'Spain in Our Hearts': The long-overlooked history of U.S. fighters in civil war

Spain in Our Hearts

Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

By Adam Hochschild

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 464 pp. $30 nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Bob Drogin

nolead ends The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) is most notable to historians for how it foreshadowed the horrors of World War II. Yet, few distant conflicts are so burned into our culture and consciousness.

Ernest Hemingway, who covered the war, made it the setting of For Whom the Bell Tolls. George Orwell, who fought in it, called his popular memoir Homage to Catalonia. Less well known are the 2,800 American men and women who risked their lives to defend Spain's democratically elected government. Avowedly leftist, they fought with antiquated weapons and supplies from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. They were defeated by Nationalist insurgents led by right-wing Gen. Francisco Franco. He was reinforced by tanks, planes, and troops from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, who used Spain to test weapons and tactics that soon would devastate Europe.

The tragic story of the Americans in the doomed Abraham Lincoln Brigade - who bore some of the toughest fighting and heaviest casualties of any unit - comes vividly to life in Adam Hochschild's compelling Spain in Our Hearts, a long-overdue book.

The Americans came from nearly every state and all walks of life: professors and union organizers, coal miners, and a former governor of Ohio. About 90 were African American. About a third came from New York. Close to half were Jewish.

Mining letters, unpublished memoirs, and other archives, Hochschild recounts how Americans like Bob Merriman, a graduate student from Berkeley, were drawn to what they rightly saw as the opening round in a global battle against fascism. Merriman rose to help lead the Lincolns in combat. Hemingway supposedly used him as a model for Robert Jordan, the American hero in his novel. Merriman disappeared in April 1938 during a chaotic retreat. Reports suggest he was captured and executed by Nationalists, one of about 800 Americans who died in Spain.

"There seemed a moral clarity about the crisis in Spain," Hochschild writes. "Rapidly advancing fascism cried out for defiance; if not here, where?"

The title comes from Albert Camus. Men learned in Spain, the French novelist wrote, that "one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, and that there are times when courage is not rewarded."

This review originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.