The forgotten heroes of a greater generation.

Today's term, "the greatest generation" is an expression of the popular consensus that the sixteen million who served in the U.S. military during World War II proved their generation's superiority. But some distinctions might be made in evaluating those millions. For example, consider the men whose duty required them to wade ashore under fire at Normandy or Tarawa. Perhaps they deserve more praise and honor than those who merely staffed desks at the Pentagon or guarded Japanese-Americans in concentration camps in Nevada.

Moreover, World War II was a global struggle against fascism. So we should give special credit to those who volunteered to go to Europe and fight that ideology before public opinion prompted and the draft forced them to go--in particular, to the thousands of young people from the United States who went to Canada in 1939 and 1940 and volunteered to serve in the Canadian armed services. They did this because they wanted to go to England, even before the United States officially entered the war in 1941, to help, during the darkest hours of World War II, defend that nation against the forces of Adolf Hitler.

Many of these individuals were trained as pilots in the Canadian Air Force then shipped to England in 1940 to join the Royal Air Force and fly Spitfires and Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain. Fighter pilot casualty rates from 1940 to 1941 were extremely high: almost all of the American RAF pilots were dead by 1943. Those Americans who volunteered to fly for the RAF in 1940 were honored and respected for stepping forward to fight prior to being required to do so.

But there were other American volunteers who volunteered to fight fascism in Europe several years earlier. From 1936 to 1938 thousands of U.S. citizens went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. In July 1936 fascist General Francisco Franco led a military revolt against the Republican Spanish government. This revolt was planned by leading Spanish fascists who had gone to Germany that February to consult with Hitler and his planners. Both Hitler and Benito Mussolini (the respective dictators of Germany and Italy) promised military aid to Franco.

In addition to the Spanish Army, the revolt was backed by the landowners in Spain, by the church hierarchy, and by powerful business or capitalist interests worldwide. The fascists expected a quick victory. A majority of the Spanish citizens were Loyalists, however, and they rallied to defend democracy and their constitutional government.

Massive support for the military rebellion in Spain then poured in from Germany and Italy. One hundred seventy-five thousand goose-stepping Italian troops arrived in Spain to aid Franco. Hitler sent 45,000 soldiers and great amounts of military equipment. More than 600 military aircraft were provided by Germany and Italy. The latest and best in this fleet included Messerschmidt 109s, Junker 87s (Stukas), and Heinkel 111s--all flown by German pilots.

France, still traumatized by the horror of trench warfare fought in France during World War I, and now menaced by the prospect of a fascist military threat on three borders, was paralyzed by domestic political squabbles. The rest of the world watched, mesmerized as triumphant fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan metastasized into Spain.

In response to this threat, more than 45,000 antifascist volunteers from fifty-two countries arrived in Spain to defend the Spanish republic. Although public opinion in England, France, and the United States was mostly sympathetic to the Loyalist cause, the governments of the Western democracies wouldn't permit any aid to defend the Spanish republic. The U.S. government embargoed the shipment of military aid to Spain under the pretense of "neutrality" and forbade travel to that country. The embargos were selectively enforced: U.S. corporations were able to provide trucks, oil, and other aid to Franco while most of the supplies sent to the Loyalists (mostly from Mexico and the Soviet Union) were stopped in France at the border.

Between December 1936 and September 1938 a total of 2,700 American men and women traveled to Spain illegally, their passports stamped "Not Valid for Travel in Spain." Most of the volunteers from the United States organized into the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the John Brown Battery, and the George Washington Battalion, but since then have been called collectively the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Many were blacks and more than a third were Jews. Those were the first racially integrated combat units in U.S. history. Most of the volunteers, poorly equipped, were injured in combat and nine hundred of them died in fighting that raged for three years.

The volunteers willingly sacrificed their futures and in many cases their lives to fight fascism. But because of massive military aid to Franco from Germany and Italy, and because of the U.S. embargo, the war went against the Republican forces. A million Spaniards died in a savage civil war that served as the proving ground for the German military and was arguably the opening campaign of World War II.

Afterwards in 1938 the major countries of the West brokered a phony peace agreement (a prologue to the infamous Munich agreement between Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain later the same year) that called for removal of all foreign forces from the fighting in Spain. The antifascist international brigades, including the U.S. volunteers, were then evacuated in tragic ceremony that left the German and Italian military forces in the country. Consequently, the Spanish republic died with the fall of Madrid in March 1939 and the Spanish people suffered under the brutal regime of Franco until 1972. (During World War II, Franco gave military aid to Hitler until it became apparent that Germany would lose the war. Franco died in 1975.)

Hitler's success in Spain emboldened him to invade Poland just six months after the fall of Madrid. World War II officially began in September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland--using troops trained during the Spanish Civil War and planes that had been flown back to Germany from Spain and refurbished. Those planes had been used to bomb cities, such as Guernica--one of the first times this practice had been used in the history of warfare.

The American volunteers paid a terrible price for their premature antifascism. One third of the Brigade had died in Spain, and the wounded survivors didn't have Veteran Administration medical care or the "G.I. Bill" waiting for them. Instead, the U.S. government did everything it could to prevent them from earning a living after they returned to the United States in 1938. Brigade veterans were hounded by the U.S. government. They were forbidden any federal employment for the rest of their lives. They were vilified and blacklisted by the U.S. Justice Department. If Brigade veterans found employment with private firms, FBI agents would visit the employers and seek to have them fired as "communists" and "subversives."

The vicious witch hunting also extended to the families and friends of the Brigade veterans; they were harassed by the FBI and other federal agencies. The discrimination and red baiting continue to this day. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade has been on the U.S. Attorney General's list of "subversive organizations" for the past six decades.

In recent years we have seen the president of the United States belatedly apologize for the nation's mistreatment of Japanese-American citizens during Word War II. Token reparations were paid to survivors for their loss of property and for their imprisonment in 1942. Also in recent years, the president has apologized to African Americans for slavery and for the infamous Tuskeegee experiments (in which blacks infected with syphilis were allowed to suffer, untreated, ostensibly as a part of medical research). Similarly, it has been acknowledged that the U.S. government mistreated Native Americans. So there have been official gestures of atonement to those earliest victims of racist policies.

But while those Americans who volunteered to fight fascism in 1939 and subsequent years have been honored, those who volunteered a few years earlier have been denounced. The treatment of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was an injustice in the 1930s and remains a national disgrace today.

Someday hence the United States will apologize for the decades of mistreatment of these veterans. Surviving widows and descendants will be invited to a ceremony at the White House in a major public relations event. But, more than likely, apology will only become official after the last survivor of the Brigade is safely dead.

The prevailing historical consensus is that the Munich Accord of 1938 was the critical event, the appeasement that enabled the fascist conquest of Europe. But fascism could have been stopped sooner in Spain. A defeat of Franco in the 1930s would have been a major reversal to the fortunes of Adolf Hitler. It was the last and best chance the world had to avert word war and the Holocaust.

Denis Brasket has a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Minnesota. He served in the United States Army during the Korean War and now lives in Minneapolis where he spends most of his time writing on a wide variety of subjects.