Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Whoever said that “the victors write the history books” never studied the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. While the Nationalists under General Franco won the war, they definitely lost the battle of the history books. Part of this was due to the fact that Franco and his Nationalists were seen as pawns of Hitler, even though Franco refused to join the Axis powers in World War II and did all he could to help Jews escape the Nazis. Another part of this may well have been because the Republican side had had enormous amounts of emotional energy invested in it by many influential people in the Western democracies, despite it being all but taken over completely by the Communist Party and being just as guilty of atrocities and enormities as the Nationalists.

Whatever the cause, the inquiring English-speaking student of the war finds himself with a wealth of information written from a pro-Republican viewpoint, both at the time of the war and later. Those seeking a pro-Nationalist point of view have much less to work with. Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War is admirably even-handed, and Cecil Eby’s accounts of the siege of the Alcazar de Toledo and the misadventures of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades are not friendly to the Republicans, but other than that, there is little to go by. Other than Mine Were of Trouble.

In 1936, Peter Kemp had just finished his college studies. Like many other young men, he was idealistic and willing to fight for what he believed in. Unusually for that time, he was a fervent conservative. While other young British men (including a young George Orwell, still flying under his birth name of Eric Blair) went off to Spain to join the Republican forces, Peter Kemp finagled his way in and joined the Nationalists, enlisting in a Carlist unit.

In many ways, his account of his war reads like a mirror-image version of Orwell’s much-better-known Homage to Catalonia . Unlike many of the people in his unit, Kemp did not hate the Republicans; of course, he had no personal grievances against them. He recounts tales of Republican massacres and atrocities that parallel the Republicans’ stories of Nationalist slaughters and cruelties, leading this reviewer to believe that civil wars, in general, are often the most bitterly-fought wars of all. Our own civil war, particularly in the Trans-Mississippi theater, bears this observation out.

Kemp did well with the Carlists, rising to junior-officer rank, but felt that he needed to serve with a more professional kind of soldier to really hone his skills. Accordingly, he arranged for a transfer to the Spanish Legion, the Tercios. He was made an alferez, (second lieutenant, more-or-less) and served with them up till nearly the end of the war, when he was wounded and invalided out.

During his time with the Nationalists, Kemp met many interesting people. In his first unit, the commander was much less ferocious and fanatical than the company chaplain, which made an interesting contrast. His fellow-soldiers were a cross-section of Spain, although there were more professional soldiers among them than were to be found on the Republican side.

According to Kemp, the ordinary people he met were pro-Nationalist, often resenting how Republican gangs from the cities had come to their towns and killed their priests and anybody else whose looks they didn’t like. Some of these stories may well have been the local people’s attempts to curry favor with the Nationalists, but some of them may well have been nothing but the truth. For all the attempts to make them out to be saints, the Republicans were just as handy with firing squads as their “fascist” enemies.

One thing that Kemp tosses off in passing was that a Cambridge acquaintance, one Kim Philby, had come to report on the war from the Nationalist side of the lines, and had nearly been killed when he and his companions ran into Republican shellfire. Since this book was originally written in 1957, before the revelations about the Cambridge spy network, Kemp says nothing more about this. However, it is interesting to speculate about what might have been had the Republicans, all unknowingly, killed the man who was going to become one of the greatest Soviet spies of all time.

After the end of the Spanish Civil War, Kemp went on to a long, adventurous life, much of it spent fighting Nazis during World War II, and then Communists afterward. He often met veterans of the International Brigade, and bore them no grudge, for all that he and his unit had been pitted against them on many occasions

Kemp speaks little about things he did not directly observe; this is a personal memoir of a man’s time at war, not a history of the war in general. Nonetheless, it is a valuable addition to the library of any student of the Spanish Civil War. After nearly sixty years out of print, it has been brought back by Mystery Grove Publishing, which deserves praise for doing so. I hesitate to say that deliberate animus against the cause for which Kemp fought was the cause of this book’s long period of near-unavailability, but that is one possible interpretation of its fall into obscurity.

If I were teaching a course on the history of twentieth-century Spain, or on the Spanish Civil War itself, I would assign this book as a companion to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

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