General Franco’s British foes

David Lomon was one of the lucky ones. While fighting in Aragon in south-west Spain in the spring of 1938, the former salesman from Hackney was captured by one of the 100,000 Italian soldiers sent by Mussolini to fight for General Franco’s forces. Incarcerated in a Francoist concentration camp, his experiences were horrifying — brutal guards, starvation rations, insanitary and verminous conditions and a decidedly uncertain future — but he did at least survive. Many of his compatriots did not. Almost one in five were killed and most were wounded at least once in their fight to defend the Spanish Republic in the civil war of 1936-1939, in what some observers have seen as the opening salvo of the Second World War.

As I describe in my new oral history of the British volunteers, Unlikely Warriors, the actions of the young Jewish Londoner — like many others across Europe — had been spurred by an understandable horror at the rise of fascism during the 1930s.