The Battle of the Jarama River

[luis triguez]

Had your dad or granpa been <a href="http://www.luistriguez.net/

batalla%20jarama/battlejarama.htm">there</a>?

[wayne_cornell2]

Nice shots from your Zorki. They are very capable picture takers when tuned up. The I-22 is a very good lens.

[lesged]

I remember hearing Pete Seeger sing a song at a UNESCO rally in NYC in the late 1940s about that famous battle. What sticks in my head is a fragment of the song. I probably have written wrong words or misspelled some. Here is what remains of the song:" Viva la quinta brigada. Rum-bala, rum-bala, rumbala- la!" Can you supply the real words? I think Joan Baez made it popular to the audiences of the 1960s

 

BTW which of the two Leica clones do you prefer? The Fed 1 or Zorki 1?I have both on a wish list. Which is the better made of the two?

[michael schub]

The post war Zorki 1 is supposed to be better than the post war Fed 1 but I've never seen any difference. The I-50 collapsible is particularly fine IMO.

 

Viva la quinta brigada

 

Viva la quinta brigada

rumba la rumba, la rumba la

Que nos cubrira de glorias

Ay, Carmela, Ay, Carmela.

 

Luchamos contra los moros

rumba la rumba, la rumba la

Mercenarios i fascistas

Ay, Carmela, Ay, Carmela.

 

El ejercito del ebro

rumba la rumba la rumba la

la otra noche el rio paso

Ay, Carmela, Ay, Carmela.

 

I a las fuercas invasoras

rumba la rumba la rumba la

Buena paliza les dio

Ay, Carmela, Ay, Carmela.

 

En los frentes de granada

rumba la rumba la rumba la

No tenemos dias lunes

Ay, Carmela, Ay, Carmela.

 

Ni tenemos dias martes

rumba la rumba la rumba la

Con los tabques i granadas

Ay, Carmela, Ay, Carmela.

[lesged]

I neglected to compliment you on the quality of your photos. Con perdon! Is the group shot a replica of one taken the 1930s? I botched up the cameras, re-reading I see you brought only one Russian camera and it was a Zorki 1. I presume the I-22 is a clone of the 3.5/50 collapsible Elmar.

Did Robert Capa take some photographs at the Battle of the Jarama River? If so, could it be the famous one of the solitary soldier who was shot while in the thick of battle? The one where you see his rifle slip out of his hand as he falls to the ground wounded or dead.

 

I met people who were in the Lincoln Brigade, but they weren't relatives. Perhaps some folks may not know George Orwell was a reporter covering the Spanish Civil War and wrote at least one book on the subject, maybe it was a collection of his articles, or a diary.

[phisc]

> Perhaps some folks may not know George Orwell was

> a reporter covering the Spanish Civil War and wrote

> at least one book on the subject, maybe it was a

> collection of his articles, or a diary.

 

That was _Homage to Catalonia_. It's one of the great Orwell books. He was a reporter by trade at the time, but he was enlisted in the International Brigade. It was his great disillusionment with Stalinism.

[alan c.]

actually Orwell was not enlisted in the International Brigades, which were specific

military units organized by communist parties and communist front groups. The

famous Lincoln Brigade, for instance, was the 15th Brigade, composed initially of two

American battalions (the Washington and the Lincoln), the British Battalion, and some

Canadians. For language reasons the brigades were national/regional. there were

German, Italian, French, Yugoslav brigades.

 

Orwell was in, if i remember my "Homage to Catalonia" correctly, the 29th Lenin

Division organized by the POUM, Catalan left wing party accused of "Trotskyist"

tendencies and purged by the Stalinists, a sorry civil war within a civil war in

barcelona, which orwell describes in the book.

 

Hemmingway's novel of the spanish civil war is "For Whom The Bell Tolls" -- not as

good as "A Farewell To Arms" -- but that's just IMHO.

 

The great history of the war is by Hugh Thomas, who has also written excellent books

on Cuba, and Mexico.

[mikeivnitsky]

Soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell volunteered to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalist uprising. As a sympathiser of the Independent Labour Party (of which he became a member in 1938), he joined the militia of its sister party in Spain, the anti-Stalinist far-left POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), in which he fought as an infantryman. In Homage to Catalonia he described his admiration for the apparent absence of a class structure in the revolutionary areas of Spain he visited. He also depicted what he saw as the betrayal of that workers' revolution in Spain by the Spanish Communist Party, abetted by the Soviet Union and its secret police, after its militia attacked the anarchists and the POUM in Barcelona in May 1937. Orwell was shot in the neck near Huesca on May 20, 1937, an experience he described in his short essay "Wounded by a Fascist Sniper", as well as in Homage to Catalonia. He and his wife Eileen left Spain after narrowly missing being arrested as "Trotskyites" when the communists moved to suppress the POUM in June 1937.

[h._p.]

This all reminds me of Tom Lehrer's parody "The Folk Song Army":

 

They may have had the best armies, but we had all the best songs

 

I got very interested in the Spanish Civil War several years back and read up on it. The depressing impression that emerged was that the Government forces needn't have lost if they hadn't indulged in so much in-fighting amongst themselves. I read somewhere that Franco told a reporter for Der Steumer (the notorious Nazi newspaper) that the Spanish Communist party was worth two whole divisions to him. Perhaps there's a lesson there for us all about knowing who our real enemies are.

[luis triguez]

Thanks for all your post boys.

[luis triguez]

The cameras I used (I made four rolls) were a Leica IIIc with Elmar 5 (no replica) and a Zorki 1 with Industar 22 (I personaly prefer the Jup 8)

 

This days a bought a Summitar 50 and a Canon 50 LTM 1,8 (superb lens)

Did't test the Summitar yet.

 

Thanks a lot for repling

[luis triguez]

Forgot:

 

Capa didn't been in the Jarama Battle. The famous shot of the militian at the very moment of his killing was at the Ebro river battle.

[vdp]

God bless the Lincoln Brigade!

[charles_stobbs3]

If Stalin had an outpost in Spain the iron curtain would have been the Atlantic coastline, not central Europe.

[michael schub]

Capa's "Falling Soldier" photo has been the subject of debate for decades. Although it will never be settled, most now feel it was staged.

[mark_sampson]

Capa's photograph was not staged. There has been some contoversy- but in recent years researchers found surviving family members of the man shown dying- who positively identified the fallen soldier and confirmed his death at the place and time photographed and described by Capa. Too bad for the "revisionist" "historians". I wish I could cite the references but a web search should get the full story.

[jamesmck]

See Richard Whelan's <A

href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/capa_r.html">article</A>

on that photo.

[michael schub]

Richard Whelan was Capa's authorized biographer. The debate still rages see this review of Kershaw's biography in the New Republic

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030818&s=thomson081803

to quote:

 

"What I am suggesting is not just that Capa's great shot is suspect, but also that by now, nearly seventy years after he took it, most photographs are vulnerable. This thought might have taken the great smile off Capa's face. The debate over "The Falling Soldier" has gone on for years, and there is no reason for it to be settled now. Kershaw (like Whelan before him) examines the case carefully, and fairly, and he is plainly struck by doubt. The most upsetting thing, you see, is that beneath the great picture Vu published another Capa shot of another falling soldier, in very much the same place at the same moment. (We know this from the clouds.) But it is a different soldier. It feels a little like a different take."

[luis triguez]

in that case. The battle of Cerro MUriano was in C�rdoba land (Andalucí¡©

[luis triguez]

Cerro Muriano, Cordoba land, Andalucia south of Spain

[michael schub]

I just realized the link requires registration so I'll quote more from the review as it bears on the whole ethos of photojournalism (by the way I have no position on whether the photo was staged but I think it is suspicious or at least not solved):

 

"In 1996, in the London Observer, Rita Grosvenor and Arnold Kemp wrote a piece that "discovered" that the militiaman in the picture was named Federico Borrell Garcia. Then in 2002, in Aperture, Whelan came back to the case in the spirit of a detective. He used Grosvenor's work and enlisted a homicide detective from the Memphis Police Department to opine that, yes, the man in the picture was really dead or dying and not an actor. This report wants us to share Whelan's estimate that "there can be no further doubt." I am not so sure.

 

Capa has never been charged with any crime, and he is in no need of vindication. Suppose he simply behaved like a professional photographer--which is very different from the weird Isherwoodian assertion that a man can be a camera. No, man has a harder role to play: he can be creative, he can have ideas, he can decide where to put the camera. Try as he may, he cannot actually be mechanical. Nothing is as suggestive of helpless intent as the proof (in Vu in 1936) that, within the space of a few minutes, Capa took two pictures from the same angle and with the same composition. The very same once-only mise-en-scene. For every ideal held about Capa as the endlessly motile photojournalist, darting here and there looking for the fleeting truth of life, he seems that day to have been possessed by an idea, a vision, an angle, a composition, a meaning.

 

Even Whelan's "clearance" in the case accepts the idea that a group of militiamen "decided to play about a bit for the benefit of Capa's camera." He uses the word 'pretending" and then supposes that a soldier who believed he was safe was suddenly cut down by a machine-gunner. This is how Whelan sustains the idea of 'chance'--without ever allowing that design would make the picture more likely. But he still says nothing about the man in the second picture, and he fails to grasp its implications as to purpose. Nor does he explain why the sweeping machine gun did not hit Capa at the same time as it hit his nearby subject. Above all, Whelan ignores this question: there are two pictures, two deaths (or, at least, two woundings). If they occurred at virtually the same place and time, which came first--and how brave, or unlikely, was the second soldier once the enemy machine gun had declared itself?

 

 

So what are the conclusions? It is possible that, having seen many people shot down and killed, Capa felt an intense urge to "get" such a moment. But then he realized the astonishing luck that this required--unless, truly, he was a camera that could take a picture as he saw a thing. So did Capa decide to re-stage what was not an uncommon event? If so, was that cheating? Or are we just very sentimental about the kind of "truth" that photography allegedly leads to?"

[jamesmck]

Michael -- I didn't care for Kershaw's biography near as much as Whelan's. In fact, Thomson's "review" of Kershaw is very interesting reading quite apart from its pretty oblique connection to the book. Thanks for making me aware of it.