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

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This isn’t a political book: in fact, Kemp talks politics quite a bit less than Orwell does. I’ve read the whole thing twice and what I get is that he’s a traditionalist who’s against communism and who doesn’t appreciate the burning of chuches and killing of priests. stars. This is worth reading if simply for the perspective it gives but the author for no fault of his own produces a painfully biased perspective. Y'know because he's fighting for Fascists. Reading between the lines makes things particular obvious the rose colored glasses Kemp is using while writing this account decades after it happens. Defining men he served alongside during the war as "good hearted" or "good natured" despite them gunning down men who had surrendered to them. Sure Kemp protested some of this but eventually accepts it (to my own disgust). Furthermore Kemp perhaps unknowingly demonizes the Republican side of the war while framing every encounter with people on the Nationalist side as being good and them being grateful for him fighting for their side. It should be noted and expected to be understood that both sides committed atrocities during the civil war. I couldn't help but notice that the majority of people he encountered we're either A) petty aristocrats in some form who very obviously would feel threatened by a communist government or B) peasants and volunteers who were likely serving for the Nationalists because wherever they were from supported that side first. Kemp's book makes up for this almost immediately by describing the Carlists and the Requetes forces, the history of the Carlist Wars, and other details. More importantly, he humanizes the Nationalists by showing them as human beings with motivations other than hatred and evil. But there’s another thing, just as important: If you’ve read the news reports published at the beginning of this war, before the imposition of censorship, you’ll know that there were appalling scenes of mob violence throughout Government territory, wherever the Reds took control. Priests and nuns were shot simply because they were priests or nuns, ordinary people murdered just because they had a little money or property. It is to fight against that sort of thing that I am going to Spain.” Kemp, p 7. The overwhelming majority of people who have read anything about the Spanish Civil War written by one who participated have read Hemingway or Orwell. Almost nobody reads anything written by anyone who served on the Nationalist side. This excellent memoir is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the conflict who wants to get a view from what was after all the winning side. In the case of the Spanish Civil War the old saying about history being written by the victors is of course stood on its head: almost everything we have, at least in English, is written by the losers.

Quote by A.E. Housman: “I to my perils Of cheat and charmer

And while Orwell’s stint in Spain is over in a few months, Kemp ends up fighting for the National cause for most of the war, first in the Requetés and then in the Spanish Legion –one of Spain’s toughest fighting forces. reading Mine Were of Trouble: A Nationalist Account of the Spanish Civil War (Peter Kemp War Trilogy) Among the people met in Spain are Kim Philby, General Franco and Randolph Churchill. These encounters are also interesting. Kemp became a journalist after the war and writes well.I’d like to express the (perhaps) unpopular opinion that Mine Were of Trouble is a better book than Homage to Catalonia. Mainly, because Kemp saw a lot more action than Orwell.

REVIEW: Mine Were of Trouble – Peter Kemp (1957; Mystery

Mine Were of Trouble: A Nationalist Account of the Spanish Civil War (Peter Kemp War Trilogy) full book 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." 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.Kemp describes those he fought with in detail, varying from praise to condemnation of various figure’s skills and personalities. Kemp fought longer than Orwell and also went on to fight in WWII for the British in SOE. By the time he wrote the book he was an accomplished soldier so his account should have some weight. Kemps account of how the Nationalist troops were equipped, the quality of their troops and the Italian and German forces who fought there and their strategies and tactics are also interesting. Toward the end of the war Kemp writes about how Franco’s forces used Blitzkrieg tactics effectively to win the war. Peter Kemp is an Englishman who served as a junior officer in the Spanish Civil War -- on the Nationalist side. All by joining the National side and fighting against the socialist, communist and anarchist “Reds”. Here’s Hemingway (and others) somewhere in Spain, in Spain. Colorization by Cassowary Colorizations, CC BY 2.0.

Mine were of trouble by Peter Kemp | Open Library Mine were of trouble by Peter Kemp | Open Library

He is, in other words, a private university kid taking a gap year – one that just happens to include some very bloody trench warfare. 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.

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Kemp doesn’t seem to be considering that he might be killed when he joins up. In fact, he thinks (like many people did at the time) that the Spanish Civil War was going

Mine Were of Trouble - Peter Kemp and the Spanish Civil War Mine Were of Trouble - Peter Kemp and the Spanish Civil War

One thing worth contemplating is how the Spanish Civil War was also something of an English Civil War. Kemp fought against British members of the International Brigades. In England after the war, he often appeared at meetings with Republicans foreign volunteers, whom he would have been trying to kill in Spain. Within a year or two, of course, Kemp and those same men were fighting fascists for England. The Legion was divided into twenty banderas, and Kemp was assigned to the 14th, a new bandera composed of disparate parts. His welcome was frosty—he was viewed with suspicion, as a foreigner, and as a Protestant, something the Legionnaires associated with Freemasonry, one of the main avenues by which leftist poison had entered the Spanish body politic. Still, using time-honored tools to overcome such military suspicion, hard work and bravery, Kemp soon enough became accepted by his men, and by most of the officers, even though some of the latter never warmed to him, less from suspicion and more because they felt he could never truly understand the existential evil of the Spanish Left, which drove many of them personally, since nearly all had had relatives murdered in Republican-held Spain. Kemp led a machine-gun platoon, with four obsolete guns with zero spare parts as their only rapid-fire weapons, so soon enough, it was three guns, and then one. In November 1937, his unit moved southeast, to the Guadalajara front close to Madrid, as the Nationalists successfully liberated more and more of Spain. At least”, he tells a friend on the day of his departure, “the experience is bound to be useful, and anyway I’ve nothing to lose.”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). As for Kemp’s memoir, this article is a great summary of it. However, I was sure that, because he provides such a contrast to today’s Catholic hierarchs, you would have taken the opportunity to mention Father Vicente! A minor character to be sure, but his presence in the Battle of Jarama was striking (from p. 64): 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.