Milton Wolff, salud!, Pere Vilanova

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:44:00 +0000

Milton Wolff was his name. He died on 14 January 2008 at the age of 92. I had the great good fortune to meet him twice in my life and I will never forget him. Within a few hours of the announcement of his death, some of the major Spanish newspapers (El Pais, El Mundo, El Periodico) published articles about him, but there was almost nothing else on the internet, in European or American newspapers, and other media. One reliable source of news was - of course - on the website of the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, for Milton was its last surviving commander. His eight predecessors had all died under fire, in Brunete or El Ebro, in 1937 and 1938.

Pere Vilanova is a professor of political science and government at the University of Barcelona. He comments regularly on international politics in media organisations like Catalunya Radio, TV3 and El País

Also by Pere Vilanova in openDemocracy:

"Aznar versus the people: a Spanish divorce?" (20 March 2003)

"Indonesian democracy: lessons for the west" (29 September 2004)

"The good, the bad, and the unjust" (7 December 2004)

"The right side of the mirror"(3 March 2005)

Let's keep the issue alive! During the Spanish civil war of 1936-39, about 32,000 young men and women joined the International Brigades and came to Spain to fight fascism and Nazism - for Spain was the first battlefield of that epic struggle, and prefigured what was to come immediately after. About 3,500 of these fighters were United States citizens, and of them more than 900 died, a rate that gives a clear picture of the intensity of their commitment and courage.

Milton Wolff was a young man of 22 when the previous comandantes of the Lincoln and Lincoln-Washington Battalions - David Doran, Robert Hale Merriman and Dave Reiss - were killed. He had no previous military experience, in fact it seems that he first volunteered as a paramedic, but he soon became the leader of a machine-gunner platoon. When the war turned very bad for the anti-fascist side, the battle of the Ebro (1938) became the last stand for the Spanish Republic, as its forces tried for over three months to stop the Francoist military machine.

A lost cause, because Franco was backed by Hitler and Mussolini, not only with ideology but also with manpower, planes, tanks and artillery. The "international community" of those days - the League of Nations and the European powers - decided that "non-intervention" (that is, not supporting the legal government of Spain) was the wisest way to prevent the expansion of fascism. Wrong. 1938 was also the year of the Munich conference, the quintessential example of the doomed appeasement policy towards Hitler. The second world war followed just a year later.

The day after the battle of the Ebro ended, Milton - after making sure that the survivors of his battalion were safe on the other side - crossed the river alone, swimming at night. It was not his only adventure in Spain. Legend has it that in Madrid, aged 21, he came across Ernest Hemingway and stole his girlfriend. And the best part of the story - Milton had no idea who Hemingway was, until some war reporter told him! Hemingway was very upset, more for the latter reason than for the girl he lost. As Milton wrote to a friend in New York: "So much for writers ... I'd much rather read their works than be in a bar with them".

But Hemingway also had his grand seigneur side. He wrote about Milton Wolff: "Tall as Lincoln, gaunt as Lincoln, and as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg. He is alive and unhit by the same hazard that leaves one palm tree standing where a hurricane has passed".

As a former anti-Francoist militant, the son, grandson and nephew of men who fought against Franco during the civil war, and as such a boy raised in exile, I came across Milton in 1975 in San Francisco. It was spring, the same spring of the fall of Saigon, at Berkeley. We organised a quiet political evening at the university, showed the legendary film of Joris Ivens, To Die in Madrid, and had a debate with students. Milton was with us. I don't remember much about the debate, except that when Milton spoke, everybody listened and the silence was thick.

The second time we met, in 1977, Milton came to Barcelona with a bunch of friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Franco had been dead a year and a half and we were on the brink of our first democratic elections. Milton and his band would not miss it. Because I was one of the few communist militants who could speak English, the leader of the party asked me and Carmen (my long life companion) to take care of them. So we were hanging out in Barcelona. Milton was still the leader, basically he ordered all kinds of tapas in several bars at the Barceloneta sea side. Of course, at the third bottle, they started to sing "those" songs: Ay Carmela, Viva la Quinta Brigada, and the rest. Pete Seeger used to sing those songs much better, and with a lot of heart. But our evening was something even more special.

After 1977, Milton came back to Spain several times. In the 1990s, the Universidad de Alcala awarded him with an honoris causa doctorate. In 2005 he visited the Ebro again, crossing it in a small boat. He did throw some roses into the river, said Salud, camaradas! once again, and then, in a quiet voice, as if talking to himself, "I carry Spain in my heart".

He had had time to fight in the second world war, to be involved with the earliest operations of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), be prosecuted by infamous McCarthyism, fight apartheid in South Africa, support the Sandinistas, and write three novels, including Another Hill.

In Spain, we remember him, elsewhere I am not sure, and to commit such men to oblivion is more than unfair.

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Milton Wolff, salud!, Pere Vilanova