Dec 13, 2024
Please contact us
with corrections
or breaking news
Please contact us
with corrections
or breaking news
My Father’s Spanish Civil War
by Doniphan Blair
Fighters in the Spanish Civil War. illo: D. BlairPLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.
“WE COULD SEE THE DARK CLOUDS OF
fascism descending on Europe,” my father, Vachel Blair (1915-1999), told me when I was about 14 or 15. “Going to Spain was how you could fight it.”
When Spain’s armed forces rebelled against the five-year-old Spanish Republic on July 17, 1936, Vach, as his friends called him, was 21. About to become an Ohio college junior majoring in library science and minoring in political science, he was enjoying his summer vacation "riding the rails,” also called "hoboing." Traveling around America by hitching rides in or on boxcars or locomotives was common during the Great Depression. He may have read about the start of the Spanish Civil War in a newspaper or heard about it on the radio, which people sometimes blasted out their windows, or from woke hobos.
“I was socialist not communist,” my father explained to me a few times. “But the communists were the only ones organized enough to get you to Spain." From an American security clearance application he filled out in 1964, I learned the details of his enlistment.
"One morning late in 1936 I noticed an advertisement in the Cleveland Plain Dealer looking for volunteers to drive trucks in Spain. What they really had in mind, they said at an interview, was soldiering. At the age of 21, during the Depression, this seemed like a fine opportunity to escape the boredom of home and unemployment, to travel, and to see what war was really like behind the headlines, all prepaid.”
I was amazed by and immensely proud of my father’s independence, volunteerism and sacrifice, given his upper middle class, all-American heritage, but I never interviewed him in-depth on the subject, unfortunately. Indeed, I only learned the details recently, by reading a long article he wrote for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, "Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain”, which featured a photo of him and a large illustration of Spanish fighters, published November 21, 1937.
Over a dozen young men from Cleveland made the journey in March, 1937, which wasn’t easy. After getting to France, they had to sneak into Spain. While hiding under the deck of a small fishing boat, Vach’s group of 13 Americans and 12 Canadians and Europeans was arrested by French authorities and incarcerated for a few days. In an earlier column, The Plain Dealer had reported their names, that "[t]hey refused to eat anything except salad and cheese, saying they were vegetarians," and that their leader, the 30-year-old Clevelander Joe Ballet, claimed they were tourists visiting Spain. Local French, who were republican Spain sympathizers and probably communists, effected their release and their renewed travel to Spain.
Of course, it was the communist Soviet Union that was arming Spain’s democrats and democratic England, France and the U.S. that was boycotting them—Vach’s passport was stamped “Not Valid for Travel in Spain,” in fact—theoretically to avoid escalating the war. Meanwhile, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy were sending troops, pilots and tons of war materiel to Franco’s fascist Nationalists.
“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,” Vach writes. “[We] participated in this determined attempt to sever the Fascist line of communications with University City, the Madrid suburb held by Franco’s army. We saw our first front line service in the Brunete Drive and in four days—July 6 to 10 [1937]—we were initiated into all the horror the Spanish war had to offer. My closest friend was killed in that destructive baptism of fire.”
Vachel Blair's 1937 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. illo: D. BlairThat was Roger Cornell, of 1886 E. 82d Street, Cleveland, the article notes, evidently as a community service. “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.”
Vach and his fellow green recruits of the Washington Battalion had joined the Lincoln Brigade, who had learned the unavoidable hard truths of war six months earlier in the Battle of Jarama. Together, they helped liberate the town of Villanueva de la Cañada. The Washington suffered so many casualties in the Brunete Drive, it was simply incorporated into the Lincoln. I remember my father telling me, with visible anger, how “macho” officers competing with each other had ordered them into ill-advised charges up the notorious "Mosquito Ridge," where they were cut down by Nationalist machine gunners.
The Lincoln was commanded by Oliver Law, an African-American from west Texas, until he died on Mosquito Ridge on July 9th. Law was succeeded by Robert Merriman, a UC Berkeley doctoral student from Eureka, California, who is thought to be the inspiration for Hemingway's hero in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940). Many fighters hailed from northern California, and San Francisco has one of America’s four monuments to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, downtown on its Embarcadero. I attended the 2007 dedication of the modest, square, structuralist display, with a lot of text and photos, by then-mayor Gavin Newsom. There was a decent crowd and a few elderly Brigaders.
Merriman died the following year, 1938, in the Aragon Offensive, when the Americans again took heavy casualties. The Nationalist were known for their take-no-prisoner tactics, but the Internationals were often used as shock troops. Hence, up to a quarter of the almost 60,000 died. For their sacrifice, they were decommissioned before the end of the war and given a hero's parade in Barcelona.
The night before the Brunete Drive began, Vach tells us that camped near by 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.”
They were also kids marching into war. Two days before the battle, “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.”
Vach’s 3,000-word Plain Dealer feature (see the full text here) takes us deep into one battle in Spain, almost 90 years ago, but also the unchanging nature of global power politics and the primordial and inherently masculine “baptism of war,” replete with poetic touches, telling details and abject horror:
A short article about Blair and his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. illo: D. Blair“We cleared our Russian rifles that morning… 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 cigarettes for a can of condensed milk, which was swiped by the British battalion’s cook… I can still see Roger Cornell, smiling as he doled out the spoonfuls to ‘Shorty,’ [Larry Friedman], ‘Smitty,’ our section leader, and two or three others.”
“The Lincoln Battalion came marching up and camped about 100 yards down the road… 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.”
“We were in high spirits, tense, expectant when the order came that night to move. Some kind of history was being made here… 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 [corned] 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…”
“Everything was silent except the sound of marching feet heading to the front. We took turns carrying the company stretcher… 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… 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… Shell after shell fell into the town bursting three at a time and leaving tall columns of smoke and debris.”
“We were approaching the range of the machine guns and their nervous rat-a-tatting… We would have to advance up a small valley toward the barricades. [Our] 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 it takes a Fascist to aim and fire again…”
Vachel Blair, in his U.S. Army uniform, about six years after he served in Spain. illo: D. Blair“Frankly, each one of us was frightened. This was our first taste of gunfire—and it was 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… 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… 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… and letting us have it, until we captured them bleeding from bullet wounds.”
His squad wasn’t central to the attack on Villanueva de la Canada that night because, when “[w]e were within 75 yards of the town… we heard the roar of triumphant Loyalist [Republican] troops as they charged into the town from the other side… 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… [W]e marched wearily toward Brunete and camped in an olive grove behind a brick farm house halfway… [D]uring 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 next morning, “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 [Carnell] 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…”
“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 to 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.”
“The 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."
Blair and his wife, Tonia Blair, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who supported the Spanish Republicans as a girl, 1962. illo: D. Blair“’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.”
“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.”
Vach left the Washington Battalion shortly after the Brunete Drive ended. Technically speaking, he deserted, since he hadn’t been decommissioned, perhaps explaining his reluctance to discuss the details of his Spanish Civil War sojourn, although foreign fighters are intrinsically volunteers. He was in Spain from March to August 1937. I got the impression, from his remarks over the years, that he concluded the Republican military was poorly organized and officered, and he would probably die there, like his friends Roger Carnell and Larry "Shorty" Friedman.
Instead, Vachel Blair returned to the United States in September, 1937, and reported what happened to the Cleveland community, notably in his Plain Dealer article. Six years later, he fought in World War Two, in the North Africa and Italy campaigns, serving in the U.S. Army Air Force as an intelligence officer and areal photographer. As such, he flew in six missions over southern Europe in B-24 bombers, which he also described in long, literary passages, as in this letter to his first wife, actually written while he was on a bombing run.
"Dearest Patty, My lady, I am going to put your St. Christopher’s Medal to a test. I’m sitting on the flight deck thinking of you as we collect the formation together before going to a lively target. Yo ho! ... Now I am looking over the pilot’s shoulder, Lt. Seitz here and he is a damn good flyer. Ahead is the squadron commander’s ship. All over the sky you can see stair steps of planes, a formation here and another there... Your little flashlight is coming in handy, for the [flight] engineer just borrowed it. Don’t forget to send more batteries will you?"
"You know, Patty, it always strikes me as I look over one of those planes in flight, droning along and vibrating to the 'quattro motore' [four motors symphony], that these sky trucks are an invention of the devil. Here we are all loaded up with men, gas and bombs. I can readily understand how there may be times when the noble thoughts of democracy and freedom might be set aside sometimes just to get in a little worry about self-survival..."
"It’s a beautiful sight outside. We’re riding high above a white cloud layer that looks like snow. Tail turret is out. 'No Bueno.' We’re going up. 'Gonna pull the pins,' says Caravalho, our bombardier, as he drops back into the bomb bay. Then we’ll be all set, Patty, to drop the load of lethal destruction upon the bastions of the Axis." What Vach withheld, due to self-censorship, was that his main job was to crawl out over the open bomb bay doors—wearing an oxygen mask but no safety strap—and film the bombs dropping and whether they hit the target. (See entire his letter here or his story about a bombing run gone bad here.)
As intense as World War Two was, Vach's brief Spanish Civil War experience, when he was 22 years old, remained foundational. Obviously, it was far beyond anything I witnessed traveling around American cities, the United States or the world, including my recent, modest foray into war reporting, "Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution". My father was much my superior in understanding war, or the way of the warrior, but he hid it from us, not wanting the attending horror, machismo and desperation to overshadow what he preferred to emphasize and provide: tolerance, optimism and support.
Doniphan Blair, in front of San Francisco's monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. illo: D. BlairNevertheless, most people in our circle knew he fought in Spain; he received the Lincoln Brigade’s newsletter and went to meetings into the 1990s (for more info, see the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives); and his Spanish volunteerism played a role in his grandchildren getting partial scholarships to a progressive private school in Manhattan.
Perhaps most significantly, when my father met my mother, Tonia Rotkopf, they bonded over the Spanish Civil War. As a young Jewish woman from a socialist family in Poland, she had learned the songs, collected donations for hungry Spanish children and knew about the politics. Indeed, some of her adoration of my father was a simple respect for the freedom fighters, who came from around the world to stop the fascists in Spain and a few years later went to Europe. Indeed, it was American troops, some tall, blond and Christian like Vach, who liberated her in Austria in 1945 from Mauthausen concentration camp.
My father, for his part, had long been friends with Jews, as we can see from his Spanish Civil War companions but also as far back as middle school, and, by college, he was a socialist. Going through his library recently, I came upon his "Black Book of Polish Jewry", a detailed expose of the onset of European atrocities, published in 1943 with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt. "The Black Book" refutes the claim that little was known about the Holocaust until late in the war. The fact that Vachel had a copy reminds us that people of good will could inform themselves and take action, much as is now needed in Ukraine.
The Spanish Civil War eerily parallels today’s war in Ukraine. Much as the democratic Loyalists desperately fought the fascist Nationalists, the 30-year-old Ukrainian democracy is in a duel to the death with the Soviet Union’s successor state, Russia, which tragically turned fascist and imperialist. Spain and Ukraine was/is on the edge of democratic Europe and struggling to join its normative, modern world; both were one of the few countries where anarchists were organized enough to mount political parties and armies; both wars had/have dedicated international brigades; and both were/are vicious confrontations where, if democracy was/is defended, it could have saved/save us a lot of suffering.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Mar 01, 2023 - 05:58 PM
by Doniphan Blair
Fighters in the Spanish Civil War. illo: D. Blair“WE COULD SEE THE DARK CLOUDS OF
fascism descending on Europe,” my father, Vachel Blair (1915-1999), told me when I was about 14 or 15. “Going to Spain was how you could fight it.”
When Spain’s armed forces rebelled against the five-year-old Spanish Republic on July 17, 1936, Vach, as his friends called him, was 21. About to become an Ohio college junior majoring in library science and minoring in political science, he was enjoying his summer vacation "riding the rails,” also called "hoboing." Traveling around America by hitching rides in or on boxcars or locomotives was common during the Great Depression. He may have read about the start of the Spanish Civil War in a newspaper or heard about it on the radio, which people sometimes blasted out their windows, or from woke hobos.
“I was socialist not communist,” my father explained to me a few times. “But the communists were the only ones organized enough to get you to Spain." From an American security clearance application he filled out in 1964, I learned the details of his enlistment.
"One morning late in 1936 I noticed an advertisement in the Cleveland Plain Dealer looking for volunteers to drive trucks in Spain. What they really had in mind, they said at an interview, was soldiering. At the age of 21, during the Depression, this seemed like a fine opportunity to escape the boredom of home and unemployment, to travel, and to see what war was really like behind the headlines, all prepaid.”
I was amazed by and immensely proud of my father’s independence, volunteerism and sacrifice, given his upper middle class, all-American heritage, but I never interviewed him in-depth on the subject, unfortunately. Indeed, I only learned the details recently, by reading a long article he wrote for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, "Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain”, which featured a photo of him and a large illustration of Spanish fighters, published November 21, 1937.
Over a dozen young men from Cleveland made the journey in March, 1937, which wasn’t easy. After getting to France, they had to sneak into Spain. While hiding under the deck of a small fishing boat, Vach’s group of 13 Americans and 12 Canadians and Europeans was arrested by French authorities and incarcerated for a few days. In an earlier column, The Plain Dealer had reported their names, that "[t]hey refused to eat anything except salad and cheese, saying they were vegetarians," and that their leader, the 30-year-old Clevelander Joe Ballet, claimed they were tourists visiting Spain. Local French, who were republican Spain sympathizers and probably communists, effected their release and their renewed travel to Spain.
Of course, it was the communist Soviet Union that was arming Spain’s democrats and democratic England, France and the U.S. that was boycotting them—Vach’s passport was stamped “Not Valid for Travel in Spain,” in fact—theoretically to avoid escalating the war. Meanwhile, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy were sending troops, pilots and tons of war materiel to Franco’s fascist Nationalists.
“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,” Vach writes. “[We] participated in this determined attempt to sever the Fascist line of communications with University City, the Madrid suburb held by Franco’s army. We saw our first front line service in the Brunete Drive and in four days—July 6 to 10 [1937]—we were initiated into all the horror the Spanish war had to offer. My closest friend was killed in that destructive baptism of fire.”
Vachel Blair's 1937 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. illo: D. BlairVach and his fellow green recruits of the Washington Battalion had joined the Lincoln Brigade, who had learned the unavoidable hard truths of war six months earlier in the Battle of Jarama. Together, they helped liberate the town of Villanueva de la Cañada. The Washington suffered so many casualties in the Brunete Drive, it was simply incorporated into the Lincoln. I remember my father telling me, with visible anger, how “macho” officers competing with each other had ordered them into ill-advised charges up the notorious "Mosquito Ridge," where they were cut down by Nationalist machine gunners.
The Lincoln was commanded by Oliver Law, an African-American from west Texas, until he died on Mosquito Ridge on July 9th. Law was succeeded by Robert Merriman, a UC Berkeley doctoral student from Eureka, California, who is thought to be the inspiration for Hemingway's hero in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940). Many fighters hailed from northern California, and San Francisco has one of America’s four monuments to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, downtown on its Embarcadero. I attended the 2007 dedication of the modest, square, structuralist display, with a lot of text and photos, by then-mayor Gavin Newsom. There was a decent crowd and a few elderly Brigaders.
Merriman died the following year, 1938, in the Aragon Offensive, when the Americans again took heavy casualties. The Nationalist were known for their take-no-prisoner tactics, but the Internationals were often used as shock troops. Hence, up to a quarter of the almost 60,000 died. For their sacrifice, they were decommissioned before the end of the war and given a hero's parade in Barcelona.
The night before the Brunete Drive began, Vach tells us that camped near by 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.”
They were also kids marching into war. Two days before the battle, “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.”
Vach’s 3,000-word Plain Dealer feature (see the full text here) takes us deep into one battle in Spain, almost 90 years ago, but also the unchanging nature of global power politics and the primordial and inherently masculine “baptism of war,” replete with poetic touches, telling details and abject horror:
A short article about Blair and his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. illo: D. Blair“The Lincoln Battalion came marching up and camped about 100 yards down the road… 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.”
“We were in high spirits, tense, expectant when the order came that night to move. Some kind of history was being made here… 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 [corned] 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…”
“Everything was silent except the sound of marching feet heading to the front. We took turns carrying the company stretcher… 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… 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… Shell after shell fell into the town bursting three at a time and leaving tall columns of smoke and debris.”
“We were approaching the range of the machine guns and their nervous rat-a-tatting… We would have to advance up a small valley toward the barricades. [Our] 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 it takes a Fascist to aim and fire again…”
Vachel Blair, in his U.S. Army uniform, about six years after he served in Spain. illo: D. BlairHis squad wasn’t central to the attack on Villanueva de la Canada that night because, when “[w]e were within 75 yards of the town… we heard the roar of triumphant Loyalist [Republican] troops as they charged into the town from the other side… 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… [W]e marched wearily toward Brunete and camped in an olive grove behind a brick farm house halfway… [D]uring 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 next morning, “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 [Carnell] 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…”
“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 to 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.”
“The 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."
Blair and his wife, Tonia Blair, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who supported the Spanish Republicans as a girl, 1962. illo: D. Blair“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.”
“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.”
Vach left the Washington Battalion shortly after the Brunete Drive ended. Technically speaking, he deserted, since he hadn’t been decommissioned, perhaps explaining his reluctance to discuss the details of his Spanish Civil War sojourn, although foreign fighters are intrinsically volunteers. He was in Spain from March to August 1937. I got the impression, from his remarks over the years, that he concluded the Republican military was poorly organized and officered, and he would probably die there, like his friends Roger Carnell and Larry "Shorty" Friedman.
Instead, Vachel Blair returned to the United States in September, 1937, and reported what happened to the Cleveland community, notably in his Plain Dealer article. Six years later, he fought in World War Two, in the North Africa and Italy campaigns, serving in the U.S. Army Air Force as an intelligence officer and areal photographer. As such, he flew in six missions over southern Europe in B-24 bombers, which he also described in long, literary passages, as in this letter to his first wife, actually written while he was on a bombing run.
"Dearest Patty, My lady, I am going to put your St. Christopher’s Medal to a test. I’m sitting on the flight deck thinking of you as we collect the formation together before going to a lively target. Yo ho! ... Now I am looking over the pilot’s shoulder, Lt. Seitz here and he is a damn good flyer. Ahead is the squadron commander’s ship. All over the sky you can see stair steps of planes, a formation here and another there... Your little flashlight is coming in handy, for the [flight] engineer just borrowed it. Don’t forget to send more batteries will you?"
"You know, Patty, it always strikes me as I look over one of those planes in flight, droning along and vibrating to the 'quattro motore' [four motors symphony], that these sky trucks are an invention of the devil. Here we are all loaded up with men, gas and bombs. I can readily understand how there may be times when the noble thoughts of democracy and freedom might be set aside sometimes just to get in a little worry about self-survival..."
"It’s a beautiful sight outside. We’re riding high above a white cloud layer that looks like snow. Tail turret is out. 'No Bueno.' We’re going up. 'Gonna pull the pins,' says Caravalho, our bombardier, as he drops back into the bomb bay. Then we’ll be all set, Patty, to drop the load of lethal destruction upon the bastions of the Axis." What Vach withheld, due to self-censorship, was that his main job was to crawl out over the open bomb bay doors—wearing an oxygen mask but no safety strap—and film the bombs dropping and whether they hit the target. (See entire his letter here or his story about a bombing run gone bad here.)
As intense as World War Two was, Vach's brief Spanish Civil War experience, when he was 22 years old, remained foundational. Obviously, it was far beyond anything I witnessed traveling around American cities, the United States or the world, including my recent, modest foray into war reporting, "Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution". My father was much my superior in understanding war, or the way of the warrior, but he hid it from us, not wanting the attending horror, machismo and desperation to overshadow what he preferred to emphasize and provide: tolerance, optimism and support.
Doniphan Blair, in front of San Francisco's monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. illo: D. BlairPerhaps most significantly, when my father met my mother, Tonia Rotkopf, they bonded over the Spanish Civil War. As a young Jewish woman from a socialist family in Poland, she had learned the songs, collected donations for hungry Spanish children and knew about the politics. Indeed, some of her adoration of my father was a simple respect for the freedom fighters, who came from around the world to stop the fascists in Spain and a few years later went to Europe. Indeed, it was American troops, some tall, blond and Christian like Vach, who liberated her in Austria in 1945 from Mauthausen concentration camp.
My father, for his part, had long been friends with Jews, as we can see from his Spanish Civil War companions but also as far back as middle school, and, by college, he was a socialist. Going through his library recently, I came upon his "Black Book of Polish Jewry", a detailed expose of the onset of European atrocities, published in 1943 with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt. "The Black Book" refutes the claim that little was known about the Holocaust until late in the war. The fact that Vachel had a copy reminds us that people of good will could inform themselves and take action, much as is now needed in Ukraine.
The Spanish Civil War eerily parallels today’s war in Ukraine. Much as the democratic Loyalists desperately fought the fascist Nationalists, the 30-year-old Ukrainian democracy is in a duel to the death with the Soviet Union’s successor state, Russia, which tragically turned fascist and imperialist. Spain and Ukraine was/is on the edge of democratic Europe and struggling to join its normative, modern world; both were one of the few countries where anarchists were organized enough to mount political parties and armies; both wars had/have dedicated international brigades; and both were/are vicious confrontations where, if democracy was/is defended, it could have saved/save us a lot of suffering.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Mar 01, 2023 - 05:58 PM
