—I saw them lying in pouring rain day and night, completely silent, just waiting for the enemy. All of us who had suffered from the lack of discipline on our side, from the very disagreeable assassinations, who had become convinced that a war could not be won like that, saw in the brigaders what a real army would have to be like …
Kitted out in his father’s leather jacket, hunting boots, gaiters and cap – ‘one of those soft, classic German caps like Dimitrov was pictured wearing after the Reichstag fire’ – Arturo del HOYO, a university student, went down to the Plaza de Cibeles and caught a No. 37 tram, which took him and the newly formed Youth Front battalion to the front. A few days before they had received arms: rifles that looked like those the Abyssinians had used to fight the Italians. ‘Each had a barrel about two metres long.’ When they reached Usera suburb, they found they had to relieve a CNT battalion.
—They had good rifles and didn’t want to hand them over. There was a bit of a struggle. Orders were that units had to hand over their arms on leaving the front. We won the day, however, and took up our positions properly armed. The same can hardly be said of our dress. My father, a railwayman, had lent me his shooting clothes; but one of my companions was wearing shirt, tie, raincoat and shoes – and that’s how he remained dressed for the months we stayed at the front …
But it was his mother’s reaction which surprised him the most; she had not said a word against his going to fight. Normally, she would be running after him in the street to make sure he was wearing a raincoat and didn’t catch cold. ‘Now she thought it natural, it was as though I was going to the office to work. What a change there was in mothers’ attitudes in those days!’
—‘To the front – five céntimos,’ the tram conductors began calling out. José BARDASANO, a painter and poster designer, saw a tram leaving from close to the Plaza Mayor to go to the Puerta de Toledo which was now nearly the front. It was full of barbers who hadn’t even had time to take off their white smocks and were still carrying their combs …
He had never believed the enemy could take Madrid, had designed a poster called 7 November. It showed a young lad shouting ‘To Arms!’ By then the workshop he had set up had enormous hoardings ready to put up on houses damaged by air raids or shelling. ‘Fascism struck here’, ‘Terror hit here’, they proclaimed. At the start of the war, he had won a poster competition organized in the Plaza Mayor. In front of each entry there was a ballot box and the people voted for the poster they liked best. His poster, called 1936 and showing a militiaman breaking the Falange’s Yoke and Arrows emblem over his knee, had been awarded the only prize. Thereafter, he received so many commissions that he set up La Gallofa workshop, run as a collective, to handle them …
There was no doubt in Régulo MARTINEZ’S mind that the communists and the JSU were playing an important role in raising morale, in exhorting the population to defend the city. At the communist party’s celebrations on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, his left republican party headquarters received a telephone call saying that the Soviet ambassador regretted the absence of a left republican representative. MARTINEZ, as president of the Madrid party, was chosen to go, and when he reached the Monumental theatre he found Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionaria) addressing the crowd. The speeches were being broadcast to the world.
—She was praising the communists, maintaining that they alone were defending the city. I rose to speak. It was not the communists but the people who were fighting, I said. The communists didn’t take that too well, but the people stood and cheered as I spoke of the times when madrileños had risen to defend their liberty …
Day after day the nationalist offensive continued; day after day, the militias, backed by 3,500 International Brigaders and soon by a somewhat smaller number of men from the Durruti column in Aragon under its leader, resisted desperately. This was no longer combat in open countryside but battle in working-class streets and suburbs the defenders knew well. Most important was the fact that several of the first new mixed brigades of the Popular Army were thrown into the fray. Though only half-formed, barely trained and equipped, they were a more effective force than the old militia columns. Added to which was Soviet aid: fighters, tanks, artillery and advisers, not to speak of food and clothing. In Lister’s mixed brigade, the first to be formed, the troops ate Russian ham and wore Russian jerseys and trousers. But even the militia were no longer the autonomous units of the past. Manuel CARABAÑO, the fifteen-year-old libertarian youth, veteran of the storming of the Montaña barracks and the retreat to Madrid, was fighting in the anarchist del Rosal column. Instinctively and without discussion, the column began to accept orders from the military staff, he observed. The orders came – no one asked where from – and were obeyed. But the defence in his view was a people’s defence. From a military standpoint, the people’s contribution was perhaps not very important; but when it came to morale and supplies it was vital. For the first two weeks he and his companions lived on whatever civilians brought them.
—Wine, sandwiches, bread, chocolate, paellas, stews – they brought us everything they had. Many of them died; they were fearless. My centuria took up position in houses on the other side of the river. Four or five men and a boy of fourteen brought us a tin of tunny and some bread. We asked them to bring ammunition. The next day another lot arrived with food and cardboard boxes containing fifty rounds of rifle ammunition. They kept us going like that for a week …
Civilians not only brought supplies but picked up fallen men’s rifles and fought. CARABAÑO recalled a forty-five-year-old bricklayer, ‘the classic Madrid mason, who played his game of cards and got drunk every Saturday, paid his union dues but nothing much more’, who joined his unit to fight, and remained for the rest of the war.
José SANDOVAL, a draughtsman who was soon to become the communist party secretary of the first mixed brigade commanded by Lister, was convinced that the civilian population’s role in maintaining the combatants’ morale was crucial. Men, women and children were prepared to do anything to support the troops.
—I think the communist party played a vital role in rallying the people, for the party decided without a moment’s hesitation to call for all-out defence of the capital. There was a real understanding between the party and people of Madrid …
After eight days of bitter fighting, the break came; legionaries and Moors stormed the river and reached the University City beyond. It was 15 November. Furious counter-attacks by the International Brigade recaptured the Hall of Philosophy, but they could not throw the enemy back across the river. Two days later, the nationalists attacked again and occupied the Clinical Hospital, which was on the very edge of Madrid; it was to be their farthest point of penetration.
—‘We need men in the West Park,’ the voice on the other end of the phone said. ‘All right,’ I replied, ‘you can count on us.’ Salvador LOPEZ, a civil servant and UGT member, set off with some companions. When we got to the West Park, adjoining the University City, we found a section of men and they said: ‘Here’s the trench, get in it, we’ve got to defend this.’ I was handed an Italian rifle; it was full of dirt. I set about cleaning it with the only thing I had – a tin of Nivea cream which I had kept from an outing in the sierra before the war …
The trench was rudimentary, little more than a ditch with a few sandbags, and its defenders were all civilians. They remained there for five days without moving. Each trade union organization sent up cold rations. Later, thinking about it, LOPEZ wondered if he and the others like him hadn’t been mad to jump into a trench without any training.
—But at the time the enthusiasm, political conviction and determination to defend Madrid were overwhelming. The defence was a popular effort. If that example had been set from the beginning matters would have turned out very differently …
In the church of San Francisco, where she and another woman were cataloguing the paintings for the government commission which had undertaken the protection of the nation’s art, Carmen CAAMAÑO
heard the shouts echoing in the street outside: ‘The Moors! The Moors!’ She ran outside. Women in the street were crying: ‘Get upstairs with the oil, get the knives – ’ She looked round but could see no troops, although the church was quite close to the Casa de Campo.
—Then the shouting died down and the word went round that it was not ‘los moros’ but rather ‘los toros’ [bulls] which had escaped from the slaughter house and were running wild in the streets …
But some nationalist armoured vehicles with Moorish troops managed to reach the city streets before being repelled. A US journalist came to see Régulo MARTINEZ to confirm a rumour that the militia had discovered a new way of combating tanks. The president of the Madrid left republicans offered to take the journalist to the scene. When they reached the Cuesta de San Vicente, MARTINEZ found a militiaman who had witnessed an armoured car being blown up.
—‘Will you tell this journalist how it was done?’ ‘Oh, it wasn’t anything much.’ I knew that the militia had repelled the vehicles with tins filled with dynamite. ‘But how could you beat off armoured vehicles without proper weapons?’ the journalist insisted. ‘Oh well,’ said the militiaman, ‘echando cojones al asunto’ [with guts]. The journalist asked me what he had said and wrote it down carefully. A week later, I was shown a copy of an American paper in which I read that Madrid militiamen had invented a new anti-tank device called ‘ echando cojones al asunto’ …
The description was not inaccurate; without anti-tank weapons, only personal bravery could stop what the militiamen feared above all – ‘as the Romans must have feared Hannibal’s elephants’ – the enemy’s tanks. Julián VAZQUEZ, the communist garment workers’ leader, was reminded of the Soviet film The Sailors of Kronstadt which he had seen shortly before when a detachment of naval orderlies leapt out of the narrow trenches in Usera suburb and charged. But then he saw an even more amazing sight. One of these sailors, a man he later learnt was called Antonio Coll, threw himself on to the ground in the path of three enemy tanks, let them nearly reach him and then threw his bombs. Two were blown up, the third turned tail and fled.
—Coll was killed; but tanks were no longer seen as invincible juggernauts …
A peasant emulated the sailor. At a mass rally, La Pasionaria called on him to explain how he had blown up the tanks. Narciso JULIAN, the communist commander of the armoured train brigade, heard his reply.
—‘Well, look, it’s – it’s very easy. You lie on the ground with a bomb in your hand and you let the tank get to within three metres and you throw the bomb at the tracks. If it explodes, the tank blows up on the spot. And if it doesn’t – if it doesn’t explode –’ He stopped, not knowing how to continue. ‘If it doesn’t,’ he added finally, ‘the tank crushes you … ’
Everything, thought JULIAN, depended on popular initiative. When they received their first Soviet tanks, crews had had to be rapidly trained; a specialized business which in the Soviet Union could take a year. Madrid taxi-drivers were pressed into service. ‘This is exactly the same as driving a taxi except that instead of a wheel you’ve got two levers.’ People who knew trigonometry were needed to operate the range-finders; the latter were removed. So too were the radio receivers, which were replaced by signalling flags. Where the radio had been there was room for three more shells. The Soviet advisers found it difficult to believe that tank crews were being trained in forty days. They came to see. JULIAN watched the taxi-drivers manoeuvre their tanks in perfect formation; but not content with this display, the Soviets wanted to see a gunnery test and selected a tank at random, ordering it to fire from standstill at targets set up at different ranges.
—First round – a bull’s-eye. Amazement. The Soviet officer ran to congratulate the tank commander. ‘How did you do it?’ ‘Oh well, you know – ’ All this was being translated. ‘Let me see,’ cried the Soviet. He got inside the tank, the gunner opened the catch, looked down the barrel at the target, put in his shell and fired. Another bull’s-eye. Imagine what the Soviet had to say to that! Well, they just had to learn that we hadn’t time to lose. Popular initiative had to make good many deficiencies …
Hand-to-hand fighting in the buildings of the still uncompleted University City continued for days with complete disregard for life. But again, in extremis, people and soldiers combined to hold the enemy. Though neither side gained terrain, it had to be counted a republican victory. For forty-eight hours Madrid suffered constant, heavy air raids by Nazi bombers of the Condor Legion. The Spanish capital was the first to experience the future fate of London, Dresden, Coventry, Hamburg. But the population could not be bombed into submission.
—Knowing you could be killed at any moment from the air you thought you might as well die fighting, asserted Josefa MORALES, the secretary. The bombing didn’t do the enemy any good. It made people angry, more determined to resist. House committees were set up to control the movements of residents, to prevent looting during raids; it was a form of civilian control but it didn’t go further than that. After a time you became fatalistic; I refused to go to the shelter when the siren sounded …
On 19 November, while inspecting the lines round the Clinical Hospital where, it appeared, a unit of his was withdrawing against orders, Durruti was fatally wounded. Rumours immediately circulated as to the origin of the bullet.
—The first was that he had been killed by the communists, according to Eduardo de GUZMAN, the CNT journalist. We denied that categorically. Then it was said he had been killed by one of his own men; this was equally false. Recently, it has been said that his sub-machine-gun went off accidentally and that he shot himself. This is also untrue. The truth was really very simple. Foolishly, he got out of his car at a position barely 500 metres from the Clinical Hospital where some of his men had taken up positions behind a night-watchman’s shack. A burst was fired by the enemy from the Hospital. As soon as I received the news I went to the hotel where he had been taken and talked to the people who had been with him …
Manuel CARABAÑO, the fifteen-year-old libertarian youth member, had heard Durruti address a joint meeting of the Madrid defence junta and the general staff shortly before. The CNT’s contribution to the war would be total and absolute, CARABAÑO recalled him as saying. The libertarian representatives on the defence junta had voiced their agreement.
—When he was killed many of us thought that his statement – a repetition of his famous phrase that the CNT renounced everything but victory in the war – was the cause of his death. We didn’t talk about it openly, for that would have been too risky, but we attributed his death to a FAI group …
Durruti died early the following morning, 20 November; at much the same hour, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, who had been tried in Alicante prison, was taken from his cell and executed in the prison courtyard.53
Left in extremis by the Caballero government to organize the capital’s defence, General Miaja rapidly became the symbol of popular resistance.
—‘I was like someone standing on the sea-shore who sees a man drowning,’ Régulo MARTINEZ heard him say during the defence. ‘Suddenly the spectator is given a push, falls into the water and in order to save himself starts to swim. The drowning man grabs him and is saved. “You’re my saviour,” shouts the man. But what I want to know is’ – Miaja liked talking in allegories – ‘who pushed me in?’ …
MARTINEZ was attending a dinner given for his left republican colleague and former prime minister José Giral who, he observed, found it impossible to understand how the Madrid population had rallied to defend the city. Evidently in Valencia, where Giral was still a member of the government, there had been complete surprise at Madrid’s resistance. Meanwhile, Miaja was continuing:
—‘I’m the man who was pushed in, but here are the real tacticians: Rojo and Casado. These are the officers who have achieved the miracle, if that’s what it is, who have carried out the staff planning so effectively in the face of the complete lack of confidence in the military’ …
Miaja was turned into an idol, and an idol, reflected MARTINEZ, was needed in those desperate moments. Moreover, on several occasions, pistol in hand, he rallied troops who were faltering in the front line when the enemy was pressing towards the heart of the city, displaying considerable personal courage in the process. But then courage had been common currency in those November days, and not only among the capital’s inhabitants but also among the peasant refugees who had flooded in from Estremadura and Toledo. People who had suffered all their lives, who knew what the republic’s defeat would mean to them, he thought, they had turned out to be magnificent defenders of Madrid.
*
By the last week of November there was a stalemate in the fighting. Hitler and Mussolini had meanwhile recognized the nationalist regime; Soviet aid had come to the Popular Front just in time. The defence of Madrid had confirmed the evidence of the very first days of the war: the fusion of disciplined fighting forces and a determined civilian population prepared for every sacrifice could hold the enemy. It remained to be seen what conclusions were drawn from it – not least by the communist party which had contributed so decisively to the defence of Madrid. ‘For people to fight, to fight with an exalted frenzy, it is essential that they believe in something, that they know the struggle has a meaning,’ noted the Pravda correspondent, Mikháil Koltsov, in Madrid on 7 November.54 The lessons to be learnt could condition the future course of the war.
In the nationalist zone, which had prepared altars, courts martial, food supplies and celebrations for the capture of Madrid, there was the inevitable disappointment. ‘Madrid remains a general obsession,’ wrote the Defensor de Córdoba, on 23 November. ‘There are those who think that taking a large city is like taking a cup of chocolate,’ said General Queipo de Llano in one of his nightly broadcasts from Seville, adding that he had never believed the task would be easy.
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 39
