The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

The Metamorphosis of the War

History seldom proceeds in straight lines. In December 1936 a series of battles, more in the style of the First World War, began around Madrid, yet the last of the militia defeats, in the pattern of the previous summer, did not take place until February 1937, in the brief Malaga campaign.

Generalissimo Franco became trapped in an unimaginative strategy. The enormous expectations aroused in October for what German diplomats cynically called ‘the bullfight’,¹ and the failure to take Madrid in November, created an obsessive determination. He insisted to Faupel, the new German chargé d’affaires, ‘I will take Madrid; then all of Spain, including Catalonia, will fall into my hands more or less without a fight.’ Faupel described the statement as ‘an estimate of the situation that I cannot describe as anything but frivolous’.²

After Varela’s attacks had been checked and the bombing had failed to break the morale of the city, there were basically three options left. One was to try to encircle Madrid from the north-west, and at least cut off water supplies and electricity from the Sierra de Guadarrama. This was to be the first target for the nationalists. The other was to strike eastwards across the River Jarama from their large salient south of the capital. Republican territory around Madrid was like a peninsula, vulnerable at its base formed by the corridor of land along the Valencia road. This would be the second offensive. And with the central front curling back round the Sierra de Guadarrama and across the province of Guadalajara, there was the possibility of striking down at the Valencia road from the north-east. This would be the sector for the third nationalist offensive in March 1937.

On 29 November 1936 Varela launched the first of a series of attacks on the Corunna road to the north-west of Madrid. The intention was to achieve a breakthrough towards the sierra, before swinging right to the north of the capital. This first attack, mounted with some 3,000 Legion and Moroccan troops, supported by tanks, artillery and Junkers 52 bombers, was directed against the Pozuelo sector. The republican brigade retreated in disorder, but the line was re-established by a counter-attack backed by T-26s. Both sides then redeployed so as to reinforce their fronts to the west of Madrid.

The German tanks, however, do not appear to have been used very effectively by their Spanish nationalist crews. ‘Inexplicable tank operations,’ wrote Richthofen scathingly in his war diary on 2 December. ‘German panzer personnel drive the tanks up to the combat zone, then Spaniards take over. They take the tanks for a ride and fiddle around.’ He also observed the republican air force. ‘Red pilots avoid coming in range of our flak,’ he noted four days later.³ Richthofen, a cousin of the famous Red Baron air ace, was a hard, arrogant man, disliked by German and Spanish officers alike. He was to become infamous as the destroyer of many towns and cities: Durango and Guernica in Spain, then Rotterdam, Belgrade, Canea and Heraklion in Crete, followed by many cities in the Soviet Union, most notably of all, Stalingrad, where 40,000 civilians were killed.

On the nationalist side General Orgaz was put in charge of the central front, where a renewed offensive began on 16 December, after a 48-hour delay due to weather conditions. Varela retained the field command with 17,000 men divided into four columns. The first objective, after a heavy bombardment with 155mm artillery, was the village of Boadilla del Monte, some twenty kilometres west of Madrid. It was captured that night and the general staff in Madrid, realizing that they faced a major offensive rather than a diversion, sent XI and XII International Brigades, backed by the bulk of Pavlov’s T-26 tanks. XI Brigade counter-attacked at Boadilla, only to find themselves virtually cut off in the village. The nationalists withdrew to take advantage of such a clearly defined artillery target and attacked again with their infantry. The International Brigades established defensive positions within the thick walls of country houses belonging to rich madrileños. They resisted desperately and on 19 December the slaughter was enormous on both sides. The next day Orgaz halted the offensive, having gained only a few kilometres. He lacked reserves and the republicans enjoyed numerical superiority.

Karl Anger, one of the Serbs in XI International Brigade, described their arrival in the village of Majadahonda just south of the Corunna highway at the start of the fighting. ‘It was still an untouched little place, far from beautiful, a little dirty because of poverty, but warm, quiet and sweet, like a lamb. We filled it with our troops, services, guns, trucks, armoured vehicles, and all things that an army drags behind it during a campaign. Quiet Majadahonda became crowded, noisy and dirty, as if on a market day. On the first morning after our departure enemy aircraft started dropping bombs on the village. The inhabitants scattered, abandoning all their property. Livestock, pigs, unmade beds and unattended houses. On the first evening and first morning there still was life at Majadahonda. One could see mysterious silhouettes of young Spanish girls behind the poorly lit windows of houses. The next day the windows were already black, gaping–frightening holes in the shells of the houses. Only stray dogs, supply people and stragglers were left in the village, and also a woman who had gone mad. She screamed terribly on a moonlit night in an empty house, and the screams echoed frighteningly in the dead moonlit streets.’⁴

It is also important to understand the chaos which resulted in the driving sleet and the winter darkness. The International Brigades lacked intelligence on the enemy. They had no maps or compasses, and blundered around just managing to avoid attacking each other. A battalion would start digging its trenches, only to find later that they were completely out of line with the neighbouring units. Language problems within the International Brigades did not help. Anger, a Serbian within a German battalion, also indicates in his account the extraordinary mixture of nationalities and of motives within the International Brigades. ‘In Majadahonda we were joined by a young Chinese volunteer, the first Chinese to join us. On the next day, when we had just started thinking how to incorporate him better into our Serbian team, he was brought back with both his legs smashed to bits. We hadn’t even had time to learn his name.’ He went on to add that ‘in all the International Brigades, including the first [i.e. XI International] brigade, there was a number of former Russian White Guardists or sons of White Guardists’. These were the desperately homesick Russian émigrés hoping to earn a safe passage back to the Soviet Union.

When nationalist reinforcements arrived towards the end of December, Orgaz prepared to relaunch his unimaginative offensive along the same axis. During the breathing space the republican general staff had redeployed their units in the Pozuelo-Brunete sector in a very uncoordinated manner and without attending to the supply of ammunition. When the nationalist offensive was relaunched on 3 January 1937 the republican right flank fell back in disorder. At first the republican troops on the left managed to hold Pozuelo, in a battle ‘which was the most complete chaos’. Koltsov said that ‘despite all their heroism, our units suffered from the confusion, stupidity, and perhaps treason in headquarters’.⁵

Varela then concentrated most of his eight batteries of 105mm and 155mm artillery, together with his tanks and available air power, on the pueblo. The republican defence collapsed and the retreat of Modesto’s formation, based on the former 5th Regiment, became virtually a rout as men lost all sense of direction in the fog. General Miaja gave the 10th Brigade the task of disarming all those who fled. The only mitigating factor was the destruction of two companies of German light tanks with the 37mm guns of Russian armoured cars. The superiority of Soviet armoured vehicles in Spain later influenced the Wehrmacht’s development of heavier tanks.

The ammunition supply was appalling. On average only a handful of rounds per man remained, while some battalions had run out altogether. The fault lay partly with Miaja and his staff for reacting so slowly to the problem, but mainly with Largo Caballero and officers in the ministry of war in Valencia. Largo Caballero replied to Miaja’s request for more ammunition with the accusation that he was simply trying to cover up his responsibility for the defeat.

While the whole republican sector looked as if it were about to collapse, Miaja placed machine-guns at crossroads on the way to Madrid to stop desertion. He ordered in XII International and Líster’s Brigade. In addition XIV International Brigade was brought all the way round from the Córdoba front. On 7 January Kléber ordered the Thaelmann Battalion to hold the enemy near Las Rozas, telling them ‘not to retreat a single centimetre under any circumstances’. In a stand of sacrificial bravery they followed his order to the letter. Only 35 men survived.

Once reinforcements arrived, the front line eventually stabilized. Both sides were exhausted and by mid-January the battle was over, the opposing armies having established themselves in defensive positions. The nationalists had overrun the Corunna road from the edge of Madrid to almost a third of the way to San Lorenzo del Escorial, but the Republic had prevented any encirclement of Madrid from the west flank. Each had suffered around 15,000 casualties in the process.

The two battles for the Corunna road, as they were sometimes called, proved a hard testing ground for French and other volunteers with the tank brigade. The French arrived with what Soviet advisers regarded as an insouciant manner. ‘From the very first days’, the report back to Moscow stated, ‘the French disliked the discipline here. They said, “What kind of life is this, one isn’t allowed to drink wine, or go to the brothel, and one has to get up early.” They particularly disliked getting up at reveille and going on 25-kilometre marches. But when we explained to them, they understood and proved themselves to be heroes on the field of battle. And when they came back from the battle, they declared, “We don’t regard ourselves as Frenchmen, we are internationalists and anti-fascists.”’ The report admitted that fighting conditions were terrible for the tank crews. ‘Men get very tired. After a day’s work, men leave the tanks as if drunk, most of them suffer from a shortage of oxygen in their tanks. In some cases they vomit, in some cases they are in a very nervous state.’⁶

The Soviet woman commissar of the tank brigade’s medical unit described the far superior medical facilities provided for Soviet advisers in comparison to the terrible conditions in the makeshift hospital in El Escorial for Spanish soldiers. The tank brigade commander, presumably Pavlov, showed an unusual commitment to the care of his men–especially rare in the Red Army. It went beyond just getting trained tankists, who were badly needed, back into their tanks. The commissar’s work and observations also provide some of the very few Soviet accounts of battle shock cases.

‘Medical vehicles of International Brigades are rushing along the highway. Some of them are painted in a mosaic-like pattern of green–yellow–black–grey, they blend in with the general surroundings. Medical transport is a weak spot here. There are few ambulances and most of them are modified little trucks or assembled from odd bits and pieces. Most of them have enough space for only four stretchers. Two tanks are crawling up from a turn of the road. In the second one is the body of mechanic-driver Ulyanov, who was killed on the spot by a direct hit on his tank. Malyshev and Starkov were wounded.

‘The field hospital [for tankists and the International Brigades] is stationed in a big room in one of the houses in a forest nature reserve. Double mattresses with clean linen and blankets have been put on the floor. There is a stove, they feed firewood into it, keeping up the temperature which is important for those who had come back from the front. During the whole operation near Las Rosas there had been a severe fog, penetrating one’s entire system…Besides water and soap, the hospital has petrol and alcohol–to wash the tankists’ faces and hands…The doctor and I go to the main hospital, to look for our wounded men. The hospital in Escorial is overflowing with wounded…I take note of the types of wounds while passing through the wards and the hall where the wounded men are received. Most of the wounded men are infantry, wounded by artillery shells. Wounds from bullets–in the back and sides.

‘During the night of 14 January I found the corpse of a Frenchman in the room next to Starkov. He had been brought back from the battle unconscious, with a heavy wound. The nurse told me that he had shouted in French, “Comrades, look out! Shells are coming from the left.” He then started to sing the “Internationale” and died. He had no documents on him. The nurse and I did not have a camera to take a photo of this dead unknown comrade. Upstairs, in an empty ward, lies a dying Italian, wounded in the neck. In the ward next to him there’s a wounded Moroccan, with a heavy wound in his leg. He does not talk and rejects food…It is unbelievably cold in the hospital. We cover Starkov [whose leg had been amputated] with several blankets, dress him in warm underwear which we’ve brought from brigade headquarters. The brigade commander asked if he could get anything for Starkov. I asked Starkov and then informed the brigade commander that he would like to have a watch. The brigade commander ordered us to take Starkov his own watch…All the wounded tankists who are now in hospitals in Madrid are sent food on a daily basis from brigade headquarters: canned milk, cocoa, oranges, apples, chocolates, sausage, cookies…In Madrid we have found the full collections of works by Gorky and Chekhov. The wounded men are supplied with newspapers and magazines, commissars keep visiting them.

‘Types of wounds varied from day to day at the front field hospitals and also at hospitals in Madrid. In the wards and operation theatres, which I visited directly after the battles, I happened to see some Spanish infantrymen who were wounded in the back, rear, backs of their legs, and shoulders. At first aid stations at the front we sometimes came across cases of “self-inflicted wounds” among Spanish infantrymen, who, while seized with animal fear, had shot through their own arms and legs, in order to be taken to hospital.’

The woman commissar also recounted the case of a tank crewman called Soloviev, with a broken right arm, who ‘developed abnormal psychic reactions’, clearly a euphemism for battle shock or what we know today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Soloviev was evacuated on 15 January to the Palace Hotel in Madrid, the Soviet fortress base. His ravings were perhaps an interesting product of propaganda. ‘Soloviev would become extremely agitated, he would talk and talk of his recollections. He spoke incessantly about his training and his time in the Red Army, mentioned the names of commanders, sites of their camps, location of units, then turned to the Spanish Civil War, matériel and people dispatched on ships, and about anarchists and Trotskyists. On the order of the brigade commander, Soloviev was moved into a separate room…On 20 January he showed symptoms of sharp delirium: “Anarchists came here during the night, and they took me upstairs!” “Anarchists will slaughter us all, they came for me, they told me about it last night!” The brigade commander ordered us to evacuate Soloviev from Madrid. Although his fits of delirium have become more frequent, we evacuate Soloviev in one of the brigade’s ambulances. We take him to a hospital in Archena. In this hospital, he can be isolated from the outside world and will get the necessary treatment. While he was at “Palas Hotel” [sic], no strangers were allowed into his ward. Political workers from the brigade kept visiting Soloviev and controlling his state.’⁷

It is important at this point to understand what fighting in the field was like for the militiamen who had now become part of the People’s Army. The majority were industrial workers who had little experience of the country. Even those who had done military service knew few of the old campaigner’s tricks for making life more bearable in general and more durable in battle. Their columns and new ‘mixed brigades’ were marched or driven out of Madrid in commandeered trucks. Maps were so scarce that they were seldom available at company level and few could read them properly when they were issued. Once at the position which they had been ordered to defend, the soldiers, equipped with little more than a rifle, ammunition pouches and a blanket, started to dig trenches with bayonets and bare hands. They did not bother with latrines, since that would only have meant more digging in the stony Spanish earth and visiting them involved a dangerous journey. In most cases they simply used their trenches, a practice which horrified International Brigaders, accustomed to the First World War idea of digging everything into the ground.

The Castilian winter is renowned for the cold winds coming down off the sierras, and the militias froze in their trenches, often having little more to wear than their boiler suits and rope-soled canvas alpargatas, which rotted quickly. With mud everywhere it was impossible to keep clean, owing to the lack of water tankers to bring up fresh water and the general scarcity of soap.

In theory each battalion had a machine-gun company in addition to its three rifle companies, but only the International Brigades or picked communist formations had anything approaching the full establishment. Automatic weapons were the key to repulsing frontal attacks and the lack of them, and of experienced operators, put the People’s Army at a grave disadvantage. The Moroccan regulares became well known as the most effective machine-gunners in the war in addition to their other remarkable ability to use dead ground. The barren terrain in which they had fought the Spanish so successfully in the colonial wars had taught them to take maximum advantage of the slightest fold in the ground. Not only did this reduce their casualties enormously, but together with their reputation for knife work, it inspired a tremendous fear in republican troops. Their skill often enabled them to creep in between carelessly sited positions and take the defenders by surprise.

Nationalist generals, most of whom proved as rigidly conventional as their republican counterparts, did not make full use of the regulares. The majority of the fighting was limited to set-piece offensives, which were often assaults across an open no man’s land, with attack followed by counter-attack. The only discernible difference from First World War tactics was the growing co-ordination between infantry and armour, together with the integration of artillery and air bombardment. This development, however, was almost entirely restricted to the nationalist side and their Condor Legion advisers.

The new breed of republican commander emerging at this time was young, aggressive, ruthless and personally brave, but as utterly conventional and unimaginative as the old officers of the metropolitan army. The outstanding examples of this type, such as Modesto and Líster, were communists from the 5th Regiment. Some, like Manuel Tagüeña, became communists in the early months of the war, having started in Socialist Youth battalions which had affiliated to the 5th Regiment during the fighting in the sierra the previous summer. Their rigidly traditional approach to tactics and their military formality were strongly influenced by Stalinist orthodoxy. The purging of Marshal Tukhachevsky and his supporters who advocated the new approach to armoured warfare returned communist military theory to the political safety of obsolete tactics. In Russia saluting had been reintroduced and the 5th Regiment followed suit. The officers of XI International Brigade had even carried swords when marching up the Gran Víaon 8 November. The exhortation of the new republican brigades may have been revolutionary in language, but the manoeuvring was Tsarist.

After the battle of the Corunna road Kléber left for Moscow in the company of André Marty, having been relieved of his command. It has been said that jealous Spanish communists made him the scapegoat for the Pozuelo collapse, while others, such as Borkenau, believed that Miaja resented Kléber rivalling him as the hero of Madrid. Whatever the explanation, Kléber had become much less flamboyant when he returned to Spain in June to command a division. Despite the idealized portraits of many foreign journalists, who ‘played him up sensationally’ as one of them admitted, Kléber never really exceeded the level of a tough First World War commander who was unsparing with the lives of his men.

In between the two parts of the Corunna road offensive, the republicans had fought an unsuccessful action in the south when Queipo de Llano’s forces advanced to capture the rich olive-growing area of Andújar. It was a singularly inauspicious start for the new XIV International Brigade under General ‘Walter’, a Polish communist, who later commanded the Second Polish Army in the Red Army’s Berlin operation. This brigade included the French Marseillaise Battalion, which had a British company. The main action, around a village called Lopera just after Christmas, became famous for the death of the two English communist poets John Cornford and Ralph Fox, and for a frightening foretaste of International Brigade justice.

The battle began on the morning of 28 December and finished 36 hours later. Walter had been ordered to retake Lopera, but he had no telephone communications with his units and no air or artillery support. The nationalists decimated their ranks with machine-gun fire, mortars and artillery. XIV International Brigade was virtually untrained. Like the militia in similar circumstances, many of its men turned and ran on being surprised by machine-gun fire. Some 800 corpses were left under the olive trees and 500 men deserted the front line.⁸ The commanding officer of the Marseillaise Battalion, Major Gaston Delasalle, was arrested and accused, not only of incompetence and cowardice, but also of being a ‘fascist spy’. He was found guilty by a court martial hastily gathered by André Marty. Ilya Ehrenburg later described Marty as speaking, and occasionally acting, ‘like a mentally sick man’, and Gustav Regler remarked that Marty preferred to shoot anyone on suspicion, rather than waste time with what he called ‘petit bourgeois indecision’.⁹ Some Brigaders, however, admired him greatly. ‘A true revolutionary,’ Sommerfield called him, ‘compounded of patience, granite firmness and absolute unswerving determination.’ Tom Wintringham, who later commanded the British battalion, described the proceedings as ‘a thoroughly fair court martial’. But Nick Gillain, serving in XIV International Brigade, wrote later, ‘The guards dragged the condemned man out of the court room, while he continued to protest his innocence. There was the sound of two or three shots. Then, a man came back into the room and placed on the table a watch and some money…Revolutionary justice had been carried out.’¹⁰

The nationalists and their Axis backers began to adjust themselves to a protracted war. Hitler was not surprised by the turn of events, informed as he was by accurate assessments from Voelckers, the German chargé d’affaires. He was also unperturbed by the long pessimistic reports from his ambassador to Franco, Faupel, and the Condor Legion commander, General Sperrle, because an extended war suited his purposes better. It would distract attention from his expansionist plans in central Europe. Mussolini, on the other hand, was eager to win military glory in Europe, but his mood fluctuated wildly according to the performance of his troops.

The most urgent task facing Franco’s staff was to create a trained army of sufficient size. German assistance in this task was almost as important as their combat contribution. The Falangist militia trained by Condor Legion officers at Cáceres in Estremadura bore little resemblance to the gangs of señoritos involved in the summer fighting. The Carlist requetés, the nationalists’ most effective troops after the Army of Africa, now numbered about 60,000. At least half of them came from Navarre, which led to the Carlist claim that ‘Navarre had saved Spain’. This arrogance, combined with open contempt for the Castilian Church, which they thought corrupt and pharisaical, did not make them popular with their allies. The famed discipline of the requetés derived, not from strong respect for hierarchy, but from the self-discipline of the hill farmer. (Their leader, Fal Conde, exaggerated when he described Carlism as a movement guided from below, but it was a uniquely populist form of royalism.) Their medieval crusading faith made them fearless. Colonel Rada described his requetés as men ‘with faith in victory, with faith in God; one hand holding a grenade, the other a rosary’.

In early December 1936 the Carlist war council decided to establish a ‘Royal Military Academy’ to ensure a supply of trained Carlist officers. Franco, jealous of their strength, declared that such an unauthorized move would be considered an act against the nationalist movement. The war council backed down and Fal Conde went into exile in Portugal. The Caudillo followed up this victory with a decree which subordinated all political militias to the code of military justice and the army chain of command.

By the end of 1936 the nationalist army’s strength approached 200,000 men, with over half this figure made up by the Carlist and Falangist forces. The Army of Africa was increased to over 60,000 men by early 1937, chiefly as a result of intense recruiting in the Rif. Foreign volunteers also joined the Legion. The largest group was Portuguese and consisted of about 12,000 men known as the Viriatos. There was also a detachment of right-wing French volunteers and 600 Irish blueshirts under General Eoin O’Duffy, but their contribution was small. They were withdrawn after only one action in which they found themselves attacked by their own side.¹¹

In January Franco set up a joint German-Italian general staff in the hope of deflecting criticism from his allies over the way the war was being conducted. He simply intended it as a sop so as to be able to request more military aid, and implicate his advisers in the responsibility of any reverse. The nationalists’ most valuable assistance undoubtedly came from the increased German contribution. The Nazi government had reacted quickly in early November to the appearance of Russian weaponry. Hitler evidently did not realize that Stalin was afraid of provoking him and that he was unwilling to let Spanish affairs embarrass Soviet foreign policy. The first contingents of the Condor Legion arrived in Spain in mid November. General Sperrle was the overall commander and Colonel von Richthofen the commander of Luftwaffe operations. German air power in Spain grew to four fighter squadrons of Heinkel 51 biplanes (to be replaced gradually with Messerschmitt 109s in the early summer of 1937) and four squadrons of Junkers 52 bombers. Other aircraft were sent out later; in fact, all the important machines used by the Luftwaffe at the beginning of the Second World War were tested in Spain.

The Wehrmacht reinforcements came under Colonel von Thoma’s command and included anti-tank and heavy machine-gun detachments, artillery and the equivalent of two Panzer battalions. This tank force of 106 Mark I Panzers assembled at Cubas north of Toledo. Their large black berets bore a badge based on the skull motif of the Death’s-Head Hussars of the old Prussian army. In support there were 20mm flak batteries and 88mm anti-aircraft guns. The signals corps, too, helped with equipment and training. There was a large contingent of engineers and civilian instructors, who later included Gestapo ‘advisers’, as well as a naval advisory staff, based on the pocket battleships Deutschland and Admiral Scheer, both of which stayed in western Mediterranean waters. On 16 November, 5,000 German servicemen disembarked in Cádiz and another 7,000 arrived ten days later.¹²

The great increase in Italian aid followed the secret pact signed by Franco on 28 November at Salamanca. The Caudillo agreed to Mussolini’s policy of Italian primacy in the Mediterranean in return for military aid ‘to restore political and social order in the country’. During the first months of the war the Italian pilots flying the Savoia 81s and Fiat fighters had in theory been attached to the Spanish Foreign Legion, whose uniform they wore. But in his desire for glory Mussolini now wanted an independent command and recognizable Italian formations in the land battles. As a result the CTV (Corps of Volunteer Troops) was organized. Its commander, General Mario Roatta, formerly of Italian military intelligence, had been Admiral Canaris’s counterpart. Roatta had already been to Spain at the beginning of the war with the German liaison officer, Colonel Warlimont.

The Italian infantry sent to Spain consisted mainly of fascist militia, many of whom had been drafted or press-ganged. Having been told that they were going to Abyssinia, they arrived in Spain in midwinter wearing tropical uniforms. The CTV’s strength later reached a total of about 50,000 men, but many Spaniards were transferred to their formations and fought under Italian officers. The number of Fiat Ansaldo miniature tanks was greatly increased, but these were little better than closed-in Bren gun carriers. Italian field guns were of good quality, though old, but then artillery has always been the strongest section of Italian military industry. The ‘Legionary Air Force’, so called to summon up images of imperial Rome, was increased to some 5,000 men. Many more Fiat fighters and Savoia bombers were also sent. Their principal base was Majorca, from where they could attack shipping and, in Ciano’s words, ‘terrorize Valencia and Barcelona’.¹³ This reorganization left Franco’s air force commander, General Kindelán, in a similar position to his republican counterpart, Hidalgo de Cisneros, who, even after he became a communist, was lucky if the Russian General ‘Duglas’ told him what was happening.

The Málaga campaign, the Italian CTV’s first action in Spain, took place while the opposing armies in the Madrid region were preparing for the next round. The southern extremity of the republican zone was no more than a long strip between sea and mountain, stretching from Motril to Estepona within 50 kilometres of Gibraltar. Only the overriding priority given to the assault on Madrid had delayed the nationalists from attacking it earlier. Quiepo de Llano had grown particularly impatient at what he regarded as a continuing insult to his control of Andalucia. The nationalist field command was given to a Borbón prince, Colonel the Duke of Seville. Franco asked Roatta to join this offensive with his 10,000 fascist militiamen and the Legionary Air Force in close support. It was a clever move, since victory was certain, and Mussolini would therefore be encouraged to continue his aid at a time when he had suddenly become worried about international opinion.

If any campaign was fated to be lost by the Republic it was this one. The terrain and the elongated sector meant that the nationalists could cut it almost wherever and whenever they wanted. The state of the defence was pitiful, for Málaga had led a revolutionary existence cut off from the reality of the war. Within the town there was strong antagonism between the communists and the CNT, while in the countryside the predominantly anarchist peasants were immersed in their collectives. The mountain range provided a most dangerous sense of security.

The republican forces consisted of no more than 12,000 militiamen, a third of whom had no rifles. There was little ammunition even for those who were armed. This state of affairs was largely the result of the deliberate neglect of the government, which disliked the continuing independence of the province. Largo Caballero is reputed to have said ‘not a round more for Málaga’. The performance of Colonel Villalba, the commander, moreover, was more than just unimpressive. There are strong grounds for believing that he sabotaged the defence deliberately, since he was treated so well by the nationalists after the defeat of the Republic.¹⁴

The Duke of Seville’s offensive began slowly in mid January with the capture of small pieces of territory. The first major section to be seized was the extreme south-west, including Marbella. Then a small force from Granada occupied a chunk of territory to the north-east of Málaga, endangering its communication with Motril, which lay at the exit of the bottleneck. Yet the attack on Málaga itself in the first week of February still came as a surprise. The Duke of Seville’s force advanced up the coast, rolling back the militia detachments with ease; the blackshirt militia under Roatta cut down to the sea; and the Granada force pushed further towards the coast road, although they left this escape route open so as not to provoke resistance. Within three days the nationalist and Italian forces had entered the outskirts of Málaga, after a naval bombardment by units of the nationalist fleet, backed by the Admiral Graf Spee. The republican warships at Cartagena never even left port.

The weather hampered operations and the Condor Legion could do little to help until almost the end. ‘At last the fighter squadrons can get off the ground,’ wrote Richthofen on 6 February. ‘Italians advancing with difficulty. One He 51 shot down. Italians are standing still four kilometres short of Málaga. Spaniards want fighters here there and everywhere. And today again in Saragossa because a red [aircraft] was there. That’s not how it should be. Today the Legion Condor had its fourteenth casualty.’ But just two days later, on 8 February, he was able to write: ‘Málaga taken! Great victory fiesta in white Spain.’¹⁵

Descriptions of the fleeing civilians and exhausted militiamen along the coast are harrowing.¹⁶ Crazed mothers nursed dead babies and the old and weak died by the roadside. It seemed to the writer Arthur Koestler and his host Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell who had a house in Málaga, as if only a few solitary figures were left in the abandoned landscape of the city. Smoke drifted upwards from houses ruined in the shelling. In the shock of defeat odd militiamen waited apathetically to be put up against a wall. The nationalist revenge in Málaga was perhaps the most horrific of the war, judging by the British consul’s report of 20,000 executions between 1937 and 1944. The nationalist prosecutor in Málaga, Carlos Arias Navarro, eventually became the last prime minister under Franco and the man inherited by King Juan Carlos in 1975.

The Málaga disaster brought tensions to a head between the communists and Largo Caballero, whom the Comintern and Soviet advisers referred to in their reports to Moscow as ‘the Old Man’. They were furious at Caballero’s attempts to restrict communist power within the army, partly because he could not forgive their successful infiltration of the Socialist Youth and the consequent loss of the whole organization to the PCE. André Marty even suggested later that Caballero and Prieto were in the pocket of the British who were urging them to resist the communists.¹⁷

‘He [Caballero] fears the exceptional influence that the Party has in a significant part of the army and strives to limit this,’ Berzin reported to Moscow on 12 January 1937. He went on to claim that General Asensio, the assistant minister for war, and General Cabrera, the chief of staff, ‘despite repeated exposures of their sabotage in the carrying out of useful measures for fortified fronts, up to now enjoy great trust from the premier and war minister, left socialist Largo Caballero. Some of them have not been exposed, but are undoubtedly agents of Franco…The fall of Málaga in particular was, for the most part, caused by treason.’ He levelled similar accusations against the anarchists and the ‘counterrevolutionary Trotskyists’ of the POUM, a leitmotif in almost every report back to Moscow. ‘It goes without saying that it is impossible to win the war against the rebels if these scum within the republican camp are not liquidated.’¹⁸ Colonel Krivoshein, in a report forwarded to Stalin by Voroshilov, concluded that ‘the Communist Party ought to come to power even by force, if necessary’.¹⁹

The communists were also outraged by the ‘impudently slanderous position’ taken by Prieto, the minister for the navy, ‘at the last council of ministers (where he in essence repeated almost word for word the attacks of the Trotskyist La Batalla against the Soviet Union)’.²⁰

The transformation of the militia columns into a formalized army started in earnest in December 1936. At the beginning of 1937 republican forces totalled about 320,000 men, although only about half this number were at the various fronts at any one time. These forces were split among the central and southern zone with about 130,000, the three northern zones (Euzkadi, Santander and the Asturias) with over 100,000 and Aragón with about 30,000. The remaining 80,000 or so in rearguard areas included the Assault Guard, the National Republican Guard, formed from loyal civil guards, the carabinero frontier police and the MVR, the Militias of Rearguard Vigilance, which were a government incorporation of irregular forces. The carabineros came under Negrín, the minister of finance, who built them up as a personal force to about 40,000 strong. The main reason for lack of precision in army figures is inaccurate reporting, both of ration returns (minor and major frauds were carried out by staff and quartermasters) and of unit strengths (commanding officers sometimes adjusted the figures for personal and political reasons).

These greatly increased figures were achieved mainly by increasing the call-up of the classes of 1933, 1934 and 1935. It is impossible to gauge what proportion of the intake was prompted by idealism, circumstances, or even hunger, for the rations were considerably better than those which the civilian population enjoyed. An English International Brigader in hospital later observed that the local people were so desperate that they would eat what they had left on their plates, even if it had been chewed. Meanwhile, with a mixture of encouragement, manipulation and blackmail, the militias were forced into the command structure already prepared on paper. Columns were turned into battalions and brigades during the winter of 1936. In the spring of 1937 divisions and even army corps started to be formed.

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 system 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

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 Varela’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

‘Suicide Hill’ could be held no longer and the whole brigade had to fall back. But a breakthrough in the centre had been prevented, because the nationalists believed republican forces to be much stronger. They also failed to discover the weakness on XV International Brigade’s southern flank.

The British battalion had lost 225 men out of 600. Wintringham himself fell badly wounded and the communist novelist Christopher Caudwell was among those killed. Meanwhile, on its right flank, the brigade’s Dimitrov Battalion of Balkan exiles and the re-formed Thaelmann Battalion of XI International held off an equally severe attack. Very heavy casualties were inflicted on the regulares until the old Colt machine-guns jammed.

In the rolling hills and olive groves to the east of the Jarama between Pajares and Pingarrón, attack followed attack throughout 13 February, as Varela became desperate to achieve his breakthrough. Eventually the Edgar André Battalion of XI International Brigade was forced back as a result of fire from a Condor Legion machine-gun battalion and 155mm bombardment from La Marañosa. The shellfire also destroyed brigade headquarters and cut all field telephone lines to the rear. Barrón’s column took advantage of this gap at Pajares and his attack turned the right flank of XV International Brigade. Since the other nationalist formations had already been fought to a standstill, Barrón’s troops pushed on alone towards Arganda on the Valencia road.

The front was on the point of disintegrating that night as XI International Brigade and its flanking formations fell back trying to reestablish a line. Varela was worried by the fact that Barrón’s brigade was exposed, so he ordered him to halt until the other columns could protect his flanks. It was to be the furthest point of their advance, for the next day 50 of Pavlov’s T-26s counter-attacked in what could best be described as a confused charge of mechanized heavy cavalry. Although not a success in itself, this attack gave the republicans enough time to bring forward reserve units to consolidate the centre of the sector.

Richthofen jotted down what he heard from nationalist officers. ‘Red opponents before Madrid–tough fighting. French, Belgian and English prisoners are taken. All shot except for the English. Tanks well concealed in the olive groves. Many dead are lying around. The Moors did their work with hand grenades.’⁶ Why British prisoners were spared is not clear. Perhaps Franco, on German advice, had judged it safer not to outrage the organizers of the Non-Intervention Committee.

Mola was by now extremely concerned at the way the offensive had halted. He, too, was obsessed with the idea of Madrid and he had persuaded Franco to let him commit the last six battalions in reserve, but these units could not even replace the losses the columns had suffered. Both sides had fought to a temporary standstill. Front-line troops had sustained fearful casualties in charges of hopeless bravery. Both sides were also weakened by hunger because the intensity of the fighting had often prevented the arrival of rations. The republican general staff had reacted so slowly to the crisis that fresh units were not in position to take advantage of the nationalists’ exhaustion by counter-attacking. The only reinforcement available at this point was XIV International Brigade, which consolidated the centre of the sector between Arganda and Morata.

On 15 February Franco ordered Orgaz to continue the advance, despite nationalist losses. It was an obstinate and unjustifiable decision, since the Italian forces were still regrouping for transfer to the Guadalajara front. Any further push should at least have been co-ordinated with their offensive. The nationalists lost more of their best troops for an insignificant gain in ground.

On the same day, on the other side of the lines, Miaja’s control over the Jarama front came officially into effect. With Colonel Rojo he reorganized the republican formations into four divisions. On 17 February the republican forces went on to the offensive. Líster’s 11th Division moved on Pingarrón in a frontal attack which brought appalling casualties; the 70th Brigade, attached from Mera’s 14th Division, lost 1,100 men, over half its strength. On the same day Modesto’s division crossed the Manzanares from the north to attack La Marañosa, which was defended by Rada’s Carlists. A communist battalion called the ‘Grey Wolves of La Pasionaria’ was shot to pieces in a doomed attack over a long stretch of open ground. Peter Kemp, an English volunteer serving as a Carlist subaltern, records how his aim was not helped by their chaplain screaming in his ear to shoot more of the atheist rabble.⁷

The only effective part of the republican counter-attack forced Barrón’s brigade back to the Chinchón–Madrid road. The Soviet tank brigade played a key role with its T-26s emerging from their camouflaged positions under the olive trees. Moscow was informed how a junior officer named Bilibin managed to evacuate a damaged tank under heavy machine-gun and shellfire. And on 19 February ‘Junior officer Novikov’s tank received three direct hits. His loader was killed and his mechanic-driver was mortally wounded. Novikov himself was heavily wounded but for more than 24 hours he would not let the enemy approach his burning tank. He was later rescued by his comrades.’ This tale of survival in a burning tank for a day and a night strains one’s credulity, but Soviet battlefield reports of often genuine heroism had to be as preposterously exaggerated as the Stalinist claims of labour achievements.⁸

Krasilnikov, a tank commander and Communist Party member, also revealed the insane influence of a Stakhanovite mentality on military affairs. ‘During the battles near Jarama, battalion commander Comrade Glaziev considered that the best crews were those that fired off the most shells. Yet they were firing these shells while three kilometres away from the enemy.’⁹

Little then happened for the next ten days, until General Gal threw his newly formed division into an impossible attack on Pingarrón. His orders stated that it ‘must be taken at any cost’, and he persisted with the attack even though the air and tank support, which had been promised, never arrived. Those behind with binoculars could see bodies strewn around, and watched the wounded struggling to crawl back, away from the killing zone. Once again both Brigaders and Spanish troops were paying for the deficiencies of their commanders and staff.

On the morning of 21 February the Scandinavian company in the Thaelmann Battalion took the opportunity of a lull to deepen their trenches and cut more branches for camouflage. It had finally stopped raining. Conny Andersson, a Swedish survivor of the battle, described the scene: ‘The morning sun caressed our earthen-grey faces and slowly dried the damp blankets.’ Some men crept back to fetch coffee from a huge green container which had been brought up to just behind the front line. Dates and biscuits were handed out. ‘We dozed a little in the sunshine, talking about nothing, rolled up the blankets as they dried, cleaned our rifles and prepared ammunition. A German poncing around with a helmet to tease the snipers was despatched to eternity with a professional crack. Some medical orderlies silently carried him down the road and extended the communal grave.’ The second company of the battalion was reinforced that day by some Austrians, ‘all of whom were bold and hearty and kitted out in short sheepskins. They aroused considerable attention wherever they went–at least the sheepskins did.’ Those who saw them coveted them, thinking of the cold hours of sentry duty in the early hours of the morning.¹⁰

The tight political control of ambitious commissars made propaganda motives interfere with military sense. There were a few extremely competent officers, like the French Colonel Putz, or the English Major Nathan (who was not promoted because he refused to become a Party member), but most senior officers bluffed their way through, relying on rigid discipline. Often their decisions resulted in massive casualties for little purpose. Their bravely dramatic orders like ‘stand and die’ or ‘not a centimetre’s retreat’, when ammunition was exhausted, sounded well in the propaganda accounts, but it was not the staff who suffered from them.

One of the most tragic episodes involved the men of the Lincoln Battalion, who had arrived in the middle of February fresh in their ‘doughboy’ uniforms. They were put under the command of an English charlatan who pretended to have been an officer in the 11th Hussars. He ordered them into attack after attack, losing 120 men out of 500. The Americans mutinied, nearly lynched the Walter Mitty character who had been imposed on them and refused to go back into the line until they could elect their own commander. Soon after these last attacks at the end of February the front stabilized, because both sides were now completely exhausted. The Valencia road had not been cut and the nationalists had suffered heavy losses among their best troops. (It would seem that casualties were roughly equal on both sides, although estimates varied from 6,000 up to 20,000.)

The Battle of the Jarama saw a closer co-ordination between ground and air forces on the nationalist side, but not on the republican, as a commissar with the Soviet squadrons reported back to Moscow: ‘The air force keeps working all day under a great strain, giving its greatest effort to the fighting. It defeats the enemy in the air [an over-optimistic claim] and on the ground, tank units break the front line. All that the infantry needs to do is to secure the results of the air and armoured operations. But the weak rifle units fail to do this. Our men, when they learn about this, feel that their work is being wasted. For example, the fighter pilots said after the air battles over the Jarama: “We don’t mind making another five or six sorties a day, if only the infantry would advance and secure the results of our work.” After our fighters had had a successful day of fighting over the Jarama sector, the pilots asked what the rifle units had achieved, and when they found out that the infantry had even retreated a little, this caused a lot of unhappiness. Pilot Sokolov became very nervous, he even wept.’¹¹

The nationalists had used the Condor Legion Junkers 52 to counter the T-26 attack on the Pindoque bridge and Modesto’s advance on La Marañosa. The republican air force had managed to maintain an effective umbrella for most of the early days of the battle, but after 13 February their supremacy was challenged by the Fiat CR 32s of the nationalists, which engaged the Chatos in a large-scale dogfight over Arganda. Five days later the ‘Blue Patrol’ Fiat group, led by the nationalist ace Morato, was transferred to the front. Together with Fiats of the Legionary Air Force they inflicted heavy losses on a republican group comprising a Chato squadron with a flight of American volunteers, a Russian Chato squadron and a Russian Mosca squadron. It would appear that the Soviet pilots were ordered to act with great caution as a result of these disastrous engagements, in which eight Chatos were shot down while the nationalists lost only one Fiat.¹²

After digging in, this second stalemate became a monotonous existence in the damp olive groves. It was a life of rain-filled trenches, congealed stew, occasional deaths from odd bursts of firing and useless attempts to get rid of lice in the seams of clothes. The commissars tried to keep up morale with organized political ‘discussions’ and by distributing pamphlets or Party newspapers. The lack of fighting also brought to the International Brigades at the front such diversely famous visitors as Stephen Spender, Henri Cartier-Bresson, the scientist Professor J. B. S. Haldane and Errol Flynn.

The events of recent months, especially the fall of Málaga, provoked dissension within the government over the handling of the war. The communists led a determined attack on General Asensio Torrado, the under-secretary of war, whose conduct Largo Caballero had successfully defended against criticism the previous October. (Earlier the communists had tried to flatter Asensio Torrado as the ‘hero of the democratic republic’, but he rejected their advances and took measures against them, such as insisting on an inquiry into irregularities in their 5th Regiment’s accounts and trying to stop their infiltration of the Assault Guard.) As they could not accuse him of incompetence after the qualified success at the Jarama, they attacked him for not having sent enough ammunition to prevent the fall of Málaga.

Álvarez del Vayo openly supported the communist ministers, thus finally ending his friendship with the prime minister. The anarchist ministers did nothing to help the general because they felt he had consistently discriminated against their troops. The republicans and right socialists also disliked him, mainly because of Largo’s obsessive reaction to any criticism of his chosen subordinate. The general was finally removed on 21 February. His place was filled by Carlos de Baráibar, a close colleague of Largo Caballero. The communists were disappointed not to have one of their own men appointed.

André Marty, in a long report to Moscow, gave his explanation for Caballero’s dogged resistance to the communists. ‘Caballero does not want defeat, but he is afraid of victory. He is afraid of victory, for victory is not possible without the active participation of the communists. Victory means an even greater strengthening of the position of the Communist Party. A final military victory over the enemy means for Caballero and the whole world the political hegemony of the Communist Party in Spain. This is a natural and indisputable thing…a republican Spain, raised from the ruins of fascism and led by communists, a free Spain of a new republican type, organized with the help of competent people, will be a great economic and military power, carrying out a policy of solidarity and close connections with the Soviet Union.’¹³ Although this blatant declaration of communist ambitions in republican Spain did not coincide with Stalin’s plans, the Comintern does not appear to have discouraged the idea in any way.

The political infighting over Asensio Torrado at Valencia came immediately after the power struggle between Miaja and Pozas. Having increased his responsibilities to include both the Jarama and Guadalajara fronts, Miaja was to have overall command during the largest battles of the first year of the civil war, including the only well-known republican victory, Guadalajara.

Franco’s decision to continue with the second half of the pincer operation was as unjustifiable as launching the Jarama offensive on its own.¹⁴ Varela’s troops were supposed to recommence their advance towards Alcalá de Henares, but the nationalist forces on the Jarama front were incapable of recreating any momentum.¹⁵ It may be that Franco continued with the operation in response to the misplaced optimism of the Italians after the Málaga walkover. The advance was to be almost entirely an Italian affair.

General Roatta now had some 35,000 men in General Coppi’s Llamas Negras Division, General Nuvolini’s Flechas Negras, General Rossi’s Dio lo vuole Division and General Bergonzoli’s Littorio Division. The last had regular officers and conscripts; the other formations contained fascist militia. This force of motorized infantry was supported by four companies of Fiat Ansaldo miniature tanks, 1,500 lorries, 160 field guns and four squadrons of Fiat CR 32 fighters, which poor visibility and water-logged airfields were to render virtually non-operational. Mussolini’s appetite for military victory pushed on the officers commanding these ‘involuntary volunteers’ whom he had now managed to have concentrated in an independent command.

The republican general staff appears to have been aware of the growing threat to the Guadalajara sector on the Madrid–Saragossa road, but only one company of T-26 tanks was sent to reinforce the thinly spread and inexperienced 12^th Division under Colonel Lacalle.

On 8 March, at first light, Coppi’s motorized Black Flames Division, led by armoured cars and Fiat Ansaldos, smashed straight through the republican lines in the Schwerpunkt manner. On their right the 2nd Brigade of the Soria Division commanded by the recently promoted Alcázar defender, General Moscardó, also broke the republican front, but they were on foot and soon fell behind. During that day fog and sleet reduced visibility to 100 metres in places. Bad weather continued on 9 March and the Italians allowed their attack to slow down while they widened the breach in the republican front. That night they stopped to rest because their men were cold and tired (many of their militia were still in tropical uniforms). This break in the momentum of the attack was incompatible with blitzkrieg tactics and was all the more serious since there was no co-ordinated attack on the Jarama front. Roatta sent urgent requests to Franco, but nothing was done.¹⁶ English and French strategists (with the notable exceptions of Liddell Hart and Charles de Gaulle) were to point to the Guadalajara offensive as proof that an armoured thrust was a worthless strategy. The Germans, on the other hand, knew that it had not been followed properly and that the Italian forces were ill trained for such a manoeuvre in the first place.

Miaja and Rojo, reacting more rapidly to the threat than they had at the Jarama, rushed in reinforcements and reorganized the command structure. Colonel Jurado was ordered to form IV Corps based on Guadalajara. Under his command he had Líster’s division astride the main Madrid–Saragossa road at Torija, Mera’s 14th Division on the right, opposite Brihuega, and Lacalle’s 12th Division on the left. Colonel Lacalle was furious not to be offered the overall command, but few people were impressed by this professional officer. The Soviet adviser, Rodimtsev, who visited the front just before the offensive began, was horrified by what he saw. After three days of battle, Lacalle claimed he was ill and the Italian communist Nino Nanetti was given his command. There was a large degree of foreign communist control at headquarters and Jurado’s staff was closely supervised by Soviet advisers, including Meretskov, Malinovsky, Rodimtsev and Voronov.

Rodimtsev, who was to be made a Hero of the Soviet Union for his bravery in the forthcoming battle, and later became world famous as the commander of the 13th Guards Rifle Division at Stalingrad, was attached to the 2nd Brigade commanded by Major González Pando. La Pasionaria had just visited Líster’s 11th Division. Dressed in male uniform and a fore-and-aft cap, she had been in the trenches talking to the soldiers, including two young women machine-gunners who, in Rodimtsev’s view, looked no more than sixteen or seventeen years old.¹⁷

On 10 March, the Black Flames and Black Arrows reached Brihuega almost unopposed and occupied the old walled town. In the afternoon the Italian Garibaldi Battalion of XII International Brigade was moved up the road from Torija, and one of their patrols came across an advance group of their fellow countrymen fighting for the nationalists. The fascist patrol spoke to them, and went back to report that they had made contact with elements of the Littorio Division which was advancing astride the main road. Soon afterwards a fascist column led by Fiat Ansaldos came up the road from Brihuega assuming the way to Torija was open. An Italian civil war then began, later concentrating around a nearby country house called the Ibarra Palace. Making use of the propaganda opportunity, Italian communists led by Nenni and Nanetti used loudspeakers to urge the fascist militia to join their brother workers. Republican aircraft also dropped leaflets promising safe conducts and 50 pesetas to those who deserted, and 100 pesetas for those who crossed over with their weapons.¹⁸

The next day the Black Arrows pushed Líster’s troops back down the main road, but the advance was halted by the Thaelmann Battalion with the help of tank support just short of Torija. On 12 March the republican forces counter-attacked. They were greatly aided by having a concrete runway at Albacete, where General ‘Duglas’ directed operations. Nearly 100 Chato and Mosca fighters, as well as two squadrons of Katiuska bombers, harried the Italians while they were pushed back in the centre by counter-attacks supported by Pavlov’s T-26 tanks and some of the faster BT-5s. The Legionary Air Force Fiats could not get off the ground to support them because of water-logged runways, and the Italian forces withdrew down the Saragossa road and back into Brihuega. General Roatta then proceeded to change the positions of his motorized divisions, a complicated manoeuvre which resulted in many vehicles becoming stuck in the heavy mud, where they were easy targets for the fighters.

Líster’s 11th Division began to advance at dawn up the ‘French highway’, with its 2nd Brigade in the lead. It was cold, with snow and mud, which made movement off the road impossible. This produced traffic jams and chaos. Rodimtsev witnessed a furious argument over who had priority between a battery commander and a supply officer. ‘Artillery is everything,’ shouted the battery commander. ‘It determines the success of a battle and an operation.’

‘So perhaps you’ll start firing at the enemy with Italian spaghetti?’ retorted the supply officer. ‘Who’s going to bring you ammunition if we don’t?’ The artillery officer, still furious, told his men to push the supply wagons off the road, whereupon the supply officer drew his pistol.¹⁹

XI International Brigade and El Campesino’s brigade retook Trijueque and advanced up the Brihuega road, dispersing the Italians they found. The inhabitants of Trijueque had been traumatized by the shelling and the air attacks. Fathers were pulling beams and rubble out of the way to find survivors. Among those killed was an eighteen-year-old heroine called Antonia Portero who, according to one Soviet account, had been leading a company. She was one of the first to enter Trijueque, but she was killed by an Italian bombing raid and buried in the ruins of a house.²⁰ Karl Anger, who witnessed the scenes, also saw the arrival of Mikhail Koltsov, the leading Soviet journalist and plenipotentiary: ‘A car arrives. Koltsov climbs out of it and greets us silently, like in a house where someone has just died.’²¹

But Koltsov’s morale soon rose when he saw evidence of the Italians’ rapid retreat. ‘The highway is jammed with Fiat tractors, which they used to transport guns, as well as huge Lancia trucks and cars. The road is littered with rucksacks, weapons and cartridges. There is lots of stuff inside the trucks…An excited young fellow is persuading the passing troops to take half a dozen hand grenades and as much sponge cake as they can. The soldiers fill their bags with grenades and cake without stopping their march.’²²

The next day, 13 March, the republican IV Corps started to prepare for a major counter-offensive, while the Republic’s own representatives protested to the League of Nations and the Non-intervention Committee with documentary proof from prisoners of the presence of Italian formations.²³ The republican plan was straightforward. Líster’s division and all available tanks were to be concentrated on the Saragossa road, while Mera’s 14th Division was to cross the River Tajuña from the south-east bank and assault Brihuega. Franco’s chief of operations, Colonel Barroso, had warned the Italians that republican forces might attack their flank in this way, but he was ignored.

Soon after midday Pavlov’s T-26s charged up the Saragossa road, with infantry clinging to the outsides and firing away from the rattling tanks. The Italians, who had been preparing to advance again, had no defensive positions and were caught in the open. The tanks even managed to ambush a convoy of Italian trucks. The Spanish infantry leaped off the tanks, which then proceeded to ram the lorries and crush some under their tracks. One group of tanks found a camp concealed in a ravine and began shooting it up. But the republican soldiers were tired after the long approach march the night before and heavy going in the mud. And as they neared Trijueque, they were repulsed by machine-gun fire. They also found themselves counter-attacked by Italians with flame-throwers attached to their Fiat-Ansaldo miniature tanks. An Italian infantry battalion then appeared out of an olive grove. Major Pando and Rodimtsev organized an all-round defence at the base of a small hill. Their machine-gun company, commanded by a woman, Captain Encarnación Fernández Luna, managed to hold off the battalion until Líster organized a counterattack with tanks and reinforcements. Rodimtsev and Pando ran over to the machine-gunners to hug their commander in gratitude, only to find her calmly combing her hair while looking into a fragment of broken mirror.²⁴

Meanwhile, Mera’s preparations for his part of the counter-offensive were not without problems. He had placed a battalion of carabineros by the river to guard a small bridge prepared for demolition by his dinamiteros, in case the enemy made a further attempt to advance, but the carabinero commanding officer blew it up despite his orders.²⁵

A serious setback was avoided only because Mera was helped by local CNT members acting as spies and scouts who were able to advise him of the best places to throw a pontoon bridge across the swollen river. At dawn on the morning of 18 March his division crossed the pontoon bridge and occupied the heights above Brihuega. Heavy sleet shielded them from the enemy’s view, but it also caused the general offensive to be delayed. Mera had no alternative but to keep the division lying in the wet with instructions not to fire, hoping that the Italians would not discover them.

The weather did not start to clear until after midday; only then did the Chato and Katiuska squadrons become operational. Jurado gave the order for a general attack. Líster’s division advanced up the main road, supported again by T-26 tanks, and this force crashed into Bergonzoli’s Littorio Division, made up of regular troops. XI International Brigade also went on to the offensive. Karl Anger wrote excitedly of ‘the tap-dance of machine-guns’.²⁶

On the republicans’ right flank, Mera’s division had almost managed to surround Brihuega when the enemy became seized by panic and fled. The CTV was saved from an even greater disaster by the fall of darkness, the more orderly retreat of the Littorio division and the number of Italian trucks available for their escape. Even so, their offensive had cost the Italians 5,000 casualties and the loss of a considerable quantity of weapons and vehicles. Captured Italian documents stated that many of their supposedly wounded soldiers were found to have nothing wrong with them under their bandages.

For the republicans, the end of the battle brought a moment of respite. Food was brought up on mules and wine was issued. Some of the men cooked paella in their trenches. Commissars issued three cigarettes to each man and trucks brought up new alpargatas to replace those shoes which had rotted in the mud and snow.²⁷ Italian morale, on the other hand, was devastated and Mussolini was furious. Since Moscardó’s troops had suffered very few casualties, Franco’s officers refused to see the engagement as a nationalist defeat. They were scathing about their allies’ performance and composed a song to the tune of ‘Faccetta nera’ which went: ‘Guadalajara is not Abyssinia; here the reds are chucking bombs which explode.’ It ended: ‘The retreat was a dreadful thing; one Italian even arrived in Badajoz.’

As the only publicized republican victory of the war, the battle became a propaganda trophy. The communists claimed that the town of Brihuega was captured by El Campesino’s brigade and even added several anecdotal touches. In fact, El Campesino arrived alone at dusk on a motorcycle and was fired at by outlying pickets from the 14th Division. He raced back to report that the town was still in enemy hands. Considering that Líster’s division was supposed to be advancing up the Saragossa road, El Campesino had no official reason for being anywhere near Brihuega. The communist version of events was dropped in later years after he was disgraced during his Soviet exile and sent to a labour camp.

In that dangerous year of 1937, Soviet officers were to disappear into camps much sooner than El Campesino. Stalinist spy mania was reaching a peak. Suspicions in Spain and suspicions back in the Soviet Union fed upon each other. Regimental Commissar A. Agaltsov reported to Moscow in 1937 that the ‘fascist intervention in Spain and Trotskyist–Bukharin gangs that are operating in our country are links of the same chain’.²⁸ And some of the Soviet military advisers who returned from special mission in Spain accelerated the ‘mincing machine’ of the purges. G. Kulik, the commander of III Rifle Corps, wrote on 29 April 1937 to Voroshilov: ‘One cannot help asking oneself, how could this happen that the enemies of the people, traitors to my motherland, for whose interests I have fought at the front in Spain, could have managed to receive leading positions?…As a bolshevik, I don’t want the blood of our people to be shed unnecessarily because of the career makers, hidden traitors and mediocre leaders of troops, whom I have seen in the Spanish army. I consider it necessary that a careful review is conducted of all our commanders, in the first place, high-ranking ones, both in the army and in headquarters.’²⁹ Stalin’s purge of the Red Army was under way.

The failure of the Guadalajara offensive was excellent for morale, but it was not the turning point which the Republic and its supporters abroad tried to portray. Herbert Matthews of the New York Times even wrote that ‘Guadalajara is for fascism what Bailén was for Napoleon’.³⁰ From a political point of view, however, some argued that ‘Guadalajara aroused the enthusiasm of all anti-fascists…and represented a hard blow for the prestige of fascism and Mussolini’.³¹ Yet, paradoxically, Mussolini’s desire for vengeance to wipe out the humiliation only tied him closer to Franco’s cause.³² As the Wilhelmstrasse put it, ‘The defeat was of no great military importance, to be sure, but on the other hand it had unfavourable psychological and political reactions which needed to be stamped out by a military victory.’³³ Mussolini replaced Roatta with General Ettore Bastico and devoted even more money and armaments to the war at a terrible cost for Italy.

The only certain consequence for the nationalists was that Franco had to abandon his obsession with entering Madrid quickly and to adopt a longer-term strategy. After the casualties suffered at the Jarama, German advisers were able to argue more strongly for a programme of reducing vulnerable republican territories first. For a number of reasons the most attractive target was undoubtedly the northern republican zone along the Bay of Biscay.

The War in the North

The isolated northern zone along the Cantabrian coast was the logical military target for the nationalists after four unsuccessful attempts to cut short the war by capturing Madrid. The German advisers put strong pressure on Franco to change his strategy. A longer war would deflect attention from Hitler’s plans in Central Europe, but they were also interested in obtaining the steel and coal of the region for their accelerating armaments programme. In any case, Franco had finally realized that he could not muster sufficient troops to mount a decisive offensive around the capital where the Republic had the advantage of interior lines as well as numbers. The only way to improve the ratio of forces was to crush a weaker sector first in order to release troops for the tougher objectives in the centre. As both the Aragón and Andalucian fronts could be reinforced by the republicans fairly rapidly, the beleaguered northern zone was the obvious choice.

The northern zone had been left untouched by the centralization carried out by Largo Caballero’s government. The councils of Asturias and Santander still reflected the union-based organization which followed the rising, while the Basques regarded themselves as autonomous allies of the Republic. Although Basque volunteer units had fought at Oviedo, and Asturian and Santanderino militia helped in Vizcaya, the northern regions were not united, except in their objection to a centralized republican command. The Basques, in particular, rejected the idea that the ‘Army of Euzkadi’ should simply be part of the Army of the North, commanded ultimately from Valencia. Largo Caballero then agreed to this without telling General Llano de la Encomienda, the army commander.

On 1 October 1936 the statute of Basque autonomy had come before the Cortes sitting in Valencia. It took effect four days later. On 7 October the municipal councillors of the region met in the Casa de Juntas in Guernica, ‘the sacred city of the Basques’, in accordance with their ancient customs. The purpose of this meeting was to elect a president or lehendakari. The proceedings had been kept secret in case of air attack, and this small country town to the east of Bilbao was unmolested as José Antonio Aguirre, the 32-year-old leader of the Basque Nationalist Party, swore his oath in the Basque language under the oak tree of Guernica.

Afterwards he named his government, which included four members of the Basque Nationalist Party, three socialists, two republicans, a communist and a member of the social-democratic Basque Action. The Basque Nationalist Party, or PNV, whose motto was ‘God and our old law’, controlled the ministries of defence, finance, justice and the interior.¹ The programme of the PNV made superficial concessions to the left, with its social-Christian doctrine, yet also insisted on the defence of religious freedom, the maintenance of public order and upheld the Basque people’s sense of national identity.² During its nine months of existence, the Basque government created the administrative structure of an independent state, with its own currency, its own flag–the red, green and white ikurriña and judicial system.

Telesforo Monzón, the minister of the interior, was a young aristocrat who some 40 years later became the leader of Herri Batasuna, the political front of the ETA guerrilla organization. His first move was to disband the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard. Then he started to recruit his new police force among Basque-speaking supporters. They were heavily armed, selected for their height and dressed in shiny leather uniforms. This elite corps, the Ertzaña, under the sole control of the PNV, was hardly reassuring to some of their left-wing allies, particularly the anarcho-syndicalist CNT.

Friction, however, came less from political than military differences. The CNT had shown in its furious assaults on the rebel-held buildings in San Sebastián during the rising, in its burning of Irún when it was almost surrounded by the nationalists and later in its intention to lay waste to San Sebastián before Mola’s troops occupied it, that it wished to fight a war to the finish. The CNT stated openly its preference for dying in the ruins rather than submitting to Franquist rule. The Basques, in line with the character of a mountain people, were content simply to defend themselves when directly attacked. They even had their symbolic Maloto tree on the border marking the point beyond which their forces should never advance. The Basque nationalists made it clear from the beginning of the civil war that, apart from their anti-fascist feelings, they were on the side of the Republic because it promised them autonomy. They proudly proclaimed their Catholic faith and attacked the anti-clericalism in other parts of republican territory. Nevertheless, their resistance to the military rising was supported by the great majority of their priests in spite of the unqualified backing of the Vatican and the Spanish Church for General Franco.

The Basque nationalists also pretended that there were no class divisions in Euzkadi. This had been partly true of agriculture, where feudalism had been weak, but the seafaring side of Basque life, dominated by local shipping magnates, with international empires, was scarcely classless. And in the nineteenth century industrialization attracted cheap labour from Castile, Galicia and Asturias. It was from this non-Basque workforce that the memberships of the socialist UGT, the CNT and the Communist Party were largely recruited. Indigenous workers were represented by the STV, Solidarity of Basque Workers.

The left believed fervently that the nationalists must be defeated. The Basque nationalists, on the other hand, seemed to know in their hearts that the republicans would be defeated. It may be that they learned the idea of being good losers from the English. At any rate, they treated their prisoners extremely well, sending many to France for release in the hope that this might induce the enemy to be a good winner. The nationalists made no reciprocal gestures to this attempt at ‘humanizing the war’, as Manuel de Irujo, the Basque minister in the central government, called it. They merely stepped up their campaign of hate, using such self-contradictory phrases as ‘soviet-separatists’ to describe the Basques.

To have the Catholic Basques as enemies was an embarrassment to the nationalist crusade and Franco was later to attack ‘these Christian democrats, less Christian than democrat, who, infected by a destructive liberalism, did not manage to understand this sublime page of religious persecution in Spain which, with its thousands of martyrs, is the most glorious the Church has suffered’. The Archbishop of Burgos called Basque priests ‘the dross of the Spanish clergy, in the pay of the reds’. The professor of moral theology at Salamanca, having described ‘the armed rising against the Popular Front’ as ‘the most holy war in history’, said ‘all who positively oppose the national government in present circumstances, trying to weaken its strength or diminish its power or obstruct its role, should be considered as traitors to the fatherland, infidels to religion and criminals to humanity’.

Cardinal Archbishop Goma also accused the Basque clergy of taking part in the fighting. Even though most modern military chaplains carry sidearms to protect the wounded, it would appear that only a few, if any, Basque priests were given a pistol, and there is no evidence that they used them. The primate also chose to overlook the fanatical Carlist chaplains on his own side. Many of these requeté almoners, purple tassels hanging from their large red berets, were in the tradition of the ferocious nineteenth-century Carlist priest, Santa Cruz, who used to absolve his prisoners en masse before shooting them. It was the Navarrese Carlists who were chosen as the main instrument to reduce their Basque neighbours in the spring of 1937.

There had been two major areas of action on the northern front during the winter. The fierce siege of Oviedo continued and a Basque offensive was mounted against Villarreal on 30 November 1936, when General Llano de la Encomienda secretly assembled nineteen infantry battalions, six batteries of artillery and some armoured vehicles. A breakthrough to capture Vitoria might have been achieved if they had not been spotted by a nationalist reconnaissance aircraft from Burgos. The nationalist counter-attack prevented the capture of Villarreal, but the Basques were left in control of the three mountains, Maroto, Albertia and Jarinto, whose peaks they proceeded to fortify. Establishing uncamouflaged defensive positions on peaks was to be one of their most serious mistakes. The Basques did not appreciate the ground-attack capabilities of fighters or the effects of bombing.

By the spring of 1937 the Basque nationalists and their left-wing allies had raised some 46 battalions, of which about half were Basque militia, the Euzko-Gudaroztea. The rest were UGT, CNT, communist or republican units. (Many Basques were shocked by the idea of women fighting in some of the left-wing ranks.) These formations were reinforced by ten battalions from Asturias and Santander who did not get on well with the local population. The general staff under Llano de la Encomienda consisted of professional officers, none of whom seem to have been either energetic or efficient. The greatest liability, however, was the shortage of weapons.

At the beginning of the war Telesforo Monzón’s trip to Barcelona had produced only limited supplies. Other means had to be used. The gold reserves in the Bank of Spain were seized. Weapons were purchased abroad, or even stolen, and smuggled back by fishing vessels through the nationalist blockade or brought in aboard English ships. In the late autumn, even though the republican battleship Jaime I had left the area, some larger ships still managed to get through. One of these was the Russian A. Andreev, which brought the Basques two squadrons of Chatos, 30 tanks (T-26 and Renaults) and fourteen Russian armoured cars with 37mm cannon, 40 mortars, 300 machine-guns and 15,000 rifles.³ Food was also a major worry, with seldom more than two weeks’ supply. The monotonous and sparse diet of chickpeas from Mexico was all that separated the Basques from starvation. There were few cats left alive in the Basque country and ingenious methods of catching seagulls were tried.

The nationalist naval force off the Cantabrian coast consisted of the battleship España, the cruiser Almirante Cervera and the destroyer Velasco. The Basques had only an ancient destroyer and two scarcely serviceable submarines. They therefore improvised by mounting 101mm guns from the battleship Jaime I on four deep-sea fishing vessels.

The problem for the republican forces, wrote a Soviet adviser, was the naval leadership, especially Captain Enrique Navarro. ‘According to the local people and sailors, Navarro was not paying serious attention to the operations of the flotilla. He has avoided visiting the ships, as he is afraid of the sailors. He wears civilian clothes while in town and at his headquarters on the shore. During our first meeting, Navarro complained about the lack of discipline among the sailors, about the threats from committees of ships, and said that a plot existed to attempt to assassinate him…There was not a single socialist, to say nothing of communists, among the personnel of the headquarters.’ Warships of the flotilla were staying passively in Bilbao, following, apparently, a silent agreement between officers at the headquarters and on the ships. Repairs lasted for indefinite periods of time under different pretexts. The republican flotilla was given the scornful nickname of the ‘Non-Interference Committee’.⁴

On 5 March the nationalist cruiser Canarias was spotted off the mouth of the River Nervión with a small vessel, the Yorkbrook, which she had captured. Basque 105mm and 155mm shore batteries opened fire immediately to drive her off; they knew that armed trawlers, escorting a boat from Bayonne, were due. When they appeared out of the mist, the Canarias left her prize to engage them. One of the trawlers, the Bizkaya, nipped round the Canarias and made off with her prize, while the other two replied to her 8-inch guns with their much smaller armament. One of them, the Guipuzkoa, caught fire and had to make for the shelter of the shore batteries, but the crew of the other one, the Nabarra, continued the attack and fought on into the night until all ammunition was used and the trawler sunk.⁵ This incident, reminiscent of Tennyson’s ‘The Revenge’, was commemorated in an epic poem by Cecil Day-Lewis.

In mid March the nationalist commanding general, Emilio Mola, issued his preliminary orders for the campaign. His chief of staff, Colonel Vigón, was the most capable planner in the nationalist army and about the only senior Spanish staff officer to be respected by his German colleagues, who described him as ‘one of the most oustanding phenomena in the new Spanish nationalist army’.⁶ However, even Vigón could do little to overcome Mola’s excessive caution. Richthofen claimed that ‘the leadership is practically in the hands of the Condor Legion’.⁷

The nationalist force was based on the Navarre Division of four Carlist brigades. In addition, there was the Black Arrows Division, with 8,000 Spanish infantry commanded by Italian officers and supported by Fiat Ansaldos. In this mountainous region, however, the Condor Legion was to prove the nationalists’ biggest advantage. The thin coastal strip allowed the defenders little warning of raids, while the terrain greatly restricted their choice of airfields from which defending fighters could be scrambled. The Basques had only a minute fighter force, so the Condor Legion was able to risk using obsolete Heinkel 51s as ground-attack aircraft while waiting for more of the new Messerschmitts to arrive.

The Condor Legion fighter wing was concentrated at Vitoria, the bomber squadrons at Burgos, because the airfield at Vitoria was too narrow. General Sperrle stayed with Franco’s GHQ at Salamanca, leaving Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen as the operational commander of the strike forces. On the northern front these consisted of three squadrons of Junkers 52 bombers, an ‘experimental squadron’ of Heinkel 111 medium bombers, three squadrons of Heinkel 51 fighters and half a squadron of Messerschmitt 109s, although they were suffering from engine problems.⁸ The Italian Legionary Air Force also flew missions in support of troop attacks, with Savoia Marchetti 81s and 79s as well as their Fiat CR 32 fighters.

After issuing his ultimatum that ‘if submission is not immediate I will raze Vizcaya to the ground’, Mola ordered an advance from the southeast. The offensive opened on 31 March with an assault on the three mountains–Albertia, Maroto and Jarinto–which had been taken by the Basques in the Villarreal offensive the previous year. The nationalists showed on this first day that they meant to make use of their crushing superiority in the air. The towns of Elorrio and Durango, behind the front line, were bombed in relays by the heavy Junkers 52s and Italian S-81s from Soria.

Durango, a town of 10,000 inhabitants, had no air defences nor any form of military presence. A church was bombed during the celebration of mass, killing fourteen nuns, the officiating priest and most of the congregation. Heinkel 51 fighters then strafed fleeing civilians. Altogether, some 250 non-combatants died in the attack. The objective of the raid appears to have been to block the roads through the town with rubble, though that does not explain the activities of the fighters.⁹ General Queipo de Llano stated on Seville radio that ‘our planes bombed military objectives in Durango, and later communists and socialists locked up the priests and nuns, shooting without pity and burning the churches’. On 2 April, the nationalists claimed on Radio Valladolid that ‘in Durango only military objectives were attacked. It has been confirmed, on the other hand, that it was the reds who destroyed the church. The church of Santa María was set on fire while it was full of church-goers.’¹⁰

The main objectives that day included the three mountains and bombing raids were combined with an artillery barrage just before the Navarrese troops of Alonso Vega went into the attack. Condor Legion bombers went in at 8 a.m.: ‘60 tons of bombs dropped within two minutes,’

Richthofen recorded. Richthofen, in his command post, had ‘a very good view’. The Navarrese troops, in order to be recognized clearly by the German aircraft ‘have white tunics on their back. The national flag is carried ahead.’¹¹ The Basque militiamen, known as gudaris, hardly knew what had hit them before they were overrun by red-bereted Carlists screaming their war cry of ‘Viva Cristo Rey!’. Reserves could not be brought up because of air strikes on all communications leading to the front. The artillery barrage had also cut field telephone wires from the forward positions.

The Basque counter-attack on Mount Gorbea was successful and they were to hold it for another eight weeks, thus securing their extreme right flank. But two other mountains were lost the next day, while the air attacks on and around the town of Ochandiano smashed a hole in the front. The gudaris were demoralized by this overwhelming air power. They could fight back against the fierceness of a Carlist infantry attack, but they lacked both anti-aircraft guns and fighter cover. Twenty battalions lacked proper automatic weapons and some units’ machine-gun companies had only a handful of machine pistols. On 4 April Richthofen noted: ‘The fighters are strafing the reds up and down the mountain. 200 dead 400 taken prisoner.’ The Basque forces were pushed back, but they dug in and fought on. ‘We are always surprised by the toughness of the red infantry. The reds are bleeding heavily.’¹²

Later that day, to Richthofen’s exasperation, Mola gave orders for a pause in the offensive. ‘War here is a tedious business,’ Richthofen wrote on 5 April. ‘First Spaniards are brought to an operation. Then operational orders have to be worked through. Then reconnaissance, then visiting headquarters. Look at the operational orders and suggest changes, perhaps with the threat “without us”. Checking if orders have gone out and were followed.’ The next morning his bombers attacked as agreed, ‘but the infantry does not intervene, then asks for more support’. Mola ordered another attack for the next day. ‘We are dropping bombs for no reason at all,’ wrote Richthofen. ‘Protest telegram to Franco.’¹³

On 6 April the nationalists announced a blockade of republican ports on the Cantabrian coast. The same day the nationalist cruiser Almirante Cervera, with the moral support of the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee in the background, stopped a British merchantman. However, HMS Blanche and HMS Brazen of the British destroyer flotilla assigned to the Bay of Biscay raced up and the cargo ship was allowed into Bilbao.

Baldwin’s government was alarmed that Anglo-Basque trade might force Great Britain to take sides in Spain. It did not wish to recognize either the nationalists or the republicans as belligerents, because that meant allowing them to stop and search British ships en route to Spanish ports. Nevertheless, in the light of subsequent events it is difficult to credit the cabinet or its advisers with impartiality. Admiral Lord Chatfield, the First Sea Lord, was an admirer of General Franco and his officers in the Bay of Biscay had an undoubted sympathy for their nationalist counterparts. Sir Henry Chilton, the ambassador at Hendaye, who still had the ear of the Foreign Office though he was not on the scene, acted as a mouthpiece for the nationalists. Chatfield and Chilton informed the British government that the blockade of Bilbao was effective because the nationalists had mined the mouth of the River Nervión and would shell British ships if they did not stop. Although no unit of the Royal Navy had been near the area in question for months, the Basques’ assurances that all mines had been cleared were ignored. The Royal Navy flotilla was ordered by London to instruct all British vessels in the Biscay area en route to Bilbao to wait in the French port of Saint Jean de Luz until further notice. As if to mitigate any damage to British prestige caused by this implicit support of the nationalists, the battle-cruiser HMS Hood was ordered to Basque waters from Gibraltar.

The Royal Navy’s view of the blockade’s effectiveness led to furious scenes in the House of Commons. There were only four nationalist ships watching 200 miles of coast and the Basque shore batteries controlled an area beyond the three-mile limit. The government was taken aback at the onslaught it received but Sir Samuel Hoare, the First Lord of the Admiralty, would not admit the truth about the mines in the Nervión, for his source of information was the nationalist navy.

On 20 April the Seven Seas Spray, a small British merchantman which had decided to ignore all Royal Navy instructions and warnings, arrived off Bilbao from Saint Jean de Luz. There were neither nationalist warships nor mines; only an ecstatic welcome from the population of Bilbao awaited them. The British government and the Admiralty were totally discredited. Other vessels waiting near the French Basque coast immediately set out for Spain. One of them was stopped ten miles from Bilbao by the cruiser Almirante Cervera. The merchantman radioed for help and this time the Royal Navy, in the form of HMS Hood, had to take a firm line with the nationalists. In the Basques’ view it was poetic justice that the battleship España struck a nationalist mine off Santander nine days later and sank.

The Basques could not now be starved into surrender, but the fighting which had begun again on 20 April was going badly for them. The combination of nationalist air power, the fighting qualities of the Carlist troops and republican units pulling out of line without warning brought the front close to collapse. Yet Richthofen’s frustrations did not decrease.

On 20 April he was furious with the Italian air force. ‘There you are. They dropped their bombs on our own troops. A day full of mishaps. Führer’s birthday. Sander [Sperrle] has been promoted to lieutenant-general.’¹⁴ Whatever the imperfections on the nationalist side, chaos among the republican forces was increased by the slowness and incompetence of the general staff. Its chief, Colonel Montaud, was notorious for his defeatism and the regular officers were widely criticized for ‘their civil service mentality’.¹⁵ The situation was so bad that Aguirre tried to intervene. Luckily for the Basques, Mola’s cautious advance failed to take full advantage of the republican disarray.

On 23 April Richthofen noted: ‘Weather very good. 4th Brigade has, despite orders, deployed two battalions not twelve. They are to be relieved. Infantry is not moving forwards. What can one do? Condor Legion pulls out at 1800 hours. One cannot lead infantry which is not willing to attack weakly held positions.’ The next day he complained again, exasperated that the Italians had bombed the wrong town. ‘These are burdens for the leadership which one cannot imagine…Should we destroy Bilbao after all?’¹⁶ The Italians had been concerned that an attack on the Catholic Basques in the north would provoke the Pope and were reluctant to bomb the main Basque city. One can only speculate, but perhaps Richthofen’s frustrations played a part in the most notorious of all the Condor Legion’s operations.

During 25 April many of the demoralized troops from Marquina fell back on Guernica, which lay some ten kilometres behind the lines. On the following day, Monday 26 April, at 4.30 in the afternoon, the main church bell in Guernica rang to warn of air attack. It was market day and, although some farmers had been turned back at the edge of the town, many had still come in with their cattle and sheep. The refugees from the advancing enemy, together with the town’s population, went down into the cellars which had been designated as ‘refugios’. A single Heinkel 111 bomber of the Condor Legion’s ‘experimental squadron’ arrived over the town, dropped its load on the centre and disappeared.¹⁷

Most people came out of their shelters, many going to help the injured. Fifteen minutes later the full squadron flew over, dropping various sizes of bombs. People who rushed back into the shelters were choked by smoke and dust. They became alarmed as it was evident that the cellars were not strong enough to withstand the heavier bombs. A stampede into the fields around the town began, then the Heinkel 51 fighter squadrons swept over, strafing and grenading men, women and children, as well as nuns from the hospital and even the livestock. The major part of the attack had not even started.

At 5.15 the heavy sound of aero engines was heard. The soldiers immediately identified them as ‘trams’, the nickname for the ponderous Junkers 52. Three squadrons from Burgos carpet-bombed the town systematically in twenty-minute relays for two and a half hours. (Carpet bombing had just been invented by the Condor Legion when attacking the republican positions around Oviedo.) Their loads were made up of small and medium bombs, as well as 250kg bombs, anti-personnel twenty-pounders and incendiaries. The incendiaries were sprinkled down from the Junkers in two-pound aluminium tubes like metallic confetti. Eyewitnesses described the resulting scenes in terms of hell and the apocalypse. Whole families were buried in the ruins of their houses or crushed in the refugios; cattle and sheep, blazing with white phosphorus, ran crazily between the burning buildings until they died. Blackened humans staggered blindly through the flames, smoke and dust, while others scrabbled in the rubble, hoping to dig out friends and relatives. According to the Basque government, approximately a third of the town’s population were casualties–1,654 killed and 889 wounded, although more recent research indicates that no more than between 200 and 300 died.¹⁸ Those hurrying towards the town from Bilbao had their original disbelief at the news changed by the orange-red sky in the distance. The parliament buildings and the oak tree were found to be untouched because they had been just outside the flight path which the pilots had followed so rigidly. The rest of Guernica was a burned skeleton.

On the following day, 27 April, news of the destruction of Guernica appeared in the British press. The next morning The Times and the New York Times published the article of George Steer which was to have a tremendous effect internationally.¹⁹ Aguirre denounced the event in the following words: ‘German aviators, in the service of the Spanish rebels, have bombed Guernica, burning the historic city venerated by all Basques.’²⁰

As with the account of Durango, the nationalists set out to reverse the story. Using the precedent of Irún, they said that the town had been destroyed by its defenders as they withdrew; Queipo de Llano specified Asturian dinamiteros.²¹ Franco’s GHQ issued a statement on 29 April: ‘We wish to tell the world, loudly and clearly, a little about the burning of Guernica. Guernica was destroyed by fire and gasoline. The red hordes in the criminal service of Aguirre burned it to ruins. The fire took place yesterday and Aguirre, since he is a common criminal, has uttered the infamous lie of attributing this atrocity to our noble and heroic air force.’²²

The Spanish Church backed this story completely, and its professor of theology in Rome went so far as to declare that there was not a single German in Spain and that Franco needed only Spanish soldiers, who were second to none in the world. It was a version that even Franco’s most fervent supporters abroad had difficulty in sustaining. General Roatta himself informed Count Ciano on 8 May that General Sperrle had told him that the Condor Legion had bombed Guernica with incendiaries.²³ An American journalist, escorted by a Falangist, met a staff officer from the Army of the North a few months later in August. Her Falangist escort, who totally believed the story put out by Salamanca, told the staff officer that ‘reds’ in Guernica had tried to tell them that the town had been bombed from the air, not burned. ‘But of course it was bombed,’ the staff officer replied. ‘We bombed it and bombed it and bombed it, and bueno, why not?’²⁴

Condor Legion veterans were later to claim that their squadrons were really trying to bomb the Renteria bridge just outside Guernica, but that strong winds blew their loads on to the town. The bridge was never hit, there was virtually no wind, the Junkers were flying abreast and not in line, and anti-personnel bombs, incendiaries and machine-guns are not effective against stone bridges. According to Richthofen’s personal diary, the attack had been planned jointly with the nationalists. Mola’s chief of staff, Colonel Vigón, agreed to the target the day before the raid and again a few hours before it. No nationalist officer mentioned the importance of Guernica in Basque life and history, but even if they had, the plan would not have been changed.

Richthofen’s war diary entry for 26 April, although terse, could hardly be clearer and completely contradicts the nationalist version of events. ‘K/88 [the Condor Legion bomber force] was targeted at Guernica, in order to halt and disrupt the Red withdrawal, which has to pass through here.’ The following day, he simply wrote: ‘Guernica burning’. And on 28 April, he wrote: ‘Guernica must be totally destroyed.’²⁵ The Condor Legion’s Gefechtsbericht (combat report) for the day does not appear to have survived for some reason. One intention of the raid may have been to block the roads, as he wrote, but everything else points to a major experiment in the effects of aerial terrorism.²⁶

As the retreat continued in this sector there were several brave and effective rearguard actions. At Guernica the communist Rosa Luxembourg Battalion under Major Cristóbal held back the nationalists for a time, despite the extraordinary incompetence of their formation commander, Colonel Yartz, who appears to have been incapable of reading a map. Then, on 1 May, as the withdrawal steadied, the 8th UGT Battalion laid a highly successful trap at Bermeo, on the coast, putting 4,000 men of the Black Arrows and their Fiat Ansaldos to flight.

For the Army of Euzkadi, however, it was now necessary to start retreating to the ‘Iron Ring’ round Bilbao. This defence works, with a perimeter of some 80 kilometres, had been started the previous winter. With 15,000 men working on it, as well as civilian contracting companies who installed concrete strong points, it was wrongly compared to the Maginot Line. It had no depth–in many places nothing more than a single line of trenches–and it was incomplete. There was no attempt at concealment and the officer in charge, Major Goicoechea, had gone over to the nationalists with its detailed plans. President Azaña had no illusions about the defensive capability of these positions. ‘What the people have called the “ring of Bilbao”…is nothing more than a fantasy. Furthermore, I fear that the city of Bilbao will not be defended when the enemy are at its gates.’²⁷ His scepticism was echoed by Colonel von Richthofen, who commented on 29 April, ‘Photographs show that for the moment large parts of these positions have not been fortified.’ Two days later he departed on holiday, having just heard of the Condor Legion’s most serious loss of the whole war. Republican fighters had intercepted a Junkers 52 carrying seven of his fighter pilots, all of whom were killed when it was shot down.²⁸

The Italians were increasing the size of their forces in the north and the nationalists’ four Navarrese brigades were each brought up almost to divisional strength. The republicans, meanwhile, raised more gudari, UGT, CNT and communist battalions, and brought in Asturian and Santanderino reinforcements. The Valencia government tried to help by sending aircraft via France, but the Non-Intervention Committee frustrated it on two occasions. That the non-intervention policy was effective only on the French frontier increased republican bitterness greatly. It was thought too dangerous to fly the aircraft straight to Bilbao and risk arriving with little fuel and no protection against nationalist fighters. There were now only six Chatos left in the Basque country and, although their pilots had managed to shoot down the first two Dornier 17s to arrive in Spain, morale seemed to sink after their ace, Felipe del Río, was killed.

Relations between the Basques and the Valencia government became strained by misunderstandings. The republican government in Valencia suspected Aguirre and his ministers of trying to arrange a separate peace, while they became convinced that help was denied them on purpose. The Republic knew that the conquest of the north would not only give the nationalists vital industries, but also release large numbers of enemy troops for deployment in the centre. They therefore planned to launch two attacks in May, the Huesca offensive and an attack in the Sierra de Guadarrama towards Segovia. Neither of these attempts, however, forced the nationalists to divert troops from the northern front.

On 22 May the 4th Navarre Brigade reached the eastern side of the Iron Ring. The nationalists’ progress was slower as the Basques and their allies were now fighting more effectively and seemed less affected by air attack. They were beginning to fire back, a tactic which, even if not successful, kept the Fiat and the Heinkel fighters at more of a distance. (Almost a third of the Fiats destroyed in action during the war were brought down as a result of small-arms fire.)

Some of the incompetent senior officers had also been replaced. But Aguirre’s attempts to animate the army staff during the campaign had done little to improve the situation. His interference stopped when Llano de la Encomienda was replaced by General Gámir Ulíbarri, a Basque regular officer sent from Valencia. Some new brigade and divisional commanders were also appointed, such as the remarkable mechanic, Belderrain, who had organized the effective defence of the Inchortas, Cristóbal, the communist smuggler, and the French Colonel Putz from the International Brigades. On the other hand the Russian General Goriev stayed on despite his unimpressive performance.

A change in the nationalist command was at the same time made necessary by the death of General Mola, in an air crash, on 3 June. His death could be described as a setback for the Basques, because his caution, which so exasperated the Germans, had saved them at critical moments. On the nationalist side there were many who suspected that the Caudillo or his supporters were somehow involved, but the suspicion was almost certainly groundless. Franco’s other great rival, Sanjurjo, had died in similar circumstances, but air crashes were frequent and accounted for nearly as many lost machines as enemy action.

Mola’s place was filled by General Dávila, who was also methodical, but far more stable than his predecessor. Dávila rearranged his forces, ordering the assault on the Iron Ring to begin on 12 June. Major Goicoechea’s plans, confirmed by air reconnaissance, pinpointed the weakest spot in the defence line. A bombardment with 150 artillery pieces and air attacks was swiftly followed by the advance of troops commanded by Colonels García Valiño, Juan Bautista Sánchez and Bertomeu.²⁹ With no depth to the defences, the whole sector crumbled. Nevertheless, it was certainly not a rout. Many units held their ground and slowed the advance.

The Basque nationalist leaders had meanwhile been in contact with the Italian government and the Vatican to try to prevent the nationalists from destroying Bilbao, as Mola had threatened.³⁰ On 6 May, Pius XI had asked Cardinal Gomá to act as mediator. He saw Mola and obtained a promise that if Bilbao surrendered there would be no bloody reprisals. Cardinal Pacelli, the secretary of state, sent a telegram on 12 May to Aguirre proposing a separate peace for the Basque country, but the telegram was sent to the Valencia government by mistake. This caused great suspicions. Then a more collaborationist wing of the Basque Nationalist Party attempted to negotiate with the Italians through their consul in San Sebastián.

In Bilbao the Basque government decided to evacuate the city on 16 June after agonized discussions. The Basque nationalist leaders also decided to blow up bridges, but not the steelworks and war industries. Their republican allies in Valencia were horrified when they heard of this later. The coast road to the west was soon packed with refugees and, although only a small part consisted of Santanderino units heading for home, the whole mass was strafed by Heinkel fighter squadrons. A junta of defence under Leizaola, the minister of justice, stayed in the city, while the government withdrew towards Santander. Other senior Basque officials and officers fled on ships leaving the harbour.

The republican forces were assigned new positions along the line of the River Nervión, which curves around Bilbao to the east. With the imminent arrival of the nationalist forces the right-wing fifth columnists in Arenas, on the east of the river’s mouth, started shooting into the streets in their excitement. The anarchist Malatesta Battalion, positioned on the other side of the river, stormed across and dealt with them rapidly. Their final action before withdrawing was to set fire to the church. The commander knew that its priest was a nationalist sympathizer; he was his brother.

The city was under continual artillery bombardment. Eventually the republican forces had to withdraw because they were threatened on their southern flank, where troops under the Italian commissar, Nino Nanetti, had withdrawn without blowing the bridge behind them. The fifth columnists in the city had another shock when they gathered in the main square with monarchist flags to greet the Carlist troops. A Basque tank suddenly appeared round the corner, fired at some nationalist flags hanging from balconies and disappeared. At five in the afternoon the 5th Navarrese Brigade under Colonel Juan Bautista Sánchez entered Bilbao. The cheers for the nationalists when they arrived sounded hollow in the half-empty city.³¹

The nationalist casualties for the campaign were high–about 30,000–but the proportion of fatalities was low. The Basques and their allies suffered only slightly more in total, but their death rate was nearly a third, mainly due to air attacks. The Basque army had operated in a markedly different way from the republican army in the centre. There was far less waste of men’s lives through futile counter-attacks over open ground.

The nationalist conquerors held summary court martials in the newly occupied territory, and thousands, including many priests, were sentenced to prison. There were, however, fewer executions than usual, because of the strength of feeling that Guernica had provoked abroad. Nothing, however, stopped the conquerors’ resolution to crush every aspect of Basque nationalism. The Basque flag, the ikurriña, was outlawed and use of the Basque language suppressed. Threatening notices were displayed: ‘If you are Spanish, speak Spanish.’ Regionalist feelings in any form were portrayed as the cancer of the Spanish body politic.

The units which retreated along the coast to Santander were demoralized. They knew that it was only a matter of time before Santander and the Asturias fell as well. They were at least given a chance to reorganize, when the nationalist advance was delayed by the major republican offensive at Brunete in the Madrid sector on 6 July. Once this had been repulsed, General Dávila redeployed his troops. They included six Carlist brigades under General Solchaga, the Italian force now commanded by General Bastico, which comprised Bergonzoli’s Littorio Division, the March 23rd Division, the Black Flames and the mixed Black Arrows. The air support consisted of more than 200 planes, split between the Condor Legion, the Legionary Air Force and the nationalist squadrons, which were being given the Heinkel 51s as Messerschmitts arrived in greater numbers.

General Gámir Ulibarri’s force of some 80,000 men had not only less infantry than the nationalists, but also only 40 operational fighters and bombers, many of which were obsolete. On the opening day of the offensive, 14 August, Solchaga’s Carlist brigades attacked from the east and smashed through the 54th Division. The Italians were held up by fierce resistance in the Cantabrian mountains to the south-west, but with overwhelming artillery and air support they captured the Escudo pass two days later. The three republican divisions sent to hold the breach were not quick enough and the breakthrough was complete.

Many of the republican formations then carried out a fighting retreat into the mountains of Asturias. The remainder were bottled up in the area of Santander and the small port of Santoña. In Santander the desperation was so great that many men sought oblivion in drink. Officers organized parties of soldiers to go round destroying the wine stocks. The general staff arranged to escape in ships, but the small boats were swamped by panic-stricken men and many capsized. The 122nd and 136th Battalions tried to organize a defence, but apathy seemed to take over once the last chance of escape had gone. They waited for the nationalists and their firing squads. Since many nationalist supporters had been killed in the previous year, mainly on the orders of the socialist Neila, little mercy was expected.

In Santoña, the Basques arranged surrender terms for their gudaris with the Italian commander of the Black Arrows, Colonel Farina. These had already been discussed in Rome between Count Ciano and Basque PNV representatives, who felt that the Valencia government had let them down badly. It was agreed that there would be no reprisals and that no Basque soldier would be forced to fight on the nationalist side. Spanish officers announced immediately that this agreement was invalid and Basque soldiers were taken off British ships in the port at gunpoint. Summary trials followed and a large proportion of the officers and many soldiers were executed. It was this dishonouring of the articles of surrender which the Basque ETA guerrillas advanced in later years as a reason why the Republic of Euzkadi was still at war with the Franquist state.³²

Mussolini and Count Ciano were overjoyed at this ‘great victory’. Ciano wanted ‘flags and guns captured from the Basques. I envy the French their Invalides and the Germans their Military Museums. A flag taken from the enemy is worth more than any picture.’³³ They felt that their decision to keep Italian troops in Spain after the débâcle of Brihuega had been vindicated. Their jubilation was premature, however, for approximately half of the republican forces had pulled back into the Asturian mountains, where there was to be a much tougher campaign lasting until the end of October, followed by a further five months of ferocious guerrilla warfare. Franco was not able to bring down the Army of the North as quickly as he had hoped.

The relative speed of the nationalists’ victory in the Basque campaign was due to the Condor Legion’s contribution. The Nazi government did not delay in taking payment. German engineers moved into the factories and steel mills which the Basque nationalists had refused to destroy and most of the industrial production went to Germany to pay the Luftwaffe’s expenses for destroying the region. Franco, on the other hand, had to wait longer for his benefits, although he knew that the reduction of the north would eventually give him infantry parity in the centre and south. Combined with his increasing superiority in air and artillery support, it would ensure ultimate victory, unless a European conflict broke out first. The war was now little more than straight pounding and he could pound the hardest, for this campaign had shown that his allies possessed far better means of delivering high explosive than his enemies’ allies.

The Propaganda War and the Intellectuals

‘H^istory to the defeated’, wrote W.H. Auden in his poem, ‘Spain 1937’, ‘may say Alas but cannot help or pardon.’ The Spanish Civil War is one of the comparatively few cases when the most widely accepted version of events has been written more persuasively by the losers of the conflict than by the winners. This development was of course decisively influenced by the subsequent defeat of the nationalists’ Axis allies. At the time, however, the Republic may have won many battles for international public opinion, but the nationalists won the key engagement by concentrating on a select and powerful audience in Britain and the United States. They played on the fear of communism in an appeal to conservative and religious feelings, and their audience’s suspicions about the Republic were confirmed by Soviet military aid.

The nationalists argued that they represented the cause of Christianity, order and Western civilization against ‘Asiatic Communism’. To bolster this version of events, they alleged, on the basis of forged documents,¹ that the communists had planned a revolution with 150,000 shock troops and 100,000 reserves in 1936, a coup which the nationalist rising had pre-empted. They declared that the election results of February 1936 were invalid, even though CEDA and monarchist leaders had accepted the results at the time. They concentrated on presenting life in the republican zone as a perpetual massacre of priests, nuns and innocents, accompanied by a frenzied destruction of churches and works of art. And to justify their failure to take Madrid, they claimed that half a million foreign communists were fighting in Spain.²

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. Censorship 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.

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 defends 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.