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Delmer Berg-Abraham Lincoln Brigade-RIP
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California, United States
Member Since: September 04, 2002
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Posted: Saturday, March 19, 2016 - 03:18 AM UTC
Delmer Berg, born in 1915, into a tenant farming family living near Modesto in Southern California, he has lived his life to the fullest. He took the side of the underdog and never backed off from a fight.

When he was 21, working as a dishwasher, he was walking in the street in Hollywood when he noticed a placard, reading “Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade”, pasted onto a building. He made a split second decision and marched inside saying that he wanted to go to Spain.

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was made up of volunteers from the United States who went to fight on the side of the Spanish Republican Forces against Franco’s Fascist Forces during the Spanish Civil War. The Lincoln Battalion was the 17th Battalion of the XV International Brigade. This brigade was made up of many nationalities as the Republicans had appealed for assistance all over the world. The men that made up these brigades served as soldiers, medics, technical staff and aviators during the war.
Berg discovered that he had not found an open recruiting office, but was told that though they could not send him, they would direct him to the right place. After several meetings and eventually a cross country bus that conveyed him to New York, he joined other volunteers on an ocean voyage to France. From Paris they took an old wreck of a bus to a drop off point near the Spanish border.

Berg, admits that when he left for Spain he was a political virgin, all naivety and illusions and little else. With his previous military experience, he was posted to a regiment whose responsibility was laying communication lines from the Republican bases in the rear to the front line. Working near Barcelona for a while, he was later transferred to Teruel, where he was part of the Battle of Ebro and was one of the men assigned to destroy the bridge over the river as the Fascists used it as a link to the Mediterranean Sea.

From Teruel he was transferred to Valencia where he found a great deal of idle time on his hands as most of the communication lines were already installed. The Germans supported the Fascists during this war and they used it to test many of their ‘Blitzkrieg’ theories, including the use of indiscriminate heavy bombardments.

In August 1938 he was asleep in the dormitory of a monastery, when Italian bombers dropped bombs on the monastery instead of their intended target, a nearby railway station. It was a standing joke within the brigade that the safest place to be was where the fascists wanted to bomb as they always missed. In the attack Berg was injured by flying shrapnel with one piece lodging in his liver to the day he died. Of the almost 3,000 young men that surreptitiously shipped out to Spain to support the Republican cause nearly 700 died in combat or of their wounds.

Franco effectively won the war in 1939 and he installed a repressive regime that ruled Spain with a tyrannical hand until 1975. Berg left Spain in October 1938, regretting that he had not played a more active role, but content that he had played a part, no matter how small.

Berg rued the fact that he was getting older and in an interview with The Union Democrat in 2007, he said that his hearing was poor and it made it difficult to attend meetings and contribute to the discussions on the topics close to his heart. The most recent of his causes was the fight for national health care and against the privatization of Social Security.

Last year the New York Times interviewed him and he was saddened by the fact that he was 99 years old and feared that he was running out of time to accomplish all the things that he still had to do. Berg died on the 28th February 2016. This was a man who lived by his beliefs. He was a staunch ally to those he supported and an equally staunch adversary to those he did not. Whether you agreed with his politics or not you have to admire his commitment and his moral fortitude.