The Premature Anti Fascist

 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-15-bk-22387-story.html

I first heard the remarkable phrase “premature anti-Fascist” in 1946 when, fresh out of the U.S. Army, I went up to New Haven, Conn., for an interview with the chairman of the Yale classics department, to which, taking advantage of the generous provisions of what was popularly known as the GI Bill, I had applied for admission to the graduate program for the PhD. in classics. I had submitted a copy of my certificate of the bachelor’s degree I had received from St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1936. I did not make any mention of the fact that I had made rather a mediocre showing in the final part of the Tripos, ending up with a second class (at least, I comforted myself, I did better than Auden, who got a third). To jazz up my application a bit, I had included my record in the U.S. Army, private to captain 1942 to ’45. The Professor, who had served in the U.S. Army in 1917 to ’18, was very interested and remarked on the fact that, in addition to the usual battle stars for service in the European Theater, I had been awarded a Croix de Guerre a l’Ordre de l’Armee, the highest category for that decoration. Asked how I got it, I explained that, in July 1944, I hadparachuted, in uniform, behind the Allied lines in Brittany to arm and organize French Resistance forces and hold them ready for action at the moment most useful for the Allied advance. “Why were you selected for that operation?” he asked, and I told him that I was one of the few people in the U.S. Army who could speak fluent, idiomatic and (if necessary) pungently coarse French. When he asked me where I had learned it, I told him that I had fought in 1936 on the northwest sector of the Madrid front in the French Battalion of the XIth International Brigade. “Oh,” he said, “you were a premature anti-Fascist.”

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