Description
Book SynopsisCecil D. Eby pushes beyond the bias that has dominated study of the Lincoln Battalion and gets to the very heart of the American experience in Spain. These papers draw renewed focus on some of the most provocative questions surrounding the Battalion, including the extent to which Americans were persecuted—and executed—by the brigade commissariat.
Trade Review“Comrades and Commissars is the best book ever written about the Lincoln Battalion. Eby does not accept the standard politically correct line, but neither does he go to the opposite extreme. Rather, he demonstrates a very good grasp of the volunteers as individuals, not as political puppets, and is thoroughly sympathetic to them on the human level, while at the same time showing the real character of the politics involved.”
—Stanley G. Payne,University of Wisconsin–Madison, author of The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism
“[Eby’s] Between the Bullet and the Lie (1969) was a good book and Comrades and Commissars is better. Cecil Eby’s book on the American volunteers who fought in the Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades (IB) in the Spanish Civil War exposes in lively detail what happened to the Americans in Spain.”
—Stephen Burgess-Whiting Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
“The result of this new research is a detailed, forthright, and empathetic account of the short, but active life of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, set masterfully in the larger context of the Spanish Civil War and the politics of the American Left in the 1930s.”
—Scott E. Belliveau Journal of Military History
Table of ContentsContents
Preface
1. Getting There
2. Men of La Mancha
3. The Yanks Are Coming
4. The Jarama Massacre
5. Waiting . . . Waiting
6. Tourists and Trippers
7. The Torrents of Spring
8. The Washington Battalion
9. Stalemate at Brunete
10. The Road to Zaragoza
11. Fuentes de Ebro
12. Teruel—The Big Chill
13. Retreat from Belchite
14. The Rout at Gandesa
15. Postmortem
16. In the Penal Colonies
17. The Far Shore
18. La Despedida
19. “Premature Anti-Fascists” and All That
Appendix 1: Bibliographical Essay—Basic Sources
Appendix 2: Interview Subjects from the XVth Brigade
Notes
Bibliography
Index
