The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  The end of the war in the north meant that the nationalist Mediterranean fleet was reinforced by units from the Cantabrian coast, including the cruiser Almirante Cervera and two seaplane squadrons of Heinkel 60s. One of these went to Palma de Mallorca, where Admiral Francisco de Moreno had set up his joint-staff headquarters with the Italian navy and air force. Palma was used as the principal Italian bomber base for attacks on shipping and republican coastal cities, chiefly Barcelona and Valencia. The Italians dominated the partnership and the island was almost entirely under their occupation. It had been their private fief ever since the early days of the war, when a Bluebeard-like Italian fascist calling himself the Conte Rossi terrorized the island.40

  It was against this formidable control of the western Mediterranean that the republican navy took everyone by surprise in March. How large a part luck played in their success is difficult to estimate. A flotilla of torpedo boats, backed by two cruisers, the Libertad and the Méndez Nuúñez, and nine destroyers left Cartagena on 5 March to strike at the nationalist fleet in Palma de Mallorca. Meanwhile, a nationalist squadron escorting a convoy from Palma was heading in their direction. It comprised three cruisers, the Baleares, Canarias and Almirante Cervera, three destroyers and two minelayers. The two forces made contact just before 1 a.m. on 6 March. Three of the republican destroyers sighted the Baleares, the flagship, and fired salvos of torpedoes. The nationalist cruiser sank rapidly; Admiral Vierna was among the 726 men lost. Although this was the largest battle at sea, it did not have important results because the nationalists soon refitted the old cruiser República and renamed her the Navarra. Their navy was much more cautious as a result of this action, but its control of the coast was not affected. And only a few days later Heinkel bombing raids on Cartagena crippled the Republic’s only capital ship, the Jaime I.

  News of the loss of the Baleares reached the nationalist Army of Manoeuvre just as it was about to launch the most devastating offensive yet seen in the war. It is not certain whether Franco decided after Teruel to give up short cuts to victory once again, and continue with the strategy of dismantling key regions, or whether he was persuaded to take advantage of the weakness of the People’s Army before it could recover from the effects of the winter battle. The opportunity of dealing the enemy’s most experienced formations a further severe blow, while at the same time separating Catalonia, the main source of republican manpower and industry, from the rest of the zone, was obviously attractive. This could then be followed by the reduction of Catalonia and the severing of the Republic from France. Without Catalan industry and supplies from abroad, the central region would fall in a short space of time. It was a less spectacular strategy than a breakthrough to Madrid, but it was more certain of success.

  The nationalists began this campaign with a major advantage. They had redeployed their formations far more rapidly than the republican general staff thought possible. Although warned of the threat by spies, the republican commanders somehow convinced themselves that the Guadalajara front was still the nationalists’ target. They assumed, also, that the enemy’s troops must be as exhausted after Teruel as their own. Within two weeks of the recapture of Teruel, General Dávila’s chief of staff, General Vigón, had finalized his plans. The Army of Manoeuvre positioned itself behind the start line, which consisted of the southern half of the central Aragón sector. Starting on the left flank, which was marked by the south bank of the Ebro, there were Yagüe’s Moroccan Corps, the 5th Navarrese Division and the 1st Cavalry Division, the Italian CTV and Aranda’s Galician Corps. Three other corps were deployed, those of Castille, Aragón and Navarre. Altogether, Dávila had 27 divisions, comprising 150,000 men, backed by nearly 700 guns and some 600 aircraft.

  On 9 March the nationalist campaign opened with a massive ground and air bombardment. By the time the nationalist infantry reached the republican trenches, their occupants were hardly in a state to hold a rifle. The superiority of nationalist artillery, to say nothing of the Condor Legion, the Aviazione Legionaria and the Brigada Aerea Hispana, left the republicans at a total disadvantage. This campaign saw the Junkers 87, the Stuka dive-bomber, in action for the first time. Luftwaffe officers in Spain claimed that it could drop its load within five metres of a target.

  Those republican defenders who endured such bombardments then had to face von Thoma’s tanks, which were used with great effectiveness: ‘the real blitzkrieg’.41 Nationalist infantry casualties were the lowest of any major offensive during the war. In fact, after many of the bombardments the Foreign Legion had little to do except bayonet the shocked survivors in their trenches. General Walter once again blamed the disaster on ‘the immense and intensive activity and work of defeatist elements and agents of the fifth column within republican units…Those were the days when the most stinking, fetid, treacherous activity by all the bastards of all shades and colours flourished the most.’42 Another report to Moscow, however, admitted that ‘we thought [that the nationalist attack] was only a feint and stubbornly continued to expect a general battle at Guadalajara’.43 This, needless to say, was a rather more accurate appreciation of the situation.

  On the first day of the offensive Yagüe’s Moroccan Corps, supported by tanks, smashed through the 44th Division and advanced 36 kilometres along the south side of the Ebro. Belchite, still in ruins, fell to the Carlist requetés of the second wave on the next day, 10 March. Yagüe, meanwhile, maintained the momentum of his attack. Any defensive line which the republicans patched together crumbled almost as soon as it was formed. The same day the Condor Legion sent all its Heinkel 111s, Dornier 17s and Heinkel 51s to attack republican airfields. They apparently inflicted with ‘astonishing effect severe damage to the enemy air force on the ground’. The next day the 5th Division’s rapid advance from Belchite was assisted with German tanks from the Gruppe Droehne and Condor Legion 88mm guns.44 Without worrying about threats to his flanks, Yagu ¨e pushed forward to Caspe.

  After Teruel the republican forces were exhausted and badly equipped (many of them had still not received proper ammunition resupply), while the fresh troops in the front line were inexperienced conscripts. The retreat was more a rout than a withdrawal. ‘A large part of the army, which survived the fascist offensive,’ wrote Stepánov, ‘the overwhelming majority of whom were officers and commanders, were confounded and seized by panic, lost their heads and fled to the rear.’45

  One or two brave stands were made, but demoralization quickly set in, as the republicans saw that they were incapable of resisting the nationalist onslaught either on the ground or from the air. The situation was made worse by the increase of anti-communist feeling after Teruel. Almost any story of communist perfidy was believed. Non-communist units thought that their ammunition supplies were being cut off deliberately. These suspicions stemmed from isolated incidents. During the battle of Teruel, for example, part of the 25th Division was refused replacement weapons and ammunition when one of their senior officers refused to join the Communist Party. There were also bitter arguments among field commanders and staff, particularly the communist officers, many of which dated from Teruel. Líster had refused to obey Rojo; El Campesino claimed that Modesto had deliberately left his division to be cut off during the withdrawal;46 and Modesto and Líster still hated each other, as they had done ever since the loss of the BT-5 tanks at Fuentes de Ebro.

  During the chaos which ensued from the Aragón debâcle, the mutual recriminations involved both Marty and Líster, who each tried to justify his behaviour by accusing the other of treason and carrying out arbitrary executions. Leaders of the Spanish Communist Party demanded that several International Brigade commanders, including Walter and C

  ? opi$$$, should be dismissed for their failures.

  In the first ten days of the Aragón offensive the nationalists took the centre-right of the front to depths varying from 50 to 100 kilometres. On 22 March they began their assault on the sector from the Ebro up to Huesca. Moscardó’s Corps and Solchaga’s Carlist divisions pus
hed down south-eastwards, while Yagüe crossed the Ebro to take the retreating republicans in their rear left flank. With the whole of central Aragón now captured the advance to the sea was launched at the end of March.

  On 14 March advance units of the Italian CTV entered Alcañiz, which eleven days before had been smashed by fourteen Savoia-Marchettis dropping 10,000 kilos of bombs, killing 200 people. The nationalist Heraldo de Aragón announced that the town had been ‘set on fire by the reds before fleeing’. The Aviazione Legionaria now had its own Guernica.47 The nationalists halted briefly on 22 March to regroup. Its next action was to be to the north of the Ebro towards Lérida. Moscardó’s Aragón Corps, and Solchaga’s Navarrese divisions continued to push to the south-east and took Barbastro and Monzón, while Yagüe, having crossed the Ebro near Quinto on 23 March, chased the republicans withdrawing on his left flank. The same day the nationalist command ordered the bombing of Lérida to prepare for their attack.

  For the republicans it was a retreat which slowed only when the enemy paused to rest. The withdrawal of a flank formation set off a panic; in the confusion nobody seemed to warn his neighbouring unit. Rations and ammunition seldom got through. And all the time the enemy fighters harried the retreating troops like hounds. Circuses of fighters dived in turn to drop grenades and strafe the republicans. The old fear of being cut off, which had broken the militias in the early days of the war, now affected the People’s Army. The senior communist officer, Manuel Tagüeña, reported that by 1 April the 35th and 45th International Divisions near Mora del Ebro had ‘completely lost all capacity to fight’.48

  On 3 April the former POUM stronghold of Lérida fell to Yagu ¨e’s troops, but the Italians were held for a time by Líster’s 11th Division at Tortosa, which had been reduced to rubble by bombing. The Aragón and Navarre Corps seized the reservoirs of Tremp and Camarasa with the hydroelectric plants which provided power to industry in Barcelona. Balaguer fell on 6 April after a terrible bombardment by 100 aircraft. Berti, with the CTV and Monasterio’s cavalry entered Gandesa, where they were welcomed by the Duchesses of Montpensier and Montealegre and the Countesses of Bailén and Gamazo, waiting to pay homage to the victorious troops.

  Meanwhile Aranda’s Galician Corps, together with the 4th Navarrese Division, fought on towards the coast just below the Ebro’s mouth. On 15 April they took the seaside town of Vinaroz, thus establishing a corridor which separated Catalonia from the rest of republican Spain. On that day, which was Good Friday, the Carlist requetés waded into the sea as if it were the River Jordan. All the nationalist press competed in describing how General Alonso Vega dipped his fingers in the water and crossed himself. The nationalists believed that the end of their Crusade was near, because ‘the victorious sword of Franco had cut in two the Spain occupied by the reds’.49

  29

  Hopes of Peace Destroyed

  During that spring of 1938, while the nationalist Army of Manoeuvre was overrunning Aragón, the Republic faced a growing economic crisis and low morale in the rear areas. There was distrust between political groups, fear of the SIM secret police and resentment against the authoritarian nature of Negrín’s government, acute food shortages, profiteering and defeatism. At the same time the population of Barcelona–now the capital of the Republic–suffered from the heaviest bombing raids of the war.

  The republican zone lived in a spiral of hyperinflation. The cost of living had tripled in less than two years of war.1 The greatest burden on the economy at the beginning of the war had been the militia wage bill. The rate of pay, however, was not raised from the original ten pesetas a day, despite the high level of inflation, so that by the winter of 1936 arms purchases from abroad had become by far the greatest expenditure. Spain had no arms industry, apart from small factories in the Basque country and Asturias. It was therefore unrealistic to expect metallurgical industries in Catalonia to be able to convert themselves for war production when the expertise was lacking. In fact, it was remarkable what their factories managed to improvise during the first six months of the war, when the central government, determined to take control from the CNT collectives and the Generalitat, refused to provide foreign exchange for the purchase of machinery from abroad.

  All the arms which the Republic needed had to be purchased abroad, with payment in advance in gold or hard currency. From the moment it was known that the Republic’s gold reserves had been transferred to France and the Soviet Union, a form of gold fever started in Europe among governments, and above all arms dealers, who saw the chance of huge profits at little risk.

  Right from the start of the conflict the republican authorities, ignorant of the arms trade, had created a seller’s market in Europe and North America by their obvious desperation. On 8 August 1936 Álvaro de Albornoz, the republican ambassador in Paris, signed a contract with the Société Éuropéenne d’Études et d’Entreprises, giving it exclusive rights ‘for the purchase in France and other countries of all products’, committing the Republic to pay a commission of 7.5 per cent for its services. Yet this company was largely owned by merchant banks (such as Worms et Cie and the Ottoman Bank), newspapers (Le Temps and Le Matin) and major industrialists such as Schneider-Creusot, all of whom supported General Franco.

  Republican purchasers found themselves facing a barrier of blackmail, when government ministers and senior officials demanded huge bribes, ranging from $25,000 to $275,000 for their signature on export licences and other documents. Sometimes they took the money and then blocked the shipment later.2 Because of the non-intervention policy, the Republic was entirely vulnerable to such tricks. And often when the weapons–paid for in advance–finally arrived, the crates contained inferior or even unserviceable weaponry. The necessity of obtaining arms wherever they were available meant equipping the People’s Army with a wide variety of calibres involving many different types of ammunition. A very large proportion, perhaps even half, of the weapons purchased never arrived, either because of fraud, or the blockade, with torpedoings at sea and the bombing of ports.

  Spanish governments had purchased weapons from Germany since well before the arrival of the Nazis in power. The colonial army in Morocco had demanded mustard gas to use against the Riffian tribes, who later became their most effective auxiliaries. Yet during the civil war the Republic purchased arms from Nazi Germany, General Franco’s most important ally. Recent research3 has now shown that what was long suspected is true: Colonel-General Hermann Göring, Minister President of Prussia and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, was selling weapons to the Republic while his own men were fighting for Franco.

  On 1 October 1936 the Welsh cargo ship Bramhill reached Alicante, having come from Hamburg with a consignment of 19,000 rifles, 101 machine-guns and more than 28 million cartridges, all ordered by the CNT in Barcelona for its militia columns. The presence of the Bramhill in Alicante was observed by officers on HMS Woolwich. Her captain immediately informed the Foreign Office, which investigated the matter. The German government made excuses, saying that Hamburg was a free port, yet it was clear that this cargo had arrived with official blessing. The Foreign Office left the matter there. In fact, the architect of this secret sale of arms to the Republic was Hermann Göring. He used as intermediaries the well-known arms trafficker Josef Veltjens, who had already sold arms to General Mola before the rising, but above all Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades, a piratical Greek on close terms with the country’s dictator, Metaxas. Bodosakis-Athanasiades was the chief shareholder and chief executive of Poudreries et Cartoucheries Helléniques SA, whose main associate and backer was Rheinmetall-Borsig which, in turn, was controlled by Göring personally.

  Bodosakis passed the demands for weapons which he received to Rheinmetall-Borsig and the Metaxas government provided end-user certificates stating that the equipment was destined for the Greek army. When the shipment reached Greece, Bodosakis transferred it to another vessel supposedly sailing to Mexico, but in fact to Spain. As Bodosakis was dealing with the nationalists as well
as the Republic, he had to split shipments between vessels, with the best and latest weapons destined for the nationalists and the oldest and least serviceable for the republicans.

  In 1937 and 1938, when the sale of German weapons to the Republic was reaching its peak, Bodosakis’s company was ordering shipments from Rheinmetall-Borsig worth anything up to 40 million Reichmarks (£3.2 million at the time). These consignments were almost all for the Republic and one can be fairly sure that Bodosakis was charging five or six times what he had paid Göring. It is more than likely that he then had to pay a significant share of his immense profits to Göring personally, rather than to Rheinmetall-Borsig, and this was on top of payments to the Metaxas regime and other officials.4

  There was even a Soviet angle to this very free market trade between Nazi Germany and republican Spain. In November 1937 Bodosakis travelled to Barcelona in a Soviet aircraft, accompanied by George Rosenberg, son of the purged Soviet ambassador. Rosenberg, who was a shipping agent and wheeler-dealer, and Bodosakis came to sign a contract with the Republic for £2.1 million to supply ammunition. On this occasion, as on all others, they insisted on full payment in hard currency in advance. The supply of German weaponry to the Republic continued until the very end of the war, as the international commission for the repatriation of foreign volunteers established in January 1939.5

  The nationalists, exasperated by this extraordinary racket, protested on many occasions to the German authorities.6 They identified eighteen vessels with such shipments to republican ports between 3 January 1937 and 11 May 1938, but received little explanation. As far as Hermann Göring was concerned, republican hard currency was as good as nationalist.7 The decoration of Karinhall, his country house of magnificent vulgarity north of Berlin, was no doubt subsidized by his enormous profits from the Spanish Civil War.