‘Blinded by anti-communism’

Writing in the October newsletter of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, Helen Graham, professor of contemporary Spanish history at Royal Holloway, University of London, offers various criticisms of Antony Beevor’s “The Battle for Spain” of which the primary one is her accusation that this history is distorted by Beevor’s distate for the comrades. “Relentless anti-communism,” is her verdict.

“In the end the Cold War view of the Spanish Republic is an imperialist one,” she states. But Beevor offers neither a Cold War view nor an imperialist view. He merely strips the varnish off the myths and reveals that the Communists played a pretty disgusting game in Spain. (He makes no apologies for the Francoists, either.) But this even-handed approach will not do for Dr Graham. She notes the “quite fundamental differences between the Francoist and Republican political projects” which she claims “are pretty much empiracally verifiable.” This is an odd formulation. Who can know if a Republican victory would have been followed by a bloodbath on the scale of the one ordered by Franco. It might have been lesser, or worse. Nobody can doubt the taste of the commissars for slaying their enemies.

Dr Graham’s review is oddly self-contradictory. She says the book’s “real value” lies in its military analysis. Yet she comes to the defence of the Republican chief of staff Vincente Rojo, trashed by Beevor as a military adventurer. Rojo was certainly quick to throw away the lives of his men in wild adventures. Yet Dr Graham defends operations like the Ebro offensive as “vital to projecting an image of military vitality and political will.” Frankly, this is an utterly bizarre assessment of a commander who marched ill-equipped men up exposed hills to be shredded by nationalist bombers and artillery, opening the gates of Barcelona in the process.

I know nothing of Dr Graham’s politics but perhaps she protests too much. The excuse that the republic was done in by shortages of material is neither novel nor sufficient explanation for the catalogue of Republican military failures. She complains of Beevor’s lack of interest in non-intervention. But this seems a red herring to me. If the Republicans were ill-equipped it was Stalin who was to blame. Having taken the Republic’s gold, he supplied his clients with scrap metal.

To write off Beevor as a Cold War historian does not do justice to his work and imputes to him an ideology for which there is no evidence (and Dr Graham supplies none). It was always going to be the case that Beevor’s work would unsettle the custodians of the sacred flame. To them, Beevor’s crime seems to be telling it like it was.

My kinsman Morris Miller was killed in the Ebro offensive. His story is here.

Uneasy peace

I am sorry to report the British war memorial in the Sierra Pandols has recently been vandalised. I was in Catalonia this month and this photo shows where a plaque above Gandesa memorialising 91 members of the British battaltion has been taken and the pediment painted with the slogan “the Falange – still in struggle.” The missing plaque included the name of my kinsman Morris Miller. There are intentions to repair and replace it but difficult to know how to prevent further attacks.

The vandalisation of civil war sites continues on both sides. With Catalonia amidst a plain economic expansion, many ancient antipathies have been put aside in the pursuit of prosperity, but the fault lines remain.

General Franco’s memorial south of Gandesa (below) is thoroughly trashed and painted with anarchist and anti-Nazi symbols. This was the site of Franco’s command post during the battle of the Ebro. Now it is a bit of an embarrassment and no attempt seems to be made to maintain or protect it or even demolish it. Perhaps this was its destiny to finish as an eyesore.

I was walking around the museum of the Ebro battle in Gandesa and fell into conversation with an elderly Spanish man who was only a young teen during the war. I asked if he was a comrade and he put his hand up in a fascist salute. I told him my relative was killed fighting for the comrades. He put his hand on me and shook his head sadly, saying, in English – “it was terrible, terrible.” We agree on that much.

One of the rare places where the dead are remembered in peace is the nearby old village of Corbera which was destroyed by Franco and left in ruins.

Above is a Joan Miró sculpture in the village, one of an “alphabet of freedom” put into the ruins by artists and poets. The site and its art are extraordinary but little visited.

This is the memorial to the British dead in Feb 2006. Below is a facsimile of the plaque. Thanks to Alan Warren for the image. Click to enlarge it to legibility!

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Me, at the Memorial to the fallen of Hill 666 including Morris Miller. Alan Warren photo.

70 years ago, Morris Miller went to Spain…

NEW!!!

July 20, 2007: Dramatic unpublished material from the memoir of Welsh Miner Billy Griffiths has been added to the Morris Miller internet memorial. This throws new light on the events and circumstances of Morris Miller’s death.

The story of Morris Miller is told here.

What I saw

Comrades. Jubilee Gardens, South Bank, London, 21 July 2007.  Annual commemoration, International Brigade Memorial Trust.

Hill 666: A search for a lost relative ends on a blasted hillside in Catalonia

Please visit http://morrismiller.wordpress.com for a substantially revised and updated version of this posting.

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Corbera d’Ebre, Catalonia – the Sierra de Pándols can be seen through the window of this house destroyed in the Spanish Civil War. Jonathan Miller photo

In August 1938 Morris Miller was killed fighting fascism on Hill 666 in the Sierra de Pándols. He was 23. Sixty-nine years later I returned to Hill 666. Little visited since, in a small glade on the steep side of a ravine there is a low concrete memorial to the men who died here. Morris’s name can be made out, faintly. Nearby, there is an empty cistern. On the hillside are ’scrapes’ into the rock. Here, behind a parapet of rocks, the International Brigaders would take what shelter they could.

There are abandoned terraces and ancient stonework. This land once was cultivated. In the ravine are great boulders dislodged, it is said, by nationalist explosives. It is here that the Republicans lost the war, in an ill-fated offensive that ended with Franco’s triumphant seizure of Barcelona and the victory of a nationalism cognate with fascism.

It is impossible now to know exactly where the shell fragment cut down Morris, but it was very near here. The hill is thickly forested with quercus ilex – the prickly-leaved and very dark green Mediterranean evergreen oak that burns like coal. The under brush is wild thyme thickly scenting the air.

I pick some acorns and stuff them in a pocket and rest my hand for a moment on the memorial. The day Morris died here, this was the most hellish place on earth as shells and bombs splintered on the bare rock and men cowered for cover. They were on an impossible mission.

How did Morris find his way here and why? I set out to recover the memory of Morris, with no idea what I would discover. In fact, I hadn’t expected to discover much. But something extraordinary has emerged. It is a tale of genuine heroism and principle, even if the ideological motivation appears in retrospect confused if not suspect, naive and misguided.

Born in Leeds, Miller was a bright, disputatious student with a talent for languages and a hunger for political activism. Hull was on the front-line of a vicious battle between communists, many of them jews, and Black Shirts. Accounts of their battles from the Black Shirt point of view, with photographs of the sites of thje fighting, can be found on the neo-fascist Heretics website still published in Hull.

Offered a place at Oxford he was unable to take it up for financial reasons, or possibly because his father not being British born, he was ruled ineligible for it (this was I am told a routine and lightly coded anti-semititic convention of the day, supposedly, designed to constrain the number of Jews). His own father having been a failure at business, unlike his brother and Morris’s uncle Wolf, Morris after leaving school was forced to take an apprenticeship at a chemist’s shop, which he loathed. At night, he attended political meetings, where the atmosphere would have been febrile, with the war in Spain hotting up, the aggressive intentions of the Nazis evident, and the rise of local fascism on the streets of their own city an ever-present threat. There were stormy public rallies and fighting subsequently in the streets. At least once, Morris came home beaten up. He was small, but physically courageous. This may have been when he decided that for him, the fight would not be over and that he would not remain in Hull.

I fall into this story and keep on tumbling. I started out curious where my family had come from. But on the way to uncovering this wider mystery, I stumbled into the tale of Morris. Morris was the cousin of my father, hence he was my second cousin. He is initially attractive simply because he seems by far the most glamorous member of a family that has distinguished itself professionally, but is otherwise absent any notable military tradition. The nature of soldiering has always fascinated me. I once did catch a glimpse of a small war. I have taken a passing interest in questions of strategy. So the story was of military interest. But of course there is so much more. Morris was not only a soldier but an ideological warrior who ended up in an inspiring fight that 70 years later remains as contentious as ever. Finally, I am intrigued because Morris was a mystery. At family gatherings in my childhood, his name would occasionally be thrown into the conversation. I was always demanding more information but nobody really knew anything. So as I began poking around in my family’s history, wondering what there might be to be discovered, it was the story of Morris that kept intriguing. I decided to leave some of the other stories to one side, and focus on Morris. I had no clue where this would take me, or how long, or how fascinating it was to become.

I start with the surviving cousins; physicians in the north of England. I have been completely out of touch with them. I talk to them on the phone and they tell me the story of the high tea and some more. “Most of the Miller family had communist leanings, mostly of the armchair variety,” recalled Eric Miller, Morris’s cousin, in June 2007, telling me what he knew of his own first cousin. I think Eric and his brother Dennis have never really quite got over losing Morris. Eric Miller’s first news is the worst. In 1939 Morris Miller’s letters and papers were destroyed by his mother in Hull, in the east riding of Yorkshire. She was fearful the incriminating documents would be discovered by the Nazi invaders whose arrival, she was convinced, was imminent. He tells me a story of Eric’s scrapes, culminating in an infamous row over Sunday high tea, following which none of them ever saw Morris again.

Eric’s story is supported by contemporary sources. Morris was a controversial character in Hull. The Mail (Hull) (1936) reported that although Spain was blockaded and because of the non-intervention policy, no official contact was allowed, but ships with food used to brave the blockades. Two ships went from Hull several times. One of them was skippered by Captain ‘Potato’ Jones. They took food for the Republican Army, but there was some opposition. Once there was a big meeting in the City Hall to raise money for food, and those who took refugees into their homes at weekends were pointed out. A witness is quoted: “Afterwards one of us, Maurice (sic) Miller, was beaten up outside, in suspicious circumstances.”

That Morris was already an official (although secret) comrade and member of the CPGB can hardly be doubted. Geoff Lawes, a researcher from Hull, has sent me this page (below) from an Brigade battle songbook signed by M.L. Miller (on the right hand side – click picture for detail) followed by the initials CPGB and the placename Hull. This artefact surfaced in May 2008 – showing that even 70 years later, further traces of this life can still be uncovered – thanks to the Internet. The image is (c) Geoff Lawes and used by his kind permission.

Click to enlarge this image

There are occasional traces of a dramatic streak in the Miller family, it may be fair to say. If one believes that this might be inherited, then the story of Morris’s departure from England would affirm this belief.

The last his cousins saw of Morris was when he stormed out of a high tea at his wealthy uncle Wolf’s house in Hull on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1937, after accusing his host of being “nothing but a dirty capitalist.” Wolf was a timber merchant and a prominent Jewish businessman in Hull. These were weekly rituals. Wolf was a sterling millionaire before the depression. On Sunday he would entertain Morris to tea – a meal that in Yorkshire would be comprehensive and quite possibly kept Morris going for the next week. But Morris was proud, angry and not easy always to like.

It was characteristic Morris behaviour. One moment he was hungrily scoffing his uncle’s food – then there was a passionate discussion of politics, not uncommon, followed by an escalating argument, with Morris red to the bone marrow and his host a very member of the class with which Morris had declared himself at war. It was not the first time there had been a row. But this time it was different. Morris most likely had already decided to go to Spain. This was supposed to be a secret. The final culminating row was his clumsy way of saying goodbye. After leaving his uncle’s table in a huff, Morris returned home to his parents and told them where he was going after swearing them to secrecy. Over the next few days, his cousins Dennis and Eric, both still alive in 2008, retired physicians in the north of England, feared the worst. In an amazing display of loyalty, they actually followed him to Paris – but could trace him no further.

Morris Miller (left), Spain 1938. On right is Joe Latus, lieutenant machine gunner and observer, fellow- fighter from Hull, who was wounded and repatriated. Photo from Hull Sentinal, “The Voice of Labour,” (Hull Trades Council publication), March 1939.

According to the files at the International Brigade Memorial Trust, he arrived in Spain on the 24th of September 1937 and entered the International Brigade (British Battalion) the following week. During the Aragon Retreats from Belchite, the begininng of the end for the Republican forces, he was wounded at Caspe in mid March, 1938.

Miller was hospitalized and returned to the British Battalion in May, 1938 where he was named assistant political commissar/political delegate, reporting to the chief political officer, Bob Cooney. Five months later he was dead.

The following illustration shows a casualty list with Miller’s name. (The cross by Miller’s name and the footnote is by Rob Wardle (see acknowledgements).) Other annotations are contemporary. The date indicates that this list refers to the battle of Caspe.

Like a lot of people I had some romantic notions about the Spanish civil war. Antony Beevor’s demythologisation is not the only challenge to these ideas. For all the romance, this was a brutal conflict. The SCW was obviously a fabulous war from the point of view of literary and artistic achievement with a heritage including Guernica (some think the most powerful painting of all time), Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and much else. The war was touched by surrealism, anarchism, fascism, and much else. But if Spain was a formative cultural and artistic event and the place to be for progressives, anti-fascists, writers and artists, it was horrid in close up and a ghastly stage-setter for the slaughters to follow.

Morris and I would not have been on the same ideological page. He was a communist and was in the milieu of progressive circles in Hull in his teens. My own sympathies would probably have been with the anarchists, at least in Spain. Not only was he a communist but he was one of their up and coming stars, at 23 already a front-line political officer.

It is painful to imagine what was lost. In the final months of his life, Miller was exposed to comrades from backgrounds very different to his own. He seemed to make friends with the Americans and especially the brainy ones who would discuss modern art and write poetry. But these friendships were cut short and his literary record is very limited.

Into Catalonia

What was it like getting to Spain when the normal border was closed? Today there are few open customs posts between Spain and France and the only officers you see are likely to be on the French side looking for cigarettes.

Then, the only way to avoid them was to pass through the mountains. As it happened, I know about this journey. I have been taken by Catalan gypsy guides over a mountain trail from France to Spain, and it is a painful, terrifying experience. We started above Collioure, the village in French Catalonia famous for its artists and market, and rode rough ponies over narrow trails, the land falling away for hundreds of feet below, trusting the animals would not trip.

I cannot say mine was the identical trajectory to Morris’s. But one gets the idea quickly of just how vulnerable humans can be in these mountains. In Catalan, the country is salvatge. The word equates to the French sauvage which would normally be translated into English as wild - although this lacks the necessary resonance of savage). The air is heady with the garrigue of wild herbs. The horses walk over trails you would think impossible; one stumbles and falls, tipping one of the riders to the ground.

We stop and dismount at a desolate ‘monestir’, now abandoned. It is hundreds of years old and decorated with faded murals. We rest but not for long. A stone marks the border. High in the Pyrenees my mobile phone beeps. “Vodafone welcomes you to Spain.” In the late afternoon we descend through olive orchards and tie up the horses at a remote inn. Exhausted, we are served beef from the hills, fried potatoes, thick red wine.

Morris Miller started his journey in Hull, now the fiefdom of John Prescott and the Labour party, then a battleground between young communists, frequently Jews, and fascists wearing the black shirts of Sir Oswald Mosely.

To Kings Cross then Victoria for the boat train to Paris. The volunteers were instructed to tell the emigration officers in Britain (and the police in France) that they were “tourists” or “students” although nobody was fooled. In Paris they were met by comrades who put them in the hands of the communist cheminots (railwaymen) who helped them travel across France on the SNCF, putting them down in Toulouse and Perpignan for the final secretive crossing of the mountain passes.

The assembly camps are described in letters from the volunteers. I feel sure I have seen a contemporary echo. During the conflict in Kosovo, which I covered for MSNBC, I visited an assembly camp in Albania, a staging post where volunteers were enlisted in what was then called the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK). The recruits were given a plate of pasta or rice. There passports confiscated. Oaths were taken. Military police stood by in case anyone thought they could change their mind. The air was heady with bravado and fear.

The Ebro campaign

In the summer of 1938 the international volunteers were mobilised for the attack over the Ebro. Morris was physically courageous and daring, having cheated death at least once, daring it again and again, and surviving a serious wound, before finally being killed, more or less instantly, by a shell fragment on a Catalan hillside that is today a place of sublime but haunted beauty and was then an unimaginable hell.

A trace of Morris at this time is in the papers of David Gordon, an American communist volunteer. On July 16 at 7.30 a.m., Gordon shares the news that “Our M.L. [Morris L. Miller] has been claimed by the British Battalion. But I’ll be seeing M.L. since he’s to take charge of Activists and Cadres for the Battalion.” This evidence strengthens the importance Miller was assuming for the party.

His death was glorious but horrible, if mercifully quick. Yet it was futile. Catalonia fell, the refugees fell back across the mountains to France where many perished in insanitary, disease-ridden French concentration camps such as the one at Cap D’Agde. Survivors and stragglers of the international brigade limped back to England and America. We heard from some again. It is astonishing how this very limited period made such a heavy footprint in everything from poster design to feminism. The letters, poems, books and screenplays are engrossing and there is no end to Spanish civil war studies because it is a subject that is endlessly interesting and about which astonishing new information continues to emerge.

Whatever else Spain might have been, she was a muse.

Recovering the story of Morris has been an eye opener and has involved intriguing research. The Tamiment Library at NYU is a time machine. You walk in from 21st century Greenwich Village and find yourself as close as you can get to the men and women who went to Spain in 1937. At random I open a box and find a letter from a volunteer to his sweetheart, describing the wild flowers. And in the letter, preserved in a glassine envelope, is a dried flower – plucked off a Catalan hillside seven decades ago. This is where I found the articles Miller wrote in the Volunteer for Liberty, the newspaper of the International Brigade and his photograph taken with David Gordon and Edwin Rolfe.

Of the two articles, the first, The 15th Brigade Motor Park, a portrait of the motor pool, shows us a writer keen to draw ideological lessons from everything he sees. “These comrades with the greased hands have…shown that they can « take it » and make the necessary sacrifices that true anti-fascists have often be called upon to make in this war for the National Independence of Spain.”

The second is more distinctive. It is his bruising participant’s account of the battle for Hill 481 in which, unwittingly or not, he offers a grim forewarning of what would lie ahead for the international volunteers in the Sierra de Pándols.

Handwritten caption on reverse of photo reads: Morris Miller Hull 2nd right front row killed Hill 666 Sierra Pandols August 1938. Sitting to the right of Morris is Harry Dobson, Welsh unemployed miner, survivor of the torpedoing of the SS City of Barcelona en route to Spain, political commissar, graduate of Moscow’s Lenin School. Identifications of others in this picture welcomed.

Hill 481

The story of Hill 481, Morris Miller’s account of a seminal battle leading up to the final rout on the Ebro (click here for the PDF ) appears in Volume 11, Number 32 of The Volunteer for Liberty, 17 September 1938.

Reading it today one is slightly shocked. There is no doubt that Morris was sugar-coating the events he described, in the interests of his ideology. Even if we all still have our own shibboleths. Take this intro:

The history of the British Battalion in the last action is a record of high morale, of discipline and of doggedness in a series of attacks against fortifications which could have withstood all but the severest blasting by artillery; of a record of attacks made beneath withering machine gun fire, enfilading from left or right, under artillery fire that (sic) almost unceasing and beneath the ever-present threat of avion.

The dramatic war correspondence which follows is a prelude to the real news which is buried close to the bottom of the piece – that the British battalion has failed to achieve its objective, has suffered heavy casualties and has retreated.

“In spite of the fact the fascists still held the position, the reputation of the battalion had increased a hundredfold.”

Delusional journalism was not unique to this era. I am looking for something else. Between the boilerplate commissar stuff, is there is a hint of a writerly voice? Can we know what we have lost? The text shows that Morris could write and that he put himself in the midst of the story. My own very limited experience of covering armed conflict gives me only a faint idea of what he would have faced as a combatant. But we will never know what he might have achieved.

Miller’s account of battle is gripping and revealing within the context of the delusional groupthink by the communist military cadre that was soon to produce the ultimate military disaster. Hill 481 was a bloody prelude to what happened later, when more troops were committed to indefensible positions. the story titled Hill 481 was Miller’s final article for the Volunteer but not his final battle. Shortly after filing it he was killed in the even more impossible position of Hill 666.In Hill 481, Miller writes of an operation where the assumptions were wrong from the start:

...for the first time the action assumed a serious aspect. What had previously been regarded as a light action became a tough proposition…

For days, the battalion takes casualties but makes little progress,

…by this time the boys were thoroughly tired. Night and day they had made Herculean efforts. To add to their difficulties water was kilometres away and very rarely could details be spared. Moreover communications had not yet been established with the Intendencia, though Bob Cooney, Battalion Commissar, had succeeded in getting up a small amount of tinned stuff which had been captured from the fascists.

Miller turns now to the fifth day when the most severe attack on the hill began, the air thick with machine gun bullets and fascist shells landing in forward positions.

…the fascist shells were landing in our forward positions . When battalion commander Wilde gave the order to withdraw, the last attack had ended. Among the comrades we lost in this attack was our brave comrade Lewis Clive, who had returned from the hospital the previous day to take command of his old company. He was killed while directing the fire of his men.

Miller’s account of Hill 481, in which the British Battalion “earned itself the name of « shock battalion » of the 15th brigade,” reveals an operation in which the intelligence was faulty, the men not supplied with either adequate food or even water, there were heavy casualties and the objectives were not met. But these are all conclusions to be drawn from the stated facts. The piece concludes with a heroic defence of the battalion commander, Sam Wilde, who had put his men in such a position, and of Bob Cooney, Miller’s direct boss in the party hierarchy, for the “high political level” of the Battalion (even as it was failing to achieve its military objectives) .

A subsequent editor’s note in the Volunteer took account of Miller’s death on the Ebro front and promised a report in a future issue, written by Miller, on the June “activist congress” of the 35th division. This article never appeared as the Volunteer was soon driven from its offices and its staff put to flight.

“Miller’s greatest legacy to the Brigade was the activist movement of which he was one of the most outstanding leaders, and in whose formation and functioning he played a major role,” declares the Volunteer showing that even as the war was being lost, the Party bosses were determined to strengthen their ideological control, and that deputy commissar Miller was part of this project. They might have been better occupied supplying their soldiers with food and water rather than pure ideology, is what I cannot help thinking.

With grateful acknowledgement to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive team at the Tamiment Library, New York University. Photograph of Morris Miller with Edwin Rolfe , the great American poet of the Spanish Civil War, and David Gordon, the American communist. This photograph appears in Madrid 1937, Routledge, NY & London, 1966, with a caption stating it is “near Marsa, summer of 1938″. Miller was dead within days or weeks of this photo being taken.

This photograph showing Miller in an olive orchard with comrades David Gordon and Edwin Rolfe was taken near the village of Corbera d’Ebre, an ancient Catalan settlement utterly destroyed by Franco in 1938 when it became a last redoubt of the Republican army of the Ebro.

The village was rebuilt elsewhere and the old village left a ruin, a constant reminder to Catalonia of the penalty for defiance. Today the old village is an amazing, haunting place, the gaping, empty shops, the roofless houses, the shattered remains of the church, rubble in narrow and winding streets, all perfumed with the scent of wild thyme. Oddly, this place, surely one of the most extraordinary to be seen in a nation teeming with tourists, is little visited.

The village is not just a memorial but a unique art installation. Artists and poets have implanted a sculpture garden called the Alphabet of Freedom, (In Catalan, L’Abecedari de la llibertat). Poems. Sculptures. Ruins. This was a place once thick in the miasma of death. Now, it has the scent of wild herbs. It is hard not to choke.

Mariano Andres – ‘T’ for terror; one of an “alphabet” of sculptural objects and poems at Corbera today. Jonathan Miller photo

In spring 1938, Morris trained with the other international volunteers for the great summer assault on fascist lines, involving the daring pontoon crossing of the Ebro, Spain’s greatest river. It was a daring but reckless plan. After the successful initial crossing, Franco’s engineers flooded the river and washed away the pontoons, leaving the Republicans cut off from their supplies.

¡ Ay Carmela ! : The lyrics to this Republican song commemorating the Battle of the Ebro can be read here. The melody is a folk tune of greater antiquity,dating to the early 19th century. The song can be heard here. It was subsequently the title of a moving film by Carlos Saura. Another version of the song here is a tribute to the XVth I.B.

Hill 666

In the summer of 1938 the Republican (largely at this stage Communist) army attempted to relieve pressure on the north and forestall the nationalist assault on Catalonia and the prize of Barcelona. The campaign began well enough with the crossing of the great Ebro River on pontoons, with communist-controlled military police shooting deserters at the rear.

But as the operation unfolded it became the biggest military disaster of them all for the Republicans, producing terrible casualties and opening the door to Catalonia.

In the hills above Gandesa, the combat was more awful than can be easily imagined. In the final edition of the Volunteer, an American writer signing himself with the initials D.A.N., described Hill 666 in terms that paid only lip-service to the party line, as first the Lincolns then the British offered themselves to the artillery of Franco:

Men of the Lincoln are not likely soon to forget that hill… no matter how long they live or how much modern warfare they may see that hell-hole will remain in their memory, a nightmare come to life.

Our introduction to the scene should have been a warning. God never made a more desolate stretch of terrain, and man never contributed more to its further desolation. From the main road, at night, we climbed for hours over broken rock; the men sweated and groaned under the weight of their equipment, their guns. As we climbed there was not a man who did not think: « It’s going to be tough getting food, water and munitions up here; it’s going to be tough for the wounded. »

The first three days were “relatively quiet” but by noon the fourth day the fascists opened up with their guns and mortars and kept up the assault for seven and a half hours.

…they gave us everything they had and it was plenty…they had the range and they kept the range…the fascist gunners knew just where we were.

This continued for days. The article in the Volunteer improbably described the withdrawal of the Lincolns as a victory.

For we licked them on Hill 666 as surely as though we had taken additional terrain They hoped to blow us off that hill by sheer weight of flying steel. Well they hammered us but it was not hard enough.

But all the propaganda could not disguise the defeat. It was the same story as Hill 481 only worse. The army of the Republic had marched (or crawled) into indefensible positions, cut off from supplies, utterly exposed to Franco’s superior artillery.

I am immensely grateful to Alan Warran, of Warren and Pell Publishing, for the following unpublished memoir of the Welsh minor Billy Griffiths. I am posting this in “raw” for now but will clean it up later. This takes up the story before the great battles in the Sierra Pandols, and describes an army already poor provisioned.

Our food was quite monotonous. It hardly varied-bread and coffee for breakfast; carrabunces for dinner and lentils for supper. However there was some slight advantage in being attached to HQ. After dinner, and sometimes after supper, Monty Sim’s batman brought out the scraps for disposal into an improvised bin. All eyes were fixed on him as he scraped the plates clean and when he had gone, there was a concerted rush to delve among the scraps!”

“It was an undignified sight. These were cultured men. Hickman, the head of the observers, had led a sheltered life. Prep school, Public school, Cambridge, a degree and an apprenticeship with Dunlop, then Spain. Joe Latus, a trawler captain; an American news reporter and so on. Yet the food was irresistible:a bit of liver or meat on a bone, perhaps a potato. It was a change.”

The filmic nature of the Griifth manuscript continues.

“One evening, whilst larking about, Joe Latus started to wrestle with one of his mates, and electrician from Liverpool. Joe was a big chap-not tall-about 5′10″. His opponent was well over 6′ and well muscled. It was a good scrap. Whilst it was on, Sam Wild came along. He watched for a while and when it was over he challenged the winner. I think it was Latus. Sam was not very big-about 5′7″, wiry muscle and bone. They rolled about stripped to the waist, over stones and pebbles and rough ground until both were exhausted. It finished in a friendly atmosphere. I relate this incident to indicate what sort of a man Wild was, perhaps one most fitted for the job he had to do.”

On the advance to Corbera on July 25/26th

“We returned to the road (after strafing by Nationalist fighters). Sam (Wild) told us to pick two men and scout the right hand side of the road towards Corbera. I chose Morris Miller and a fellow from Swansea. Miller, though young (about 20) was a seasoned campaigner. He had been wounded badly at Caspe. In fact he was stalked around a tree and fired at five times at close range and being left for dead. An ambulance picked him upon the side of the road and now here he was in my scouting party. The other was very young, and it was his first experience.”

“We moved leisurely through trees laden with fruit-black luscious figs, pomegranates, grapes. It was like the garden of Eden! We climbed upwards until we arrived at a prominence overlooking Corbera. There was nothing to report. There seemed little movement. On the way back we took the shortest direction to the road, calculating that the battalion would have moved forward to that point.”

“Suddenly we came across a camp! There were horse and men. Morris and I assumed them to be Moorish cavalry. Our companion became hysterical and wanted to run down and join them, insisting they were our men. This could
not be. We had no cavalry! We pulled him down and Miller sat on his head until he regained his composure. We told him to take the long way back to keep out of danger. This he did. In the meantime, Miller and I crept closerto the camp. We came across a mule loaded with rifles and immediately decided to pinch it. Scarcely daring to breath we untied the animal and led it away.”

“When we reached the road at a point a few miles further down, we found ourselves under fire. We scampered off the road and lay behind a bank. To our right was a house. I hung onto the mule while Miller went to investigate. It was a temporary Brigade Headquarters. The British Battalion were in action, attacking some strongpoint in the hills on then other side of the road. We left the mule in the care of the officer in charge, telling him he could have the rifles, but the animal was ours. Having done this we dashed oacross the road to join the Battalion..

Then Sam heard about our mule. We were ordered to enter Corbera and look for grub. We set off, the three of us on the back of the mule-Dobson, Miller and myself. The place was deserted. They had left in a hurry. There were masses of stores. Tinned milk, tinned food of all kinds and lots and lots of boots. We drunk a few tins of milk, and while Dobson searched for a pair of boots to fit him, Miller and I went to look for a cart. We found one, and a harness. Soon the mule was hitched up, the cart loaded and we were on our way.”

After Hill 481 the Bn went into reserve returning to the front on the evening of August 15th.

” It was good to relax. Hot coffee in the morning and evening. Even the carrabunces and lentils semed more appetizing. I had a parcel from home-the only one I ever received! Cigarettes from the local club, salmon, chocolate. This was indeed luxurious living! Morris miller and I were making a dugout. Most people thought us daft, but I was always over cautious. We had stopped work to share out the parcel. I didn’t smoke, so the cigs were a free distribution. A fair crowd had gathered and we sat around eating chocs and generally gossiping. Half a dozen planes came over and dropped a few bombs. The crowd melted like magic. All went into the dugout, piled on top of each other. All that is, except me and Miller. We were the only two left outside. There was no room for any more. It was quite a joke. At least, they thought
so!”

August 15th

“That evening I shared blankets with Lesser (This is Sam Russell who is still alive and will be at the London Eye on the 21st, but he does not talk much about the Ebro). The food truck came at dawn, and Lesser had gone downto the road to wait for it. The road continued in the direction of our rear in a straight line for about half a mile along a narrow valley, no more than 20 yards wide flanked by steep hills. Where Lesser waited it swung sharply to the right in the direction of Gandesa, for about 200 yards and then disappeared in another bend which seemed to block the valley completely. To the right of where I sat, the terrain took on a new and more sinister appearance. It was as if a giant’s hand had cut a cleft through the mountain, revealing the rocks in all its nakedness below.

Through the jungle of boulders and projecting needle-like rocks, dwarfing a man by their size, a narrow tortuous path wound its way from the road, skirting precipitous drops where cleavage was sharpest and running onto the open at a point to the right, on the rising hills behind our position. Skirting the head of the ravine, the path got lost in a more open stretch of level ground, before the hills rose again, sharply to the crest and the front line positions of the British Battalion. One tried to avoid as much as possible the path and open ground because of the intensity of shell and mortar fire, which at times, came over at the rate of 40 per minute. Yet this was the only way to the British battalion HQ, the Canadian positions and the front line.

I got caught twice, but each time was fortunate to be near a shallow slit trench. Morris was not so lucky. He was killed outright!! So also was the Chief of Fortifications for the Brigade (Egan Schmidt), who with his staff, was caught in a barrage not far from the Brigade HQ. He and three of his staff were killed and a number wounded”.

These memoirs are really extraordinary and include important recollections of Morris Miller including the circumstances of his previous wound, the daring and resourcefulness with which he and Griffith steal a donkey from Republican cavalry, up to the final very abrupt killing of Miller by shellfire.

Concludes Alan: “Basically, one can locate the valley where Morris was killed and of course, his name is on the memorial further up the valley along Egan Schmidt’s grave. This was a dressing station on the way up to Hill 666, and of course,
you know that Morris’ name is on the XV memorial there. “

On the slopes of the Sierra de Pándols today, overlooking the Ebro valley, one can still see the shallow excavations where the soldiers attempted to dig themselves in. But the stony surface made real trenches impossible and when the shells and bombs fell there was no real cover. The splintered fragments of rock were themselves lethal. The communist military commanders were at best careless with the lives of their men but a more severe verdict is that this is how they lost the war, squandering their best soldiers on an ill-considered venture that resulted only in Franco winning it.

-Jonathan Miller photo

This is the war memorial on the Sierra de Pándols which commemorates Morris Miller and other men of the XV International Brigade who died here.

Peter Beaumont, describing this in the Observer, noted: “89 British and Irish volunteers died here accounting for almost 10 per cent of all British fatalities in the civil war. Among them were former soldiers, union activists and every colour of the left, from members of the Communist party to social democrats – including David Haden-Guest, uncle of the film-maker Christopher, who was shot by a sniper as he read a newspaper.”

From this hill you can see sprawling, modern, unfinished Gandesa, the thundering lorries hauling away the produce from a surrounding landscape of polytunnel salad farms, vineyards and orchards. To the east is Corbera, the ruined village on the hill, the new town below it, on the new main road.

I leave some flowers on the memorial and walk over a stony path to the hillside where Miller and the others were killed. If one were to choose the worst possible static position, this would probably be it. The place is extraordinary and I pick a sprig of thyme and tuck it into my notebook as a souvenir. What a place for Morris Miller’s journey to end. I feel both close to him and sad.

Why did these men die here? What made them commit to such a cause? Their motives were noble and correct even if they proved powerless to arrest the enemy.

In 1936, the British government had not yet completed its abject grovel to Adolph Hitler. The editor of The Times was working late into the night removing anything from his newspaper that would upset the Fürher. In Spain, a nationalism cognate with fascism was attempting to seize control. In Hull and other British cities, Blackshirts were roaming the streets, beating up Jews and left-wing militants (often the same people). Although the holocaust was still to begin in the Baltics, there were chiller than normal winds blowing in off the North Sea. There were still strong links between the Latvian port of Libau and Hull. Morris upset people with his bloodthirsty predictions of what was in store and not just for the Jews. (So many International Brigade volunteers were Jews that they would joke that yiddish was the common language.)

Morris was generally penniless and although he argued consecutively with all of his brothers, cousins and uncles, he was not averse to showing up at their homes for a meal, which would typically culminate with Morris expounding his theories in a way that had a tendency to upset some of those around him. He was hardly sanguine at a time when a lot of middle class British Jews, desperate to assimilate, were still preferring to look the other way.

Morris’s accurately predicted the lethal threat posed by Nazism, fascism and, a subject that increasingly pre-occupied him, Spanish nationalism. Morris was a Marxist anti-clericist and didn’t need much encouragement to see the reactionary Spanish coalition of church, landowners and proto-nazi chancers as a force that absolutely must not be allowed to prevail if Europe was not to descend into a hegemon of national socialist dictatorships. He was infuriated by the British government which was pretending to be even-handed and yet continually obstructed any aid to the Spanish republican government, for fear of offending Hitler. Worse, the weak French government was being heavily influenced by the British to close its borders to supplies for the Republicans. It was practically as if Chamberlain was going to hand Europe to the dictators on a plate.

Morris’s discourses rattled his family. His family was poor, he was clever but his educational opportunities were forclosed by lack of money, his relatives were relatively affluent – his uncles proprietors of a thriving timber business. Morris was bright and a linguist, who spoke French and German, but he was underemployed as a pharmacist’s assistant. He joined the communist party in December 1936.

After stalking out of that high tea at his uncle’s house – often his most substantial meal of the week, he was rakish thin and always short of money – he travelled to Spain in 1937 swearing his parents to secrecy, as what he was doing was technically a crime. He promised to write and kept his word, in fluent letters describing the train journey from Hull to London and then the boat train to Paris, lying to the emigration inspectors that he was a student on his way to Paris.

At the Gare du Nord he was met by a French commusist who assembled him with the other sheepish young men arriving on the boat train. They were shepherded to the front of the station where comrade taxi drivers ferried them across town to the (?Austerlitz) station for the train first to Toulouse and then the local trains to Perpignan where they were given a meal again by local comrades, and helped across the border to Catalonia, where an international force of volunteers was assembling. Morris had no doubt what he was fighting for. He had fought the blackshirts on the streets of Hull and even if he had come off the worst for wear, his physical courage was not in doubt.

Every year to this day, a handful of Morris’s comrades gather at Jubilee Gardens on the Embankment in London to remember him and the others who fell in their battle against the fascists. The surviving veterans become older and frailer but it is interesting that the number of younger people attending is increasing as a new generation discovers (as I did) what their relatives had done.

Is the story of Morris Miller one to inspire or is it merely intriguing? He was a controversial and divisive character. His cousins still miss him. You can admire and even be awed by his sacrifice – but to me it seems wasted. The volunteers did not really change the course of the war. Their sacrifice was heroic, but futile. Today there are still young men and women who go off to fight in defiance of their own governments, but in a different cause and rarely communism. Today religion is back as the opiate of the masses.

If Morris had lived, would he have remained a party loyalist? Who can tell? Many returned from Spain with shattered faith. What’s plain to me, even as I see in Morris the immaturity of a young and hot-headed man, was a conviction and a political consciousness that could not accept fascism. This only became the official policy of the United Kingdom two years later.

I like to think Morris could have become a great writer. It is hard to tell from the fragments he left behind but obviously I want to believe that he could have been one of the greats. But we shall never know. This is the collateral damage of war.

Today, modern Catalonia, part of the EU, remains distinctive and the history still unsettles. Catalonia is neither fascist nor communist (although it still has anarchic qualities) and hence it can be said that as far as the long-ago civil war is concerned, here at least, both sides lost. There is a small museum in Gandesa, which tries in its own way to memorialise the horror, yet in the curation, curiously detached… as if wishing it all swept away, put in a cupboard, covered in dust, a memory to be avoided.

—

Acknowledgements: A number of people are owed thanks including the surviving cousins of Morris Miller and his niece, Elaine Davison, who got me started. David Leach the filmaker has created a film Voices from the Mountain and sent me a DVD which is fascinating but I have not had the nerve to tell him that it was destroyed by my new puppy! Leach prepared comprehensive notes on four volunteers named alongside Morris Miller on a small memorial in the Sierra de Pándols. The others are Lewis Clive, a descendant of Clive of India; Harry Dobson, communist Welsh miner; David Guest, son of the Labour MP Dr. Haden Guest, leader with Miller in the militant activist movement, and Wally Tapsell, active young communist later circulation manager of The Daily Worker. The International Brigade Memorial Trust and Tamiment Library at NYU are invaluable sources. Gail Malmgreen at NYU is a walking encyclopedia although I am not sure every visiting researched gets cake! Marelene Sidaway at the IBMT is another magnificent figure and the go-to person on British volunteers as is James Carmody. Alan Warren provided the unpubished memoir of the Welsh miner Billy Griffiths which added so much to the story. I had a kind response to requests for information from the late Rob Wardle, whose father Robert was killed in action at Calaceite in April 1938. Wardle died in December 2005. Wardle revealed to me the open mystery of a chair dedicated to Morris Miller, attribution entirely unknown, that now stands in the Guildhall, Hull, next to a plaque commemorating the men from Hull who died in Spain. This plaque will soon be rededicated and I will supply further information when I know it. This is journalism and not history – needless to say all errors are my own.

A note on naming: Morris Miller was known as Maurice in Hull but his name appeared in a simplified style in his by-lines for The Volunteer and he is cited as Morris in his contacts with a number of contemporary sources. I have thus assumed that at the time of his death he would wanted to be known as Morris, and for the sake of simplicity have called him thus throughout.

This is a work in progress. To be corrected, extended, continued…