For whom the Bell Tolls: With the International Brigade in Spain
Randall Sollenberger, despite his small stature, stood out among his contemporaries at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was an American, a native of Baltimore and a graduate of West Point. He had originally hankered after a military career but had eventually settled for medicine instead. He was also a committed Communist, who was to die whilst serving as a surgeon and anaesthetist with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.
Born in Baltimore on 17 May 1902, Sollenberger early showed academic promise to his teachers at the Boys’ Latin School of Maryland where he was considered to be ‘unusually bright and ambitious.’ As well as excelling in mathematics, Latin and history, he proved himself to be an all-round sportsman. His studies of history encouraged his interest in politics. Yet after leaving school in 1919 he decided to enter the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1920 rather than take up a place to study at Johns Hopkins University.
At that time the Superintendent of the Military Academy, Douglas MacArthur, was introducing a greater emphasis on history and the humanities in the curriculum as well as encouraging athletics among the cadets which suited the interests and skills of the young Sollenberger. However, despite graduating from West Point on 12 June 1924, he was not offered a commission in the United States Army. The military authorities believed that he was unsuitable to be an officer as he would be unable to command the respect of his men because he had a pronounced stutter. His later career was to prove them very wrong.
Denied the military career he had originally chosen, Sollenberger, who had got married at Highland Falls, NY, on the day of his graduation from West Point and then fathered two children, later decided to abandon his life in the United States in order to study medicine in London. He entered St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in October 1928. Despite being awarded the Physics Prize in 1929 and the Histology Certificate in 1930 and 1931, his previous record of high academic success now seemed to have deserted him. Not only did he fail physiology in 1931 and the Group II subjects of his final University of London MB, BS examinations in 1934 and again when he re-sat them in 1936, but he was unsuccessful in his Conjoint Board LRCP, MRCS examinations in 1933 and 1934. The Conjoint Board of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons of London was considered an easier option than a University of London degree but Sollenberger could not even fall back on that lesser qualification which would have allowed him to practise medicine. Instead he went to Edinburgh in December 1934 and entered the examinations for LRCP Ed and LRCS Ed offered by the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons of Edinburgh and the Licentiate of the Royal Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, and, he was successful at last in 1936. His medical training was supplemented by a short period of study of psychiatry for six months in Vienna. He briefly worked at Bury Infirmary and Barnstable Hospital, but the darkening international situation was to offer a new challenge to this politically committed young man.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Sollenberger, with his deeply felt and pronounced left-wing views, volunteered to fight for the Republican government against Franco and his Nationalist revolt. He saw it as part of the fight of the left against the onward march of fascism. Dressed in khaki drill obtained from an army surplus store, he left for Spain on 23 August 1936 with the British Medical Aid Unit led by its administrator the Barts medical student Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, who later reflected that
‘We were mostly young, we were not yet really battle-hardened, though, by now, we had all had a sufficient experience to know what war really meant. We were certainly ready to carry on, we were convinced that our side in the Spanish Civil war was as right as the other was wrong. Even more determinant to our morale was our profound belief, irrespective of our nationality, that we were fighting for the future of our own homelands’
These young doctors were generally as politically committed and professionally ambitious as Randall Sollenberger, although the ambulance driver Wogan Phillips, himself the son of a wealthy businessman, dismissed them as ‘terribly bourgeois’ which made them ‘superior in manner’ and ‘jealous of each other’. They were seen off at Victoria Station by the Labour leader Arthur Greenwood, representatives of the TUC and local left-wing politicians resplendent in their chains of office. The Unit had been organised by the Spanish Medical Aid Committee under the auspices of the Socialist Medical Association and the Inter-Hospitals Socialist Society. Although it enjoyed cross-political support, the dominant force behind the British Medical Aid Unit was the Communist Party.
In September 1936 Sollenberger himself described his medical unit, in which he served as surgeon and anaesthetist in a letter to his father ‘There are twenty-two of us, including four surgeons. We are only the first of several units. Ruth is working hard in London, keeping our lines of supply open. The workers of Spain are almost unarmed, but will win.’
The Unit set up a hospital at Granen in a confiscated house belonging to a local fascist doctor. Later Sollenberger was appointed captain in the Edgar Andre Battalion of the Abraham Lincoln XI Brigade in December 1936 as a ‘specialist in anaesthesia’. The Brigade Medical Post was set up in a small hostel in Fuencarral where the lack of personnel and materials meant that only the most urgent of operations could be carried out. This did not matter to a man who was more interested in working at the battle front than in anaesthetics. He later became medical officer to the British Battalion in the XV Brigade.
At first he was not a particularly commanding or impressive figure, being described as ‘not very young’ in appearance, ‘short, stocky with a round face framed by a greying beard, very blue eyes’, and a ‘slight speech impediment.’ He had a reputation for not wasting words and would often return to his medical post, tell his comrades that he was tired and hungry, satisfy his appetite with tinned meat, throw his case into the corner of the room and, fully dressed, ‘snore throughout the night’. His colleague in the British Medical Aid Unit Archie Cochrane was not at all impressed by the stout American. His fellow Communists even claimed that he had ‘lowered the hospital prestige in the eyes of the Spaniards’ when he was based at Granen in the early days of the war in their attempts to denigrate the work of the British Medical Aid Unit, yet Oskar Goryan, medical chief of the XV International Division had nothing but praise for the skills and dedication of Sollenberger. Some of the nurses working with him also admired ‘the wonderful surgery’ that he performed in difficult conditions. An American nurse Frederika Martin later even went so far as to say that ‘veterans who were around him there loved him. So did medical student John Simon who admired Sollenberger with all his heart’. The young graduate of West Point whose stuttering disqualified him from military command was now more than able to inspire soldiers and fellow medical professionals.
Thwarted in his military ambitions as a younger man at West Point, Sollenberger now saw himself as an active combatant rather than merely a doctor and refused to stay at base but kept himself prominently in the front line with his men, often taking up arms to fight. Disgusted by the Republican retreat at Majadahonda y Las Rozas, ‘he picked up the helmet and rifle of a wounded comrade, left his bandages and went out to the battlefield’. He became noted for the gun that was ever in his hand. On one occasion he and two of his colleagues fought for three hours with only a single machine gun between them. Despite the view of his superior officers that doctorswere too valuable to risk in armed combat, he refused to stay at base and insisted upon fighting in the front line with the men.
Sollenberger’s personal interventions into military medicine during the Spanish Civil War were decisive even if the way that he ‘pioneered the use of a mobile operating theatre’ might be considered unorthodox. At the battle of Jarama in February 1937 he stole two trucks and turned them into a mobile operating theatre. The Catalan surgeon Moisès Broggi, head of the International Brigade surgical unit, had introduced the mobile operating theatre to ensure that treatment was available to the wounded as soon as possible. Sollenberger took bold action to ensure that he had his own mobile theatre, considering his exploit to be a matter of requisition rather than theft.
During the battle of Brunete in July 1937, Sollenberger served with the Fifteenth Brigade, dressing many wounded men in exposed positions at Mosquito Hill, ‘tending the wounded in his truck after running back and forth all day, rallying men all the time to fight’. On 20 July 1937, he was working with two ambulances picking up the wounded on the road from Villaneuva de la Canada to Quijorna. As he bent down to treat a wounded man, he was shot through the head by a sniper and killed instantly. His two ambulances, despite their Red Cross markings, were blown up by artillery fire. Sollenberger was 35. His death was announced in Madrid on 26 July 1937. St Mary’s Hospital Gazette mentioned his death in action in Spain without any indication of which side he was fighting for, nowhere referring to the International Brigade with all its political connotations, though it did offer condolences to his wife. At least his death did not go unmarked in the Republican Spain for which he died fighting. Oskar Goryan lamented that ‘even now I am not sure whether he died as a doctor, bandaging a wound, or as a soldier with a weapon in his hands. I only know that we have lost a valiant and admirable comrade. Now both the Medical Service and the British Battalion mourn the loss of a man, a true man’.
He may not have been considered officer material by West Point, he may have struggled to gain his medical qualifications while at St Mary’s, but in death Randall Sollenberger had proved himself to be a warrior and a dedicated, politically-conscious doctor.
Kevin Brown Historian 
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