The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  No organization could match the intellectual mobilization for which the Communist Party aimed. In the 1930s the Communist Party succeeded in attracting to its cause many writers, particularly poets, who included Miguel Hernández and Rafael Alberti, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, Hugh MacDiarmid and Pablo Neruda. The most famous writer to support the Republic, and lend his weight to the campaign which the communists organized so effectively, was Ernest Hemingway. Nevertheless, the two sides to his character are of great interest when seen against the conflict of political forces within republican Spain. Hemingway was an individualist who believed in discipline for everybody else. He supported communist broadsides against the anarchists, but backed their methods only because he thought them necessary to win the war. ‘I like the communists when they’re soldiers,’ he remarked to a friend in 1938. ‘When they’re priests, I hate them.’ The communists did not realize, when they accorded him such special attention, that his deep and genuine hatred of fascism did not mean that he admired them out of any political conviction. Even so, the brutal way in which Hemingway informed Dos Passos of the communists’ secret execution of José Robles (Dos Passos’s great friend) ended their association. Hemingway found fault with Dos Passos for supporting the anarchists and for not being ‘regular enough in his attitude towards the commissars’.14

  It is difficult to ascertain how much Hemingway was influenced by the privileged information he received from senior party cadres and Soviet advisers. Being taken seriously by experts distorted his vision. It made him prepared to sign moral blank cheques on behalf of the Republic: hence his absurd statements that ‘Brihuega will take its place in military history with the other decisive battles of the world’, and that the Republic was ‘licking the rebels’, as if the fight were almost between Yankees and Southern slave owners. The American civil war haunts his major work, For Whom the Bell Tolls. This novel, written just after the Republic’s defeat, reveals both a lingering admiration for communist professionals and yet also the author’s own selfish libertarianism. Its hero, Robert Jordan, one of Hemingway’s self-images, asks, ‘Was there ever a people whose leaders were as truly their enemies as this one?’

  A number of other writers were to have their idealism undermined far more by the events they witnessed. Simone Weil, who supported the anarchists, was distressed by killings in eastern Spain. She was particularly affected when a fifteen-year-old Falangist prisoner from Pina was captured on the Aragón front and shot after Durruti spent an hour with the boy trying to persuade him to change his politics and giving him until the next day to decide. Stephen Spender, who wrote Poems from Spain, was shaken by the executions in the International Brigades and left the Communist Party soon afterwards. Auden, who had written an enthusiastic description of the social revolution at the end of 1936, returned from Spain, after hoping to serve with an ambulance unit, saying little and evidently disillusioned. He nevertheless wrote his long poem ‘Spain 1937’, with its famous line–‘But today the struggle’–in less than a month and donated the proceeds to Medical Aid for Spain. Yet Orwell’s subsequent criticism of the work helped turn him against his own creation.

  Not all writers were pro-republican. The nationalists had the support of Charles Maurras, Paul Claudel, Robert Brasillach, Henri Massis and Drieu La Rochelle, as well as the South African Roy Campbell, who wrote a 5,000-verse epic poem, violently racist, which was entitled Flowering Rifle. Evelyn Waugh, having said that he would support Franco if he were a Spaniard, then emphasized, ‘I am not a Fascist, nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice is imminent.’ Ezra Pound replied that ‘Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes’ and Hilaire Belloc, a supporter of the nationalists, had already described the struggle as ‘a trial of strength between Jewish Communism and our traditional Christian civilization’. Yet the majority of those questioned for Nancy Cunard’s ‘Writers Take Sides’ declared their opposition to Franco in varying forms. Samuel Beckett replied, ‘¡UPTHEREPUBLIC!’ In the United States, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck simply declared their hatred for fascism, while others qualified their position by supporting a particular faction on the republican side. Aldous Huxley specified his opposition to communism and sympathy for anarchism (which led Nancy Cunard, a fellow traveller, to mark him down as a neutral).15 Other supporters of the CNT-FAI included John Dos Passos, B. Traven and Herbert Read.

  While the Republic won the propaganda battle, greatly helped by Comintern efforts, the communists were winning the conflict on the left. The bolshevik coup in Russia had given them the unique position of ‘controlling the only beacon of revolutionary hope’ in the world. Bertrand Russell remarked that any resistance or objection ‘was condemned as treachery to the cause of the proletariat. Anarchist and syndicalist criticisms were forgotten or ignored, and by exalting State Socialism, it became possible to retain the faith that one great country had realized the aspirations of the pioneers.’16 The triangular nature of the civil war in Spain could, in fact, be said to echo the Kronstadt rising against the bolshevik dictatorship in 1921. Three years later, when Emma Goldman condemned the communist regime vehemently at a dinner of 250 left-wing intellectuals, held to welcome her to London, Bertrand Russell was the only person to support her. The rest sat in shocked and embarrassed silence. Yet even Russell wrote soon afterwards that he was ‘not prepared to advocate any alternative government in Russia’.

  The split between Spanish intellectuals was more complex. Many had gone into exile, appalled both by the nationalist right and the revolutionary left. On the whole, the best known and the majority of those who had stayed in Spain supported the Republic.17 Literary output during the war was very uneven, with some strong poems and mostly disappointing novels.18 The republicans devoted great efforts to popular culture through organizations such as the theatre section of the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas and the company ‘New Scene’, which had writers of the calibre of Rafael Alberti, José Bergamín and Ramón J. Sender preparing material for it.19 There were also the Militias’ Cultural Service, the ‘Front Loud-Speaker’, The ‘Guerrillas del Teatro’. Every sort of medium was used–books, pamphlets, press, radio, cinema and theatre.

  Behind the lines, political organizations and unions produced a wide range of newspapers. At the front, almost every army corps, division, brigade and sometimes even battalions, produced their own publication.20 But perhaps one of the most innovatory methods of propaganda was the use of posters, urging loyalty and confidence in victory as well as warning against spies and venereal disease. They were known as ‘soldiers of paper and ink’.21 Poster art, especially the Soviet example, had had a great influence in artistic circles even before the civil war. The Republic made use of the best poster designers in Spain, while the nationalists had comparatively few of any merit.22

  Both sides made all possible use of radio stations for information, recruiting and propaganda.23 The republicans, however, deployed the cinema with great effect. Right from the start of the war, cinemas screened a series of Soviet films. Chapaev, the heavily romanticized story of a red partisan hero of the Russian civil war, was shown the most. He urged the peasants to defend the revolution and died heroically at the end. In Spain, however, they often left out the last reel to bolster their audiences with the impression that Chapaev had survived.

  The other film which caught the imagination of the Spanish communists was The Sailors of Kronstadt, by Yefim Dzigan, which depicted the transformation of a group of anarchist sailors from the naval base of Kronstadt into a disciplined unit of the Red Army. Needless to say, anarchists who knew the truth about the bolshevik crushing of the Kronstadt uprising were less enthusiastic about the film. The Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein was also screened many times, as well as a number of other Soviet films. Documentaries made in Spain during the war were also shown. The Soviet film-makers Roman Karmen and Boris Makadeev made Madrid se defiende (Madrid defen
ds herself), Madrid en llamas (Madrid in Flames) and the full-length Ispaniia.

  The republican government subsidized newsreels and propaganda films, such as España Leal en Armas (Loyalist Spain under Arms), on which Luis Buñuel worked, and later when the Republic’s own film studios were set up, they made Madrid, directed by Manuel Villegas López; Viva la Repu

  ´blica; Los Trece Puntos de la Victoria (The Thirteen Points of Victory) and, most famous of all, André Malraux’s and Max Aub’s L’Espoir, which did not appear until after the war was over. Even the Generalitat set up its own organization, Laya Films, which produced weekly newsreels, España al día, and nearly thirty documentaries.24

  In the spring of 1937, when the republicans were at last starting to win the propaganda war, the International Exhibition of Arts took place in Paris. The Republic’s pavilion became famous with the display of Picasso’s Guernica, but also the work of many other great artists, including Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Luis Lacasa, Josep Lluís Sert, Horacio Ferrer and Antoni Bonet. The nationalist government put on its own exhibition, but it had to be under the Vatican flag. Its main work was an altarpiece painted by José María Sert, Intercesión de Santa Teresa por la guerra española.25

  The other great event was the International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture, which had sessions in Valencia and Madrid, and finished in Paris. This was entirely a communist front organization, with writers from Spain, the Soviet Union, France, Britain, the United States and South America, as well as exiles from the Axis countries.26 But the communist attempt to create a cultural as well as political hegemony on the left was not helped by events in Moscow.

  Less than a month after the start of the Spanish Civil War the first of the great show trials started. Anyone who criticized them was accused of being a crypto-fascist. Victor Serge, speaking against them in Paris, was heckled by a communist worker: ‘Traitor! Fascist! Nothing you can do will stop the Soviet Union from remaining the fatherland of the oppressed!’27 Apart from rare exceptions, like the poet André Breton, socialists dared not speak out because ‘the interests of the Popular Front demanded the humouring of the communists’. André Gide prepared a statement on the Soviet dictatorship, but when Ilya Ehrenburg heard of it he organized communist militiamen on the Madrid front to send telegrams begging him not to publish a ‘mortal blow’ against them. Gide was appalled: ‘What a flood of abuse I’m going to face! And there will be militiamen in Spain who believe that I am actually a traitor!’ In Spain the POUM’s La Batalla published critical accounts of the trials, thus greatly increasing the enmity the communists felt for their Marxist rivals. Even CNT leaders tried to prevent their press from attacking Stalin’s liquidations at a time when Soviet arms were so desperately needed. The blind, short-term reaction of Western governments and their weakness in the face of Hitler and Mussolini gave the Comintern an apparent monopoly of resistance to fascism.

  All this time, the Republic suffered from its dependence on Soviet supplies, which confirmed the fears and prejudices of the minority to whom nationalist propaganda was addressed. In December 1938 Churchill finally came round to the view that ‘the British Empire would run far less risk from the victory of the Spanish government than from that of General Franco’. And he said of Neville Chamberlain that ‘nothing has strengthened the Prime Minister’s hold upon well-to-do society more remarkably than the belief that he is friendly to General Franco and the nationalist cause in Spain’.28 This section of the population cannot have made up much more than 20 per cent of the total, yet it would appear that it had far more influence over British, and therefore Western, policy towards Spain than the large majority who supported the Republic. On this basis the communists’ role on behalf of the Republic probably helped the nationalists become the effective winners of the propaganda war. Appeasement and the Western boycott of the Republic had greatly strengthened the power of the Comintern, which was able to present itself as the only effective force to combat fascism.

  Another important lesson from the time was that mass self-deception is simply a sedative prescribed by leaders who cannot face reality themselves. And as the Spanish Civil War proved, the first casualty of war is not truth, but its source: the conscience and integrity of the individual.

  PART FIVE

  Internal Tensions

  22

  The Struggle for Power

  The failure of four attempts on Madrid in five months did not only strain Franco’s relations with his German and Italian allies. It also provoked rumblings of discontent within the nationalist coalition. The Carlists had not forgotten Franco’s strong reaction to their attempt to maintain the independence of their requeté formations. Meanwhile, Falangist ‘old shirts’ shared their dead leader’s fears that the army would annex them, even though they had grown from 30,000 to several hundred thousand members in a year.

  Franco kept himself well informed of developments within these two parties. He was not unduly worried, because the nationalist alliance required a single commander and he had no effective rival, either within the army or outside. The main Carlist leader, Fal Conde, was exiled in Portugal and the Count of Rodezno, who remained, was far more amenable. The continued suppression of any announcement of the execution of José Antonio Primo de Rivera at Alicante encouraged wishful rumours among the Falange that he was still alive. This prevented the appointment of a permanent replacement. The German ambassador, Faupel, repeated in a report to the Wilhelmstrasse the astute remark of an Italian attaché: ‘Franco is a leader without a party, the Falange a party without a leader.’1

  In addition, the Falange was still weakened by the potential split which came from the inherent contradiction in José Antonio’s philosophy: socialist aspirations had been swamped by reactionary nationalism. José Antonio could be quoted by the proletarian ‘old shirts’, led by the provincial chief, Manuel Hedilla, to show that the ‘socialist’ aspect of their movement was fundamental. At the same time the reactionary wing, which was growing more powerful than the ‘old shirts’, could point to other statements to show that recreating ‘traditional Spain’ was uppermost in the mind of José Antonio.

  It was the latter group, the modern reactionaries, who contacted the Carlists during the winter of 1936–7 for secret talks about an alliance, while the proletarian elements, led by Hedilla, opposed such a move. Sancho Dávila, a cousin of José Antonio, had been in touch with Fal Conde since before the rising and proposed a union of the two parties. Franco heard privately of these discussions, which took place in Lisbon on 16 February, and although they came to nothing, he saw that trouble was more likely to come from Falangist ranks than from the Carlists, who were disciplined fighters uninterested in political intrigue.

  Hedilla had been the Falangist chief in Santander and he was lucky to have been in Corunna when the rising began in the north, for his home town was held for the Republic. In Corunna he played an important role, both in bringing the well-armed Falange to help the rebels secure the town and in conducting the subsequent repression, which was among the worst in Spain. Yet this former mechanic soon became the most outspoken critic of indiscriminate nationalist killing on the grounds that it alienated the proletariat from their cause. On Christmas Eve 1936 he told the Falange not to persecute the poor simply for having voted for the left ‘out of hunger or despair. We all know that in many towns there were–and are–right-wingers who are worse than the reds.’

  Such statements made Hedilla and the left-wing Falangists highly suspect in the eyes of the Spanish right. Many senior army officers–only Yagüe was a committed left Falangist–saw them as little better than ‘reds’. A count in Salamanca even declared indignantly to Virginia Cowles that ‘half the fascists were nothing but reds’, and that in the north ‘many of them were giving the Popular Front salute and talking about their brothers in Barcelona’.2 On the other hand, the señorito wing of the Falange, which was strongest in Andalucia, was viewed much more favourably by other nationalists. This faction attrac
ted many from the professional middle class.

  During the winter of 1936, the German ambassador, had started to cultivate the admiration which the ‘old shirts’ held for the Nazis. It seems that Faupel was trying to curry favour at home, not acting on orders. He encouraged Hedilla to resist the middle-class takeover of the Falange and advised Franco that the nationalists could win the war only if they introduced social reform. Nevertheless, he wrote to the Wilhelmstrasse that if a clash occurred between Franco and the Falange ‘we are in agreement with the Italians that despite our sympathy for the Falange and its healthy tendencies, we must support Franco at all costs’. Franco tolerated his allies’ interference in military affairs because he had no choice, but he would not brook their involvement in the political future of Spain. He demanded von Faupel’s replacement, even though he had not been involved in any attempt to change the nationalist leadership.

  On the night of 16 April 1937, Hedilla’s followers attempted to seize the Falange headquarters in Salamanca in a move to oust the rightists led by Sancho Dávila. A gun battle broke out around the Plaza Mayor during which two Falangists were killed. The Civil Guard had to be sent in to restore order and arrests were made. Hedilla was fortunate to have stayed clear of the disturbance. On 18 April he arranged a meeting of the Falange council at which he was elected leader. He thought his triumph was complete when he went round to the bishop’s palace, where Franco resided, to announce his election and state that he was at his orders. Franco congratulated him, but the wily Caudillo, who had allowed the Falange’s internal strife to continue without interference, made his well-prepared move the next evening.3

  PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT II