With the eyes of the world on Paris for the Olympics, we look back at David Ebsworth's 2021 article in which he explains the inspiration for ‘A Betrayal of Heroes’, his thriller about Jack Telford and the Spanish Republicans who continued the fight against fascism.
As an author of historical fiction, none of the periods in which my novels are set has been more special for me than the Spanish Civil War.
I’d already written a couple of thrillers set towards the end of the conflict, ‘The Assassin’s Mark’ and ‘Until the Curtain Falls’. They follow the fortunes of fictional journalist Jack Telford.
The climax of ‘Until the Curtain Falls’ finds Telford on board the Stanbrook – that remarkable true episode during which a final shipload of Republicans managed to escape from Alicante on board the tramp steamer captained by Cardiff skipper Archibald Dickson – and then in Oran with the vessel’s refugees. But I started to be intrigued by what might have happened next.
I knew that when Paris was liberated in August 1944, the first Allied troops into the city belonged to a company of Leclerc’s Second French Armoured Division. Yet they weren’t French troops but Spanish, as many readers will know. They belonged to the Ninth Company in the Third Battalion of the Chad Armoured Infantry Regiment.
Spanish Republicans in the vanguard of the liberation of Paris in August 1944.
The company was by then universally known as La Nueve, because most of its soldiers were formerly members of the Spanish Republic’s army. Their half-tracks were emblazoned with the names of battles in Spain – Teruel, Guadalajara, Jarama, Belchite and others. Their battalion commander was an old warhorse, Joseph Putz, a French veteran of the First World War, but who’d also commanded the 14th International Brigade as a volunteer in Spain.
So, between the Stanbrook in March 1939 and the liberation of Paris in August 1944, what had happened? Was there a link, a thread between one event and the other? Naturally – and it turned out this thread would inspire the story which forms the historically factual background of the novel.
There’s a very direct link, of course, since one of the Republican soldiers who escaped aboard the Stanbrook was Amado Granell Mesado, who fought throughout the Spanish Civil War and, not quite by coincidence, was also adjutant to La Nueve, helping to lead the company when they fought their way into Paris five years later. He features strongly in the novel.
Granell operated a motorcycle shop in Orihuela, south of Alicante, until the outbreak of the civil war in 1936. He served with distinction for the Republic and did, indeed, escape from Alicante on the Stanbrook. After the war, he received the Legion of Honour but rejected an offer of promotion within the French army. By 1950 Granell had opened a restaurant, Los Amigos, on the Rue du Bouloi, Paris, which became a meeting point for Spanish Republicans.
Another La Nueve member who makes an appearance is Miguel Campos, formerly a baker from the south of Tenerife. Known as Campos the Anarchist, he had not fought in Spain since he had been imprisoned early in the civil war and later in various forced labour camps. After his escape, he joined the French Resistance in Oran in time to take part in assisting the American landings during Operation Torch.
Later, he’d joined La Nueve and, though he had no military experience, he was a natural leader. His exploits in Normandy, in the liberation of Paris, and during the fighting in Lorraine, became something of a legend. Yet he disappeared without a trace during a routine patrol in December 1944.
Jack Telford may be a fictional character but perhaps it’s worth a mention of the factual background which, in my novels, had brought him to Spain in the first place.
I needed a ‘real’ newspaper for which Jack might have worked, and I chose Reynold’s News – a hugely popular and progressive Sunday newspaper back in the 1930s, whose editor, Sydney Elliott, worked hard to support the Aid for Spain campaigns. Elliott, I knew, would have been intrigued by the brochures that suddenly appeared in all of London’s travel agency windows early in 1938: ‘National Spain invites you to visit the War Routes of the North’ – an invitation to tour the glories of northern Spain and the scenes of Franco’s victories. It was an important and often overlooked part of Franco’s propaganda strategy, and one which attracted more than 20,000 tourists, from every country in Europe and further afield, an average of 80 tours each year between July 1938 and June 1945. An all-inclusive holiday for just £8, and all the pro-Franco propaganda you could handle. So, why not send ace reporter Jack Telford off on one of the tours, to expose the truth?
The betrayals which give the novel its title are many and varied, but they include the false promises made to the Spaniards fighting within Leclerc’s Division – promises that, once the Allies had dealt with Hitler and Mussolini, they would next turn their attention to Spain and Franco.
Yet those promises were never kept and the men of La Nueve suffered the double agony of hearing how, in October 1944, thousands of guerrilleros, having previously liberated so many of those southern French cities like Toulouse, took the weapons supplied to them as part of the Resistance and drove a Republican wedge through the heart of the Pyrenees into northern Spain, the Aran Valley, towards Lleida. Without support from the Allies, the guerrilleros were doomed to fail and they were ultimately overwhelmed by Franco’s forces.
Those former soldiers of the Republic within the ranks of La Nueve, and Brigaders like Joseph Putz who fought alongside them, continued their battle against fascism to the very end.
Sadly, the part they played has, until relatively recently, been airbrushed from history. But thankfully that further betrayal is now being corrected – perhaps ‘A Betrayal of Heroes’ might make some small contribution to that process.
‘A Betrayal of Heroes’ by David Ebsworth was published in July 2021 by SilverWood Books. You can hear David talk about the book, taking in Casablanca, Brazzaville, the Spaniards who fought for Free France and the 1940s celebrities and spies who fill the novel’s pages, in Wrexham on 12 September. Find out more.