Milton Wolff, 92, Dies; Anti-Franco Leader

[AlphaCentauri]

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: January 17, 2008

Milton Wolff, the last commander of the American volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and the longtime commander of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died Monday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 92.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Peter N. Carroll, chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

At first a young Communist rabble-rouser on soapboxes in New York City, Mr. Wolff was wielding a machine gun in Spain by the time he was 21. By 22, he was the ninth commander of what is commonly called the Lincoln Brigade; four of his predecessors had been killed, four wounded; none now survive, the archives confirm.

Mr. Wolff found himself holding together the remnants of North American volunteers on a counteroffensive that moved across the Ebro River to the violent Hill 666 in the Sierra Pandols. It was a last gasp by foreign troops supporting the elected leftist government of Spain against the revolt led by Gen. Francisco Franco. The Americans soon left Spain; Madrid fell in March 1939, and the war was over.

While Mr. Wolff was in Spain, he became a friend of Ernest Hemingway, who served him his first glass of Scotch; Hemingway was in Spain as a reporter and wrote fiction about the conflict as well. Later, in a pamphlet issued when sculptures of the fighters were unveiled, he called Mr. Wolff “as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/obituaries/17wolff.html?