Nov 16, 2025
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Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain
By Vachel Blair as told to Martin H. Miller
Vachel Blair, in his U.S. Army uniform, about six years after he served in Spain. photo: Unknown Vachel Blair's Other cineSOURCE Stories: “My Father’s Spanish Civil War”, “Life and Death in the Air: A Bombing Run Goes Bad” and “While Flying in a B-24 Over Fortress Europe”
This article had the subhead of "Local youth, back from the front, gives first-hand account of those battling for the Loyalists" when it was first published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, on November 21, 1937, and an introductory paragraph.
In the following article, Vachel Blair, 3028 Woodbury Road, Shaker Heights [Cleveland, Ohio], who recently returned from service in the George Washington Battalion, International Brigade of the Spanish government army, relates his experiences under fire in a major offensive.—Editor’s Note [from Cleveland Plain Dealer].
CLEVELAND WAS WELL REPRESENTED IN
the Brunete offensive [by the Spanish Republicans, 15 miles north of Madrid, in July, 1937]. The most extensive and thoroughly-planned drive of Loyalist Spain against Gen. Francisco Franco’s forces attacking Madrid.
At least 15 Clevelanders were enlisted in the George Washington Battalion, in which I was an infantryman, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the two American units of the International Brigade [the Washington was eventually incorporated into the Lincoln]. They and Cleveland youths who served as truck drivers in the transportation division, participated in this determined attempt to sever the Facist [sic] line of communications with University City, the Madrid suburb held by Franco’s army.
Since I left the Washington Battalion shortly after the offensive ended, I can tell you only of the experiences of the Clevelanders in my company.
We saw our first front line service in the Brunete Drive and in four days—July 6 to 10—we were initiated into all the horror the Spanish war had to offer. My closest friend was killed in that destructive baptism of fire.
It was only the night before the attack came to a stop Roger Cornell, 1886 E. 82d Street [Cleveland] and I shared for the last time our ponchos, the squares of khaki which serve as raincoats in the day and sleeping covers at night.
Steve Kosjak, 978 E. 76th Street, was likewise killed in the attack. Roy Peters, 1741 E. 19th Street, died, needled by machine gun bullets.
I saw Larry Friedman, a Cleveland College freshman, writhing on the ground, his stomach wrapped in bandages, waiting for a stretcher.
Two days before the artillery opened the offensive by sending shell after shell down into the enemy town of Villanueva de la Canada, all of us were alive, encamped under the scrubby, thinly-foliaged olive trees some 12 miles northwest of Madrid.
'Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain', was an long article written by Vachel Blair and published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 21, 1937. image: CPD archive
Any stray aviator flying over the rugged Spanish terrain would notice nothing unusual—we hoped—but around us in all directions were thousands of troops keeping cover. Near the Americans were two battalions made up of former inmates of concentration camps and victims of oppression in the Balkans. Men were here who had tramped hundreds of weary miles with one thought in mind—to even the score a bit by taking a crack at the Fascists.
Here, too, were liberty and wine-loving Frenchmen and Belgians (together in the Franco-Belge Battalion). English, Scotch and Irishmen, Czechs, Scandinavians, Canadians, Cubans, Poles and Italians and even a few Chinese who had come half way across the world to fight western Fascism.
We were truly the International Brigade, but the bulk of the 120,000 troops concentrated on this spot consisted of Spaniards. Forty thousand of them were to sweep down into the plain to the northwest of Madrid and take the strongly fortified Villanueva de la Canada.
The George Washington Battalion and 9,000 other members of the International Brigade were to circle in the southwest in the second contingent of 40,000 take Villaviciofa and attack the Fascist rear at University City.
The 40,000 Spaniard remaining were to head southwest smash through Brunete, continue south a few miles, and capture Navalcarnere, which is on the supply road to Franco’s University City salient. Once this was done, the Fascists surrounding Madrid would be either bottled up or, if retreating, might easily be routed as Mussolini’s troops were at Guadalajara.
It was July 4, and we were in a world which hadn’t more than the faintest connection with the world we had known. We wondered about you people back home. Were you planning picnics? All of us, with no noticeable exceptions, spent the afternoon writing letters to mothers, sweethearts, relatives and friends. The battalion mail box was stuffed, and not one letter even vaguely mentioned the attack. Not one of us wished to risk having our letters—possibly our last we would ever write—thrown out by the censor.
We cleared our Russian rifles that morning, and cut down on the equipment we would have to carry. Each of us kept a French helmet, a gas mask, a grub sack with mess utensils, a canteen, a bandolier or cartridge belt and 200 rounds of ammunition, some of it stuffed in our pockets.
Every movement, every moment had significance that day. But we were not downhearted—yet. I traded a pack of American cigarets [sic] for a can of condensed milk which was swiped by the British battalion’s cook. It tasted good, a spoonful at a time.
Vachel Blair, with his wife, Tonia Rotkopf, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor. photo: Nicholas Blair “When we get back, we’ll each buy a can of this stuff and get good and sick on it,” Larry Friedman remarked.
I can still see Roger Cornell, smiling as he doled out the spoonfuls to Shorty [nickname for Friedman], “Smitty,” our section leader, and two or three others, including myself, who sat in a circle around the tin can nectar. It was good for four rounds.
Just at dusk trucks began to stream by us on the road at the edge of the camp, ammunition trucks, food trucks, ambulances, lorries, trucks of every description jammed with soldiers, trucks loaded with large artillery and anti-truck guns, and later giant Diesel [sic] trucks, each carrying a three-ton tank, covered with a tarpaulin. Their headlights were painted or papered to cut illumination to the point where German aircraft would not observe them.
The Lincoln Battalion came marching up and camped about 100 yards down the road. This battalion had helped thrust back the Fascists who almost severed the Madrid-to-Valencia highway on the Jarama Front back in January. Their boys were not singing as much or as loudly as we. We were anxious to see what the front was like.
Several fellows in our battalion, led by Milt Young, a Jewish boy from New York City, went over to the Lincoln.
“You’ll see, you’ll see,” they told Milt. This wasn’t sport to them. Nevertheless, we were in high spirits, tense, expectant when the order came that night to move. Some kind of history was being made here. The hillsides in the rolling, brush-covered country alive with the buzzing of voices as far as we could hear, and the coolness of the evening us once more comfortable and free, for eight hours at least, from the burning sun.
All night we marched, walking beside the road much of the time, to permit the trucks to pass, stopping to rest once every hour for a smoke. The next morning we arrived at our last encampment, ate our dry rations of bully beef and bread, and slept until late afternoon.
Larry and I went down to the small, dirty creek just below us for a bath and a shave, Spanish style, and found our battalion commander there ahead of us. “Food is coming up at dusk,” he told us. And it did—rice pudding and beans, lemons and beef and coffee, and even cigarettes, and we could take as much as we could eat.
We could hear the tanks, now off the trucks, rumbling toward the front on their own power. Once again everyone was excited, jumpy and very wide awake. Hurry, hurry! Tempers were short and several fights occurred when representatives of each section lined up with their buckets for grub. Fights over the place in line, fights over nothing, fights because each was afraid marching orders would come before his section could be fed.
A short article about Blair's involvement in the Spanish Civil War. photo: N/A Three hours later, a half hour past midnight, marching orders did arrive. We tried to sleep in the meantime, but sleep was impossible. We merely lay on the ground and rested, not talking, thinking.
Cars began to pass us with their lights off. Everything was silent except the sound of marching feet heading to the front. We took turns carrying the company stretcher. Finally, at the dawn we saw another road parallel to the front, thousands of troops lined the road. Later I learned that over 110,000 men were here for an attack on 15 kilometers (nine miles) of the front.
We hurried east on the road until we reached our position for the attack, and started south down the slope toward the Fascist line, single file.
At our rear the sun rose from behind the snow-peaked Guadarrama Mountains, the hot, blistering Spanish sun. At 6 o’clock the artillery would open fire in order to “soften” the town for our first division. Behind the road we could see the guns and the gun pits. Eighteen miles to the southeast on this same road was Madrid. In front of us, three miles away, we could see our first objective, Villanueva de la Canada. Ahead of us to our left the Spaniards were already down the foothills, waiting for the opening artillery barrage before charging this strategic town.
Three shells cracked over our head in rapid succession, the first shells we had heard in close range. They were from our own batteries, however.
Gradually we made our way down the large gulches of the foothills. On the riddges, a quarter mile to our left and right, were rows of tanks, on in front of us and behind us thousands of men streamed single file down to the rolling plain.
Shell after shell fell into the town bursting three at a time and leaving tall columns of smoke and debris. The Loyalist aviation of twenty bombers and ten pursuit planes circled over the town in perfect formation, for now there were no big black puffs from German anti-aircraft guns. The planes circled twice over the town, dropping their deadly loads, and then speeding away along the front.
We were now in the rolling plain, only 500 yards away from the town. We were approaching the range of the machine guns and their nervous rat-a-tatting. Then, much to our surprise and chagrin, a runner reported that the first troops had been unable to take the town. We would have to advance up a small valley toward the barricades. The men were lying on the ground, waiting. Suddenly, a short, bronzed lad let out a yell, rose quickly and dashed forward for 25 yards before diving into some bushes. As soon as he yelled, the rest of us followed him. There were no given orders to charge. It is always spontaneous action. The men ran as far as they could in the four seconds it is estimated that the it takes a Fascist to aim and fire again.
Again we rose, and again we ran. Frankly, each one of us was frightened. This was our first taste of gunfire—and it aimed directly at us. I was down flat on my nose and stomach when a bullet dug into the earth eight inches in front of me. It may have been a spent bullet but that did not assure me.
Blair, his wife, Tonia, and sons Doniphan and Nick, circa 1972. photo: Unknown along its edge. The towns barricades were less than 250 yards away from us, but all of that is uphill and bare of cover. We waited here in the hot sun, dug holes two feet deep in the sand for water, and poured the coffee-colored liquid down our throats, into our hair, and into our helmets.
An order comes to move south again. This new position is on a low ridge covered with wheat stubble. Here we were sniped at by riflemen in the tower of the town’s church. Two Moors [Moroccans fighting for Franco] added to our discomfort by wriggling down on the plain, perching themselves on a blanket and letting us have it, until we captured them bleeding from bullet wounds.
The general attack on Villanueva de la Canada is to take place at sundown. We place our packs and surplus equipment on the ground thinking we would return for them after the attack. We never did. Orders to move came at sundown. We were within 75 yards of the town when we heard the roar of triumphant Loyalist troops as they charged into the town from the other side. The ditches of the road retreat [sic] and the road south were filled with Fascist dead, which were later identified as mostly German. Yells and revolutionary songs rang out in many languages. Cavalry and infantry intermingled as the troops marched by devastated, white-walled Spanish homes, some with black, empty doorways, others rosy with the glow of half extinguished fires. The pungent odor of anise came from a dark, bomb-shattered café where a slight breeze rippled the sheet of canvas in the doorway.
After only a few moments in the plaza before the church, we marched wearily toward Brunete and camped in an olive grove behind a brick farm house halfway to Brunete. The next morning I got up to get a drink at the well and found that during the night the Spanish boys had laid down next to the Fascist dead under the wall of the farm house, perhaps believing them to be exhausted comrades.
The call came to fall in. Brunete had been captured during the night and all morning trucks had sped down the road toward it. German aviators bombed us as we marched along on empty stomachs, killing six and wounding many. One bomb burst directly across from us as Carnell, Bready and I were falling on our faces.
That night Roger and I shared the same poncho. We were weary from marching in the hot sun and we were hungry. That was the last time Roger and I exchanged confidences. The next day he was killed on “Mosquito Hill” without tanks to prepare the way and without adequate machine guns.
Weary and exhausted, suffering from fatigue and hunger, we charged up that hill, and would have taken it had we received adequate support.
Carnell and I moved together as the company advanced into the bullet zone. At the signal cry, with several other men, Roger ran up a ridge to the right. A quick glance showed me there wasn’t enough cover there for another man. I scurried up the left, flopping behind a tree. I was parked there, half way up Mosquito Hill, a Russian rifle in my hand, when a Spaniard ran up the ditch behind me, drawing additional gunfire as he came.
San Francisco's monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on February 25, 2023, when a pro-Ukraine rally was held across the street. photo: D. BlairThe middle of an attack may not be the best time to begin a conversation but we did talk there, throwing German, French and Spanish words together in order to understand each other. He came from the Lester Battalion, he said.
I was down on my knees firing into clumps of bushes where Fascists might be lying, when he stood up.
“Shoot a little higher into those clumps,” my companion directed. “Like this.”
“Down,” I shouted in Spanish. He paid little heed. We were tired, more tired than ever before. The sun beat down fiercely. We were too exhausted to fear bullets.
Suddenly the Spaniard threw his arms around me. “Comrade,” he yelled. Blood dripped from the seat of his trousers and his shirt was stained. I put my hand on his back to stop the blood. A bullet penetrated his body entering under the armpit and leaving through his back.
I finally succeeded in slipping my first aid gauze under his coat, raised his garrison belt and tightened it to keep him from bleeding to death. Now to get him a stretcher. I ran down the ditch and jumped over a clump of bushes just in time as eight or ten bullets whizzed over my head.
There were no stretchers at the dressing station but young Larry Friedman was there, lying on the ground his stomach bandaged.
“How are you making out, Shorty,” I asked.
“Do something,” he moaned, “Do something.”
Now I needed at least two stretchers, one for Larry who was my friend.
Two Americans joined me in the search for stretchers. The bullet that wounded Larry had first pierced the hand of one of these boys before entering Larry’s body. We couldn‘t find our ambulance, and once we picked up a stretcher we were forced to return it. Eventually we located some blankets which were better than nothing at all. And then on our return we ran into the grub truck and stretchers.
Loading bully beef cans, bread and cheese for our company on a stretcher, we located our lads, who had been without food for many hours. Larry had been taken away. I never saw him again.
Back again we distributed welcome rations to the fighters. The company dug in in a ravine halfway up the hill. The attack had been stopped.
And that night under cover of darkness we searched among the bushes for wounded and missing comrades.
Editor’s Note: Vachel Blair went on to live in New York City as a cinematographer, marry a Jewish Holocaust survivor, have two sons and live to 84.
For more info about the American fighters, see the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.
Posted on Mar 01, 2023 - 05:26 PM
By Vachel Blair as told to Martin H. Miller
Vachel Blair, in his U.S. Army uniform, about six years after he served in Spain. photo: Unknown This article had the subhead of "Local youth, back from the front, gives first-hand account of those battling for the Loyalists" when it was first published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, on November 21, 1937, and an introductory paragraph.
In the following article, Vachel Blair, 3028 Woodbury Road, Shaker Heights [Cleveland, Ohio], who recently returned from service in the George Washington Battalion, International Brigade of the Spanish government army, relates his experiences under fire in a major offensive.—Editor’s Note [from Cleveland Plain Dealer].
CLEVELAND WAS WELL REPRESENTED IN
the Brunete offensive [by the Spanish Republicans, 15 miles north of Madrid, in July, 1937]. The most extensive and thoroughly-planned drive of Loyalist Spain against Gen. Francisco Franco’s forces attacking Madrid.
At least 15 Clevelanders were enlisted in the George Washington Battalion, in which I was an infantryman, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the two American units of the International Brigade [the Washington was eventually incorporated into the Lincoln]. They and Cleveland youths who served as truck drivers in the transportation division, participated in this determined attempt to sever the Facist [sic] line of communications with University City, the Madrid suburb held by Franco’s army.
Since I left the Washington Battalion shortly after the offensive ended, I can tell you only of the experiences of the Clevelanders in my company.
We saw our first front line service in the Brunete Drive and in four days—July 6 to 10—we were initiated into all the horror the Spanish war had to offer. My closest friend was killed in that destructive baptism of fire.
It was only the night before the attack came to a stop Roger Cornell, 1886 E. 82d Street [Cleveland] and I shared for the last time our ponchos, the squares of khaki which serve as raincoats in the day and sleeping covers at night.
Steve Kosjak, 978 E. 76th Street, was likewise killed in the attack. Roy Peters, 1741 E. 19th Street, died, needled by machine gun bullets.
I saw Larry Friedman, a Cleveland College freshman, writhing on the ground, his stomach wrapped in bandages, waiting for a stretcher.
Two days before the artillery opened the offensive by sending shell after shell down into the enemy town of Villanueva de la Canada, all of us were alive, encamped under the scrubby, thinly-foliaged olive trees some 12 miles northwest of Madrid.
'Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain', was an long article written by Vachel Blair and published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 21, 1937. image: CPD archiveAny stray aviator flying over the rugged Spanish terrain would notice nothing unusual—we hoped—but around us in all directions were thousands of troops keeping cover. Near the Americans were two battalions made up of former inmates of concentration camps and victims of oppression in the Balkans. Men were here who had tramped hundreds of weary miles with one thought in mind—to even the score a bit by taking a crack at the Fascists.
Here, too, were liberty and wine-loving Frenchmen and Belgians (together in the Franco-Belge Battalion). English, Scotch and Irishmen, Czechs, Scandinavians, Canadians, Cubans, Poles and Italians and even a few Chinese who had come half way across the world to fight western Fascism.
We were truly the International Brigade, but the bulk of the 120,000 troops concentrated on this spot consisted of Spaniards. Forty thousand of them were to sweep down into the plain to the northwest of Madrid and take the strongly fortified Villanueva de la Canada.
The George Washington Battalion and 9,000 other members of the International Brigade were to circle in the southwest in the second contingent of 40,000 take Villaviciofa and attack the Fascist rear at University City.
The 40,000 Spaniard remaining were to head southwest smash through Brunete, continue south a few miles, and capture Navalcarnere, which is on the supply road to Franco’s University City salient. Once this was done, the Fascists surrounding Madrid would be either bottled up or, if retreating, might easily be routed as Mussolini’s troops were at Guadalajara.
It was July 4, and we were in a world which hadn’t more than the faintest connection with the world we had known. We wondered about you people back home. Were you planning picnics? All of us, with no noticeable exceptions, spent the afternoon writing letters to mothers, sweethearts, relatives and friends. The battalion mail box was stuffed, and not one letter even vaguely mentioned the attack. Not one of us wished to risk having our letters—possibly our last we would ever write—thrown out by the censor.
We cleared our Russian rifles that morning, and cut down on the equipment we would have to carry. Each of us kept a French helmet, a gas mask, a grub sack with mess utensils, a canteen, a bandolier or cartridge belt and 200 rounds of ammunition, some of it stuffed in our pockets.
Every movement, every moment had significance that day. But we were not downhearted—yet. I traded a pack of American cigarets [sic] for a can of condensed milk which was swiped by the British battalion’s cook. It tasted good, a spoonful at a time.
Vachel Blair, with his wife, Tonia Rotkopf, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor. photo: Nicholas Blair I can still see Roger Cornell, smiling as he doled out the spoonfuls to Shorty [nickname for Friedman], “Smitty,” our section leader, and two or three others, including myself, who sat in a circle around the tin can nectar. It was good for four rounds.
Just at dusk trucks began to stream by us on the road at the edge of the camp, ammunition trucks, food trucks, ambulances, lorries, trucks of every description jammed with soldiers, trucks loaded with large artillery and anti-truck guns, and later giant Diesel [sic] trucks, each carrying a three-ton tank, covered with a tarpaulin. Their headlights were painted or papered to cut illumination to the point where German aircraft would not observe them.
The Lincoln Battalion came marching up and camped about 100 yards down the road. This battalion had helped thrust back the Fascists who almost severed the Madrid-to-Valencia highway on the Jarama Front back in January. Their boys were not singing as much or as loudly as we. We were anxious to see what the front was like.
Several fellows in our battalion, led by Milt Young, a Jewish boy from New York City, went over to the Lincoln.
“You’ll see, you’ll see,” they told Milt. This wasn’t sport to them. Nevertheless, we were in high spirits, tense, expectant when the order came that night to move. Some kind of history was being made here. The hillsides in the rolling, brush-covered country alive with the buzzing of voices as far as we could hear, and the coolness of the evening us once more comfortable and free, for eight hours at least, from the burning sun.
All night we marched, walking beside the road much of the time, to permit the trucks to pass, stopping to rest once every hour for a smoke. The next morning we arrived at our last encampment, ate our dry rations of bully beef and bread, and slept until late afternoon.
Larry and I went down to the small, dirty creek just below us for a bath and a shave, Spanish style, and found our battalion commander there ahead of us. “Food is coming up at dusk,” he told us. And it did—rice pudding and beans, lemons and beef and coffee, and even cigarettes, and we could take as much as we could eat.
We could hear the tanks, now off the trucks, rumbling toward the front on their own power. Once again everyone was excited, jumpy and very wide awake. Hurry, hurry! Tempers were short and several fights occurred when representatives of each section lined up with their buckets for grub. Fights over the place in line, fights over nothing, fights because each was afraid marching orders would come before his section could be fed.
A short article about Blair's involvement in the Spanish Civil War. photo: N/A Cars began to pass us with their lights off. Everything was silent except the sound of marching feet heading to the front. We took turns carrying the company stretcher. Finally, at the dawn we saw another road parallel to the front, thousands of troops lined the road. Later I learned that over 110,000 men were here for an attack on 15 kilometers (nine miles) of the front.
We hurried east on the road until we reached our position for the attack, and started south down the slope toward the Fascist line, single file.
At our rear the sun rose from behind the snow-peaked Guadarrama Mountains, the hot, blistering Spanish sun. At 6 o’clock the artillery would open fire in order to “soften” the town for our first division. Behind the road we could see the guns and the gun pits. Eighteen miles to the southeast on this same road was Madrid. In front of us, three miles away, we could see our first objective, Villanueva de la Canada. Ahead of us to our left the Spaniards were already down the foothills, waiting for the opening artillery barrage before charging this strategic town.
Three shells cracked over our head in rapid succession, the first shells we had heard in close range. They were from our own batteries, however.
Gradually we made our way down the large gulches of the foothills. On the riddges, a quarter mile to our left and right, were rows of tanks, on in front of us and behind us thousands of men streamed single file down to the rolling plain.
Shell after shell fell into the town bursting three at a time and leaving tall columns of smoke and debris. The Loyalist aviation of twenty bombers and ten pursuit planes circled over the town in perfect formation, for now there were no big black puffs from German anti-aircraft guns. The planes circled twice over the town, dropping their deadly loads, and then speeding away along the front.
We were now in the rolling plain, only 500 yards away from the town. We were approaching the range of the machine guns and their nervous rat-a-tatting. Then, much to our surprise and chagrin, a runner reported that the first troops had been unable to take the town. We would have to advance up a small valley toward the barricades. The men were lying on the ground, waiting. Suddenly, a short, bronzed lad let out a yell, rose quickly and dashed forward for 25 yards before diving into some bushes. As soon as he yelled, the rest of us followed him. There were no given orders to charge. It is always spontaneous action. The men ran as far as they could in the four seconds it is estimated that the it takes a Fascist to aim and fire again.
Again we rose, and again we ran. Frankly, each one of us was frightened. This was our first taste of gunfire—and it aimed directly at us. I was down flat on my nose and stomach when a bullet dug into the earth eight inches in front of me. It may have been a spent bullet but that did not assure me.
Blair, his wife, Tonia, and sons Doniphan and Nick, circa 1972. photo: Unknown An order comes to move south again. This new position is on a low ridge covered with wheat stubble. Here we were sniped at by riflemen in the tower of the town’s church. Two Moors [Moroccans fighting for Franco] added to our discomfort by wriggling down on the plain, perching themselves on a blanket and letting us have it, until we captured them bleeding from bullet wounds.
The general attack on Villanueva de la Canada is to take place at sundown. We place our packs and surplus equipment on the ground thinking we would return for them after the attack. We never did. Orders to move came at sundown. We were within 75 yards of the town when we heard the roar of triumphant Loyalist troops as they charged into the town from the other side. The ditches of the road retreat [sic] and the road south were filled with Fascist dead, which were later identified as mostly German. Yells and revolutionary songs rang out in many languages. Cavalry and infantry intermingled as the troops marched by devastated, white-walled Spanish homes, some with black, empty doorways, others rosy with the glow of half extinguished fires. The pungent odor of anise came from a dark, bomb-shattered café where a slight breeze rippled the sheet of canvas in the doorway.
After only a few moments in the plaza before the church, we marched wearily toward Brunete and camped in an olive grove behind a brick farm house halfway to Brunete. The next morning I got up to get a drink at the well and found that during the night the Spanish boys had laid down next to the Fascist dead under the wall of the farm house, perhaps believing them to be exhausted comrades.
The call came to fall in. Brunete had been captured during the night and all morning trucks had sped down the road toward it. German aviators bombed us as we marched along on empty stomachs, killing six and wounding many. One bomb burst directly across from us as Carnell, Bready and I were falling on our faces.
That night Roger and I shared the same poncho. We were weary from marching in the hot sun and we were hungry. That was the last time Roger and I exchanged confidences. The next day he was killed on “Mosquito Hill” without tanks to prepare the way and without adequate machine guns.
Weary and exhausted, suffering from fatigue and hunger, we charged up that hill, and would have taken it had we received adequate support.
Carnell and I moved together as the company advanced into the bullet zone. At the signal cry, with several other men, Roger ran up a ridge to the right. A quick glance showed me there wasn’t enough cover there for another man. I scurried up the left, flopping behind a tree. I was parked there, half way up Mosquito Hill, a Russian rifle in my hand, when a Spaniard ran up the ditch behind me, drawing additional gunfire as he came.
San Francisco's monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on February 25, 2023, when a pro-Ukraine rally was held across the street. photo: D. BlairI was down on my knees firing into clumps of bushes where Fascists might be lying, when he stood up.
“Shoot a little higher into those clumps,” my companion directed. “Like this.”
“Down,” I shouted in Spanish. He paid little heed. We were tired, more tired than ever before. The sun beat down fiercely. We were too exhausted to fear bullets.
Suddenly the Spaniard threw his arms around me. “Comrade,” he yelled. Blood dripped from the seat of his trousers and his shirt was stained. I put my hand on his back to stop the blood. A bullet penetrated his body entering under the armpit and leaving through his back.
I finally succeeded in slipping my first aid gauze under his coat, raised his garrison belt and tightened it to keep him from bleeding to death. Now to get him a stretcher. I ran down the ditch and jumped over a clump of bushes just in time as eight or ten bullets whizzed over my head.
There were no stretchers at the dressing station but young Larry Friedman was there, lying on the ground his stomach bandaged.
“How are you making out, Shorty,” I asked.
“Do something,” he moaned, “Do something.”
Now I needed at least two stretchers, one for Larry who was my friend.
Two Americans joined me in the search for stretchers. The bullet that wounded Larry had first pierced the hand of one of these boys before entering Larry’s body. We couldn‘t find our ambulance, and once we picked up a stretcher we were forced to return it. Eventually we located some blankets which were better than nothing at all. And then on our return we ran into the grub truck and stretchers.
Loading bully beef cans, bread and cheese for our company on a stretcher, we located our lads, who had been without food for many hours. Larry had been taken away. I never saw him again.
Back again we distributed welcome rations to the fighters. The company dug in in a ravine halfway up the hill. The attack had been stopped.
And that night under cover of darkness we searched among the bushes for wounded and missing comrades.
Editor’s Note: Vachel Blair went on to live in New York City as a cinematographer, marry a Jewish Holocaust survivor, have two sons and live to 84.
For more info about the American fighters, see the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.
Posted on Mar 01, 2023 - 05:26 PM
