Narrator: Naked, bleeding, and freezing, two men stumbled onto a Spanish highway at dawn. They were American volunteers, John Gates and George Watt, and they had just swum the icy Ebro River to escape capture and certain execution by Francisco Franco’s advancing forces. Moments later, a car pulled up, and out stepped the journalists Herbert Matthews and Ernest Hemingway. As the survivors shared news of fallen comrades, Hemingway, overwhelmed with rage, shook his fist at the enemy-held riverbank and shouted, "You fascist bastards haven’t won yet! We’ll show you!"

This desperate scene from April 1938 is the opening salvo in Adam Hochschild's Spain in Our Hearts, a book that plunges into the brutal, idealistic, and tragic story of the Spanish Civil War. It reveals how this conflict was not just a local struggle, but the first major battle against international fascism, a brutal prelude to World War II that drew thousands of Americans into its vortex.

Narrator: The Spanish Civil War did not erupt in a vacuum. It was a flashpoint in a world reeling from economic collapse and ideological turmoil. Hochschild shows how the Great Depression shattered faith in capitalism for millions of Americans. In this climate of mass unemployment and social unrest, alternative systems like communism seemed to offer a promising future.

This search for a better world is embodied in the story of Robert Merriman. A tall, handsome, and brilliant economics graduate student at Berkeley, Merriman was a product of the Depression's intellectual ferment. He witnessed the harsh conditions of factory work firsthand and volunteered during the violent San Francisco longshoremen's strike. For him and his wife, Marion, the economic chaos of the West stood in stark contrast to the Soviet Union, which projected an image of a planned economy with full employment. Awarded a fellowship to study in Moscow, Merriman became convinced that fascism was the ultimate enemy of progress and that it had to be stopped. When the war in Spain broke out, his academic interest transformed into a moral imperative. Despite his wife’s desperate pleas to return home and start a family, Merriman made the fateful decision to go to Spain, believing the fight against Franco was the frontline in a global war for humanity's future.

Narrator: When a left-leaning coalition, the Popular Front, won Spain’s democratic elections in 1936, it was immediately met with a violent military coup. Led by General Francisco Franco, the uprising was not just a political maneuver; it was a campaign of annihilation. Hochschild details how Franco’s strategy was built on a policy of limpieza, or "cleansing." This involved the systematic mass execution of anyone who did not think as they did.

General Emilio Mola, a key plotter, explicitly ordered his forces to "spread terror" and eliminate all opposition "without scruples or hesitation." This brutality was not a secret. American journalist John T. Whitaker witnessed the aftermath of the Badajoz massacre, where thousands of Republican sympathizers were herded into a bullring and machine-gunned. When he questioned the commanding general, the officer casually replied, "Of course we shot them... What do you expect?" This terror was enabled by immediate and decisive foreign support. While Western democracies like the U.S. and Britain declared a policy of "non-intervention" that primarily hurt the Republic, Hitler and Mussolini rushed to Franco's aid. They provided the crucial airlift that transported Franco's most brutal troops from Morocco to mainland Spain, effectively turning a domestic coup into an international fascist crusade.

Narrator: While the fight against Franco was the main event, a second, internal war was raging on the Republican side. In regions like Catalonia, the military coup’s failure sparked a sweeping social revolution led by anarchists. For a brief, intoxicating period, a new world seemed possible. American newlyweds Lois and Charles Orr arrived in Barcelona to find a city transformed. Class distinctions vanished, waiters looked you in the eye as equals, and factories and farms were run by the workers themselves. It felt, as Lois wrote, like "a new heaven and a new earth."

However, this utopian experiment was at odds with the goals of the Spanish Communist Party and its backer, the Soviet Union. The Soviets, the Republic’s only major arms supplier, demanded a high price for their aid: political control. They insisted the revolution be suppressed to present a more moderate, "bourgeois" image to the West. This led to a brutal crackdown. Anarchist and other anti-Stalinist leftist groups were targeted, their leaders arrested, tortured, and executed by a Soviet-controlled secret police. The war within a war culminated in violent street fighting in Barcelona, effectively crushing the revolution and leaving a bitter legacy of betrayal and disillusionment among many who had come to Spain to fight for a new world.

Narrator: While the U.S. government maintained its official neutrality, powerful American corporate interests were actively working to ensure a Franco victory. Hochschild uncovers the story of Torkild Rieber, the fiercely anti-communist and pro-fascist CEO of the oil company Texaco. In direct violation of the spirit of the U.S. arms embargo, Rieber supplied Franco’s forces with all the oil they needed, extending millions of dollars in credit.

But Rieber’s support went far beyond simple sales. Hochschild reveals that Texaco established a covert international intelligence network for the Nationalists. Texaco agents in ports around the world would report the movements of oil tankers bound for the Spanish Republic. This information was funneled to Franco’s navy, which then intercepted and destroyed the Republican tankers. This corporate espionage was devastating, starving the Republic of the fuel it needed to run its tanks, planes, and trucks. It was a hidden war, waged from corporate boardrooms, that had a decisive impact on the battlefield, demonstrating how private greed could subvert national policy and fuel a fascist war machine.

Narrator: The Spanish Civil War is often called a "dress rehearsal" for World War II, and Hochschild provides chilling evidence of this. The conflict became a laboratory for Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to test new weapons and tactics, most infamously the use of terror bombing against civilian populations. The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in 1937 was a watershed moment. German and Italian planes systematically reduced the city to rubble, strafing civilians as they fled.

The Nationalists and their allies tried to cover up the atrocity, claiming the Basques had burned their own city. But brave journalists like Virginia Cowles, reporting from the Nationalist side, exposed the lie. In a stunning moment of candor, a Nationalist officer admitted to her, "Of course, it was bombed. We bombed it and bombed it and bombed it, and bueno, why not?" The destruction of Guernica, immortalized by Picasso’s masterpiece, sent a shockwave across the world. It was a horrifying preview of the total war that would soon engulf London, Dresden, and Hiroshima, proving that in Spain, the future of modern warfare had arrived.

Narrator: Ultimately, Spain in Our Hearts reveals that the Spanish Civil War was far more than a civil conflict; it was the great moral and political battle of the 1930s. It was a war where idealism collided with brutal reality, where democratic hopes were crushed by international indifference and fascist aggression, and where a generation of volunteers learned, as the writer Albert Camus put it, "that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, and that there are times when courage is not rewarded."

The book’s most powerful takeaway is its exploration of this tragic lesson. The American volunteers and their allies lost the war, and fascism was not stopped in Spain. Yet, their struggle raises a timeless and challenging question: what is the right thing to do when faced with overwhelming injustice? Even in defeat, the story of those who put their lives on the line for a cause they believed in serves as a potent reminder that some fights are worth fighting, not because victory is certain, but because the alternative is to stand by and do nothing.