Michael Petrou, Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War.(Book review)

Michael Petrou, Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War (Vancouver and Toronto: University of British Columbia Press 2008)

THE EMINENT CANADIAN historian Jack Granatstein has been recruited to pen a cover blurb for this book and has written: "Based on massive research, this is the best and most complete account of Canadians in the Spanish Civil War we are ever likely to get."

Research alone, of course, cannot guarantee that a book will be the definitive work on a subject. And the notion that any history is the most complete account "ever" short-changes future historians. Indeed, there are certain inexplicable gaps in Renegades that historians might wish to explore to write a more complete history. For example, to paraphrase Frank Scott's famous question to E.J. Pratt about his poem on the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, "Where are the women?"

Raising these caveats is not to say that Petrou's Renegades isn't good. It IS good--ironically--because it's the very type of history that Professor Granatstein disparages--social history. With the able assistance of archivist and historian Myron Momryk--whose immense labor Petrou gratefully acknowledges--Petrou has put together a comprehensive factual database chronicling the personal details of the almost 1700 Canadians who went to Spain in the late 1930s to fight fascism.

In addition to recognizing Momryk, Petrou might have inscribed a thankful word for the long-dead faceless functionaries of the Communist International (Comintern). It was they, after all, who assembled and preserved the exceedingly important record of international leftist history that is found in the political assessments of the tens of thousands of anti-fascists who joined the fight for democracy in Spain in 1936-9. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, these Comintern records have now become public.

Petrou has brought together this data, sorted out a host of problems fundamental to its very nature (just one of which was the many pseudonyms people used) and drawn an informative portrait of the volunteers from Canada who made up the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, the Canadian contingent of the International Brigades.

Petrou sums up the features of this group in a single word: renegades. They were renegades several times over. In the midst of a Depression that made many of them obsolete as workers and seemingly irrelevant as humans, they forged their way to the front lines of the Spanish conflict to declare themselves to be historical actors. They refused to be mute victims and to accept that Spain would be one. In this regard they were mavericks too. Western governments were prepared--indeed happy, some have cogently argued--to hand over Spain to fascism.

Petrou's database on the volunteers also shows that the Canadian volunteers were, in the words of one of their political commissars, "very, very working class." (25) This distinguished them from us recruits, whom one Canadian dismissed as New York City "ice cream boys" who "would starve to death in a grocery store." (17) Having survived in tough, dangerous jobs as loggers and miners, the Canadians were also indomitable fighters.

Another significant fact about them was that three quarters were members of the Communist Party of Canada. (24) This should not be surprising. What is startling is the fact that despite their solid working-class background and clear party affiliation they were regarded as political renegades by international communist leaders. The Canadian Mac-Paps were thought to harbour anarchistic tendencies and exhibit ideological weakness. Apparently, years of living on the bum and resisting military authority in the 20-cent-a-day labour camps gave the Canadians in Spain a disrespect for any authority, even that of the Communist Party. (42) And a disproportionately large number of volunteers came from British Columbia, where the anarcho-syndicalist Iridustrial Workers of the World exerted an influence into the 1930s. In addition they had a "rank-and-file consciousness" that made them desire to be "one of the boys." (110) Taking and giving orders was not a task they accepted easily.

Another feature of the volunteers was that they were mostly not native-born Canadians. Almost 80 per cent of them were immigrants, often refugees from authoritarian regimes in Europe. Petrou argues that for some of the immigrants, Spain was round two in an on-going battle against fascism. (48)

In addition to the detailed social portrait of the mass of the volunteers, another element that stands out in Renegades is Petrou's journalistic approach. Petrou left journalism to pursue a PhD at the University of Oxford, and Renegades is his revised dissertation. After completing his PhD, Petrou returned to journalism. This background gives Petrou an eye for memorable detail. He describes, for instance, the response of one Canadian to a political commissar's question of whether or not he liked his coffee: "It depends ... If I'm politically developed, comrade commandante, the coffee is very good. But if I am not politically developed, it tastes like horse piss." (136)

But Petrou's journalistic approach has its weaknesses, too, one of them being occasional failure to provide adequate background. The context of the Spanish Civil War explains some arrangements that Petrou regards as iniquitous. He asks, for instance, why "trusted members of the Communist Party were more likely to be given command positions than those who were not." (65) This prevailed in all of the International Brigades. Given the origin of the war--a rebellion by reactionary military officers against the elected republican government--and the characteristics of the volunteer armies that saved the Republic--untried, untrained, Spanish and foreign volunteers--how else were commanders to be chosen? In that crisis atmosphere, is it any wonder that the communists, the backbone of the new armed forces, turned to their own members to be leaders? The concept of the political commissar as a quasi-officer had its roots in the Soviet Red Army. But it also made practical sense in a newly constructed army composed of raw recruits and in which officers were either totally absent or politically suspect.

Another case where greater contextual foundation is required is the chapter dealing with William Krehm, one of three individuals whom Petrou examines in detail. In 1936, Krehm was a supporter of a tiny Toronto Trotsky-influenced splinter group. In September, after attending a conference of leftists in Brussels, he made his way to Barcelona to assist the Spanish fight against fascism. He remained in Barcelona for most of the next eight months before being arrested by the Servicio de Investigaci6n Militar (SIM), the Republic's communist-dominated security police, and held in a Republican prison for three months. Through the intercession of the British and Canadian governments, Krehm was released from jail and expelled from Spain. His ordeal confirmed Krehm's fear of "the threat that communism posed in Spain." (149) Petrou's sympathetic treatment of Krehm might be seen as providing ammunition to those who claim that Stalinist perfidy destroyed the Spanish Republic.

It's true that the republican government was convinced that the area of Spain it controlled was riddled with "fifth columnists." The phrase itself originates in the fascist General Mola's claim that he would take Madrid through the use of agents inside the city. Although the boast was exaggerated, there were in fact fascist supporters and agents in the Republic. No less important, it was not just the Republic that was preoccupied by uncertainty about whom to trust. Reports from fascist-controlled parts of Spain indicate that paranoia about security was a fixation there too. And the same obsession prevailed in a good part of the Western world in the 1930s. Authorities in many countries were overwrought by fears of fifth columnists, spies, and saboteurs. Popular culture--see, for instance, the Alfred Hitchcock films from 1935 to 1941--reflected a similar agitation.

Republican Spain had good reason to scrutinize foreigners like Krehm. Consider the fact that some 40,000 people from over 70 countries joined the International Brigades. Most were screened by their home communist parties, but police agents certainly did enlist. The RCMP, for instance, had an agent ready to board a ship for Spain. (55-6) Also flooding into the Republic was an uncounted host of curious, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes just plain adventuristic journalists, commentators, and political voyeurs. For people of various political and sexual temperaments in 1936, Spain was the place to be.

One of them was William Krehm. For eight months, as the Spanish Republic tottered on the edge of collapse under a murderous assault by both Franco's army and the militaries of Germany and Italy, Krehm waged his own campaign of international solidarity with the embattled republic. In the cafes of Barcelona he held his ground, arguing with Spanish comrades and trying to "show them the proper line." (150) British journalist Virginia Cowles described a similar scene in Valencia in March 1937, observing that "the squares of Valencia were filled with young men of military age who seemed to have nothing better to do than stand in the sunshine picking their teeth." (Looking for Trouble, 1941, 7) In May 1937, when actual fighting broke out in Barcelona--between communists and the anticommunists whom Krehm supported --Krehm was arrested. Perhaps the truly remarkable thing about Krehm's arrest by the SIM, his imprisonment (in a prison with plywood walls) and his expulsion from Spain was that it did not occur many months earlier.

Petrou forges new ground by devoting a chapter to the crimes committed by the Canadian volunteers and the punishments meted out to them. Comintern records show that about 150 of them ended up in some kind of trouble with authorities, for both military offenses such as incitement to mutiny and desertion and for offences off the battlefield such as drunken escapades and rape. (136-7) Given the desperate conditions in Spain (one Canadian volunteer had no shoes for most of the war) and the composition of the International Brigades, this number of recorded misdemeanours was remarkably low. Regular armies devote strict attention to both training and instilling discipline. The typical training for Mac-Paps was firing three bullets into a hillside before being sent into action. Engendering discipline was, inevitably, just as haphazard. Little wonder, then, that there were some problems, which Petrou properly attributes mostly to battlefield exhaustion. (121) Ironically, the low rate of severe problems presents Canadians not as renegades but as disciplined loyalists.

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