I offer Memorial Day remembrances to those Americans who perished in the effort to meet fascism with steel and lead during the years when our national policy was neutrality.
In the summer of 1936, a newly-elected democratic government in Spain was challenged by forces of the far right. The German and Italian fascist states sent aid and arms to the right, Mexico and the Soviet Union supported the left. Volunteers from many countries, organized chiefly by communist and socialist groups, joined formations known as International Brigades and traveled to Spain to fight.
You're not going to do any fighting without something to eat. You're not going to do it. So what kind of hero are you going to be without the heroes who brought up the food and made it hot, or made it edible?
-Evelyn Hutchins
The Western powers in general maintained a policy of not risking the spread of any local war, and thus enforced an arms embargo against Republican Spain. The US went so far as to stamp passports of the day "Not Valid For Travel To Spain" and to harass volunteers as ''premature anti-fascists''.
But some 3000 came from the United States, and were formed into combat units known as the Washington and Lincoln Battalions. The generic term for these men and women is the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, although it was not a "brigade" in the order-of-battle sense. With various crises of training and leadership compounding the fact of combat as a hazardous undertaking, the Lincolns lost nearly a third of their personnel by the war's end in 1939.
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