Speaker Well, I was thinking of that, yeah. Are we on? We’re on. Right. I was thinking of that. And originally I thought I met him at the same time. I met Hemingway in her Mathew’s and that whole gang and Cafe Chakotay at the Brunete. But I’m not sure about that. It may have been the first time that I met him is when he brought Hemingway up to the front in that photo you have of Hemingway or myself there, because now that I’m thinking back, I think Hemingway introduced me to him. Up there at the front.
Speaker After we crossed the river Abro River, yeah, but that water is that parallel or is that another front now?
Speaker That’s the Abreau Front, the action at the Oregon Abreau Front for terror. Well, was part of it, but. But why are you hung up on terror? Well, this is the second time you’ve mentioned it.
Speaker I know you were all there.
Speaker Yeah, we were there for one brief faction to save terror. Well, which we did for a while, anyhow. Of course, the fascists had already cut Spain in half and Tara Wall was on their side.
Speaker That was their next objective. So we went in there with other international brigades and with what I remember about the most is how cold it was in Spain. And that’s it, and then we went back to the Condesa front and then up to the Sierra Brandos and so on, and when you first met Kevin, what do you remember your impressions of him?
Speaker Well, at that meeting, we had no conversation at all. He just took the photos and so on.
Speaker And later on, I was on leave in Madrid is where I was up in Hemingway’s room in the hotel, Florida, Florida. And we talking about the fifth column of play that he was running. Writing when he had written because he gave it to me to read and.
Speaker So must have been around there somewhere that I met him, right, and we realized that we were both Hungarians and like that, that’s about all we had in common except our devotion to the loyalist cause in Spain.
Speaker And what does it mean to be Hungarian? I mean, if you. Yeah. Huh.
Speaker Well, Hungarians think it’s great to be Hungarian like every other ethnic group, but. In my case, my mother insisted that my father was the product.
Speaker I have a Hungarian and he partner with Gypsy, so we sort of watered down a Jewish the Jewish Hungarian background was.
Speaker They went out with general merchandise to where people were cutting down trees, you know, who didn’t have access to cities and so on and other small villages and towns, they were peddlers. In other words, you know, the peddlers they were peddling and in the course of his peddling and so on, my father was conceived. That’s my mother’s story. My father never admitted to because gypsies were looked upon the same as Jews during the Holocaust. They they were the lowest type people in the world because they were lawless.
Speaker You know, in our own land, Cappa looked like a gypsy who kapper or there you go.
Speaker Why? I’m not telling a story. I’m telling my story. I don’t know anything about his background except that he morgiana Hungarian.
Speaker Yeah, his parents were tailors. They had a tailor tailor salon.
Speaker Where? In Budapest. Yeah.
Speaker Yeah. And he was really into clothes. Did you ever know that about him. Was very fastidious about his clothes.
Speaker No, I didn’t notice that.
Speaker No. So what are the things when you think of Robert Capa, what are the things that come to mind? What qualities of his personality?
Speaker Well, first of all, he’s very good looking guy. I mean, you know, good looking Hungarian and.
Speaker He was upbeat.
Speaker He was upbeat, I don’t ever remember him being otherwise. And smiled a lot.
Speaker And passionate about his work. Is what I remember most, and as I warned you before, we I had.
Speaker Two or three encounters with him and usually with other people present, and so the conversation was brief and I was not aware of his photography at all, that he was photographing for life or anything like that.
Speaker And you met him. It sounds like maybe you could because you won’t hear me in the final show. So I’m going to ask you about Gerta, but maybe you could tell us a little bit about who was Gerta and what was her relationship with Cappa and what happened to her.
Speaker Well, as I said, I never met Gerta. I didn’t know anything about Curda, but in that crowd of the Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn and Eddie Roth. And people like that who knew the whole story knew that girder.
Speaker With a photographer.
Speaker And I think it was alleged that she thought cops everything you knew instead of the other way around and that he was very devoted to her.
Speaker And whether they were sleeping together or not, I don’t know, but I think the information was that they were and.
Speaker And she was killed at Brunete at the front somewhere. And that he went into a slough of depression. To it from which he recovered, well, I don’t know whether he recovered, but he continued doing his work.
Speaker Did he ever talk to you about Gerta?
Speaker No, no, this is all I heard about her.
Speaker This is all I heard about her. She was German, right? Am I right? Yeah. And I don’t know where he met her in Paris. Yes. OK.
Speaker When I met him, when I met you in New York, you said that you thought tappa losing Gerta made him reckless.
Speaker Yes, I thought so. Yeah. I thought that may have that that’s an assumption I make that it made him.
Speaker Well, she went up front and got killed, you know, and so and she was his mentor, so to speak. Lover.
Speaker And so, yes, there was a great deal of recklessness about him in the covering of the war in Spain and later on, of course, in World War two, Vietnam and so on. Can I ask you, though, are you going to the front? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But not neglecting the people, as I saw in that book back there. Right. Right. The civilians.
Speaker Could I just ask you to the way you said it probably won’t be clear to the audience the connection, but if you could just make the connection that I know it’s an assumption on your part, but between Gerda’s dying and Cappell becoming reckless and you see the trouble with you people is you should have gotten this information 20 or 30 years ago when the people who were really intimately connected with with Kapper.
Speaker As a matter of fact, Martha just died only a couple of years ago and they were very close, Martha Gellhorn. And so I can’t even refer you to anybody who would know more of the story than that. And I would say the only possible source would be some of the old international brigade is. From Germany, from Czechoslovakia, from Bulgaria, from Hungary, there are all kinds of some of these guys is still alive. What can I tell you?
Speaker Well, I guess what I’m just asking if you could just rephrase what you said.
Speaker So that’s why did I rephrase the guy?
Speaker The guy was got to the front as often as he could, and he was not eating confine himself to the Americans. He was with the Bulgarians. He was with the Taliban battalion, which was German antifascist. And maybe they were a source for Gerta or not. Maybe that meant she was a brunette. She may have been with the Taliban battalion when she was killed. I don’t know whether there’s any documentation on that or not, but it would be logical for her to be with them because they were shock troops and they were always up. And you know what a shock troops, you know. Well, a shock troop was is put in the greatest where where the either in an offensive where they had to punch a hole through or in a defensive where they had to stop a whole. In a counter attack, for instance. And they have the most casualties and so on and so on, so they were there and Gerta, I think was up there with them where Cappa was with some other outfit at that time, or he may have been in the hotel, Fareeda Shearim, they would have anyway, I don’t know. But he was a bon vivant, among other things that you know or you should know. And he loved life and he loved living it as fully as possible. That’s why he was in Paris and came to Spain.
Speaker So do you think there’s a connection between and he may have been in Vietnam because Martha Gellhorn was in Vietnam at that time and they said they were very close, at least very close friends, if not more, but they were very close friends. So like that.
Speaker Do you think there’s a connection with his love of wine and women and all of that and the horrors that he saw? I mean, is there any kind of connection between those two parts of his character?
Speaker You remember the thing, my fair lady, where what’s his name? Rex Harris, what’s his name says. Danced across the floor with that oily Hungarian. Do remember that line? Typical says it all, that womanizer and dancer, then the good life, good in life. But his heart was always in the right place as far as I was concerned, and that was with a good fight.
Speaker Let’s talk about the good fight, because I think most audiences don’t really know much about the Spanish Civil War or the context of what was going on in Europe at the time. So I guess the first question is, why did you sign up to go over to Spain?
Speaker You know.
Speaker Studs Terkel, I think, coined that phrase. Which brings the good fight.
Speaker And he interviewed a number of vets, among others, who were in the good fight. He did a book called The Good War Two. I don’t know what the hell that was about World War Two. And he did a wonderful piece on my wife, who was Frida, who was a USO person, know a Red Cross person in World War Two. Oh, yeah, a great piece on her, huh?
Speaker And anyhow, in that book, The Good War.
Speaker So where was I?
Speaker We were talking about, yeah, Winfried was a good fight to come to think of it. Yeah.
Speaker Yeah, OK, I’m changing tape to the siren of the siren when the siren goes out.
Speaker Just this you get you get that part about my wife again.
Speaker OK, I got to get a plug. Emotionally dead, unfortunately. But when did she die? She died in 84, 70 years old. Yeah. So but she was very active. She was like that was a good fight was because we continued in good causes. You know, I we on and.
Speaker I came out here to marry her and.
Speaker We built this post in San Francisco, the and we were very active, we sent ambulances to Nicaragua and food to Cuba and medical supplies to Cuba, Guatemala, all in the central Central America, the Caribbean nations, the country all spoke Spanish. And they were veterans from all of these nations who fought in Spain, that little country that I’m talking about and we were active on and all these things.
Speaker When the Soviet Union sent those kids about 3000 kids and their mothers to Cuba after Chernobyl, they had been exposed to radiation. For instance, we raised a lot of money to support them. I mean, to participate in the support and there were other sources coming in to support them.
Speaker So and as you see, I just got a call from my post commander, a new post commander, and they’re working on a monument in the Embarcadero, you know, San Francisco Embarcadero near Harry Bridges Plaza.
Speaker There were a lot of seamen and longshoremen who fought in Spain and were also in our post and forever active afterwards in all of our activities. The guy who was here, a professor from. From the University of Illinois to interview yesterday, he remembered Bill Bailey. I don’t know if you know that name and who was a veteran, the guy who thought it was taken down off a German ship that had come into this before World War Two. And Barbara’s going to Skokie, Illinois, where the fascists were having a thing to oppose, but anyhow.
Speaker Well, I guess I mean, this is an illustration of our activities, right?
Speaker Yeah, but if you think back to when you were how old were you when you went to Spain? How old were you?
Speaker I just hit 21. Yeah.
Speaker So what was it that made you go over there to risk your life at 22 in the trenches? You what what was it that made you go over there to risk your life for people you didn’t know?
Speaker I knew that they knew them as its fascist fighters, the first ones to put up resistance to fascist aggression. Well, I was political politicized during the Depression. People talk about a recession here and around the valley talking about they don’t know where Social Security came from or the five day week or all time or unemployment insurance or World War one bonus payments or anything. These were all the struggles of my youth. And it began with my family being on relief and putting me into something called the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933. I went out to the Allegheny State Park. We built Allegheny State Park. We got thirty dollars a month and keep and we got five dollars and twenty five dollars. Went home to the people there and I loved it. I was the only guy literate enough to say they made me a what do you call Fereshteh man.
Speaker And. They may be First-Day Man. And.
Speaker What happened when it happened?
Speaker Well, what happened inside my tent, mate, yeah, cut himself with an axe and died of blood poisoning and that activated me slightly, somewhat. I got involved with his parents to tell them the story about this thing with that doctor was some kind of we call them the admiral. He was some kind of a Navy corpsman who was run by military personnel. The camps were. And and then there was a guy in a camp by the name of Shapir. By the way, I have a photo of the three of us from the back then this guy.
Speaker We went he explained that on Arenado, if you want me to tell you this whole story, well, it’s kind of a long story. I think we should probably stick to well, anyhow, anyhow, he discovered that they were shorting us.
Speaker The military people were taking our money that was supposed to go for rations and feeding us beans and rice and stuff like that. He figured it out and he organized a strike in which I participated. He organized it, not me. I participated in. And we refused to go out into the field and we won the strike. OK, that politicized me. OK, that you could do this and you can win a strike. So when I came back to the neighborhood and I looked around the people who were active putting people back in their apartments, who were evicted and so forth and so forth, were communists and young communists. Me and I joined the Young Communist League in Bensonhurst, their Brooklyn, OK, and that was the beginning of my political career. And then the young communist, we I learned about the rest of the world. All right, because as a kid, the only newspapers in my house with the Daily News and The Daily Mirror and the Journal, and they were like almost like the yellow press, you know, so they were. So I began reading The New York Times in the Post and so on.
Speaker So like that. But OK, so but but what was it about? OK, maybe go back a little bit what was happening and just give us some really.
Speaker You come back to Gerda.
Speaker No, no, no. Later. No, no. It’s just because the audience is going to be watching this. They’re not going to know about fascism. They’re not going to know about what was going on in Spain. So what I’m trying to get is what was happening in Spain. Why was it so bad and why did you have to go to fight against it? What made you want to fight against it?
Speaker Well, by this time, Hitler had showed his hand. He was going to do everything that he wrote about in his book, Mein Kampf. All right. And he was having his way.
Speaker There was no resistance to his move with Anschluss, with Austria, for instance, and so on, and of course, Mussolini was going into North Africa, Ethiopia three. And so in that whole period. I don’t know the dates mixed up, but there was a lot of movement at that time and a lot of discussion in the League of Nations about this stuff and so on. And there was a lot of movement in this state, in the America, to keep out a war to be neutral Lynn. Charles Lindbergh, the hero who flew across the Atlantic in the spirit of St. Louis all by himself, which was record making, and but he was an isolationist. And so there was a lot of light going on. And we knew about this and the.
Speaker When the election took place in Spain, the.
Speaker Popular Front won the April 18th election, and this was the line of the Communist Party that put the revolution aside, the main task was to defeat fascism and the way to defeat it was to the United Front and Camuto. Come in front, OK, Popular Front, which included all the parties in the government, the Spanish Communist Party was the smallest party at that time in the government, and so we were supporting them. I was in the subway when it came raising money, and I spoke on street corners. My voice was stronger then. And and for that reason, because we didn’t have this electronic equipment that you have now.
Speaker And I gather a crowd of anywhere from 10 people to 60 people that we depend on whatever it was. And then we passed the hat around and we raised money for the loyalists.
Speaker What did you say in those speeches? What what how are you convincing them of this cause?
Speaker Well, that that Franco was being assisted by Hitler and Mussolini to overthrow the legally elected government of Spain and that they were resisting and this was the first resistance that they had met the fascists had made, so that basically it was a war of Franco, who was the object of all the support he was getting from Germany and Italy with the fascist, OK?
Speaker And these were the loyalists, the ordinary people, trade unionists and so on, who came out to defend Madrid. And then we identified with them. That was it.
Speaker And then the word went out for volunteers.
Speaker Which I didn’t know about at the time, and the first group when we arrived there in February and for that arama Americans and. Under the command of Oliver Law, who is a black at the time, we call them Negroes and. We were the first integrated military American unit, not official, but we were we had 80 African-Americans in our outfit and some guy came to one of our meetings and said, who want to volunteer to fight in Spain?
Speaker It is possible there are Americans there fighting already at ARAMA. Put up your hands. I put out my hand and that was it. I was the only one to put up my hand.
Speaker Kind of embarrassed me, but what was I going to do? And so then I had to tell my mother I was going to Spain. I had to explain to her what fascism was about. And we’re Jewish and we were the targets already of Mein Kampf. It was quite clear what he was going to do to the Jews and. I told you I was going to Spain to work in a factory and a Spaniard would go to the front. That was my task. And so she gave me her blessing reluctantly.
Speaker And I went with about 40 other guys on the hill to France on the Tour de France, the very luxury liner. We were in steerage and like that. You’re amusing. We all and we all who had a suit at that time never had a suit. And we all went to Barney’s, who we almost all looked the same in uniform. And we’re not supposed to know each other. Anybody else is. We’re going to Paris for vacation.
Speaker I got supposed to go to. Was there something of that the United States didn’t want you to go to Spain?
Speaker Oh, the passport was stamped not valid for use in Spain. Everybody had rubber stamped, not valid for use in Spain. Why? Why? Because we were neutral in that struggle. Why were we neutral? Because Chamberlain leaned on Roosevelt.
Speaker Now, is that the non-intervention committee that was active because of an intervention committee that was a creation of the League of Nations?
Speaker Yeah, the nine. Yeah, right. Yeah.
Speaker Could you say that because you won’t hear me?
Speaker Well, I don’t know what the thing is that the Germans and the Italians got in all the supplies they wanted to get in and they were part of it. They belong to the League of Nations and they were assigned to patrol the republic in port. So very little came in through the Republican Party and then Chamberlain leaned to close the border in France, OK, and the stuff that Russia was the Soviet Union at that time, if your readers don’t know the difference between the Soviet Union and Russia anyhow, the Soviet Union was sending stuff through France and then piled up on the other side of the Pyrenees and the border. And when we got to France, we got in at LE. And luckily, they were going to ship us right through, but the French Union went on strike and I had 10 days in Paris, which was very fine, and then we went down to port bux and we climbed over the Pyrenees to get in because the border was closed and we were taken over the Pyrenees by Andalusians smugglers who knew there every way in and out.
Speaker And we were told, if you stop by Van Damme or anybody, tell him your mountain climbers and we’re all in civilian clothes. And I still had civilian shoes on because the abaca that were given out were too small for my big feet. So American big feet. So that is a we climbed in one night over. That’s why my book is entitled Another Hill, because every time we thought we were to the top, there was always another hill and then another hill and then another hill. And that was in Spain as well. In our battles, we were always taking a hill or defending a hill. So we climbed the hill and we were in Spain. That was it.
Speaker And what was your first battle battle with Brunete, Brunete and in Brunete?
Speaker I was a water carrier for the machine because when we got the vigorous support it forgets they asked people to step out, who knew how to drive a truck, who knew how to use a sewing machine or whatever and anything about Fereshteh. I had been a first aid man, C.C.C., so I stepped out OK.
Speaker And so when we were training, we were the George Washington Battalion. The Lincoln Battalion was that drama. And they kind of get that distinction. And so I was Asani that we call it, and they’re an English doctor.
Speaker And I was Buntin. And with the machine gun company and the command and the machine gun company was Walter Garlan, who was an African-American who had already seen action at ARAMA, had been wounded, came back and now took over the Washington Battalia machine gun company. OK, so my doctor was an Englishman there and he taught us very well. And then we moved. That was that we moved out of madrigals, the Arizona, and we got an American doctor and its first lecture was on venereal disease and he showed us how to use a condom. And I quit Senate and became a machine gunner. That’s how it happened, OK?
Speaker And that’s why I was the last man on the machine gun, because it was made up of water carriers, ammunition carriers. The guy who fed the belt into the gun, the gunner and the spotter, was a whole machine gun squad. And the last guy with was Wolf with the water cannon. Three days in the brunete. I was behind the gun with the casualties and heat exhaustion. I was in good shape because of the CCC.
Speaker Yeah. So you were looking at a picture of the of the machine gun in there and you were talking about it a few minutes ago. You could tell.
Speaker I told you, you got me talking. I would talk. No, you’d have to cut me off whenever I go. What about it?
Speaker Oh, just, you know, the machine gun, water, machine gun, it was called the maximum and we had a Russian training us when we were training on it. And everybody had to learn the gun, including the war to carry. Everybody in the squad had to learn everything about the gun.
Speaker And it was patterned after a British machine gun from World War One. And we carried rifles in the rifles, 1903 Springfield that had seen action, the Russo Japanese war back then. OK. And that was it.
Speaker That was our problem as we went into action, and that’s what you were fighting. I mean, the fastest, I assume, were better armed. Oh, yeah.
Speaker Yeah. When they were also professional mercenaries, there was the Foreign Legion Franco had that had seen a lot of action in Africa. There was the more and more troops and the regular most of the regular army of Spain had gone with the with the rebels. So they were better equipped and far better trained. We were up to me bleep bleep. I mean, we most of us never had maybe a BB gun or something like that or a water pistol. So but they were better trained.
Speaker And how did you hold up against them with that ammunition?
Speaker Well, we did the best we could. We were effective. We were pretty effective. I can Caspari, we halted the we hope that the blitzkrieg there and Kaspi, I was commanded a battalion more than. Came back and we took photorealism we took him 66.
Speaker We did some good action, we were part of taking control of Cheetah, went to Abreau where I had my 22nd birthday, and like that we were sort of shock troops. But the polls, the dombrovskis and the diamonds were more shocking than we were, more shocking truths than we were.
Speaker You talk about the I mean, you talk about the International Brigades and why people were coming from all over 54 countries from war, not in big numbers, but, you know, a handful from Cuba and all the Central American countries. There was somebody from China, there was some people from China. And that’s before China became this was nationalist China and some Japanese were there, but the main groups were English. And they were the first in because soon as they broke out, they came in before the border was closed. They were the they were the largest group and the French also, because it was easy for them to come in and the Americans, which had 2800 go in. Twenty eight had to be. We left 800. In Earth in Spain, about which Hemingway wrote a beautiful elegy on the dead in Spain, the American dead in Spain anyhow. I got him to cut a record of it and call them up in Key West, and I said, Ernest, this.
Speaker No, he’s just come in. How many Krauts did you kill that, having worked for you?
Speaker That’s why I’m trying. So, anyhow.
Speaker I asked them to come up for our tenth anniversary, this is 1947, and he said and, you know, deliver that speech and talk about it, and he said, no, I won’t do that, but I will cut a record. And he did.
Speaker Is that what we hear on the good fight, the sound of Hemingway talking?
Speaker Yes. Yes. Good. That was my record.
Speaker And it’s now in the archives. And they reproduced it and sold it along with the thing.
Speaker Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. I talk a little bit about the people that came from the countries that were already fascist controlled or they had already or they were terrific.
Speaker Who were they kind or the Germans from the time when the battalion was anti Nazi, anti Nazi Germans and among them they had people who were well trained, you know, Germany and Spain, where they had good offices and so forth and were familiar with arms.
Speaker And then there was the Garibaldi de Karabo, Dinis from Italy, Antine, Mussolini, Italians, who are also very good and also had among their.
Speaker People who had had military service and seen some military training, at least, and for the rest they were Hungarians, Bulgarians, Czechoslovakia, Czech, Czechoslovakia, the one I was most familiar with was the Poles of the DOMBROSKI thing. And the Poles had a lot of experience with pogroms in order program is your audience. And our program is in Russia and in countries like Poland. The Cossacks and other violent antisemite would raid the Jewish Sextons section, destroy their shops and loot them and so on, and beat up the Jews and so on, sometimes kill them as in Russian programs. And this this is the forerunner of the Holocaust, actually, because it was not happening in Germany.
Speaker The Jews were secure. In Germany, this was not a thing until Hitler came along or in Austria, for that matter, though, there was anti-Semitism was not expressed in this violent way. And the programs were until 1933. And then it became another story.
Speaker And did you sense in well, Pappert particularly, but in other people whose countries were already fascist, did you sense was there a difference in the way that they fought or felt or was there they fought to the last man.
Speaker They fought as hard as they could fight with the weapons that they had. We all did. It was a passionate war. We were motivated. It wasn’t a question of being drafted and not knowing what the hell you’re fighting for or maybe knowing a little. We were all conscious combatants, combat combatants, whatever you call.
Speaker So though there were exceptions, some guy climbed on his adventures and so on, but very, very, very few and not among the groups that I’m talking about, not among the people from the occupied countries.
Speaker They were solid and they they were passion. What can I tell you that I had to pull the polls out? I believe the polls had this year to Kabul. They were there. They were they they were really among themselves about 12 or 14 and had decided they were going to stay there till the last man.
Speaker And I came up with my troops and relieved them, convinced them to go back. And they were from the DOMBROSKI and they were heavily decimated and they continued fighting and we lost 894.
Speaker Well, I told you before, I forgot what my next question was. Well, I know that I wanted to ask you. Oh, I know it was in one of your interviews that I you mentioned that you were kind of annoyed with journalists who could come in and watch the action and then go back and sleep in our hotels and have good dinners.
Speaker And who you mean a correspondent? Yeah, of course. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker I could talk a little bit about why Hemingway wrote a book called The.
Speaker For whom the bell tolls, for whom the bell tolls, for whom the bell tolls, which was a Hollywood production, which was all right, but he said some nasty things about the Lord is immorality, who we call passion Spain. He was a leading communist figure, but universally accepted by all parties in Spain. And she coined the slogan, It’s better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees or something like that. And. Beautiful woman and. So he said while she was making our speeches, you know, urging everybody pull out front to fight and everything for the front, she had sent her child to Moscow for safety because Madrid was being bombed and so on. What he failed to say was that thousands of children were evacuated by the republic to Moscow, to Moscow, to Mexico. They’re still living in Mexico. Their children grew up in Mexico, to Brazil, to Argentina. Whoever would take them, they got the children, sometimes with the mothers, sometimes with or without. So he selected that thing for Dolores, who’s giving her whole life and soul to the struggle she sent her child. And then he said something about Modesto, who is one of the four leading generals of the Republican Army. He said something about Modesto. That was derogatory. I don’t remember what it was, but what I found out later was that Modesto would not let him go up to the front. You know, he said, no, my Chiesi Meraki VIPR proper. So he he said slanderous thing about those two. And so I wrote I wrote him a letter in which I quote, I said, you know, if you were only a tourist in Spain and this just I couldn’t go. I couldn’t I couldn’t have invented any curse. Worse than that, I think all of the tourists industry. And when he wrote back, he said, I called him a ruler, I didn’t call him a ruler. I called him a tourist and he called me every name under the sun. And then he wrote another letter a week after. He says, I take it all back. I know you did it on the communist orders that you’re the Communist Party. Couldn’t care less about that. They had nothing to do with it. By that time when he wrote the book, they were into the other goddamn thing. This is what I did on these two people. All right. So, yeah, but then we were friends after that.
Speaker I mean, we’re not here, so.
Speaker But when you were in Spain, what did you like these journalists or did you think they were the, you know, the reporters? Did you think that they were there for doing a good job or did the reporters.
Speaker Yeah, Hemingway. Vincent Chin. Herbert Matthews of The New York Times and some guy from The New York Post, she was from the Chicago Tribune, some guy from the I can’t remember his name did a terrific job. 80 percent of the American people, according to a Gallup poll, were Perlow loyalists. And that was their work. That was their work. And The Times have one more reporter on the fascist side. Carney was his name and so were the times when you know how The New York Times read. They ran a story by Matthews, ran a story by Carney, you know, but Carney didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
Speaker They have a different kind of person from.
Speaker Matthews came up to him 66, 66, and that son of a gun made me take him up to the front troops because I was a commander. Then I was behind the lines, you know, where I’m supposed to be. And no, you got to take me. I want to talk to some guy. Is it different? And he he was, I think, at least two or three inches taller than me. I was 62 at the time and at the time. Chris, nice rock. And and the amazing thing is he was totally exposed and nobody shot on him or us. And he talked to the guys in the trenches that the kind of guy he was. And he was madly in love with Gellhorn, you know, but.
Speaker Gellhorn, with not having anything but go along with Hemingway’s wife at the time, yeah, right, being dragged around like a wet rag, she told me she left and went to Czechoslovakia. She was there with Benish when he committed suicide.
Speaker What was what was Martha Gellhorn like?
Speaker She was a fireball, I piso.
Speaker She knew where the story was, he was in Prague, where Munich took place, tell tell the audience what what happened? What was the Munich Munich thing is when Chamberlain arranged.
Speaker In order to keep what he called peace in our time to validate Anschluss with Austria, that means Germany taking over large parts of Austria, the rest of Austria becoming fascist. And parts of Czechoslovakia were OK, too, and in return, that’s all Hitler said he wanted.
Speaker And.
Speaker That was the Munich seller, Nygren was the premier of the Spanish republic at that time, and he knew when that happened that it was over, it was over for the republic. And he said the he took the internationals, first of all, at the League of Nations. He proposed that he would return all the national internationals to their countries and. Unilaterally and at the other side should do the same voluntarily, of course, they never did.
Speaker But that’s when we were pulling out of the line in September of 38, right in Cappa, photographed both the final review and the parade in Spain. So maybe you could talk about those. He did what? He photographed the final review and saw the parade in Barcelona.
Speaker Yeah, well, we the thing is, the League of Nations sent the committee down to Spain to check us out looking for Russians, OK?
Speaker And so we they held us in a place called repoll up there in in Catalonia.
Speaker And the.
Speaker And then and they have we were out of the line in September 28. Every because they held us, we didn’t we didn’t get out of Spain until.
Speaker Until. Almost the end of December.
Speaker So there was a the Communist Party in Spain threw a banquet for the people, for the international brigade there, I danced with passion area there and so on and.
Speaker And then we had the parade for the people of Barcelona before we left, and that photo was from the good fight that shows us just marching in. That was it. And we went cause during that whole time, we didn’t sit in repoll. We took lives in Barcelona and so on. And I thought, how do you feel about leaving? I can only speak for myself. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t come there under any contract. I never expected to be paid.
Speaker And we weren’t in actuality pay or get any medals or anything like that or any set date.
Speaker When we would leave, we would stay there until we won with my editor. So I was not happy about going home. I don’t know that was it, but I kept myself amused while I was there anyhow.
Speaker Did you feel that? Did you feel. Do you see the writing on the wall that when you were leaving Spain would fall?
Speaker No, no, again, I only speak for myself.
Speaker Majid was holding out and we were very active in that period because we were home in 38. And Madrid fell in 39. In 39, I forget the whole way to wait a while, Madrid fell.
Speaker What was Poland invaded in September of 39, am I right?
Speaker 39, I don’t know what month.
Speaker Well, anyhow. It was it was like I remember three or four months after Madrid fell, but Madrid held out until that time and then it was just surrendered by KSM guy who took over and surrendered it. And right after that, Hitler walked in Poland and World War Two was afoot, and that’s what we said would happen.
Speaker That’s what we said would happen then when we were all volunteer for the U.S. Army, they marked this down premature at times, fascist.
Speaker Tell me about that. Everybody was now an anti fascist, but we were premature antifascist when it was nonlegal because they took our passports away when we came back from Spain, who said that we had violated the law because they had been stamped not valid travel in Spain.
Speaker So I took our passports away anyhow.
Speaker Uh.
Speaker Tell you about what we’ll know about the premature antifascist thing. What was that about?
Speaker Well, for instance, they held me and my friend Jerry at Fort Dix for I don’t know how long, six weeks.
Speaker It was a processing center. And then you went to a fighting unit or whatever unit. And so nobody was there for more than a week, but they held us for six weeks at one point during the holidays, something Jerry Cooke went into the clerk’s office and he looked at the files and he saw the file.
Speaker Our files were marked pay and nobody else’s files were marked OK. And so we tracing it back and so are premature antifascist.
Speaker And that was it.
Speaker So and we had a fight to go to the front. I mean, they put me in longshore, they put me in chemical warfare, they put me in training Khajeh. I don’t know how many different outfits they put me in until I finally got to join Joe Stillwell up and vinegar Joe Stillwell up in Burma for an action. What was I doing in Burma? I wanted to go and indeed they’d be in for me.
Speaker And they kept me out of a year. They kept me out of here. That was that.
Speaker But you have to realize, I was already in the war before the United States was in. I was working for because Britain declared war immediately after when Hitler went into Poland and we were neutral, we were still neutral. And I knew Wild Bill Donovan, who was a hero of World War One, the first American expeditionary forces in France, Wall Street, No. One law office. And he was a good friend of the wife of Jimmy Sheehan, who is a reporter in Spain that I told you about. That’s a very long story. So I won’t go into it. But at any rate, he got hold of me and I was going to jail for picketing something.
Speaker I shouldn’t have been picketing the French Council at the time. They were going to send the Spanish refugees back into Franco’s Spain.
Speaker But anyhow, uh, we tied up we tied up Fifth Avenue with the help of the cops because there were more cops there and there were demonstrators. But anyhow. He he recruited me for British Special Forces, and I worked for them recruiting international brigades who couldn’t go back to their occupied countries, and they were going to join the Monkees in the Partisanize and so forth and so forth and the military intelligence for the British.
Speaker And so I worked with them. Right after France fell until Pearl Harbor and Pearl Harbor, Special Forces became a part of special forces, became O.S.S. officers, officers, strategic services, which later became the CIA. So I was in way says, OK, but then after a while, I recruited quite a number of guys, including an American bunch that dropped into North Africa, was supposed to I took my parachute training and all that was supposed to go into Spain. But Britain never, never allowed anyone to lay a finger on Franco, not because they loved them, but to protect their financial interests in Spain.
Speaker And they figured he was better. He’s the better man for it. And so where was I? So, yeah, that’s what happened to that. I was an officer candidate school and they kicked me out and I was not the only bit of the Spanish war who had been kicked out of office candidates. Anybody who got over 110 on an IQ test was a candidate for officer candidate school, you know, and most of our guys had no trouble with those tests.
Speaker What was the government afraid of from you guys? I have no idea. You would think they would put me up from where I had a better chance of getting killed. But that kept me back. They kept me back was a fear of they wouldn’t let me.
Speaker And I kept writing letters to people back in the states, including my wife, about what was happening, you know, and the sense is that those people who are reading the letters were saying, this guy is crazy.
Speaker He’s safe back where he is right now. Is he want to go to the front with a fear of communism or what? I have no idea what their thinking was in this regard.
Speaker Of course, they had a fear of communism, but I don’t see I don’t know how to express itself in this regard. I don’t know how to express itself.
Speaker OK.
Speaker I had already left the Communist Party by that time, but not not broken with them and not attack them or anything like that, but I couldn’t stand branch meetings or like crap, you know, I could tap I was, you know, was not allowed to go over to photograph the words of 43 because of. Yes. Premature. Absolutely. Absolutely. More so than me.
Speaker He was also an enemy alien because. Right. Right, right. Right.
Speaker I go back to Brunete and just if you could remember and just describe the battle of Brunete, because I want to make that really vivid for one girl who was killed. I mean, I know you didn’t see Gerta being killed, but what was going on in that battle?
Speaker Well, when I tell you and tell you where the Bangerter was there before we got to Brunete, as Pappa’s were was there, we went out to Brunete, the Washington Battalion and the Lincoln Battalion, which had been in reserve in Hiroshima for, I don’t know, two or three months, came into Brunete two. And we fought side by side about by the fourth the fifth day we were hyphenated. We became the link. And this gives you some idea of what happened during 21 days of fighting. All right. We were hyphenated. We came to Lincoln Washington Battalion and then that battle went on. We left George Washington behind and just kept Abe Lincoln, OK. We sort of preferred him. And but that will give you the idea of the casualties that took place and also heat exhaustion. It was hot as hell. It was July and it’s very hot in that area. And we were constantly on the offensive. And fighting, and it was what can I tell you about it, I went dead behind and the third day from war to carry, I became a machine gunner. And I was feeding the feeding the bells a machine gun, the cartridges are in a belt, in a wet belt, and they go through the chamber like that and the lock picks them up, put it in a chain firing chamber and you’re fired. And the other the belt, the empty belt comes out on the other side. OK, so little girl, as tall as I was, he was short. We were the. But just over 30. And that was it. We had the gun going on it. I don’t know how many barrels we we burn that every barrel has what’s called in the rifling, which puts a spin on a bullet which makes it accurate. OK, and the more you’re fired and it gets hot, the rifling wears out and then you’re not you’re not as effective. All right.
Speaker So why I mean, I know the answer to this, but for the audience, why was it so different from one day being wondered why you became the gun or what was happening to all the guys getting killed or wounded or dying passed out from heat exhaustion? Was Pernetti especially chaotic and violent battle?
Speaker It was the most violent, the most while it lasted for 21 days. And it was it was like a World War One kind of confrontation, which was the wrong way to fight the war at that time. And the casualties were very heavy. What can I tell you? It came out two battalions went into one battalion came out, about 400 men in a battalion. That doesn’t mean everyone was killed, but they were wounded and killed and heat exhaustion. Everybody had diarrhea and everybody was dying of thirst, putting wine in the barrel. And I think war is how Sherman were, you know, wasn’t lying. General Sherman, when he said in the civil war, war is hell, it’s hell. Besides just the bullets going back and forth. The food doesn’t come up. It comes up, it’s cold, it’s greasy, it’s this or that or whatever. You get sick, you get diarrhea. It saps the strength of you. You have to carry that machine gun around of driver, but it all takes its toll. Yellow fever turns. Then, you know, I got malaria in Burma, but that’s another story. There was a general understanding that there was no resistance to the aggressive moves that Hitler and Mussolini were making Mussolini in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Speaker It was going to lead to World War Two.
Speaker Ad. And the.
Speaker This was and the Spanish people were the only ones who had put up resistance to this aggression, and if they fell, that would be the beginning of World War Two. And they felt whenever they did six months later in September, he had to go back six months to see when they felt they felt April 18th or something. I don’t know. But when Madrid fell. About six months after Madrid fell, World War Two started when Hitler moved into Poland and England declared war would turn out to be a phoney war because they didn’t fight for two years before they opened up D-Day. You know that. So or maybe your audience doesn’t know whatever and so like that. So that was the whole motivation. That was the whole war. When I spoke at StreetCorner, they spoke about the possibility of war. They were anti-war speeches. They were anthe even before Spain became an issue because, well, Stalin, for one thing, said in 30 years, somewhere back in 1917 or 24 or whatever it was, he said in 30 years there’s going to be a world war that daddy used that as a justification for. Instituting his five year plans, which were drastic, a drastic drive to build up an industry, a industry that could fight a war, OK, and the Russian people paid a heavy price for that, wasn’t it?
Speaker But it wasn’t just that. It was to avoid World War two. It was particularly to avoid the takeover of the world by fascists. Right? I mean, wasn’t that part.
Speaker Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Then of course the Jewish thing came with the I can’t pronounce it in German the last night when they went into Berlin and they destroyed all the Jewish shops. So that was another thing that we were fighting against right then.
Speaker And maybe you could tell us just for the audience again, you know, what is fascism?
Speaker Why was fascism such a bad thing? Well, Hitler fascism was an extreme because it dealt with eugenics. For instance, he wanted to kill all babies who were born with major defects and so they wouldn’t be and and gypsies and Jews. This was an aspect of it.
Speaker Apart from how he organized industries in Germany and suppressed all opposition, took over all the media, that television didn’t exist then. So it was radio and newspapers, censored books. Right. Did a lot of revision on the glorious history of German cultural. The people who, like Thomas Mann and others nitpick and misinterpreted and I think and all these people and so on. So it was a war. It was a war on culture. It was a war on ethnicity. He was looking for a pure, pure German race. And this was a peculiar character of German fascism. OK, but fascism itself, like in Franco fascism, was to suppress all opposition and.
Speaker Which meant the press and also the media break all the trade unions, right, and exploit the workers that they held and that was it, basically I. Censoring everything and so on and so on, that was great, and it’s said, yeah, that was great and that great sound bite, you know, great.
Speaker Oh yeah. Yeah. So that’s that’s how it.
Speaker Do you know anything? I don’t know whether you could speak to this book about fascism in Hungary when Kafka was growing up in the 20s and 30s.
Speaker Fascism at home in Hungary. Yeah. Cappa hated Horthy, who is who was the fascist premier of Hungary. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he he may have wanted to go in with one of my groups, come to think of it, now that you mention it. Yeah, yeah. He was good but not directly. He was going through the British on it anyhow. I don’t think he got it. Did he get in with the macchi. Did he get in with the partisans and World War Two. Where was he operating.
Speaker He was, he was in Italy, North Africa, Italy.
Speaker And then he was a photographer for Life magazine, as you know. Yeah. OK, so what else?
Speaker Well, just back again to who is Horthy? I mean, I don’t know if you can speak to this.
Speaker Well, there was Horthy, each of the Occupy countries. Croatia, for instance, allied itself directly with the Nazis.
Speaker And.
Speaker It sent the brutal division into fight. With the arrival of my which was the German army in Russia in the Soviet Union. But I don’t know the name of all these puppets that were installed in all these countries later on, they were replaced by puppets from the common term, from the communist side. Unfortunately.
Speaker And and and that’s that’s what I don’t remember their names. Yeah, I know you won’t. Let me tell you the story of Gellhorn and the Benish. What can I tell you?
Speaker Where did that take place? That she left Hemingway flat and she went to Czechoslovakia and she got an interview with Benish. And she asked Benish, are you going to fight? Are you going to resist?
Speaker And he said he said the. It is not clear yet, and she asked them point blank. Did Stalin offer?
Speaker Assistance you if you find. And he said, yes, did you reject it, and he said, yes, we were going to get assistance from England, which never happened. And then he jumped out of a window and killed himself. Good Stalin that said, if you resist, we will aid you all the way.
Speaker Resist against.
Speaker The advance of Naziism, not because not because he was a Sterling Payne person, but this was the gateway to Russia central here, and he said Russia has been invaded. He said, I don’t know how many times through history coming through Central Europe, through the Balkans and so on. And it’s not going to happen this time. But it didn’t happen. And just for the audience who is Finnish, he was the premier of Czechoslovakia at the time.
Speaker Czechoslovakia was a key country because it was pure democracy. It was highly industrialized and very prosperous country. It was probably the best situated. Country in Central Europe.
Speaker And that was it, as a matter of fact, Republican Spain got quite a bit of help. As much of it that could get through from the blockade from Czechoslovakia, that 1993 rifle was replaced by a marvelous Czech mouser at that time and they had a great military industry check. Arms were known all over the world and so forth. So it was the way it was here and it gave it away. Munich gave it away was Chamberlain, who was the premier of England. His line was peace in our time not to fight, but the compromise was the compromises were all in favor of Hitler and Mussolini.
Speaker So when Winston Churchill was incurious about this and they ousted Chamberlain and Churchill came in and Winston Churchill became the premier of.
Speaker England, it changed, but not in regard to Spain everywhere else.
Speaker And Roosevelt could work, even though we were neutral, Roosevelt could work with Churchill. That’s how I became part of the British Special Forces, because while Bill Donovan was the hero, World War One was working was Roosevelt’s man. His contact with the British military and rouge, of course, had other guys working with other aspects of the British Empire.
Speaker That that’s good is everything I want to go back. Now we’re jumping around a lot. I know, but to just to finish off Brunete, we’re talking about the horrors and the violence of Brunete. And I was starting to say that there was a general at Brunete who told Gerta to get out of there. And she didn’t. She wouldn’t. She was according to what was the name of the guy who wrote about it? On camera, there’s a journalist with her, not Kapa. She just wouldn’t leave. She would just she had this movie camera and she would just stand up in the middle of the field and shoot, you know, and I guess what would be good to hear is I don’t know about what would have been going on around Gerta. If you have any thoughts about why she wouldn’t leave.
Speaker And and you have to realize you have to realize that this war, as I told you before, was a passionate war. And I her commitment, I’m sure, to the loyalist side was such that her life she was she would not compromise her commitment in any way in terms of putting her life first.
Speaker And in the work she was doing and this was true of a great many people, so that that was that that’s why at the conclusion I come to honestly and I think Cap understood that very well, Robert. And it was no more than he expected from her or from himself.
Speaker Why do you say from himself, what are some of the evidence you have of his commitment?
Speaker Well, he spent a lot of time at the front with different battalions and with the Spaniard, and he went right, right into the thick of battle in Vietnam where he’s blown up by a mine gave his wife. That was their orientation.
Speaker And I know and I know through.
Speaker Martha Gellhorn, that he was on the Vietnam side, I mean, Viet Cong side.
Speaker Yeah, I told you that, huh? Oh, yeah, so was she. That’s interesting, Nooria. What else did Martin we’re off camera. I’ll tell you something about that. Yeah.
Speaker What else did Martha Gellhorn tell you about Kapa? Did she talk to you a lot about Kapa? No. No, we were. No. So one more question about Brunete when he was killed. I know you didn’t see or anything, but was there a general reaction among the soldiers there about his death, about Greg Curda, about Garner’s death?
Speaker Well, as a lowly soldier at that time, I heard this story. So it must have been widespread, OK, to come down to that level. What else can I tell you? That they were she was his mentor. She introduced him to photography and they were together like this and came to Spain as antifascists.
Speaker And it broke them up when she died, but he kept doing his work. Now, I’m not going to invent anything about what I don’t know.
Speaker No one I was wondering is if if there was a general mourning of Gerta at when she died, people mourned her.
Speaker If they were talking about mourning, we were fighting.
Speaker Well, Heidi, we were fighting. What we do start the battle and have a ceremony is something I don’t even know if they’ve recovered a body yet they did. So I don’t know, maybe up there they had some kind of ceremony, I don’t know. But I didn’t participate in or our group and I didn’t know anybody who did.
Speaker I just met if her death was a special, different kind of loss.
Speaker For whom you want to have a personal reaction? No, because my whole squad died practically, OK, people would die. We had three talented guys who call themselves the Kokomo Chenery Singers, great singers. We love them all.
Speaker And one of them died right over there, right over there, the machine gun was right over there.
Speaker Ernie Arean died right there. If anybody was going to have a ceremony, I would have had him. Wonderful song. So the other guy died in Bel Tuti and the other one died in the April. So they were all wiped out. And his songs with him, their original songs. I don’t think anybody having them.
Speaker Do you remember do you remember any of the songs from the World look to every single one of them.
Speaker You know, you you don’t want me to think because I can’t carry a tune. I don’t. I can’t. I’m off key off here all the time.
Speaker I don’t care. I was the number one listener in my high school class.
Speaker Milton, you sit there and listen to the names of the songs or some of the names of where they sang. Yeah, what were some of the names of the songs you remember?
Speaker I don’t know. Yeah, I.
Speaker We are fighting at times fashions.
Speaker Where members of the International Brigade. And that was repeated a couple of times, and we’ll stay right here until the fascist Tuomas later, stuff like that, you know, or a song they wrote was.
Speaker About the American Council and the board of Bianco’s. You better turn back with the voice of the American Council. But we all know something is something he was only straining his tongue. So, I mean, it’s the kind of thing, you know, like that and I don’t remember him very much. Yeah. And they did a marvelous song. They really sorry.
Speaker They they conjugated the main verb, the Spanish word to music and song was beautiful, but it’s lost and I can’t possibly be repeated and repeated.
Speaker That was nice. That was really nice. Justin. Is the water. Yeah. All right, I’m getting I’m getting close. I just want to make sure I didn’t forget anything. I wanted to ask you if I asked you what Martha Gellhorn, what was she like, Martha Gellhorn as a person? Well, what was she like?
Speaker Passionate.
Speaker Passion, and now she is, if not the first among the first war correspondents, woman war correspondent, and she may have been.
Speaker Well, she’s just a great gal, so I don’t know, and she was beautiful and she had no trouble. Getting what she wanted from generals and stuff like that, going where she wanted to go, what was her marriage with Hemingway like?
Speaker Was it already on the rocks or was it?
Speaker Yeah, she resented being dragged around because Hemingway already had a reputation.
Speaker His books had been a farewell to arms and to the Sun Also Rises and a lot of short stories. Well, I didn’t know him, but other people know him very well. And Martha Gellhorn, if she was known at all, it was on a March seven and he was where whenever wherever he went, she was just standing there while he was doing whatever he was doing. She got fed up with it and went down. And from then on, she was on her own and he couldn’t take that. Of course, after she bought the house, she bought the what the how very call outs again in Key West. How did it come to me on the keyboard, but anyhow, it two strong personalities like that were not meant to to marry each other, both in the same profession as writer. And of course, he was a far superior writer than she is her the best she ever wrote, in my opinion. Was a what do you call an obituary to Freddie Keller, who is very close to Freddie Keller, was a vet, was in the Lincoln Battalion. He was my commissar for a while. And they were very close. And when he died, I asked him to do a few words for him and two pages came back and it was the best writing of us that I ever saw. I’ve got all homeworks in there and they’re very hard to read.
Speaker Have you read the story? She wrote two by two. It’s based on Kapa.
Speaker I probably have written that thing.
Speaker I don’t know, based the character of the main character. Yeah, that should be helpful. It is good. Yeah. Why do you think she and Cappa were such good friends.
Speaker What did they how they could talk to each other. They could talk to each other.
Speaker And.
Speaker As far as math is concerned, to my knowledge.
Speaker She talked about war, mostly about.
Speaker Our children suffered in war, the children in the Vietnam War. She was really. Moved by the plight of the poor Vietnamese children suffering in that war, and of course, Capa photographed children suffering.
Speaker Yeah, yeah. So I think they had a lot in common, a lot in common. She was Jewish. She was Jewish. But you’ve had a lot of common.
Speaker Yeah, just this is a different kind of question. It’s related to what we’re talking about when you look at Cathy’s pictures, we were just you know, I told everybody this is going to take only an hour.
Speaker Yeah, yeah. Can’t say what.
Speaker OK, you look at pictures, you’re just looking at those pictures, Capa’s pictures of war. Are they you know what what strikes you? Are they different from other war pictures? Do they have to speak to you in a different way or in a personal way or.
Speaker Yes, I think I don’t remember photos of the wars. They’re concentrated so much on the rank and file. No, no, the big shots, not only heroes, not on a lot of rain and brass and all that stuff that you see around, but the guys in the trenches. I think that that set him apart and then, of course, others followed on that, as always happened.
Speaker But I think I think that that that was that was his signature with the with the people in the trenches, just like Matthew’s signature with the people in the trenches, so.
Speaker And like that.
Speaker And the other thing that strikes me is how he turned the cameras on so often away from the battlefront to the people, the civilians who are suffering.
Speaker Yeah, yeah. He is always aware of what was going on in there. Yeah.
Speaker And those pictures he of the people on the bombardment in Madrid are extraordinary because what’s not seen there, but you have to know that he was standing there while they were running, taking his photo and they came over and squadrons, you know, up there and just the bombs, they were no smart bombs in those days. And the bombs just came out of there and string’s. And fell where they fell.
Speaker He like you, he was lucky, you know. Yeah, for war, yeah. Yeah, and he seems to have put himself in a terribly well.
Speaker Well, that’s one example of it. OK, you want to march in those women and that kid then with the who had her mother had obviously put a coat on wrong, was she about 10 years old or something like that? Running away, looking for shelter in the city was being bombed.
Speaker And matter of fact, it was the first time when I wasn’t the first time the there was a bombing in London, but it was very effective in World War One. OK, let’s go off that. All right.
Speaker I mean, anything you want to say about, well, the bombing of Greenacre, which Pablo Picasso’s world famous mural is based, was the first bombing, as I understand it this time, as was reported, of an open city. In other words, that city declared itself not military, are no arms and no armed forces or nothing like that. It was up in the Basque country, a different province all there, and it was bombed.
Speaker Why did they bomb? Well, you had you see, everything has a background. Everything has a background.
Speaker What what? Franco and the church, the Roman Catholic Church and the patrons and the landowners did with the election of April 18th, when when the Popular Front, the Republican, the Republicans won with the support of the Popular Front, at which time they overthrew warlords. They gave women all their rights. They did away with the serfdom system in the agricultural field, things of that nature. They reduced the of the role of the army and abolished the monarchy. All those of the old feudal Spain, they liberated feudal Spain. So as a matter of fact, in the day he died, the communists were not Franco’s main enemy, though he used that for propaganda purposes.
Speaker But it was the Republicans who did it, not the American republic. The European Republican who you could compare to left wing Democrats more or less were Right-Wing or moderate Democrat, whatever. And women could vote, women could get divorced, women could share in property, and I know things, you know, no more conscription, no paying money to the monarchy, cetera, et cetera.
Speaker And so so where did that lead to guanaco being bombed?
Speaker Oh, is that you’re you talk about again, but that was great, what you just said was fabulous in terms of well, because he was still in his mind, he was still with the government that had been overthrown. And all these, like the Basque Country, was separatist and Catalonia was a separatist and Madrid was always holding.
Speaker Under the monarchy.
Speaker And the army and the church was the unified Spain, whole Spain in one part, and so this was a lesson to Granik not to be thinking in terms of and of course, it brought the best closer to Madrid than the other way around. So that’s it.
Speaker Now, now, now I’m thinking for Franco, right? I was not in his mind, but that this is what apparently it is.
Speaker Franco Bond, where it was Hitler, the bomb now, Frank, with Hitler’s planes.
Speaker Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. With De Franco. Didn’t have any airforce all planned for Germany. And a lot of the pilots were. German pilot, that’s what that’s what I heard.
Speaker You know, what I read also was that Madrid was really the first civilian city to be really bombed.
Speaker Yeah, but daily. Nightly. Yeah.
Speaker Yeah, yeah. Were you ever in Madrid when it was being bombed?
Speaker I don’t know, I was in Barcelona when they bombed the port, I don’t remember probably I don’t know.
Speaker Now the Russian Santini’s mothe in combat fighter planes. NASA cleared the skies over, they cleared the skies over Madrid.
Speaker Now, there was only in the early days with Madrid being born when the Russian planes appeared on the scene, they drove them off course. The Italian plane, the Fiat, were worthless and the German planes were better. But the Russian planes were better than the German plane at that time. The Stukas and the Yankees.
Speaker When you see those type of pictures of people running in the streets of Madrid while they’re being bombed, it seems like. People had well, I guess you’re right, in the Blitz in England, they’d experienced it, but now we’re so used to that seeing where war is. But I think at that times like what’s happening, no hell is being rained down out of the sky that’s trying to demoralize the population.
Speaker Put pressure on the government to make peace because they were we were operating on a no surrender basis, no compromise, no surrender until 2006 over Madrid with never fell, Madrid never found it was handed over. OK, last question.
Speaker It was a song Lost Battle during a game, a three star general called the Star Campesino Conga Line, Chico, Modesto Sonas, Quatro Battalion, Escape Madrid and stand in the commercial.
Speaker And then on the other side, Kaypro, the Yano, who was a general under Franco, said, We’re going to take Madrid with four battalions. They had four battalion and the 5th Battalion that insiders know were four columns and a fifth column, but inside MacGillivary, that’s where Hemingway’s plane came from, the Fifth Column and where Fifth Column entered the dictionary, as you know, betrayers of people who work inside. The friendly forces to undermine the.
Speaker And that, of course, never happened, never happened.
Speaker You mentioned that that you and Robert Capa were kind of competing for the woman you married.
Speaker That’s what I was told. What can I tell you? These stories go around. I never made any such claim, but that’s what I. Well, he did tell me in my present and to somebody else, he said somebody else said, oh, Campbell was saying he’s going to California. He’s got a girl.
Speaker And somebody else said, oh, woof, woof, woof. That girl had to and Annie and Cap as well. In that case, I don’t have a chance. The same girl.
Speaker Yeah. So this was after World War Two. We were having this conversation somewhere. I don’t know where. I don’t know where. And this Rusev around 47 or something like that, what did your wife say about Cavalcanti?
Speaker I never discussed Kapper with her. I never discussed time because I didn’t marry her into 20 years after I met her.
Speaker So I met her in 47, I was up in Princeton, Callinan’s house, he was a prominent lawyer here who defended Harry Bridges, the leader of the Longshore Union, who is an Australian that the government was trying to deport.
Speaker I say this for your audience, who you say are completely ignorant. So what can I tell you? And I had a Spaniard with me, OK? And we’re raising money. So he would make a speech and I would translate for him. And after it was over, Italians offered this beautiful brunette came up to me, tall, beautiful, blue, and she said to me, that isn’t what he said.
Speaker So what could I say? And I know that is what he said, but that’s what I wanted to say, to collect money. So then she went to Los Angeles with us and our next town. And then we thought she would come in New York and I would come out to.
Speaker California, she’s Spanish.
Speaker She was Spanish, her father was Spanish, and she was completely. What do you call it in Spanish?
Speaker Completely at home in Spanish. So that isn’t what she said. Famous last words that what he said.
Speaker You know, she’s the only one that said no to cover for somebody else.
Speaker I don’t know about those two. You know, when I first met Hemingway and I sat down at the table, they invited me and all these people around and the beautiful Spanish girl, OK, she didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. And I didn’t know what they were talking about because they were I was deaf, mostly deaf. And so I had to make conversation. I turned that. I said, Janice, I’m hungry. And she said, See, Katie, Michael, yo, poor, poor man. Si, he said, and we laughed. OK, so then I’m shacked up with her in a hotel room and every Shipman’s comes in her. I left the door open, I mean unlocked in my haste to say and every shipment comes in. He was supposed he and Hemingway abroad, ambulances to Spain for the republic. He comes in and he wakes me up and he’s saying she’s beautiful, she’s free. He said, you know, you stole Hemingway’s girl. I didn’t know who the hell she was. So that’s all I know about it. Hemingway never, never, never confronted me with never anything. And he was married to Gellhorn. So I don’t know where the hell I saw. But as it made the rounds, he can gain more and more veracity as these things do, you know, by constant repetition.
Speaker OK, this is the last question, unless we were both hungry, that was the problem.
Speaker Yeah, go ahead. Doesn’t sound like a problem.
Speaker What do you think? That Robert Capa was a hero?
Speaker No, I don’t think he was a hero. I think he did his job. And the best way that job could be done. The Richmond. Putting his life on the line, but that doesn’t always make somebody a hero. I don’t know, you might call me here or try with me. I never thought of him as a hero. I never thought of myself as you. So I don’t know.
Speaker I don’t know. I mean, I don’t show those things around loosely for me. They my my my number one character in Spain with Dr. Edward Karpovsky, who is the head of the American Medical Bureau, the nurses and doctors in Orlando and who continue the good fight afterwards, refused to give the names of the people who contributed for the Spanish refugee aid, which he held that went to jail for a year, lost his license for two years to practice. Now, that guy’s a hero.
Speaker That guy’s a hero to me.
Speaker And what what is the value of the legacy that Castro left for, for us?
Speaker Well, I left a legacy of Kappa Kappa for other photographers how it should be done. Never lose sight of the human side of the people, of the people. And it’s not the generals and it’s not the brass where the story is that the story is with the men up in the lines where he put himself.
Speaker And that’s it, that’s far as I know. I know, came up to the Abreau with Hemingway. Like then.
Speaker And.
Speaker I think this session has been longer than the fight I fought in Spain.
Speaker We’re done unless you have anything else you’d like to say about Cappa or anything else we’ve talked about.
Speaker We all love. OK, he was he was a lovable character, he wasn’t a braggart or a poster.
Speaker He did make a big display of what he was doing. He did his job. He was always pleasant company, had stuff like that, as far as I know. And I think he and Berty led the way for Tigresses in the wars that followed.
Speaker And I hope not for the way of future wars, I hope there aren’t any, but there are. There are.
