Alvah Bessie on World War II

“Those Americans who went to Spain to fight Franco and stave off World War II have never minded being called "premature anti-fascists." They were proud of the label.”

“Men went to Spain for various reasons, but behind almost every man I met there was a common restlessness, a loneliness. In action these men would fight like devils, with the desperation of an iron-bound conscience; in private conversation there was something else again.”

“Hitler and Mussolini never could afford to withdraw their 'volunteers'- ten times as many as we had- and it could no longer be denied that the British Government was a silent partner in the Fascist Powers' attempts to strangle Spain; that we were witnessing one of the most amazing and cynical displays of hypocrisy in world history.”

“We have long memories. We have developed a relative immunity to the endless barrage of propaganda, slander and outright lies that has been laid upon us. And especially, we are immune to the Big Lie that destroyed Spain and which Hitler developed to such a point of perfection that it was necessary for millions of human beings to die to achieve the defeat of the Axis. Yet the Big Lie survives and flourishes mightily in our own country today. As it is promulgated daily, hourly and every minute of the day through every medium of communication, so it must be answered- until our own people see it for what it is and explode it in their own good time.”

“They had started at twenty thousand feet, mixed it up till you couldn't tell what they were doing, and the scream of their propellors as they dived sounded in our ears as though they were directly overhead. Three went down in flames, one after the other, with two parachutes blooming suddenly like spring flowers in the air, and floating slowly down. You could see the men hauling on the shrouds to guide the chutes, swinging wildly from side to side like pendulums as their own planes, Fascists, dived at them and tried to machine-gun them. "The bastards!" Aaron said. "Look at them, the sons-of-bitches!" Two of our planes spiralled slowly around the descending pilots to protect them. "This is one hell of a war," Aaron said.”

“More and more we felt that only a resolution of the European situation could save Spain, if Spain was to be saved. The Blum Government, at least, had recognized the importance of Spain to French security. The Daladier outfit was hand in glove, not only with its own brand of Fascists, but with the foreign gang as well. (Class is thicker than nationality.) "Why doesn't France do something?" became a cliché. "Don't they see that if Hitler and his little pal take over Spain, France will be strangled on three fronts?" Well, either they didn't see it or they didn't care, which was more likely. The French people were with us heart and soul; they had given thousands of their best sons, millions of their money; the French people's rulers were against us. They bore no ill-will toward the Fascists; they were Fascist.”

“The news from Europe was worse than ever, with England and France agreeing to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and presenting a 'plan' of compromise to her. This plan was cynical in the extreme: it involved outright cession of the Sudeten areas; the autonomy of other regions containing a large German population; the 'neutralization' of Czechoslovakia in the event of a major conflict between other powers, and the usual 'guarantees' of her frontiers by England, France, Germany and Italy. The murderers were guaranteeing to respect the corpse! These terms, we believed, the present Czech Government would never accept. It had an army second to none. Its people had tasted years of true democracy. It had a munitions industry that any one could well have envied (many did). And so we expected that France would respect her previous commitments, that popular indignation in both France and England would bring about the fall of their respective cabinets. We were wrong.”

“Fog meant no airplanes, so we could relax. Yesterday they had been active all day, bombing Pinell behind us, Corbera and the road to Gandesa on our right, Mora and our lines of communication. We could see them from the hilltop, cruising slowly in formidable array and with damnable slowness over the terrain, sowing their seed up and down, back and forth over large square areas, and for hours the air was full of smoke and dust and trembling with the constant drumming of the explosive. Our 'pom-pom' guns sniped at them pitiably. This is a long, light anti-aircraft gun that was fairly effective, but we had s few that they paid no attention to them. Seventy-five planes merely sailed with exasperating ease through their sparse fire; then when ten of ours appeared they had to run a gauntlet of fire that blackened the sky for hundreds of acres. It was heart-breaking, and you could thank France for that; you could thank England and its Non-Intervention Committee; you could thank Italy and Germany, and last but not least you could thank the good old U.S.A. and its 'Neutrality' Act, that permitted the sale of American-made munitions to Italy and Germany for transhipment to Franco.”