George Nathan
Samuel George Montague Nathan was a British volunteer in the International Brigades in Spain. He initially commanded the British Company of the otherwise French Marseillaise Battalion but was appointed battalion commander in early 1937 following the execution of his predecessor for espionage.
He later became Chief of Staff of the XV International Brigade and was killed on 16 July 1937 at the Battle of Brunete. Even though he had been turned down for Communist Party membership — either because of his "sexual orientation" or because of his unwillingness to "pretend great political enthusiasm" - Comintern observers admired him for his "cool arrogance under fire".
Background
Samuel George Montague Nathan was born in Hackney, London in 1895. His father was Jewish and the Nathans had been settled in England since the 18th century. His mother was an Englishwoman and was a Christian. George Nathan himself was baptised into the Church of England at St Mark's, Bow Street on 24 January 1897. Although nominally raised an Anglican and identifying himself as such earlier in life, after 1917 he referred to himself as Jewish.Military
World War I
During the First World War, he fought in the British Army on the Western Front. He rose from private to company sergeant major and "after three years and 334 days in the service, he was commissioned in the field on 9 April 1917" to become "the only Jewish officer in the Brigade of Guards". This is what he claimed but Nathan was, as his medal index card shows, commissioned into the Warwickshire Regiment and was never a CSM.Irish War of Independence
Nathan joined the ADRIC on 20 October 1920 and was posted to G Company as a Section Leader, located at the Lakeside Hotel, Killaloe, County Clare. This organisation was a paramilitary sponsored by the British state and participated in the Irish War of Independence against the Irish Republican Army which claimed to be representing the Irish Republic. The Auxiliaries were closely associated with the Black and Tans. Nathan was returned to depot in Dublin on 30 April 1921 and left the ADRIC on 2 May 1921, returning to London.During his posting, Nathan is associated with the Curfew murders in Limerick; a series of killings which took place on the 7 March 1921, when the sitting Sinn Féin mayor of Limerick George Clancy, the councilor and former mayor Michael O'Callaghan and a city clerk named Joseph O'Donoghue, were all shot at their homes. Plain clothes men had knocked on the door of each, claiming to be a search party and once inside struggled with each party, shooting them. George Clancy's wife Máire; who had struggled with the party before they shot her husband; identified George Nathan in a statement.
An article published in the New Statesman by Richard Bennett in 1961 stated that two former British Army officers who had served in the Auxiliaries had anonymously identified Nathan as the killer of the two mayors. Local rumour in Limerick has claimed that Leslie Ibbotson was the other man involved, but this has never been proven. Brigadier-General Frank Percy Crozier, a former commandant of the Auxiliaries, in his book Ireland for Ever, stated that he agreed with Kathleen O'Callaghan that the mayors were "murdered by police, acting under orders, as part of a plan to 'do away with' Sinn Fein leaders, and put the blame on Sinn Fein."
Spanish Civil War
After returning from Dublin, Nathan relinquished his commission and rejoined the British Army; this time the West Yorkshire Regiment as a private, but had left the military by October 1922 at his own request. Having spent his entire adulthood in the military, Nathan was ill-prepared for civilian life. He worked a number of jobs, such as being a doorman for Peter Jones, but was fired after trying to form a trade union. He also worked as a butcher. He briefly rejoined the Army as a private in the Royal Fusiliers but was discharged with ignominy after a Court Martial on 25 May 1926. He traveled to Halifax, Nova Scotia in February 1928, intending to become a farmer, but only found work as a salesman, staying in Canada for some years. His financial state was poor and he wrote to the British Legion in 1935, requesting assistance.The Spanish Civil War began in the summer of 1936 in the Second Spanish Republic, as a Nationalist insurgency was launched by elements of the Spanish Republican Armed Forces. In September 1936, the Communist International under the control of Joseph Stalin decided to found the International Brigades to assist the sitting Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic. Nathan elected to travel to Spain in December 1936, where he joined the mostly French Marseillaise Battalion of the XIV International Brigade, as a Captain of the British Company with it.
Nathan's first action in the conflict was at the Battle of Lopera. This was a disaster for the International Brigade, in their attempt to take the town of Lopera, they were decimated by local Andalusian requetés and the Moroccan regulares. 78 of the 145 "British" Company died including John Cornford and Ralph Winston Fox. Comintern were embarrassed by this and so André Marty, the political commissar, had Marseillaise Battalion commander Gaston Delasalle executed for "incompetence, cowardice" and being a "fascist spy" That day Nathan had organised a retreat under fire, which saved even more of his men from being killed.
In January 1937, the British Battalion of the XV International Brigade was founded, training at Madrigueras. However, problems emerged when some Irish members were unhappy about being referred to as part of a "British Battalion". Irish volunteers from the Republican Congress also found out that they were subordinated to two former members of the Auxiliary Division from the Anglo-Irish War; Nathan and Wilfred Macartney. The tension was such that Nathan had to explain to Frank Ryan and the Irish that he had indeed served the Auxiliaries in County Limerick, but that as a Jew he was a genuine anti-fascist and that "we are Socialists together now". Joe Monks claims that, "the meeting responded to the spirit of his speech and clapped him". Nevertheless, later that month the Irish volunteers voted 26 for and 11 against the motion to instead join the American Lincoln Battalion as the Connolly Column.
Nathan's purported homosexuality did not go down well with the Communist International representatives and though he professed a vague allegiance to socialism, he was not a hardcore Marxist–Leninist and had not been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain before arriving in Spain. However, he proved to be generally popular among the rank and file of the International Brigades, according to the likes of Jason Gurney and Fred Copeman. Aside from this, as a man with proven military experience, he was an asset at a time when the British volunteers consisted mostly of people with little prior training.
According to Copeman, Nathan performed well during the Battle of Jarama in February, one of the most heated contests of the Spanish Civil War. Particularly on the third day, he is claimed to have been the most capable officer of the XV International Brigade. During this battle, the Brigade lost more than half of their men; 375 out of 600 died; including Christopher Caudwell. Nathan finally came unstuck at the Battle of Brunete where he was killed as a result of bomb fragments from a Junkers Ju 88 aerial bombardment and died on the 17 July 1937. Romantic myth claims he was "buried under olive trees close to the River Guadarrama," but he was actually buried in the village cemetery of Torrelodones, which was along the way on an evacuation route for the combat wounded and dead from Brunete to Madrid.