Whose Who In Knickerbocker Village History: Irving Goff

an excerpt from his wikipedia entry

Irving Goff (1900 - 17 May 1989) was a member of the Communist Party USA and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, a unit that volunteered to fight during the Spanish Civil War for the Popular Front. During World War II, he was a member of the American Office of Strategic Services, and was instrumental in setting up guerrilla units working behind enemy lines in North Africa and Italy.[1] His exploits as a guerrilla in Spain are considered to be the inspiration for Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Irving Goff's parents, of Jewish origin, emigrated from Odessa, Russia to New York in 1900. He grew up in the streets of Brooklyn and Long Island. He was a premier body builder (famous as the "Adonis" of Coney Island's Muscle Beach) and worked as an adagio dancer and professional acrobat before becoming an organiser for the Communist party in New York. Goff arrived in Spain on 4 April 1937, where he joined the International Brigades, working as a driver. In December 1937, he volunteered for dangerous guerrilla operations which frequently required him to work behind enemy lines for up to weeks at a time. ........ One of their objectives was the destruction of the main supply bridge spanning the Albarracín River. The operation may have been the inspiration for Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. When the book was published in 1940, Goff was critical of the novelist's ignorance of guerrilla operations and the way in which war was treated from "a romantic adventuristic point of view rather than [as] the grim, practical war that it was". In a later interview he said: "I never saw Ingrid Bergman in all the time I was in the war. If I did, I might still be there [Laughs.] The way Gary Cooper blew that bridge - like blowing a seam in a coal mine. I've blown bridges. You put a detonator in the thing and then you'd better be twenty miles away. You went after bridges and railroads. Usually it'd last five or six days behind the lines." ....... In September 1938, with a Republican defeat in sight, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion was withdrawn from the front line and shortly afterwards disbanded. Irving Goff returned to the United States. Once home, he resumed his activities in the Communist Party, and in 1940 was sent on a mission to investigate pro-fascist "synarchista" organizations in Texas, California and Mexico. Posing as a newspaper reporter, Goff filed regular reports about these groups with party leaders, but failed in his effort to link them with the right-wing group America First. Goff continued to campaign for the Spanish cause, and in February 1941, he led 28 Lincoln veterans in a Peace Motorcade to Capitol Hill to lobby against Francoist Spain receiving Lend-Lease aid. In 1941, Goff was approached by former Abraham Lincoln Battalion commander Milton Wolff to work for British intelligence through the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). On Goff's advice, Wolff invited other Lincoln veterans to participate in the group, including William Aalto, Milton Felsen, Mike Jiminez, Vince Lossowski and Alfred Tanz. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the OSS leader General William Donovan turned the project into a wholly American operation. In 1942, Goff was transferred to North Africa, where he was put in charge of training Spanish recruits to operate behind German lines. Here, he was promoted by Donovan to second lieutenant. After the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943, the OSS Lincolns moved to Naples, where Goff's previous experience in Spain proved a boon for American intelligence. He was appointed by the OSS as liaison officer to the Italian Communist Party, and the Americans promptly started training programmes, using Italian volunteers to wage guerrilla warfare behind the German lines in northern Italy. Goff's infiltration programs parachuted thirty teams of radio operators and meteorologists into enemy-held areas to provide daily weather reports for the Allied air forces. Working with the Italian Communists, Goff built the most effective intelligence operation in northern Italy. With multiple teams behind German lines, he could count on fourteen separate radio reports every day. "We had guerrillas operating on every highway, every railroad, every German convoy. We had identifications, the material in every car on every highway reported through the network of radios".......

Who's Who In Knickerbocker Village History: Gerald Cook

from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade archives

Gerald Cook was born in St. Louis, Missouri on April 30, 1916 to Catherine and James Cook. He was self educated and was never graduated from high school. As a young man, he moved to New York City and was active in organizing unions, specifically the Department Store Workers union. While on a picket line, he met his first wife, Anne Freedman. They married before he left for Spain to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. When he returned from Spain, he shipped out to fight the fascists in WWII. He served both on the European front and in the Pacific front. After the war, his first child, Catherine Anne Cook, was born inh 1947. A few years later Gerald and Anne divorced and Gerald married Joan Riddell Barlow, a journalist. They remained married until Jerry did in 1980. They had two children, Joseph Fitzgerald Cook (b. 1952) and Jezebel Cook (b. 1959). He also raised a step-son, John Barlow (b. 1946). Jerry is survived by his two daughters, his step-son and four grandchildren, Alexandra Barlow, Thomas Barlow, James Barlow and Caleb Cook. For most of his post soldier life, Jerry was a journalist, working on various publications. He also worked for local 1199, editing their newsletter. He also worked for the Daily World. He never stopped being an activist and fought all his life for peace and justice. He died firmly believing in his Marxist principles of dialectical materialism.

Milt Felsen: The Anti-Warrior

From Mike's memoir, "The Anti-Warrior." Mike and his wife shared a penthouse apartment in the G building with the families of fellow Lincoln Brigade vets Jerry Cook and Irving Goff. This occurred in 1941. Soon the men would be off to fight in World War II.

Who's Who In Knickerbocker Village History: Michael and Ann Sidorovich

They lived at 10 Monroe Street from October 1942 until May of 1943 in apartment GB12. Michael attended Seward Park High and later Stuyvesant High School. After graduation he fought in Spain as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Michael and Ann were a suspected Communist spies who were friends and, for a short time neighbors, of the Rosenbergs. They were also witnesses before the Grand Jury during the Rosenberg trial.

Who's Who In Knickerbocker Village History: Wolf Kupinsky, aka Harry Milton

I think I was doing a search on the Rosenbergs and I stumbled on an incredible document, a list of the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and their home addresses. Originally there were 2800, now they number in the tens. Those that are still alive are in their 90's. It set me off on the making another one of my google maps. What I do is plot their addresses and then go off to photograph the site, hoping that the original structure (in this case 70 years later) is still there. It's fascinating (at least to me) to look at two houses, maybe a block apart and then look at the names of two guys in their late teens and with no military experience, probably childhood friends, who came up with the idea in 1936 to go to Spain and fight Fascists. I think about a third of those 2800 never made it home. Survivors came home heroes, got no official recognition for their efforts, were lucky to escape recrimination (many went under alias' because of this) for breaking the law, but were later harassed and hounded because they fought on the side of the Communists. Anyway, when I checked the list there were two guys that came from Knickerbocker Village. One of them was Wolf Kupinsky, aka Harry Milton. He was lucky to survive the war and he is credited with saving George Orwell's life.
an excerpt THE MAN WHO SAVED ORWELL, David Jacobs

The American sentry I had been talking to had started forward. ‘Gosh! Are you hit?’ People gathered round. There was the usual fuss — ‘Lift him up! Where’s he hit? Get his shirt open!’ etc., etc. The American called for a knife to cut my shirt open. I knew that there was one in my pocket and tried to get it out, but discovered that my right arm was paralyzed. In the hazy photo (Orwell and Milton), a group of men and one woman pose for the camera behind a wall of sandbags, with their weapons at hand. They do not have the look of regular soldiers, and there are no uniforms. One individual stands literally head and shoulders above the rest. It is none other than George Orwell, or as he was known then, Eric Blair, his real name. The scene is the Spanish Civil War, and the photograph includes ‘the American’ who came to Orwell’s aid when he was shot: Harry David Milton. A small but interesting collection in the Hoover Institution Archives records Milton’s time in Spain, including his encounter with the future author of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Milton collection sheds light on Orwell’s political development in the crucible of Spain and underlines the role played by American volunteers in Spain who were not members of pro-Moscow Communist Parties and who chose to serve in formations other than the largely Comintern-recruited International Brigades, which received much more attention. Orwell’s vivid description of being wounded on the front lines near Huesca occurs near the end of his memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. Many years later, Harry Milton, describing the incident to a reporter in California, attributed Orwell’s misfortune both to his height and to his somewhat reckless habit of looking over the top of their unit’s fortified position: ‘I heard the crisp sound of a high velocity shot and Orwell [toppled] over. He landed on his back.’ Milton recounts giving first aid, as Orwell waited to be taken to the hospital. In another article about the shooting, Milton claims only a modest role for himself: ‘I simply stopped the bleeding.’ Milton does, however, claim some credit for influencing Orwell’s political consciousness as it developed during his time in Spain.