Peter Anderson

So it's very different to march up through rural areas of Spain in open land and to try and take a city.

So Madrid is besieged.

There's fighting on the main street that goes into the center of Madrid there.

So Madrid is almost taken, but it's not taken.

So Madrid became the symbol for groups on the left and center of politics, both in Spain and internationally, as the place where fascism was being stopped.

at a time when fascism seems to be advancing all across the world.

Madrid, famously, the famous slogan from Madrid was, Madrid will be the tomb of fascism.

Over the summer of 1936, the Spanish Civil War becomes the conflict of the moment.

People are following the conflict from around the world.

Lots of people are wanting to volunteer.

In September 1936, the Soviet Union, under Stalin, decides that the British and the French are not doing anything to defend democracy.

It doesn't want to become directly involved in terms of sending large numbers of soldiers, or it does send lots of advisers and pilots and tanks.

But maybe one of its more decisive decisions was to back international brigades.

So they were going to take volunteers from around the world and channel them towards Spain.

I think the international brigades are really important in terms of telling us the strength of feeling that people had at the time against fascism, that they were prepared to give up their civilian lives and their safety.

Nearly a hundred African-Americans traveled to Spain, for example, because they saw the struggle against fascism as the same struggle against discrimination and lynching and Jim Crow and so on in the United States.

So the brigades really matter for that.

They tell us a lot.

So after the Siege of Madrid, the war really progressed through different fronts.

One of the first places that Franco tried to gain was Malaga.