XV International Brigade
military unit
The XV International Brigade, also known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, was one of the International Brigades formed to fight for the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War.
History
The XVth Brigade mustered at Albacete in January 1937. It consisted of English-speaking volunteers – arranged into four battalions: the mostly British Saklatvala Battalion, the mostly North American Lincoln Battalion, the Balkan Dimitrov Battalion and the Franco-Belgian Sixth February Battalion. The brigade fought at Jarama, Brunete, Boadilla, Belchite, Fuentes de Ebro, Teruel and the Ebro River.
The brigade's first combat, at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937, resulted in heavy casualties. The British lost 225 men out of 600, the Lincolns 120 out of 500. After the battle, the brigade was seriously undermanned.
At the end of March, a Spanish battalion, Voluntario 24 (the 24th Volunteers), joined the brigade. Over the next few months, under the close supervision of Janos Galicz, the XVth was re-organized into two regiments of about 1,200 men. Galicz appointed "the gallant major", George Nathan, as brigade Chief of Staff.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q941335. VIAF identifies the subject as 139526385. The Library of Congress control number is n88119968. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “XV International Brigade” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.