As Spain shrugs off the last cobwebs of general Francisco Franco’s fascist regime 70 years after it hatched amid civil war, Americans are also looking back, honoring their own who fought there and the ideals for which they stood.
The faces of some of the 3,000 or so men and women who broke US isolationism to volunteer in the 1936 to 1939 Spanish war look out from the translucent onyx squares of a monument recently inaugurated on this city’s touristic Embarcadero.
“I wasn’t about to watch another country go to hell,” said veteran David Smith, 92, recalling that Italy and Germany were already controlled by dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler when he left the US to join the Jarama front in 1937.
THE STAKES
Although the Spanish Civil War has been enshrined in literature and art by the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso, Americans who risked their lives for the values at stake were never recognized in their home country. Only about three dozen of those who snuck aboard ships and crossed the mountains from France to fight survived to see the US’ first public memorial to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, as they were known.
The celebration was timely. Three have died since the monument’s inauguration — Abe Osheroff, whose last speech was at the monument’s March 30 unveiling, Abe Smorodin, of Brooklyn, New York, and Ted Veltfort, of Oakland.
The only acknowledgment most brigade members received following their return to the US were the 1950s investigations for participation in leftist organizations, they said.
Smith returned to the US and sought work as a tool maker, only to find he’d been blacklisted. Afraid he’d be arrested by the FBI, Osheroff went underground following the 1949 jailing of leaders of the American Communist Party.
“They took a heroic stand and then had to live in fear, after losing their livelihoods,” said Anita Toney, whose father, Anthony Toney, abandoned his art scholarship in Paris and walked across the Pyrenees mountains that divide France and Spain to join the fight.
This monument makes right that historical injustice, said Spanish Ambassador Carlos Westendorp y Cabeza at the unveiling, after thanking the veterans for risking their lives for his country.
“We democrats lost that battle, but we won the war,” he said.
FRONT LINE
Although contained by that country’s borders, the Spanish Civil War was the front line of the battle of ideologies that marked the 20th century.
Supporters of the democratic leftist government that had supplanted Spain’s monarchy faced the right-wing, Catholic supporters of Franco, who led a military uprising against the government. It was a national war, but it became the focal point of an international struggle. Mexico and the Soviet Union threw their weight with the leftist Republic, while Franco’s nacionales had help from fascist Germany, Italy and Portugal.
Though US volunteers’ contribution was long unacknowledged, the memory of the Spanish war lived on in part because of the pivotal role it played on the world stage.
It was a modern war — a theater used by Hitler’s Germany, in particular, to rehearse blitzkrieg tactics later used in World War II.
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