History Rhymes: Canadian Foreign Fighters and the Spanish Civil War

By Tyler Wentzell

Readers of Intrepid will be familiar with the saga of the Canadian foreign terrorist fighters and other supporters who went to the Middle East to support ISIS and now (along with their families) are trapped in camps in Syria.  Perhaps less well known is the saga of the Canadians who left to fight in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and similarly found themselves trapped in camps when the Spanish Republic demobilized the international units.  The two conflicts provide a reminder of the saying, usually attributed to Mark Twain, that history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

The Spanish Civil War, like most civil wars, was a mess of old grievances and internal fissures exacerbated by external interference.  Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany assisted the rebelling Nationalists.  Mexico and the Soviet Union came to the aid of the Republican government.  Canada and most of the Western world were eager just to keep the conflict contained in Spain.  However, thousands of individuals flocked to the Republican cause.  Nearly 1700 Canadians made their way to Spain, mostly through the pipeline created through the Soviet Union, the Communist International, and their network of Communist Parties around the world.

For some, the volunteers were instant folk heroes – they were putting their lives on the line to fight fascism and save Spanish democracy.  For others, like RCMP Commissioner James Howden MacBrien and Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, this travel to Spain was a scheme meant to both corrupt Canadian youth and for young revolutionaries to acquire combat experience that they could bring back to Canada.  They viewed the Canadian volunteers as posing a legitimate national security threat.

The Minister of Justice, Ernest Lapointe, drafted a Canadian Foreign Enlistment Act, replacing the British statute of 1870 of the same name.  Like the British statute, the new law (amended, but still in effect today) was largely focused on interstate conflicts, not civil wars.  However, it prohibited the act of recruiting soldiers to fight in civil wars and could prohibit the act of volunteering to fight in a civil war by way of an order-in-council.  The law was passed in April 1937, but the order to prohibit volunteering in Spain was not issued until the summer, a full year into the conflict.  By this time, there were more than 1000 Canadians in Spain and a nominally Canadian unit: the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion.

The RCMP monitored the recruiting effort closely.  Much of this surveillance was ancillary to their broader surveillance of the Communist Party of Canada, but they quickly established a detailed operational file on the recruiting effort.  The RCMP argued that the volunteers should not be permitted to return to Canada at all, as their departure presumptively showed that they had violated the Foreign Enlistment Act.  The Department of Justice argued that this course of action amounted to a finding of guilt without a trial and the matter was dropped.  Finally, in the summer of 1938, preparations were made for the prosecution of the recruiters.  Warrants were issued for the arrest of the key recruiters and the searching of known offices, and the Department of Justice hired the prosecutors for the trials to follow.

At the last minute, RCMP Commissioner Stuart Wood (replacing MacBrien after his natural death) and Minister of Justice Lapointe decided that they would not press charges.  The recruiting effort had come to a natural end as the Republic started to lose their war against the Nationalist rebels, and Lapointe assessed that the popular backlash for the arrests would outweigh the benefits.  None of the recruiters or volunteers were ever tried for violating the Foreign Enlistment Act.

While Canadian authorities debated whether or not to pursue charges against the volunteers and recruiters, most of the volunteers were engaged in combat operations against the Nationalists.  During the summer of 1938, the Canadian volunteers fought in the Republic’s last offensive of the war – the Crossing of the Ebro – and the various defensive actions to hold the bridgehead.  The offensive was meant to bolster the Republic’s position in their negotiations with the Nationalists.  Among other things, the Republic hoped that they could secure a guarantee by the Nationalists to withdraw the Italian and German forces from the conflict.  In return, the Republic would demobilize the International Brigades.  The foreigners were removed from the Spanish Republican Army in September 1938.

The foreigners were sent to a camp in Ripoll where they were re-organized by country of origin.  A League of Nations commission arrived to catalogue the volunteers, and little by little, they were sent home.  Canada sent a representative from their High Commission in London to confirm nationality so that confirmed Canadians could later be issued emergency identification in lieu of passports, but offered no other assistance.  The Canadians languished.

By December 1938, the Canadians were the last national group remaining in Ripoll.  While most countries spent between 1.75 and 2.25 million British pounds to bring their citizens home, Prime Minister Mackenzie King refused to financially contribute to the repatriation.  And the situation in Ripoll was becoming dire as Nationalist forces began their offensive into Catalonia in December.

The money to get the Canadians home was a combination of gifts from Spain and privately raised donations.  A.A. MacLeod, a member of the Communist Party of Canada and national director of the League for Peace and Democracy, led the effort.  He travelled to Europe where he coordinated amongst the governments of Britain, France, and Spain, and the Canadian Pacific Railway.

250 Canadians departed Barcelona on the very last train out of the city before it fell to the Nationalists.  The train had to take cover in railway tunnels on the way to France to hide from Nationalist aircraft.  The second contingent of 150 Canadians had to march to the French border where they were fortunately allowed to cross along with tens of thousands fleeing Spanish refugees.  The remaining Canadians escaped in small groups, were captured by the Nationalists, or lie buried in mostly unmarked Spanish graves.

There are a great many differences between the Spanish situation and that in Iraq and Syria.  First of all, the volunteers in the International Brigades served in a uniformed force fighting for the government of Spain in accordance with the laws of armed conflict.  Those currently in the Syrian camps are much more diverse: some are foreign terrorist fighters, some were supporters of a different kind, and some are children with neither the means nor the agency to have played any role in the conflict whatsoever.  None have been found guilty of anything in a Canadian court of law.

Second, in the case of Spain, although there was a desire to dismantle the recruiting apparatus through criminal prosecutions, there was little ambition to prosecute the volunteers themselves.  The League of Nations encouraged member states to stop the flow of volunteers into Spain, but towards the end of the war it facilitated the repatriation of volunteers in the hopes of deescalating the conflict.  It did not call for the prosecution of the volunteers.  Canada’s Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, O.D. Skelton, noted that Canada’s allies were not prosecuting the volunteers, so he supported Minister of Justice Lapointe’s decision to leave the returning volunteers be.  In the case of Iraq and Syria, however, there is much international and national will to prosecute the volunteers.  UN Security Council Resolution 2178 on Foreign Terrorist Fighters, among other things, requires that member states have a legal framework for prosecuting volunteers.  Notwithstanding the difficulties of these prosecutions, such as the intelligence to evidence challenge, Canada has already demonstrated its willingness and ability to prosecute these foreign terrorist fighters.

Third, the Canadian volunteers in Spain were brought home by funds donated by the country for which they fought and private donations.  These Canadians fought in Spain’s army, and Spain and private Canadians paid to bring them home.  This outcome is impossible, or at least undesirable, in the modern instance.  The last thing anyone wants is for ISIS to make the travel arrangements, and private actors – even if pursuing legitimate humanitarian purposes – would be open to criminal liability for providing material support to a terrorist organization should they attempt a repatriation initiative.  Only the government of Canada can manage a controlled repatriation.

In the case of Spain, there was little political will to prosecute the Canadian volunteers and even less desire to bring the Canadians home.  The Canadian government screened the volunteers for nationality, but otherwise merely admired the problem.  These Canadians got home through the intervention of private actors, and barely: the Canadians fled just steps ahead of the advancing Nationalists.  In the case of Iraq and Syria, there is significant will to prosecute the foreign terrorist fighters (notwithstanding the practical difficulties) but, to date, no demonstrated desire to take action and bring these Canadians home.  The situation in Syria is even more dynamic than in Barcelona in 1939, and private actors cannot step in to solve this problem.  This problem is the government of Canada’s to solve, and it is not going to go away with the passage of time. 

Tyler Wentzell is the author of Not for King or Country: Edward Cecil-Smith, the Communist Party of Canada, and the Spanish Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2020), a biography of the commander of the Canadians in the Spanish Civil War.  It is available now through the University of Toronto Press’s website or amazon.  You can read more about the 1937 Foreign Enlistment Act here.  The opinions expressed in this blogpost do not represent those of any branch of the Government of Canada.