Irving Goff; Member of 1930s Lincoln Brigade

Irving Goff, who battled fascism as a guerrilla in both the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and in World War II scant years later, died Wednesday of a heart condition in a Los Angeles convalescent home.

His brother, John Goff, said he was 77 and had suffered from a longtime heart ailment.

Irving Goff was a young man in a Jewish community on the Lower East Side of New York City, where, he told The Times in 1986, “we’d discuss the Depression and what was happening in the German concentration camps.”

They also discussed animatedly the revolt against Gen. Francisco Franco’s Spanish Nationalists.

Lincoln Brigade

“In 1936,” Goff recounted 50 years later, “the word went out that an international brigade was being formed” to go to Spain.

“I got a passport and joined up in New York.”

He boarded a liner to Europe with 200 others, some of them leading American intellectuals. Once in Spain he became part of the fabled Lincoln Brigade, a group of guerrilla fighters made immortal by Ernest Hemingway in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Within two days of his arrival after a march across the Pyrenees from France with other American volunteers, he blew up his first train, learning later that it contained some of Benito Mussolini’s Italian soldiers en route to the front to fight Goff’s fellow Loyalists.

Adolf Hitler had also dispatched troops to assist Franco, and Joseph Stalin had sent Russian soldiers to assist the Loyalists.

Goff emerged relatively unscathed from that conflict (a touch of scurvy was his only physical problem), in which he always fought furtively behind enemy lines, usually with a cache of dynamite as his primary weapon.

Half of the 3,300-man Lincoln Brigade perished in the struggle.

Recruited by OSS

Because of his experience, Goff was recruited during World War II by the Army’s Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, and once again found himself behind enemy lines--this time German--in North Africa and later Italy.

John Goff said that a chapter of a biography of Gen. William J. (Wild Bill) Donovan, who formed the OSS, was devoted to his brother’s exploits.

Irving Goff was discharged as a captain and awarded a Legion of Merit citation that read, in part: “He recruited, trained and placed in the field and directed teams of men whose missions and assignments were of a secret and hazardous nature.”

After the war Goff settled in Los Angeles and became a salesman for a printing supply firm. He married and had two children.

He will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.