Sources
Spanish Inferno
Sunday Independent, June 26th 1960
15th Bandera leave a town of menace
The saga of the Irishmen in the war in Spain continues. They fought � and some of them died � knowing that they could not expect any of the honours which armies bestow on the brave. For the men of the 15th Bandera there were no medals, no war correspondents told of how they lived or how they died. In letters in which they wrote home, a little was told. �but not all. This is the story of their occupation of the hills above La Maronosa�
Back in Ciempozuelos the Irish of the 15th Bandera felt once more the eerie atmosphere of that shell battered town. Almost all the young men form Ireland found that in Ciempozuelos one jumped suddenly for no apparent reason, then looked over one�s shoulder as if in expectation of encountering some nameless menace. It was a town they were glad to leave.
That inexplicable feeling of living in a town of ghosts oppressed them. It may have been the sights they saw when they first entered it. Some of them remembered the monastery � a Franciscan foundation, they thought.
In the courtyard of the monastery there was a deep well. At the bottom of the well there were bodies, perhaps those of the murdered priests. It may have been the unspeakable tortures inflicted on the hapless inhabitants.
Tortured
They remembered the story of the doctor who had been tortured on his own table in his own operating theatre. The story of how the fingernails had been torn from him, how his eyes had been put out, and he had been allowed to run screaming through the streets of Ciempozuelos while Red officers used him as pistol target practice until he crumpled in merciful death.
Refit
Whatever the reason, the men of the 15th Bandera were glad to get away from Ciempozuelos. They spent two weeks refitting after their assault on the Jarama. They noted with some satisfaction that the Franco command had sent 1,500 fresh troops to hold the line which the 15th Bandera of 700 men had held for weary months in appalling weather.
Rumours
At the end of their third week after the attack the happy rumour spread that the Bandera was to be sent to the Canary Islands. A further elaboration was that they would not be ordered to the front line for many weeks. That rumour sounded good to men who had not taken off their clothes to sleep for at least two months.
They greeted the lorries that came to Ciempozuelos towards the beginning of Spring 1937 with cheers. They were still cheering as they moved form that town where the shadow of death hovered daily. For hours they rumbled through the Spanish countryside from which all signposts had been removed. Towards the end of a long days travelling they came to a crossroads where a single direction post stood. The sign said �Madrid.�
So they weren�t going to the Canary Islands at after all. They were bound, instead, for the Madrid front. They had scarcely travelled for another hour when the thudding of artillery in the distance told them that there was more fighting ahead of them.
Hilltops
It was near nightfall and after a long, tiring haul over ground which became steeper and steeper with every mile that they came to what was once the village of La Maronosa. Once it must have been a pretty little place of about a dozen houses. Nearby was a sugar factory in which most of the inhabitants worked.
Now the cottages were in ruins and the factory was a heap of rubble. The inhabitants had fled. On the ruins lived nomad Moors who were even then probing the ruins for buried wine or household valuables which the villagers of La Maronosa might have hidden before they took flight.
From La Maronosa the Bandera of weary Irishmen marched for an hour and a half, moving up corkscrew roads, higher and higher until at last they came to the position which they were to occupy for many weeks to come. When dawn came they moved cautiously to the highest point in the sector, marked on their maps as Sierra Artelleria.
And from there they could plainly see the big skyscraper of the general post office in Madrid. They could also see that they were back in the thick of the fighting. Their positions, which they immediately began to improve and to strengthen, were on the floor of a valley in the hills.
To their left on higher ground were the Requetes, the volunteer force which wore a red beret. To their right, and again on rising ground, was a battalion of regular Spanish troops.
The positions above the village of La Maronosa were shelled regularly and viciously by the Red gunners. Constant shellfire was to be the lot of the Irishmen during their stay in the hills within sight of the Spanish capital.
Trickle
Through the valley held by the Irish Bandera ran a narrow river. It was the Jarama they knew so well. The Irishmen thought it a very small river indeed to have such a well-known name. For already it was a mere trickle in comparison to the torrent t had been in winter. And across the river were the Red Government forces.
It was at this point that the Irish built a dugout chapel for Father Alonzo, Chaplain to the Requetes, who also became chaplain to the 15th Bandera. When the Irishmen had finished work on their dugout chapel they thought of decorating the altar.
Close to the edge of the river there grew flowers of red and deep purple. They were the only flowers in the entire region. The 15th Bandera wanted those flowers for the altar.
Those flowers were the start of a story which ahs become legendary whenever the Spanish Requetes recall their comradeship with the Irishmen. On the evening on which the dugout chapel was completed a lines of Irishmen lay along the rim of the valley overlooking the river and the flowers.
Barrage
While they stood ready to provide covering fire, three volunteers wriggled to the river�s edge on the strangest mission ever undertaken by soldiers � to pick flowers under enemy fire. They returned, each with a bunch of red and purple flowers for the ledge in the dugout which was their altar.
Day after day the shelling continued. Day after day the Irish kept their heads down in the trenches which they contrived to make deeper and stronger every night. Nighttime was a time of patrols, the time to occupy advanced points far down in the valley and close to the river.
Tanks
On a little mound there was such an advance post. At night it was a machine gun nest and to give it protection a small group of Irishmen had to wriggle towards it every night and wriggle back before dawn light came.
Sergt. Maurice Cadell and Sergt. Sean Clarke did it many times, usually with Volunteer Austin Hamill, from Monaghan. On the far side of the river they could see the shapes of eight tanks which would have no difficulty in getting across the river at that point.
Those nights spent out there alone were nerve racking as patrol met patrol in the inky darkness or tracer bullets suddenly cut swathes of light, carrying death behind each flicker of phosphorus.
Rationed
As Spring advanced the hot sun of the Spanish plateau began to torture the Irishmen. At night they froze in bitter cold. For them water became precious. All that they used had to be brought by lorry in barrels or in goatskins from La Maronosa. Oftentimes the road to their position was so heavily shelled that the water and ration transport could not make the journey. In one week they were three days without water. Those were days in which every two men were issued with sufficient water to fill the lid of a boot polish tin for shaving.
Shot at
But it was not the fault of Capt. Finnerty at La Maronosa or of Quartermaster Willy McGrath, of Tipperary, or of Vol. Sean Stewart, of Dublin, who were mostly on this hazardous work, that supplies did not get through.
Not only did they have to contend with raking shellfire from the Reds, but their own guns often shot short. As John Lonergan, of Glenconnor, Clonmel, wryly remarked: �It�s bad enough to be shot at by the Reds but when your own side take pot shots at you it�s time to look out!�
Shell-wise
By this time every man in the Bandera knew exactly when a shell was likely to explode in his vicinity and when it was likely to burst many hundreds of yards in front or behind. Sean O�Reilly, of Ballysheen, Killinick, Co. Wexford, remembers the terrible shambles he saw when a shell exploded among a group of six Requetes. �It was a terrible sight,� he recalls, �one that I shall never forget.�
While the sun beat mercilessly down upon them, the Irishmen talked of the cool, clear spring wells of Ireland and longed for just one glass of water that was not brown or brackish, or green with moss-stain.
Near Miss
There was an evening when Tom Hudson, from Longford, and the two Hoban brothers from Clare, were crouching in a dugout as the red artillery opened up a particularly vicious duel with the Franco guns. Tom Hudson heard the whistle of an approaching shell. He said; �That one�s going a long way over.� He heard the second and the third. But there was no sound of a fourth. And he knew there must be a fourth. All of them became aware of one instant of ominous silence, that silence could mean sudden death. It nearly did.
With a sudden scream, the fourth shell burst a yard wide of their dugout entrance. All of the occupants were thrown against the walls and earth and stones rained down from the roof. In these conditions the number of shell-shock cases began to increase. Wounds from flying splinters began to mount in number.
On one occasion in 22 minutes 56 shells exploded on a short line of trenches held by the Irish. It could not be said that the Reds were ever short of ammunition. Behind the front at La Maronosa there was a battery of anti-aircraft guns. It was manned by a youthful German group in charge of an officer called von Thoma.
That officer was to become one of Rommel�s chief military advisors in the desert during World War 2. But even in 1937 he was preaching to anyone who would listen that anti-aircraft guns were splendid weapons to use against tanks. It was a theory which he did not put into practice until Rommell gave him scope to do it with the Afrika Corps.
Reunion
In that battery was a young German soldier named Joacim Shrodter, from Berlin. He became friendly with Sean Clarke, of Dublin. After both had returned home they corresponded frequently. Then came the World war and all letters ceased.
Last week Sean Clarke in his office in St. Kevin�s Hospital received a letter from Joacim. It told how he had come unscathed through the German campaign in Russia. And this summer, he added, he hopes to come to Dublin to met Sean Clarke once more.
For eight weeks the Irish held their position above La Maronosa, and with the passing of each day the fire of the Reds seemed to grow in fury. Among men who had become accustomed to sudden death, whose lives were in danger every minute of every day, there are some who will say that one of the most contemptuous of danger and the toughest soldier of them all was Paddy Fox of Athenry.
Sometimes he did long spells of sentry � so to relive men who were so weak of dysentery that they could hardly move. Sometimes he volunteered for listening-post duty. In what would be his free time he helped with the cooking.
Depleted
From the hills above La Maronosa Fred Aherne, from Blackboy Pike, Limerick, wrote home: �It is inevitable that the strength of the Bandera should be depleted because of wounds, sickness and strange food. These things mean extra duty for those who are left and the strain has had ill effects on all of us here.
�If we had another Bandera we could get some relief from duty in the trenches. It would give us a chance to recuperate and we would be ready for duty in a few days.�
Lieut. Michael Cagney, of Cork, wrote of similar conditions and added: �If some of the people who doubt the motives of the Brigade would come to Spain they would see for themselves the ravages of Communism in action.�
Defiled
Jeremiah O�Neill, from Cahircivenn, wrote that there was no doubt that the war in Spain was a religious war. In explanation for their determination to man the lines at La Maronosa he wrote: �I have seen what the Reds did to several churches. In all of them the altars were defiled and smashed to fragments.�
To all these men cramped in their shelters in the red earth of that part of Spain there was one consolation. In Ireland they had a friend in Miss Gertrude Gaffney of the Irish Independent.
Grateful
Since she had visited the Brigade in their training quarters at Caceres she had done wonderful work in encouraging the despatch of gift parcels to the men of the Irish Bandera.
Miss Gaffney, like many of those whom she helped in Spain, has died. Those who are survivors remember her with gratitude. For General O�Duffy who was constantly with his men, the fighting at La Maronosa brought many problems.
Serious
These were the thoughts he put into writing to a friend at home: �Without a reserve, to any hope of a reserve, it is a very serious responsibility for a commander to order men into action in modern warfare where one or two actions might result in the annihilation of a little band of men like this which constitute the Irish Brigade.�
Sunday Independent, July 3rd 1960.
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