Fraser Raeburn looks at how the veterans of the International Brigades were viewed and treated by MI5 and the military authorities after the Spanish Civil War. This article was originally published in ¡No Pasarán! 1-2019.

As the train from Newhaven pulled into London’s Victoria Station on the evening of 7 December 1938, hundreds of returning volunteers arrived home from Spain to a rapturous crowd and an uncertain future. The story of what they had achieved in Spain as part of the International Brigades is well known and has been celebrated ever since.

British Battalion members at Jarama in 1937 (Marx Memorial Library).

Yet what came next for the veterans of Spain is often much less clear. Their relationship with the British state was already strained, having fought for a foreign government in a conflict that Britain did its best to wash its hands of.

Above all, their close association with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and their clear willingness to fight and die for their beliefs marked their loyalties out as suspect in the eyes of the political establishment. This question was thrown into sharp relief by the outbreak of war against Germany less than a year later: to what extent would the British state trust the Spanish
veterans to participate in the war effort?

Unlike their service in Spain, we know far less about what happened to the volunteers during the Second World War. Broadly speaking, there are two settled-upon narratives of what happened. The first reflects continuity – those who had recognised the dangers of fascism the earliest, gearing up for a new phase in the struggle, swapping the battlefields of Spain for those in France, North Africa and elsewhere.

There are numerous individuals, such as Roderick MacFarquhar or Bill Alexander, whose talents were recognised through commissions, or Tommy McGuire, who was killed while serving as a paratrooper, whose wartime service conforms to this picture. They are not the focus of this article, however, which is concerned with the darker narrative: one of exclusion, victimisation and waste.

Soldiers from the British Expeditionary Force firing at low-flying German aircraft during the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940 (AWM/Wiki Commons)

Despite the volunteers’ recent experience of modern warfare and their demonstrable commitment to opposing fascism, they were shunned by the British state and prevented from participating in the war effort. These, in the parlance of the American volunteers, were the ‘premature anti-fascists’, a label adopted out of ironic pride in the face of official absurdity.

Historians of the British Battalion have long been aware that the ex-volunteers faced highly variable treatment at the hands of the state during the Second World War, but have struggled to explain exactly what was going on. Clearly, the boundaries to participation were not absolute, otherwise many ex-volunteers’ distinguished wartime service would have been impossible.

Equally, there are many cases where individuals faced obvious or implied discrimination. This problem is compounded by the absence of wartime records or testimony from the bulk of ex-volunteers, which makes building an overallpicture very challenging.

As part of my research into Scottish volunteers, I sought to understand and explain why the International Brigade veterans faced such variable treatment. The picture that emerged from MI5 records was mixed – on one hand, there was plenty of confirmation that many veterans were subject to surveillance, discharged unfairly or otherwise had their participation in the war effort monitored or curtailed.

Yet it also became clear that this treatment was rarely the result of their service in Spain. In the records of investigations I found, outcomes were rarely connected to the International Brigades. In some cases, punitive action was straightforwardly nonpolitical, such as for Glaswegian Robert Middleton, who was arrested for desertion and assault in 1941, and who had run afoul of battalion authorities in Spain as well.

William Gilmour, a Scottish volunteer discriminated against by MI5.

William Gilmour, originally from Blairgowrie in Scotland, is an interesting exception. He was one of relatively few Scottish volunteers discriminated against by MI5 for explicitly political reasons – his application to join the Home Guard was refused in 1942.

Yet his file revealed that it was not his time in Spain that sealed Gilmour’s fate. Rather, it was a report from the City of Glasgow Police, which noted that he had been dismissed from a factory inMay 1941 for carrying out ‘abnormal communistic activity in his place of employment’. In fact, Gilmour’s service in Spain had been declared as prior military experience on his application to join the Home Guard. If this sufficed to bar him from enlisting, no investigation would have been required in the first place.

This needs to be understood within the context of wartime anti-communist policy. While MI5 in particular always held that the CPGB represented a dangerous enemy to be countered at every turn, they were canny enough to realise that disproportionate persecution would onlystrengthen the communists’ case.

Instead, they advocated only targeting communists who had demonstrated the capacity and willingness to undertake subversive activity in wartime. This last point was crucial – MI5 was aware of ruptures within the CPGB following the decision in September 1939 to oppose the war with Germany.

They judged that most party members, while not enthusiastic about the war effort, would not go so far as to actively undermine it. They were therefore to be treated as individuals, and their participation in the war effort managed according to their specific threat.

As a result, by early 1941 – before the invasion of the Soviet Union – only about 30 British communists had actually been
prevented outright from joining the armed forces. This, however, does not seem to tally with what we know from the International Brigaders themselves, more than 30 of whom faced discrimination during the war.

Upon further investigation, it became clear that the answer to this – and the broader question of why the volunteers were treated so variably – lay in the limitations of MI5 itself. Far from the omnipotent organisation depicted in popular culture, they had little capacity to monitor over 1,000 returned volunteers across the country amid many other more pressing duties.

Especially outside of London, they were reliant almost entirely on local police to actually keep tabs on persons of interest, and I found that a lot of the variation in volunteers’ experiences could be explained by geography – places with a history of militancy and a large, well-resourced police force were much better at monitoring.

For Glaswegian veterans such as James McFarlane, it was the anti-communist obsessions of local police rather than MI5 or the armed forces that kept them on the security services’ radar.

A British government wartime propaganda poster (National Archives/Wikipedia).

Moreover, MI5 had only limited influence in actually enforcing its recommendations. Sometimes, this meant that obvious security
threats slipped through – such as when communist James Klugmann was employed by the SOE (Special Operations Executive) over their protests – but this could also work the other way. It appears that the procedures were rarely followed to the letter (or at all). Instead of liaising with MI5 as they were supposed to, local British military authorities often seemed to take it upon themselves to decide what to do with potential ‘subversives’ in the ranks.

While MI5 had spent 20 years trying to understand and evaluate the CPGB, the British military had far less knowledge and understanding of British communism. This meant that the kind of nuanced judgements envisaged by MI5 when it came to the Spanish veterans were circumvented by the whims of local commanders.

Some lost little time in getting rid of ‘reds’, using whatever excuse they could find, such as when Frank McCusker was discharged days after his old Spanish wound was discovered by an army doctor. Others kept them under close watch, though some ex-volunteers, such as Bob Cooney, were able to subvert their efforts neatly.

Yet many British officers, perhaps most, came to the view that it mattered little what a soldier’s political opinions were, so long as they did their jobs. Equally, many veterans of Spain – despite their radical reputations – were happy enough to do just that, a small price to pay for another chance to fight fascism.