David Marshall’s Spanish equipment

Reading accounts of the Battle of Jarama, and the XV Brigade up until May 1937 I am struck by the seemingly relentless impression given that the British Battalion were; ill equipped, ill disciplined and had inadequate training: Ben Hughes in They Shall Not Pass  is a good example :

. . . the training was severely hampered by the lack of guns . . . As well as the antiques, some of which dated from 1888, wooden ‘rifles’ and sticks were used on manoeuvre. In the evenings, Macartney indulged his passion for night-time raids. Whilst he remained in his villa, the men would fumble their way across the sodden fields seeking check points in the dark. The marches often ended in farce. (pg 60)

Frankly this does not hold up to much scrutiny,  alas it appears to be the standard narrative. This made me look to where these misconceptions come from; the answer is partly  from Tom Wintringham’s English Captain and partly from what appears to be a confusion over the chronology of the accounts of ‘English’ volunteers fighting in the first six months of the War in Spain. As David Marshall was one such volunteer, one of the first to volunteer,  I think it is useful to look at his experience.

We’d taken things seriously, we drilled, we tried to practice a few manoeuvres. I can drill in German, Spanish, English and French, doesn’t do you much good. David Marshall IWMSA

This is remarkably similar to John Longstaff’s account, who recalls the Spanish instructions in his IWM interview. 

We did field manoeuvres which were useful, we learnt to advance in open order. David Marshall IWMSA

David had spent seven years in the British Army during the Second World War, and felt his training in Spain was comparable. Talking about his time in Albecete (see David Marshall and the Tom Mann Centuria) he moves on to talk about the equipment:

The only rifles we’d ever had must have come from Morocco, they were all engraved in Arabic, they had no firing pins, and we used to use these for drilling with.

back in May I wrote about Firearms in the Spanish Civil War, but this was only about the firearms not the equipment.

We were kitted out with Uniforms there [Albecete] I’d had several different ones before all of them dreadful. This time we got more or less what became the accepted uniform of the International Brigades, it was rather like Battledress . They were dark cord blouse and trousers, the trousers buttoned at the ankles.

The equipment was bloody awful, it was a sort of black plastic on canvas and you had two shoulder straps, a belt around you and three enormous ammunition pouches about as big as  building bricks. well the one in the middle of the back was bloody stupid, every time you crawled it caught  on everything and you felt like a camel, you felt like you were bound to be shot through the backside, so we soon ditched that, most of us generally stuck to one which we kept for bread and grapes for food. When we did get amo we slung it round our necks in its bandoliers. David Marshall IWMSA

We’d been there [Albecete] about 10 days when the rifles came, they were in cases, i don’t know, half a dozen rifles to a case, or eight or something like that, reeked like hell. It seems they were Ross Rifles, a Canadian rifle from the Great War, which had not been used because they were larger than the Lee Enfield and had a more delicate sight, a more damageable sight, and were not so well suited to trench warfare. These  were brand new. David Marshall IWMSA The ammunition was in boxes and in English printed on the sides – “reexamined in England, 1932, for target practice only” – Well we intended it for target practice in a way, didn’t we?  David Marshall IWMSA

We were given these rifles one day, it was a job finding cloth to get all the grease off, I think we’d to sacrifice the odd sock. then we’d hadn’t finished cleaning them and we’d dished out 100 rounds a piece which as I’d said we’d hung of course around our necks, when they shoved us on the train that night . . . We hadn’t even fired the rifles before we went into action. David Marshall IWMSA

I think one can see where the idea of an untrained, underequipped group of men, who hadn’t even fired  their rifles comes about. However this is October 1936, not February 1937, these early  men and women had made their own way to Spain, but when put into action the units did have some idea as to how to fight as a co-ordinated unit. The success of the Republican Army in holding off the Army of Africa in 1936 is testimony to the skill and, admittedly brief, training they had.  

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