The famous Lincoln Brigade
The first racially non -segregated military force of the history of the United States, the famous Lincoln Brigade, fought in Spain during the Civil War. Volunteer Brigadistas, in total, 2.800 Americans, of those who died more than a third, went to the conflict to fight in favor of the Republic. But with this section, idealistic nurses also traveled who persecuted fighting the coup fascism exercising their profession in campaign hospitals, driving ambulances or withdrawing injured from the front.
The Civil War (1936-39) attracted Spain to international looks like no other event in history. As a prelude to World War II, future combatants were tested in Spanish territory, and each side, the Republican and El Nacional, received the help of the countries that ideologically agreed with each one or with which it best represented their interests.
One of the supports received by the Republicans was that of the Lincoln Brigade, from the United States. These volunteer militiamen fought in different battles and fronts, such as Jarama, Belchite, Teruel or Valencia. These brigades were one of the most famous sections of the Republican Army, and with them also traveled nurses.
KEA Salary
Kea Salary, African -American nurse, an activist against Kenya’s Italian invasion in 1935, climbed on board, in March 1937, of the SS Paris ship, which would bring it to Spain.
This professional, along with other sanitary volunteers headed by the surgeon Edward K. Barsky, one of the founders of the American medical office to help Spanish democracy (AMB), settled at the Villa Paz campaign hospital, located on the outskirts of Madrid. This nurse, on her return to her native country in 1938 after escaping the captivity to which the national side submitted it, dedicated himself to offering conferences about the need to continue sending health volunteers to Spain. Kea, whose experiences are collected in the book Mississippi to Madrid. Memoirs of A Black American in The Spanish Civil War (1990) by James Yates, also served in the post -term of World War II.
VRies Linni
Linni de Vries, a member of the American Communist Party, a fact that forced her to exile Mexico during the Maccarthismo Hysteria years, was one of the most active nurses in AMB.
De Vries departed to Spain in January 1937, also at the orders of Barsky, and, months later, on his return to the United States, he followed the example of his classmates and his talks about the necessary health aid in the conflictSpanish were frequent.
The civil war and his experience of the same left this nurse deeply marked, who highlighted the idealism of the Republican combatants and the mentality of the Spanish people in the face of the situation in which he was. Robert Coale, from the University of Paris, in his article American volunteers in the Civil War: witnesses of social transformations (2005), citing the letter of March 15, 1937 of this nurse, collected in the book Letters of the Lincoln Brigade FromThe Spanish Civil War (1996), by Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks, collects De Viries’s words describing the Spanish people: “They live in a semi -feudal society and are still at a much higher political level of thought than the American proletariat. They are alive, sensitive and intelligent (…). My nurse, modest, arrived yesterday afternoon with an ambulance. No work is too much for her, four weeks ago she was a peasant and today she puts injections ".
A fundamental work
As we have seen, the work of the voluntary nurses who enlisted in the Lincoln Brigade was not limited to health aspects. They also carried out a work of dissemination of war and helps those who still fought;Anyway, they did a function in the same sense as important as the one carried out by other better known and recognized names as Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Gerda Taro or Martha Gelhorn. Thanks to the experiences, the stories, the conferences and the books of these nurses we can find a practically unknown first -hand testimony, but equally essential, of the civil war.
However, despite everything that Kea, of VRies and many other nursing professionals, not only of this brigade did, whose work was released by Dr. Isabel Antón Solanas in her thesis evolution of the Spanish nursing during the civil war thatSpain ravaged between 1936 and 1939 (2010), his work has been practically unnoticed.
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