The Truth About Spain

This small paperback of 32 pages, published in 1945, replicates the familiar mode of pocket yellowbacks given to departing Australian soldiers as reading matter during the inevitable weeks on shipboard when the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was despatched to European theatres of war in World War One and in World War Two. These portable sources, usually provided by the government, functioned as a form of the history crib that set out the reasons for Australia’s involvement in whichever war it was that the soldier-reader was on his way to join. Such texts almost always emphasised that the new recruits were now part of the heroic tradition of the Australian bushman-at-war whose manly demeanour in battle could be relied upon to defeat the dastardly practises of the enemy.  

The Truth about Spain: Yesterday Today and Tomorrow is similar in structure and didactic message to the genre of these earlier texts however the content and the optimistic skew of the analysis reflects a very narrow window of historical time between the end of World War Two and the onset of the Cold War.   

Dedicated to ‘the heroic dead and the gallant living band of Australian International Brigadiers’, the booklet appeared under the imprimatur of the Communist Party of Australia in October 1945, that is a month after the end of the Asia Pacific War. The author, Archer Russell, a journalist and literary critic at the Sydney Morning Herald provides a short, Sovietized version of the Spanish Civil War. Most importantly, however, is the author’s up-beat prediction of the certain post-Civil War success of the anti-Franco resistance. He calls all previous Friends of Democratic Spain to rally in readiness for this happy ending. An optimist, without a crystal ball, Russell confidently predicts that by the sheer moral force of their peace aims, the victorious Allies will depose Franco and bring democratic Spain into the post-war world of peace, harmony and international democracy.