Exhibit Documents Last and Largest Campaign of Spanish Civil War

U of Ideas of General Interest ó August 1998 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Contact: Andrea Lynn, Humanities/Social Sciences Editor (217) 333-2177; [email protected]

PHOTOGRAPHY

Exhibit documents last and largest campaign of Spanish Civil War

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. ó An exhibit of photographs of American volunteers fighting in the Spanish Civil War now on view in a Washington, D.C., gallery opened on the 60th anniversary of the last, largest and greatest campaign of that war.

The exhibit, ìThe Aura of the Cause,î opened on July 24, the date that marks the beginning of the bloody Ebro offensive in the summer of 1938. The exhibit closes on Sept. 5, a few weeks short of the 60th anniversary of the end of the campaign, which ushered in the end of the costly war. The Fonda del Sol gallery, 2112 R St., N.W., is hosting the exhibit, which first opened in May 1997 in New York, and since has traveled to seven U.S. and Canadian sites. Marc Zuver is gallery director.

The never-before published photographs of the ragtag recruits in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade are ìa testament to the first citizens of the world who took up arms against the greatest evil we faced in the 20th century,î said Cary Nelson, curator of the exhibit.

According to Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois, the Ebro campaign ìwas dotted with the most astonishing acts of heroism on the part of the Americans, and the most terrible slaughter of the Internationals at the hands of Hitler and Mussoliniís armored mechanized divisions.î

ìHolding only rifles, the Americans were repeatedly surrounded by mechanized columns overshadowed by German 88 mm guns that fired explosive round after explosive round into the unprotected troops. The only hope of survival was to slip out between the armored columns in the dead of night, since movement in daylight was certain death.î The battles of the Ebro campaign were, in fact, ìthe most brutal and ill-matched battles of the war,î Nelson said, noting that the campaign had started quite differently, with a series of dramatic victories for the Republican forces.

ìIt looked in July and in early August that this would be the greatest Republican victory of the war, that it might turn the tide for the Republicans. The Internationals crossed the river and captured territory and soldiers, and then Franco called in tanks and planes and armored vehicles. In a matter of a couple of weeks, his huge mechanized assault just slaughtered the Republican troops,î Nelson said, adding that with the fascist counterattack at the end of August, ìthe war essentially was over.î

One photograph on display shows a boatload of American volunteers starting out across the Ebro; another captures them building a pontoon bridge, one of several repeatedly attacked by enemy planes.

By July 28, only 400 of the 700 men in the battalion were still in action. By Aug. 15, strength was down to 300, 100 of them Americans. Bombarded by aircraft and artillery for 10 days, the volunteers held Hill 666. On Sept. 6, the Lincolns began action around Corbera, but by Sept. 21, a unilateral withdrawal of all international troops from the Republican army was announced, and three days later, the Lincolns were withdrawn from the Ebro region. Some 2,800 American volunteers served in the International Brigades; about 160 of them are still living.

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