The 50th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) has produced a plethora of books about this tragic conflict. This one will most likely outlast most of the others. It is beautifully crafted by the Pulitzer Prize winner, Lerude, and it contains material from Merriman’s secret diary that has been withheld from public view for half a century.
Approximately 40,000 foreigners from 53 countries came to Spain to form the five International Brigades. For nearly 30 months, until the shattered remnants were withdrawn from the battlefield in November 1938, these volunteers helped hold at bay Franco’s Spanish Nationalists, his 75,000 Moorish mercenaries, an Italian expeditionary corps of 80,000, and Hitler’s gift to the rebellion, the Kondor Legion. The Americans were the last to join the fray; their Abraham Lincoln Brigade contained the fewest experienced military men. Their courage, and indeed their innocence in combat, won the respect of the Spaniards and that wider global audience that watched their war from the sidelines.
Robert Hale Merriman was the model that Ernest Hemingway used in his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. He changed the young economics professor from the University of California at Berkeley to the Spanish professor from the University of Montana. Whatever was noble about the novelist’s Robert Jordan was derived from the life and death of the Lincoln Brigade’s one-time commander. What this book spells out is the terrible odds faced by the American battalions. They were poorly armed and poorly trained amateurs, fighting a largely professional force, superbly equipped by the arsenals of Germany and Italy. What comes through clearly in these pages is that the American volunteers lived up to the tradition of Valley Forge and Gettysburg.
There is another quality to this book which makes it more than a mere chronicle of men in battle. It is a love story. Merriman’s wife, Marion, was able to accompany her husband to Spain and was in fact the only woman who was officially part of the International Brigades. It is their love story, beginning on the campus of the University of Nevada, and persisting through the years after his death in battle, that makes this a chunk of Americana that deserves the widest possible readership.
