The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  In Catalonia, where the militia system was the most entrenched, the air force officer Díaz Sandino became the Catalan councillor of war while the secretary-general, the anarchist Juan García Oliver, took over militia organization. His main work was to arrange training programmes in the rear. Even though about a tenth of the militia force in Aragón were ex-soldiers who had joined the workers, the standard of training in the metropolitan army had been so abysmal that they provided little help.

  Militia volunteers were kitted out at the former Pedralbes barracks, now the Miguel Bakunin barracks where García Oliver had based the Popular School of War. The same building was used for foreign anarchists who arrived to fight in the International Column. They came from all over Europe and Latin America. There were many Italians including Camillo Berneri, a philosophy professor who was murdered the following year during the events of May in Barcelona, and Carlo Roselli, who organized the Giustizia e Libertà column of liberals and anarchists, but who was assassinated in France the following June by members of the right-wing Cagoule. A group of Americans formed the Sacco and Vanzetti centuria and a detachment of Germans made up the Erich Muhsam centuria, named after the anarchist poet murdered two years before by the Gestapo. The POUM also used these barracks for their militia columns, which included foreign volunteers of whom the most famous was George Orwell. The communist PSUC, under Joan Comorera, found itself in a difficult position. Communist policy demanded a regular army, not militias, yet they could not antagonize their allies.

  The largest operation in the east at this time was the invasion by Catalonian militia of the Balearic Islands. Ibiza was taken easily and on 16 August 8,000 men invaded Majorca under the command of an air force officer, Alberto Bayo, later to be Fidel Castro’s guerrilla trainer. The invaders established a bridgehead unopposed, then paused as if in surprise. For once the militia had artillery, air and even naval support, yet they gave the nationalists time to organize a counter-attack. Modern Italian aircraft arrived and strafed and bombed the invading force virtually unopposed. The withdrawal and re-embarkation, ordered by the new minister of marine, Indalecio Prieto, turned into a rout. The island then became an important naval and air base for the nationalists for the rest of the war.

  The Aragón front became a stalemate after the Carlist reinforcements arrived at Saragossa. The only exception was an unsuccessful attack on Huesca organized by Colonel Villalba. The town was defended by 6,000 men against his besieging force of 13,000, but a supply line along the railtrack stayed open, allowing the nationalists to bring up supplies and reinforcements.23 Militia detachments held each hill in a rough line along the front, while nationalist troops were installed on the far side of the valley. (The day-to-day existence is best described in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.)

  PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT I

  The famous photograph of the young King Alfonso XIII getting to know his people.

  Crowds celebrating in Madrid on 14 April 1931 when Alfonso abdicated and left Spain for ever.

  The king with General Miguel Primo de Rivera, who seized power with his approval in 1923.

  Lerroux, President Alcalá Zamora and Gil Robles in 1934.

  Civil guards arrest a socialist in Madrid, October 1934.

  Civil guards escort their prisoners after the failed revolution in Asturias of October 1934.

  José Antonio Primo de Rivera (seated centre) and fellow Falangists.

  April 1936. Shooting breaks out during the funeral of a civil guard officer suspected of an attempt to kill President Azaña.

  On 18 July 1936, the day after the rising began in Morocco, Franco reaches Ceuta from the Canary Islands to take over command of the Army of Africa.

  19 July 1936. Carlist volunteers flock to the main square of Pamplona to become General Mola’s main force.

  Assault guards and anarcho-syndicalist workers of the CNT with a captured field-gun in Barcelona.

  POUM militia in the Carlos Marx barracks in Barcelona.

  Junkers 52 sent by Hitler with Moroccan regulares during the airlift to Seville, July 1936.

  A bandera of the Foreign Legion rounds up villagers during Yagüe’s advance north, August 1936.

  28 September 1936. Colonel Varela’s troops advance into Toledo.

  Colonel Moscardó, Varela and Franco celebrate the relief of the Alcázar of Toledo.

  Franco, as saviour of the Alcázar, became the unchallenged leader of the nationalists. Yagüe (in glasses), Franco (saluting) and Serrano Súñer just behind him.

  Luftwaffe pilots with their Heinkel He-45 fighter-bombers.

  In Madrid the Communist Party already had a military base on which to build. Their Worker and Peasant Anti-Fascist Militia (MAOC) provided the initial cadres for their 5th Regiment. The first communist objective was to make them look and act like disciplined soldiers. Practical military training was secondary to drilling. ‘Steel’ companies were formed (later to be imitated by other parties) and they paraded ostentatiously through Madrid causing an appreciable effect.24 Marching in step presented a great contrast to the militias. The mentality of the 5th Regiment was best described by a party official: ‘We established special slogans designed to create an iron unity…“If my comrade advances or retreats without orders I have the right to shoot him.”’25

  The training of the International Brigades was to follow a similar pattern with drill, discipline and political indoctrination taking up most of the precious time before they were sent up to the front. The Party manual said that a soldier would only fight well if carefully instructed on why he was fighting. This ideological drilling was the work of political commissars and the 5th Regiment was responsible for their introduction. Officially they were there to watch over the ‘reliability’ of the regular commander. In fact, they were agents in the Communist Party’s plan to take over the republican army, which would have to be formed if a conventional war was fought. These ‘secular chaplains’ were later the cause of a great power struggle between the communists and the government.

  The first commander of the 5th Regiment was Enrique Castro Delgado, who was assisted by foreign communist advisers. The Party’s ‘common front’ recruiting campaign, led by La Pasionaria, attracted many who admired the 5th Regiment’s professional appearance. Some 25 per cent of the new recruits were socialists; about 15 per cent left republicans. Later they discovered that promotion was virtually impossible without Party membership, since the 5th Regiment served chiefly as a training base for future communist officers. The Communist Party claimed that some 60,000 men served in its ranks, but a maximum of 30,000 is probably more accurate.26 They included Juan Modesto, a former Foreign Legion corporal, and the Moscow-trained Enrique Líster, both of whom were to become important commanders.

  Most regular officers preferred to co-operate with the communists because they were horrified by the militia system. On the whole these loyalist officers tended to be the older and more bureaucratic members of the metropolitan army, since the younger, more aggressive elements had sided with the rising. But only colonial soldiers had received any practical experience. The pre-war home army had seldom even carried out manoeuvres.

  The republican commanders therefore had little to offer but secondhand theories left over from the First World War. Along with the communists and the government, who wanted all forces controlled through a central structure, they insisted that the militias adapt to an orthodox model. Eventually the militias would have to agree. They could not resist the enemy for long without major changes and their theorists had failed to put forward any alternative strategy. The government and its allies had an additional motive for wanting to create a regular military organization. They believed that the Republic must impress foreign governments as a conventional state possessing a conventional army.

  PART THREE

  The Civil War Becomes International

  13

  Arms and the Diplomats

  The failure of the military coup by the rebels, matched by the failure of
the government and unions to crush it, meant that Spain faced a long and bloody war. The need for weapons in this much longer struggle forced both sides to seek help abroad, the first major step in the internationalization of the Spanish Civil War.

  Of the three most important neutral governments, the British played the most crucial role. An isolationist United States was wary of international commitments. The French government of Léon Blum was alarmed by Hitler’s rearmament and, despite France’s pact with Russia, relied primarily on Great Britain for mutual defence. Yet when Blum received a telegram on 19 July from José Giral’s government in Madrid requesting arms, his first reaction was to agree to help. The Republican government wanted twenty Potez bombers, eight Schneider 155mm fieldguns, Hotchkiss machine-guns, Lebel rifles, grenades and ammunition.1 He prepared their despatch in secret with Pierre Cot, the minister of aviation.

  The reasons for such discretion were that Blum’s Popular Front coalition had been in office for only six weeks, and street fighting in France took place between left-wingers and fascist groups, such as the Croix-de-Feu. The violence, although not comparable to that in Spain during the spring, still made senior army officers restless. Generals Gamelin, Duval and Jouart, as well as the powerful industrialists of the Comité des Forges, warned that the slightest suggestion of involving the country in the Spanish conflict risked provoking a major storm.2 The Catholic writer François Mauriac warned in the Figaro: ‘Take care! We will never forgive you for such a crime.’3

  The despatch of the aircraft may have been organized in secret, but nationalist sympathizers in the Spanish embassy informed the press, and perhaps also Count Welczeck, the German ambassador. On 23 July he reported to the Wilhelmstrasse, ‘I have learned in strict confidence that the French government has declared itself prepared to supply the Spanish government with considerable amounts of war matériel during the next few days. Approximately 30 bombers, several thousand bombs, a considerable number of 75mm guns, etc., are involved…Franco’s situation is likely to deteriorate decisively, especially as the result of the supplying of bombers to the government.’4 Not only did this pro-nationalist source exaggerate the scale of the intended shipment, in Tetuán, nationalist officers convinced the German consul that they had not been able to delay the rising because ‘Soviet ships had arrived in Spanish harbours with arms and ammunition for an uprising planned by the Communists’.5

  Blum survived the attacks of right-wing newspapers by restricting the agreement to private sales of unarmed military aircraft, but this meant that the Republic was now being treated on a level similar to the insurgents. To make matters worse, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, Juan Cárdenas, joined the nationalists. Giral’s government called on Fernando de los Ríos, then on holiday in Geneva, to replace him, but time was lost. De los Ríos could not be recognized by the French government straight away, he lacked accessible funds and he had no idea of weaponry. On the night of 24 July he had a meeting with Blum, Pierre Cot, é douard Daladier and Yvon Delbos to examine a clause of the 1935 commercial treaty which allowed Spain to purchase arms up to the value of 20 million francs.6

  The alternative method of helping the Republic was to prevent foreign support reaching Franco. The British Foreign Office feared that the conflict might escalate and warned the French government that helping the Republic would only encourage Hitler and Mussolini to aid the nationalists. Blum and Daladier, his war minister, were aware that French armaments were inferior to those that Franco could obtain from the dictators. Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, agreed with the view of Salvador de Madariaga, the former Spanish representative at the League of Nations, that apart from foreign intervention, the two sides were so evenly balanced that neither could win. This sort of reasoning encouraged the French government to believe that it was better for the Republic if no arms were allowed to reach either zone.

  The last hopes of the Spanish republican government that it would not be treated on a par with its enemies disappeared on 25 July. President Albert Lebrun summoned an emergency meeting of the council of ministers to discuss the impact of the right-wing press campaign against aid to the Spanish Republic. Any attempt to sell arms to the Republic was forbidden. The only exception would be the sale of a few unarmed aircraft through private companies or third parties, such as Mexico.7

  A policy of ‘non-intervention’ was therefore proposed by Blum’s government on 2 August to include the French, British, German and Italian governments, and any others who became involved in the Spanish conflict. There is little doubt that the British government’s attitude was crucial. As Eden said, the French government ‘acted most loyally by us’.8 On 3 and 4 August the French foreign ministry sounded out the Germans and Italians on their intentions. They avoided a definite response to gain time while they speeded up their shipments of arms to the nationalists. Meanwhile the British ambassador in Paris put pressure on the French government not to help the Republic.9 Blum, afraid of alienating the British, suspended further arms sales as well as civilian aircraft on 8 August. The Spanish frontier was closed to all prohibited commerce.

  Four days later the French chargé d’affaires in London recommended an international committee of control ‘to supervise the agreement and consider further action’. Eden, however, decided to announce that Britain would apply an arms embargo without waiting for other powers to respond. This in effect meant denying arms to the recognized government and often ignoring those going to the rebels, for the British government refused to acknowledge the proof of German and Italian intervention. On the other hand, there were instances of the British being even-handed. For example, it appears from a German foreign ministry report that the British embassy in Portugal put heavy pressure on the Portuguese authorities to prevent the German vessel Usuramo from unloading ‘a “certain” cargo’ (probably ammunition) and the ship had to sail away to unload elsewhere.10 And later Franco complained to the German ambassador that Britain had put heavy pressure on Portugal not to recognize his regime.11 Baldwin’s government nevertheless told the Labour opposition that any active expression of sympathy with the republican government of Spain would at that time be against the interests of Great Britain and therefore unpatriotic.

  The policy of appeasement was not Neville Chamberlain’s invention. Its roots lay in a fear of bolshevism. The general strike of 1926 and the depression made the possibility of revolution a very real concern to conservative politicians. As a result, they had mixed feelings towards the German and Italian regimes which had crushed the communists and the socialists in their own countries. Much of the electorate also held anti-militarist sentiments after the First World War and feelings of guilt about the Allies’ humiliation of Germany at the Treaty of Versailles.12 The British population, moreover, knew little of events abroad. As the British minister in Berlin, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, wrote later, the country ‘could not be expected to take an enlightened view of the situation when the government had done nothing to inform it’.13

  When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Eden was to handle the situation virtually on his own. Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister, was ill when the war began and then became preoccupied by the Abdication crisis. ‘I hope’, he told Eden, ‘that you will try not to trouble me too much with foreign affairs just now.’ Eden was hardly an impartial observer of the conflict. He is supposed to have told the French foreign minister, Delbos, that England preferred a rebel victory to a republican victory. He professed an admiration for the self-proclaimed fascist Calvo Sotelo, who had been murdered. He abhorred the killings in republican territory, while failing to comment on nationalist atrocities. From his diplomatic staff on the spot he received emotive descriptions of the killings in the capital and Barcelona. The ambassador, Sir Henry Chilton, was a blatant admirer of the nationalists and preferred to stay in Hendaye rather than return to Madrid. The government also listened to Royal Navy officers who supported the rebels. The naval base of Gibraltar had been flooded with pro-nationalist refugees, among whom jour
nalists of the British press searched diligently for ‘first-hand’ accounts of atrocities. Franco’s admission at the end of July that he was prepared to shoot half of Spain was virtually ignored.

  Franco’s new press officer, Luis Bolín, had, before the rising, organized a discreet but effective anti-republican campaign in London as correspondent of the monarchist newspaper ABC. He claimed, with justification, that he had ‘developed a not inconsiderable degree of influence in appropriate circles’. His most important ally was the Duke of Alba, who also had the English dukedom of Berwick and was addressed as ‘cousin’ by Churchill. In these circles Alba, with his affection for English institutions, typified the civilized Spaniard. His quiet conversations in White’s club were infinitely more influential on government policy than mass rallies or demonstrations. But then anyone speaking up for the Spanish republican government in such surroundings would have provoked the kind of horrified reaction caricatured in a Bateman cartoon.