The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  That morning, in Estremadura, the republicans’ XXII Corps launched a surprise attack and broke the nationalist front line in the Hinojosa del Duque sector, opening a breach eight kilometres long. On the following day the republicans managed to break the second line and occupied Fuenteovejuna, but the bulk of the nationalist troops, some 80,000 men backed up by 100 guns, halted them at the Hill of the Saints, preventing them from reaching Peñarroya.

  In Catalonia, General Solchaga’s troops took Vinaixa on 6 January, but Richthofen was unimpressed. He sent an ultimatum to General Vigón. ‘If tomorrow Agramunt is not attacked then the Condor Legion will not provide support any longer.’14 The next day, he wrote, ‘7 January. Corps Valiño fails again. Three times the reds are thrown from their positions by [German] flak and air attack. Instead of the possible fifteen kilometres only two kilometres are taken. Of the whole Corps comprising 36 battalions, only two battalions attack.’ Richthofen saw this as ‘bad faith’ and ceased operations, because he considered that the nationalists were letting the Condor Legion do all the work. The next day at a meeting he told Franco, Dávila and Vigón what he thought about the lack of Spanish leadership at Artesa. ‘Good troops and miserable generals who are only battalion commanders, which is a natural consequence of the way things develop here. The Spaniards complain that they could relieve commanders but they do not have better ones.’

  On 9 January the Aragón Corps and Gambara’s Italians joined up at Mollerusa. The republican V and XV Corps were unable to block the Carlist requetés and the Italians. The northern part of the Ebro front collapsed in disorder with this threat to its rear. It was a bitter ending for those who had fought so hard for so little on the Ebro.

  The day before, 8 January, the nationalists had begun the second phase of their offensive with the bombardment of Montsant. On 12 January they took Montblanc. On 13 January the republicans suffered another disaster. ‘Our fighters destroy ten red fighters on the airfield at Vendrell,’ Richthofen noted.15 On 14 January the nationalists took Valls. Solchaga’s Carlist troops turned south towards Tarragona, which was being battered by the Condor Legion. At dusk on 15 January the Navarre Corps joined up round Tarragona with the Moroccan Corps, which had just carried out another of its 50-kilometre forced marches, all the way from Tortosa in a single day. The Aragón and Maestrazgo Corps managed to take Cervera at the same time.

  The nationalists had taken 23,000 prisoners and inflicted casualties of 5,000 dead and 40,000 wounded. The Battle of Catalonia was already decided after a third of the territory was conquered, yet Franco did not want to repeat the mistake of the Aragón campaign: he intended never to allow the enemy a real chance to reorganize.

  Meanwhile, in Estremadura the republican offensive had come to a halt in heavy rain after taking some 500 square kilometres. The attack never managed to gain momentum again, mainly because of enemy aircraft, but also because the tanks and guns were bogged down in the mud. The nationalists counter-attacked and seized back Peraleda del Saucejo on 22 January and three days later retook Fuenteovejuna.

  In Catalonia the republican general staff had designated fall-back lines, but they were purely theoretical. ‘Only when Tarragona fell’, wrote Stepánov, ‘did we realize that there was no Maginot Line round Barcelona, as some of our military leaders seemed to think. There was not even a kilometre of trenches.’16

  The republican authorities had called up reserves on 9 January from the classes of 1922 and 1942, and a week later they ordered the general mobilization of all citizens of both sexes between 17 and 55 years old. All industry and transport was also militarized.17 But these measures came far too late to have any effect. They were just gestures of defiance. The republican forces found themselves outnumbered six to one. Many were out of ammunition or without weapons. A defence of the city was also impossible because the morale and determination of 1936 had completely disappeared. Resistance might have taken place only if the city was surrounded, but an escape route to the French frontier remained open.

  Since the fall of Tarragona the nationalist air forces never ceased bombing the city, yet Franco was still nervous about French intervention. On 17 January Richthofen had to reassure him again that it was simply too late for them to send in troops. The nationalists and their allies were now convinced that they could prosecute the campaign to the bitter end without the slightest worry of international reaction.

  On the republican side, Negrín called an emergency meeting of the council of ministers on 18 January, to which Companys and Martínez Barrio were also invited. He proclaimed a state of war after two and a half years of fighting, a curiously empty gesture. For Federica Montseny, as for almost everyone else, the war was clearly lost. ‘The Spanish people could do no more,’ she wrote. ‘Any solution aimed at saving lives…seemed to us to be a collective salvation.’18

  On the morning of 22 January General Rojo told Negrín that the front had ceased to exist.19 The same day Negrín ordered all government departments to abandon Barcelona and make their way to Gerona and Figueras. The divisions of Solchaga and Yagüe were crossing the river Llobregat, the two corps of Muñoz Grandes and of García Valiño were attacking Sabadell and Tarrasa, while Gambara’s Italians were advancing on Badalona. ‘Barcelona, 48 hours before the entrance of the enemy’, wrote Rojo, ‘was a dead city.’20

  On the night of 25 January, Lluís Companys rang his friend Josep Andreu i Abelló, president of the Appeal Court of Catalonia, to invite him to dinner. Afterwards the two men drove to the centre of the old town through deserted streets. Leaflets appealing for resistance to the bitter end blew in the wind, along with identity cards that had been thrown away. ‘It was a night which I will never forget,’ recounted Abelló many years later. ‘The silence was total, a terrible silence, of the sort which comes at the culminating point of a tragedy. We went to the Plaza de Sant Jaume and we made our farewell to the Generalitat and the city. It was two in the morning. The vanguard of the nationalist army was already in Tibidabo and close to Montjuich. We never believed that we would return.’21

  Companys would return, but against his will, when the Gestapo found him in France in the autumn of the following year. He would be handed over to nationalist representatives and brought back over the border. The president of the Generalitat was to be declared guilty of ‘military rebellion’, sentenced to death and executed in the moat of Montjuich on 15 October 1940.

  A large part of the population of Barcelona, seized by fear, abandoned the city. So many documents were being burned around the city that many minor fires broke out.22 Shops were looted by people wanting food to take with them on the hard journey ahead. The coast road eastwards was jammed with buses, heavy lorries, vans, motor cars and horse-drawn carts piled with mattresses and domestic utensils, trunks and suitcases as well as exhausted women and children. Some men pushed their family belongings on handcarts, but it was hard to see them having the strength to cross the Pyrenees.

  The military convoys full of soldiers cast an even greater shadow over the sadness of departure. Teresa Pàmies, a young militant of the Communist PSUC, described what she saw: ‘Of the flight from Barcelona on 26 January, I will never be able to forget the wounded who crawled out of the Vallcarca hospital. Mutilated and covered in bandages, half-naked despite the cold, they pushed themselves towards the road, yelling pleas that they should not be left behind to fall into the hands of the victors…Those who had lost their legs crawled along the ground, those who had lost an arm raised the other with a clenched fist, the youngest crying in fear, the older ones shouting in rage and cursing those of us who were fleeing and were abandoning them.’23

  Also on 26 January the fifth column, right-wing men and women who had remained hidden for two and a half years, appeared in the streets to settle accounts. They mixed with the advance detachments of nationalist troops entering the city, particularly Yagüe’s regulares, who were allowed several days of looting–their ‘war tax’–in shops and apartment buildings, without worrying whether th
e owners were reds or whites. Although the republicans had released most of their prisoners before the downfall, the nationalists and their supporters killed some 10,000 people in the first five days of ‘liberation’.24 Italian officers were shaken by these massacres in cold blood, but obeyed the orders of Mussolini that any captured Italian who had fought in republican ranks should be executed immediately, ‘because dead men tell not tales’.25

  General Dávila, the commander-in-chief of the nationalist troops who had occupied Barcelona, published on that day an edict which ‘reintegrated the city of Barcelona and other liberated territory of the Catalan provinces within the sovereignty of the Spanish state’. All appointments and decrees made since 18 July 1936 were annulled and gave ‘the Catalan provinces the honour of being governed on an equal footing with their counterparts in the rest of Spain’.26

  General Eliseo A

  ´ lvarez Arenas, under-secretary of public order, and now chief of the occupation authority, published a decree which indicated that the nationalists saw themselves as an invading army in conquered territory. The Falangist Dionisio Ridruejo, who was in charge of propaganda, had prepared leaflets in Catalan. General A

  ´ lvarez Arenas, on discovering this, gave orders that they should all be destroyed. The Catalan language was forbidden by law. ‘It is a city which has sinned greatly,’ he told Ridruejo, ‘and now it must be cleansed. Altars should be erected in every street of the city and masses said continually.’27 In less liturgical terms, Serrano Súñer told the special correspondent of the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter, ‘The city is totally bolshevized. The decomposition is absolute. The population, whose deeds I myself have checked up on, is morally and politically sick. Barcelona and its citizens will be treated by us in the way one would attend to someone who isill.’28

  On the day of the fall of Barcelona no newspaper appeared in the city. All were requisitioned, passing under the control of the ‘Press of the Movement’. On 27 January the first issue of Hoja Oficial de Barcelona came out, in which was written, ‘Yesterday Barcelona was liberated! At two in the afternoon, without firing a shot, nationalist forces under the command of General Yagüe, entered Barcelona.’ On the same day La Vanguardia and El Correo Catala

  ´n also reappeared. The former now called itself La Vanguardia Española and had changed its motto of ‘Daily paper in the service of democracy’ for ‘Daily paper in the service of Spain and Generalissimo Franco’. Posters were displayed on walls proclaiming ‘If you are Spanish, speak Spanish’, and ‘Speak the language of the empire!’. Books censored by the Church or the army were burned.

  A few republican officers and officials had not fled to the frontier, but also stayed hidden waiting for the nationalist troops. They included Antonio Rodríguez Sastré, the chief of republican intelligence, who had been working for Franco and later became Juan March’s lawyer. Others also remained either because they felt they had nothing to fear, or because of exhaustion and apathy. There was a numb relief that the fighting was at last over and they told themselves that nothing could be worse than recent months. For most, though, the atmosphere of downfall before the arrival of the enemy contributed greatly to their panic. Some nationalist prisoners, other than those left behind in Barcelona, had been herded ahead of the retreating forces. A number were shot by their guards, who either lost their heads or acted out of the bitterness of defeat. The victims included the Bishop of Teruel and Colonel Rey d’Harcourt, who had surrendered the town.

  On 28 January, at eleven in the morning, nationalist troops paraded through Barcelona. Richthofen observed, no doubt with amusement, that the Italian commanders were furious that the nationalists were not allowing them to take part in the triumphal entry. A squadron of Condor Legion Messerschmitts flew overhead as an umbrella in case republican fighters tried to make a hit-and-run raid. The next day the Luftwaffe fighter pilots switched to making low-level attacks on railways and roads, which were packed with at least as many refugees as fleeing soldiers. ‘The successes they had were excellent,’ the Condor Legion reported, ‘and the pilots are gradually getting a taste for it.’29

  The few formations of the republican army which remained intact carried out desperate rearguard actions, such as the defence of Montsec, or fell back from one position to another, ambushing their pursuers. The Italians took five days to cover the 30 kilometres between Barcelona and Arenys de Mar. Meanwhile, in the castle of Figueras Negrín tried to manage the remains of the republican administration, split between different towns.

  On 1 February the Cortes met in the stables of the castle of Figueras. Only 64 deputies out of the full 473 were present. In his speech, Negrín laid down three minimum conditions for peace negotiations: the independence of Spain from all foreign interference; the holding of a plebiscite so that the Spanish people could decide the form of government it wanted; and the renunciation of all reprisals and political repression after the end of the war. Negrín hoped that the democracies might support this, but Franco would never have accepted the last two.

  On the following day the nationalists entered Gerona. Their progress had been held up by bridges blown up in the retreat or destroyed by their own bombers. The Condor Legion reported, ‘The number of prisoners increases in an extraordinary way, just as the resistance in certain sectors.’ Among the prisoners were two Sudeten Germans. If they were handed over to the nationalists, ‘the best they could hope for was a bullet’. The Condor Legion’s main task was to intercept any republican pilots trying to fly back to the central zone. In two days they destroyed another fifteen aircraft.30

  During the battle for Catalonia International Brigaders waiting for repatriation had clamoured since early January to be allowed to rejoin the fighting. The republican authorities refused because this would break the agreement undertaken on the withdrawal of foreign volunteers. The volunteers, exasperated with their forced idleness, then appealed to the Spanish Communist Party. Only some 5,000 of them were fit to fight and they were finally given permission. One of them was a Latvian called Emil Shteingold and he recorded what happened: ‘Soldiers and officers were distributed hastily in platoons, companies and battalions. We were put on trains in a great rush, and moved off towards Barcelona. It was cold on the train, as the wind pierced the carriages completely. Glass had long ago disappeared from the windows. Walls and partitions, too, were sometimes missing. Our carriage was moaning like a wounded beast when the train moved. We huddled against one another in an attempt to keep warm. At dawn we arrived at Granollers. As the train was not going any further, we started to disembark. Barcelona had fallen, and Italian motorized divisions were moving along all the roads heading north. Exhausted refugees with children and household belongings were trudging along the roads.’

  A truck arrived with weapons and ammunition. These were distributed and the International Brigaders moved off as quickly as possible. They cleaned the grease from the rifles as they marched. After half an hour they took up positions either side of a small bridge to cut off the road.

  ‘Some time later the enemy’s reconnaissance appeared. There were two motorbikes, and after them an ambulance with officers. When we tried to capture them, the motorcyclists turned back and we killed them at the turn of the road. The ambulance also turned back, but was surrounded by our soldiers…Officers surrendered and were taken to the headquarters of the brigade.’ Then a short column of motorized infantry appeared. They halted them by knocking out the first and the last vehicles, and started firing with their rifles and machine-guns. The Italian troops panicked. ‘Soldiers were pouring down from the truck like peas. Many fell and never got up again. Those who were still alive turned to flee, hiding behind vehicles which caught fire, and the ammunition and petrol on board began exploding. The corpses of these Italian fascists received a free cremation.’

  But this was a short-lived success. They were soon attacked by fighters and then outflanked by stronger forces. They had to retreat over the hills by paths to find another ambush position. It w
as raining and they had received little food. ‘Our boots were wet and torn by sharp gravel, they started to fall apart. After the sleepless nights, people were falling asleep while on the march. No one was allowed to sit down, as it would be impossible to get them up again.’ This pattern of ambush and retreat repeated itself for at least a week, until the order finally came to withdraw over the French border.31

  On 5 February Negrín, accompanied by President Azaña and his wife, crossed the frontier with Martínez Barrio, Giral, Companys and Aguirre. Azaña wanted to resign at that point, but he was persuaded to remain a little longer. He went to stay, supposedly incognito, in the Spanish embassy in Paris. Meanwhile, the endless caravan of refugees moved painfully towards the French frontier.

  The nationalist rejoicing at having captured the second city of Spain slowed their advance and allowed the fugitives more time. The official cars of government functionaries tried to make a way through the crowds of refugees on foot. In the general atmosphere of sauve qui peut, some bureaucrats and politicians commandeered ambulances for themselves and their families, while the wounded had to make it on foot. ‘A human mass,’ wrote Julián Zugazagoitia, the socialist ex-minister who would also be handed back to Franco and shot, ‘scattered across the countryside and slept on the hard winter ground, heating themselves with fires made from wood from the carts and branches. Some died of cold during the night. Mothers refused to let go of dead babies and women who had just given birth stood little chance.’32

  The nationalist troops pursuing them were also tired from the long marches of the campaign, yet the main concern of the nationalist general staff focused on the remaining republican fighters. They did not want to allow them to rejoin squadrons in the central zone. All the nationalist and allied fighter and bomber groups were tasked to attack the last enemy airfields.