Mine Were of Trouble: A Nationalist Account of the Spanish Civil War

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Our style is clean. Our procedures are different from theirs. They shoot, they torture, they exterminate. We, because we are Christians and gentlemen, know how to fight”.

Mine Were of Trouble (Peter Kemp) April 12, 2020 Mine Were of Trouble (Peter Kemp) April 12, 2020

After the war (spoiler alert: Nationalists won), the author ended up working for the British SOE in Europe, incidentally acting against the Nationalist's former allies. Probably a warmer reception by the British Government than many would receive, and a sign of the enemy of one's enemy often still being entirely horrible. This was the cause of “Christian civilisation” for which Francoists claimed to be fighting, and for which they overwhelmingly received the Church’s blessing. A Jesuit chaplain in the Legion, Fernando Huidobro Polanco, explained it thus:The book’s penultimate adventure details a nearly-fatal wound Kemp received toward the end of the war. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t go into detail, but it’s some of the grisliest descriptions of its kind I’ve read in recent memory. Kemp’s dry commentary makes the ordeal seem all the more horrifying, despite assurances that—obviously—it wasn’t fatal, as he survived to not only write this book, but even to serve as a British commando during the Second World War. Soft cover. Condition: New. Peter Kemp War Trilogy - VOL. #1 Mine Were of Trouble: A Nationalist Account of the Spanish Civil War; VOL. #2 Alms for Oblivion: Sunset on the Pacific War: VOL. #3 No Colours or Crest: The Secret Struggle for Europe. Kemp, taking the place of an Alferéz, describes the perks of everyday anecdotes compellingly enough for the non-war literature enthusiast. He brings to light a side of this war which is still considered, to this day, "unfashionable", although he makes it very clear why he found imperative to join the Nationalist side. Yet he also kept an impartial view on the abuses he saw. The actual war itself was, like many civil wars, incredibly dirty. Summary executions of many classes of combatants were standard (of all non-Spaniards by the Nationalists, and of most prisoners by the Republicans), and there was harsh discipline (execution for any insubordination) on the Nationalist side, and outright crime (rape, murder of civilians) on the Republican side. From Kemp and Orwell’s book it can be seen why the Nationalists won. Orwell writes extensively about the infighting between the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) and other factions, some controlled by the USSR. Kemp has a little of this, but part of the reorganisations, at least according to him were more about improving the fighting forces.

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Kemp has a substantial amount about atrocities. Kemp believes that the Republic were worse and has numerous examples of where his troops went into villages where people had been executed. The treatment of POWs is also horrid. The foreign volunteers on either side if captured were generally executed. One of the striking aspects of the book is just how much better the International Brigades (i.e. international communism) was at media and international recruiting than the Nationalists. The Nationalists had some limited support from Germany and Italy (mainly to test weapons), but fairly limited organic support by international individuals, and almost none from Anglo-American sphere (and this little written in English). This included stupidly not supporting press visits (they were all viewed as spies by the Nationalists), ensuring they were covered badly (either ignored or made to appear evil). Thousands of foreigners, too, join the struggle. Most fight with the Soviet-sponsored International Brigades or other militias aligned with the loyalist “Republicans”. Only a few side with the rebel “Nationalists”. One of these rare volunteers for the Nationalists was Peter Kemp, a young British law student. Kemp, despite having little training or command of the Spanish language, was moved by the Nationalist struggle against international Communism. Using forged documents, he sneaked into Spain and joined a traditionalist militia, the Requetés, with which he saw intense fighting. Later, he volunteered to join the legendary and ruthless Spanish Foreign Legion, where he distinguished himself with heroism. Because of this bravery, he was one of the few foreign volunteers granted a private audience with Generalissimo Francisco Franco.The Reds had perpetrated appalling crimes in Spain, as I should soon find out for myself. This theme, most of which accorded with my own views, was one which I was to hear repeated constantly and with rising vehemence by all kinds and classes of Spaniards during the next two and a half years.” I do have a couple of suggestions for readers who decide to take up this book. Kemp is living in a big, complicated war but experiencing it at very fine grain, while its vast spaces and the sweep of its history inhabit, you might say, the air above him. He knows this and works to fill in the blanks with passages describing what was happening in the Big Picture, but a general history taken in, perhaps, before this book, will give a good grounding to the reader. I recommend Antony Beevor’s “The Spanish Civil War,” which is very, very complete. We also get an inside look at the realities of the Spanish Civil War. The sense we get is that the Nationalists had substantial popular support among peasants and villages. This undoubtedly reflects that Kemp was on the winning Nationalist side and the villages captured by the Nationalists would hardly have indicated support for the Republic. However, Kemp's description of the starving and cowed village people suggests that the Republicans were not winning the hearts and minds of the Catholic peasants.

Mine Were of Trouble by Peter Kemp | Goodreads

This is a very readable and important book. It is practically the only account we have of the Spanish Civil War told by an Englishman who was fighting on the Nationalist/Fascist rather than the Loyalist/Republican side. It serves as a mirror-image of George Orwell's A HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, and gives a fascinating and curiously even-handed account of the war. There is bias, of course, but the author tries hard to be fair and critical, and succeeds, I think, more than Orwell did in seeing a certain amount of virtue as well as a certain amount of villainy in both sides. Thank you for the response. I think Father Vicente toes that line you mention quite Jesuitically. I’m sure his apparent callousness is explicable by him hearing about (or even witnessing) atrocities committed by Republicans against clergymen all over Spain.He [Franco] had always admired the English, he said, especially their system of education with its emphasis on self-discipline, breeding the spirit of adventure that had made so small a country the ruler of so great an empire.” The Nationalists had their own International Brigades in the form of the many thousands of foreigners who came to support Franco’s cause. Most ended up in the Spanish Foreign Legion, among them the Cambridge-educated conservative Peter Kemp. Motivated to take part by a fierce hatred of communism, he saw sharp end of the Civil War and had most of his teeth smashed out by a mortar shell at the Ebro but never lost faith in the rightness of Franco’s cause. Years later he wrote this, recently republished, memoir of the war that is equally vivid and disturbing, never more so… Many of these men didn’t make it home. Kemp’s illustration of how suddenly a man’s life ends is carried by his dryly English commentary in a number of places. His meetings and friendships with Nationalist co-sympathizers tend not to last, as reassignments shuffle the soldiers all over the country. Apparently having done the legwork after the war, Kemp notes—with some forced detachment—on whatever engagements some of these friends were involved with after their parting, and often how they died. This is a most unusual book. It recounts the experiences of Peter Kemp, a young British man who like many went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to fight for civilization. While there are probably many similar books - George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" was one such book - Kemp's book is different in that he decides to fight on the side of the Nationalists, i.e., the "fascists."