Issue 194 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published February 1996 Copyright © Socialist Review

My family were all in the Labour Party and my father was out of work. I became politically active and joined the Labour League of Youth in 1932 when I was 17, I moved to the Young Communist League two years later. The Labour Party then was pretty moribund, busily expelling members like Foot and Bevan for preaching socialism. An echo of today--mention the word socialism and you were out on your car.

What made me become an anti-fascist was the Italian war on Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935. Mussolini was invading Abyssinia and using poison gas, machine guns and aircraft--nobody helped the Abyssinians. The League of Nations was supposed to stop this but it didn't do a bloody thing. This led to a wave of anti-fascist feeling. Also at that time Hitler had come to power in Germany. Workers in the trade unions knew about the concentration camps, though there wasn't much publicity in the press.

There was a feeling of political hopelessness with Hitler and Mussolini coming to power. And what were we doing in Britain? Very little, what with the means test, unemployment and poverty. Mosley tried to get on the fascist bandwagon. He went about provoking clashes all over the place. We retaliated. I attended all the fascist meetings to disrupt them.

The biggest fascist meeting in Manchester was in Kings Hall in Belle Vue, but the one which sticks out in my mind was Mosley's visit to Hulme Town Hall. He was about to give his meeting but thousands of people turned up, surrounded the hall and even pushed a tram over. Mosley had to sneak out through the back door. It opened my eyes to what a mass of people could do just by protesting.

In July 1936 Franco organised a fascist uprising in Spain. The first thing we did was to organise medical aid for the Republican side. The Labour Party was pretty quiet about it, but their rank and file joined in and helped. There was a real mass movement. Meetings were held all over Manchester and Salford to raise money for medical aid and also to raise food for Spanish workers.

A favourite occupation at weekends was to go round the streets pushing a handcart, which you could hire out for a tanner, and walk down the street shouting, 'Aid for Spain'. People would come out and put tins of food on it. We'd take it to a lorry and send it off to Spain. This was being done all over Manchester and the rest of the country.

Between July and December (1936) a fair number of Britons had gone out to Spain. There were a sizeable number from Manchester. There were already some lads from Manchester down there for the Workers' Olympics in Barcelona--mostly cyclists. Many of them joined in with the militia. Unfortunately I think practically all of them were killed because they found themselves in a situation where they were untrained and not properly armed. Those who returned told us what was going on. I think we lost a dozen or so lads from Manchester.

In December I tried to go, but was discouraged as I had no training, but in February I heard that the British group were trying to form a battalion, so I volunteered again, and they said I could go.

The journey was straightforward enough and I ended up in a place called Albacete. We got off the train and marched off into the bullring where we were separated out into our nationalities and asked what particular skills we had. In my case nothing much, but when asked if anybody was interested in radio and telephony I pricked my ears up because I was a bit of an amateur radio enthusiast and had a good knowledge of electronics as they were then. There were 20 or 30 of us from all over Europe and the US. Our job was transmission--setting up telephone communications at the fronts. I was with this group for about three months and at that time the colonel in charge was a Czech who insisted that we had military training, so we worked right through the French military manual. We learned how to use rifles, machine guns and grenades.

We moved up to the front at the end of May, worked our way into the mountains round Madrid and in July we started the Brunete offensive and went into battle. We made a base, sorted our telephones out and then I got a bullet wound in the foot in an open field. Some Spaniards came and took me to the ambulance and took me to Madrid. It wasn't a bad wound--I was out of action for a couple of weeks.

As I lay in bed at night I was kept awake by the fascists bombing the city--my first experience of bombing. Next I moved into a hotel which, like all the others, was under workers' control. I was advised to get up at 5am as shelling usually started at around 6am and they hit my side of the hotel--no wonder the room was cheap!

After another week or so I could move about, so I thought I'd best get back to the front. I'd been away for 19 days or so. As we drove in, there were palls of smoke from bombardment. Aircraft were coming up and down dropping bombs. I found my unit. The fellow in charge, a Bulgarian, asked me what I'd come back for as we were about to be withdrawn due to heavy casualties. When we got the order we withdrew on to a road that ran from the mountains right across a sort of open plain with rocks all scattered around. We were bombed again and our major was hit by splinters of rock from a bomb blast and killed. He was about 100 yards from me. Of the 300 who went in there were 90 left.

The battalion was built up again and we moved into Aragon (August 1937) and carried on fighting there till the end of November. I was injured again by shell shrapnel and hospitalised from December 1937 until April 1938.

In early spring it was everybody out and back to the Aragon front. There was a new fascist offensive. During a retreat under bombardment we found ourselves cut off from the brigade. Numbers were being reduced by attacks and splitting up as we retreated, until I eventually found myself more or less on my own going down a road until finally I was captured by Italian army motorcyclists. I was held in a police station along with others before being handed over to the Spaniards who put us in San Pedro concentration camp at Burgos which was grim and brutal. Later on we were exchanged for Italian prisoners. The Italian army sent us back over the border from San Sebastian into France and we returned to Britain.

We got back just as Chamberlain had arrived with his peace plan. We were still wearing old Italian army uniforms. We got fixed up by the Communist Party, and stayed at my friend's in Dagenham who was a Ford worker. That was towards the end of October. The rest of the International Brigaders didn't get released till about March (1939). So I had been in Spain for nearly two years.

I thought the film Land and Freedom was good and bad. Good because it was coherent, it had a feeling about it, it gave a message and if you'd not been there you got the idea that this was worthwhile. The getting together of the people, the cast, the actors, the general effort was good. But if you were a Brigader you saw that the military resistance to the fascists was pitiful.

Up at the front we had a lot of political discussions. Socialists, Trotskyists, anarchists all fighting together. We knew about the uprising in May, the suppression of the anarchists and the POUM by the Communists in Barcelona, because it percolated along the grapevine. But we were under orders, carrying on with the job. As far as we could judge from discussions, the message from the Communist Party was win the war first and put the revolution off. All I know is that many Spaniards didn't believe that the POUM and the anarchists were fascists as the CP claimed.

But the war was lost through non-intervention. The British sabotaged any chance of the Spanish government getting supplies. But I think one of the virtues, if you can have a virtue in a bloody war, is that Hitler was delayed in his attack on Russia. If the Spanish Civil War had been over more quickly, then he would not have attacked Russia as late as he did. By the time he did, the Russians had begun to rebuild--in spite of all the problems Stalin had due to killing off his generals and officers.

Also the people who had fought the fascists in Spain had gained enough military knowledge to form successful resistance groups when the Second World War broke out. The Italian and French resistance groups were largely run by Communists who had fought in Spain. In lots of other places there were resistance groups run by CP members. Tito had fought Hitler in Yugoslavia; 18 of his generals had been Brigaders and they had held down 20 German divisions. So what they'd learned in Spain they put to good use in Yugoslavia.

On my return to Britain I was fixed up with a job in a clothing factory. But when war broke out I left my job and joined the RAF and spent the next six years in Signals. I saw joining up and fighting in the Second World War as a continuation of the fight against fascism. As soon as the war broke out the CP said that it was an anti-fascist war and we should all join up and fight. I'd have joined anyway. Then after a few months the CP decided it wasn't an anti-fascist war but an imperialist war. Myself and several party members took no notice of the party line. We thought they were round the bend, so we just carried on. Then in 1941 when Hitler attacked Russia it became an anti-fascist war again.

The thing that peeved me was that Franco sent his Blue Division to fight against Russia, which was an act of war. When the war was won and the Germans were defeated, all that Stalin had to do was send his planes and army down into France and cross into Spain to defeat Franco. He could have done that but he didn't. Europe was carved up. The big powers drew a line through the map: Germany, Greece, Yugoslavia. To me it was a betrayal.

After the war Tito rejected Stalin's interference in his country's development, which led Stalin to denounce him as a fascist. I can remember CP members standing up at a meeting in Caxton Hall in Salford denouncing Tito, and I thought, 'What the bloody hell is this?' So I walked out and tore my party card up. I joined the Labour Party and I've been a member ever since.

But I don't go to meetings much these days. If we put forward a motion that was in any degree socialist there'd be somebody coming down to see what we were doing--to make sure we're following the rules. Some Labour councillors and MPs today seem to have no particular values themselves. I'm assuming that we'll get in at the next election with an overwhelming majority. Then they'll have no excuse for saying, 'You can't do this--don't rock the boat.'

I am still a socialist. I didn't feel happy, though, in the Labour League of Youth. I felt happier in the Young Communist League because there was a lot of socialist feeling, attempts to put Marxism--the scientific study of socialism--into perspective, to try and explain the faults of capitalism. I think there's always been a need for a revolution, but I don't think we'll see it in my lifetime.
The stories of Bernard McKenna and other Brigaders are told in Disciplina Camaradas by Christopher Hall, available from Gosling Press, 35 Cross St, Upton, Pontefract or Bookmarks (0181 8026145)