Table of Contents

Contents

Preface

1. Getting There

2. Men of La Mancha

3. The Yanks Are Coming

4. The Jarama Massacre

5. Waiting . . . Waiting

6. Tourists and Trippers

7. The Torrents of Spring

8. The Washington Battalion

9. Stalemate at Brunete

10. The Road to Zaragoza

11. Fuentes de Ebro

12. Teruel—The Big Chill

13. Retreat from Belchite

14. The Rout at Gandesa

15. Postmortem

16. In the Penal Colonies

17. The Far Shore

18. La Despedida

19. “Premature Anti-Fascists” and All That

Appendix 1: Bibliographical Essay—Basic Sources

Appendix 2: Interview Subjects from the XVth Brigade

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Cecil D. Eby is a retired Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of eight books, including Hungary at War: Civilians and Soldiers in World War II (Penn State Press, 1998).

Reviews

“Comrades and Commissars is the best book ever written about the Lincoln Battalion. Eby does not accept the standard politically correct line, but neither does he go to the opposite extreme. Rather, he demonstrates a very good grasp of the volunteers as individuals, not as political puppets, and is thoroughly sympathetic to them on the human level, while at the same time showing the real character of the politics involved.”—Stanley G. Payne,University of Wisconsin–Madison, author of The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism

“[Eby’s] Between the Bullet and the Lie (1969) was a good book and Comrades and Commissars is better. Cecil Eby’s book on the American volunteers who fought in the Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades (IB) in the Spanish Civil War exposes in lively detail what happened to the Americans in Spain.”—Stephen Burgess-Whiting Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

“The result of this new research is a detailed, forthright, and empathetic account of the short, but active life of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, set masterfully in the larger context of the Spanish Civil War and the politics of the American Left in the 1930s.”—Scott E. Belliveau Journal of Military History