The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  The Catalan War Industries Committee, presided over by the politician Tarradellas, organized by Colonel Jiménez de la Beraza (director of the arms factory in Oviedo in 1934),3 was being reasonably successful in gearing the industries of Catalonia to the manufacture of war material: for example, at the end of February 1937, these industries of Catalonia (non-existent in July 1936) produced daily 500,000 rifle cartridges.4 This committee had also had some success in concentrating production in plants with the best equipment, and reorganizing several industries. But the far more important Basque war industries were a long way behind pre-war production, due partly to lack of raw materials, and partly to unsatisfactory management.

  The republican army continued to be armed with rifles of many origins, about a third being Mausers (that is, of the old army), a third Russian (the ‘Mosin’ type), and another third of varying makes, principally Mexican.5 The variety in calibration caused many problems. The republicans had some hundred 37-millimetre Russian anti-tank guns, which they did not use well, and, by this time, much of the artillery which they had had in July was depleted, thanks to ignorant misuse by the militia columns or by being left behind on the field, during retreat. Nevertheless, over the winter of 1936–7, schools of artillery at Chinchilla and at Almansa were opened: highly necessary, since most artillery officers in July 1936 were on the nationalist side.1

  The republican air force, because of its close relation with Russia, in respect of training and material, was more communist than the army was: its commander, Hidalgo de Cisneros, an aristocrat and Prietista, had, as has been seen, become a communist of the same kind as Cordón and other previously non-political army officers. (Hidalgo de Cisneros told his wife, Constancia de la Mora, granddaughter of the conservative politician Antonio Maura, the secret that he had joined the party; she replied that, some weeks earlier, she had done the same.)2 Most of the Spanish pilots who went for a six-month training course in Russia knew how to fly well when they came back; many had also become communists. The Russian pilots under General Smushkevich constituted excellent propaganda in themselves, though between them, the Spanish pilots, and Belarmino Tomás, the Asturian commissar-general of the air, an anti-communist, there were continuous arguments.

  In the navy, communism had been less successful. The commander, Admiral Buiza, his successor, Captain González Ubieta, and the commander of the flotilla of destroyers, Vicente Ramírez, were all career naval officers who did not develop any liking for that creed. Bruno Alonso, the rough but good-hearted commissar-general of the fleet, was a Prietista, though he was ignorant of the sea. Two Russians captained republican submarines, a number of other Russian officers were attached as advisers to the navy, and the Russian naval attaché, Captain Kuznetsov, was always giving Prieto advice. But the Soviet pressure was not otherwise marked. This relative freedom from Russian or communist influence did not make for efficiency. Indeed, the republican fleet was a white elephant of the civil war, inactive and neglected. Much of the blame must lie with Prieto, the minister responsible, who knew as little of the sea as did Bruno Alonso, and who trusted too much in these matters a personal secretary, Lieutenant Eduardo Merín (El Papa Negro), who breathed an air of omniscience, while being indolent, procrastinatory and possibly even treacherous.1 Many naval officers who were technically loyal to the republic were far from enthusiastic about the revolution; while most of the rank and file were anarchists. Captain Kuznetsov described a visit to the battleship Jaime I where he found at least three political meetings going on. ‘Disputes and discussions never ceased,’ the future commander-in-chief of the Russian navy commented sourly, ‘the phrase “conquer or die” was heard everywhere, but the anarchists neither conquered nor died.’2 This indiscipline among the men, ignorance among many of those promoted to command ships, and conflicting emotions in the hearts of the supreme commanders, were the reasons for the failure of the republican fleet. Buiza was reticent, brave but shy; González Ubieta had no desire to fight; Vicente Ramírez, an expansive Andalusian, laced his conversation with strong nautical expressions and hence was popular, but he could not create discipline; while the most effective officer was the conventional commander of the submarine flotilla, Remigio Verdía.3

  The most important task of the republican fleet was admittedly less to fight Franco than to protect the route to Russia. Here the republic was more successful; between October 1936 and September 1937, over twenty large, mostly Spanish, transport ships made journeys from the Black Sea to Spain without difficulty.

  In addition to the army, there survived, too, four armed police forces: the old civil guard, renamed the national republican guard; the assault guards; the carabineers, directed by the minister of finance to ensure the payment of customs on the frontier; and the corps of ‘investigation and vigilance’. Of these, the first two played little part once the civil war was under way. They were less important than the local ‘militias of the rearguard’, many of which survived only too long, because the weakness of the well-meaning socialist minister of the interior, Angel Galarza. The carabineers were built up by Negrín over the winter of 1936–7, to do their work effectively, being nicknamed the ‘100,000 sons of Negrín’, though there were no more than 40,000 of them. They were almost all socialists, not communists, insofar as that could be ensured. But the police proper and the corps of ‘investigation and vigilance’ did have substantial communist components, though the new director-general of security, Wenceslao Carrillo—he succeeded Muñoz—was a supporter of Largo Caballero. Still, the police chiefs of Madrid were either communists or friendly to them and the two chiefs of the intelligence department of the ministry of the interior, Juan Galán and Justiniano García, were both party members.

  One series of innovations in the republican army in the winter of 1936–7 would ultimately affect the rest of the world. These were the changes in the treatment of war wounds introduced to begin with in Catalonia, under the inspiration of the chief surgeon at the General Hospital in Barcelona, Josep Trueta. Trueta’s innovations were the treatment of wounds and fractures by immediate surgery; the stitching of the edges of the wound; and the protection of the injured part, and the giving of rest to the patient, by extensive use of plaster of Paris. These changes meant bringing the surgeon to the patient and not, as was usual in the First World War, the patient to the hospital. That change in itself saved many lives. The use of banks of preserved blood in the front line allowed surgeons to perform operations without delay. Doctor Durán-Jordà, director of the blood transfusion service of the Generalidad (subsequently of the republican army), was responsible for beginning this, together with his Canadian assistant, the undisciplined, flamboyant, but heroic Norman Bethune. Dr Bethune’s mobile Spanish-Canadian blood unit first gave transfusions at the front on 23 December 1936 in the University City: an event as important in the history of war as the contemporaneous flight for the first time over Madrid of the new German fighter, the Messerschmitt 109.

  Another of Trueta’s innovations was the abandonment of the daily change of dressings and antiseptics, which had been for so long dreaded by the wounded. The consequence was that, in republican Spain, the number of deaths per casualty was much lower than it had been in France during the First World War, even though, to begin with, the medical services were not properly organized and sanitation was bad, while communication trenches (to get the wounded back) hardly existed.1

  Trueta had some difficulties in getting his ideas accepted in the conventional republican army, though he ultimately succeeded in persuading Colonel d’Harcourt, the surgeon who was the head of the army surgical service, of their wisdom.2 There was a particularly favourable change in respect of the incidence of gas gangrene, that fatal disease of war—so much so that surgeons visiting Barcelona in 1938 began to think that Spain (or at least Catalonia) had no anaerobes, the carriers of that disease. But those with longer memories knew otherwise.

  32

  The troubles between the anarchists and the communists over the army were
compounded by worse difficulties still on the land. For the communists now openly gave support to the small farmer, while the anarchists, and many socialists in collaboration with them, championed agrarian collectives. These collectives were the romantic innovations of the Spanish revolution. They have dominated the imaginations of many in the years since. What were they like, how did they work, could they have survived, were they just?

  There were perhaps some 2,500 collectives in republican Spain—a few hundred in Andalusia, about 450 in Aragon, about 350 in Levante, and in Castile perhaps 300. In Catalonia, there were only about 80; and, in the little pinch of Estremadura still with the republic, about 40.1 By no means all these agrarian innovations were dominated by anarchists; there were some 800 socialist collectives, and about 1,100 more had at least one or two socialists on their committees. Families who worked on agricultural collectives numbered nearly half a million, and the total land under collective management was almost 9 million acres. Alongside the collectives, some 300,000 peasants had received land from the Institute of Agrarian Reform, the total having been handed over since 1932 being by now perhaps 1,500,000 acres; and there survived many private farmers, who desired to remain such, particularly in Catalonia and even in Aragon. Some places were wholly collectivized, most had a private element alongside the collective.1 Some places even had two collectives, one anarchist, one socialist. In some places, a majority of the township had voted, when they took over the large estates nearby, to work them as small farms. In Aragon, the collective was often the village itself. In the Levante, the collectives were more often partial undertakings, with only 40 per cent of the agricultural population organized communally.2 In Andalusia, collectives might be formed on the confiscated private estates whose size and history gave rise to different problems to those occurring in Aragon. In fact, most of the land in collectives had previously been middle-sized, rather than very large estates, since the classic area of the latter of Estremadura and Andalusia had passed swiftly to the nationalists.

  In Catalonia, in the country, the association of vinegrowers (rabassaires) expanded their organization to absorb all the independent peasants’ associations in a single federation, which all such peasants were required to join. All land held on any form of tenancy was taken over by the cultivators. Barcelona might be, in the early months of the war, a triumph for collectivized industry; the countryside of Catalonia was a sea of smallholdings.3

  Between a half to two-thirds of the entire country was taken over during the first six months of the civil war.4 As so often, unfortunately, with revolutionary schemes on the land, the revolutionaries thought in terms of numbers of acres rather than of types of crop. This was a weakness, since, whether revolution or reaction triumphs, a vineyard in La Mancha, an orange farm in the huerta of Valencia, and a poor mixed farm in Castile are plainly different enterprises.

  The collectives varied in size, between one with 5,000 members, such as that of Tomelloso (Ciudad Real) in the heart of the country of Don Quixote, which controlled wine vaults in which over four million gallons of wine could be stored, and Villas Viejas (Albacete), which consisted of two farms taken over by about twenty families (ninety-two persons) who worked there. To begin with, each collective adopted a separate statute of inauguration, with rules differing from place to place. Afterwards, a regional anarchist conference approved a model statute for all to copy. A general accounting system was also approved, and a national statistical section established. The collectives continued, however, to differ in character and regulations. In Aragon, as previously described, a congress of collectives had led to the formation of a regional council, directed by Joaquín Ascaso. Though, in other areas, councils were formed for other activities (production and rationing), nowhere else was there a powerful, independent anarchist-led body which rejected all external political authority.

  Most collectives in villages or small towns were directed by an alliance of the UGT and CNT. Whatever differences there were at a national level between these two organizations, or between their leaders, in many small places relations were good throughout the war. These UGT members were mostly people who in 1931 or 1932 had joined the socialist movement which had played such an important part in agricultural politics before the war. Unlike the socialists in the towns, these rural socialists remained fairly free of communist influence. They had been, of course, revolutionary Caballeristas in the months leading up to the war.

  The leading members of the local unions would declare the collective constituted, and name the ‘delegates’ to look after different branches of work—cattle, wine, oil, and so on, including statistics, transport, administration, and exchange. These men meeting together would constitute the administration of the collective, consisting of a president, secretary, vice-secretary, treasurer, and perhaps four other members. In some places, this council was formed by vote of a ‘general assembly’ of the collective. The same ‘delegate’ could assume several jobs, always providing that he could carry out his own work in the fields: these men were not, above all, professional politicians or clerks. To show that one could not gain by being a delegate, members of the administration often received less pay than ordinary workers: for example, in Tomelloso, they got 11 pesetas a week less than the rest.1 (This practice is one which might be emulated in other conditions.) The administrative delegate would, at the end of the year, tell the accountant of the region the balance of imports and exports into the collective. Surpluses, if any, were to go to the regional savings account, to help collectives which could not cover costs. The money might also go towards new purchases needed locally. All who joined the collective brought their land, farm implements, and stock. By no means all collectivists were landless persons hoping to have a share in the estates of the local landlord: smallholders also joined. For example, Jaime Segovia, a young lawyer of Alcorisa (Teruel), helped to organize the collective there, despite his modest fortune;2 and the farmer Vidal Cruz, president of the council of Alcázar de Cervantes, brought in four acres of his own land, together with two others he rented.3 All the collectives maintained a treasury of their own: but even a prosperous collective would be unlikely to have more than 7 pesetas per member in cash on hand.

  How far persons were forced into collectives is difficult to estimate. The communist press alleged that terror was general, even that ‘known falangists’ established themselves everywhere under the guise of being anarchists. Most of these collectives were established after summary executions of a few persons of the Right. By early 1937, small proprietors were able to carry on in most places without interruption, though they were forbidden to employ anyone and, anyway in Aragon, were even not allowed to have their properties registered on the cadastral survey—‘in order to counterbalance the spirit of egoistic proprietorship’.4 Relations between private peasants (sustained by communist membership) and collectives improved throughout 1937.

  The question of how far the collectives were socially successful, and how far they degenerated into the dictatorship of local bosses as closed in outlook as those whom they had expelled or killed, remains difficult to resolve.5 The communist Lister was critical of the Council of Aragon in his memoirs: he depicted Ascaso arriving in Barcelona in a fleet of large cars, being received by banquets, while the average worker in his domain lived ‘under an inhuman tyranny infinitely worse than before the anarchist revolution’. It was enough for the local committee to denounce a peasant family for it to be murdered, and those who asked for the people concerned would be told they had ‘passed over to the enemy’. In the time of communismo libertario, he concluded, ‘the Aragonese knew terror as an instrument of authority and organized crime … The self-proclaimed enemies of all dictatorship established a rule which had nothing to compare, in respect of terrorist methods, with the most reactionary governments.’ The anarchists themselves admit defections: in Iniesta (Cuenca), for instance, the individualistas appear to have been strong. These people were not communists, but anarchists interested in the distribution
of land. The large properties were the basis of the collective, but the individualistas insisted on getting three-fifths of this land, together with about half the stock and farm implements. Eighty families remained in the collective afterwards and, evidently, they prospered—borrowing 13,000 pesetas from the regional headquarters—so that the number of families cooperating increased to two hundred by the end of 1937.1 In Peñalba (Huesca), the outcome was less satisfactory. To begin with, in August 1936, the whole population, of 1,500, became part of the collective. But that was not popular, because their chief task was to feed the Durruti column established nearby. As a result, the majority of the population, when they had gathered sufficient courage, or when they realized that they would have communist backing, announced their intention to reclaim their property. A commission was entrusted to supervise the act of demolition, and did so satisfactorily. Five hundred persons were left to carry on the collective. Even so, there are further mentions of ‘bad collectivists’ who, when everything was provided free, tried to accumulate goods and then sell them or let them go bad.2 What happened to such people is not always clear: in San Mateo (Castellón) and Serós (Huesca), it was explicitly provided that the general assembly of the collective could expel members for immorality3—though this power was never used. In many places, relations between private farmers and collectivists were cool and formal but not outright bad: at Calanda (Teruel), the birthplace of Buñuel, for instance, they had separate cafés.1 Finally, at Fatarella (Tarragona), the small proprietors rose in arms against the CNT who wished to collectivize them; there were several dead before order was restored.2 But was Lister, making all allowance for his bias, right in his condemnation of this experiment or not?