On January 11, 1937, Robert Merriman crossed into Spain by train and began the journey of his lifetime. The first few diary pages are from his impressions of Barcelona and Valencia as he moved southward to the Albacete training base of the International Brigades.

His traveling partner was Milly Bennett (Mildred Mitchell) who he joined up with in Paris.  Mildred was writing for a Russian newspaper at the time, but had been a reporter with the Daily News in San Francisco with wild experiences in China in the 1921.  Her own exploits were written up in a book “On Her Own: Journalistic Adventures from San Francisco to the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1927.”   Milly Bennett had been in China with Wilbur Burton, brother of another Lincoln Vet Wallace Burton, and they were in Spain, her as a reporter and Wallace to fight.  More on Wallace Burton later in the year.

Peter Carroll¹ describes their meeting in Paris:

“When Millie Bennett, correspondent for the Moscow News, entered Brentano’s bookshop on the rue Operá in Paris in early January 1937 in search of a Spanish dictionary, she was surprised to see her old Moscow drinking buddy, Robert Merriman, snatching books about Spain by the fistful…. Soon the two Californians were charging around Paris to buy a revolver, cartridges, and (with memories of the World War) gas masks to fit over their horn rimmed glasses”

The sentence starting the Diary was “From Paris with Milly Mitchell unusual united front” meaning that the two of them made an unusual united front.   We have been unable to decipher who “A.E., A.W” were.

As an example of the excitement that Merriman had for his experience in Barcelona, in the earlier diary pages from January 1 to 11, he had taken notes of the posters he had seen.  Here are two pages:

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¹ Peter Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, Stanford University Press, 1994.

Robert Hale Merriman was born in Humboldt, California, on November 17, 1908 to Henry and Faye Merriman.  Henry was reported in some histories to be a lumberjack but by 1920 he was living in Santa Clara, California, and working as a vulcanizer of tires in San Francisco, a profession he kept until at least the 1940s.  Henry and Faye moved to Los Angeles during the Depression and settled in Mojave, California in the late 1930s. As we progress with Robert’s history,  we will see a letter from Faye (“Mother”) to Robert later in 1937.

Robert Merriman was to become the Commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain, then head of the training unit at Albacete, Spain, and subsequently Chief of Staff of the XVth Brigade, which encompassed most of the English-speaking units of the International Brigades.  His diary is a chronicle of the development of the Brigade over the period from January to November 1937. By studying it, we learn quite a bit about the actions of the Brigade on a day-to-day basis.

In 1931, Bob Merriman was  a cadet officer at the University of Nevada at Reno,  graduating from the University on May 9, 1932.   His biography at the Abraham Lincoln Brigades Archives (ALBA) states that he married Marion Stone on his graduation day.  Marion appears frequently in his diary (she is mentioned often in the diary so we will discuss Marion in more detail as the year progresses).

Bob Merriman attended the University of California at Berkeley as a graduate student,  but according to some biographies he was also a professor.  The evidence, however,  indicates that he had teaching duties at Berkeley as an assistant instructor the Economics Department, but it is not clear that he earned an advanced degree.

By January 1935, Robert and Marion left the U.S. on a Newton-Booth Traveling Fellowship in Economics¹ and traveled to Moscow where it was widely believed by his critics that he attended the Lenin School.  Rolfe², Eby³ and Barry McLoughlin⁴ contradict this view and state that Merriman was in Moscow to study agricultural economics.  Comintern documents say that Merriman was never a member of the Communist Party but as we will see in the diary, this seems improbable.  It was from Moscow that they would go to Spain in 1937 when the need arose for Internationals to fight in Spain.   In Paris in January 1937, Robert met up with Milly Bennett (Mildred Mitchell), a reporter, and they travelled to Spain together.  He told Bennett he was going to study collective farming.

Milly Bennett’s papers are in the Hoover Archives at Stanford University and she recalls the meeting:

I was poking through the books at Brentano’s {in Paris}, looking for a good, short history of Spain, when I saw Bob Merriman, snatching books from the shelves by the fistful with his hamlike hands.  Good old Bob from Moscow!  I yelled.  He yelled.  We fell into each other’s arms.  What was I doing in Paris.  Why wasn’t I in New York where I’d started last month?  What was he doing in Paris?  Why wasn’t he in Moscow cramming his economics?

“I’ve got a job covering the Spanish war.  I leave tonight”

“Wait for me,” Bob said, “wait until tomorrow and I’ll go with you.”

“You!  What does Marion (his wife) say?  You’ll get killed.  The foreign brigades are the shock troops.  They have the biggest casualties.” (Twenty thousand French volunteers, hundreds of Slav, German,  Italian political emigres had gone to Spain shortly after the outbreak of the war, July 18, 1936 and their ranks had been decimated.)

Bob said he expected to do some work on the new collective farms, but he didn’t look me in the eye when he said it.

“Nonsense.  I was in Spain last month and cruised all over the place with that human dynamo Anna Louise Strong.  What few collectives there are don’t need your advice.”

He said, alright, I am going to Spain to fight, but nothing I could say would change his mind.  If Marion couldn’t, how could I.  He’d had ROTC training at the University of Nevada and knew a little about machine-guns and he’d like to try it out fighting fascism.⁴

Milly would go on to tell her friends in a letter that she and Bob went to a Department store and were able to buy gas masks “which would fit over our hornrimmed glasses”, ammunition and Merriman bought himself a pistol.
According to this journal entry,  Robert entered Spain, via train,  on January 11, 1937. We will start Robert’s diary on January 11, 2014,  to follow his career in Spain.

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¹ Arthur Landis, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Citadel Press, 1967.

² Edwin Rolfe, The Lincoln Battalion, Random House, 1939.

³ Cecil Eby, Comrades and Commissars, Pennsylvania University Press, 2007.

⁴ Barry McLoughlin, Fighting for Republican Spain, Lulu.com, ISBN 9781291968392

⁵ Mildred Bennett, unpublished story, Mildred Bennett Archives (in file: carbons, drafts, notes Spain 1937), Hoover Institution Archives, Palo Alto CA

As we can see from the diary, Merriman remained in Barcelona until his train left for Valencia on the afternoon of the 13th.  Yellow notations in the text indicate words that still need research (confusion on the spelling of names and places).   The one marked Secord is believed to be his spelling of the name of American Volunteer Douglas Seacord but it would need confirmation that Seacord was in Barcelona at that time.

As a bit of background for those who don’t know the timeline of the war, between 13 and 16 July 1936, a number of Generals of the Spanish Army, including General Emilio Mola Vidal and Francisco Franco organized the Spanish Foreign Legion in Morocco to lead an “invasion” of Spain.  We cannot reproduce that history here but there are many excellent books on this uprising against the elected Republican Government of Spain.  We can recommend Hugh Thomas¹ , Anthony Beevor², and Paul Preston³ as three additional sources of the background and history of the war (we will be building up a reading list as we go along).  Preston’s book is particularly good to understand the major leaders of the Second Republic as well as the “forces of the invasion” as the Spanish called the Fascists. By late fall, International units from all over Europe had been mobilized to help the endangered Republic.  By November 1936, Franco had built two assaults on Madrid, one from the south and the other from the north by way of the Asturian coast.  The division of Spain is seen in a map from Thomas’ book.

Madrid held in November 1936 with the mobilization of the Madrileños, fortifications on the west of Madrid and a major battle at University city in the northern suburbs.  Famous in IB history was the arrival of the German Thaelman Battalion to help.  The first group of 96 Americans to travel to Spain left New York the day after Christmas in 1936.  Douglas Seacord was one of that group.   “C.H.” and “Liston Oak” were baffling.  Alan Warren explained Liston Oak in a comment attached to this post.

Merriman talks of the bombing of a hospital in Barcelona in January with 10 dead.  We have yet to find the details of that event but there is an article by Laia Balcells in Reis from October-December 2011 (reference included in pdf) which describes the air war on Catalonia by the Franquistas.  La Vanguardia now allows access to their archive and we could find no record of a bombing of a ship in the harbor killing 10 people in that week’s papers.  There was a torpedo attack on the Ciudad de Barcelona reported on January 10 (it survived this attack) and the bombing of the English Embassy on January 15.

 

 

Merriman also speaks of meeting Tom Wintringham, a commander of the British Battalion.  Wintringham is shown below and his book⁴ describes his exploits in Spain.   We will come across him several times in the next six months.

And thanks to Chris Brooks’ comment where he points out that Kitty B.  is Kitty Bowler and Chris provided a link to her story with Wintringham.

¹ Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, Harper, New York, 1961

² Anthony Beevor, The Battle for Spain, Orbis Publishing, London, 2006

³ Paul Preston,  ¡Comrades! Portraits from the Spanish Civil War. London, UK: HarperCollins, 1999.

⁴  Tom Wintringham, English Captain, Faber, 1939