Fighting for Spain by Alexander Clifford

Author:Alexander Clifford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / Military / General
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2021-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Perhaps what is most remarkable is that the International Brigades still existed at all at this point, given that every brigade, save the 11th, appears to have been in extremely poor shape. Truth be told, after virtually non-stop combat since the winter, the volunteers were badly in need of a rest, if not repatriation, especially given the near-uninterrupted chain of military setbacks the Republic had endured, surely wearing down morale and motivation. In an effort to reduce national tensions, the Brigades were reorganised in an effort to make them more linguistically homogenous: the 11th was now solely Germanic, the 12th Italo-Spanish, plus the Frenchmen of the Marty battalion, the reconstituted 13th Slavic, the 14th French-Belgian and the 15th Anglophone, with the exception of the Balkan Dimitrov battalion, soon to be transferred. It goes without saying, however, that each brigade was also, to varying degrees, manned by Spaniards, with each national battalion being complemented by a Spanish company and most International Brigades also having at least one all-Spanish battalion. The heavy losses of the last nine months could not be replaced with new arrivals from abroad. While the flow of volunteers had averaged nearly 3,500 per month up to March 1937, from April to July the average was just 1,500 (and this figure includes wounded men returned to action). Yet somehow the officers and commissars were able to forge the battered remnants and the trickle of new arrivals into crack units once again. The Comintern report quoted above ends on a remarkably upbeat note:

The picture of the International Brigades’ military and political situation sketched here is not as dark as one might think. Doubtless, these processes of demoralization can be stopped. In some cases, the symptoms indicate potential demoralization, rather than the disease itself …

Now, I believe I can affirm that whatever some say their faults may be, the International Brigades still represent a quarter of the Spanish army’s shock units [author’s italics]. There is not an army in the world that can spare a quarter of its shock units.24

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