Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War.

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

From 1936 to 1939, more than 1,600 Canadians defied their own government’s prohibition against serving in foreign wars and volunteered to fight for Republican Spain against the Fascist coalition led by Generalissimo Franco. Many of these Canadians were working-class landed immigrants from Europe who had experienced totalitarian governments in their home countries. Other volunteers were Canadian-born university students who had become naively enamoured with the romantic notion of fighting for a socialist democracy. More than one-fourth of these volunteers are known to have been killed, making the Spanish Civil War one of the deadliest per capita conflicts in which Canada has ever participated. Many Canadians have heard of the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion, but due to the official suppression of information by the Canadian, Spanish, and Soviet Russian governments until now few people knew anything about the brave men and women who fought in it.

This book by veteran Michael Petrou intertwines fascinating new information from the RCMP, Spanish, and Soviet Union archives with face-to-face interviews with Canadian veterans and Spanish witnesses. Petrou squelches any notions of the supposed glory and romance of fighting for a doomed but noble cause. Poorly equipped, half starved, and usually led by untrained and often incompetent officers, the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion would fight and suffer through some of the bloodiest battles of the war. As part of his research, Petrou travelled to Spain to examine the battlefields and talk to Spanish witnesses to the war. He also went to Russia, where recently declassified documents from the Soviet era are now available to the public. An appendix is included that lists every Canadian known to have served in Spain. This document includes the name, nation of birth, occupation, and whether the volunteer survived the war or not. Although plain data can be dry reading in some cases, if readers use their imagination they can form an idea of what serving in the M-P battalion was like as they read that the volunteers were “Ukrainian, Croatian, Canadian-Jewish, Serbian, Lithuanian, English, Bulgarian, French Canadian,” and their occupations were “miner, driver/writer, lumberjack, auto-mechanic/sailor, cigar maker, teacher” and in some cases just plain “worker.” More than three dozen black and white photographs support the text and help put a face on some of the names mentioned in the book. Detailed endnotes, a bibliography, and an index are included at the back of the book.

Given the limited serious writing that has been done on this subject until now, Petrou’s book is an important breakthrough. His painstaking research will likely be the starting point for any new book on this subject. Petrou’s smooth journalistic writing style also ensures an absorbing read for anyone interested in this long buried period of Canadian history.