Handbook for Spies

by Foote Alexander

Too many books have been written about the Spanish Civil War for me to say more than is necessary to my story. Too many of my comrades have died to make it easy for me to write about it at all. It was for me merely a halting place on my way. The fact that I did not realise that it was only a halting place and regarded it as the be-all and end-all of my existence at the time is neither here nor there. For me the war was a struggle where my friends fought and died. For others it was merely a testing ground and a suitable place for talent spotting.

The man in charge of the formation of the battalion was Wilfred Macartney. The political commissar was Douglas Springhall, who played a more vital part in my life later, when he recruited me for the Red Army Intelligence. Battalions were formed approximately on language groups and in our battalion we had British and dominion troops and a sprinkling of Swedes whose only other language was English. We even had an Ethiopian who claimed that he was the son of Ras Imru, one of the Negus' chieftains. After the preliminary flurry, however, it was discovered that he was merely a Lascar sailor who had picked up his English on British ships, and he then faded out of the propaganda limelight. Despite the occasional bad egg that is as inevitably attracted toward a cause where there is a possibility of loot as a fly is to honey, the morale of the battalion was high. Whatever were the motives of the Republican equivalents of brass hats, the rank and file fought magnificently. The casualty lists are sufficient evidence of this; almost half of the thousand-odd British who served with the International Brigade were killed.

I remember Professor J. B. S. Haldane, when for a short period he served with the brigade as a private soldier, standing in a trench, brandishing a tiny snub-nosed revolver, and shouting defiance at the advancing Franco infantry. Luckily for science, we managed to repel the Rebel attack and the professor was spared for his further contributions to world knowledge.

I was posted as battalion transport officer. Ranks at that time bore little relation to fact. I was not "politically reliable" and as such ranked lower in the political hierarchy than the fellow comrade who had sold the Daily Worker with distinction in North Shields. Though I never achieved commissioned rank, I performed all the duties for my battalion which would have been carried out in the British Army by a transport officer. The work was as varied as it was dangerous, ranging from the prosaic bringing up of the rations to the evacuation from an encircled town of the Republican alcalde with the entire civic funds. In this case the alcalde abandoned us first and fell promptly into the hands of skirmishing Moorish cavalry. The funds, however, lingered for days in the boot of the car, as we had rashly supposed that the mayor had been evacuating his wardrobe rather than his revenue. It was on such a trip, with Franco planes machine-gunning the road, that, bundling without dignity into a nearby shell hole, I was stepped softly on by Slater, then on the Planning Staff, who was similarly hurrying for shelter from the back seat of my car. He curled himself gracefully down on top of me with an exquisitely polite "Excuse me" which I have always treasured as a fine example of courtesy under difficulties.

There were not unnaturally preliminary teething pains in the battalion. One of these resulted in the Irish contingent's transferring in a body to the American Lincoln Battalion; they refused to serve under Macartney because he had been an officer in the Black and Tans in Ireland after World War I. Eventually the British Battalion was included in the 6th International Brigade, which for the greater part of the Civil War formed part of the 11th Division of the Republican Army.

This division was commanded by a Russian-trained General "Walter, " who recently became Minister for War in the Polish government. By using his Christian name he was following the example of his Soviet colleagues, who preferred to veil their identities behind a noncommittal first name. I myself came into close touch with only one Red Army officer while in Spain; this was a certain "Max" who, despite his junior rank of captain and his function as "observer, " wielded great authority. He came into my life again later when his endorsement of my suitability for work for the Red Army Intelligence helped to establish me in the confidence of the Russian D. M. I.

As an infantry soldier the strategy and politics of the war naturally passed me by. We, fighting in the line, knew little or nothing of Barcelona and Valencia politics and intrigues, and less still of their international ramifications. We only knew that we fought, always ill equipped and frequently under-armed, against an enemy who appeared to be furnished with a multiplicity of modern weapons. Our task was not made easier by the frequent "purges" of our officers which took place. After every reverse we could be certain that one or more of our colleagues would vanish- failure and "Trotskyist inclinations" being almost synonymous. Attacks did fail. This is hardly surprising when an army, often with only five live rounds a day to fire off, is thrown against a well- equipped force with modern weapons and stiffened with foreign troops. Not all our failures, however, can be attributed either to the Republican General Staff or to the lack of equipment. The "Moscow Operation" of Fuentes de Ebro will long be remembered by those who were lucky enough to survive it.

It appeared that Moscow had evolved a new tank theory which they wished tried out, not in mock combat but in battle conditions, which were found, conveniently and economically, in Spain. (I have no more bitterness toward the Russians for this technique than I have toward the Germans and the Italians, who did exactly the same thing. The only difference is that the Germans were publicly arraigned for it at Nuremberg. ) The idea was to throw some forty tanks against the enemy during the siesta. These tanks were to break through the infantry front line and push straight forward to the artillery and, having disposed of the latter, turn back and take the infantry in the rear. The tanks were brand-new and the crews were Germans newly trained in a Russian tank school. It was in vain that our chief of staff, Malcolm Dunbar, pointed out that the rebel position had been heavily plastered with artillery fire, with the result that the irrigation ditches had been broken and the place was a quagmire. Moscow orders were orders, and the attack went in. Some twelve out of the forty tanks returned; the majority of the rest were captured intact by the enemy. I trust that the lesson was instructive to the Russian observers. It was certainly so to the surviving tank crews, who drove their Russian commander back to the base area never to be seen again.

This is, however, all past history, and the average person nowadays has forgotten the Civil War or remembers it merely as a curtain raiser to the second Great War. Of course it was such, and my comrades in their unmarked graves round Teruel were merely the first skirmishers in the great encounter to come.

After two years' continual service with the International Brigade, I was sent back on leave to England in September 1938 to be present at the Communist Party Congress at Birmingham. The political commissariat at the brigade must have regarded me with some favour to allow me, a non-Party member, to be selected to return. My job as transport officer made me less vulnerable to accusations as a "Trotskyist" and my personal friendship with my own particular commissar may have helped. I left the brigade, decimated by losses and beginning to be demoralised by "purges" never to return.