did, again, the global fascist, dispensive and violent reactionary invasion and perceptions of this contribute to notions of solidarity or solidarity itself?
- [22:22]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
If there's anything that anyone knows about the International Brigades, it's that they fought fascism. That's what the memorials all around the world tell passersby, thousands of them every day. It's often used as an answer, isn't it? Why did the International Brigades come into existence? They wanted to fight fascism. For me, that's not an answer. For me, that's a question in its own right, something which might seem a little bit less provocative, a little bit less surprising in our own times, where what constitutes a fascist and what constitutes fascism is really present in contemporary debates about society and politics. It's not my intention to be provocative when I say that the International Brigades made fascists as much as they fought them. I don't want to deny that there are very good grounds to define Franco's military effort as a fascist military effort and his incipient state as a. A fascist state. Mussolini was very keen that it became a fascist state and made quite deliberate and concerted efforts to see this outcome. Why do I say that they made fascists, then? I say that they made fascists because a lot of the people they were fighting wouldn't have used that term to describe themselves. Some of them almost certainly would have. Many of them wouldn't. So we need to grapple with what made these people fascists. For the 35,000 foreigners, foreign volunteers of the International Brigades, many of them, as I said, were communists. For them, fascism had a distinct political meaning, a meaning increasingly conveyed by the Comintern and by speeches by its leader, Dimitrov. It was associated with decadent capitalism, but it was also invested with all sorts of ugly human traits. Fascism bullied people. Fascism quite literally bombed people. Above all, it bombed what the International Brigade saw as the Spanish people. And here, once again, we're using a term that's perhaps thrown about all too casually by admirers of the Insatia Brigades, but needs to be picked apart. The Spanish people was a concept politicians, activists, indeed historians had been fighting over ever since it was invented by Liberals in the 19th century in Spain. As a matter of fact, around the time of the Napoleonic Wars, Spain was at war with itself. As far as the intelligades were concerned. Nonetheless, Spain was a country being attacked by foreign fascist forces. The Spanish people were under threat by a global offensive being led by Hitler and Mussolini, whose help, material help for Franco, of course, absolutely convinced them that Spain was a frontline in that global fascist offensive. That's why party politics really wasn't important at all for the Insatia Brigades. Franco didn't have to be a card carrying fascist for them to regard him as a fascist. And this was an impression which was reinforced once they were in Spain, either through confirmation bias or other means. They very much saw the Spanish people being attacked by fascism. Many of them were completely unaware, for example, of the fact that there were Spaniards fighting in Franco's ranks, Spaniards fighting willingly and happily in some cases in Franco's ranks. Unsurprisingly, they preferred to focus on the Italians and Germans who had gone to Spain to fight on behalf, as they saw it, of that fascist offensive.
- [25:52]
Ryan Tripp
Right, so next up we have on one side of things the preset of panantoudat, and then we also have racial stereotyping. I thought that was not so much, I guess, not surprising to me. And then on the other, we have this very notion of impoverished laborers supporting Franco's nationalists. How are these all reconciled or not reconciled?
- [26:23]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
Volunteer is a word that comes up again and again in my book. And it's because it comes up again and again in the International Brigade's culture throughout the war, including in their newspapers, thousands of pages of which have survived in the archives. Volontav perhaps translates best as will. As far as the Ancestral Gates were concerned, they had it. You know, they were fighting consciously, willingly against fascism. Volantad was not something they thought the other side had. They thought that the troops fighting for Franco weren't only fighting out of coercion or fear, but could only possibly have been fighting out of coercion, fear, or because they'd been misled, because fascism didn't align with their interests. Fascism was intrinsically against the working classes. Fascism could only succeed as far as they were concerned, by tricking the working classes into aligning with its goals once again. This is a way in which the intestine brigades unintentionally tell us more about themselves than the people they claim to be describing. Historians have done really good work showing that even many of the North African soldiers brought in by Franco to fight for his war efforts, and of course many of the Italians weren't cajoled necessarily, but fought consciously and willingly, as they saw it, against not a global fascist offensive. But a global red atheist offensive. And I think it's really important to remember that because it shows us that soldiers fighting on both sides had agency. As far as the incexual brigades were concerned, though, that was impossible. And whenever they did find out about Spaniards fighting for Franco, they said, well, the only possible solution is they didn't really know what they were fighting for, or they didn't really hold the Francoist cause dear to their hearts. That's when they acknowledged the presence of Spaniards in Franco's ranks. They much preferred, as I said, to concentrate on the presence of North Africans, Italians and Germans, for the obvious reason that they could be much more easily depicted as shock troops for their global fascist offensive. As far as racial stereotyping goes, before I forget, I think that ties in with this kind of deprivation of agency. The interchanges were progressives in many ways, but their language and attitudes towards Franco's North African soldiers was anything but. Certainly they had a reputation for violence. There were reports of rape, there were reports of really violent behaviour as these North African troops made their way from southern Spain throughout the peninsula. Yet I would say the International Brigade's own attitudes towards these soldiers weren't based on fact or evidence, but rather racist stereotypes and storytelling. And that's reflected in many of their testimonies where they will explicitly say they said all sorts of awful things about the Moors or I heard many awful things said about them. So these soldiers were really depicted in the most unpleasant of terms.
- [29:17]
Ryan Tripp
Okay, so this is kind of a. Kind of a pretty, not so much prodigious question, but a big question. How did distances from their respective homes. So how did distances from the International Brigade's perspective, respective places of provenance, the normalization of killing fastest soldiers as well as prisoners as kind of a job well done. And this kind of hatred for individual fascist troops, how. How did this all weave a common thread that outweigh, on the other hand, the variants that you discuss and reasons for deploying lethal force?
- [29:58]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
So we've established that the International Brigade went to Spain to fight fascism. A complicated and contentious statement, I would say, in its own right. But even if we accept it, which I do, fighting fascism is very, very different to fighting human beings. And I think that this is something that's been perhaps sidelined in the historiography. I don't know if it's been done deliberately. I don't think there's a conspiracy, but nonetheless, I think it's seen as an inconvenient question at best, or perhaps one that detracts from the way we should remember the International Brigades as sort of heroic soldiers. I think as historians, it's a question worth exploring. I think the lack of attention to the use of lethal forces is extraordinary. The lack of attention is perhaps there in the testimonies of the International Brigades themselves. There are hundreds of them, possibly thousands of them. But whenever killing is mentioned, it tends to be sort of integrated within broader narratives, broader stories of maneuvers on the front lines, of storming a hill or going over the top of a trench. It's represented, in other words, as another mundane aspect of war. It's not mundane to me. I think that the moral dilemma that all combatants face when they are themselves faced with an enemy soldier is not lessened by the fact that they had a clear anti fascist mission. And here we get to that complicated topic of combat motivation. It's well known that what motivates soldiers to enlist for war and to remain fighting on the front lines can be very different to the things that motivate them to quite literally fight in the moment, let alone to use lethal force in the moment. And the Incas Brigades are absolutely no exception. They went to Spain to fight fascism, but in the moment itself, they killed or engaged enemy soldiers to avenge fallen comrades, to save themselves for a whole range of complicated and important reasons. Their emotional reactions to using lethal violence were just as varied as their actual uses of force, too. Some enjoyed it. A really good example of this is perhaps Fred Copeman. He was a British volunteer. And the audio interviews that were called, sorry, the oral history interviews that were carried out with him in the, if I remember correctly, 70s and 80s can be accessed online. And I recommend that your listeners check them out. One reason that I recommend they check them out is because it reminds us of the importance of personality in determining the International Brigade's use of lethal force. Here we have someone from London, a former boxer, someone who obviously revels in his macho personality. And a friend of mine said that every time he goes to take a puff on his pipe, you just know he's going to start talking about mowing down those bloody fascists. He doesn't hide it either, and why should he? Others, however, found it really difficult to come to terms with killing. It was something that had to be acquired like any other skill. Other people fell somewhere in between where they took professional pride in a job well done. Again, I remember listening to an interview with an American volunteer who fought in a guerrilla unit behind the lines, describing a spectacle of a train being derailed by his explosives. Wham o. He said, literally describing the sound of that train going up. For all of this variation, though, for all of that variation, the insertion brigades seem to have been united in the belief that their use of lethal force was justified by the existential nature of their fight and the fact that they had made, at the end of the day, an unwritten contract with themselves, with their family members, with their communities, with their comrades, and, as far as they saw it, with the Spanish people to do whatever was necessary to defeat fascism. This doesn't mean that they bore specific grudges against the soldier on the other side of their sights, but it does mean that shooting that soldier was always seen as legitimate in order to get the job done, as it were.
- [33:59]
Ryan Tripp
Okay, you argue that the foreign volunteers often found themselves in the rear guard, which gave them opportunity to record their observations of Spanish landscapes untainted. Well, how they perceive this, untainted by capitalism, yet populated by those living in squalor. How did these oppositional observations heighten their anti fascist impulses?
- [34:25]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
And however it heightened their anti fascist impulses, the fact that it did is something worth mentioning, because the rear guard really appears so infrequently in the existing literature. And when it does, it's in the guise of, you know, sort of, once again, a sort of entertaining backdrop for incidental anecdotes. But incidental, the rear guard was not, I think that it, for the most part, and from the testimony that we have, kind of shifted the way in which the volunteers thought about their military service in Spain, it shifted their understanding of service as being something carried out to stop fascism on a global scale, towards being something perhaps more positive. They saw themselves as fighting not only against fascism, but for Spain and specifically for the Spanish people. Historians have rightly pointed out that contact with the people of the rear guard could be very limited. It could be limited by language, for example, and sometimes it could be limited by the fact that they had commissars watching their movements. But I didn't think contact had to be all that direct to be consequential. I think the fact that they were traveling through these unfamiliar, exotic landscapes was itself impactful. Itself left an imprint on the volunteers. Almost all of them, including those who came from poor backgrounds themselves, such as a peasant from Ukraine, were taken aback by the squalor and the poverty of Spain. They saw Spain as a country stuck in feudalism and threatened by fascism. The answer, of course, for them was winning the war, which would not only stop fascism, but create new opportunities for the people of Spain. As one volunteer put it to work, their Way out of their medieval conditions. In other words, the squalor and misery of Spaniards. As far as Intel Brigade saw, it presented an opportunity. There's one particular volunteer, John Simon, American volunteer, who actually spoke about this. And again, Ryan, if you'll permit me to be so vain as to read from the book.
- [36:27]
Ryan Tripp
Permission granted.
- [36:28]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
Thanks.
- [36:29]
Ryan Tripp
Your podcast, my friend.
- [36:31]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
He was traveling through a town in Catalonia and the people of this town came out to greet the volunteers. And this is what he wrote in his diary at the time. He said, I could not look at the people without having tears come to my eyes. These were the most wretched looking people I had ever seen. Later on he wrote that my stodgy, bookish language is inadequate to express the thrill that comes to one who, attempting to follow the teachings of Marx and Lenin. Again, Ryan, that communist connection finds himself about to fight for one of the most oppressed and wretched group of people he has ever seen. Now he's representative of many of the volunteers in his emphasis on the rural rear guard rather than the cosmopolitan towns, perhaps of Barcelona and Madrid. Certainly the volunteers spoke about those towns, but when they defined Spain, when they looked for the essence of Spain, they mirrored all those journalists actually that were travelling through Spain at the time in locating it in the rural rear guard that they saw as sort of untainted by capitalism and threatened by fascism. So there's a little bit again of maybe confirmation bias going on here, but nonetheless, I think the sentiment itself was very real. The sentiment, the dual sentiment perhaps of shock at the state of Spain, but also excitement at the possibility to do something about it.
- [37:46]
Ryan Tripp
So going a little bit beyond these encounters and descriptions of poverty and squalor, can you elucidate a little bit their quotidian encounters with civilian adults and children, particularly in like communal villages or perceptions of communal villages, and how these reconfigured what you describe as abstract solidarity into kind of direct kind of comradeship or comrade. And what about volunteer drunkenness and theft? What roles did these play in the anti fascist civilizing mission?
- [38:23]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
I think the way that abstract solidarity was turned into direct camaraderie was the way in which meeting these Spaniards quite literally put a face to that abstract entity of the Spanish people. Meetings could, between the two could emerge spontaneously around wells, around village square. The volunteers were really quick to work out the geography of these small Spanish towns in the rear car, where life, as far as they could tell, seemed to have followed the same pattern for centuries on end. The only difference being that instead of going to mass on a Sunday the church was now turned into a canteen where the volunteers would go for their breakfast or lunch on a daily basis. And one of the groups that they found it easiest to get along with were children, where difficulties of language didn't cause embarrassment necessarily, but could cause mutual curiosity. The foreign volunteers, some of them anyway, became local celebrities, with these children willing to sort of dole out sweets and ice cream and to teach words from their own languages and in turn be taught parts of the body, perhaps in Spanish, to the amusement of both. But this process of turning abstract solidarity into a direct feeling of solidarity was too important, as far as the commissars were concerned, to be left to the volunteers alone. And they put real effort into organizing all sorts of cross cultural initiatives. Why bother? Well, getting the goodwill of the rear guard is useful in any total war when you're a unit operating in friendly territory. But I think these commissars, and the volunteers too, for that matter, saw this as a total war, which left pretty much no room for civilian indifference. If civilians didn't care about the war, well, they should, because it was a war as far as volunteers were concerned, not only for their survival, but, as I just said, for their social betterment too. So harvests were arranged, doctors were sent out to cure all sorts of ailments, fiestas were held, and sometimes the political messaging was quite explicit. Speeches were given in which the townspeople were told again why they should care about the anti fascist war effort of the volunteers. But sometimes I think the volunteers were more interested in just, you know, creating a sense of goodwill with the communities in which they found themselves embedded. That doesn't mean, though, that the Spaniards sort of regarded these encounters in the same way. Again, we don't have many testimonies, but those that we have show that reactions to the volunteers could be, for the most part positive, but interpreted in quite a different way than the volunteers might have expected. Many of the locals that spoke about volunteers in their midst later on said that they enjoyed having them with them and they treated them with courtesy, but mostly because they seemed like good blokes rather than the fact that they were committed and passionate anti fascists like the volunteers were. I'm not sure that matters all that much, though, because when the volunteers went off to the front lines, they very often did so under the impression that they were sort of adopted sons of the communities that they had just met. So once again, they really felt they were fighting for the Spanish people rather than merely against fascism as an abstract. As an abstract entity. You did mention, I've Just remembered one, you did mention drunkenness and theft.
- [41:35]
Ryan Tripp
Yeah.
- [41:37]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
And I suspect that's what you're most interested in hearing.
- [41:39]
Ryan Tripp
Everyone.
- [41:41]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
I'm a little bit worried here because of course I'm a young Englishman talking about drunkenness in Spain and we already have a bit of a, bit of a reputation for this. Abuses certainly occurred, there's no doubt about it, but the common souls were really keen to keep, keep a hold on it because they knew full well that drunkenness, that theft, would undermine not only the individual volunteers, but the entire unit and by extension the whole antifascist mission itself. So all of those Francoist propagandists that describe the International Brigades as having come to Spain for the sole purpose of raping and pillaging should be treated with supreme caution. Not only because they very rarely if ever cite specific examples, but because it would have just gone against Ian Saintwige's own interests. That's not to say that abuses didn't occur. Theft was a pretty serious crime. Drunkenness was quite a bit more common. I think the Spanish wine was as strong as it was cheap. And many of the foreign volunteers learned an important lesson in their first days and weeks in Spain and were often given stern lectures by their commissars not to repeat their actions. Being the perfect anti fascist was not easy to do on a day to day basis. But I would treat the worst cases as exceptions to the rule rather than a reason to sort of denigrate the unit, the unit as a whole.
- [43:05]
Ryan Tripp
So next up is a pretty. It's a multifaceted question and you only have to address facets of it. What were the rules of exclusion by gender? I mean, we've been talking. You, you polluted a little bit and explicitly mentioned rape a couple times. But which is more sexuality? But what were the roles of exclusion by gender from the front lines? Also the tropes of a beautified female martyrdom as an escape from war. And then you mentioned nurses and sanitary purity and finally the role of a, and I'm deploying here, a US occupation after World War II kind of concept and anti paternalization, the fully loaded prostitute. Fully loaded in terms of like she has a gun and she's a spy and fully loaded that she has an STD in making anti fascist war. And then I think, and this is especially more sexual than gender, sexual assault by the foreign volunteers.
- [44:11]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
As with drunkenness and as with theft, sexual assault did occur. There's very, very little evidence of it. That doesn't mean to say that the amount of evidence is reflective of its frequency during the Spanish Civil War, let alone its importance. But it did occur. Giles Tremlett did a really good job of bringing this up in his book on the International Brigades. And again, I think it's important to bear in mind women in general were a major presence in the Volunteers lives. And once again, their absence in the existing literature shouldn't be taken as a reflection of their absence in the lived experiences of the International Brigade. They came into contact with villagers, of course, in the rearguard. They were nursed by women for weeks, sometimes months on end, and they slept with women, often prostitutes, often prostitutes, actually, that they encountered just beyond the walls of their respective hospitals, often while being treated, ironically enough, for vd. The presence of the International regate of women, sorry, in the International Brigades is more important still, I think, though, for its symbolic relevance. As with anarchists and as with Spanish villagers, here is a group of Spaniards the International Brigades could use to better understand themselves. Everything they said about Spanish women tells you something about how they viewed themselves. And what they had to say about Spanish women was overwhelmingly related to their appearances. When it wasn't related to their appearances, it was related to their caring responsibilities as nurses or their romantic attraction as villagers. It's surprising, perhaps, for people fighting against fascism and fighting on behalf of the liberation of humankind. As they saw it, they had very little to say about the fact that these women were very often the anti fascist mission embodied, personified in the form of, for example, nurses carrying out work that was previously only carried out by the religious authorities. Why did they concentrate so much on these characteristics? Well, I don't think it was just sexism, although machismo quite plainly has a lot to do with it. I think it's because, as I said, this sort of vision of a pure rear guard inhabited by angelic and wonderful and smiling and soothing women, reminded the Volunteers that they in turn were men engaged in the grubby and occasionally grim business of fighting war. It was kind of chivalry reframed for the purposes of 20th century total war. Another way, of course, in which women appeared in the International Brigade's culture at the time, including their print culture in their posters, was as martyrs of fascist bombs. The International Brigades didn't seem to disagree with the fact that the Republican government generally excluded women from the front lines. The Malithianus, as they were called, of the early days of war, began to disappear as the war progressed. None of them really seemed to take issue with it. I think those understandings of themselves as male anti fascist soldiers was Too deeply ingrained.
- [47:19]
Ryan Tripp
So how did the International Brigades Committee for Children and its goals of humanitarian aid, including the depiction of volunteers as compassionate, stimulate sympathetic solidarity in a Spanish childhood martial culture?
- [47:33]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
I think the International Regaze attitudes towards children are really interesting. This might be seen actually in relation to one particular man called Alfred Brauner, who was a Frenchman put in charge of the International Regaze work with children, which included setting up all sorts of homes and canteens, fiestas and other costly initiatives in order to create this sense of a shared community between the children of Spain and the foreign volunteers. Braun is remembered for his use of art and drawing to help children overcome the trauma of war. During the Spanish Civil War, however, he used art and drawing for a quite different purpose, which was to actually extol the virtues of anti fascist war, to celebrate the role of the Insatiable Brigades in taking up arms against fascism on the front lines and to engage children in that martial culture. Just like the women of the rear guard, just like the peasants and civilians of the villages behind the lines, children were expected to be fully signed up, members of this anti fascist community fighting against the forces of General Franco. This was carried out partly to reinforce the volunteers sense of themselves as different soldiers, soldiers of culture, military men of feeling who were fighting the fascists on the front line, but also looking after children in the rear guard. Two sides of the same anti fascist coin point. But this work was also carried out to turn these children into little comrades, into conscious anti fascists themselves, who looked up to the International Brigades, some of whom they met in the homes and canteens run by the International Brigades as sort of anti fascist father figures. They drew pictures of themselves meeting the International Brigades of the International Brigades fighting on the front lines. And they wrote letters describing this great war against the Francoists, which really couldn't have depicted the war in the Intash Regay's terms any better. Some of them seem like they were written by adults, but they were written by children as young as 9 or 10.
- [49:32]
Ryan Tripp
So we're wrapping up here, if you can briefly elaborate on your conclusion, which examines remembrances of antifascist war.
- [49:42]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
The International Brigades are, I would say today, perhaps the most famous foreign fighting force in history. And their story is very well known. But I think we have to be careful when we talk about that story in the singular. The story of the Insatiable Brigade didn't emerge from nowhere. It's not an accident that the experiences, the memories of some 35,000 individuals have coalesced into such a familiar anti fascist Epic. Like all stories, certain facts have been remembered, certain facts have been forgotten, rearranged. But what we have today is this very clear story of ordinary men from across the world going to Spain to support Spain and the Spanish people against fascism. Again, that's not an accident in the first place. Someone had to collect that story, someone had to record the interview, someone had to take the notes, someone had to write the memoirs and then publish them. Those people willing to do that work have never been in short supply. Those perhaps interested in the experiences of the Spaniards in the ranks of the International Brigades are fewer and far further between. But the result of their efforts is this, this really familiar narrative. I think that Spain has got an ambiguous place within that narrative. As far as progressive supporters of the International Brigades are concerned. There's no doubt that they went to Spain to fight on behalf of a martyred people. The Francois dictatorship would quite obviously have disagreed with that rendering. They would have seen International Brigades as sort of unwanted intruders on the grand stage of Spanish imperial history. When in the 1960s, certain revisionist historians and scholars and authors in Spain began to see the Civil War less as a Francois crusade and more as a tragedy, the International Brigades once again could be easily represented as sort of meddlesome interlopers whose main contribution was, as one author put it, killing Spaniards like rabbits. I certainly don't think that's entirely fair. I think a much better way of remembering the Intasha Brigade is as a group of people who went to Spain and met Spaniards engaged with landscapes, who took its politics, its culture, its history seriously, even if they got it wrong very often. I think putting cross cultural encounters at the center of our understanding of the International Brigade also gets us closer to the truth of who these people were and what made them tick. It helps us to understand the world in their eyes. It helps us to understand those ubiquitous but really slippery terms like freedom and fascism in a more historically rooted context as well. Either way, having said that, I don't think these debates about what the International Brigade's real relationship to Spain was are likely to abate anytime soon.
- [52:41]
Ryan Tripp
Well, Dr. Pol, thank you so much for being on our show today. I really, really appreciate it. Okay, so the book is making Anti Fascist the International Brigades Transnational Encounters with Civil War Spain, 1936-1939. This has been a production of the New Books in Military History, a channel on the wider New Books Network. I'm your host, Ryan Tripp. On behalf of Dr. Pol and the International Brigades, please tune in next time.
- [53:19]
Dr. Adrian Pohl
Many thanks, Ryan.