Book Description

"On every battlefield, there is a four-part litany of sorrows: killed in action, wounded in action, captured in action, and ambiguously, missing in action. For Generalissimo Franco's Christian crusade, one will want to add the category 'butchered in cold blood after surrender.' Those Americans and other international brigaders who survived the other battlefield calamities and ended in Franco's jails are the subject of Carl Geiser's history. He has searched the archives in a half dozen countries to tell this all-but-forgotten epic of American fortitude in the presence of appalling privation and humiliation ... For a time, Republican successes, as at Teruel and in the crossing of the Ebro River, kept their spirits high and their morale undamaged. And when the tide turned ... and the Republic lay shattered, they, behind prison walls, retained faith, not in their government, but in their people, in the wisdom and insight of that common folk from whom they had sprung. In this they were not mistaken. Carl, who shared in full measure all their suffering, has, in writing this book, restored a page torn out of American History"--Preface.