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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade
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First published January 1, 1967
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April 17, 2021
Arthur H. Landis’ exhaustive history of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade is both indispensable and notably flawed. Indispensable, because there will probably never be another author with both the diligence and professionalism to produce such a thoroughly cited and comprehensive history of what is an increasingly niche subject; and, crucially, a level of access to primary sources in the form of documents and in-person interviews that will likely never be exceeded. Flawed, in that what Landis gains in intimacy with the subject matter he loses in objectivity – sometimes in ways that are ultimately trivial, and sometimes in ways that are more concerning. Both of these aspects deserve to be explored in detail in order to fully understand this unique work of history.
Arthur Landis was uniquely positioned to write a history of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, because he himself fought in Spain as a machine gunner in the 60th “Mackenzie-Papineau” battalion of the XV International Brigade “Abraham Lincoln.” He was wounded at Teruel, returned to the fighting, and stayed all the way through to the end of the Internationals’ involvement. When he writes about Canadian soldiers turning a machine gun on deserting Spanish conscripts in January 1938, and you check the citation, it turns out that the author, personally, fired a machine gun at deserting Spanish conscripts. That’s an unanswerable citation, especially 85 years after the fact – who the hell’s going to argue with the man? It would be like telling Dick Winters that he was wrong about Carentan.
While the author’s experiences in Spain doubtless leant a degree of realism and credibility to his description of the actions in which he personally took part, they were doubly important to his ability to complete this work in that they gave him – in the 1960s, fresh on the heels of McCarthyism – the street cred to get interviews with a huge number of ALB veterans, including guys like (convicted Soviet spy in The Manhattan Project) Steve Nelson, who would likely not have given interviews to just anyone. Although Nelson was a high ranking Commissar, Landis appears to have taken source material from dozens of volunteers, including many who were not in leadership positions. No historian in the ‘60s was even trying to do this, or could have gotten a grant to fund it, so Landis’ labor of love is an invaluable contribution to the historical record. Coupled with his access to documents that are now contained in the VALB Archive at NYU, but which were then stored in the author’s garage after he physically smuggled them out of war-torn Spain in a backpack, this means that the level of detail and accuracy regarding XV International Brigade operations in Spain that he achieves is incomparable, and all other works on the subject are likely to be, to some extent, derived from this.
If you want to know who the 2nd Platoon Leader, 3rd Company, British Battalion was at the Battle of Quinto, and what part 3rd Company played, and how many casualties they took, and where they took them, and what their names were, it’s in here, and it’s no where else. Although there have been a few additional contributions to the historical record since this was published in 1967 – the recently-published diary of XV International Brigade Chief of Staff MAJ Robert Hale Merriman, and the memoirs of his wife and fellow volunteer Marion Merriman-Wachtel, whom Landis did not seem to have interviewed, this is pretty much the best record you’re going to get without physically going to NYU and digging through musty papers, or going to Spain or Russia for foreign-language primary sources. It’s unequalled – it inherently can’t ever be equaled.
Landis appears to have done his best to offer a well-cited and professional work of history, and he did better than most amateur historians would – there are nearly 60 pages of citations here, with solid explanatory notes. Where he uses the consensus of eyewitnesses, or where he chooses between two conflicting accounts, he says so. He also – unsurprisingly for a man who would go on to be a prolific writer of pulp science fiction – does a good job of writing fluidly and keeping it interesting, which is valuable in a book that could have become very dry indeed in the hands of a lesser author. With that being given, however, the style and tone of the writing is the first instance where this book departs from strict objectivity. The best way to describe it is that it sometimes reads as if it was written by a tankie Theodore Roosevelt. Indeed, if you’ve read Roosevelt’s book The Rough Riders, another work by a gifted writer who was a little too close to the subject matter, about another war involving Americans and Spain, you’ll understand the analogy. Landis forever has the Lincolns charging “gallantly” up another hill, outnumbered ten to one by Franco’s best troops [italics author’s] and so forth. Was a man dismayed – no, though the Soldier knew someone had blundered &c. This is understandable in that the author probably felt that he had something to prove to an American reading public that, then as now, had heard a lot of its news from fascist sympathizers, but it does make one start to question the author’s take just a little bit.
With that being said, it’s not as if he sugar-coats the war, or the Lincolns’ involvement in it. He is very clear when he feels that the Brigade or higher leadership made a major tactical or strategic error, and is very vivid in his descriptions of American volunteers, horribly maimed and dying in excruciating pain in no-man’s land, with no water, because no one on the Brigade staff could organize resupply or casualty evacuation. In a military organization where every leader from about Corporal on up was in way over his head, there’s a lot of criticism to go around, and, to his credit, Landis is prepared to offer it. There’s even a description of an incident wherein the Lincolns were on a train carrying them back to a rest area from the front line at Teruel, when Merriman stops the train and gets everyone off in the middle of a field in January to hear a speech from CPUSA Chairman Earl Browder. Seeing the thousand-yard stares on the faces of the filthy, exhausted, un-shod infantrymen, Browder tells them that they’d better change their attitudes or they’ll be sent home. The reaction is what one would expect, and Browder is hustled off into a waiting car as guys demand to know when the boat is leaving.
There is, of course, a definite editorial stance at times. Landis clearly has a bone to pick with the likes of Neville Chamberlain and FDR, whom he blames for not supporting the Spanish Republic with weapons and money at a time when corporations like Ford and Standard Oil were selling “non-military supplies” to Franco at a discount, to say nothing of the enormous amount of support that Germany and Italy sent. To some extent this is a valid position for an historian to take: in retrospect, it probably would have been smart to allow the Republican government to buy weapons, in as much as a Nazi plane shot down by a Spanish pilot in a Curtiss P-36 in 1937 was going to be one less Nazi plane for an American pilot to shoot down a few years later. It may just be an oversight that he neglects to mention the exorbitant, cash-and-carry terms that the Soviet government extracted from the Republic for the meagre amount of military aid that the Soviets sent.
Or it may not. Most concerning about Landis’ take on the war is his possible willingness to pick the Communist Party line – which is to say, the hardline, Stalinist Communist Party line -- over the strict truth. There are only a few instances where this is truly obvious, but where they are obvious, they are alarming, and make one question where there might be less obvious instances. Most glaring is the matter of the fate of XV International Brigade Commander LTC Vladimir Copic. Now, it is widely agreed, here in 2021, that Copic returned to the Soviet Union after the war and was almost immediately shot without trial by the NKVD, a fate shared by many International Brigades’ leaders and Soviet advisors, who were thought by the Stalinist government to have been contaminated with foreign, Trotskyist ideas. Landis simply has him “disappear from the record” with nothing more to be said about the matter. Him? Oh. Nobody knows what happened to him, Comrade. Let’s drop the subject. Interestingly, about the only place where, in 2021, you can find anyone offering an alternative fate for Copic is on the hard-left Spartacus Educational, which shows you where the lines are drawn, even to this day. It would have been well-known, even in 1967, that Stalin had had tens of thousands of Red Army officers shot for supposed disloyalty, so it seems improbable that there would have been anything to gain by telling this particular lie; it may just have been a reflexive habit of the author’s to minimize or discount criticism of the Communist cause. Still, it means that it is doubly important to take some of the more politically relevant parts of this book with a grain of salt. Another literary veteran of the Spanish Civil War – though of the POUM, which Landis also hates – had lots to say about the war’s effect on truth.
Which is not to say that The Abraham Lincoln Brigade is a complete work of Communist propaganda with no redeeming value. It couldn’t have been, because the Communist Party wouldn’t have cared enough to publish it. This was clearly a book that Landis wrote for himself, because he had to, and for his buddies, who would not have tolerated any truly egregious lies, at least not ones about them. My individual copy has a note in the front stating: “This is a specially bound edition made for the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and limited to 1,500 copies, of which this is number:” – the numeral 508 is written in ballpoint pen, probably by Landis himself, or by Milton Wolff or somebody. The book’s first owner went through the index and underlined the names of all of his friends, including where each was killed. If this book was a complete collection of lies, it wouldn’t have flown for that audience in particular, which is a reason to take it seriously as a work of history, even if it is a flawed one. As the author undoubtedly intended, it mainly does justice to the thousands of heroic and underappreciated Americans who decided to put their lives on the line to fight Fascism before it was fashionable, only a handful of whom left Spain alive and unwounded.
Arthur Landis was uniquely positioned to write a history of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, because he himself fought in Spain as a machine gunner in the 60th “Mackenzie-Papineau” battalion of the XV International Brigade “Abraham Lincoln.” He was wounded at Teruel, returned to the fighting, and stayed all the way through to the end of the Internationals’ involvement. When he writes about Canadian soldiers turning a machine gun on deserting Spanish conscripts in January 1938, and you check the citation, it turns out that the author, personally, fired a machine gun at deserting Spanish conscripts. That’s an unanswerable citation, especially 85 years after the fact – who the hell’s going to argue with the man? It would be like telling Dick Winters that he was wrong about Carentan.
While the author’s experiences in Spain doubtless leant a degree of realism and credibility to his description of the actions in which he personally took part, they were doubly important to his ability to complete this work in that they gave him – in the 1960s, fresh on the heels of McCarthyism – the street cred to get interviews with a huge number of ALB veterans, including guys like (convicted Soviet spy in The Manhattan Project) Steve Nelson, who would likely not have given interviews to just anyone. Although Nelson was a high ranking Commissar, Landis appears to have taken source material from dozens of volunteers, including many who were not in leadership positions. No historian in the ‘60s was even trying to do this, or could have gotten a grant to fund it, so Landis’ labor of love is an invaluable contribution to the historical record. Coupled with his access to documents that are now contained in the VALB Archive at NYU, but which were then stored in the author’s garage after he physically smuggled them out of war-torn Spain in a backpack, this means that the level of detail and accuracy regarding XV International Brigade operations in Spain that he achieves is incomparable, and all other works on the subject are likely to be, to some extent, derived from this.
If you want to know who the 2nd Platoon Leader, 3rd Company, British Battalion was at the Battle of Quinto, and what part 3rd Company played, and how many casualties they took, and where they took them, and what their names were, it’s in here, and it’s no where else. Although there have been a few additional contributions to the historical record since this was published in 1967 – the recently-published diary of XV International Brigade Chief of Staff MAJ Robert Hale Merriman, and the memoirs of his wife and fellow volunteer Marion Merriman-Wachtel, whom Landis did not seem to have interviewed, this is pretty much the best record you’re going to get without physically going to NYU and digging through musty papers, or going to Spain or Russia for foreign-language primary sources. It’s unequalled – it inherently can’t ever be equaled.
Landis appears to have done his best to offer a well-cited and professional work of history, and he did better than most amateur historians would – there are nearly 60 pages of citations here, with solid explanatory notes. Where he uses the consensus of eyewitnesses, or where he chooses between two conflicting accounts, he says so. He also – unsurprisingly for a man who would go on to be a prolific writer of pulp science fiction – does a good job of writing fluidly and keeping it interesting, which is valuable in a book that could have become very dry indeed in the hands of a lesser author. With that being given, however, the style and tone of the writing is the first instance where this book departs from strict objectivity. The best way to describe it is that it sometimes reads as if it was written by a tankie Theodore Roosevelt. Indeed, if you’ve read Roosevelt’s book The Rough Riders, another work by a gifted writer who was a little too close to the subject matter, about another war involving Americans and Spain, you’ll understand the analogy. Landis forever has the Lincolns charging “gallantly” up another hill, outnumbered ten to one by Franco’s best troops [italics author’s] and so forth. Was a man dismayed – no, though the Soldier knew someone had blundered &c. This is understandable in that the author probably felt that he had something to prove to an American reading public that, then as now, had heard a lot of its news from fascist sympathizers, but it does make one start to question the author’s take just a little bit.
With that being said, it’s not as if he sugar-coats the war, or the Lincolns’ involvement in it. He is very clear when he feels that the Brigade or higher leadership made a major tactical or strategic error, and is very vivid in his descriptions of American volunteers, horribly maimed and dying in excruciating pain in no-man’s land, with no water, because no one on the Brigade staff could organize resupply or casualty evacuation. In a military organization where every leader from about Corporal on up was in way over his head, there’s a lot of criticism to go around, and, to his credit, Landis is prepared to offer it. There’s even a description of an incident wherein the Lincolns were on a train carrying them back to a rest area from the front line at Teruel, when Merriman stops the train and gets everyone off in the middle of a field in January to hear a speech from CPUSA Chairman Earl Browder. Seeing the thousand-yard stares on the faces of the filthy, exhausted, un-shod infantrymen, Browder tells them that they’d better change their attitudes or they’ll be sent home. The reaction is what one would expect, and Browder is hustled off into a waiting car as guys demand to know when the boat is leaving.
There is, of course, a definite editorial stance at times. Landis clearly has a bone to pick with the likes of Neville Chamberlain and FDR, whom he blames for not supporting the Spanish Republic with weapons and money at a time when corporations like Ford and Standard Oil were selling “non-military supplies” to Franco at a discount, to say nothing of the enormous amount of support that Germany and Italy sent. To some extent this is a valid position for an historian to take: in retrospect, it probably would have been smart to allow the Republican government to buy weapons, in as much as a Nazi plane shot down by a Spanish pilot in a Curtiss P-36 in 1937 was going to be one less Nazi plane for an American pilot to shoot down a few years later. It may just be an oversight that he neglects to mention the exorbitant, cash-and-carry terms that the Soviet government extracted from the Republic for the meagre amount of military aid that the Soviets sent.
Or it may not. Most concerning about Landis’ take on the war is his possible willingness to pick the Communist Party line – which is to say, the hardline, Stalinist Communist Party line -- over the strict truth. There are only a few instances where this is truly obvious, but where they are obvious, they are alarming, and make one question where there might be less obvious instances. Most glaring is the matter of the fate of XV International Brigade Commander LTC Vladimir Copic. Now, it is widely agreed, here in 2021, that Copic returned to the Soviet Union after the war and was almost immediately shot without trial by the NKVD, a fate shared by many International Brigades’ leaders and Soviet advisors, who were thought by the Stalinist government to have been contaminated with foreign, Trotskyist ideas. Landis simply has him “disappear from the record” with nothing more to be said about the matter. Him? Oh. Nobody knows what happened to him, Comrade. Let’s drop the subject. Interestingly, about the only place where, in 2021, you can find anyone offering an alternative fate for Copic is on the hard-left Spartacus Educational, which shows you where the lines are drawn, even to this day. It would have been well-known, even in 1967, that Stalin had had tens of thousands of Red Army officers shot for supposed disloyalty, so it seems improbable that there would have been anything to gain by telling this particular lie; it may just have been a reflexive habit of the author’s to minimize or discount criticism of the Communist cause. Still, it means that it is doubly important to take some of the more politically relevant parts of this book with a grain of salt. Another literary veteran of the Spanish Civil War – though of the POUM, which Landis also hates – had lots to say about the war’s effect on truth.
Which is not to say that The Abraham Lincoln Brigade is a complete work of Communist propaganda with no redeeming value. It couldn’t have been, because the Communist Party wouldn’t have cared enough to publish it. This was clearly a book that Landis wrote for himself, because he had to, and for his buddies, who would not have tolerated any truly egregious lies, at least not ones about them. My individual copy has a note in the front stating: “This is a specially bound edition made for the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and limited to 1,500 copies, of which this is number:” – the numeral 508 is written in ballpoint pen, probably by Landis himself, or by Milton Wolff or somebody. The book’s first owner went through the index and underlined the names of all of his friends, including where each was killed. If this book was a complete collection of lies, it wouldn’t have flown for that audience in particular, which is a reason to take it seriously as a work of history, even if it is a flawed one. As the author undoubtedly intended, it mainly does justice to the thousands of heroic and underappreciated Americans who decided to put their lives on the line to fight Fascism before it was fashionable, only a handful of whom left Spain alive and unwounded.
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