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Franco's International Brigades: Adventurers, Fascists, and Christian Crusaders in the Spanish Civil War Revised ed.

Paperback by Othen, Christopher

Franco's International Brigades: Adventurers, Fascists, and Christian Crusaders in the Spanish Civil War

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£15.99

ISBN:
9781849042475
Publication Date:
31 Jan 2013
Edition/language:
Revised ed. / English
Publisher:
C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
Pages:
256 pages
Format:
Paperback
For delivery:
Estimated despatch 7 - 9 Oct 2025
Franco's International Brigades: Adventurers, Fascists, and Christian Crusaders in the Spanish Civil War

Description

Foreign volunteers fought on behalf of General Franco and the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War for a right-wing cause whose aim was to smash democracy. These assorted adventurers, fascists, and Catholic crusaders were on the winning side, but their role has remained strangely hidden until now. Men from Portugal and Morocco signed on for money and adventure. General Eoin O'Duffy organised 700 Irishmen in a modern Crusade; 500 Catholic Frenchmen fought in the 'Jeanne D'Arc' unit; and thirty British volunteers, including aristocrats and working-class fascists, also took up arms. Romanian Iron Guard extremists died at Majadahonda and an Indian volunteer fought in the fascist militia. There were Russians, Americans, Finns, Belgians, Greeks, Cubans, and many more. Goose-stepping alongside the volunteers were fascist conscripts from Germany and Italy, in training for the next world war. Foreigners, whether unknown individuals like British pilot Cecil Bebb or infamous figures like the German dictator Adolf Hitler, were essential to Franco's victory. Without Bebb - - who flew General Francisco Franco from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco in 1936, a journey which was to precipitate the onset of the Spanish Civil War - - the war would never have started; without Hitler, Franco would never have won.

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