The Passionate War: The Narrative History of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

The memory is alive in art and literature: Picasso’s GUERNICA, Hemingway’s FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, and Orwell’s HOMAGE TO CATLONIA. But what really happened in Spain from 1936 to 1939? Why did idealistic volunteers from all over the world (including 3,000 Americans) feel compelled to fight history’s last passionate war, the holy cause that forced the world to choose sides for decades to come? How did the Spanish Civil War escalate into the dress rehearsal for World War II? Peter Wyden brilliantly brings to life the brutal proving ground where Hitler and Stalin secretly learn the techniques of total war. For the first time, defenseless cities are set ablaze by saturation air raids. Women fire rifles next to their men in the front lines…..nearly one-third of all casualties are killed by execution squads…..famous authors gamble with their lives (you meet Orwell as a wounded foot soldier, Andre Malraux as aviator, Hemingway and John Dos Passos as propagandists, Arthur Koestler as a spy). A Canadian told Wyden, “Everybody was there but Shakespeare!” Even more vividly than in his prizewinning history BAY OF PIGS-THE UNTOLD STORY, Wyden weaves hundreds of interviews, memoirs and documents into a narrative that unreels with the close-up immediacy of television footage. For the first time, eyewitnesses speak out about the daring behind-the-lines operations of guerrilla fighters; the secret Soviet “advisers”; the American pilots, doctors and nurses; the complex motivations behind the destruction of Guernica; the American Ambassador’s consistently wrong war reports to President Roosevelt; the failure of the Germans’ Stuka dive-bombers; the legalization of abortions in anarchist Catalonia; and General Franco’s secret wish to prolong the war. Along with the war stories, eyewitnesses tell of love under artillery fire even more poignant than the romances made famous by the war’s fiction.