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We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War

Paul Preston

3.85 · Rating details · 127 ratings · 17 reviews

From 1936 to 1939, the eyes of the world were fixed on the devastating Spanish conflict that drew both professional war correspondents and great writers. Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst, Martha Gellhorn, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Kim Philby, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Cyril Connolly, André Malraux, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, and others wrote elo ...more

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Hardcover, 448 pages

Published September 1st 2009 by Skyhorse Publishing (first published May 30th 2007)

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Nov 03, 2014 Geoffrey Fox rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: revolution

Many of Spain's current problems stem from the fact that the Spanish civil war set back the country's evolution toward modernity and democracy by at least 40 years, from the outbreak of the army insurrection in 1936 to the death of Franco in 1975, and the distortions of justice and other institutions still persist. It was not an exclusively Spanish conflict, but a global one, acted out in Spain not just by Spaniards but by all the fascist, socialist, liberal and conservative capitalist forces in Many of Spain's current problems stem from the fact that the Spanish civil war set back the country's evolution toward modernity and democracy by at least 40 years, from the outbreak of the army insurrection in 1936 to the death of Franco in 1975, and the distortions of justice and other institutions still persist. It was not an exclusively Spanish conflict, but a global one, acted out in Spain not just by Spaniards but by all the fascist, socialist, liberal and conservative capitalist forces in Europe and the Americas—and thus we need the outsiders' views for a full perspective.

"Spain" did not die, but it was badly wounded and still has not recovered fully. The Second Republic did die in that terribly brutal war, 1936-39, killed by a coalition of the Church, the old oligarchy and crazed ideologues who feared the power of ordinary men and women—especially of the women—to decide for themselves how to live and whom to love. Paul Preston has done a tremendous job digging up details of the lives and work of more than a dozen journalists from half a dozen or more countries who managed to reveal, and in some cases horribly distort, how that massacre was unfolding, and the hundreds of thousands of more particular murders it required. And Preston has done much more than that: He has pulled together a coherent story from notes, archives, published reports and oral reminiscences by and about those journalists, with their various languages and their diverse political views.

Of the Americans, Herbert Matthews and Louis Fischer earn Preston's greatest appreciation, for their personal courage and their insistence on getting the facts right, regardless of pressures from their respective sponsors to slant their stories. Matthews, writing for The New York Times, was expected by his editors to be more favorable to the "Nationals" (as the Franco-led insurgents called themselves) than to the forces defending the Republic. Matthews was a moral Protestant indignant at fascist abuses, but not ideologically committed to socialism, and he exposed himself to considerable danger to report personally on such horrors as the bombing and strafing of civilian refugees fleeing from Málaga (which had just fallen to the insurgents) along the coastal road to Almería, or the fighting in Valencia, even though he
"was convinced that [his dogmatically conservative editors in New York] treated his copy with 'suspicion, anger, and, at times, disbelief', tampered with his wording and buried entire stories because they were perceived to favour the Republican side. In contrast, they printed unashamedly partisan material from William P. Carney, his counterpart in the rebel zone, despite knowing that it was someties faked." [p. 22]

Fischer was under different political pressures. A fluent Russian- and German-speaker and with a wife and child in Moscow, he was committed to socialism and felt comradeship to (though he never accepted the discipline of) the Communist Party. Whether he ever learned to speak Spanish fluently is unclear, though he must have managed: he had excellent personal relationships with prominent Republican (i.e., Spanish Republic) politicians, even including Juan Negrín. But despite his commitment, he perceived and reported on what he saw as gross failures in political and military policy—for example, the lackadaisical defenseworks supposedly protecting Madrid. He was especially indignant with the aged trade-unionist and prime minister Largo Caballero who was afraid to alienate his trade union supporters by ordering idle construction workers in Madrid to go out to Toledo and build serviceable trenches and breastworks.

After the fall of the Republic, Fischer had the good sense to get his family out of Russia before Stalin's paranoia could destroy them. His subsequent career included works on Gandhi and professorship at Princeton. Matthews continued with the NYT and achieved notoriety again years later for his reports from Cuba proving that Fidel Castro was still alive and his guerrilla movement going strong. Both Fischer and Matthews wrote many books, not only on Spain, that merit attention.

Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, and John Dos Passos are also here, interesting mostly for what they had to say about one another and less interesting for any insight into the Spanish struggle. Hemingway was boisterous and outrageous and having a great testosterone-charged time, at one point firing off a machinegun to no purpose but with dangerous consequences (it drew return fire), but you've got to love the big brute because in a jam, he could pull his buddies through—on at least one occasion, by sheer muscular force, rowing a little boat across the mined Ebro river with Robert Capa, Matthews and Henry Buckley aboard.

Another reporter who deserves and gets major attention from Preston is the audacious and hyperenergetic little Russian Jew Mikhail Koltsov, whose extremely vivid reports for Pravda would be his undoing when he returned to the USSR. He not only wrote rapidly, succinctly and dramatically, he also carried a pistol and didn't hesitate to intervene and give military orders (for which he had no authority) when he saw it necessary to avoid disaster. When required to do so by his party bosses, however, he was quite capable of writing outrageous lies condemning the leaders of the POUM as Trotskyists and traitors to the revolution. As Koltsov surely knew, the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista had broken with Trotsky long before and was one of the main defenders of the socialist Republic in Catalonia, but because it did not follow the dictates of Moscow Stalin ordered his operatives in Spain to destroy it—as George Orwell has famously recounted in Hommage to Catalonia.

Stalin was suspicious of all the Russians who had served in Spain, whether as journalists or military officers, probably (in Preston's interpretation, which is persuasive) because they returned with a more revolutionary, more participatory and much freer vision of socialist revolution than Stalin's democratic centralism could tolerate. Koltsov, like others who had been acclaimed as heroes in Spain, was at first praised and then arrested and ultimately executed by Stalin's forces.

Oddly, Preston makes only passing mention of Orwell, mostly regarding his impressions of Koltsov and his grudging review of another reporter's book, South African-born George Lowther Steer's report on the ruins of Guernica, from observations made as soon as Steer could get there after the devastating German bombardment of that quiet and undefended little Basque town. Steer's book was essential to counter the massive disinformation campaign by Franco-ist propagandists and their allies in the Catholic Church in the U.S. and other countries, who were claiming that there had been no bombardment but that the destruction was the work of leftist incendiaries. (Orwell recognized the value of the eye-witness report but took issue with Steer's exaggerated and emotional bias for the heroic Basques as contrasted to the supposedly less noble Spaniards elsewhere.) Of the other British reporters mentioned here, we learn of Claud Cockburn, an imaginative Communist who, it seems, would write anything to support the cause, even if he had to make it up, and Tom Wintringham, Commander of the British Batallion of the International Brigades. Wintringham got in trouble with the CP back home because of his defense of his latest lover, American journalist Kitty Bowler, who was absurdly accused of being a fascist infiltrator (apparently because she was much better looking than most of the Communist women in party HQ in London and so aroused the suspicion of those others, including Wintringham's wife).

The brazen Swedish nurse-turned-reporter Kajsa Rothman, a courageous and physically impressive women (much taller than most Spaniards and with bright reddish-blonde hair) also deserves mention, more for her presence than for her reporting—though she (fluent in several languages) must have been important to Swedish short-wave enthusiasts for her broadcasts from Spain. We also learn of the Spaniards on both sides of the propaganda war: Luis Bolín, the cruel and pompous chief of the foreign press in the "national" (Franco-ist rebel) zone who tried to control every word and didn't hesitate to order executions of reporters who strayed too close to the truth of the rebel massacres. On the Republican side, the chief concern of Arturo Barea and later the redoubtable Constancia Mora was to facilitate the reporters' demands for access—in the belief that the truth could only help the republic—without letting them reveal military secrets (gun emplacements, etc.) which could serve the enemy.

Preston ends the book with a tribute to his former professor Herbert Southworth, who got to Spain after the fighting was over but contributed mightily to undoing the myths of Franco propagandists. ...more

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Feb 04, 2014 Olethros rated it liked it · review of another edition

-Tratar un tema mientras se trabaja otro.-

Género. Historia.

Lo que nos cuenta. Retrato de las vivencias de buena parte de los periodistas internacionales de diferentes orígenes y simpatías personales que cubrieron la Guerra Civil en España durante distintos momentos y en varios frentes, que simultáneamente expone muchas circunstancias de la propia guerra pero con más interés en mostrar cómo se cruzó en muchas ocasiones la delgada línea que separa lo personal de lo profesional.

¿Quiere saber más d ...more

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Apr 02, 2013 Tuck rated it it was amazing

Shelves: basque, europa, spain

paul preston is arguably THE BEST synthesizer of spain civil war around. in this new book he parses newspaper writers and their attempts to report and understand the war. the fascist takeover of the democratic govt was seen by many as THE battleground for democracy and progress vs going back to corporatism, dictatorship, churchism, monarchism. AND as germany and italy fascists were integral to the victory of franco, also THE battle line to stop a coming world war. we all know how it worked out.
l ...more

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Jun 06, 2009 Amanda rated it really liked it

Detailed and colorful account of the experiences of the (mainly British, but some American) war correspondents who covered the Spanish Civil War, by one of the foremost historians of the period. Extremely good on the historical context (not surprisingly) and full of both documentation and dramatic detail.

A number of the positive reviews of this book -- which has so far been published in England but not in the US -- call it "narrative history" or say that it "reads like a novel"; but (with respe ...more

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May 28, 2012 Richard Paul rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I've read quite a few books on this period but this takes a rather distinctive angle, focussing on the correspondents. While it is largely sympathetic to the Republican side it does give a warts and all account of the correspondents, many of whom went to Spain unsympathetic to the Republican struggle but who converted, either through experiencing the brutalities of the fascists directly or by seeing the enthusiasm of the people for the Republic.
The book is meticulously scholarly and provides a w ...more

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Aug 27, 2021 Rafel Socias rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Preston recupera la memòria dels periodistes que es desplaçaren a Espanya per informar de l'evolució del conflicte, però també per contribuir a la difusió dels ideals republicans. Interessant obra per entendre la dimensió Internacional de la guerra del 36 i el paper que hi jugà la premsa. ...more

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Oct 05, 2019 Barry Phillips rated it really liked it · review of another edition

4.5

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Jan 10, 2014 Philip added it · review of another edition

We Saw Spain Die by Paul Preston is a thoroughly engaging, often perplexing, challenging and ultimately depressing book. It’s a story of how observers presented and reported the unfolding events of the Spanish Civil War, and chronicles the experience of some people who recorded history as it was made. These observers were correspondents and journalists, specifically for Paul Preston’s purposes, the foreign ones.

Having thus defined the specifics, the generality provides essential context that hel We Saw Spain Die by Paul Preston is a thoroughly engaging, often perplexing, challenging and ultimately depressing book. It’s a story of how observers presented and reported the unfolding events of the Spanish Civil War, and chronicles the experience of some people who recorded history as it was made. These observers were correspondents and journalists, specifically for Paul Preston’s purposes, the foreign ones.

Having thus defined the specifics, the generality provides essential context that helps us interpret the content of this book. Spain’s war was in the mid-1930s. Fascism was on the rise in Germany and Italy, but important players were convinced that a policy of appeasement might avoid conflict. Thus it was thought that giving away what you never really had or wanted might just satisfy another’s greed. The Soviet experiment, on the other hand, was very much under way, with Stalin strengthening his grip on power. Ideologically, the Soviet leadership expected an inevitable force of history to compel people across the globe to follow their lead, despite the internal conflict over tactics between Stalin and Trotsky turning murderous.

And so Spain, with its reforming, democratically-elected, left-wing government, perhaps via its espousal of republicanism, repelled the Western European powers and then inevitably forced it closer to the Soviet advice and assistance that was pragmatically available. Thus, the Spanish rebels derived encouragement from the Republic’s isolation, and so launched an armed insurrection against the government, clearly assuming they would not be opposed from outside the country. Appeasement even assured that a blind eye would be turned on the presence of Italian and German forces lining up alongside the rebels. It was into this context that outsiders went to observe, to report and to analyse.

The point illustrated by Paul Preston in We Saw Spain Die is that many of these correspondents did not in fact observe, nor did they even bother to describe what they saw. What they did, at least a good number of them, was arrive with a mindset fixed by their ideological standpoint in relation to the international context and then allow that mindset to filter experience so that only content that would reinforce the original prejudice was allowed through. And so reporters who remained faithful to their experience, followed their conscience and described precisely what they saw, those who thus aspired to a detached impartiality, could always be written off as liars because their copy always appeared to contradict the weight of material that presented a largely fictional, but received and assumed position. It’s what some people might describe as hegemony.

That truth is the first casualty of war has become a cliché, but We Saw Spain Die also largely kills off integrity, honesty, impartiality and even justice for good measure. And this is what is ultimately so depressing about the book. If the reporting was dishonest or biased, it conformed to assumptions that would see it published as authoritative. If it was observant or faithful, it often could not fit in the assumed paradigm, and so it would be rubbished, along with the career of the largely honest purveyor of the message.

No short review of We Saw Spain Die could begin to address any detail of the scores of stories that the book presents. To cite even one as an example would be a distortion. The book is both authoritative in its presentation of fact and forensic in its desire to achieve accuracy. It deals not only with how foreign correspondents covered the Spanish Civil War itself, but also how the positions they took influenced their lives and careers. It is a truly great achievement and needs to be read both slowly and, perhaps, alongside Paul Preston’s other major work on the war, The Spanish Holocaust. But if a reader should value honesty, truth, accuracy and integrity, then We Saw Spain Die will ultimately present a depressing experience, but one that will encourage all of us to see history and maybe also contemporary events in a different light.
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Apr 21, 2015 Micah rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: history-sociology

That expert on reification, Lukács, once said that journalists were the most reified of all. There's little here to contradict that, although there might be a glimmer of proletarian subjectivity in someone like Jay Allen, who wrote about the Badajoz massacre and spiralled into deep depression when he realized the US government was not anti-fascist after all.

Like most authoritarians, Preston gives a distorted, even false, representation of the Spanish conflict by virtually ignoring the fact that ...more

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Feb 02, 2013 Shane Kiely rated it liked it · review of another edition

Paul Preston is quite possibly the definitive (English language at least) authority on the Spanish Civil War, though this isn't my favourite book of his on the subject. From what I've read on the subject I've developed quite a favourable opinion of the Republican/Loyalist side of the conflict though even I felt the tone of the writing occasionally veers into bias. There's a degree of overt passion that's actually missing from Preston's other work that deal with what should be more visceral topic ...more

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Aug 20, 2014 James rated it liked it · review of another edition

A mixed bag. Parts of the book are very engaging--the chapter that covers the bombing of Guernica connected me to Picasso's painting of the same name. Likewise, the stories of the bombing of Badajoz drew me in closely. Reading about Hemingway, Dos Passos and Orwell in the thick of war was worthwhile. The struggles of journalists to remain sane amidst massacres, the intrigue of suspected spies and difficulty to get stories out of the country amid censorship and political revisionism kept my atten ...more

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Nov 20, 2014 Jennifer Sarha rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Excellent book. Paul Preston has written several non-academic books on the Spanish Civil War, and it would be easy for them to become repetitive, but no. This one focuses on the experiences and contexts of various foreign correspondents during the war, and avoids the easy way of only discussing famous anglophone writers like Hemingway. The course of the war, the varying treatment of the press on the Republican and the rebel sides, and the later reputations and work of the journalists, are all br ...more

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Aug 31, 2013 Sanity Assasin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Never knew anything about the Spanish Civil War before reading this except for the name of the eventual dictator. For me it was very informative garnering the knowledge of how it paved the way for World War II and the rise of Fascism in Europe. Guernica was a massive learning curve for me. It seems extremely well researched and has successfully spawned a tireless interest in me to look further into the subject. Suddenly I have an urge to purchase the old movie "for whom the bell tolls". ...more

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Jun 29, 2010 Richard rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history

Chapter 3, "The Lost Generation Divided" convincingly refutes Stephen Koch's THE BREAKING POINT. ...more

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Dec 08, 2013 Dinah Jefferies rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, spain

From 1936 to 1939 the devastating Spanish Civil War drew both professional war correspondents and great writers. This book sees the war through their eyes. A fascinating read.

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Sep 01, 2013 Caroline rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Just wonderful. One of the best factual books I have read. It really stoked my interest in the Spanish Civil war and Spain in general. You can't say better than that for a book. ...more

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About Paul Preston

Paul Preston

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Paul Preston, author of Franco and Juan Carlos, holds the Príncipe de Asturias Chair of Contemporary Spanish History at the London School of Economics. He lives in London.