The Spanish Civil War has been called “The Last Great Cause” as the fight against Fascism involved a striking number of intellectuals, writers and journalists both from Europe and the United States. They fought in battalions, supported medical services, reported from the front lines or entertained the troops as non-combatant partisans.
Princeton-born concert artist Paul Leroy Robeson traveled to Spain in 1938. He sang to wounded soldiers and joined the front line to boost morale. In besieged Madrid, Republicans literally deployed his voice as a weapon, rigging up loudspeakers so that his songs reached the Nationalist trenches.
The idea that these volunteers consisted solely of committed left-wingers is a post-war re-writing of history. Some were excited by the “adventure” of war; others were lured into action by the promise of generous payments. One of them was the naval aviator Frank Glasgow Tinker.
Sacked by the US Navy for his involvement in drunken brawls, he joined the Republicans as a highly paid pilot. His book Some Still Live (New York, 1938) was illustrated with original images by the Hungarian-American photographer Robert Capa.
Many volunteers came themselves from marginalized or repressed minority groups. Some ninety African-Americans joined the multi-racial International Brigades. To them, General Francisco Franco represented the white supremacism they had been fighting in Mississippi or Georgia.
In the words of the poet and war reporter Langston Hughes: “Give Franco a hood and he would be a member of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Many thousands of Jews also joined the International Brigades (nearly half of the Poles who fought in Spain, over one-third of the Americans and around twenty per cent of the Britons were Jewish recruits). It is estimated that seventy per cent of the medical personnel serving in operating theatres at the front were Jews. One of these volunteers was the author James Neugass.
Lincoln Battalion
In February 1936, a “Popular Front” government made up of Socialists, Communists and Liberals was narrowly elected in Spain. Five months later Franco, then commander of Spain’s Foreign Legion in Morocco, launched a military coup against the Republican government which was supported by Hitler and Mussolini.
Germany dispatched forty combat and transport planes to ferry Franco’s army from Morocco to Seville, whilst the Italian fleet in the Mediterranean attacked ships carrying aid or volunteers to Republican Spain.
The day after Christmas 1936, a group of ninety-six volunteers traveled from New York City to Albacete in Southeastern Spain to meet other International Brigades at their headquarters there.
Ultimately, 2,800 men and women of different races, religions or social backgrounds (artists, academics, journalists and industrial workers) reached Spain to join the Lincoln Battalion, America’s first fully integrated fighting force (although with little military experience). Oliver Law, an African-American from Texas, was an early Lincoln commander.
Americans traveled to Europe to save the Continent from itself and the evils of a right-wing ideology, but also to make a statement about their own political ideals. For anti-Fascists in the United States during the late 1930s, the Lincoln Brigade expressed the internationalist and non-racial spirit that was fundamental to their alternative vision of society. To many politicians and commentators, their intervention was not welcome.
Whilst a tragedy was unfolding in Spain, Western democracies looked the other way. Some governments tried to stop the flow of volunteers by outlawing travel to Spain. France closed the border with its neighbor and England formed a Non-Intervention Committee of twenty-six nations that blocked aid to the Republican government, but not to Franco’s Nationalist rebels.
The United States adopted a similar policy. Passports were stamped “Not Valid for Spain” and the State Department tried to prevent medical supplies from reaching the country. Both big corporations and the Catholic Church supported the crusade against Communism.
The Texas Company (TEXICO, now owned by Chevron) supplied tons of gasoline on credit to Franco; Ford, Studebaker and General Motors provided twelve thousand trucks to Nationalist forces.
Franco’s superior military power crushed the Republic in November 1938. By the end of March 1939, he declared victory. The war was over and the International Brigades were disbanded. Some nine hundred American volunteers had been killed in action. The Pope sent a message expressing gratitude to the General for his “Catholic” triumph.
From that moment onward Franco created a carefully constructed political image of the warrior-crusader, defender of the Faith and restorer of Spanish Greatness. Committed to a policy of institutionalized revenge (Terror Blanco) and a cleansing of society, he refused any suggestion of amnesty and imposed a policy of severe repression.
Decades after the end of hostilities, Spanish prisons held numerous inmates waiting for execution.
American Medical Bureau
James Isidore Neugass was born on January 29, 1905, in New Orleans into a prosperous Jewish family of bankers and merchants. Several branches of the family had migrated in the late nineteenth century from Frankfurt-am-Main to Louisiana. One of the descendants was Herman Neugass.
A student and athlete at Tulane University, he had built a reputation as a talented sprinter, nicknamed the “Human Bullet.” He famously boycotted Hitler’s 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin because of Nazi anti-Semitism.
James Neugass received an exclusive education at a prep school in New Hampshire. He attended Yale, Harvard and Balliol College, Oxford, reading a variety of subjects without attaining a degree or pursuing an academic career.
His passion was poetry. Like so many gifted youngsters of his generation, the pull of modernist Paris was irresistible. During the late 1920s he traveled to Europe and stayed in Paris in the early 1930s where he tried to find his voice in a variety of literary projects.
Returning to the United States in late 1932, he continued writing while migrating from one job to another: book reviewer, shoe salesman and social worker. On October 23, 1937, he received the passport he had applied for, listing his address as 49th Street, Manhattan.
Ten days later he sailed on Cunard’s flagship RMS Queen Mary to Europe as a member of the American Medical Bureau (AMB) which was heading for Spain. This group of volunteers was led by the surgeon Leo Eloesser who had been physician to Tom Mooney (an anarchist who had wrongly been imprisoned for an act of terror) and was a lifelong friend and medical adviser to Frida Kahlo.
Having arrived in Spain in mid-November 1937, Neugass joined the AMB staff at a field hospital in Villa Paz near Madrid, the once summer residence of the exiled King Alfonso III.
Associated with the Lincoln Battalion, the AMB had been set up by Manhattan-born Edward Barsky, a graduate from the College of Physicians & Surgeons at Columbia University, to deliver medical support to the Republicans.
James was sent directly to the front. In December 1937, during the worst Spanish winter for decades, he acted – in spite of poor eyesight – as an ambulance driver in the Battle of Teruel. Fierce fighting took some 110,000 casualties. With his dominance in man power and (aerial) equipment, Franco overran the city in February 1938.
Throughout the brutal course of the battle, Neugass drove an ambulance back and forth in hazardous combat zones and assisted in setting up hospital units. He received a number of shrapnel wounds himself. When the Republican lines finally began to collapse, James found himself engaged in hand-to-hand fighting for survival.
When defeat became inevitable, Republican soldiers fled the battlefield in fear of the Nationalist’s revenge. Neugass also escaped, helping to transport Edward Barsky and other members of the AMB staff to safety. He returned to the United States on April 14, 1938, aboard the transatlantic liner Ile de France, and settled in New York.
Lost Manuscript
Working as a cabinet maker and foreman in a machine shop, Neugass wrote short fiction for popular magazines and published a powerful epic poem about the International Brigade entitled “Give Us This Day” (1938).
His novel Rain of Ashes, based on his New Orleans family, appeared in June of 1949, receiving positive reviews in a number of newspapers (including the New York Times and Daily Worker). In September that same year, James died of a heart attack in Sheridan Square subway station, Greenwich Village.
Rumors persisted about a lost memoir which he had drafted by hand in Spain, a section of which had been published in the 1938 collection Salud! Poems, Stories and Sketches of Spain by American Writers (edited by Alan Calmer).
An incomplete typed up version of the manuscript had been circulated to publishing houses. The document was then apparently withdrawn, before it mysteriously vanished. The fact that many of the author’s manuscripts were destroyed during a flooding of his property added to the difficulties in tracing the memoir.
A typed copy of War Is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War unexpectedly turned up in the year 2000 in a Vermont second hand bookshop. The suggestion that the manuscript had been found amongst papers in a house once occupied by the critic and editor Max Eastman has been disputed.
Published by The New Press in New York City in 2008, the war account is loosely constructed as a diary and contains fast-paced and at times dark-humored observations on daily life in uniform and sharp descriptions of local customs and scenes.
It combines (unsentimental) tales of missions onto the front to treat wounded soldiers with mournful renderings of long days spent on alert, anxiously waiting for the dreaded call. Why did the author use the word “beautiful” in the title of his memoir?
Like for many of his contemporaries, Neugass felt compelled to get involved. In Paris he had encountered the appeal of Futurism amongst writers and artists. Its spokesman, the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, had linked creativity to a worship of technology. He declared war “beautiful” because it represented the subjugation of machines to the human will. Armed conflict was hailed as a process by which a new and contemporary aesthetics would be created.
Neugass rejected the idea as delusionary. The title of his memoir is a sarcastic reference to the Fascist “beauty of war” slogan. It relates the devastating impact of “mechanical death-machines” instead. Modern combat is ugly.
War Memoirs
The “War Memoir” is a narrative that offers readers a first-hand account of the experiences, emotions and perspectives penned by individuals who were involved in warfare. Each era has produced personal accounts that capture the challenges of those times, providing a window into the psychological impact of armed conflict and its harsh realities.
The devastation of the First World War added new depth and intensity to the genre by highlighting the horrors of armored warfare.
In 1928, Erich Maria Remarque published his novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) in 1928. The author described the experiences of German soldiers during the First World War. The tale became a landmark work in twentieth-century anti-war literature and inspired a wave of memoirs in print and cinema.
The Nazis condemned the novel as “unpatriotic.” In 1933, Fascists students pillaged university libraries in search of un-German books and burned all of Remarque’s writings they could find. The hostile climate forced the author to seek exile in New York City where he settled at East 59th Street and took on American citizenship.
The Spanish Civil War was noteworthy for the impact it had in literary circles. George Orwell’s experience of fighting for the Republican cause is recorded in Homage to Catalonia; Ernest Hemingway’s journalistic work during the war inspired his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls; Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1939 short story “Le Mur” (The Wall) is a chilling account of the execution of prisoners by Franco’s firing squads.
In our days of political polarization, the scapegoating of society’s “bad guys” and the heedless flirtation with dictatorial leaders, it is important that readers return to these books and take note of their message. In any selection of war accounts, the Neugass memoir deserves a prominent place.
Illustrations, from above: Robert Capa’s “Death of a militiaman, Córdoba front,” September 1936 (International Centre of Photography); Tom Mooney Company from the Lincoln Battalion in Jarama, Central Spain, ca. 1937; A political button worn by supporters of the Lincoln Battalion; Detail from Arturo Reque Meruvia’s Madrid mural “Allegory of Franco as a Crusader,” 1948-9; Armband of the American Medical Bureau (AMB) in the colors of the Republican flag; James Neugass (standing second from right) and fellow medical officers; and Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), 1929.
