| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comrades and Commissars: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War. By Cecil D. Eby. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. xvi, 510 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-271-02910-8.)

Almost forty years ago, Cecil D. Eby published Between the Bullet and the Lie (1969), a history of the Americans who fought with the International Brigades. A few months later (full disclosure here), I published a book on the same topic, Crusade of the Left (1969). The titles alone say something of the difference between our interpretations. Both of us obviously admired these 2,800 leftist Americans who volunteered to "stop fascism" in Spain, but Eby was inordinately harsh on anyone associated with the Communist party (probably 80 percent of members of the Lincoln Battalion were from the Communist party or the Young Communist League) and eager to seize any scrap of evidence that "proved" Communists were villains in Spain. Thus he focused on desertion, punishment battalions, political purges, and even assassinations ordered by party leadership. Without denying those excesses, I argued that there are good and bad Communists; the party certainly had its vicious side, but it also had its heroes, some of whom organized and led the brigades as a fighting force.

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