On the second day, the survivors were cheered by the efficiency of Aitken, "the only Political Commissar who was effective without becoming sanctimonious," who brought up to the front not only stragglers but food and hot coffee. Disaster struck, however, when Harry Fry's machine-gun company, lying about 100 yards in front of the sunken road, was infiltrated and captured by the Moors. Upon the orders of General Gal, the arrogant and inept commander of the XVth Brigade, Wintringham was forced to make an assault. As "the English Captain" stood up to lead his men, he immediately was felled by a bullet. George Aitken succeeded him in command.

During the night about 30 stragglers from No. 3 Company were found at the cookhouse by the battalion political commissar, George Aitken. Where possible, Aitken cajoled them to return to the line but, as he freely admits, on occasions he forced some volunteers back to the front under threat of his pistol. However, Aitken never actually used it; like most of the other senior figures in the battalion, he was vehemently opposed to the shooting of deserters. Aitken claims that he was approached at Jarama by higher officers, "and a civilian", with the idea of trying, and possibly shooting, some of the deserters. Aitken resisted it and states that he remained totally opposed to the idea of shooting men who had volunteered. He later stated categorically that "there was nothing of the kind while I was there." However, coerced or not, the volunteers were a desperately needed addition to the front line.

As commissar I approached George Aitken, who was the brigade commissar on that front, and told him that a man in my opinion was no use and should be taken to the rear, away from frontline duty. To my surprise Aitken agreed. He was very understanding. He had been in World War I himself and been wounded. I thought it was very good of him because you have to be very hard during a war. You can't just fit everybody in who might feel that they can't carry on, otherwise you would have nobody left.

After about the third day at Jarama when we went into action, there was very little defence. We were out in the open and people were standing up when they should have been taking cover. They were being shot down and we were losing quite a number of men and right to the front of us, about 500 yards away, there was a big white house. We were hoping to capture that white house but we never got near it. Our commander, Bert Overton, came over to me and said: "I have forgotten my binoculars." I was a runner then, a messenger, and I said I would go back for them. He said, "No, I will go". I said you can't go and leave the company, but before I said anything else he walked off and he was gone. I didn't think too much more about it. I thought that maybe he had been killed. So many people got killed, especially officers, at that time.

It was about six months later, at Mondejar, that I met Peter Kerrigan, the commissar, who was a very stern and severe but good commissar. He did things for everyone's good. He says to me, "There is a battalion trial, go and get the prisoner". So I went in and there was this bloke sitting there. It was Overton. I looked at him, sort of remembered his face, told him to come along and marched him in. I remember Kerrigan and a fellow called George Aitken were sitting there. Overton was asked about this and he told them the same story as he had to me: that he had left his binoculars and he went back to fetch them. He was accused of cowardice, taken in front of the battalion, stripped of his officer epaulettes and was dishonoured. That was the last I saw of him. I was told he went off to another front and died there. After the trial I did say to Peter Kerrigan that because Overton had given my name as a witness I should have been allowed to step forward. I couldn't have made any difference. I would have told the same story, but it seemed a bit unfair to me. Kerrigan said he was a coward and that men had died.

For several days I remained with Frank Ryan, whose duties kept him just in the wake of the gruelling advance. Along the road from Villanueva to Brunete we came across rows and rows of bodies, many with their names pinned on slips of paper. Many of them were British lads. I remember one, who had been a Labour councillor at home, clutching, of all things, a dead rabbit. Frank told me that Will Paynter was in the very front position with the lads. The next day Frank took me over to the 15th Brigade HQ located in a huge pantechnicon. George Aitken, the brigade commissar, was seated on an upturned box, banging grimly away at a typewriter; from time to time the pantechnicon shuddered as bombs dropped nearby. Frank told George to give me a safe conduct back to Albacete, explaining his reasons. After much grumbling George gave me the precious slip of paper with the brigade stamp.

The dispute began when Battalion political commissar Walter Tapsell claimed that the promotions of Scots George Aitken (to Brigade Commissar) and Jock Cunningham (to Battalion commander) had left the two men isolated from regular Brigaders. Tapsell wrote that, "Aitken's temperament has made him distrusted and disliked by the vast majority of the British Battalion who regard him as being personally ambitious and unmindful of the interests of the Battalion and the men." Meanwhile, Cunningham, "fluctuates violently between hysterical bursts of passion and is openly accused by Aitken of lazing about the Brigade headquarters doing nothing." Assistant Brigade Commissar at Albacete, Dave Springhall, weighed in, claiming that the Battalion's entire leadership structure had collapsed under the pressures brought on by defeat at Brunete.

With an amicable resolution impossible in Spain, all parties involved were summoned back to London for a meeting with CPGB leader Harry Pollitt. At its conclusion, Pollitt told Aitken, Cunningham and Bert Williams (a political commissar with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion) to remain in Britain, while Fred Copeman (commander of the British Battalion) and Tapsell were to return to Spain. Aitken and Cunningham, though barely on speaking terms themselves, were apoplectic at the decision, and the former wrote a 10-page letter of "emphatic protest" to the CPGB, in response to this monstrous injustice".

Within a matter of months, both had resigned from the Party, and the leadership of the British Battalion had been radically reshaped. As part of its restructuring, the Battalion became an official part of the republican army, meaning popular six month terms of service were now prohibited. Disputes at the top of the hierarchy had undermined soldier morale and damaged the reputation of the Brigades on a level that the smattering of desertions at the bottom never could.

The people who were there in Spain representing the communist leadership in my view made a hash of things. Tapsell definitely made a hash of things. I know for a fact that he caused a tremendous amount of despair among those who survived the Battle of Brunete. I was present at the meeting and I told George Aitken lots of these lads had arrived after the main part of the battle was over and so we suffered a defeat.

In fact we hadn't achieved our objective, we had to fall back and things had been bad, but it wasn't any different from anything that had ever happened before. We always got so far but we never had that little extra which enabled us to make anything out of it, because we didn't have the weapons and so on. Their [fascists'] aeroplanes used to come over and just stand out of range, our anti-aircraft would fire at them perhaps for an hour and then we would run out of shells. So then planes would come, they would bomb and they would strafe. It was nobody's fault that we weren't an organized army, we couldn't possibly be and therefore we were bound to have defeats.

After the battle we were exhausted. A lot of the men were new and just arrived and there was Tapsell telling them that the reason for the whole of this is because the military command was useless; that they weren't revolutionary enough and what we must do is demand that there should be full cooperation between all ranks so that there was full discussion of all tactics, rather than having orders given to you from above, and so on. And that if we had this revolutionary strategy running right through all the forces in the army then these defeats would not occur. I went to George Aitken and said the way things are going on, every lad in the battalion will go home because he was telling them that their officers were useless and that they are being driven to the slaughter like cattle. So Tapsell was arrested and of course the next thing there was a political struggle, because Tapsell was representing the Communist Party.

At base we had Peter Kerrigan, who was a similar thing to Tapsell, and it would have been too politically dangerous for Tapsell to have been put on a proper charge for disaffecting the troops, although there was a 30 percent desertion after his speech and the morale in the unit went right down to zero. What happened was that Tapsell and George Aitken went back to England.

After that I was with the battalion and was then an old timer. I was one of the few remaining from the first English company. Aitken lost his battle in England so Tapsell came back and I was asked to make a speech of welcome, to welcome Tapsell back into the battalion. Of course, I couldn't, and at the same time not only could I not do that but I couldn't say why because then I would be just as bad as Tapsell. So for the first time in my life I went out and got drunk. I just sat in a cafe and drank a bottle of rum (I have never touched rum since). So I avoided that. It could be that Tapsell was a different person later on, because instead of being an observer he became a company commander in the battalion and was killed on the Ebro front.