[icheerthebull]

Delmer Berg, the last known living veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which vainly fought against Fascism’s advance into Spain in the late 1930s, died on Sunday at his home in Columbia, Calif. He was 100.

His death was confirmed by Marina Garde, the executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives in New York, who said Mr. Berg was believed to have been the only survivor left of the nearly 3,000 quixotic young Americans who volunteered for the Spanish Civil War in a bloody prelude to World War II. About 800 of those who volunteered were believed to have been killed.

Mr. Berg, an unreconstructed Communist, was a 21-year-old union-card-carrying hotel dishwasher in 1937 when he spotted a billboard for the brigade and, through the Young Communist League, enlisted. After cobbling together bus fare to New York, he boarded the French luxury liner Champlain for France.

“I was a worker,” Mr. Berg told The Modesto Bee, a California newspaper, in November. “I was a farmer. I was in support of the Spanish working people, and I wanted to go to Spain to help them.”

The war was an audition by proxies for World War II, with a democratically elected leftist government under siege from rebels led by Gen. Francisco Franco.

Through the Communist Party, the Soviet Union was supporting the Republicans, or Loyalists. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy fortified Franco. Franco won the war in 1939 and installed a dictatorship that endured until his death in 1975. The United States was officially neutral during the war.

Mr. Berg slipped into Spain in January 1938, crossing the snow-capped French border. He went on to install communication lines for front-line antiaircraft artillery near Barcelona, defended the mountain town Teruel and fought at the Battle of the Ebro, the biggest battle of the Spanish Civil War.

He was wounded that August when Italian bombers missed a railroad station and instead struck a monastery where he and others were billeted. Shrapnel from the bomb remained in his liver for the rest of his life.

The Munich Pact, which appeased Nazi Germany by allowing Hitler to annex portions of Czechoslovakia, left many Loyalists demoralized. Mr. Berg left Spain and returned home early in 1939.

Unlike a number of other starry-eyed recruits to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Mr. Berg never outgrew his devotion to underdogs.

He joined the Communist Party USA in 1943, became a vice president of his local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., organized farm workers and protested the war in Vietnam and nuclear weapons.

“He was always attached to just causes,” a friend, Pat Cervelli, said in an interview.

Delmer Esley Daniel Berg was born in Anaheim, Calif., on Dec. 20, 1915, of Ukranian, Dutch and Bavarian ancestry. His father was a tenant farmer.

He left high school in Manteca, Calif., as a junior during the Depression (auspiciously, given his stint in Spain, after studying Latin and “Don Quixote”) to help support his family in Oregon. He later moved to Los Angeles, where, tempted by recruiters for the military and the circus, he joined the National Guard.

He legally bought his way out of the Guard for $120 and got a job washing dishes at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, when he saw the billboard advertising for Lincoln Brigade recruits.

After returning from Spain, he was drafted into the Army and assigned to an antiaircraft battery in New Guinea. He was later discharged because of his shrapnel wound from the fighting in Spain.

After the war, he worked as a farm laborer and a landscaper, and started a cement and stonemasonry business with one of his sons.

He and his wife, June, lived in the Sierra Nevada foothills. She died last year. Survivors include his sons from an earlier marriage, Ernst and Tom, and two grandsons.

Asked in 2013 what his proudest moments had been since Spain, he told the weekly Anderson Valley Advertiser in Mendocino County: “When I was elected vice president of the local N.A.A.C.P. and when one of my grandsons was valedictorian at his Oregon high school graduation and said in a newspaper interview, ‘My grandfather is my inspiration. He’s a Communist!’”

In 2014, according to the Archives, after the death of John Hovan of Rhode Island, Mr. Berg became the only known survivor of the Lincoln Brigade.

Nearly 80 years after the war, as the last torch bearer, he still considered his mission incomplete. “It bothers me a little that at 99 you’re going to die any minute,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2015, “because I have a lot of other things I want to do.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/03/us...es-at-100.html

[icheerthebull]

"No man ever entered the earth more honorably than those who died in Spain" - Ernest Hemingway

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was a group of volunteers from the United States who served in the Spanish Civil War as soldiers, technicians, medical personnel and aviators fighting for Spanish Republican forces as part of the International Brigades, against the Fascist forces of Francisco Franco and the Spanish Nationalists.

The Spanish Civil War was fought from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939 between the Republicans, who were loyal to the democratically elected Spanish Republic, and the Nationalists, a rebel movement led by General Francisco Franco.

Of the approximately 2,800 American volunteers, between 750 and 800 were killed in action or died of wounds or sickness.




Lincoln Volunteers arrive in Barcelona.


Lincoln volunteers with the Karl Marx barracks in the background.


Jarama front: left. Seaman from Chile, Sterling Rochester (USA) Artemio Luna (Phillipines) Juan Santiago (Cuba) and Jack Shirai (Japan)


Jarama Front. left: Max Krauthamer, (killed July 6th 1937 at Villanueva de la Canada) Eli Biegelman and Mel Offsink (killed in March 1938 during the retreats)


Jarama: Seamen from all over the world who shipped out of American Ports. Holding the newspaper is Barney Spalding from Philadelphia


Tom Mooney machine-gun Co. Doug Seacord (second left) Dave Smith (second right)


Jarama: Lincoln Battalion members Juan Castro, Captain Van Der Bergh, Marty Hourihan.


Jarama Spring '37: left. Irving Chocheles, Harry Fischer (reading) Charlie Nusser and Hy Stone (on water tap)


Jarama: left: Oliver Law (L) unknow and Norberto Borges (Cuba)


Left: Bill Lawrence, XV International Brigade Commissar at Alabcete, Harry Haywood and Ed Bender of the Cadre Service.


Cubana Hermosa with Comrades at Jarama.


Brunete: Doug Roach and Steve Nelson.


Lincoln's: Back row left: Joe Stone, Mome Teietbaum, Sam Stone, Robert Zimmer, John Murra. Joe and Sam Stone were both killed at Mosquito Hill 09/07/1937. front left: Benevidio Dominguez (Puerto Rico) Jack Schulman, Joe Azar, Julius Deutsch.


Wisconsin Volunteers: back left: Fred Palmer, Harry Lichter, Ray Disch. Front left: John Cookson, Clarence Kailin


back left: Steve Boleshaw and Bill Bailey (back second right)


Machine-Gun Crew: Back row left: Milton Wolff, Mike Pappas, Zip Kachinski. front row, unknown, unknown Dave Reiss.


Chief of Auto Park Lou Secundy (l) with Abraham Lewis of Brigade Commisseriat, December 1937.


'Maximville' home of the Mother Bloor Machine Gun Unit. 177_178029


The Mother Bloor Machine-Gun Company


Transmissions Unit: Frank Barcena (Second left) Pat Read (third right) December 1937. 11_0991


July 1938: Volunteers returning to Spain: Joe Rehill, Bill Wheeler, Joe Gordon, Joe Cobert Joe Cuban and Al Tanz.


16/10/1938, Falset: Lincoln Battalion led by Left: Captain Don Thayer, Commander Milton Wolff, Commissar George Watt.


18/10/1938: Marca football field. Don Thayer (third left) John Gates (Fourth left) Milt Wolff (Fifth left) George Watt (third right)

[lobo221]

nice find :-)

[MaxRobespierre]

Thank you for showing these Heroes of the International!!!