Our Fathers Fought Franco by Willy Maley sampler

Our Fathers Fought Franco
Green’s description of the ordinary men who made up the extraordinary
battalions of the International Brigades is almost as poignant as his wife’s
account of her husband’s last moments. According to Nan Green, who was
also in Spain nursing the wounded, George, ‘killed almost in the last hour
of the last day, [...] died flying as it were, you know, like a bird dies’.
In !Comrades!: Portraits from the Spanish Civil War (2000), leading
historian Paul Preston reminds his readers of the greys between the reds
and blacks and blues:
The conflict was not a tidy split between right and left, between the
forces of evil and the forces of good. It was a messy and appallingly
painful amalgam of intertwined hostilities and hatreds. 3
In Doves of War: Four Women of Spain (2002), Preston homes in on
four ‘relatively unknown’ female figures from diverse political backgrounds
– including Nan Green – to provide a portrait of the war through the eyes
of women who experienced it directly. Our Fathers Fought Franco also
tells the story of relatively unknown participants. All were members of
the Communist Party at the time of volunteering, committed antifascists
prepared to lay down their lives for the fledgling Spanish Republic. They
travelled to Spain at the end of December 1936 – just before the British
Government reaffirmed that under the Foreign Enlistment Act it was illegal
to recruit or volunteer for service in Spain on either side – and were thrown
into battle six weeks later. Their lifelong bond was forged in the crucible of
the Battle of Jarama, one of only three episodes in the war where Franco’s
forces were held at bay, the other two being Madrid from 1936 onwards
and Guadalajara in March 1937. But Jarama was a costly defence of the
Republic, with half the battalion lost. Many died on the first day.
Before and after Spain, the lives of Maley, Renton, Watters and Williams
took different turns, but for a few dark and bloody hours in the Jarama Valley
their fates intersected, and for the next few months they spent their days and
nights in close proximity as prisoners of Franco. There can of course be no
happy ending here; these men fought Franco and Franco won. But in no
way did it deflect them from their lifelong commitment to the cause of the
Left. Their activism had its roots in the trade union movement, the National
Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) and in resistance to the British
Union of Fascists (BUF). They were veterans of street fights and strikes, of
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