by Hugh Thomas
This Basque government came into being only after some labyrinthine negotiations during which, on the one hand, Aguirre had to persuade Largo Caballero that this concession was the best way to get the Basques to fight; and, on the other, some Basque nationalists had toyed with the idea of exchanging autonomy as a return for supporting the nationalists, with whom they had contact through some of their members who, in Alava, had supported the rising.3
The same day as the Basques achieved their ambitions, 7 October, the rebel offensive against Madrid was resumed. Yagüe, forgiven, returned to field command, though he was placed under Varela. The Army of Africa, now about 10,000 men, and still organized in columns (under Colonels Asensio, Tella, Delgado Serrano, Castejón and Barrón) was now to act in the final onslaught on Madrid alongside the 10,000 falangists, requetés and regular soldiers delegated for the attack by Mola under General Valdés Cabanellas. (Mola was in supreme command of this army, but Varela took the day-to-day decisions, in conjunction with Franco and Yagüe.) There was also a cavalry column under Colonel Monasterio. The army, particularly the legionaries, was well fed, and well armed.
Yagüe probably expected the command but his relations with Mola were too bad to allow that. Instead, Varela was given the great opportunity. Impeccably dressed, always with white gloves, he was rumoured to keep his medals on when sleeping; certainly, one English journalist saw them on a silk dressing gown. General Mola announced facetiously that he would be taking a cup of coffee in the Gran Vía in the capital by 12 October. The Army of Africa soon captured San Martín de Valdeiglesias, and merged its offensive with that of Valdés Cabanellas at El Tiemblo. The militia fled towards Madrid and always along the road, making an easy target for nationalist aircraft with their machine-guns. Bayo, the commander of the ill-fated Majorcan expedition, tried somewhat unsuccessfully to harass the nationalist army by a series of guerrilla actions.1
Thus, although Mola did not keep his rendezvous in the Gran Vía (in whose Café Molinero a table was thereafter mockingly kept, with a reservation for him upon it in large letters), at the end of the first ten days of October the republic was faced once more with defeats on all sides. But Largo Caballero refused to mobilize Madrid’s large building industry to dig entrenchments, on the ground that he had no shovels and no barbed-wire. He also thought that Spaniards might fight from behind trees, never from trenches.2 The French journalist Simone Téry reported his expostulation: ‘What, do you think that Spaniards can fight under the ground, like rats?’3 In addition, his old friends in the builders’ union in Madrid were reluctant to urge their members to build trenches after hours.1 He did call up, on 30 September, the reserve classes of 1932 and 1933, but, to communist anger, he allowed the conscripts, if they were anarchists, to join CNT militia units. The communist leaders were now beginning to criticize the Prime Minister for what they thought his pedantry, his vanity, and his strange reliance on old and conventional generals.2 Largo Caballero had not as yet made a single speech to the nation since he became Premier. He was a noble man and an honest man, everyone conceded, but he seemed not to be a war leader after all. Russian arms had not been arranged, while the supply from French or other sources was as unreliable as that from the Spanish factories. On 10 October, de los Ríos, newly appointed republican ambassador at Washington, appealed unsuccessfully to Cordell Hull to allow the republic to purchase arms from the United States, saying that the collapse of the republic would cause the fall of Blum, and so presage the extinction of democracy. Hull said that America had no law against aid to Spain—only a policy of ‘moral aloofness’.1
15. The advance on Madrid, September–November 1936
Still, Largo Caballero was doing his best in many ways to rouse the republic to its maximum efforts. In an attempt to achieve efficiency in the army, the government decreed the end of the independence of the militias, making them dependent on the central general staff. The basic unit of the army henceforth would be the self-sufficient ‘Mixed Brigade’, consisting usually of three militia battalions and one battalion of the old army, each unit having three companies of riflemen and one of machine-gunners. This reorganization was begun on 16 October, but it was a long time before it was complete. As the intelligent French military attaché Colonel Morell put it in a report to Paris, ‘an army cannot be created by decree’. He added:
The quality of the army continues to deteriorate. Instead of the enthusiastic young madrileños of the first month, underfed peasants are collected whom the evacuation of the countryside has flung into Madrid. They get ten pesetas. They are dressed, after a fashion (in a uniform with a red star, à la Russe), they are armed; they leave, without understanding, for the front, where they discover, too late, that war is serious.2
To try to avoid this ignorance, the government, apparently on the suggestion of the Italian ‘Carlos’ (Vidali),3 also established in all units the system of political commissars which already obtained in the communist Fifth Regiment. These were intended to maintain the militiamen’s political faith in the cause after the disappearance of their own parties, and to diminish their suspicions of the regular army officers. The idea derived from the commissars of the Red Army, more distantly from Carnot’s regiments in 1794. The commissar’s role was not well defined; he could be everything or nothing. The emergence of these ‘theologians of the Red Army’ or ‘red almoners’ (as the nationalists referred to them) turned out to be another victory for the communists. The organization was superficially fair to all parties: the socialist Álvarez del Vayo, for example, was commissar-general, the vice-commissars-general were Crescenciano Bilbao (a Prieto socialist); Antonio Mije (communist); Angel Pestaña (the old anarchist, now a ‘syndicalist’); Gil Roldán (anarchist); and Felipe Pretel (another socialist, and second-in-command of the UGT). In fact, Mije played the dominant part in respect of organization, while an ex-socialist youth leader, now a communist, José Laín Entralgo, became director of the training school for commissars near Valencia, which he made into a communist bastion. Both Álvarez del Vayo and Pretel were fellow-travellers, and Pestaña was shortly to be succeeded (through ill-health) by another socialist friendly with communists, García Maroto. Pestaña was a man with no following at this time. Álvarez del Vayo, busy as foreign minister, did little as commissar-general, Mije and Bilbao being the real managers.1
A few months later, the commissars seemed to be more assistant chiefs-of-staff than anything else: periodically they would ‘be sent round by the party to … deliver some sort of political discourse … By this time, the political commissar was simply a go-between who was sent to headquarters to complain about rations etc ….’2
On the battlefield, in the north, the nationalist garrison in Oviedo, meantime, was relieved by a column from Galicia, and after many privations—and, indeed, only just in time to prevent its fall to the Asturian miners, who had already penetrated into the town.3 But the miners continued to press hard, if ineffectively, at Oviedo for another six months, since the garrison’s link with the outside world was a thin neck of land.
General Varela soon launched the next stage of his assault on Madrid. On 15 October, the whole twenty-mile front was driven forward ten miles. The road junction of Illescas, halfway between Toledo and Madrid, fell on 17 October. Largo Caballero telephoned the town to speak to his commanding officer, to be answered, to his horror, by Varela. The next day, the weary republican militias, brutalized by the savagery of their Moroccan and legionary opponents, and only partly believing the assurance of their commissars that Russian help was coming, launched a counter-attack upon Castejón at Chapinería. Six thousand militiamen broke Castejón’s lines, and surrounded the town by the morning of 19 October. Castejón then led a sally out of the town through its cemetery, and converted the republican counterattack into another defeat. On 20 October, another republican counter-attack, directed by Colonel Ramiro Otal, under Asensio Torrado (now a general),1 with Majors Rojo, Mena, and Modesto, leading 15,000 men, was launched at Illescas, where Barrón w
as established with his Moroccans and legionaries. The republican forces were brought up to the front by double-decker Madrid buses visible across the flat land from Barrón’s command post. Illescas was plastered by republican artillery bombardment, and the town surrounded. Monasterio’s cavalry and Tella’s column from Toledo were then thrown into the battle. The nationalists outflanked the militiamen, who were as usual driven back beyond their point of departure by 23 October.
The sound of battle could now be heard in Madrid. The government decided to move to a safer city. Their first choice was Barcelona, and President Azaña set off first, establishing himself in the parliament buildings in the Catalan capital. The government then changed their minds about leaving Madrid. Azaña remained where he was and the cabinet hastily announced that he had left for an extended tour of the front.2 Henceforward, Azaña could be consulted only by telephone. He increasingly infuriated his ministers. He refused to listen to intelligence reports, which (not inaccurately) he named ‘bad detective stories’. His sincerity impelled him to speak the truth, even on telephone calls to other countries which could easily be tapped. When his cabinet expostulated, he would reply: ‘I am not to blame that I am of an analytic spirit and you are not.’1 Appalled by the murders and judicial assassinations carried out in the name of the republic, convinced that the republic would lose, contemptuous of Largo Caballero, Azaña now seemed more a liability than a leader.
In these nervous circumstances, a committee of the Popular Front and CNT was set up in Madrid to intensify the search for secret supporters of the nationalists. Illegal killings, which had almost ceased, broke out again. One so killed was, incredibly, Ramiro de Maeztu, once counted among the Generation of ’98, later a theorist of Spanish monarchism. He was arrested because he had the ‘face of a priest’. Another was Ramiro Ledesma, co-founder of Spanish fascism. Loyalty was everywhere suspect. Asensio Torrado was blamed for the defeat of Illescas, especially by the communists, but Largo Caballero admired him and insisted on giving him the post of under-secretary in the war office on 24 October, while General Pozas took command of the Army of the Centre.2 Pozas, like many other non-political senior officers, was becoming more and more impressed by the communists. The same day, General Miaja, the old scapegoat for the collapse of the Córdoba offensive, was brought from Valencia and named commander in Madrid in succession to General Castelló, the ex-minister of war, whose mind was wandering. Miaja had denounced a recent rash of executions in Valencia, and he was apparently appointed to Madrid in order to save him from the consequences of that complaint.
The approach of battle to Madrid brought a measure of fraternity to anarchists and socialists in Catalonia. In Barcelona, at least, they sealed their differences, in a declaration of common purpose on 22 October, which was put into effect by a decree of the Generalidad two days later. While large firms (those employing over 100 workers) and firms owned by ‘fascists’ were to be collectivized without compensation, plants employing between 50 and 100 workers (actually a majority of Barcelona’s factories) could only be collectivized if that were requested by three-quarters of the employees. Still smaller firms were only collectivized at the owner’s request, unless they were involved in war production. The Generalidad would have a representative on each factory council, and would appoint the council chairman on large collectives: and each collectivized plant would be run by a council chosen by the workers and have a two-year term of office. All collectives making the same things could be coordinated by one of fourteen councils of industry, which could also bring in private firms, where needed, in order ‘to harmonize production’. This decree was, in fact, the culmination of a hundred other legislative acts on the subject of collectivization. It meant less a free hand to the anarchists than an effort by the state to standardize, and hence control, the process of collectivization. Some of the things for which the decree provided had already been achieved. Juan Fábregas, councillor for the economy, and also president of a still anarchist-dominated economic council of Catalonia (under the Generalidad, theoretically), a new anarchist convert, was largely responsible. Coordination nevertheless remained in practice vague; there were no statistics and no records of sales. Cut off from both raw materials and markets, the Catalan textile industry was running down.1 The war industries were working but their transformation from peacetime uses was anything but easy.
The character of rebel Spain after three months of war was that of a new state, in which the trends were towards centralization, unity and hence, in war, efficiency; in the republic, the institutions of the old state were laboriously being revived, while such innovations as were introduced spelled continued dissipation of resources. In rebel Spain, a group of able generals in their forties were ruthlessly seeking a new world; in republican Spain, a number of elderly politicians sought to hold on to a wreck which had already been scuttled. For the presence of so many young men in the army and in the communist and socialist parties, not to speak of the anarchist movement, should not delude the observer into thinking that the republic offered much of a chance for youth. The revolution did; but republic and revolution were separate crafts.
27
The annual assembly of the League of Nations had, meantime, met in Geneva. That organization was crumbling. Its faults were patent. Although, in 1936, the League was not twenty years old, and its permanent headquarters, with its huge, optimistic murals by the Catalan painter Sert, had not yet been opened, the undertaking seemed already something from another age. Never, even at the time of its splendour (such as after the admission of Germany in 1925), had the League lost the character of an institution dominated by the victors of 1919. Nevertheless, until 1935, it had carried out its role as the expression of a world-wide desire for peace comparatively successfully. It had made peace between Greeks and Bulgars in 1925. It ended the Colombo-Peruvian War of 1934. It had abstained from resolution, true, over Manchuria in 1931. But that mistake did not seem irreparable. In 1935, however, the League failed to take effective action over Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia. It voted for sanctions, but not for any which had any effect. On 4 July 1936, even these had been abandoned. Mussolini’s African adventure was tacitly condoned.
The responsibility for all these retreats lay with the British and French governments, whose influence was supreme at the Palais des Nations. At the general assembly of 1936, the débâcle over Abyssinia had to be reviewed. But now there was also Spain. In the wings of the assembly, on 24 September, Eden persuaded Dr Monteiro to bring Portugal into the Non-Intervention Committee. In his speech in the general debate which opened the assembly, Eden, however, did not mention Spain at all. Dr Carlos Saavedra Lamas, the Argentinian president of the assembly, supported by other Latin American delegations, sought to prevent the republic’s foreign minister, Alvarez del Vayo, from speaking on the civil war, since it was not on the agenda, though the general debate had usually been regarded as permitting discussion of anything. (Saavedra was pro-rebel.) But Alvarez del Vayo made his speech all the same, having been persuaded to be moderate by Eden. He deplored the fact that the Non-Intervention Agreement had placed his government on the same footing as the rebels: whereas, by international law, a government was entitled to buy arms abroad, while rebels were not. The republic would accept real non-intervention, but by that he meant freedom to buy arms.
This meeting at Geneva was not a happy one for the republic. It seemed evident that the Anglo-French policy was to subordinate Spain to the general European policies of these two governments. Azaña, Giral, Azcárate and all the ‘liberals’ in the government of the republic were disillusioned. Only Litvinov had spoken favourably for Spain. By that time, whether Litvinov knew it or not, Russia had decided to help Spain with arms as well as words. Indeed, the decision was taken some time in August since weapons began to reach Spain in mid-October.
The government of the republic had asked the Russian government to sell them arms while Giral was still Prime Minister. A delegation from Madrid reached Odessa at the
end of August.1 By that time, it will be remembered, a strong Russian presence had been established in Madrid and Barcelona led by an experienced ambassador (Rosenberg) and an influential head of military mission (Berzin).2 A few days later, a handful of Russian pilots started flying some of the new French aircraft which the republic had recently bought, ‘in conditions of inferiority for us’, making a considerable impression on their Spanish comrades: they were ‘truly extraordinary pilots’, Captain García Lacalle described them.1 Some war material may also have arrived by late August, though none of it substantial—no Russian aircraft or tanks were to be seen till October.2 Even with Britain and France backing non-intervention, there were alternatives to Russia in the US or in South America as suppliers of arms to the republic. But with German and Italian governmental assistance to Franco, a government, not just an arms manufacturer, was plainly desirable as a backer, and the Russian equipment was better qualitatively than anything to be found outside Britain or the US. Indeed, the Russian tanks and aircraft were as effective as, if not better than, anything in the world, as will be seen;3 though neither Largo Caballero’s nor Giral’s cabinets knew that.
According to Walter Krivitsky, the Russian military intelligence ‘resident’ in The Hague, Stalin took a decision to help the Spanish republic on 31 August at a meeting of the Politburo in Moscow4 and, from then on, both the Russian government and the Comintern, as well as their various secret and semi-espionage agents and organizations, began to prepare for a major military commitment. One reason for this decision was the mismanagement of the republican interests in Paris: the ambassador, Albornoz, and de los Ríos, together with the socialist deputy for Granada, Dr Alejandro Otero, were all enlightened men, but they were not good arms smugglers. La Pasionaria (with a delegation from Madrid) visited Paris at the end of August and found that the telephone operator at the Embassy in Paris (who had been in the same post under the monarchist ambassador, Quiñones de León) told all the republic’s secrets to the nationalist representatives in Paris.1 At all events, Krivitsky in The Hague received instructions (on 2 September, according to him) to mobilize all possible facilities for the shipment of arms to Spain from Europe.2 About ten days later, on 14 September, there was a meeting in Moscow to arrange the shipment of aid from Russia direct to Spain. The meeting was held, ominously, in the Lubianka and present, it seems, were Yagoda, still for another week or so head of the secret police (NKVD); General Frinovsky, at the time ‘commander of the military forces of the NKVD’; General S.P. Uritsky, chief of military intelligence in succession to Berzin, who was in Spain as head of the military mission; and A. A. Slutsky, an ‘amiable, courageous and humane’ man, who was chief of the foreign division of the NKVD. At this meeting, the NKVD was given an important supervisory role in the subsequent supply of arms and men in Spain, and it was agreed (or confirmed) that the superintending officer should be Alexander Orlov (his real name was Nikolsky), a ‘veteran officer’ in the NKVD, who had worked recruiting spies in England.3 The shipment of arms was to be the work of Uritsky, who would set up a special agency to be directed by Captain Umansky, in Odessa; and this was shortly done.4 But no one knew of this plan who did not absolutely have to: probably the Foreign Minister, Litvinov, and Russians in Spain such as Rosenberg and Koltsov remained in ignorance of these moves, as did the Comintern leaders (in Moscow or in Paris), most of whom continued to complain during September and early October that Stalin was continuing to ‘betray the Spanish Revolution’, in Trotsky’s words from Norway.1 The Spanish government did not know that Russia was going to help them with arms until a short time before the ships carrying the material set off.
