Columbia man fought Spanish fascists in 1930s

Delmer Berg, 99, has outlived all of the Americans who joined Spain’s fight against fascism in the 1930s.

He was among about 2,800 members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which sought to defend an elected leftist government from a revolt led by Gen. Francisco Franco. Berg was wounded in a losing cause.

“I was a worker,” Berg said in a recent interview. “I was a farmer. I was in support of the Spanish working people, and I wanted to go to Spain to help them.”

Berg was born in Anaheim and spent part of his childhood on a farm near Manteca. He later lived in Modesto, where he took part in farm labor and other causes. He has been a communist most of his life, drawing notice from the FBI in the 1950s, and was the only white member of the Modesto chapter of the NAACP.

Berg served his own country twice – in the National Guard before Spain and in the East Indies during World War II. He later worked as a landscaper and then a stonemason. He used the latter skills on the house that he and his late wife, June, built of native stone and reused lumber north of Columbia.

Berg has trouble hearing, and he struggled with memory during parts of the interview, but his service is well-known to admirers of the brigade. It was part of the 40,000-strong International Brigades, which sought to counteract the air and ground support provided to Franco by fascist Germany and Italy.

“Del is a lifelong fighter for freedom and an activist in the civil rights movement to this day,” said an email from Marina Garde, executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive in New York City.

The March 2014 death of John Hovan in Rhode Island made Berg the only known survivor.

The United States was neutral in the Spanish Civil War, which raged from 1936 to 1939 and killed an estimated 500,000 people. The international volunteers hoped to slow a fascist movement that would soon lead to world war and the deaths of tens of millions. Franco’s dictatorship in Spain would last until his death in 1975.

Berg has told his story in several venues, including Friends and Neighbors Magazine, published in Tuolumne County, and The New York Times Magazine.

He was working as a dishwasher at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel when he saw a sign about the brigade. In early 1938, he traveled by bus to New York and joined other volunteers on an ocean liner to France. They crossed the Pyrenees Mountains by bus and foot into Spain.

Berg ended up with an anti-aircraft unit and was assigned to lay telephone lines for batteries trying to take out the fascists’ superior air power. The unit took part in the defense of Teruel and a battle at the Ebro River.

Berg was quartered in a monastery in Valencia when an Italian plane, aiming for a nearby railyard, bombed his dormitory instead.

“I was sitting up in bed and the bomb came closer than expected,” he recalled. “I’ve had shrapnel in my liver all my life from that bomb.”

Berg underwent surgery at a nearby hospital and was still recuperating when both sides agreed in September 1938 to withdraw their international forces. About 800 of the American volunteers died in the war.

Berg returned to California and worked on his father’s farm near Modesto. He was drafted into the Army after the United States entered World War II and was assigned again to communications, including service on the island of Morotai.

After the war, Berg resumed farm labor, working in fields and orchards in the Modesto area, and campaigned to improve conditions.

“I organized farmworkers before Cesar Chavez started,” he said of the man who later co-founded the United Farm Workers. Berg also worked with Dolores Huerta, another co-founder, and testified at a 1950s congressional hearing attended by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Berg joined the NAACP around the time of the Civil Rights Movement. He was vice president of the Modesto chapter, and he helped in its work against housing discrimination.

Berg saw his communist membership, which started in the 1930s, as a way to improve life for working people. Federal agents, thinking the party was a front for Soviet influence, tried to glean information from his friends. Berg said they did not learn much.

He has filled his retirement with activism against nuclear weapons, U.S. involvement in Central America and many other causes. He has returned to Spain and monitored an election in Namibia. He has kept up on the issues through reading and correspondence.

“He’s still in that realm of ‘we’ve got to change the world,’ ” said Pat Cervelli, a Tuolumne County resident who has known Berg since the 1980s, when she helped found the Mother Lode Women’s Center.

Berg said he is looking forward to a family gathering in honor of his 100th birthday on Dec. 20. He does not get around well, but he is happy to talk about why he went to Spain.

He said it best in a video for the archive: “I didn’t like what them SOBs were doing.”

This story was originally published November 14, 2015 at 4:50 PM with the headline "Columbia man fought Spanish fascists in 1930s."