Cecil D. Eby's Books

Comrades and Commissars

The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War

By: Cecil D. Eby

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Comrades and Commissars

The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War

By: Cecil D. Eby

In the summer of 1936, Generalissimo Francisco Franco led a group of right-wing nationalists in a military attack on the Republican government of Spain&—the start of what would become the Spanish Civil War. Despite U.S. laws banning participation in foreign conflicts, American volunteers began pouring into Barcelona in January 1937. The most famous of these anti-Franco groups was the band of 2,800 American fighters who called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. In Comrades and Commissars, Cecil D. Eby pushes beyond the bias that has dominated study of the Lincoln Battalion and gets to the very heart of the American experience in Spain. Controversy has plagued the Lincoln Battalion from the very start. Were these men selfless defenders of liberty or un-American Communists? Eby has long been regarded as one of the few balanced interpreters of their history. His 1969 book, Between the Bullet and the Lie, won accolades for its rigorous and fair treatment of the Battalion. Comrades and Commissars builds upon that earlier study, incorporating a wealth of information collected over intervening decades. New oral histories, previously untranslated memoirs, and newly declassified official documents all lend even greater authority and perspective to Eby&’s account. Most significant is Eby&’s use of Lincoln Battalion archives sequestered in a Moscow storeroom for sixty years. These papers draw renewed focus on some of the most provocative questions surrounding the Battalion, including the extent to which Americans were persecuted&—and even executed&—by the brigade commissariat. The Americans who served in the Lincoln Battalion were neither mythic figures nor political abstractions. Poorly trained and equipped, they committed themselves to back-to-the-wall defense of the doomed Spanish Republic. In Comrades and Commissars, we at last have the authoritative account of their experiences.

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Page Count

528

Publisher

Penn State Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0271029102

ISBN 13

9780271029108

The Road to Armageddon

The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870-1914

By: Cecil D. Eby

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The Road to Armageddon

The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870-1914

By: Cecil D. Eby

The Lost Generation has held the imagination of those who succeeded them, partly because the idea that modern war could be romantic, generous, and noble died with the casualties of that war. From this remove, it seems almost perverse that Britons, Germans, and Frenchmen of every social class eagerly rushed to the fields of Flanders and to misery and death. In The Road to Armageddon Cecil Eby shows how the widely admired writers of English popular fiction and poetry contributed, at least in England, to a romantic militarism coupled with xenophobia that helped create the climate that made World War I seem almost inevitable. Between the close of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the opening guns of 1914, the works of such widely read and admired writers as H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, and Rupert Brooke, as well as a host of now almost forgotten contemporaries, bombarded their avid readers with strident warnings of imminent invasions and prophecies of the collapse of civilization under barbarian onslaught and internal moral collapse. Eby seems these narratives as growing from and in turn fueling a collective neurosis in which dread of coming war coexisted with an almost loving infatuation with it. The author presents a vivid panorama of a militant mileau in which warfare on a scale hitherto unimaginable was largely coaxed into being by works of literary imagination. The role of covert propaganda, concealed in seemingly harmless literary texts, is memorably illustrated.

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Page Count

308

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822307758

ISBN 13

9780822307754

Hungary at War

Civilians and Soldiers in World War II

By: Cecil D. Eby

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Hungary at War

Civilians and Soldiers in World War II

By: Cecil D. Eby

In Hungary at War, Cecil Eby has compiled a historical chronicle of Hungary&’s wartime experiences based on interviews with nearly one hundred people who lived through those years. Here are officers and common soldiers, Jewish survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, pilots of the Royal Hungarian Air Force, Hungarian prisoners of war in Russian labor camps, and a host of others. We meet the apologists for the Horthy regime installed by Hitler and the activists who sought to overthrow it, and we relive the Red Army&’s siege of Budapest during the harsh winter of 1944&–45 through the memories of ordinary citizens trapped there. Most of the accounts shared here have never been told to anyone outside the subjects&’ families. We learn of a woman, Ilona Jo&ó, who survived in a cellar while German and Russian armies used her house and garden as a battleground, and of the remarkable Mer&ényi sisters, who trekked home to Budapest after being freed from Bergen-Belsen. Eby has also included a rare interview with a former member of the Arrow Cross, Hungary&’s fascist party, that sheds new light on its leadership. From these personal accounts, Eby draws readers into the larger themes of the tragedy of war and the consequences of individual actions in moments of crisis. Skillfully integrating oral testimony with historical exposition, Hungary at War reveals the knot of ideological, economic, and ethnic attachments that entangled the lives of so many Hungarians. The result is an absorbing narrative that is a fitting testament to a nation buffeted by external forces beyond its capacity to control.

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Page Count

342

Publisher

Penn State Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0271040882

ISBN 13

9780271040882

Comrades and Commissars

The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War

By: Cecil D. Eby

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Comrades and Commissars

The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War

By: Cecil D. Eby

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

528

Publisher

Penn State Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0271029102

ISBN 13

9780271029108

Book's by Cecil D. Eby

Comrades and Commissars

Comrades and Commissars

The Road to Armageddon

The Road to Armageddon

Hungary at War

Hungary at War

Comrades and Commissars

Comrades and Commissars

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