In Spanish Trenches

Introduction / McLoughlin and O'Connor -- Ireland and the SCW: the setting, Spain and Europe in 1936, clericalism and anti-clericalism in Spain and Ireland, politics in Ireland / O'Connor -- Northern Ireland and the SCW: contrasting perspectives of Unionists and nationalists on Spain / O'Connor -- First actions: Madrid, Lopera, and the defection of the Irish from the British battalion to the Lincoln battalion in January 1936 / O'Connor -- Blood and Boredom at the Jarama: February-June 1937 / McLoughlin -- Frank Ryan and the politics of the SCW in Ireland / O'Connor -- Republican offensives (I): Pozoblanco, Brunete / McLoughlin -- Republican Offensives (II): Aragón, Teruel / McLoughlin -- Retreat and Capture, March 1938: Irish POWs / McLoughlin -- Frank Ryan's trial and imprisonment, 1938-1939 / McLoughlin -- Attempts to Frank Ryan Released, 1939-1940 / McLoughlin -- The Irish volunteers: discipline, desertion and punishment / McLoughlin and O'Connor -- Over the Ebro: Last battle of the Internationals, July-September 1938 / McLoughlin -- Withdrawal, homecoming, and the politics of commemoration / O'Connor -- Conclusion / McLoughlin and O'Connor.

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations fighting for the POUM militia of the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War. The war was one of the defining events of his political outlook and a significant part of what led him to write in 1946, "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism, as I understand it." The first edition was published in the United Kingdom in 1938. The book was not published in the United States until February 1952, when it appeared with an influential preface by Lionel Trilling. The only translation published in Orwell's lifetime was into Italian, in December 1948. A French translation by Yvonne Davet-with whom Orwell corresponded, commenting on her translation and providing explanatory notes-in 1938-39, was not published until five years after Orwell's death. Book Summary: Orwell served as a private, a corporal (cabo) and-when the informal command structure of the militia gave way to a conventional hierarchy in May 1937-as a lieutenant, on a provisional basis, in Catalonia and Aragon from December 1936 until June 1937. In June 1937, the leftist political party with whose militia he served (the POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, an anti-Stalinist communist party) was declared an illegal organisation, and Orwell was consequently forced to flee. Having arrived in Barcelona on 26 December 1936, Orwell told John McNair, the Independent Labour Party's (ILP) representative there, that he had "come to Spain to join the militia to fight against Fascism." He also told McNair that "he would like to write about the situation and endeavour to stir working class opinion in Britain and France." McNair took him to the POUM barracks, where Orwell immediately enlisted. "Orwell did not know that two months before he arrived in Spain, the [Soviet law enforcement agency] NKVD's resident in Spain, Aleksandr Orlov, had assured NKVD Headquarters, 'the Trotskyist organisation POUM can easily be liquidated'-by those, the Communists, whom Orwell took to be allies in the fight against Franco."

In 1938, twenty-one-year-old Francisco Pérez López, born in Spain and raised in France and Algeria, joined the International Brigades to fight the Nationalist armies of Franco and became a part of the bloodiest guerrilla war in Spanish history. His feats were remarkable. As the commander of the Brigades' First Death Platoon, as a jack-of-all-trades prisoner, and as the feared and admired guerrilla leader El Mexicano, Pérez López performed exploits that grew and spread in reputation throughout Spain -- until he became a legend. This is his own book: Dark and Bloody Ground, a terse and factual account of his part in the Spanish Civil War. In simple, spare language it tells a staggeringly dramatic story. With a remarkable feeling for the physical immediacy of people, terrain, and weather, Pérez López tells of months of hit-and-run attacks and day-to-day survival; and of his youth, which helped prepare him for this war by teaching him how to do everything from baking bread to setting bones, from making love to handling knives. He relates the sometimes humorous, often horrifying details of capture and imprisonment by the Nationalists, where his wits were all that kept him alive; and his incredible odyssey of escape, in which as head of a band of guerrillas he hid, attacked, and zigzagged his way to the Pyrenees. There, in the middle of a blizzard in the dead of winter, having lost all his men, he crossed the French border to freedom. His story is at once coldly objective and intensely personal. Pérez López has an innate ability to convey feelings he hardly ever expresses in words -- the physical and emotional weariness brought about by a long, cruel war, the satisfaction of avenging a victim of the Nationalists. Dark and Bloody Ground is not only a unique eyewitness account of a little-understood war, it is a deeply human story of a man whose motivation for fighting stemmed from a sincere respect for human dignity rather than from any political considerations -- and it is a completely gripping tale of chase and adventure, of pure war reduced to the basics of kill or be killed. Death has been very, very close to Pérez López. This stark and powerful narrative is the extraordinary result: Dark and Bloody Ground.

The Civil War was the bloodiest war America has ever faced. In many ways, it was a time of change for the United States. One of these changes was in the technologies that were developed and used. The repeating rifle, the railroad, and the submarine are technologies that were created, tested, or greatly improved during this crisis. This book explores the effect of the war, the impact each technology had on the war and on society in the years and decades following it, and the legacy of these events and developments today.