The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  Blum regretted this. He nearly resigned, but his colleague, Auríol (who was in favour of the Spanish republic), and Fernando de los Ríos persuaded him not to do so. A Blum government would, after all, be better for the republic than any other.4 On 9 August, Blum, in spite of everything, was cheered at a meeting at Saint-Cloud by a great crowd chanting ‘Arms for Spain’, while an aircraft traced the word PAIX in smoke across the blue summer sky. Both the socialist and communist French trade-union leaders were now committed to the policy which the crowd demanded. Léon Jouhaux, the socialist trade-union leader, and Thorez, the communist secretary-general, were as one in declaring that there could be no neutrality for ‘the conscientious worker’. Since the dispatch of arms was forbidden, funds for clothing, food, and medical supplies for the republic were collected instead. In fact, so long as Pierre Cot remained minister of air (till June 1937), French airports were told to help republican aircraft. These breaches of non-intervention were officially excused as caused by ‘errors of navigation’.1 Some aircraft also continued to be sent from France. Fifty-six aircraft are believed to have reached Spain between 9 August and 14 October from the Air France airfield at Montaudran.2 The Catalan government succeeded also in getting some assistance, in both personnel and material, from France and Belgium, to help develop their munitions industry.3

  While Blum was speaking at Saint-Cloud, the counsellor of the German Embassy in London was blandly assuring the Foreign Office that ‘no war materials had been sent from Germany and none will be’.4 But the Junkers, Heinkels, their pilots and technicians were already making an impact on the war in the south of Spain. The German consul in Seville appealed to the Wilhelmstrasse that these Germans should not appear in the streets in German uniform, since, if they did, they would be recognized and given ‘great ovations’.5 One Junkers 52, however, made a forced landing in republican territory, where it was detained, with its crew. The next day, the German counsellor in Madrid, Schwendemann, on instruction from Berlin, demanded their release. The Spanish government refused. On 12 August, Neurath told François-Poncet that, until the Spanish gave up the aircraft (‘merely a transport aeroplane’), Germany could not agree to a Non-Intervention Agreement.6 But, on 13 August, Portugal accepted non-intervention in principle, reserving liberty of action if her border were threatened by the war. A few days before, the Spanish government had declared the Canaries and Galician provinces to be ‘zones of war’ and therefore subject to blockade. The Foreign Office said that they regarded the statement as one of intent: the fact of blockade was necessary before it could be internationally recognized.

  The United States had by now also been called upon to take up an attitude to the Spanish war. On 5 August, after a meeting in the department of state, the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, allowed it to be generally known (though not announced) that his government favoured non-intervention.1 On 10 August, then, the Glenn Martin Company, the leading aircraft firm in the US, asked what the government’s attitude would be to the sale of eight bombers to the republic. The acting secretary of state replied that such a sale ‘would not follow the spirit of this government’s policy of a “moral embargo” on arms to Spain’.2 The State Department next instructed Bowers, the American ambassador in Spain, to refuse even to join a mediation proposal suggested to the diplomatic corps at St Jean de Luz by the Argentinian ambassador.3 American liberal opinion was shocked: ‘Let us ask Jefferson where he stands on this issue!’ The words might be those of Earl Browder, the American communist, but his sentiments were those of many democrats. Still, most Americans certainly supported the embargo. Mexico, meantime, alone of governments openly began to send a few arms to the republic. President Cárdenas would announce in September that he had sent 20,000 rifles and 20 million rounds of ammunition to the Spanish government.

  The British and French pursuit of the chimera of non-intervention continued. Britain prohibited exports of war material to Spain on 15 August, after news had been received of flights of British aircraft from Croydon to rebel Spain.4 Neurath gave a note to François-Poncet on 17 August agreeing, pending the release of the Junkers and the acceptance of similar obligations by all countries possessing arms industries, to ban arms shipments to Spain and suggesting that this ban should be extended to volunteers.5 Ciano also took up this last point with the French ambassador in Rome, but promised, before that question and that of funds were settled, that Italy would prohibit the export of arms.1 This reversal surprised the French. It was caused by a realization that it would be possible, in the words of the German chargé at Rome, ‘not to abide by the declaration anyway’.2 On 24 August, with the future of the Junkers in Madrid still unsettled, Germany signed the declaration demanded by the French.3 That day, the British chiefs of staff presented an important paper, often subsequently referred to inside the British government, which argued that, for strategic reasons, Britain had to be on good terms with whoever won the war.4 Perhaps this was the most important of British documents of the time affecting Spain.

  Russia did not propose to be left out of these negotiations any more than the German foreign ministry wanted her to be. Given his desire for an alliance with France and Britain, Stalin wanted to be a party to all such discussions. On 23 August, Russia accepted the Non-Intervention Agreement and, on 28 August, Stalin issued a decree forbidding export of war material to Spain. Russian officials showed even greater diffidence than usual during these negotiations, and Litvinov had to refer even insignificant details of wording of their government’s adhesion to Stalin.5 Izvestia turned many logical somersaults in denouncing neutrality as ‘not our idea at all’ and as ‘a general retreat before fascist governments’, yet explaining that the Russian acceptance of it was ‘due to the fact that the French declaration aimed at the end of fascist aid to the rebels’.6 The dilemma of Russian policy, desirous of pleasing France, while not appearing to desert the world revolution, was never more difficult. But Stalin’s slowness is also explained by his preoccupation at that moment with the trial of the first group of Old Bolsheviks, which began on 19 August: Kamenev was condemned to death on 23 August, and Zinoviev some days later. Stalin’s mind was thus on other things than Spain.

  Moreover, at the very moment that Russia adhered to the Non-Intervention Agreement, diplomatic relations between her and the Spanish government were being formidably established.1 An old revolutionary, Vladimir Antonov-Ovsëenko, who had commanded the Red Guard which stormed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in 1917, and had later been a member of the first bolshevik government, arrived in Barcelona as consul-general on 25 August. In the late twenties, he had been a member of the Trotskyist opposition, but in 1928 he had capitulated to Stalin and had been afterwards a diplomat in Prague and Warsaw. The nomination of so experienced a revolutionary to Barcelona was a curious, and, as it turned out, an ironic step.2 The competent diplomat Marcel Rosenberg, ex–deputy secretary of the League of Nations, reached Madrid as ambassador on 27 August. Rosenberg brought with him a large staff, including a naval attaché, Captain N. Kuznetzov, an air attaché, Colonel Boris Sveshnikov, and a military attaché, General V. Gorev.3 The chief Russian military adviser in Spain was the Latvian General Jan Berzin, previously head of Soviet military intelligence, a courageous man whose youth in Latvia had been spent fighting the Tsarist police. He played a brilliant role in the Russian Civil War. He was a tall, grey-haired man whom some mistook for an Englishman.4 Antonov-Ovsëenko also had an adviser, Arthur Stashevsky, who was in effect Russian economic attaché in Spain. He was a Pole, short and thick-set, married to a Frenchwoman, seeming to be an ordinary businessman, and had once also been Berzin’s assistant. Other Russians included the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who came to Spain as Izvestia correspondent in late August, and busied himself with propaganda and even military activity as well as reporting.5 Another Russian writer of eminence, Mikhail Koltsov, correspondent of Pravda, had arrived earlier, on 8 August.1 The date of the arrival of these missions suggests that the double attitude expressed in Izvest
ia reflected a double policy, showing that, as ever, Stalin intended to keep all courses open. The headquarters of the Russian mission in Madrid was the quiet Gaylord’s Hotel, between the Prado and the Retiro Park.2 As yet, no Russian military equipment was to be seen in Spain, though, at the moment that Russia was formally ‘banning the export of war material’, Stalin was approving it.

  Russia’s double-dealing was matched by that of Germany. On 25 August, the day after Germany had signed the Non-Intervention Agreement, the war minister, Field-Marshal von Blomberg, summoned Colonel Warlimont, a promising and ambitious officer. The Führer, said Blomberg, was moving into an attitude of explicit hostility to Russia. Hitherto, his anti-communism had been confined to Germany. Now it embraced the Comintern and all its works. His speech at the annual congress of the Nazi party at Nuremberg in September would reflect that attitude. As a result, Blomberg went on, Hitler had decided to give substantial aid to Franco. Warlimont would lead the German contingent. On the 26th, Warlimont and Canaris visited the head of Italian military intelligence, Colonel Roatta, and then Roatta and Warlimont left for Tetuán, on an Italian cruiser. A German aircraft flew the two of them to Seville, where they talked to Queipo, and then to Cáceres, where they met Franco. Warlimont thereupon took up his duties.3 Roatta returned to Italy but, in the course of the next month, about twenty light Ansaldo-Fiat tanks, including some fitted with flamethrowers and a quantity of Italian artillery of the reliable 65/17 millimetre model used in the First World War, were sent to Spain by Mussolini, along with ‘specialists’ in the use of this material, to act alongside the pilots of the Savoias and Fiat fighters already there.

  While the other powers were thus busy arranging to break their words, Eden took up an Italian suggestion for a permanent group to supervise the working of non-intervention. After dispute as to its powers, a committee was arranged. This, deriving from the successful ambassadors’ conference at the time of the Balkan Wars, was to be convened at the Foreign Office in London. The first meeting was arranged for 9 September. Thus was born the Non-Intervention Committee, which was to graduate from equivocation to hypocrisy, and which was to last out the civil war.1 Eden had returned to London on 16 August; Baldwin, however, had been ordered three months’ rest, for medical reasons, and was away in South Wales. The cabinet ‘did not meet’, reported Eden later, ‘from the end of July until the beginning of September, and the British policy was decided by the Foreign Office’.2

  The Non-Intervention Committee met for the first time in London on 9 September. W. S. Morrison, financial secretary to the Treasury,3 led the British delegation and took the chair. The other countries, represented by their ambassadors in London, included all the European countries except for Switzerland, which had banned the export of arms, but whose code of neutrality forbade her intervention even in a committee of non-intervention.4

  The first meeting of the committee was concerned with ‘the murky tide of procedure’, in Pravda’s unusually accurate words. The representatives present agreed to give to Francis Hemming, a British civil servant in the cabinet office whose knowledge of Spain was confined to the butterflies of the Pyrenees and who became the committee’s secretary, the texts of the laws their countries had passed banning the export of arms. Apart from the British representative, the leading men at the committee were Corbin, the French ambassador; Grandi, the fascist ex–foreign secretary of Italy whom Mussolini had transferred to the Embassy at London for not being satisfactorily fascist; and Maisky, the Russian ambassador. Ribbentrop (who became German ambassador on 30 October), and his second-in-command, Prince Bismarck, the grandson of the Iron Chancellor, took a less prominent part than Grandi to whom, indeed, they had been instructed to leave the running. Ribbentrop later described how difficult he found working with Grandi—‘an intriguer if ever there was one’.1 Portugal, whose attendance the Russians had insisted upon, was not immediately represented. The Portuguese minister in Berlin said on 7 September (when the German ship Usamoro was refused facilities to discharge another cargo of arms for the nationalists at Lisbon due, it was thought in Berlin, to British influence) that she would not be represented until after a ban on volunteers.2 Salazar apparently thought that to join the committee would to some degree imply a surrender of authority.3 But the Portuguese need not have worried. Grandi had been instructed by Ciano ‘to do his best to give the Committee’s entire activity a purely platonic character’.4 Ribbentrop later joked that a better name for the Non-Intervention Committee would have been ‘intervention committee’.5 The German attitude to the committee was more ambiguous than the Italian, because the German foreign office was so ill-informed as to what the war ministry and Nazi party were doing. The German diplomats had not, indeed, decided whether real non-intervention would aid Franco or not. As for France and Britain, Bismarck reported that the first meeting of the committee left the impression that, for both countries, ‘It is not so much a question of taking actual steps immediately, as of pacifying the aroused feelings of the Leftist parties … by the very establishment of such a committee’.1 From the start, the British and French governments were occupied less with the end of intervention on all sides, than with the appearance of such an end. In this way the flow of war material to the two sides in Spain might not be prevented, but, at the least, the extension of the Spanish war might be.

  Britain accused Italy of landing aircraft in Majorca on 7 September.2 On 12 September, Ingram, the British chargé in Rome, told Ciano that changes in the Mediterranean would ‘closely concern the British government’. Ciano replied that no such alteration had occurred or was contemplated.3 But Majorca was nevertheless an Italian stronghold throughout the civil war. The main street, the Rambla, in Palma, was even renamed the Vía Roma, and statues of two Roman youths in togas with eagles on their shoulders stood at its entry. The Bay of Pollensa became an Italian naval base. War material poured into the island. The island was mined and refortified by Italians. The incident showed that Britain might protest when she felt her interests were threatened by some consequence of the Spanish war, but that she would not do so in respect of a simple breach of the Agreement. Yet, to give Baldwin’s and Blum’s Cabinets their due, both believed that their countries, and European peace, would be best served by the prevention of military help to Spain. Both governments made every effort to keep the pact, even though in France this continued to make trouble for Blum. But, at this time, the majority of expressed opinion in both countries supported this policy. The Labour party in England even deplored the delay in bringing non-intervention into being. As for the communists, Thorez tried to persuade Blum to change his policy on aid to Spain on 7 September.4 Despite his failure, he undertook that the communists would not vote against the government in the National Assembly. The Comintern sponsored in London a ‘Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Breaches of the Non-Intervention Agreement in Spain’. Such respectable persons as Philip Noel-Baker, Lord Faringdon, Professor Trend of Cambridge, and Miss Eleanor Rathbone were members. The two secretaries were Geoffrey Bing and the journalist John Langdon-Davies, of whom the first, a young lawyer, was then a member of the communist party.1 Langdon-Davies was also on the far Left. This was a typical communist tactic of those days, the favourite one, it would seem, of the inventive Willi Muenzenberg.

  The second meeting of the Non-Intervention Committee occurred on 14 September, and set up a sub-committee, composed of Belgium, Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Sweden, to deal with everyday matters of non-intervention.2 The smaller states even on the sub-committee were only too willing to follow the lead of the great powers and the real debates were confined to France, Britain, Germany, and Italy. The timidity before Hitler, and before all international responsibility, of the Scandinavian and (as they would now be called) the Benelux countries was indeed, in some ways, the most distasteful aspect of the diplomatic history of those days. But then, what could they do, if Britain continued with ‘appeasement’? And ‘appeasement’ seemed the only safe pol
icy for an empire already embarked on a decline, however little she desired to admit it.

  This meeting coincided with Pope Pius XI’s first public reaction to the war in Spain. He spoke on 14 September of the republicans’ ‘truly satanic hatred of God’ at Castelgandolfo to six hundred Spanish refugees.3 The same day, a priest in Madrid who had sided with the republic, Father García Morales, adjured the Pope to denounce the rebels. Some days later, José Bergamín, a Catholic apologist who edited Cruz y Raya, described the generals, bishops, Moors, and Carlists who were fighting the republic as being implicated in some ‘fantastic mumming show of death’. Thus the Spanish Civil War caused a conflict within the Catholic church, throughout Europe and the world. Diplomatic manoeuvres were equalled by ecclesiastical. War within international opinion had also been declared. The conflict was by September 1936 thus no isolated Carlist war of the nineteenth century.

  24

  At the beginning of September 1936, Franco was at Talavera, and Mola was at Irún, threatening San Sebastián. The republic’s Majorcan expedition had failed. Saragossa, Huesca, Oviedo, and even the Alcázar at Toledo remained in rebel hands. In the south, much of Andalusia had been lost to the republic, as well as nearly all Estremadura. The experience of the well-armed Army of Africa was the chief explanation for the nationalists’ success. Bravery might win street-battles, but was inadequate against legionaries and the Regulares. Only the Fifth Regiment among the militias knew anything of discipline. The remains of the regular army, the civil guard and assault forces still with the government seemed demoralized. The republic, with their purchases of French aeroplanes and their initial numerical advantage in aircraft, might often have enjoyed command of the air; but the mercenary French pilots were not of high quality, and the nationalists’ concentration of their few, but impressive, new aircraft from Germany and Italy on the Estremaduran and Tagus fronts gave them superiority there. The young German pilots who flew these Junkers and Heinkels, alongside Spaniards, in the so-called squadron of ‘Pedros and Pablos’, were superior to their French counterparts. Political predilections also affected tactics. On the Talavera front, for example, the republicans had high hopes for an armoured train, a favourite development of the Russian Civil War. In Spain, that ‘vital shovelful of coal that keeps a dying fire alive’, as Trotsky had called his own train, proved useless. The Russian Civil War was nevertheless constantly recalled by the Spanish officers of the republic in search of some precedent for their own problems.1 Their troubles were not only in the fighting line. The ministry of war had no real central staff, and the movement of militia forces from place to place entailed endless delays. The Catalan and anarchist forces still had no relation with the government in Madrid. There were few opportunities for rifle practice, and few rifles too for such training, since many workers continued to carry these weapons as symbols of liberty and because the political parties all kept back a proportion of arms for possible use against their friends. The CNT in Madrid, for example, were believed to possess 5,000 rifles at their headquarters. A food shortage also developed—this being due not only to the loss of Old Castile, but to the phenomenal waste of food at the front and the excessive slaughtering of herds, in many agricultural collectives.2 Deep distrust prevented any understanding between communists and anarchists; La Pasionaria, on a delegation to France to seek arms as well as sympathy, with the ex-minister Marcelino Domingo, was held up for a long time in Barcelona by the crippled FAI leader, Manuel Escorza, and Aurelio Fernández, chief of the ‘Investigation Committee of Barcelona’.3 The British and French governments’ championship of non-intervention was also demoralizing, less because there was as yet any shortage of weapons than because non-intervention made the republic seem isolated.