The Spanish Company, Churchill's 1,200 Spanish Republicans against Nazism

The British historian Séan F. Scullion rescues from oblivion the Spanish Company , "more than 1,200 Spanish republicans , many of them anarchists, who participated under the command of Winston Churchill in the British Army", buried under oblivion by Spain and the United Kingdom for a long time.

In an interview, Scullion, a historian and career soldier , clarifies that "none of them were linked to the International Brigades," military units of foreign volunteers who fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), but at the end of the war they went to France and decided to fight for freedom, against Nazism.

Scullion, who speaks perfect Spanish, regrets that the popularity of the Ninth, the division of Spanish Republicans that participated in the liberation of Paris with the French General Leclerc, has overshadowed the courage of Churchill's Spanish soldiers, who "between 1939 and 1945 were in Dunkirk, Normandy, Germany, Italy, France, Crete, the Middle East, and North Africa."

"It's important to talk about these men, because otherwise we'll lose them from our memory ," says Scullion, who spent nine years consulting archives and interviewing more than 90 Anglo-Spanish families descended from those 1,200 Republicans.

The pattern of their involvement is usually similar in all of them: "They went into exile in 1939, passed through internment camps in France and North Africa, many enlisted in the French Army, in foreign labor companies, in volunteer regiments, but with the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940, many decided to continue fighting and enlisted as volunteers in the British Army ."

Scullion has just published Spaniards Against Nazism in Spain, which, based on his research, includes a list of all those enlisted in the British Army , with their regimental number, place of enlistment, unit, entry into service, and discharge. Half a thousand decided to remain in the British Isles.

The last of those Republicans, the author recalls, died recently at the age of 103, but "most of them died in the 1990s."

Another common sentiment, Scullion was able to gather, is that " everyone experienced a fair amount of disillusionment after 1945 at seeing that Britain and the Allies had not ousted Franco from power," as evidenced by photographs from the archive of one of them, Agustín Roa Ventura, of demonstrations in Trafalgar Square in the 1960s.

Shortly before the death of dictator Francisco Franco in October 1975, members of the Association of Spanish Veterans gathered in Whitehall, London, to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph, the memorial to the fallen. Among them was Luis Portillo, the father of Michael Portillo, who later became British Prime Minister.

According to the author's research, Spanish participation in the British Army began in 1940 with the First Spanish Company , and continued with the commandos within the Special Operations Directorate (SOE), which was a part of the British secret services that were to be inserted into the Iberian Peninsula in the event of a German invasion.

Others were in the so-called 'sconces' , enlisting from Gibraltar or joining British troops in the Middle East, and more than 700 joined the British Army as sappers, starting in North Africa and continuing in Italy or the Battle of the Bulge.

" Their role spanned the entire geography ; they fought in North Africa, in Crete, were in the invasion of Italy, in the Normandy landings and some even reached Berlin in July 1945, and even after the end of the war two Spanish SAS (Special Air Service) were sent to Norway to disarm the Germans who were there," Scullion recounts.