The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  The republican government’s oversimplified case was that it had been elected legally in February 1936 and was then attacked by reactionary generals aided by the Axis dictatorships. Thus the Republic represented the cause of democracy, freedom and enlightenment against fascism. The Republic’s foreign propaganda emphasized that their government was the only legal and democratic one in Spain. This was of course true, when compared with the illegality and authoritarianism of their opponents, but liberal and left-of-centre politicians had hardly respected their own constitution at times. The rising of October 1934, in which Prieto and Largo Caballero had participated, greatly undermined their case against the rebels.

  The passionate supporters of the Republic refused to acknowledge that the left’s threat to extinguish the bourgeoisie and the pre-revolutionary situation which was developing in the spring of 1936 was bound to react to defend itself. The unspeakable horrors of the Russian civil war and the Soviet system of oppression that emerged–the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Largo Caballero had demanded–was a lesson unlikely to be forgotten. And once the war had started, the Republic’s democratic credentials began to look increasingly tattered when the Cortes was reduced to a symbolic body with no control over the government. Then, from the middle of 1937, the administration of Juan Negrín developed marked authoritarian tendencies. Criticism of the prime minister and the Communist Party virtually became an act of treason.

  Both sides had a very selective and manipulative view of history. In later years supporters of the Republic held that the Spanish conflict represented the start of the Second World War. The Franquists, on the other hand, said it was simply the prelude to a third world war between Western civilization and communism, and that any Nazi or fascist aid they received was incidental.

  The Republic’s need to convince the outside world of the justice of its cause was greatly increased by the effects of British foreign policy. In addition, the already strained political atmosphere of the 1930s and the internationalized aspect of the civil war made foreign opinion seem of paramount importance to the outcome. The Spanish workers and peasants believed, with innocent earnestness, that if the situation were explained abroad, Western governments must come to their aid against the Axis dictatorships. Foreign visitors were asked how it was possible that in a democracy like America, where the majority of the population supported the Republic (over 70 per cent according to opinion polls), the government refused it arms for self-defence. Republican leaders were much more aware of the reasons for the actions of Western governments, but even they were wrong in believing that the British and French governments would eventually be forced to accept that their interests lay in a strong anti-Axis policy before it was too late.

  Under such circumstances it was inevitable that journalists and famous writers should be courted by the Republic. There was a great deal of ground to be made up after the first reports of the ‘red massacres’, and the tide started to turn in the Republic’s favour only in November 1936 with the bombing of working-class areas and the San Carlos hospital during the battle for Madrid. Five months later the destruction of Guernica gave the Republic its greatest victory in the propaganda war, particularly since the Basques were conservative and Catholics. The non-interventionist policy of Western governments, however, remained unaffected.

  In July 1936 the Catholic press abroad sprang to the support of the Nationalist rising and castigated the anti-clericalism of the Republic, the desecration of churches and the killing of priests. The most sensational accusation was the raping of nuns, a similar fabrication dating back to the Middle Ages, when it was used to justify the slaughter of Jews. Two unsubstantiated incidents became the basis for a general campaign of astonishing virulence. The nationalists were on firmer ground when they condemned the murder of priests and they were supported by the Pope, who declared the priests to be martyrs.3

  On 1 July 1937 Cardinal Gomá issued an open letter to ‘the Bishops of the whole World’ calling for Church support of the nationalist cause, a letter in which he stated, somewhat defensively, that the war was ‘not a crusade, but a political and social war with repercussions of a religious nature’.4 Only Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer and Bishop Mateo Múgica failed to sign it. This was in contrast to the statement of the Archbishop of Valencia a month earlier that ‘the war has been called by the Sacred Heart of Jesus and this Adorable Heart has given power to the arms of Franco’s soldiers’. In addition, the Bishop of Segovia had said that the war was ‘a hundred times more important and holy than the Reconquista’ and the Bishop of Pamplona called it the ‘loftiest crusade that the centuries have ever seen…a crusade in which divine intervention on our side is evident’. Leaflets with photomontages of Christ flanked by Generals Mola and Franco were issued to nationalist troops.

  The political role of the Church was ignored when the religious victims were made into martyrs, although some Catholic writers abroad made the connexion. One was François Mauriac, who turned against the right-wing cause after a nationalist officer told him, ‘Medicine is in short supply and costly. Do you honestly think that we’d waste it for no purpose?…We have got to kill them in the end, so there is no point in curing them.’5 ‘For millions of Spaniards,’ Mauriac wrote to Ramon Serrano Súñer derided him as ‘a converted Jew’. The publication in 1938 of Georges Bernanos’s book, Les Grandes Cimetie`res sous la Lune, which described the nationalist terror on Majorca, greatly strengthened the liberal Catholic reaction against the Church’s official support for Franco.

  In the United States, the Catholic lobby was very powerful. Luis Bolíñer (Franco’s brother-in-law and main political adviser), ‘Christianity and fascism have become intermingled, and they cannot hate one without hating the other.’ Mauriac defended his fellow Catholic writer, Jacques Maritain, when the pro-Nazi Serrano Su ´n recounted that a young Irishwoman, Aileen O’Brien, ‘spoke on the telephone to every Catholic bishop in the United States and begged them to request their parish priests to ask all members of their congregations to telegraph in protest to President Roosevelt’.6 As a result of her efforts, Bolín claimed, more than a million telegrams were received at the White House and a shipment of munitions for the Republic was stopped. The power of the pro-nationalist lobby was best demonstrated in May 1938. A group led by the ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy, managed to frighten Congressmen who depended on the Catholic vote into opposing the repeal of the arms embargo. They did so even though no more than 20 per cent of the country and 40 per cent of Catholics supported the nationalists.

  Nevertheless, in 1937 the nationalists sensed that they had started to lose the battle for international public opinion. Several factors operated against them. First, there was a fundamental difference of attitude between the opposing military commands in their dealings with the press. The nationalists often regarded journalists as potential spies and allowed them little freedom of movement, especially when they might witness a mopping-up episode. As a result their correspondents could not compete in the ‘din of battle’ personal accounts so beloved by the profession. Also, not all the nationalist press officers were as articulate and urbane as Luis Bolín. One of his successors was Gonzalo de Aguilera, Count de Alba y Yeltes, a landowner from Salamanca, who drove around nationalist Spain in a yellow Mercedes with two repeating rifles in the back. He proudly announced to an English visitor that ‘on the day the civil war broke out, he lined up the labourers on his estate, selected six of them and shot them in front of the others–“pour encourager les autres, you understand”.’7

  Foreign journalists allowed to enter nationalist Spain soon discovered to their amazement that a hysterical relationship with the truth existed there. Anyone who doubted an invention of nationalist propaganda, however preposterous, was suspected of being a secret ‘red’. The American journalist Virginia Cowles, who had just been in republican Spain, discovered in Salamanca that people were eager to ask how things were in Madrid, but refused to believe anything which did not accord with
their own grotesque imaginings. The degree of political self-hypnosis she encountered was so strong that ‘it was almost a mental disease’. When she told her questioners that bodies were not piled in the gutters and left to rot, as they had been told, and that militiamen had not been feeding right-wing prisoners to the animals in the zoo, they instantly assumed that she must be a ‘red’ herself. Pablo Merry del Val, the chief of Franco’s press service, admiring the gold bracelet that she was wearing, said with a smile, ‘I don’t imagine that you took that to Madrid with you.’ Cowles replied that in fact she had bought it there. Merry del Val was ‘deeply affronted’ and never spoke to her again.8

  A modern public relations officer would blanch at some of the extraordinary speeches of General Millán Astray, the founder of the Foreign Legion, who had been so mutilated in the colonial wars. ‘The gallant Moors,’ he once proclaimed, ‘although they wrecked my body only yesterday, today deserve the gratitude of my soul, for they are fighting for Spain against the Spaniards…I mean the bad Spaniards…because they are giving their lives in defence of Spain’s sacred religion, as is proved by their attending field mass, escorting the Caudillo, and pinning holy medallions and sacred hearts to their burnooses.’9 Franco, of course, avoided such indelicate contradictions when he spoke of ‘the Crusade’.

  One technical factor undoubtedly told against the nationalist version of events for much of the war. The overseas cable heads were in republican territory, so that journalists in that zone usually had their copy printed first. Accounts from nationalist Spain were, therefore, often out of date. Nevertheless, the nationalists had won the first round for several reasons. There were very few journalists representing foreign newspapers on its territory during the first days of rearguard slaughter, while Barcelona and Madrid had attracted vast numbers, so that the initial killings on republican territory were reported the most rapidly. The other key point for the early reports was Gibraltar, where many upper-class refugees were arriving, especially from Málaga.

  On 21 August 1936 the New York Herald Tribune reporter Robert Neville wrote, ‘In Gibraltar I found to my surprise that most of the newspapermen had been sending only “horror” stories. They do not seem to be awake to the terrible international implications in this situation.’ Sensational accounts sold newspapers, but the initial ‘white terror’ just to the north in Andalucia was reported only by one or two correspondents, one of them Bertrand de Jouvenal of Paris Soir. This can be explained in part by the fact that most journalists were incapable of understanding the peasants who had fled from the Army of Africa, whereas middle-and upper-class Spaniards were more likely to speak a foreign language. However, journalistic or editorial bias could work both ways.

  The battle lines of the war in Spain were rapidly taken up in France, Great Britain and the United States. A foretaste of the propaganda struggle came in Great Britain just before the rising, when reports appeared claiming that Calvo Sotelo’s eyes had been dug out with daggers, a story to which even Spanish right-wing papers had not given credence. The Republic was supported by the News Chronicle and the Manchester Guardian. The Times and Telegraph remained more or less neutral, while the rest supported the nationalists. Immediate sympathizers with the rising were the Observer, whose editor, Garvin, was an admirer of Mussolini, and the Northcliffe press, which had backed Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Its Daily Mail correspondent, Harold Cardozo, was accordingly accredited to the nationalist forces.

  The practice of a newspaper sending a reporter to the side it supported became customary. In fact, Kim Philby, already a secret communist, developed a conservative image as The Times correspondent with the nationalists. An exception in the early days was another secret communist agent, the writer Arthur Koestler. Although representing the left-wing News Chronicle, he started with the nationalists in Seville, but had to escape when seen by a German journalist called Strindberg, who knew he was a communist. Luis Bolín, the nationalist press officer, was too late to arrest him as a spy. Koestler returned to republican territory, but Bolín caught up with him at the fall of Málaga, and only pressure from the British and American press saved him from execution.10

  In the majority of cases the correspondent reflected, or adapted himself to, the political stance of his paper. As a result, Richard Ford’s comment of 1846 was equally true 90 years later: ‘The public at home are much pleased by the perusal of “authentic” accounts from Spain itself which tally with their own preconceived ideas of the land.’ At the beginning of the war correspondents were rushed to Spain, regardless of whether they spoke the language or understood the country’s politics. But then even a respected expert like Professor Allison-Peers was unable to differentiate the parties of the left accurately and attributed the peasant troubles in Andalucia to agitators who were profiting from improved communications. The ideas that Latin people had ‘violence in the blood’ and that military dictatorships were natural to them were reflected in the shorthand of headlines. As always, the pressure of space and journalistic simplification to make accounts easy to digest were bound to distort the issues.

  Newspapermen were as much affected by the emotions of the time as anybody else. Many became resolute, and often uncritical, champions of the Republic after experiencing the siege of Madrid. Their commitment affected their coverage of later issues, such as the Communist Party’s manoeuvring for control. The ideals of the anti-fascist cause anaesthetized many of them to aspects of the war that proved uncomfortable. It was a difficult atmosphere in which to retain objectivity. In the United States, the Republic was supported by Herbert Matthews and Lawrence Fernsworth of the New York Times, by Jay Allen and John Whitaker of the Chicago Tribune.

  There were also various types of censorship and pressure, which affected the accounts printed at home. These ranged from propaganda-orientated briefings from government press officers and republican censorship through to the political or commercial prejudices of the editor. At the end of the war Herbert Matthews of the New York Times was told by his editor not to ‘send in any sentimental stuff about the refugee camps’. In 1937 Dawson, the editor of The Times, blocked some of Steer’s accounts from the Basque country because he did not want to upset the Germans. On 3 May, a week after Steer’s report on Guernica, he wrote that he had ‘done the impossible night after night to keep the paper from hurting their susceptibilities’.11 The most famous dispute was the one between Louis Delaprée and his editor on the right-wing Paris Soir. Shortly before his death (he was flying back to France when his plane was shot down), Delaprée complained that his reports were suppressed. He finished his last despatch by observing bitterly that ‘the massacre of a hundred Spanish children is less interesting than a sigh from Mrs Simpson’.

  Republican propaganda was often little different from its nationalist counterpart.12 Both sides seized upon isolated incidents to make general points. The republicans spread horror stories of Moorish regulares chopping off the hands of children who clenched their fists, in case they were making the left-wing salute. They also recounted secular miracles, like the nationalist bombs which did not go off because they contained messages of solidarity from foreign workers instead of explosive. There were undoubtedly cases of sabotage by munitions workers, but the exaggeration of republican propaganda developed such addiction to misplaced hope that it became a major liability. Colonel Casado argued with justification that it was a major contribution to the republican defeat. Once the government had excited wild optimism over an offensive, it became virtually impossible to admit failure and this led to the loss of vast quantities of men and matériel in the defence of useless gains.

  The major problem of the republican government was the need to provide two incompatible versions of events simultaneously. The account for external consumption was designed to convince the French, British and United States governments that the Republic was a liberal property-owning democracy, while domestic communiqués tried to persuade the workers that they were still defending a social revolution. Censo
rship came under A

  ´ lvarez del Vayo’s control. The aide responsible for English-speaking journalists stated that he ‘was instructed not to send out one word about this revolution in the economic system of loyalist Spain, nor are any correspondents in Valencia permitted to write freely of the revolution that has taken place’.13

  The Spanish Civil War engaged the commitment of artists and intellectuals on an unprecedented scale, the overwhelming majority of them on the side of the Republic. The conflict had the fascination of an epic drama involving the basic forces of humanity. Yet they did not just adopt the role of passionate observers. The slaughter of the First World War had undermined the moral basis of art’s detachment from politics and made ‘art for art’s sake’ seem a privileged impertinence. Socialist realism took this to its logical extreme by subordinating all forms of expression to the cause of the proletariat. The support given by intellectuals to the republican cause was usually moral rather than practical, although a few writers, including André Malraux, George Orwell and John Cornford, fought, and others like Hemingway, John Dos Passos, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, Herbert Read, Georges Bernanos, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard spent varying amounts of time in Spain. Malraux’s novel, L’Espoir, was regarded by many as the great novel of the Spanish Republic’s resistance, but it would not be long before this great political opportunist became a ferocious anti-communist.