Re: Connolly Column-Spain-70th Anniversary -- Stormont Watch

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Date Posted: Thu, Jan 25 2007, 10:48:42 PST
Author: Matts Nilsson (swedish tradeunionist)
Subject: Re: Connolly Column-Spain-70th Anniversary
In reply to: iapl_newsroom32@hotmail.com 's message, "Connolly Column-Spain-70th Anniversary" on Sat, May 27 2006, 19:47:53 PDT

> Information about Jock Cunningham, please! Is there anyone who have somthing? Please send it!

>Sent : Wednesday, May 17, 2006 9:33 AM
>
>Subject : Connolly Column 70th Anniversary
>
>Connolly Column 70th Anniversary
>By Scot MacCreamhain
>
>Viva La Quince Brigada
>(Christy Moore)
>
>Ten years before I saw the light of morning
>A comradeship of heroes was laid.
>
>From every corner of the world came sailing
>
>The Fifteenth International Brigade.
>
>They came to stand beside the Spanish people.
>To try and stem the rising Fascist tide
>Franco's allies were the powerful and wealthy,
>Frank Ryan's men came from the other side.
>
>Even the olives were bleeding
>As the battle for Madrid it thundered on.
>Truth and love against the force of evil,
>Brotherhood against the Fascist clan.
>
>Viva La Quince Brigada!
>"No Pasaran" the pledge that made them fight.
>"Adelante" was the cry around the hillside.
>Let us all remember them tonight.
>
>Bob Hilliard was a Church of Ireland pastor;
>
>From Killarney across the Pyrenees he came.
>From Derry came a brave young Christian Brother.
>
>Side by side they fought and died in Spain.
>
>Tommy Woods, aged seventeen, died in Cordoba.
>With Na Fianna he learned to hold his gun.
>
>From Dublin to the Villa Del Rio
>
>Where he fought and died beneath the Spanish sun.
>
>Many Irishmen heard the call of Franco.
>Joined Hitler and Mussolini too.
>Propaganda from the pulpit and newspapers
>Helped O'Duffy to enlist his crew.
>
>The word came from Maynooth: 'Support the Nazis.'
>The men of cloth failed yet again
>When the bishops blessed the blueshirts down in Galway
>As they sailed beneath the swastika to Spain.
>
>This song is a tribute to Frank Ryan.
>Kit Conway and Dinny Coady too.
>Peter Daly, Charlie Regan and Hugh Bonar.
>Though many died I can but name a few.
>
>Danny Doyle, Blaser-Brown and Charlie Donnelly.
>Liam Tumilson and Jim Straney from Short Strand.
>Jack Nalty, Tommy Patton and Frank Conroy,
>Jim Foley, Tony Fox and Dick O'Neill.
>
>
>July 18th 2006 marks the 70th anniversary of the
>Fascist uprising against
>the democratically-elected Spanish government. The
>Fascists had military
>support from Germany and Italy whilst the Spanish
>Republic relied on the
>Soviet Union and Mexico for arms and advisers. Most
>other Western
>governments refused to get involved and signed a
>non-intervention pact.
>
>Many on the left felt that these were the opening
>shots of a second world
>war against Hitler, Mussolini and Spain�s rebel
>General, Franco. Idealistic
>young men and women from all over the world
>volunteered to come to the aid
>of the Spanish Republic in the face of indifference
>and hostility of their
>own governments. From Germany came the Thaelmann
>battalion, from Italy the
>Garabaldis, from Canada the Mackenzie-Papineaus, from
>the USA, the Abraham
>Lincoln battalion, from Scotland, Wales and England,
>the British Battalion,
>and from Ireland the Connolly column. All Anglophone
>fighters were organized
>under the XVth International Brigade. In total the
>International Brigades
>totalled 45,000 men and played a major role in
>fighting the fascist forces.
>
>In Ireland, support for the beleaguered Republic was
>organized by Frank
>Ryan, a Republican Socialist, veteran of the Limerick
>IRA flying columns,
>Gaelic scholar and former editor of An Phoblacht. Ryan
>was driven by an
>intense dislike of Eoin O�Duffy, former Garda
>Commissioner, Blueshirts�
>leader and first Fine Gael president, who had already
>with the support of
>Cardinal McRory, The Independent newspaper and
>capitalist W.L Murphy,
>organized an Irish Brigade to help Franco�s side in
>the war.
>
>O�Duffy had promised 5000 men to Franco and at their
>peak in 1934 the
>Blueshirt movement had 50,000 members. This movement
>had come out of the
>Treatyite Army Comrades Association which represented
>the large farm owners
>and capitalists but also the rural poor who lived
>under an almost feudal
>relationship with the church.
>In the end though O�Duffy only managed to dupe 670
>men, mostly rural-based
>from Cork and Kerry to follow his crusade to Spain
>believing that the
>catholic religion was under attack. In some areas of
>Catalonia churches had
>been burned and some atrocities carried out but were
>highly exaggerated by
>the church hierarchy:
>
>�Spain has always been a catholic country like
>Ireland. We are for religion
>and we don�t want the Reds to conquer Spain.� said
>O�Duffy
>
>In many cases churches were used as storage dumps for
>fascist arms,
>personally witnessed by Frank Ryan and there were
>reports of individual
>fascist priests firing on civilians from church
>towers, again bullet holes
>on houses opposite churches provided the evidence.
>What O�Duffy failed to
>tell his men was that Franco was actually using
>Moorish Muslim troops in his
>front line from colonized Morocco and were themselves
>persecuting the
>catholic Basques who had gained autonomy under the
>leftist government.
>
>On the 18th December 1936 480 men sailed on the SS
>Urundi from Galway flying
>the German Swastika to form the Irish Brigade of the
>XVth Bandera el Tercio,
>an elite battalion based on O�Duffy�s claims that the
>men were there to die
>as Christian martyrs. As the battle for Jarama was in
>full swing the Irish
>Brigade arrived late in the proceedings and were
>caught up in a friendly
>fire incident and withdrew without orders. All in all
>they lost 6 men and
>were involved again only briefly. In fact their
>drunken behaviour at camp
>and poor performance on the battlefield (mainly down
>to bad leadership) led
>to the Irish Brigade being sent home in disgrace. A
>split also had the
>effect of denying them any sizeable parade on their
>return to Dublin.
>
>In stark contrast the Irish section of the
>International Brigades, 200
>strong, were drawn from some of the poorest urban
>sections of Irish society
>(66% from Dublin and Belfast), mainly communists and
>IRA men from the
>Republican Congress who had a visceral hatred of
>O�Duffy and the bosses.
>Some of these men saw the chance to fight in Spain has
>a way of avenging the
>result of the Civil War and many blamed O�Duffy for
>the Ballyseedy atrocity
>in particular.
>
>Ryan is quoted at the quayside on leaving for Spain:
>
>�The Republican contingent, besides being a very
>efficient fighting force �
>every member of it having been in action � is also a
>demonstration of the
>sympathy of revolutionary Ireland with the Spanish
>people in their fight
>against International Fascism. It is also a reply to
>the intervention of
>Irish Fascism in the war against the Spanish Republic,
>which, if
>unchallenged would remain a disgrace on our people. We
>want to show that
>there is a close bond between the democracies of
>Ireland and Spain. Our
>fight is the fight of the Spanish people, as it is of
>all people who are
>victims of tyranny�
>
>
>Desmond Ryan (no relation) made this appeal:
>
>�Why do you fight by the side of the upholders of a
>land system as crushing
>and as terrible as that which your own grandfathers
>fought against in the
>days of the Land League. The answer is easy; cynical
>politicians and
>thoughtless bigots have misled you.�
>
>Bob Doyle said:
>
>�O�Duffy and his Blueshirts intended following in the
>footsteps of the
>Nazis...I thought there was a danger Ireland would go
>Fascist and that was
>one of the motivating factors in making up my mind to
>go. I didn�t know much
>about Spain, but my thoughts on the way to Spain were
>that every bullet I
>fired would be a bullet against the Dublin landlords
>and capitalists�
>
>Tommy Patton said:
>
>�the bullet that will get me won�t get a Spanish
>worker�
>
>Two volunteers whose enthusiasm was not wanting and
>whose republican
>credentials were well-known to Ryan, presented
>themselves for enlistment but
>Ryan curtly dismissed them; Brendan Behan and Cathal
>Goulding were barely 14
>years old!
>
>The Irish and British battalion was organized with
>military efficiency by
>the Comintern and volunteers were vetted by the CPI
>and the CPGB in London
>before traveling onwards through France to the I.Bers
>base at Albacete.
>Volunteers were asked to travel in discrete (and
>discreet!) groups and only
>to speak when spoken to by members of bourgeois
>authority. The party
>travelling with Frank Ryan disdained to behave in such
>an anti-social manner
>and on one channel crossing around forty men occupied
>the bar giving out a
>stirring repertoire of rebel songs and impressing on
>their fellow passengers
>their strong distaste for fascism and Franco.
>
>The first party of Irishmen to arrive was soon pressed
>into action after
>only a couple of days training at Lopera on the
>Cordoba front at Christmas
>1936. Kit Conway was in charge of this company. 8
>Irishmen were killed
>including Tommy Woods aged 17.
>
>Meanwhile more Irish began to arrive at camp and found
>they were to be part
>of the British Battalion and not a separate Irish
>section. Frank Ryan
>explained that the English working class were their
>allies against fascism
>and they should work together. However tensions rose
>when it was discovered
>one of the British Officers, a Captain Nathan, had
>been part of a Dublin
>Castle murder gang responsible for the deaths in
>Limerick of the mayor and
>ex-mayor. A meeting was called and a majority of the
>Irish present decided
>they wanted to move to the Lincoln battalion.
>
>As more Irish arrived the IB leadership refused to
>allow any more to move to
>the Lincolns and that they must serve with the British
>which most agreed to
>do remembering their enemy was imperialism and
>fascism. Nathan was demoted
>and moved from the area.
>
>In February 1937 Franco was making a major push to
>encircle Madrid and the
>apex of the battle to stop him was the Jarama valley.
>The fighting done by
>the International Brigades here is the stuff of legend
>and rightly so. On
>the 12th February Kit Conway led troops across olive
>fields straight into
>fascist fire capturing enemy positions and halting the
>advance, Conway
>himself being fatally wounded. Franco�s troops,
>veterans of the Moroccon
>war, had never been stopped so effectively in open
>countryside. Ryan called
>out with a loudhailer in case the Irish fascists were
>in the enemy trenches:
>
>�Irishmen go home! Your fathers would turn in their
>graves if they knew that
>you�d come to fight for imperialism. This is the real
>Republican army, the
>real, real men of Ireland.�
>
>On the 13th some defensive positions were lost after a
>British commander
>withdrew without orders and the defensive line fell
>back slightly however on
>the 14th when all seemed lost the men were ready to be
>routed in the face of
>overwhelming numbers including tanks, the fascists
>failed to pursue them
>possibly tiring themselves. Frank Ryan and
>Scots-Irishman Jock Cunningham
>turned around the bedraggled remains of the batallion
>singing the
>Internationale and led 140 men back towards the enemy.
>The fascists
>erroneously believed fresh units had arrived and fled.
>The machine gun
>positions were re-captured Ryan was wounded in the arm
>and went back to
>Ireland for a period of recuperation. Nearby on the
>battlefield the 40 Irish
>with the Lincolns attacked Pingarron Hill and lost
>over 100 men including
>the UCD scholar and poet Charlie Donnelly who coined
>the phrase �even the
>olives were bleeding�. The battle was over and
>Franco�s army looked to other
>fronts to win the war.
>
>Jarama was the Connolly Column�s finest hour but they
>went on to fight at
>Brunete, Guadalajara, Belchite and finally at Gandesa
>where in March 1938
>Frank Ryan and hundreds more were surrounded and
>captured by Italian Black
>Arrows. Most were eventually released but Ryan was
>passed over to German
>intelligence, the Abwehr and spent the rest of his
>days in Berlin, finally
>dying in Dresden in 1944.
>
>The International Brigades were wound down in November
>1938 with a parade in
>Barcelona just months before Franco came into control
>of the entire country
>and a long dark period of repression would begin.
>
>However Dolores Ib�rruri, La Pasionaria, gave the
>farewell address at the
>parade which finished with these words:
>
>�We shall not forget you; and, when the olive tree of
>peace is in flower,
>entwined with the victory laurels of the Republic of
>Spain --- return!
>Return to our side for here you will find a homeland
>--- those who have no
>country or friends, who must live deprived of
>friendship --- all, all will
>have the affection and gratitude of the Spanish people
>who today and
>tomorrow will shout with enthusiasm --- Long live
>the heroes of the International Brigades!�

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