Kiwi Companeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War.
Ed. Mark Derby
Canterbury University Press, $45, pbk
The Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 slipped under New Zealand's radar at the time and has been overlooked ever since.
Kiwi Companeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War is the first real attempt to see it through New Zealand eyes, both from those New Zealanders who were there and those involved in the war who subsequently settled in New Zealand.
There are not many of either.
But it was a significant conflict for New Zealand.
It revealed for the first time just how divided the Left was, both here and internationally.
No wonder contemporaries feared for the future of democracy when the heavily outnumbered Right was able to prevail over the legitimately-elected Left in Spain.
The Republican Government was able to attract about 40,000 men to its International Brigade - plus non-combatants such as nurses - to fight the Nationalist rebels.
It also attracted support from the Soviet Union, but this was outdone by the greater support from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
The New Zealand Government followed the lead of Britain, France and the United States in ignoring it, although Mexico was very pro-Republican, one of the few countries that was.
"Appeasement" first reared its head in Spain as an international attitude. As far as the New Zealand Labour government of the day was concerned, it was appeasement born of helplessness.
The trade union movement and the Government were both divided.
The Leftist supporters of the Spanish Republican Government were riven by feuds between the anarchists (majority) and the communists (minority), but the latter had the support of Russia.
Eventually, the two arms of the Republicans hated each other even more than they hated the Nationalists, with fatal effects for their cause.
There was an enormous well of hatred in Spain that had been accumulating for centuries and the atrocities by both sides were appalling.
The rebel Nationalist forces were supported by the monarchists, the landowners, the professional soldiers and the Roman Catholic Church.
The Republican forces were supported by the intelligentsia, the artisans, rural poor and the industrialised workforce.
When you hate someone it gives you carte blanche to do absolutely anything and they did.
Naive, idealistic New Zealanders stumbled into this morass. They died or were scarred for life.
Most of the interviews of survivors upon which this book is based were pro-Republican and the same is probably true of the overall numbers of New Zealanders involved.
That makes it unrepresentative of the conflict, but an accurate representation of New Zealand's participation.
It was fortunate that the few New Zealanders who did go to Spain lived long enough to give interviews before old age carried them off.
The whole world could see that what was happening in Spain was a preliminary passage of arms for the world war that soon followed.
The hatreds and consequent atrocities in Spain were to be magnified on a much vaster scale, but not in degree.
This is a very readable account of what happened in Spain and what it was like to be there, and of the effects back in New Zealand.
- Oliver Riddell is a Wellington writer.
