The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  Life in the republican prisons of the central zone, on the other hand, was no better than it was in those of Franco. Old gaols, such as that at Montjuich in Barcelona, or the prison ships in the harbour, were overcrowded, the food scanty (rice and a piece of bread for lunch and for dinner, a little hot water with drops of coffee and another piece of bread at daybreak), and washing conditions primitive. As with the republicans and revolutionaries in Franco’s gaols, many of the prisoners conducted themselves with exemplary heroism; and as in Franco’s prisons, the gaolers were often petty, brutal and arbitrary. Nor were the people’s tribunals as yet more honest courts of law than Franco’s courts-martial were: prisoners were given little time to prepare their defence, they often had to accept a defence lawyer whom they had never known before the day of the trial, and the tribunal was still often composed of prejudiced persons themselves swayed by the enthusiasm of a crowd who might clap every time a death sentence was announced. In December, it is true, a governmental order announced that no one was to be executed before the sentence had been approved by four judges and afterwards by the cabinet, and gradually this order came to be carried out. Nevertheless, the shooting of ‘rightists’, officers, voters for the CEDA, priests, conspirators and innocent people continued during the winter of 1936–7 throughout republican Spain, though the role of the private gang became less, and that of the courts and of the government more pronounced. The main difference between the two Spains on this score was that gradually the treatment of prisoners improved in the republic, the government being desirous of introducing humanity as well as regularity. In Franco’s Spain no such desire is possible to detect. Melchor Rodríguez, the humane anarchist whom García Oliver had now appointed to be director-general of prisons, had no equivalent in Burgos or Salamanca. A self-taught philosopher, fearless and hostile to all terrorism, Rodríguez gained considerable moral authority. But his nomination subsequently led to the opening by the communists of their own gaols, without authorization or supervision, under the aegis of José Cazorla, the communist youth leader responsible for public order in Madrid.

  García Oliver, the anarchist minister of justice, stood behind most such legal changes for the better. He made, on 31 January 1937, the most remarkable speech of any law minister at any time:

  Justice [he announced] must be burning hot, justice must be alive, justice cannot be restricted within the bounds of a profession. It is not that we definitely despise books and lawyers. But the fact is that there were [sic] too many lawyers. When relations between men become what they should be, there will be no need to steal and kill. For the first time, let us admit, here in Spain, that the common criminal is not an enemy of society. He is more likely to be a victim of society. Who is there who says he dare not go out and steal if driven to it to feed his children and himself? Do not think that I am making a defence of robbery. But man, after all, does not proceed from God, but from the cave, from the beast. Justice, I firmly believe, is so subtle a thing that to interpret it, one has only need of a heart.1

  When he took office, he later said, there were no organs of justice. ‘… everyone administered their own justice. That was what has been called the paseo. I call it justice administered directly by the country in the complete absence of the traditional organs of justice.’ Despite this unpromising beginning, he proceeded to establish a new code of laws. From 4 December, when Rodríguez was elected, conditions in the prisons improved and there were no more ‘sacas.’ On 12 December, black-marketeering was made punishable by imprisonment. On the 22nd, a decree annulled all penalties for crimes committed before 15 July.

  On 28 December, a number of labour camps were created for nationalist prisoners—‘work and do not despair’ being the motto over the gates. This innovation was an improvement on the gaols. But libertarian anarchists of the past would have turned in their graves, particularly at the Nazi sounding motto. Court fees were also abolished, including fees for barristers. On 4 February, a decree gave women for the first time a legal identity, and another recognized the ‘free unions’ of militiamen killed at the front as legal marriages.2 Anarchists had always believed in ‘free union’ as opposed to conventional marriage, with its virtual sale of brides in poorer places; but not in easy divorce. Federica Montseny, for example, did not oppose the family and she thought that children were often better educated at home than at school. She did believe in birth control, though she thought that most women would be against it.1

  The isolated northern republican territories remained distinct from the quarrels of the south. They also remained remote from each other. Each of the three regions (Asturias, Santander, Vizcaya) had their own money, and even frontiers ‘much more difficult to cross than an international one’. Once when General Llano de la Encomienda, the commander-in-chief in the north, desired to cross from Asturias into Santander, for both of which he was responsible, his car was searched at Unquera and a cheese confiscated.2

  In the coal mines of Asturias, management was in the hands of local councils, elected in the pits, themselves supervised by a labour committee, dependent on the provincial junta. The fishermen of Gijón were organized in an anarchist collective. The port at Santander was run by the socialists. In the Basque country, industry carried on normally. But each of these areas had their own difficulties. A manifesto issued in January by the provincial secretaries of the UGT and CNT in León, Asturias, and Palencia vigorously attacked ‘bureaucracy’, indicating by its tone the menace that it was becoming even in such a small socialist state as Asturias. That region meantime was also still locked in a chronic battle against its own capital, Oviedo, still held by Aranda.

  The Basque nationalists were trying to preserve their small territory from the extreme solutions of republican Spain. But it became more and more difficult to do so. On 4 January, a series of riots followed a German air attack on Bilbao carried out by the Condor Legion’s Junkers 52s. Two of these were shot down by Russian fighters. Two Germans parachuted to the ground. One was killed by a crowd infuriated by this wanton attack. The other was saved from a similar death by a Russian pilot. In the meantime, Bilbao turned mad with anger. The rage of the people was exacerbated by hunger, since few food ships had recently managed to penetrate the increasingly effective nationalist blockade. A mob, supported later by a battalion of UGT militia, marched to the buildings where the political prisoners of Bilbao were being kept. About 208 prisoners were killed in three separate gaols.1 A similar outrage occurred, for a similar reason, in the prison ship Alfonso Pérez, off Santander: nearly 200 falangists, Carlists and supporters of the Right died there.2

  Relations between the Basques and the central government were distant. No doubt the former might have tried to surrender on favourable terms if the republican government had not accepted their demands for autonomy. The visit of the republican fleet to Basque waters in September helped morale, however, and also brought arms. Later, though some Russian and further arms supplies did go to the north, they were irregular.3 Aguirre had made himself commander-in-chief of the army in ‘Euzkadi’—some 30,000 men—for all the world as if he were the head of an independent state’s independent army; but Largo Caballero considered that force to be part of the republican army of the north, including the Basques with Asturias and Santander, nominally commanded by General Llano de la Encomienda, the somewhat reluctant victor of Barcelona in July. In ‘Euzkadi’, Basque was a joint official language with Spanish. Alone in republican Spain were the churches open in the Basque provinces. ‘Euzkadi’ remained dominated by a Catholic and conservative nationalist party which had been driven by calculation, circumstances and accident to ally with the revolutionary Left republic. Many Basques—including some sometime nationalists—were fighting for Franco, and ‘Euzkadi’ now only comprised Vizcaya. Alava and Guipúzcoa were already mostly Francoist. But morale was high in ‘Euzkadi’. There were no problems with the communists, and the local communist leader, Astigarribía, was virtually a Basque nationalist. One Basque minister, it is tr
ue, Espinosa, of the Republican Union, was treacherously flown to the nationalists by a disloyal pilot and there executed in the course of the winter. Otherwise, forgetting a shortage of food, it would have sometimes been difficult to realize that the Basque country was at war.1 But it was, as events were soon to show; and the poor production figures of the Basque arms industries would soon tell against the little republic.

  In republican propaganda, two pictures were counterposed as if there were always potentially a civil war within the civil war: one picture, for foreigners, depicted constitutional democracy struggling against international fascism; the second picture, for consumption at home, showed the Spanish people at one pace only away from a new world: victory would lead to la vida nueva.2 The conflict was not easily resolved.

  31

  By December 1936, the remains of the old army had been effectively merged with the militias, in the self-sufficient Mixed Brigade, two or three of which were supposed to form a division.1 This was a feat of organization for which General Asensio, under-secretary of war, should take the credit. Several thousand regular officers, either from the retired or the active list in 1936, were, or were soon to be, implicated in the new army.2

  This was said to number some 350,000 in the winter of 1936–7: of whom 85,000 were in the centre, 40,000 in Aragon, 30,000 and 20,000 in the southern and Levante zones, 40,000, 16,000 and 45,000 in the Basque country, Santander, and Asturias respectively, with perhaps 80,000 reserves.3 But these figures were artificially inflated, with divisional paymasters sometimes receiving, corruptly, food and payment for many more men than were present:1 20,000 militiamen in Aragon apparently received pay for 90,000, rations for 80,000 and, on the Madrid front, 120,000 rations were daily issued to 35,000 men. The food question was important: voluntary recruitment continued mostly perhaps because it was known that food was good at the front, while, in the cities, it was both difficult to get, and bad. Commanders did not report deserters with enthusiasm, nor those absent without leave. Anxiety to maintain numbers made them keen to avoid casualties. The ‘useless riff-raff, amounting to 5 or 10 per cent, who are found in all bodies of troops, and who should be got rid of ruthlessly, were seldom or never got rid of’. Thus, George Orwell, a sympathetic observer. It is true that Orwell was stationed on that ‘quiet section’ of the quiet Aragon front (commemorated in John Cornford’s fine poem The Last Mile to Huesca), and his remarks did not apply to shock units, such as Lister’s brigade, nor to the International Brigades. But most of the republican army must have been as Orwell said it was.2 ‘I came to the conclusion,’ Orwell went on, ‘somewhat against my will, that, in the long run, “good party men” make the best soldiers, if they were working class particularly. In the POUM militia,’ he added, ‘there was a slight, but perceptible, tendency for people of bourgeois origin to be chosen as officers.’ As for age, Orwell noticed that ‘while boys as young as fourteen are often very brave and reliable, they were simply unable to stand the lack of sleep’. The comment shows that many of the republic’s soldiers (and no doubt Franco’s army too) were young.3

  Most of the Spanish war’s long front was quiet. On the other hand, most republicans believed that, if they were captured, they would be shot; and, if they were volunteers or officers, they usually would be. Few conscripts were shot on either side. Still, the danger concentrated the mind, and encouraged caution. All in the republican army were understood by now to have joined up for the duration of the war. The International Brigade’s volunteers could not choose their moment to withdraw, though some did, taking advantage (if they were from anti-fascist or democratic countries) of their leaves to visit their embassies, and sometimes thereby finding the means to escape.

  Men were kept in the front line for long periods—in Aragon five months continuously, sleeping indefinitely in discomfort in trenches. The life of the troops was duller than it need have been: ‘The few women who were in or near the line … were simply a source of jealousy. There was a certain amount of sodomy among the younger Spaniards,’ Orwell drily recalled.1

  The anarchists were aghast at these developments leading to a new conventional army. The People’s War schools, the Fifth Regiment’s school in Madrid, and even the anarchists’ own ‘Bakunin’ school in Barcelona represented the end of an epoch. Was it possible for an anarchist to serve in the same unit as a communist, or a member of the bourgeoisie? To wear uniform, to obey orders from a central government? The libertarian youth spoke of the danger that the army would be scarcely different from the force that had rebelled in July: ‘A shock force, knowing nothing of the cries of the cannon fodder for liberty, bread, justice’. ‘We are not making war, but revolution,’ said an editorial in Acracia.2 The FAI demanded the suppression of the salute, equal pay for all in the army, newspapers at the front, and soldier councils, at all levels. Solidaridad Obrera grumbled about ‘obsession of discipline’, ‘neo-militarism’, and ‘psychosis of unity’. The 3,000-strong Iron Column before Teruel (partly freed ex-convicts—perhaps 400) rebelled against the implications of the decree against militias.3 Hitherto, the column had been paid en bloc. Now the men were to receive wages individually, from a paymaster in the ministry of war. The despair felt by these men at the prospect of having to obey orders; of having to refer to officers as usted, not the familiar tú; of having to expect insults from corporals and sergeants, such as they had known in the bad old days, was terrible. Many members of the unit, perhaps several thousand, deserted, rather than become ‘robot-soldiers’—the rest, about 4,000, with great reluctance, voted on 21 March to accept militarization, as an alternative to dissolution.1

  ‘One day,’ wrote an ex-convict in the Iron Column, who had been condemned before the civil war to eleven years of imprisonment (for the murder of a cacique),

  one day—a day that was mournful and overcast—the news that we had to be militarized descended on the crests of the Sierra like an icy wind … I have lived in barracks and there I learned to hate. I have been in the penitentiary and it was there, strangely enough, in the midst of tears and torment, I learned to love, to love intensely. In the barracks, I was on the verge of losing my personality, so severe was the treatment and the stupid discipline they tried to impose upon me. In prison, after a great struggle, I recovered that personality … When, in the distance, I heard murmurs of the order for militarization, I felt my body become limp, for I could clearly see that the guerrilla fearlessness that I had gained from the revolution would perish.2

  The anarchists realized that the communists intended to play a preponderate part in the new army, along with ex-regular officers. The leader of the communist Fifth Regiment, for example, Enrique Lister, was named to lead the first Mixed Brigade.3 Perhaps these fears were exaggerated. Asensio, the under-secretary, Martínez Cabrera, the chief of staff, Llano de la Encomienda in the north and Martínez Monje in the south were not communists, nor were the leading defenders of Madrid, Miaja and Rojo. Still, the failure of the anarchists at the front, the delays caused by discussion of the political advantages of this or that attack, made the anarchists’ position weak. Anarchists disliked regular officers as much as they did communists, and were suspicious when the two showed signs of being in agreement.

  For some months, militias survived, particularly in the south and in the Levante, where the new army commanders appointed by the republic had a hard time. But by and large the old groupings vanished. Battalion leaders became majors; ‘century delegates’ became captains. By the spring, Brigades 1–40 were complete; Brigades 101–115 were being trained; and 41–100 were in various stages of organization.1 The Brigades were also swiftly placed in divisional units.

  Some anarchists were active in the military reconstruction, García Oliver himself being nominated by the government to direct the officer schools. He was also the anarchist representative on the Supreme War Council, created on 9 November under Largo’s chairmanship. (The other members were Prieto, Julio Just and Alvarez del Vayo.)2 Federica Montseny was also sympathetic to t
hese changes; she had deplored the hours lost in discussion at the front. But other anarchists regretted their own leaders’ acceptance of the forms of ‘reaction’; particularly when García Oliver was referred to on the radio as ‘His Excellency the minister of justice, Comrade García Oliver’.

  As for Catalonia, the Generalidad formalized in Aragon what was in effect a separate army of its own in December. Three divisions were raised by conscription, and the old columns were converted into the regiments which the Catalans preferred to the brigade as the basic unit. The total nominally numbered 40,000, though (as suggested earlier) probably the figure was smaller; but it was certainly more than the 20,000 or so nationalists opposite them, who would have been hard put then to resist a determined Catalan attack. The Catalan divisions retained their old political colouring under another heading. Thus, the anarchist militia was transformed into three divisions, ultimately led by new ‘Majors’ Ortiz, Sanz, and Jover, all of them guerrilleros by way of preparation.3 The POUM militia became the 29th Division, under the so-called Major Rovira; the PSUC militia became the 27th Division, under the communist militia leader ‘Major’ José del Barrio; while the ‘Maciá-Companys’, or Catalan, column, became the 30th Division, under regular Major Jesús Pérez Salas. Most of these commanders had led those columns since July. The overall commander was Colonel Vicente Guarner, before the war a regular major.1 Despite the ‘militarization’, the separate political colour of different units, nevertheless, persisted, and the government was never able to appoint its own nominees to command anarchist units: the defence committee of the regional CNT would give the government names from whom the commanders were to be chosen.

  Uniforms were still non-existent, but most soldiers wore corduroy knee breeches and a jacket with a zip. Training was rudimentary. Marksmanship was poor and rifle drill almost unknown. Grenades were still as liable to explode in the hands of the thrower as upon the enemy. In many places, there were no maps, range-finders for artillery, field glasses, or cleaning materials; and Orwell discovered, with the horror of a trained member of the Eton College Officer Training Corps, that no one in his POUM column had heard of a ‘pull-through’ with which to clean rifles.2