Ireland’s Quixotic Cruzada: the Irish and the Spanish Civil War

This may also seem like a modest figure. Yet as the authors of In Spanish Trenches point out, total membership in Ireland’s Communist Party in 1937 numbered only 120—meaning that the volunteer turnout amounted to double the membership total.

Of course, this support violated the non-intervention agreement that all three fascist powers (and the Soviet Union as well) had signed before the outbreak of war. The International Brigades and other left-wing Loyalist militias numbered no more than 40,000, along with 2105 Russian troops (chiefly Red Army commanders, or so-called military advisers) who equipped them with Russian weaponry. Thus, by “honoring” the non-intervention agreement, the USA, Britain, and France effectively became appeasers who surrendered Republican Spain to the fascists by blocking supply lines and outlawing volunteer service. (Or rather, honoring the agreement selectively: for example, the Americans and British sent plenty of oil throughout the war to rebel-held Spanish territory as well as Republican Spain.) On these points, see the recent voluminous study by Giles Tremlett, The International Brigades.

It is also a myth that all the Irish radical volunteers were exemplars of heroism. In their excellent recent study, In Spanish Trenches, Barry McLaughlin and Emmett O’Connor note that at least 40 Irishmen (16 percent) deserted their units; 24 soldiers slipped out of Spain without official discharges. At a more august level, in post-Franco Spain, the Connolly veterans have been awarded honorary Spanish citizenship for their services to the Spanish Republic. So the dismissive remarks proceed—and it goes downhill from there. O’Duffy’s Blueshirts are ridiculed as a half-mad flirtation with fascism—if they are remembered at all. Even the Church they fought for failed to offer them any recognition for their services when they returned from Spain—nor subsequently either. Within a decade of the Blueshirts’ trip to Spain, the ignominy of the Hitler regime and crimes of the Holocaust had besmirched their memory. They were portrayed as villainous knaves who had fought alongside the arch-monster of totalitarianism and his legions of genocidal henchmen.