These letters will lift your spirit and break your heart. They will take you back to a time when 2,800 Americans took up arms and confronted Hitler's Condor Legion, Mussolini's Black Shirts, and Franco's fascist cavalry on the battlefields of Spain.

Here are the actual letters that Abraham Lincoln Brigade members wrote home from 1936 to 1939. Here are accounts of their combat experiences, the love letters they wrote under fire, tales of the friendships they formed among themselves and with their Spanish comrades, and their reports of history's first saturation bombing of civilian targets in Madrid and Barcelona.

It was the eve of World War II, and these men and women saw clearly the danger the world was facing. Now, both those who died and those who lived tell us their stories for the first time.