The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War

Carroll ( Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History ) skillfully melds the simple brutality of the Spanish Civil War with the human complexity of the 2800 American volunteers who fought in it from 1937 to 1939. Known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, most of these Americans were Communists who saw themselves as liberators and antifascists. After portraying their diverse, Depression-era backgrounds, Carroll follows them into battle in Spain where one-third died and nearly all were wounded. Almost half had no previous military experience, and the oral accounts of 200 contemporary survivors tell heartbreaking stories of slaughter. Meanwhile, as the U.S. government stressed nonintervention, observers assessed the fight as a ``laboratory for the weapons of the next war.'' Surviving Lincolns returned as outcasts, facing indictments by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and, only through persistent idealism, did the Lincolns sustain their fight and maintain the right to protest publicly. Not until 1965 was the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade removed from the list of subversive organizations, ending 25 years of harassment. The breadth, depth and humanity Carroll depicts set this engrossing work apart from other juiceless war reports. (July)