The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  The other development which went ahead rapidly was the practice of attaching commissars to every brigade and battalion headquarters. The commissars’ official role was to watch over regular commanders and look after the welfare of the troops. However, Álvarez del Vayo, the foreign minister and secret communist supporter, persuaded Largo Caballero to make him commissar-general and with his assistance the communists managed to take control of this powerful branch. By the spring, 125 out of 168 battalion commissars were from the Party itself (PCE and PSUC) or from the Joint Socialist Youth.

  The Generalitat in Catalonia followed the policy of the central government, but at the same time it tried to establish the eastern forces as an independent Catalan army. This was an ambitious policy, intensely disliked by the central government. The communists refrained from criticizing the Generalitat, since their policy was to aid Companys, the Catalan president, to assert state power at the expense of the anarchists. Once that was close to being achieved, they would use their Catalan PSUC to help bring the Generalitat under central government control. On 6 December, the Diari Oficial de la Generalitat published the decree creating the Exe`rcit Nacional de Catalunya, an army composed of three divisions instead of mixed brigades. But in February 1937, when the Generalitat called up the classes of 1934 and 1935, it also had to place its army under the control of the central general staff.21

  In Euzkadi, meanwhile, Aguirre’s Basque government organized its own independent army, the Eusko Gudarostea, with 25,000 men, nominally forming part of the Army of the North. War industries were militarized and work started on constructing the ‘iron ring’ of Bilbao, a defence line to defend their capital.22

  The only offensive in the north was General Llano de la Encomienda’s push southwards in the mountains towards Villareal in early December. The Basques and their ill-assorted allies had virtually no air support and only a few field guns hauled by oxen. But morale was high. Pierre Bocheau, a French communist volunteer with the Larrañaga Battalion, recorded his impressions. His unit, an international detachment, was named after Jesús Larrañaga, the Basque communist deputy and chief commissar of the army. ‘Friday, a grey, rainy morning, we have assembled in the courtyard of the barracks and we are filling our ammunition pouches, checking our machine-guns, revolvers and rifles. Suddenly one of us, almost a boy, starts singing a song…We cross Bilbao. At the railway station are the sisters, fiancées and mothers of our Spanish comrades. Some of them are crying. And we Italians, French and Bulgarians from the international detachment are thinking about our mothers, fiancées and sisters who are not here. Spanish women surround me. They offer me bread and oranges. They say with much tenderness in their voices: “Muchacho! Your family is not here to kiss you goodbye.”

  ‘In the train, one of my comrades–Piero, I think–spoke of death with much indifference. “To die is nothing. The main thing is to win.”…We begin to sing the ‘Carmagnole’. Then, we sang in Spanish ‘The Young Guards’. It seemed to me for a minute that we are immortal. That not one of us is going to die, even if a bullet strikes the head or the heart.

  ‘Elorrio. The train stops. Night. We call to each other while lining up in companies. It’s pouring with rain. Our battalion of workers and peasants is marching forward between the black, silent fences of the village.

  ‘Tuesday. “Comrades! Get up!” It is two in the morning and the night is dark. The company is ready to fight in two minutes. In fact, all we had to do was to put on our boots. Dudul said suddenly, “And actually when you are going into battle, your heart really does beat fast.”

  ‘Bullets are hitting the branches of the trees. Bullets are flying past our ears. Bullets hit the ground round our feet. A whisper is heard. “Comrades, we’re going to advance now.” Then, a loud cry: ‘Adelante!’ We move forward, knee deep in mud. We move forward through a curtain of bullets. My body is shaking and I am not a coward. It is flapping around like a pennant in the wind. I have to take my own body by the shoulders and push it forward…

  ‘It is so heavy to carry a wounded man. The wounded men seem so heavy when you have been on your feet from dawn till dusk. At times, we stumbled into shell holes, tripped and dropped the man we were carrying. Every moan broke our hearts. I collapsed when we reached the wood where the French battalion was fighting. That’s all I remember.’23

  The conduct of the war on the Aragón front, particularly the lack of action, soon became a major cause of tension between the anarchists and the communists. It is true that once the possibility of recapturing the key towns of Saragossa, Teruel and Huesca had diminished, lethargy seemed to descend on the Catalonian militias. Nevertheless, the communist charges (such as the football matches with the enemy, which Hemingway accepted as gospel) were often inaccurate and misleading. The Communists made sure that none of the new equipment went to the Aragón front, certainly no aircraft or tanks, which were reserved for their own troops and were, therefore, concentrated around Madrid. Some of the best Catalonian troops were helping on the Madrid front, and many of those left behind were armed only with shotguns. Under such conditions it was unrealistic to expect conventional offensives to be mounted, particularly since XIII International Brigade failed in seven attacks on Teruel.

  Even so, anarchist inactivity in a region which they had promised to turn into ‘the Spanish Ukraine’ was remarkable. Nothing was done by the CNT-FAI leadership to organize guerrilla groups and prosecute a Makhnovista-style campaign, which would have avoided the military conventions which they detested. It is surprising that a man such as García Oliver, who was energetic and imaginative, did not realize that extending enemy forces over wide areas through a vigorous guerrilla campaign would be far less costly in human lives than the slaughter into which they were being inexorably drawn. The nationalists did not have the troops to fight both an anti-guerrilla campaign in their rear areas and a conventional war at the front. There were, it is true, many guerrilla groups behind nationalist lines. But, as will be seen later, a considerable proportion of them were simply refugees from the nationalist execution squads trying to survive. Nevertheless, there was active resistance in Galicia, León, Estremadura and Andalucia, where an irregular brigade under the Granadine cabinetmaker Maroto operated.

  The GRU and especially the NKVD carried out ‘active work’ in Spain. This meant that apart from purely intelligence missions, they conducted sabotage work in the rear areas of the nationalists. ‘Orlov’, the NKVD chief in Spain, was in overall charge, but Kh. U. Mamsourov, under the name of Colonel Xanthé, worked in Spain from August 1936 to October 1937 guiding all partisan activities there. He set up aktivki, small sabotage groups who crossed the lines for a mission. Mamsourov, who was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, later claimed when a colonel-general, that he was the person on whom Hemingway based his hero, Robert Jordan, in For Whom the Bell Tolls.24 Mamsourov was replaced by Naum Eitingon, still one of the great heroes of Soviet foreign intelligence who had been an expert in ‘wet operations’: it was he who organized the assassination of Trotsky. In his letter to Largo Caballero in December 1936 Stalin also advocated the formation of detachments behind enemy lines.

  Later on, Orlov claimed to have trained 1,600 guerrillas in his schools and put 14,000 ‘regulars’ in the field, but the latter figure is probably a gross exaggeration.

  The conversion of militia forces into the People’s Army was known as ‘militarization’ and it was not a smooth process. Those anarchists, poumistas and left socialists, who defended the militia system on the basis of principle, obstinately refused to see that it could not answer the needs of the situation. They also drew false parallels with the French and Russian revolutions.25 A ‘military machine’ can be defeated only by a better machine or by the sabotage tactics of irregular warfare. The militia fell between the two roles. Their improvisation had been a revolutionary necessity, not a military virtue, and as a force to resist a relatively sophisticated enemy they were utterly obsolete.

  The theory used to justify the militia sy
stem depended almost entirely on morale, which is only one part in the military mix, and the most vulnerable of all. There were too many anarchists who allowed morale to serve as a substitute for practicality, who did not replace the discipline they rejected with self-discipline and who sometimes let their beliefs degenerate into an ideological justification of inefficiency. But there were others, like Cipriano Mera, who realized that they were now committed to a course of action, which they had to pursue even if it conflicted with their ideals. More and more anarchists came to accept this during the autumn and winter of 1936. They were alarmed by the increase in communist power, but they knew that the war against the nationalists was a war of survival.

  There were two main stumbling blocks in the process of militarization. One was the principle of ‘unified command’, which worried the anarchists and the POUM because they feared the communists, even though they came to recognize its necessity in conventional war. The other was the imposition of traditional military discipline. The POUM wanted soldiers’ councils like those formed in the Russian revolution, an idea which horrified the communists, while the anarchists were split among themselves. Mera emphasized on several occasions that the instinct of self-preservation had proved itself too strong to be controlled solely by individual will-power in the unnatural atmosphere of the ‘noise of artillery, the rattle of machine-guns, and the whistle of bombs’.26

  The anarchists’ beliefs usually made them extremely reluctant to accept any form of command position, which of course made them vulnerable. (This was not new; in 1917 Trotsky became head of the Petrograd Soviet when Voline refused the post on the grounds of anarchist principle.) The conflicts between the anarchists and the military hierarchy were solved by a series of compromises. Saluting, the formal term of address and officers from outside were rejected by the anarchists, and delegates they had already elected were confirmed with the equivalent rank. (As only regular officers could become colonels, militia column commanders remained majors.) The problem over pay differentials was usually solved by officers contributing everything they earned above a militiaman’s wage to the CNT war fund.

  It was not only the militias who were forced to alter their attitudes in the winter of 1936. In less than six months an attempted coup d’état had turned, first into a full-scale civil war and then into a world war by proxy. On 31 December 1936 nationalist artillery opposite Madrid rang in the new year by firing twelve shells into the centre of Madrid on the stroke of midnight. Ten of them hit the Telefónica. The Caudillo was said to have been angered by this unprofessional levity. Nevertheless, even such a career-minded general as Franco could not have liked the words of Captain von Goss of the Condor Legion: ‘No longer in the spring of 1937 could one talk merely of the Spanish war. It had become a real war.’27

  19

  The Battles of the Jarama and Guadalajara

  After the bloody shock of the Corunna road had ended in a stalemate, Franco began to prepare a new operation against Madrid. He refused to abandon the idea of taking the capital before spring, but although his strategy of a pincer attack to the east of Madrid was sound, he did not follow it through.

  During the second half of January 1937, the front ran southwards from Madrid along the line of the road to Aranjuez. The new offensive was planned in the centre of this sector, thrusting north-eastwards across the River Jarama to cut the Valencia road. This was to be accompanied by an attack of the Italian Corpo di Truppe Volontarie under Roatta, which would strike down towards Guadalajara from the northern part of the nationalist zone. The pincers were planned to join round Alcalá de Henares, thus cutting off Madrid completely. But these two assaults did not coincide because the bad weather in January had delayed the redeployment of Italian troops after the Málaga campaign. There was little chance that they could be in position by the first week of February, yet Franco decided to launch the Jarama offensive without waiting for his Italian allies. The weather was indeed a problem. ‘Raining, raining, raining,’ wrote Richthofen in his diary at the end of January. ‘Airfields are completely sodden. Ice and mist!’1

  Franco was slow in appreciating how the war had changed in the last few months and that his best troops could not put the republican forces to flight as they had done in the previous autumn. It was no longer a war of rapid manoeuvre, but of head-on slogging, and as a result the advantage of his troops’ fieldcraft and tactical skill was greatly reduced. Even the increase in air and artillery support was not enough to ensure victory, especially since the Russian Mosca made the Heinkel 51 obsolete. Delivery of the new Messerschmitt 109 to the Condor Legion was accelerated, but the first models did not arrive until March. In any case, the republican forces were already better prepared to survive air or artillery bombardment.

  Although General Mola had supreme command, General Orgaz was in charge of the front. Once again Varela was the field commander. He had five brigades of six battalions each, with a further eleven battalions in reserve, totalling some 25,000 men. They were backed by two German heavy machine-gun battalions, von Thoma’s tanks, six batteries of 155mm artillery, and the 88mm guns of the Condor Legion, which were to be battle tested for the first time. Colonel García Escámez commanded the brigade on the right flank by Ciempozuelos near Aranjuez. Colonel Rada was on the left or northern flank, which was bounded by the River Manzanares as it flows eastwards to join the Jarama. In the centre were the brigades of Asensio, Barrón and Sáenz de Buruaga with an axis of advance towards Arganda. The majority of the troops were Moroccan regulares and legionnaires. Rada also had a Carlist regiment and Barrón ten squadrons of cavalry.

  The republican general staff, too, were planning an offensive in this sector, but jealousies between General Miaja in Madrid and General Pozas commanding the Army of the Centre had held it up. Even so, the Republic mustered some 50 battalions in the area, making the opposing infantry forces roughly level.

  When the rain finally eased on 5 February, Mola gave the order for the attack to begin the next morning. On the left Rada’s force assaulted La Marañosa, a hill almost 700 metres high, which was defended ferociously by two republican battalions. Five kilometres to the south, Sáenz de Buruaga’s brigade took the hamlet of Gózquez de Abajo, only one kilometre short of the River Jarama. Asensio’s brigade thrust eastwards from Valdemoro and overran San Martín de la Vega, while García Escámez’s force captured Ciempozuelos after heavy fighting in which the defending 18th Brigade lost 1,300 men. By the morning of 8 February the nationalists controlled most of the west bank of the Jarama. On the following day Rada’s men occupied the high ground in the loop formed by the confluence of the Manzanares and the Jarama opposite Vaciamadrid. Varela’s strategy was correct in allocating the Rada and García Escámez brigades to secure his flanks, but the remaining three columns in the centre proved too small a force to ensure a breakthrough.

  The republicans had no idea where the next attack was going to take place, so they decided to reinforce the Madrid road and right bank of the Manzanares. The nationalist offensive was held up for the next two days because heavy rain had made the Jarama unfordable. On 11 February at first light, Moroccan troops from Barrón’s brigade, using their large triangular knives, killed the French sentries of the André Marty Battalion (XIV International Brigade) who were guarding the Pindoque railway bridge between Vaciamadrid and San Martín de la Vega.2 The bridge had been prepared for demolition and the charges were detonated just after its capture, but the metal construction, which was similar to a Bailey bridge, went up in the air a few feet and came down to rest again.

  Barrón’s brigade, followed by Sáenz de Buruaga’s troops, crossed rapidly, but they were then held up for some time by heavy fire from the Garibaldi Battalion from XII International Brigade on higher ground. Later in the day 25 T-26s counter-attacked twice, but each time they were driven back by the nationalist 155mm batteries on La Marañosa. Downstream, Asensio’s regulares captured the bridge at San Martínde La Vega in a similar attack at dawn the next morning, despite V
arela’s order to wait until the other bridgehead was established. His brigade then swung south-east towards the high ground at Pingarrón, which like other key features in the area had not been prepared for defence.

  General Pozas, the republican commander of the Army of the Centre, had immediately hurried to Arganda to organize a counter-attack. Matters were not helped by his squabble with Miaja, whose chief of staff, Colonel Casado, described their differences as ‘fundamentally childish’. Miaja refused to send the five brigades he had available to join the battle unless he was given command of the front. He had his way, but by then the nationalists were across the river in strength, despite air attacks against the two crossing points, in which the Chato fighter squadrons suffered heavy losses from the Condor Legion’s 88mm guns.

  During the night of 11 February the newly formed XV International Brigade arrived under the command of General ‘Gal’ (Janos Galicz). His chief of staff was Major George Nathan, widely regarded as one of the most competent officers in the International Brigades. The British battalion was on the left, under the command of Tom Wintringham, the Franco-Belgian ‘6th of February’ Battalion in the centre and the ‘Dimitrov’ on the right. The brigade advanced through the sodden olive groves under heavy enemy fire, which allowed them no respite.3 Gal’s orders were to attack the troops of Sáenz de Buruaga on the San Martín–Morata road. The American battalion was being hurried through induction at Albacete to be ready to reinforce them.

  The next day Asensio’s troops captured the commanding feature of Pingarrón, while to the north XI International Brigade and the 17th Brigade just held on at Pajares. The British battalion bore the brunt of the attack on the south of the road. They lost over half their men in capturing, then defending, ‘Suicide Hill’ with their Maxim machine-guns until they ran out of ammunition.4 The French ‘6th of February’ Battalion on their right was forced back. The British received no warning of what had happened and their machine-gun company was captured by a group of regulares from their exposed side. They claim to have been surprised when a group of nationalist troops came up singing the ‘Internationale’.5