An-tee-fa? MY Dad in 1945:

[struggle4progress]

41. I just re-read his 1959 and 1979 introductions: the FBI story is not in the 1970 introduction but

in the 1959 introduction; and neither seems to contain the phrase 'prematurely antifascist'

The 1959 introduction is interesting, because he says he wrote the book in 1938 and that it began to appear commercially ten days after the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed and two days after WWII started. He also says there here received a number of letters from US servicemen who had read his book in Army libraries and that before the end of WWII he himself encountered a copy in such a library in Okinawa

There is no reason to assume that this account is inaccurate; and if he were writing a pacifist novel in the era before the end of the Spanish civil war, then his views would have been unpopular among the leftists sometimes called 'prematurely antifascist' -- since they were then already taking the view that it was important to resist Franco and his then-allies Hitler and Mussolini