The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  A meeting was then held in Paris when Eugen Fried (‘Clément’) presented the instructions which he had brought from Moscow. Maurice Thorez and the other leaders of the French Communist Party were to organize the recruitment and training of volunteers destined to fight fascism in Spain. Communist Parties and organizations, such as Red Help International, Friends of the Soviet Union, Rot Front, la Confédération Générale du Travail, the Paix et Liberté movement and the various local committees to aid the Spanish Republic organized by the Soviet intelligence officer Walter Krivitsky, from The Hague, were all to play their part.3

  In Spain there were already several hundred foreign volunteers. Most had just arrived in Barcelona for the People’s Olympiad when the rising took place. A number of them volunteered to form the first nucleus of the International Brigades, the centuria Thaelmann, then attached to the PSUC in Catalonia. This unit was led by Hans Beimler, a member of the central committee of the German Communist Party and a deputy in the Reichstag. After Hitler’s seizure of power, Beimler had been locked up in Dachau, from where he had managed to escape, reaching Barcelona on 5 August 1936. During the course of the whole civil war between 32,000 and 35,000 men from 53 different countries served in the ranks of the International Brigades.4 Another 5,000 foreigners served outside, mostly attached to the CNT or the POUM.

  The main recruitment centre chosen for the International Brigades was Paris, where volunteers were organized by leaders of the French and Italian Communist Parties. André Marty, a leader of the PCF and a member of the executive committee of the Comintern, had Luigi Longo (‘Gallo’), who had been in Spain during the rising, as his second in command. Giuseppe di Vittorio (‘Nicoletti’) became head of the commissars. Another key figure was Josip Broz (‘Tito’), who was also in Paris. The Comintern claimed publicly that the International Brigades consisted of a wide group of spontaneous volunteers, democrats and anti-fascists. It denied that young communists had been ordered to Paris as part of an organized recruitment. Towards the end of the 1960s Moscow admitted that in September 1936 the Comintern had decided to infiltrate ‘volunteers with military experience to send them to fight in Spain’.5 Esmond Romilly, the young nephew of Winston Churchill who enlisted in the International Brigades, wrote that French communists reprimanded those who shouted ‘Vive les Soviets!’.6

  With right-wing dictatorships forming a belt from Hamburg to Taranto, it required careful organization to bring the East Europeans to Spain. Poles in exile from their country’s military regime started to arrive in Paris, together with Hungarians fleeing from Admiral Horthy’s dictatorship and Romanians escaping from the Iron Guard. Yugoslavs avoiding the royalist police came along Tito’s ‘secret railway’. Even White Russians, hoping that service with the Brigades would allow them to return home, joined the mass of East European exiles. Most of them had a hard and painful journey before reaching their destination. ‘Often on foot, across fields and mountains, sleeping in the open, hidden in coal tenders or in the bilges of a ship, they managed to get through police control points and frontiers to reach France.’7 Volunteers from North America did not arrive until much later. The first detachment from the United States left New York on Christmas Day and the Lincoln Battalion saw action in the battle of the Jarama in February 1937.

  The story of the International Brigades later became distorted in many ways, not simply from the propaganda motive of exaggerating their role out of all proportion to that of Spanish formations. An impression arose, especially in Great Britain and America, that they consisted of middle-class intellectuals and ideological Beau Gestes such as Ralph Fox, John Cornford, Julian Bell and Christopher Caudwell, who were all killed in action. This came about partly because the intellectual minority was newsworthy and partly because they were articulate and had ready access to publishers afterwards.

  In fact, almost 80 per cent of the volunteers from Great Britain were manual workers who either left their jobs or had been unemployed.

  Photographs of them show scrubbed faces with self-conscious expressions, short hair, cloth caps clutched in hand and Sunday suits with boots. Some of them were glad to escape the apathy of unemployment, others had already been fighting Mosley’s fascists in street battles, as their French equivalents had fought Action Française and the Croix de Feu.

  But most had little notion of what warfare really meant. Slightly over half of them were Communist Party members. Jason Gurney of the British battalion described the drawing power of the Party in the 1930s: ‘Its real genius was to provide a world where lost and lonely people could feel important.’ Interminable, deeply serious meetings at branch level gave members a feeling of being involved in ‘the march of History’.8 Yet all the time they were made eager to have the responsibility and effort of original thought taken from them. Slogans in ‘pidgin agit-prop’, as Victor Serge termed it, became an inwardly soothing mantra despite the outward protest.

  George Orwell later attacked the left’s intellectual dishonesty in the apparently effortless switch from pacifism to ‘romantic warmongering’: ‘Here were the very people who for twenty years had hooted and jeered at the “glory” of war, atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would have fitted into the Daily Mail of 1918. The same people who in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotskyist-Fascist if you suggested that the stories in New Masses about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back into the fighting might be exaggerated.’9

  In their own countries some young middle-class idealists were ill at ease with workers and perhaps wary of the way their earnest social potholing could risk derision. Like Marx before them, they had often despaired of England’s ‘bourgeois’ proletariat. The Spanish proletariat, on the other hand, had never respected or aped their social superiors. Even in the eighteenth century foreign travellers were amazed at the cavalier way Spanish servants and labourers treated their aristocracy. Also, the fact that the Andalucian peasant had never been crushed by the seizure of the common land or contained by religion meant that the Spanish working class could be romanticized in a way which their own working class seemed to thwart. Consequently, the Spanish conflict offered Anglo-Saxon intellectuals a breath of pure and uncloseted emotion in comparison to the suffocating complacency at home. Middle-class guilt feelings and an urge to sublimate a privileged identity in the mass struggle made many of these intellectuals ideal recruits for communist authority.

  There were, perhaps, many volunteers who went to Spain partly in search of excitement, but the selflessness of the International Brigaders’ motives cannot be doubted. They saw fascism as an international threat, and the Brigades appeared to offer the best way of fighting it. Spain was seen as the battleground which would decide the future. This belief was maintained long afterwards, so that even to this day there are those who argue that a republican victory would have prevented the Second World War.

  Paris was the marshalling yard for volunteers of all nationalities. The secret networks directed them there from eastern, central and southeastern Europe. From the north, British workers without passports crossed the channel on excursion tickets. On arrival at the Gare du Nord, left-wing taxi drivers drove them to the reception centres in the 9th Arrondissement. Almost every day, young men, brown paper parcels under their arms, could be seen waiting for the Perpignan train at the Gare d’Austerlitz, conspicuously trying to look inconspicuous.

  Once safely on the train, they would fraternize with those whose glances they had just been avoiding so studiously. Wine was passed round, food shared and the ‘Internationale’ sung endlessly. The two principal routes were either to Marseilles, where they were smuggled on to ships for Barcelona or Valencia, or else to Perpignan and then over the Pyrenees at night. Some anarchists, who still controlled the Pyrenean frontier, wanted to turn them back. Their argument was that weapons were needed, not men, but their mai
n fear was that a communist-controlled ‘Foreign Legion’ was being built up to crush them later.10 In the fields peasants straightened up to watch the young foreigners pass, singing, in their trains or lorries. The reaction to them was warmest in the towns, where most of the population, especially the children, cheered them and gave the clenched-fist salute. In Barcelona the welcome was unstinted despite the misgivings of the libertarian movement.

  On 12 October the steamer Ciudad de Barcelona reached Alicante with the first 500 volunteers who had embarked two days earlier in Marseilles. They then boarded a train which took them to Albacete, the base chosen for the International Brigades. Their barracks in the Calle de la Libertad had been seized from the Civil Guard after the rising.

  The barracks where many of the nationalist defenders had been killed was used as the induction centre. It was in a disgusting state until a party of German communists cleaned it out thoroughly. Hygiene was a problem, especially for those who were weakened by the malnutrition of unemployment. Certainly the rations of beans in oil contributed to the dysentery suffered by the British working-class volunteers who, like the Canadians and Americans, were unused to foreign food. As soon as they arrived, the German communists put up a large slogan in their quarters proclaiming ‘We Exalt Discipline’, while the French posted precautions against venereal disease. (With the lack of antibiotics, the latter was to take almost as heavy a toll as in the militias.)

  In Albacete, the Brigaders were given their initial indoctrination and issued with ‘uniforms’–often either woolly Alpine hats or khaki berets, ski jerkins, breeches, long thick socks and ill-fitting boots. Some found themselves in army surplus uniforms from the First World War, and the Americans later turned up almost entirely kitted out as ‘doughboys’. It was rare to find anything that fitted satisfactorily. Senior Party cadres and commissars were conspicuously different. They favoured black leather jackets, dark-blue berets, and a Sam Browne belt with a heavy 9mm automatic pistol. This last item was the great status symbol of the Party functionary.

  The recruits were lined up on the parade ground for an address by André Marty, the Brigades’ controller who had earlier brought the French volunteers over the border during the fighting at Irún. Marty, a squat man with white moustache, drooping jowl and outsize beret, had made his name in the 1919 mutiny of the French Black Sea fleet. The heroic legend woven around him in Party mythology made him one of the most powerful figures in the Comintern. Almost nobody dared challenge his authority. At that time he was starting to develop a conspiracy complex that rivalled Stalin’s. Influenced by the show trials in Moscow, he became convinced that ‘Fascist-Trotskyist’ spies were everywhere, and that it was his duty to exterminate them. Marty later admitted that he had ordered the shooting of about 500 Brigaders, nearly one-tenth of the total killed in the war, but some question this figure.11

  The organizational committee of the International Brigades transformed itself on 26 October into a military council, which included Vital Gayman (‘Vidal’) and Carlos Contreras as well as General Walter. Constancia de la Mora, the niece of the conservative prime minister Antonio Maura and the wife of the communist commander of the republican air force, Hidalgo de Cisneros, acted as interpreter. The military council installed itself in a villa on the outskirts of the town and André Marty requisitioned other buildings in Albacete. The Brigades’ military commander was General ‘Kléber’ (alias Lazar Stern), a tall, grey-haired Hungarian Jew and veteran of the Red Army, who was later to be shot on Stalin’s orders. He had travelled under the name of ‘Manfred Stern’ on a Canadian passport faked by the NKVD.12

  The parade ground at Albacete was used for drill, after which battalion commissars gave the volunteers long lectures on ‘why we are fighting’. These talks were followed by group discussions, used by the commissars to introduce ‘ideas’ which were then ‘discussed and voted upon democratically’. The International Brigades followed the 5th Regiment in introducing the saluting of officers. ‘A salute is a sign that a comrade who has been an egocentric individualist in private life has adjusted to the collective way of getting things done. A salute is proof that our Brigade is on its way from being a collection of well-meaning amateurs to a precision implement for eliminating fascists.’13

  Such meetings and ‘democratic procedures’ provided tempting targets for the iconoclasts to mock, but these light-hearted jokers were marked down by the commissars. They were likely to be the first suspected of ‘Trotskyist-Fascist leanings’. Other sceptics, especially the old sweats from the Great War, were bitterly critical of the ‘training’. Most of the volunteers were very unfit, as well as ignorant of the most elementary military skills. As one of the veterans remarked, they were not preparing to go over the top with Das Kapital in their hands.

  Marty told the volunteers that ‘when the first International Brigade goes into action, they will be properly trained men with good rifles, a well-equipped corps’. This was all part of the Party’s myth of the professional, when in fact sheer courage, bolstered by the belief that the world depended on them, had to make up for appalling deficiencies in the Brigaders’ basic training. Men who were to be sent against the Army of Africa had to project the aura of experts to impress the militias, but they could do little except form ranks, march and turn. Many of them had never even handled a rifle until they were on the way to the front, and the few Great War veterans had to show them how to load their obsolete weapons of varied calibres. From a box of assorted ammunition, inexperienced soldiers had to find the right bullets to fit their rifles. The number of jammed weapons through wedged and separated casings was predictably high.

  The militias had suffered from similar disadvantages, but they had no pretensions to being an elite force arriving in the nick of time to save the situation. Nevertheless, the foreign innocents, who felt a ‘moment of awe’ on being handed a rifle, had several advantages over the Spanish militiamen on first going into battle. They had a slightly greater knowledge and understanding of modern military technology, they understood the value of trenches and, most important of all, they had men in their ranks who ‘had been through it before’. Spain’s neutrality in the Great War made the first shock of battle much more traumatic to the militia.

  The Soviet authorities did everything they could to camouflage the number of Red Army personnel in Spain, even making some of them enlist as volunteers in the International Brigades. The most obvious examples were the commanders, Kléber, Gal, Copic and Walter, while in the Polish Dombrowski Battalion there was a significant nucleus of Red Army officers. Altogether thirty Soviet officers were sent to Spain as commanders in the International Brigades.14 The Palafox Battalion appears to have had an even larger Soviet contingent than most. It was commanded by a Major Tkachev (‘Palafox’), most of the four companies were commanded by Red Army lieutenants and many of the men, it would appear, were Soviet citizens. ‘There was all sorts of nationalities in it,’ wrote one member in the official account, ‘such as Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, etc.’15 In addition, a training centre for International Brigade officers was set up in Tiflis with a capacity for 60 infantry officers and 200 pilots.16 The Soviet military advisers were ordered to keep out of range of artillery fire (podalshe ot artillereiskogo ognia), so that captured officers could not be paraded in front of the Non-Intervention Committee.

  Although it is hard to establish exactly the number of Soviet personnel who served in the Spanish Civil War, it is clear from documents that there were never more than 800 present at any one time. The total appears to have been a maximum of 2,150, of whom 600 were noncombatant, including interpreters. There were, in addition, between 20 and 40 members of the NKVD and between 20 and 25 diplomats. Altogether, 189 were reported killed or missing: 129 officers, 43 NCOs and 17 soldiers.17

  On 16 October, in a coded telegram, Voroshilov, the People’s Commissar for Defence, ordered Gorev to ‘send advisers to work in divisions and brigades’.18 The vain Voroshilov, who adopted the cod
ename of ‘The Master’ for Operation X, was eager to impress Stalin. He hoped, while sitting in his office in Moscow with a map of Spain, to control events on the ground thousands of kilometres away.19 Advisers, exasperated by his interference, started to refer to him ironically as ‘the great strategist’. Voroshilov started sending messages to Madrid telling the chief military adviser to ‘use his brains and display some will-power, so that the situation would start looking different’.20 He also threatened the most senior advisers that ‘if the aforementioned instruction is not implemented [on the concentration of forces to attack on the Madrid front], strict disciplinary measures will be taken against all of you.’21

  The trouble was that many of the advisers were so junior that they had as little experience of command as the Spanish officers they were supposed to advise. Colonel [later Marshal] R. Malinovsky (‘Malino’) wrote that advisers to some divisional commanders were ‘very good lieutenants, wonderful commanders of companies or squadrons, but, of course, were not ready to command a division–and how could one offer advice on something that one has no idea about?’22 Some advisers were extremely undiplomatic in the way they worked with republican officers and ‘rudely interfered in the operational orders given by the commanders’.23

  Soviet advisers, however, were soon complaining bitterly in their reports back to Moscow about the incompetence and inertia with which they had to deal. ‘Sometimes my hands itch to take some of these bastards out of their offices and stand them up against a wall,’ wrote General Berzin to Voroshilov. ‘Such unpunished, unbridled sabotage of necessary measures, such sloppiness and irresponsibility as reign here in the general staff and in the bureaucracy of the administration at the front, I could never have imagined before. People simply do not carry out the orders of the war ministry, or they do the opposite and calmly continue to stay where they are.’24