ABSTRACT
The American contingent in Albacete was headed in the summer of 1937 by Bill Lawrence, a prematurely gray CP district organizer from New York. Americans were scattered all over the map, some in hospitals in Madrid and elsewhere, others serving as truck and ambulance drivers in Spanish units, or in vehicle repair shops or as medical lab technicians. Louis Fischer found that Andre Marty treated the American party leaders with "calculated rudeness," and some of his countrymen seem to have followed suit. In the auto repair shops, Americans sometimes squabbled with their French chiefs, the arguments degenerating into childish assertions about the general shortcomings of the other's country. Among the Americans in Spain the situation was improved in the fall of 1937, when John Gates, after eight months as a commissar on the Cordoba front, took over Lawrence's post as chief American commissar.
