Tom
Murray,
the son of a small tenant farmer, was
born in Aberdeenshie in 1900. In his youth he joined
the Independent Labour Party but
later became a member of the Communist Party.
He eventually became a town councillor in Edinburgh.
Murray
was a supporter of the Popular Front
government in Spain. Soon
after the outbreak of the Spanish
Civil War he joined the International
Brigades where he became a political commissar.
His sister, Annie Murray, also went as
a nurse in a British Medical Unit working with the Republican
Army.
After
returning to Scotland Murray remained active
in left-wing politics. Tom
Murray died
in 1983.
(1)
Tom
Murray,
Voices From the Spanish Civil War (1986)
The role of the commissar
of course is an extremely interesting one and a valuable aspect of
a popular army. You see, in the days of Cromwell and the Roundheads,
they had what was similar to commissars, but they weren't called commissars
- they were really religious to some extent. But it's noteworthy that
the commissar in the Spanish army had a dual role. He had an equal
military status with the commander of the unit to which we was attached
as commissar. But he never interfered with the commander unless he
felt that something required to be corrected. All the time I was a
commissar Jack Nalty, an Irishman, was our company commander, and
a very capable man he was. Unfortunately, he was killed in the last
stages of the War. Jack Nalty and I of course ran this organization
of the Company and only on one occasion did I exercise my authority
as a commissar against him. He was dead beat and we were marching
along a road with the machine guns and I was becoming more and more
conscious of the feeling that we were going in the wrong direction.
I said to him, "Well now, don't you think you should halt the
Company and let us think about it?" Oh, he wasn't in favour.
He says, "We're all right." "Well," I says, "I'm
afraid that I've got to exercise my authority as commissar,"
and I halted the Company. A runner from the British Battalion, whose
commissar was Bob Cooney, had been sent down in fact to see where
we were. And right enough, if we'd gone round another corner we'd
have been bang into a group of Fascists with machine guns. That was
the only occasion on which I exercised my authority to supersede the
function of the commander of the company. But it illustrates the high
responsibility which rested on the shoulders of the commissar.
The commissar was the
master of all trades, as it were. Our job was to look after the welfare
of the personnel, their clothing, their recreation, their food, the
distribution of food, and the general military efficiency. The military
efficiency of course was the primary consideration over-shadowing
everything else, and we had the job of dealing with any people who
were browned off or who had been there maybe for a long time and had
come back into the company from the
front, from the earlier actions before the rest of us were there at
all. And some of them of course were exhausted, mentally and physically
exhausted and we had to get them back to a normal state by whatever
form of special treatment that was desirable.
One of the jobs of the
commissar when people were killed was to take their personal effects
off their bodies and send them home to their people. Also our job
was to bury the dead. And as a matter of fact, up on these sierras
or mountains, Sierra Pandols, you could scarcely get enough earth
to cover them. It was a most difficult job finding ways and means
of covering the dead bodies.
Then another job that the
commissar had to do was to create a wall newspaper. And we had wall
newspapers with all kinds of press cuttings and contributions from
various people who were writing up little stories and so on, and writing
up reminiscences and their observations and so on. And the wall newspaper
was always a popular rendezvous for people to meet and discuss things.
(2)
Tom
Murray
took part in the Ebro
offensive. He wrote about his experience in Voices
From the Spanish Civil War (1986)
The crossing of the Ebro
at night was a remarkable performance. The pontoons consisted of narrow
buoyant sections tied together and men would sit straddled across
the junctions of these sections to hold them firm, because the Ebro
was a very fast-flowing river. And then others went across in boats.
The mules were swum across. We went across the pontoons carrying our
weapons, our machine guns. We had light machine guns as well as the
heavy ones. We had five machine gun groups in our Company. No two
people had to be on one section at the same time. We got across all
right, lined up and marched up to the top of the hill.
The Fascists got scared
stiff. They had been about to celebrate Mass, some of them, down in
the valley, and there were tons, great streams of white muslin, which
had been part of the preparation for this mass. We used them as mosquito
nets, as a matter of fact, later on.
But we crossed the Ebro
and made a rapid advance towards Gandesa. The real fighting then began,
because the Nazi German planes were sent back and they bombed us like
the devil. However we got our machine guns set up and we defended
ourselves. I think we maybe made a tactical mistake in not rushing
down right past and round Gandesa to prevent the Fascists fortifying
it, which they did next day.
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