The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  The situation was exacerbated by further attacks upon British ships in Spanish waters. By this time, most seaborne trade with the republic was carried in British-owned ships. Other nations decided that the risk of being bombed, or seized, was too great. Many of these ships, however, were British only in name—many being Greek, registered in nominally British companies, through the agency of men such as Jack Billmeir, whose Stanhope Shipping Company now had some thirty-five ships trading with the republic. Between mid-April and mid-June, 22 British-registered ships (out of 140 then trading with the republic) were attacked in Spanish waters. Eleven were either sunk or seriously damaged. Twenty-one British seamen died, as did several Non-Intervention Committee observers. Chamberlain’s cabinet, according to Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, was ‘almost distracted’.1 Daily, the British government was attacked in the House of Commons for permitting this sorry state of affairs. Most of the ships were sunk in harbours and the Navy found it thus hard to counter the action. The subtle vocabulary of R. A. Butler, parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office, was taxed to explain why the government would not permit the export of anti-aircraft guns to republican Spain, nor the merchant ships to carry their own arms. Yet it became evident that the attacks were deliberate. Several conservatives, such as Duncan Sandys, were at one with the socialist Nöel-Baker in protesting against the ignominy of the position. The rising star of the left, Aneurin Bevan, evoked memories of what Clive of India would have done, and Lloyd George demanded reprisals by bombing Italian air bases in Majorca.2 Churchill said:

  I think it could be perfectly safely said to General Franco, ‘If there is any more of this, we shall arrest one of your ships on the open sea’… I can quite understand undergoing humiliation for the cause of peace. I would have supported the government, if I felt that we were making towards greater security for peace. But I fear that this abjection is woefully misunderstood abroad. I fear that it will … actually bring us nearer to all those dangers which we desire above all things to withhold from our people.1

  Lord Cecil of Chelwood resigned the conservative party whip in the House of Lords because of the government’s ineffectiveness. The archbishop of York, Dr Temple, with other prelates, pleaded for ‘effective action’. Chamberlain noted in his diary: ‘I have been through every possible form of retaliation, and it is absolutely clear that none of them can be effective unless we are prepared to go to war with Franco … of course, it may come to that, if Franco were foolish enough.’2 On one occasion, in the cabinet, he suggested that Britain seize Minorca in protest; ‘The difficulty of this,’ the cabinet minutes acidly noted, ‘was that Minorca was owned by the government.’3

  The nationalists eventually suggested that Almería might be made a safety zone for shipping. This idea was rejected both by the republic and by the Committee of British Shipowners, since only a seventh of the shipping then frequenting republican ports could be accommodated in Almería. The situation was permitted to continue. The British ship Dellwyn was sunk off Gandia in the sight of a British warship. ‘The first time in history,’ mourned Bowers, the American ambassador and a devoted friend of democracy.4 Prieto, in a speech at Barcelona, reflected,

  Who would have thought it possible, we who, in our study of international relations, have come across mention of the arrogance and pride of England, who would not tolerate the least harm to its material interests, nor an attack on the lives of one of its subjects? Yet here, in our cemeteries, are the bodies of English sailors who have paid with their lives for the confidence they had in the protection of the Empire.

  The continuance of attacks caused Lord Perth to tell Ciano that he feared that Chamberlain ‘might fall if the raids continued’.1 The raids were, in consequence, called off from the start of July.

  The crisis had made for bad relations between the nationalists and their allies. For, if Germany and Italy denied responsibility, they were placing it upon Franco. Stohrer was instructed to tell Franco that Germany had expected that he would have protected the Condor Legion from odium. But some Germans were being indiscreet themselves. On 12 July, the News Chronicle published a report of a lecture by General von Reichenau, the ambitious Nazi commander of the German 4th Army Group, on ‘The German attitude towards events in Spain’: ‘two years of real war experience’, said Reichenau, ‘have been of more use to our yet immature Wehrmacht, to the offensive power of the people, than a whole ten years of peaceful training could have been’. The British cabinet had the lecture circulated to them, and those ministers who read it could see that in aerial, tank and anti-tank warfare the Germans had gained much from their Spanish experience.2 ‘Spain has taught us particularly valuable lessons in the use of motor vehicles in war’, said von Reichenau. Lord Halifax suggested that the British should ‘draft an appeal to the contending sides to stop the war. Such an appeal would, of course, be based on grounds of humanity, Christianity and so forth … it would not be likely to succeed, but it would strengthen the moral position of His Majesty’s government.’3

  The Germans were, in fact, this summer engaged in a serious quarrel with Franco. Franco signed the new mining law before showing it to von Stohrer. Concessions included to please the Germans permitted 40 per cent foreign capital investment, and the possibility of exceptions, higher than this percentage, in Morocco. The law satisfied Germany, but not the manner of its publication. Von Stohrer demanded whether he was no longer persona grata. He was told that Franco was busy. Von Stohrer demanded whether he could not spare half an hour to see the German ambassador. Later, he was received by Gómez Jordana, who explained how he and Franco had championed Germany in their cabinet, and had even gained amendments in Germany’s favour. Enemy propaganda, he added, would have claimed that Germany had forced concessions if Franco had received the ambassador just before the decree was published. ‘But Spanish nationalist newspapers never report when I call,’ von Stohrer pointed out. With bad temper, Germany accepted the apology, as well as the concessions.1 During the next few weeks, German relations with Franco were excessively complicated; Germany even seems to have toyed with the idea of making its half-formulated desire to prolong the war in Spain into a reality by selling equipment to the republic, and German Nazi negotiators secretly met Negrín, as will be seen.

  During these weeks of continuous international crisis, the nationalist offensive in the Maestrazgo and along the Mediterranean continued with painful slowness. The republic, its forces commanded by General Leopoldo Menéndez (under the overall command of Miaja), resisted with skill and valour. The Condor Legion’s commander, General Volkmann, reported that its material was exhausted.2 The republicans had, on the other hand, received from Russia numerous new Moscas, including the so-called ‘Supermosca’, with four machine-guns and high speed; from France, forty Canadian Grumman fighters.3 Thus only on 14 June did Castellón, sixty miles south of Vinaroz, fall to Aranda, after several days of ferocious fighting in its suburbs. Forty political prisoners were murdered and the town sacked before the last republican units left. The nationalists henceforward had a large Mediterranean port in El Grao de Castellón. They were also only fifty miles north of Valencia. But, despite the fact that García Valiño’s experienced troops (now an army corps) had joined Aranda, Solchaga and Varela, a military stalemate was reached, eight miles north of Sagunto. The only nationalist success now obtained was General Iruretagoyena’s conquest of El Esquinazado’s enclave in the Valle del Alto Cinca. The Pyrenean town of Bielsa fell on 6 June. Four thousand men escaped into France.4

  In mid-June it was no longer suggested in Spain that the war would soon be over. The optimism of the spring had vanished. War weariness was everywhere. According to von Stohrer, ‘the terror practised at present in the nationalist zone by Martínez Anido’ was ‘unbearable, even to the Falange’.1 Negrín, speaking in Madrid on 18 June, said that not one more second of war could be tolerated if Spain’s existence as a free country was to be preserved. The bishop of Gero
na wrote a letter to Companys, on 28 June, from nationalist territory, in which he argued that the republic should surrender, since Franco’s army had triumphed in over half Spain and, therefore, President Companys, as a good democrat, should recognize this ‘majority principle’.2 Abroad, Litvinov announced that Russia would be only too glad to withdraw from Spain on the basis of ‘Spain for the Spaniards’, while Ilya Ehrenburg in Pravda, on 17 June, stretched out the ‘hand of conciliation’ towards the old Falange, whom he surprisingly named ‘Spanish patriots’. Already the Russian military mission in Barcelona was smaller than it had been before. Azaña had an interview with the British chargé, John Leche, in the Museum of Vich, in which he once again urged a mediation in Spain which would include a plebiscite, following a cease-fire.3 Azaña was more and more critical of the judicial procedures being practiced in his name: of the supreme tribunals, he noted desperately: ‘lack of guarantees. Incompetence of illiterate judges. Impolitic cruelty … a few boys condemned to death for singing a song. The informer did not know what he was doing. Bad treatment: one blind, one deaf.’ But Negrín still believed that a few exemplary punishments would win as much as battles.4

  On 27 June, Maisky agreed to the plan for the withdrawal of volunteers worked out in the Non-Intervention Committee. Two commissions were to be sent to Spain, the first to enumerate the foreigners, the second to supervise their withdrawal. The cost, estimated at between £1,750,000 and £2,250,000, would be borne by the non-intervention countries.5 The plan was sent for comment to the two sides in Spain. The nationalist attitude was expressed by Jordana. He explained to Stohrer that ‘a way must be sought of strengthening Neville Chamberlain’s position by accepting the plan in principle, but, by skilful reservations and counter-proposals, to win as much time as possible to prosecute the war in the meantime’.1 The minds of all were best expressed by Maisky (inculpating his own country) when he said that ‘the whole demeanour of the interventionist powers compels me to doubt whether the actual evacuation of the “volunteers” will take place’.2

  On 5 July, the nationalist army in the Levante began a great effort to force a way to Valencia.3 Nine hundred cannon and four hundred aircraft were now concentrated in that zone. García Valiño pressed down from the north outside Castellón, but here the Sierra de Espadán reached almost to the sea and the republican forces, led by the astute Gustavo Durán and General Menéndez, could not be dislodged. On 13 July, Varela, with Berti and three Italian divisions, alongside Solchaga’s Navarrese, attacked southwards from Teruel. The armour of the Italians decided the first days of the battle, but the republican resistance was well organized. A force of carabineers held out for a long time at Mora de Rubielos. Then Sarrión fell, and, with it, the republican positions along the Sierra de Toro. The front now began to crumble in a fashion reminiscent of what had happened in Aragon. The nationalist tourist bureau, recently opened, announced bus tours of the battlefields.4 Protected by heavy aerial and artillery bombardment, the Navarrese and Italian infantry in five days advanced sixty miles along a front twenty miles wide. All that barred the way to the soft country of the Valencian huerta, so prosperous in peace, so easily conquered in war, were certain fortifications constructed before the small pueblo of Viver and running into the Sierra de Espadán. These fortifications, however, the so-called XYZ line, were imaginatively conceived, and defended by two Army Corps commanded by colonels who had won golden opinions in the battle of Madrid in November 1936, Romero and Güemes.1 Trenches had been constructed capable of withstanding thousand-pound bombs. The advance was held. Artillery bombardment and bombs made no impression upon the defenders. Every nationalist infantry assault was repelled by a hail of machine-gun fire. Between 18 and 23 July, the nationalists suffered heavy casualties, estimated by the republic at 20,000. By the last date, the attack showed clear signs of grinding to a halt. Valencia was saved.2

  32. Division of Spain, July 1938

  47

  On 24 July 1938, Negrín told the republican war council in Barcelona that Valencia would be lost unless there were a diversionary attack elsewhere. General Rojo, chief of staff, therefore proposed to attack to the north of the nationalists’ salient to the Mediterranean. The plan was to force a passage across the broad river Ebro at several points, about seventy miles from the sea, in order first to confuse communications between the nationalists in the Levante and in Catalonia and secondly, if possible, restore land communications between Catalonia and the rest of republican Spain. To carry out this scheme, a new ‘Army of the Ebro’ had been constituted under Modesto, consisting of the 5th Army Corps under Lister, the 12th under Etelvino Vega and the 15th under Manuel Tagüeña. The 18th Army Corps, under José del Barrio, was in reserve. This force of 80,000 men was to be supported by 70–80 field batteries, and 27 anti-aircraft guns. The republicans’ air support had been much improved, thanks to the Supermosca and Superchato fighters manned by Spaniards who had been trained in Russia. All the proposed leading commanders of the Army of the Ebro were communists, corps commanders and divisional commanders alike, as well as, of course, Modesto. Indeed, these commanders met regularly, as party members, with the directorate of the party.1 The anarchists held only two brigade commands out of twenty-seven in the whole Army of the Ebro.1 They were not, however, anything like so badly represented as that in other armies. For example, Colonel Perea, commander of the Army of the East, had always been sympathetic to the anarchists, while, of the five armies of the central zone, under Miaja, only one (the unimportant Army of Estremadura) was led by one who could be called even a communist sympathizer, Colonel Burrillo.2 The others may not have been anarchists, but they were not communists.

  In addition, the communists were not united: Modesto and Lister, the two outstanding military successes of the war, were on bad terms. Modesto was a sarcastic, despotic Andalusian, sometimes brutal, rarely candid, but a real military leader, with no political gifts or ambitions. Lister was a warm-hearted and ambitious orator, with a strong sense of friendship, undisciplined, and ready to lend himself to any propaganda activity, which he carried out well; sometimes harsh, he also tolerated innumerable mistakes by his subordinates if he liked them.3 In addition, many new communists were really bourgeois in all but name. Other successful communist commanders had had their political attitudes formed exclusively by the war. No one knew what views they would have afterwards. The chief of staff of the army, Rojo, continued to seem to the anarchists all too tolerant of the communists, but he was a technician pure and simple. Bernal, the chief of transport, was a known anti-revolutionary. The socialist chief of administration of the army, Trifón Gómez, was a follower of Prieto’s, and had even been removed from the party directorate in 1934 when Largo Caballero began his move to the Left. Colonel Jurado, the artillery officer, now in charge of anti-aircraft, was thought by some to have backed the republic by accident. Manuel Albar, in charge of coordination of the different commissariats, and Alfonso Játiva, the sub-secretary of the navy, were men of Prieto. So too were Belarmino Tomás, the new commissar of the air, and Zugazagoitia, the secretary-general of defence—though his job scarcely existed.4 Many other assignments in the ministry of war were still held, as they had been under Prieto, by politically neutral professional officers rather than by communists. For example, artillery was still directed by Colonel Fuentes, the officer who had seemed so anti-Russian to Major Voronov in November 1936; Colonel Montaud, one of the commanders of the Basque army, directed communications; Doctor José Puché, rector of the University of Valencia, a friend of Negrín, was head of the army medical corps; only Major Azcárate, a cousin of the ambassador, who controlled the engineering corps, and Colonel Sánchez Paredes, the tank specialist, could be regarded as close to the communist party. The sub-secretary in charge of arms purchase, the enigmatic socialist deputy for Granada, Alejandro Otero, seemed, on the other hand, a capitalist of wide imagination. The communist-led units received the lion’s share of the best arms; but they were the offensive ones.

&nbs
p; In the Army of the Ebro, the rise of Manuel Tagüeña, still under thirty, but in command of an Army Corps, with no military experience before 1936, was symbolic of what befell the large number of young men, chiefly communists, or members of the united youth, who gained field command in the later stages of the civil war.1 Tagüeña’s communism was that of a patriotic fighting-man, not that of an ‘ideologue’.

  These reorganized armies held on in republican Spain throughout 1938. The recovery after the defeats of the spring was a great achievement. The opening of the French frontier in March was partly responsible. The calling up of new classes of reserves was also important, as was the provision of new officers’ schools. The recovery was also the stubborn work of embattled men, most of them under twenty-five, who knew that they stood to lose all, including their lives, unless they worked until they dropped.