http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419108/unwelcome-truth-teller-about-spanish-civil-war-ron-capshaw

In 1986, the liberal weekly The Village Voice had its offices picketed by aged left-wing protesters. What occasioned this protest was an interview columnist Paul Berman conducted with William Herrick, who had served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. According to Berman, Herrick, during the interview, “decided to tell me things that he had never told anyone, not even his wife, about his time in Spain.” Asserting that the Brigade “answered to the Communist chain of command, which included the GPU,” Herrick recounted how he was indirectly warned after he mildly criticized the Party. As he was recovering from a throat wound, he was taken from his hospital bed and “ordered to accompany a GPU execution squad, and to stand among them, unarmed, as the squad coolly put to death three Spanish leftists.” But that was not his only startling revelation. The other involved the way Brigade Commander Oliver Law died in 1937.

Law was billed by the Communists as the first African-American soldier to command an integrated unit, and they peddled the story for years that he died heroically leading his men in a charge against fascist lines. Herrick said otherwise. He asserted that Law’s own men killed him for incompetence and cowardice. Herrick heard this story second-hand from his “best friends in Spain,” Brigade soldiers Doug Roach (who was also black) and Joe Gordon, both of whom claimed to have taken part in the murder.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419108/unwelcome-truth-teller-about-spanish-civil-war-ron-capshaw