Recommend this book to your friends. ( )

Great stuff. A few minor errors in the text but none bad enough to detract from the narrative. ( )

Peter Kemp is an Englishman who served as a junior officer in the Spanish Civil War -- on the Nationalist side.

This doesn't go deeply into the causes of the war (which are complex), and is primarily told about activities which a single junior officer directly saw (with some other parts, for instance the Guernica incident, where propaganda widely believed was incorrect).

It was pretty interesting how easily one could slip across borders and participate in conflicts internationally at the time. Far more common on the Republican/communist side, but until closer to the end of the war, international border controls were lax.

Kemp is primarily an adventurer and writing well about interesting situations, rather than one of truly great fiction writers of history (such as Hemingway), but the writing is quite good, honest, and the book is easy to follow. Unlike a lot of war writers, he writes about direct experiences without becoming overly gory, yet doesn't avoid dealing with greater philosophical issues than just direct experience. Pretty much the perfect war memoir.

One of the striking aspects of the book is just how much better the International Brigades (i.e. international communism) was at media and international recruiting than the Nationalists. The Nationalists had some limited support from Germany and Italy (mainly to test weapons), but fairly limited organic support by international individuals, and almost none from Anglo-American sphere (and this little written in English). This included stupidly not supporting press visits (they were all viewed as spies by the Nationalists), ensuring they were covered badly (either ignored or made to appear evil).

The actual war itself was, like many civil wars, incredibly dirty. Summary executions of many classes of combatants were standard (of all non-Spaniards by the Nationalists, and of most prisoners by the Republicans), and there was harsh discipline (execution for any insubordination) on the Nationalist side, and outright crime (rape, murder of civilians) on the Republican side.

It's always shocking to me that I own perfectly modern and functional firearms from the early 1900s, but even 5 year old elections are antiques. The equipment and techniques of war were just becoming modern at the time of the civil war (for weapons) -- with effective bombers, light artillery (vs. WW1-style mass artillery), effectively used light machine guns, etc., although there were pretty huge weaknesses in command and control (same as in WW1) which were not really brought up to modern standards until WW2 and Korea.

After the war (spoiler alert: Nationalists won), the author ended up working for the British SOE in Europe, incidentally acting against the Nationalist's former allies. Probably a warmer reception by the British Government than many would receive, and a sign of the enemy of one's enemy often still being entirely horrible.

Overall, this is an excellent book, fortunately brought back into print by a small press focused on such works. ( )