Churchill's Spaniards

Book excerpt: Unveils the untold story of over a thousand Spanish Republicans who joined the British Army to continue their fight against fascism during WWII. Very little, if anything at all, has been told about the service of over one thousand Spanish Republicans who volunteered to join the British Army during the Second World War. Churchill’s Spaniards remedies this and tells their story, men who were ‘continuing the fight’ against fascism from 1939 to 1946. Churchill’s Spaniards is not the story of the Spanish Civil War, nor the equally well-known one of the International Brigades. It is the story – against the backdrop of Churchill’s efforts to keep Spain out of the war – of the recruitment, training and deployment of often battle-hardened Spanish Republicans into the service of the United Kingdom. These fighting men served widely across British Armed Forces: as members of the elite SAS and Commandos, in the ranks of the Infantry and of the Pioneer Corps and as members of the Special Operations Executive. Further Spaniards fought in almost all of the battles and campaigns in the West from the Fall of France and the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, to the campaigns in North Africa and Italy, as well as those in North-West Europe. Using a wide range of material from Britain, France and Spain as well as previously unpublished eyewitness and official accounts along with groundbreaking new research, Séan Scullion finally tells the story of these previously overlooked men.