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

The Struggle for Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Falange, the Carlists, the Alfonsine monarchist Renovacíon Española and the remnants of other right-wing groups, like the CEDA’s Popular Action, were amalgamated by decree into one party under his direct orders.⁴ The party was to be called the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS (Traditionalist Spanish Falange and the National Syndicalist Offensive Juntas). As the choice of name indicated, the Carlists came off worst in this forced union, with a programme based on 26 out of José Antonio’s 27 points.⁵ But, as Franco had calculated, the Carlists were more obedient and less politically minded. The new uniform consisted of the Falangist blue shirt and the Carlist red beret. The fascist salute was officially adopted and the movement’s slogan was to be ‘Por el Imperio hacia Dios’ (For the Empire towards God). The Caudillo was proclaimed chief of the new party and his brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Súñer, was appointed executive head. (This produced a new Spanish word, cuñadismo, meaning ‘brother-in-lawism’, as a variant on nepotism.) Serrano Súñer, an intelligent and ambitious lawyer who had been a friend of José Antonio, had become a vice-president of the CEDA, then moved towards the Falange in the spring of 1936. He was captured in Madrid after the rising and held in the Model Prison, where he witnessed the killings in revenge for the news of Badajoz. This experience and the death of his two brothers made him one of the most intransigent advocates of the limpieza after he escaped from hospital (in circumstances which have never been satisfactorily explained) and reached nationalist territory in February 1937.⁶

The suddenness of Franco’s coup increased its effect. By the time the announcement had been fully appreciated, anyone who wanted to object only exposed himself to the charge of treachery towards the nationalist movement. Hedilla, somewhat unimaginatively, believed that he could maintain a position of power as the head of the Falange and guarantee its independence. He refused to join the council of the new party and tried to mobilize his supporters. He was arrested on 25 April, and condemned to death a month later for ‘a manifest act of indiscipline and subversion against the single command of nationalist Spain’.⁷ On ˜er’s advice, however, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In fact, he served only four years, but it was enough to remove him from any position of influence during a critical period. The new puppet council appointed by Franco was no longer challenged, after the rest of the Falange was rapidly brought into line by dismissals and about 80 prison sentences.

As commander of the most important formation in the nationalist army, the Army of Africa, Franco had started his climb to leadership from an advanced position. He had no effective rival and the very nature of the nationalist movement begged a single, disciplined command. As a result he had achieved supreme power in two well-timed stages: September 1936 and April 1937. With the first he became de jure leader; with the second, suppressing all potential opposition, de facto dictator. Now he was in position to tackle a long war and to construct his idea of what Spain should be.

A power struggle had also begun in republican territory during the winter of 1936 and the spring of 1937, although the winners, the communists, were never to achieve the same degree of power as Franco. They started from a very restricted base and their policies to centralize power were resisted by one of the major components of the republican alliance, the anarchists. At the same time the Valencia government was exasperated at its lack of control over independent regions, especially Catalonia and Aragón.

In December 1936 the central committee of the Comintern had met on several occasions to analyse the course of events in Spain and the position of the Spanish Communist Party. On 21 December Stalin sent a letter, counter-signed by Molotov and Voroshilov, to Largo Caballero. Stalin first of all underlined the fact that the republican government had asked for Soviet advisers to help them, and that the officers sent to Spain had been told ‘that they should always remember that, in spite of the great solidarity which now exists between the Spanish people and the peoples of the USSR, a Soviet specialist, being a foreigner in Spain, can be really useful only if he stays strictly within the limits of an adviser and adviser only’.⁸

He then went on to emphasize the Comintern line that Soviet aid to republican Spain was to safeguard democracy and insisted that the government followed the popular front strategy, which helped landowning peasants and attracted the middle classes. In fact, Stalin was interested in avoiding any embarrassments to his foreign policy, which on one hand wanted to evade provoking Nazi Germany, and on the other to seek a rapprochement with Britain and France. A parliamentary republic should Serrano Su ´n be maintained ‘to prevent the enemies of Spain seeing her as “a communist republic”’.

Comintern agents were meanwhile instructed to construct a disciplined army, with a single command, to develop the war industries and achieve united action among all political groups. Codovilla was to convince Largo Caballero to bring forward this programme, a difficult task considering how bad relations were after the communists had taken over the Socialist Youth. The fall of Málaga and the arrival in Spain of the Bulgarian Comintern agent Stoyán Minéevich (‘Stepánov) were to put an end to such optimism. On 17 March Stepánov informed Moscow that the person ultimately responsible for the fall of Málaga was Largo Caballero because of his connivance with traitors on the general staff. The Comintern convinced Stalin that it was essential to remove Largo Caballero from the ministry of war and told the Spanish Communist Party to do everything necessary to ensure that “Spaak” [Largo Caballero] remained only as head of the government’.⁹

The communist tactic was to block ministers from exercising control over the People’s Army. This they regarded as essential both in the interests of winning the war and in order to increase their own power. But the anarchists from the beginning had warned clearly that any attempt to impose non-anarchist officers on their troops would be met by force. Faced with such resistance, the communists solicited the support of regular officers. They approached the most ambitious, presenting themselves as the true believers in iron discipline and good organization. Experts in the manipulation of bureaucracy, they infiltrated their own members into key positions. They managed to place Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Cordón as head of the technical secretariat of the ministry of war, where he controlled pay, promotion, discipline, supplies and personnel. They also removed Lieutenant-Colonel Segismundo Casado from the post of chief of operations on the general staff because he had denounced their machinations and they replaced him with a member of their own party. A report to Moscow in March 1937 reveals that 27 out of the 38 key commands of the Central Front were held by communists and three more by sympathizers.¹⁰ Another report claimed later that ‘the Party therefore now has hegemony in the army, and this hegemony is developing and becoming firmly established more and more each day both in the front and in rear units’.¹¹

The communists set out to remove General Asensio Torrado, whom they called the ‘general of defeats’, accusing him of incompetence and treason. The most prominent attack came from the Soviet ambassador, Marcel Rosenberg. Since January 1937, Rosenberg had been behaving like ‘a Russian viceroy in Spain’, continually harassing Largo Caballero, telling him what to do and what not to do. On one occasion the old trade unionist had thrown him out of his office. The irony of the affair was that on 21 February, while the communists were still calling for Asensio Torrado to be shot, Rosenberg was recalled to Moscow, where he was executed soon afterwards in the purges. Although Rosenberg’s successor, Gaikins, played a less dominant role, he continued to urge the fusion of the socialist and communist parties, a step to which Largo Caballero was now completely opposed. Strong-arm tactics became less necessary at such a high level, because the Party controlled most of the bureaucracy.

The Soviet military advisers nevertheless continued to exert pressure by saying to any Spanish officer who objected to their plans that they ought to ask their government whether Soviet assistance was still required. Such activity took place despite the statement in Stalin’s letter that Soviet personnel had been ‘categorically ordered [to] keep strictly to the functions of an adviser, and an adviser alone’. After the socialist newspaper Adelante published on 30 April 1937 an article ‘which contained provocative attacks addressed at the USSR and its leaders’, Voroshilov, in a coded telegram, gave orders to the chief adviser, General Stern. ‘Visit Caballero personally and declare, in response to his request for us to send our pilots, etc., to Spain, that considering this disloyal attitude, we not only cannot send them any more of our men, but we will also have to withdraw the men who are in Spain now, unless they disavow this provocative article in Adelante and punish the ones who are guilty for its publication, and unless they apologize to us.’¹²

Largo Caballero’s position was also being eroded from within. He could no longer ignore the fact that his close friend, Álvarez del Vayo, the foreign minister, was an active Party supporter. The communist Enrique Castro described their attitude to the foreign minister when he said in a paraphrase of Lenin that ‘he is a fool, but more or less useful’. Largo Caballero tried to limit Álvarez del Vayo’s control over the appointment of commissars to the army. On 17 April he published a decree placing the corps of commissars directly under his orders.¹³ The communist press exploded in outrage. ‘Who can feel hostile to this corps of heroes?’ it demanded. ‘Who can show themselves to be incompatible with those forging the People’s Army? Only the declared enemies of the people.’¹⁴ Once hailed as ‘the Spanish Lenin’, Largo was now a ‘declared enemy of the people’. La Pasionaria gave a remarkable example of what Orwell later called double-speak. According to her, restricting the commissars would ‘mean leaving our soldiers at the mercy of officers, who could at a moment disfigure the character of our army by returning to the old days of barrack discipline’. Yet the communists were the chief advocates of drill, saluting and privileges for officers.

Caballero’s attempts to prevent communist recruiting drives within the armed services also came to nothing. A Soviet officer reported back to Moscow: ‘As Largo Caballero has banned party work in units, we have taught our friends to carry out their party work under the guise of amateur creative activities. For example, we organized a celebration dinner on the eve of the [1 May] holiday to which representatives of the anti-fascist committee were invited, as well as those from the Party committee, the editorial office of Mundo Obrero, and the best commanders of other units of “friends” (Líster and others).’¹⁵

The communists also set up a police school in Madrid, where students who refused Party membership were failed. The secret police was taken over by NKVD agents in the late autumn of 1936 and it soon became the communists’ most feared weapon. Even Wenceslao Carillo, the director-general of security, found himself powerless against them. Many of the Spaniards who were recruited for this work could hardly be described as ‘anti-fascist’, but they were given Party cards nevertheless. When the first Soviet ambassador, Rosenberg, made his comment about scum always coming to the top in revolutions, he failed to add that much of it was creamed off into the secret police afterwards. Meanwhile, the campaign to win over the paramilitary forces like the Assault Guard was helped by Margarita Nelken, a socialist member of the Cortes and another secret communist. This was the manoeuvre to which General Asensio Torrado had objected, earning the Party’s bitter enmity.

On frequent occasions the communists in the police, stirred up by the paranoia of their NKVD controllers, arrested and interrogated members of other parties. Soon after the battle of Brihuega, Antonio Verardini, the chief of staff of Mera’s 14th Division, went to Madrid on a 24-hour leave. There he was arrested on the orders of José Cazorla, the communist councillor of public order, and accused of espionage and treason. As soon as Mera found out he left for the capital with Sanz, the commander of the 70th Brigade, and a lorryload of heavily armed soldiers. On his arrival he told General Miaja that if Verardini was not freed by the communists his men would free him by force. Miaja obtained his release immediately. Mera was to return to Madrid on a similar mission when the communist persecution of the POUM reached its height. On the second occasion he had heard that Mika Etchebehere, the woman militia commander, had been arrested for ‘disaffection to the Republic’. It was only by seeing the director-general of security that he obtained her release and had her brought to his headquarters so that she could not be snatched again.

During that spring of 1937 the communist police and the anarchist militia confronted each other in Madrid in an increasingly bitter struggle. The CNT exploded the greatest scandal by publishing the accusations of Melchor Rodríguez, the delegate in charge of prisons, who had put an end to the evacuation and killing of nationalist prisoners the previous November. Melchor Rodríguez revealed that José Cazorla, the communist in charge of public order, had organized secret prisons holding socialists, anarchists and republicans, many of whom had been freed by popular tribunals, to torture and execute them as spies or traitors. Largo Caballero used this on 22 April to dissolve the Junta de Defensa controlled by the communists and re-establish the authority of the Valencia government over Madrid. Nevertheless, there was little he could do to rein in the actions of the NKVD, known in the Soviet Union as ‘the unsheathed sword of the revolution’.

The prime minister realized, however, that he could not reveal the dangerous growth of communist power without confirming the suspicions of the British government. At the same time he could count on fewer and fewer allies in his own cabinet. The moderate socialists, such as Prieto and Negrín, were considering the amalgamation of the Socialist Party with the Spanish Communist Party and agreed with the communist arguments that the fragmentation of power must be ended in order to win the war.¹⁶

The liberal republicans of Martínez Barrio’s Unión Republicana and Manuel Azaña’s Izquierda Republicana followed a similar path to the moderate socialists in their opposition to Basque and Catalan separatism, and the revolutionary collectives of the anarchists. Lacking the support of liberals and social-democrats, Largo Caballero could only count on the four ministers of the CNT-FAI as allies against the communists and their plan to take over control of the army. Yet the anarchist movement itself was starting to suffer from a split between its reformist leadership collaborating with the government and its militants in Barcelona and in the militia columns.

One radical group, ‘The Friends of Durruti’, was led by a former Catholic and separatist, Jaime Balius. Since March, the Friends of Durruti in its pamphlets and publications had been denouncing the ‘Stalinist counter-revolution’ and the ‘collaborationism’ of the CNT leadership. They claimed to be the guardians of the spirit of 19 July, and demanded a government made up uniquely of the UGT and the CNT. But the basic problem was a deep frustration among the libertarian movement that it was losing all its influence and power. There was a deep regret that they had failed to seize the opportunity the previous July to establish libertarian communism in Catalonia.

The change of atmosphere in Barcelona was remarked upon by observers who returned after a year’s absence. The camaraderie and the optimism were gone. Nightclubs and expensive restaurants supplied by the black market had reopened, while the bread queues started at four in the morning. The anarchists blamed the food crisis on Joan Comorera, the communist PSUC leader who was the Generalitat councillor in charge. Comorera had disbanded the food committees, which the CNT set up in July 1936, and ended bread rationing. The food distribution committees had certainly had their deficiencies, but these were overshadowed by the hoarding and profiteering which followed their abolition. The communists, meanwhile, blamed the anarchist agricultural collectives.¹⁷ Angry scenes outside shops were frequent. The Assault Guard often rode their horses into the bread queues or dispersed the women with blows from rifle butts.

There had been many more serious developments to make the anarchists and the POUM feel threatened in Catalonia. In the winter the PSUC had set out to exclude the POUM from the Catalan government. The anarchists, who until then had regarded the Communist-POUM battle simply as a Marxist rivalry, began to realize that its outcome would affect them too. The Generalitat, now feeling that it had sufficient power to face down the anarchists, issued a decree on 4 March, dissolving the control patrols and the security council dominated by the FAI. At the same time it amalgamated the Assault Guard and the Republican National Guard into a single force under the command of the councillor for internal security, Artemi Aiguader. The decree also demanded the surrender of weapons.

The Communist PSUC stepped up the pressure over the following month. It issued a ‘victory plan’, which demanded the complete integration of Catalan forces in the People’s Army, the call-up of all classes between 1932 and 1936, the nationalization of war industries, the militarization of all transport and the government control of all weapons.¹⁸ The anarchists, although torn in two directions, felt that they had given up enough to their colleagues in the government. ‘We have made too many concessions and have reached the moment of turning off the tap,’ declared their newspaper, Solidarid Obrera.¹⁹

Andreu Nin, the leader of the POUM, was exultant that the CNT had reached the end of its tether. He wanted the anarchists to join the POUM in an attack ‘on the counter-revolution’.²⁰ The battle lines of the so-called ‘events of May’ were being drawn. The POUM could not be defined as ‘Trotskyist’, as Stalinist propaganda continually proclaimed, and certainly not as ‘Trotskyist-Fascist’, which was the usual Comintern epithet–a death sentence in Soviet terms. But Stalinists refused to acknowledge that Trotsky’s Fourth International had condemned the POUM for having joined the Popular Front in the elections, with Trotsky himself repudiating his former colleague in furious articles.²¹

For Nin, everything that was not revolutionary was reactionary, which was why he despised republican institutions and called on the CNT to install a workers’ democracy. The POUM in its revolutionary fanaticism had even convinced itself that the government of the Popular Front was secretly hatching a plot with the nationalists, a curious mirror image of Stalinist suspicions. It was, however, on more rational ground in its belief that the communists were preparing a purge similar to those taking place in the Soviet Union.²²

The Civil War within the Civil War

In Barcelona towards the end of April a series of developments and incidents increased an already tense situation. On 16 April Companys reshuffled his government, giving the post of minister of justice to Joan Comorera, the leader of the communist PSUC. This caused deep unease, especially among the POUM, whom he had threatened with liquidation. On 24 April an unsuccessful assassination attempt was made against the Generalitat’s commissioner for public order, Eusebi Rodríguez Salas, another leading member of the PSUC.

The next day, 25 April, carabineros sent by Juan Negrín took control of the Pyrenean frontier posts, which up until then had been in the hands of CNT militia. They clashed with anarchists in Bellver de Cerdanya and killed several, including Antonio Martín, president of the revolutionary committee of Puigcerdà.¹ In Madrid, José Cazorla, infuriated by Melchor Rodríguez’s denunciation of his secret prisons, closed down the CNT newspaper Solidaridad Obrera. Also on that day, in Barcelona, the communist and UGT leader, Roldán Cortada, was killed in Molins de Rei, probably by an anarchist, but there have long been other theories.² The PSUC organized a public funeral, which was to be used as a mass demonstration against the CNT. Meanwhile, Rodríguez Salas unleashed an aggressive sweep through the anarchist bastion of Hospitalet de Llobregat to search for the killers of Cortada.

The fear of open conflict on the streets of Barcelona prompted the Generalitat, with the agreement of the UGT and the CNT, to cancel all May Day parades. On 2 May Solidaridad Obrera asked workers not to allow themselves to be disarmed under any circumstances: ‘The storm clouds are hanging, more and more threateningly, over Barcelona.’³

The very next day the Generalitat, deciding to take back all the power lost since 19 July 1936, seized control of the Telefónica in the Plaza de Cataluña. Although this telephone exchange was directed by a mixed committee of CNT and UGT, together with a delegate from the Catalan government, the anarchists had considered it their own since capturing it the previous July. It allowed them to listen in on any conversations made to and from Barcelona, including those of Companys and Azaña.

At three in the afternoon, the communist commissioner for public order, Rodríguez Salas, arrived at the Telefónica with three trucks full of assault guards. (It is assumed, but not certain, that he was acting on the orders of the councillor for internal security, Artemi Aiguader.) They surprised the sentries and disarmed them, but were then halted by a burst of machine-gun fire from the floor above. The anarchists fired shots out of the windows as an alarm call and within a matter of minutes news of the event had spread to all the working-class quarters of the city.

Dionisio Eroles, director of the control patrols, went to the Telefónica and tried to persuade the assault guards to lift their siege of the building, but without success. During the next few hours, people began to tear up paving stones and cobbles to make barricades in Las Ramblas, the Paralelo, the old city, the Vía Layetana and also in the outlying barrios of Sants and Sant Andreu. Shops closed and trams ceased to circulate. On one side were arrayed government forces, the communist PSUC and the Unified Socialist Youth, as well as some people from Estat Català; on the other were the CNT and the FAI, the Libertarian Youth, the Friends of Durruti, the POUM and its youth affiliate, the Juventudes Comunistas Ibéricas.

The leaders of the CNT went to the palace of the Generalitat to meet Companys and the chief councillor, Josep Tarradellas. They demanded the immediate resignation of Aiguader and Rodríguez Salas to calm things down, but after a marathon session, which lasted until the early hours of the morning, the negotiations reached a dead end. In the meantime the regional committee of the CNT had declared a general strike for the next day.

The network of barricades which were erected on Tuesday, 4 April, reminded many of the Semana Trágica in 1909 and almost everyone of 19 July 1936. Groups of workers shared out arms on the barricades while others prepared buildings for defence. A German agent of the Comintern in Barcelona reported a week later to Moscow, ‘No vehicle which did not belong to the CNT was allowed to pass and more than 200 police and assault guards were disarmed.’⁴ Ambulances with large red crosses evacuated the first of the wounded and, because of the random firing, the CNT brought out some of the home-made armoured vehicles from the previous summer. There was fighting on the Paralelo, on the Paseo de Colón, in the Plaza de Palau, in the railway stations and around the building of the Generalitat. The paramilitary police fired from the Colón and Victoria Hotels. Government forces and the PSUC occupied only a few areas in the centre, while the anarcho-syndicalists and their allies controlled the greater part of the city as well as the heavy guns in the fortress of Montjuich.

Whenever the assault guards attempted to seize a building, they were met by a hail of bullets. Firing echoed in the streets from rooftops and balconies, fortified by sandbags. ‘From time to time,’ Orwell recounted, ‘the bursts of rifle-fire and machine-guns were mixed with the explosion of grenades. And at longer intervals, we heard tremendous explosions which, at the time, nobody could explain. They sounded like bombs, but that was impossible because there were no aircraft to be seen. Later they told me–and perhaps it is true–that agents provocateurs had set off large amounts of explosive to increase the noise and sense of panic.’⁵

In the middle of the afternoon, Juan García Oliver and Mariano Vázquez, the national secretary of the CNT, reached Barcelona with two leaders of the UGT. They had been sent by the government in Valencia to try to find a way out of the very dangerous situation which put the Republic in an extremely embarrassing position, especially vis-à-vis the European press. A meeting was held with the Generalitat, which continued to oppose the forced resignations of Aiguader and Rodríguez Salas. Companys told them that taking into account the turn of events, he saw no other option but to request the Valencia government to take matters in hand, even if this meant the end of the Generalitat’s Council of Defence.

The anarchist leaders made an appeal over the radio for a ceasefire while Abad de Santillán talked to the control patrols.⁶ The council of ministers met that same evening in Valencia. They decided to appoint Colonel Escobar as government delegate in Catalonia, but he was unable to take up the position due to a serious injury. The communist General Pozas was given command of all the forces on the Aragón front.

While anarchist leaders were trying to calm the situation, La Batalla, the POUM’s newspaper, argued that the best method of defence was attack and called for the immediate establishment of committees for the defence of the revolution. On Wednesday, 5 May, the anarchist leaders had another meeting with Companys and agreed a compromise solution of a new Catalan government which excluded Aiguader. But the tension in the streets did not lessen. That day, at 1 p.m., the secretary general of the UGT in Catalonia, Antonio Sesé, was shot in his car on the way to the Generalitat to take up his new appointment as councillor of defence. Later, the corpses of the Italian anarchists Camillo Berneri, who had been professor of philosophy at Florence University, and Franco Barbieri were discovered, as well as that of Francisco Ferrer, nephew of the pedagogue executed at Montjuich after the Semana Trágica, and Domingo Ascaso, brother of the anarchist hero who had been killed the year before in the assault on the Atarazanas barracks.⁷

The middle classes in Barcelona, exasperated by the disturbance and shooting in the streets, wanted governmental authority to be re-established. The central government asked Federica Montseny to go to Barcelona to make an appeal over the radio to beg her fellow anarchists to lay down their arms. She had no success and was forced to accept that order could be reimposed only by force. ‘They were the most terrible and bitter days of my life,’ she was to say many years later.⁸

Largo Caballero found himself in a difficult position. He needed the CNT, yet events in Barcelona were giving ammunition to the communists. He felt there was no alternative but to agree to the transfer of Assault Guard reinforcements from the Jarama front. In addition Prieto despatched two destroyers packed with paramilitary forces from Valencia. Meanwhile, in other parts of Catalonia and Aragón the communists had taken advantage of events to broaden their offensive by seizing the telephone buildings in Tarragona, Tolosa and several smaller towns. All these attempts were resisted and developed into street fighting, causing the Assault Guard column, which was heading for Barcelona from the Jarama, to stop in Tarragona and crush resistance there.

The same day a group of over 1,500 men from the Red and Black column, the 127^th Brigade of the 28^th Division and the Lenin Division of the POUM, left the front for Barcelona, but were halted at Binéfar by republican aircraft. They were finally persuaded to return to the front, but only after venting their fury on Barbastro and other Aragonese villages.⁹

Hidalgo de Cisneros flew to the airfield of Reus with two squadrons of fighters and two of bombers ‘to undertake operations against the region in the event that the insurgents won’.¹⁰ The reinforcements which had meanwhile arrived in Barcelona on board the destroyers Lepanto and Sa

´nchez Barcáiztegui increased the government’s forces towards the level of the rebel troops the previous July, but they had even less hope of taking the city. The anarchists had an overwhelming numerical superiority, holding almost 90 per cent of Barcelona and its suburbs, as well as the heavy guns of Montjuich. These overwhelming advantages were not used because the CNT-FAI knew that further fighting would lead to a full civil war within the civil war, in which they would be cast as traitors, even if the nationalists were unable to take advantage of the situation.

During the day the famous pamphlet of the Friends of Durruti was distributed on the barricades and published the next morning in La Batalla. It had been drafted with the POUM on the evening of 4 May and was addressed to the workers, demanding ‘A revolutionary Junta–execution of those responsible–the disarming of the paramilitary police–the socialization of the economy–the dissolution of the political parties which had attacked the working class’ and declared, ‘We do not give up the streets!–The revolution before everything!–Long live the social revolution!–Down with the counter-revolution!’ That afternoon, the CNT and the FAI disowned the pamphlet.

At dawn on Thursday, 6 May, the CNT-FAI leadership proposed a pact with the government. They offered to take down the barricades and order a return to work on condition that the assault guards were withdrawn and did not carry out reprisals. The Generalitat replied positively at five the next morning. Solidaridad Obrera made a general appeal: ‘Comrades of the government forces, back to your barracks! Comrades of the CNT, back to your unions! Comrades of the UGT and the PSUC, also to your centres! Let there be peace.’ But the communist publication El Noticiero Universal, referring to the leaflet of the Friends of Durruti, attacked ‘the criminal Trotskyism’ which had encouraged the anti-fascists of Catalonia to fight among themselves. Other communist publications also raised the temperature with similar attacks.

On Friday, 7 May 150 trucks, bringing 5,000 assault guards and carabineros, reached Barcelona. The regional committee of the CNT appealed over the radio for everyone to assist in the re-establishment of law and order. There were the odd shots, but the barricades began to be taken down. But the PSUC and the Assault Guard did not give up their positions and carried out violent reprisals against libertarians.

The libertarians had not won even a pyrrhic victory. Companys had repudiated Rodríguez Salas’s attempted seizure of the telephone building and removed Aiguader from the government, but in fact both the libertarian movement and Companys suffered a defeat, while the communists had also gained the lever they wanted to force Largo Caballero from power.

The moral outrage of the communist press knew no bounds when expressing the Party line of Trotskyist treason. This was also reflected in the reports to the Comintern in Moscow, which claimed that the disturbances had been planned well in advance. One Comintern representative claimed that the events in Barcelona were simply a ‘putsch’, and added that there were ‘very interesting documents proving the connection of the Spanish Trotskyists with Franco…The preparations for the putsch began even two months ago. This is also proved.’¹¹

‘We have succeeded in revealing close connections’, wrote another, ‘between Gestapo agents, agents of OVRA, Franco’s agents living in Freiburg, Trotskyists and Catalonian fascists. It is known that they have systematically transported weapons and machine-guns over the frontier of Catalonia and that Spanish fascists have sent valuable objects from Catalonia abroad as a payment for these weapons…The fact that the rebellion in Catalonia was quickly suppressed is regarded by fascist organs as a great failure.’¹² Another report stated, ‘There isn’t the slightest doubt that people from the POUM are working for Franco and Italian and German fascists.’¹³

At times, the Stalinist delusion appears to have developed into wishful fantasy. ‘Some most repulsive looting has started in a number of places,’ another report said. ‘Gangs of Trotskyist-bandits took all the scarce supplies that the civilian population had, and all their more or less valuable belongings. Those Spanish people who had weapons in their hands replied to this immediately. The Trotskyist traitors were literally wiped out within a few hours.’¹⁴

Orlov’s NKVD officers were sent to Barcelona to investigate and report back. They soon concocted an even more grandiose conspiracy theory of the sort which was already becoming the norm under the Stalinist terror, known in the Soviet Union as the yezhovschina, after the head of the NKVD. ‘While investigating the rebellion in Catalonia, organs of state security discovered a large organization committing espionage. In this organization Trotskyists were working in close cooperation with the fascist organization “Falange Española”. The network had its branches in army headquarters, at the war ministry, the National Republican Guard, etc. Using secret radio stations, this organization was passing to the enemy the information on the planned operations of the republican army, on the movements of troops, on the location of batteries, and directed air attacks using light signals. A plan was found on one of the members of this organization, with marked targets that fascists planned to bomb, and the following message was written in invisible ink on the reverse side of the map: “To the Generalissimo. We are able at the present time to inform you on all that we know about the situation and movements of red troops. The latest information broadcast by our radio station shows a great improvement in our information service.”’¹⁵

As many disillusioned communists later acknowledged, the greater the lie, the greater the effect, because only a committed anti-communist could disbelieve it. The Spanish Republic was infected by the grotesque Stalinist paranoia of the NKVD, yet some Russian historians have recently argued that events in Spain also served to accelerate the ‘mincing machine’ of the Great Terror back in the Soviet Union. In any case, faced with the barrage of communist lies, any question of republican unity was now dead, whatever the gains in central government control and the restoration of military discipline.

Franco was, of course, delighted with the turn of events in Barcelona, even though the nationalists had not profited from it in military terms. He claimed in an empty boast to Faupel that ‘the street fighting had been started by his agents’, and Nicolás Franco also told the German ambassador that ‘they had in all some thirteen agents in Barcelona’.¹⁶

The virtual collapse of CNT and POUM influence allowed the judicial system in Catalonia to be reorganized. Joan Comorera, the communist councillor of justice, introduced Special Popular Tribunals, which were more like military tribunals. The following month, under the authority of the central government, a Special Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason was set up. Of the many thousands accused of taking part in the ‘events of May’ and arrested, 94 per cent were freed by the ordinary popular tribunals, but only 57 per cent by Comorera’s variety.¹⁷ At the same time, there were many political prisoners locked up with the common prisoners. Others were detained by the communist-run counter-intelligence service, the DEDIDE, which became the Servicio de Investigación Militar. They were held in a number of secret prisons, including the Palacio de las Misiones, Preventorio C (the ‘Seminario’), Preventorio G (convent of the Damas Juanas), as well as the state prison on the Calle Déu i Mata. There were also labour camps holding 20,000 prisoners.¹⁸

While the communists blamed the disturbances on ‘Trotskyist-Fascist’ provocations, the CNT and the POUM accused the PSUC of having planned the attack on the Telefónica to provoke a revolt and crush their opponents. The timing was perfect for the communists, by then desperate to get rid of Caballero and longing to crush anarchist power in Catalonia, which they estimated was weakening rapidly. But this is far from certain. If this had been the case, the communists would have mustered a far greater force in Barcelona well in advance and, according to Companys, armed police in the city on 3 May numbered no more than 2,000.

In any case it was a defeat for the CNT and the POUM. Their newspapers now faced a strict censorship. The POUM in particular was unable to reply to the barrage of invective, however ludicrous. They were accused even of planning the assassination of Prieto and the communist General Walter, ‘one of the most popular commanders in the Spanish army’. The very brazenness of the lies had an initial effect of disorientating people. They were tempted to believe what they heard on the grounds that nobody would dare to invent such allegations. Jesús Hernández, the communist minister who turned against the Party after the war, said with some exaggeration, ‘If we were to decide to show that Largo Caballero, or Prieto, or Azaña, or Durruti were responsible for our defeats, half a million men, tens of newspapers, millions of demonstrators, and hundreds of orators would establish as gospel the evil doing of these citizens with such conviction and persistence that in a fortnight all Spain would agree with us.’ However, several of the Spanish communist leaders were uneasy at the brash tactics insisted upon by their Soviet and Comintern advisers.

La Pasionaria realized that such methods were ‘premature’ in Spain, where the communists did not have a total control of the media.

On 9 May, just after the ceasefire in Barcelona, JoséDíaz of the Party’s central committee advanced their strategy of deposing Largo Caballero and dealing ruthlessly with the POUM. ‘The fifth column has been unmasked,’ he declaimed, ‘we need to destroy it…Some call themselves Trotskyists, which is the name used by many disguised fascists who use revolutionary language in order to sow confusion. I therefore ask: If everyone knows this, if the government knows it, then why does it not treat them like fascists and exterminate them pitilessly? It was Trotsky himself who directed the gang of criminals that derailed trains in the Soviet Union, carried out acts of sabotage in the large factories, and did everything possible to discover military secrets with the object of handing them over to Hitler and the Japanese imperialists. And, in view of the fact that all this was revealed during the trial…’ With these words the communists revealed their plans for a spectacular arraignment of the POUM. A renewed attack on the POUM by Trotsky’s Fourth International was, of course, ignored by the Stalinists who were determined that their label should stick.¹⁹

At a cabinet meeting on 15 May (two days before measures introduced by Largo Caballero against communist infiltration of the commissar department became effective) the communist minister, Uribe, demanded on Moscow’s orders that the POUM be suppressed and its leaders arrested. Largo Caballero refused, saying that he would not outlaw a working-class party against whom nothing had been proved. The anarchist ministers backed him and proceeded to charge the communists with provoking the events in Barcelona. Uribe and Hernández walked out, followed by the right socialists Prieto and Negrín, the Basque nationalist Irujo, A

´ lvarez del Vayo and Giral.²⁰ Largo Caballero was left with the four anarchist ministers and two of his old socialist colleagues.

Azaña had been warned by Giral eight days earlier that the social democrats and liberals would back the communists at the next cabinet meeting. They took this decision partly because they identified with the communist policy of increased central government power and partly because they felt that any other course would put the Republic’s arms supply at risk. Prieto insisted that as the coalition was broken, Largo Caballero must consult the president, but Azaña wished to avoid any complications. He told Largo to carry on so that continuity of planning might be maintained on the Estremadura offensive, which was due to be launched later in the month. The anarchist press joined their leaders in supporting Largo Caballero and his ‘firm and just attitude which we all praise’. But without Soviet approval of the government there would be no arms. Largo Caballero had not appreciated his growing isolation. He knew about A

´ lvarez del Vayo; he may well have suspected Negrín; but, although he had quarrelled frequently with Prieto, he never expected him to come out on the communists’ side.

When, on 14 May, Azaña asked Largo Caballero to continue as prime minister, the old unionist knew that he would not be able to form another administration with the existing distribution of ministries. He therefore returned to the idea of a basically syndicalist government. This was similar to the National Defence Council, which the anarchists had proposed the previous September, with Largo Caballero at its head and the bulk of the ministries split between the UGT and the CNT. He had resurrected the idea in February, when he first became alarmed at the growth of communist influence, but Azaña had angrily rejected the proposal. Soviet control of their arms supply made the proposal totally impracticable. Largo Caballero was therefore allowed to continue only if he gave up the war ministry, as Stalin wanted. This he refused to do, believing that his presence there was the last barrier to a communist coup.

On 17 May Largo Caballero resigned, the final point in a long governmental crisis. Some historians argue that the origins of the ministerial crisis of May 1937 went back to the rising of October 1934 and that Caballero was not destroyed by the communists, but by the split with the moderate wing of the socialist party.²¹

The communists had approached Negrín at the end of the previous year and obtained his agreement to be the next prime minister.²² General Krivitsky, the NKVD defector, claimed that this had first been prepared the previous autumn by Stashevsky. The other important communist renegade, Hernández, asserts that the decision was taken at a Politburo meeting early in March when foreign communists including Marty, Togliatti, Gerö and Codovilla outnumbered Spanish Communist Party members. Prieto and the liberal republicans agreed with their choice, and Azaña asked Juan Negrín to form an administration on 17 May.

Negrín kept the ministry of finance as well as his new position of president of the council of ministers. Prieto was minister of defence, Julián Zugazagoitia minister of the interior, Giral foreign minister and Irujo, the Basque conservative, minister of justice. To hide communist influence according to Stalin’s instructions, the Party received just two minor portfolios: Jesús Hernández as minister of education and health, and Vicente Uribe as minister of agriculture.²³

The governing system of the Republic became what Negrín and the communists later described as a ‘controlled democracy’. This basically meant government from above in which the leaders of the main parties negotiated the distribution of ministries. Normal political life and argument was made difficult under war conditions, and contact between leaders and party members was severely restricted. Azaña complained at the lack of parliamentary debate and its result: ‘The newspapers seem to be written by the same person, and they don’t print anything more than diatribes against “international fascism” and assurances of victory.’²⁴ The infrequent proceedings of the Cortes were no more than the trappings of democracy. Only the surviving members from the Popular Front parties remained to take part in its cosmetic role.

Negrín tends to be portrayed either as a puppet of Moscow or else as a man who, recognizing necessity, tried to ride the communist tiger for the benefit of the Spanish Republic. Both interpretations are misleading. Juan NegrínLópez was born in 1892 into a rich upper-middle-class family in the Canary Islands. In his youth he showed sympathy for the autonomist movement in the Canary Islands and agreed with the PSOE’s federalist programme. He was, above all, convinced of his own abilities and there are signs that he felt unsatisfied with the seemingly effortless success of his medical career which, after studies in Germany, led to his becoming professor of physiology at Madrid University at the age of 29. He soon became more actively involved in politics and his talents were undoubtedly greater than those of the professionals. Like many men who are conscious of their ability, he showed himself to be a firm believer in hierarchy, an authoritarian with few scruples who knew what was best for others. Not surprisingly he soon acquired a strong taste for power, once it was offered to him. In his case it appeared to run parallel to gross tastes for food and sex rather than act as a substitute.

Negrín’s credentials and his ‘iron hand’ were applauded by official circles in London and Washington. Yet this government, which was welcomed by Churchill for its ‘law-and-order stance’, was to leave the NKVD-controlled secret police unhindered in its persecution of persons who opposed the Moscow line and to sacrifice the POUM to Stalin in order to maintain arms supplies in his determination to win the war.

On its first day, Negrín’s government agreed to the closing of the POUM’s La Batalla newspaper. Soviet and Comintern advisers were under great pressure to achieve results quickly. Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Ortega, the new communist director general of security, took his orders from Orlov, not Zugazagoitia, the minister of the interior. On 16 June, when the POUM was declared illegal, the communists turned its headquarters in Barcelona into a prison for ‘Trotskyists’. The commander of the 29th Division, Colonel Rovira, was summoned to army headquarters and arrested. POUM leaders who could be located, including Andrés Nin, were also arrested. The wives of those who could not be found were taken in their place. These actions were given a veneer of legality by the retroactive decree a week later which created the Tribunals of Espionage and High Treason.

The POUM leaders were handed over to NKVD operatives and taken to a secret prison in Madrid, a church in the Calle Atocha. Nin was separated from his comrades and driven to Alcalá de Henares, where he was interrogated from 18 to 21 June. Despite the tortures he was subjected to by Orlov and his men, Nin refused to confess to the falsified accusations of passing artillery targets to the enemy. He was then moved to a summer house outside the city which belonged to Constancia de la Mora, the wife of Hidalgo de Cisneros and tortured to death. A grotesque example of Stalinist play-acting then took place. A group of German volunteers from the International Brigades in uniforms without insignia, pretending to be members of the Gestapo, charged into the house to make it look as if they had come to Nin’s rescue. ‘Evidence’ of their presence was then planted, including German documents, Falangist badges and nationalist banknotes. Nin, after being killed by Orlov’s men, was buried in the vicinity. When graffiti appeared on walls demanding ‘Where is Nin?’ communists would scribble underneath ‘In Salamanca or in Berlin’. The official Party line, published in Mundo Obrero, claimed that Nin had been liberated by Falangists and was in Burgos.²⁵

Despite the protests in republican Spain and the petitions from abroad, Negrín, who cannot have believed such a version of events, did nothing when the communists claimed that they were ignorant of Nin’s fate. This shameful behaviour opened up a deep split in the new government. When Negrín repeated the communist version to Azaña the president did not believe a word. ‘Isn’t it too novelettish?’ he asked.²⁶

With the passage of time since the Moscow show trials and the mood in Spain in 1937, it is very hard to understand how anybody could have believed the accusations of fascism thrown at the POUM, nor why the government did nothing to stop the Stalinists’ dirty war against Nin and his followers, who were tortured and ‘disappeared’. The ‘disciplined machine’ had taken over, but it now lacked the energy of popular support. For many, there seemed to be few ideals left to defend. The anarchist theorist Abad de Santillán remarked, ‘Whether Negrín won with his communist cohorts, or Franco won with his Italians and Germans, the results would be the same for us.’²⁷

The Battle of Brunete

Early in 1937 Nikonov, the deputy chief of Red Army intelligence in Spain, had written enthusiastically to Voroshilov, ‘The war in Spain has revealed a number of extremely important aspects in the use of modern military equipment and has brought some valuable experience for studying operational, tactical and technical problems.’¹ But both Soviet advisers and communist commanders had learned very little, as the Republic’s first major offensive of the war would demonstrate. The ‘active war policy’ of set-piece attacks adopted for propaganda reasons by the Comintern would rapidly destroy the Republic’s ability to resist.

During April 1937, when nationalist troops were advancing on the northern coast towards Bilbao, Largo Caballero’s general staff had begun to prepare an ambitious offensive in Estremadura, with 23 brigades and Pavlov’s tanks.² The plan had been drawn up by General Asensio Torrado before he was removed. The idea was a major attack in the south-west to split nationalist territory in two and to finish with the cycle of battles around Madrid, which always ended in a useless bloodbath. Another reason for choosing Estremadura and not New Castille was that the nationalist troops in the area were inexperienced, badly armed and spread out. For Franco, it would have been much more difficult to bring in reinforcements by rail when republican guerrillas operated behind his lines. On the other hand it would have been extremely hard for the republicans to have deployed their troops and tanks in secret so far from Madrid; it would have left the capital vulnerable; and resupplying an army in Estremadura would have been very difficult.

The Soviet advisers and communist leaders opposed the plan mainly for political reasons. They had invested a huge international propaganda effort in the defence of Madrid, to say nothing of sacrificing many of their best troops in four battles. They were, in fact, as obsessed with the capital as Franco had been over the previous six months. They therefore had informed Largo Caballero that neither their tanks nor their aircraft would support the Estremadura offensive and that General Miaja would not transfer any men from the capital for the operation. Instead, they wanted an offensive to the west of Madrid, attacking very close to where the battle of the Corunna road had been fought.

The dispute over the Estremadura offensive produced the first reaction of regular officers against communist control of the republican army. A number of them, who had at first welcomed communist ideas on discipline, now began to suspect the communists might be more interested in increasing their power than in winning the war. They were alarmed that military affairs could be manipulated for purely propagandistic reasons, and they were horrified by the Party’s infiltration of the command structure and its vitriolic campaigns against any officer who resisted.

The fall of Largo Caballero in May, and the appointment of Negrín as head of government, intensified the situation. Prieto, as minister of defence in charge of all three services, was prepared to collaborate closely with the communists and follow their advice on military operations. Yet he was to become one of their fiercest opponents later.

The situation in the north was critical, with the nationalists threatening Bilbao. Republican leaders decided on two operations, one in May and one in June, to take nationalist pressure off the Basques. The first, which was launched on 30 May, took place in the Sierra de Guadarrama. It consisted of an attack on La Granja de San Ildefonso ‘to seize Segovia by surprise in an energetic attack’, according to Prieto’s instructions. This offensive was later used by Hemingway as the background for his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Bertolt Brecht also set his only poem about the Spanish Civil War there.

My brother was a pilot,

He received a card one day,

He packed his belongings in a box

And southward took his way.

My brother is a conqueror,

Our people are short of space

And to gain more territory is

An ancient dream of the race.

The space that my brother conquered

Lies in the Guadarrama massif,

Its length is six feet, two inches,

Its depth four feet and a half.³

Taking part in the republican operation were the 34th Division, under the command of José María Galán, the 35th Division under General Walter and Durán’s 69th Division, supported by artillery and Pavlov’s tank brigade. All these forces were under the command of Colonel Domingo Moriones, the head of I Corps.

At dawn on 30 May the attack began after a heavy bombardment of nationalist positions around the Cabeza Grande, Matabueyes and la Cruz de la Gallega. The infantry of the 69th Division launched its assault lacking air cover. The republican air force did not arrive until eleven in the morning, and then bombed republican positions.⁴ Nevertheless, the 69th Division managed to occupy Cruz de la Gallega and continued its advance towards Cabeza Grande, from where it would be able to deploy direct fire on the Segovia road. Walter ordered XIV International Brigade to launch a frontal attack, which left the pinewood hillside scattered with corpses. Walter’s cynicism was revealed in a report back to Moscow in which he wrote, ‘the XIV, which heroically, but passively, allowed itself to be slaughtered over the course of five days’.⁵

On 1 June Varela’s forces, with one division from Avila and the reinforcements which Barrón had brought from the Madrid front, counterattacked with strong support from bombers and fighters. They forced the republicans back from Cabeza Grande and threatened the whole advance on La Granja. The next day Walter was relieved from operational command of the offensive and on 6 June Colonel Moriones ordered his troops to withdraw to their start lines. According to Moriones, the attack cost 3,000 men, of whom 1,000 were from XIV International Brigade. And as for the original purpose of the operation, the nationalist assault on Bilbao was delayed by no more than two weeks at the most.

The operation failed partly because the nationalists appeared to have got wind of what was being prepared, but mainly because the republican command had greatly underestimated the speed of the nationalists’ reactions and the effectiveness of their air power. The nationalist Fiat fighter force, led by García Morato, even managed to machine-gun Moriones’s headquarters.⁶ The Soviet pilots of the republican aircraft, on the other hand, demonstrated a distinct lack of aggressive action. Colonel Moriones in his report wrote, ‘Our own aircraft carried out bombing attacks from a great height and carelessly…our fighters kept at a respectable distance and rarely came down to machine-gun the enemy…enemy aircraft were highly active and extraordinarily effective.’⁷

This action in the Guadarrama produced the first example of unrest in the ranks of the International Brigades as a result of being sacrificed for little benefit. And the brutality of their commanders when some of their men broke in the face of strafing by nationalist fighters was extreme. Captain Duchesne, who commanded the punishment company of XIV International Brigade, ‘designated five men at random and shot them, one after another, in the back of the head with his pistol in Soviet style’.⁸

When the 69th Division retreated from Cabeza Grande, an infuriated Walter (before he was relieved) had ordered ‘the machine-gunning of those who pull back, executions on the spot, and the beating of stragglers’.⁹

The second tactical operation to take pressure off the northern front was an attack on Huesca with the newly constituted Army of the East commanded by General Pozas. General Lukács was ordered up from Madrid with XII International Brigade, which included the Garibaldi Battalion, as well as four other brigades from the Central Front. He was put in charge of the operation, but found that many of the soldiers were badly armed, and that they would have little artillery or armoured support.

Lukács launched the offensive against Huesca on 12 June. The infantry had to attack across a kilometre of open ground. The nationalists, who were well dug in, forced them back with machine-gun fire and artillery. To compound the disaster, the vehicle in which General Lukács and his aides were travelling was hit by a shell. Lukács and his driver were killed, and Gustav Regler, the commissar of XII International Brigade, was badly wounded.¹⁰

At dawn on 16 June the republican troops launched a new attack against the villages of Alerre and Chimillas, but the intensity of enemy fire forced them back. On 19 June, after another two days of desultory firing, the offensive was cancelled. The Navarrese brigades had just entered Bilbao. Walter reported that XII International Brigade’s performance ‘was nothing like what it had been during earlier battles.’¹¹

The Huesca offensive, recounted by Gustav Regler in his book The Great Crusade, contributed to a defeatist mood in republican ranks. It had taken place soon after the events of May in a sector where there were many anarchist formations and the POUM’s 29th Division, which included the British centuria led by George Kopp, who had just been arrested and accused of espionage. Newspapers from Valencia and Barcelona were intercepted so that the troops should not hear of the denunciations of members of the POUM as traitors.¹²

Total losses for the Huesca offensive rose to nearly three times those of the Segovia offensive. The losses among anarchist and POUM members were very heavy. (Orwell himself received a bullet through the throat, a wound which took him out of the war.) As it had been a communist-led operation and the nationalists appeared to have been forewarned, this only increased their suspicions and their bitterness.

The major operation, however, which the republican government planned to replace the Estremadura offensive, was to take place against Brunete, a village some 25 kilometres to the west of Madrid. The idea was to penetrate the weakly held nationalist lines and cut off the salient, which extended to the edge of the capital. The Communist Party had been carefully preparing the Brunete offensive to demonstrate its power and military effectiveness.

All five International Brigades and the communists’ best-known formations were given key roles, and every important officer had a Soviet adviser at his elbow. Miaja was overall commander. Under him were Modesto’s V Corps on the right with Líster’s 11th Division, El Campesino’s 46th Division, and Walter’s 35th Division; Jurado’s XVIII Corps on the left with 10th, 15th and 34th Divisions. (Jurado, the only non-communist senior commander, became ill and was replaced by Colonel Casado during the battle.) There was also a forward reserve of Kléber’s 45th Division and Durán’s 69th Division. In support of this force of 70,000 men, Miaja could count on 132 tanks, 43 other armoured vehicles, 217 field guns, 50 bombers and 90 fighters, although only 50 turned out be serviceable.¹³ It was by far the largest concentration of strength yet seen in the war. To the south of Madrid, II Corps commanded by Colonel Romero was to attack towards Alcorcón to meet up with XVIII Corps. And II Corps was to make a diversionary attack in the area of Cuesta de la Reina. ‘If we cannot succeed with such forces,’ wrote Azaña with his usual lucid pessimism, ‘we will not be able to manage it anywhere.’¹⁴

The great operation, however, concealed crucial weaknesses. The People’s Army supply services were not used to coping with such large numbers and the Segovia offensive had shown up the bad communications between commanders as well as their lack of initiative. This last defect, which was to prove so serious in the Brunete offensive, is usually attributed to a fear of making independent decisions among Party members. Such caution may seem surprising in aggressive 30-year-olds like Modesto and Líster. Yet among this new breed of formation commander only Modesto and El Campesino had seen service in Morocco as NCOs, while Líster had received some training in Moscow. Their first experience of military command had come during the sierra engagements of the previous summer. They had often shown themselves daring and resourceful at battalion level, but now they commanded formations with anything up to 30 battalions and had to cope with unfamiliar staff procedures. Azaña disliked the fact that these ‘crude guerrillas’, ‘improvised people, without knowledge’, pushed aside regular officers. Despite all their efforts, they could ‘not make up for their lack of competence’.¹⁵ But if the new leaders of the People’s Army were intimidated by their responsibilities or conscious of their limitations, they certainly did not allow it to show. As with the International Brigades at the Jarama, ignorance was hidden behind a bluff confidence sustained by a ferocious discipline.

The offensive started in the early hours of 6 July, when the 34th Division from XVIII Corps attacked Villanueva de la Cañada. The Nationalist resistance was unexpectedly fierce, and when the troops seemed reluctant to keep going into the assault, Miaja gave orders to ‘take Cañada at all costs and if the infantry will not go forward place a battery of guns behind our own troops to make them’. Though outnumbered by nine to one, the defenders held off the republicans for a whole day.

Líster’s 11th Division swung past this action and attacked Brunete, defended by a very small nationalist force and a handful of medical orderlies.¹⁶ He took the village on the morning of 7 July, but then failed to advance towards Sevilla la Nueva and Navalcarnero. He was concerned that El Campesino’s 46th Division had failed to crush the Falangist battalion defending Quijorna to his right rear. (A similar hold-up due to a brave defence occurred on XVIII Corp’s left flank at Villanueva del Pardillo.) Instead of advancing while the way ahead lay open. Líster and his Russian adviser, Rodimtsev, ordered their troops to dig in just south of Brunete, where they waited for El Campesino’s troops to finish off the Falangists in Quijorna. That took three days, partly because they had not surrounded it properly. This gave Varela time to send a Moroccan tabor of regulares to reinforce the Falangists.¹⁷

In the meantime two republican reconnaissance soldiers captured by the nationalists admitted that Navalcamero was indeed the objective.¹⁸ The town had no defences and no garrison, save a handful of civil guards and supply detachments. Líster’s delay saved the nationalists. Within 24 hours of the offensive starting, Varela could count on Barrón’s 13th Division and the next day Sáenz de Buruaga’s 150th Division arrived from the north in several hundred trucks, acquired on credit from the United States.¹⁹

He ordered the 150th Division to attack between Brunete and Quijorna. This threat was met by Walter’s 35th Division, which filled the gap between Líster and El Campesino.

On the left flank 15th Division, supported by artillery and aircraft, attacked towards Villanueva de la Cañada and managed to take the village at ten o’clock that night, after heavy fighting against the nationalist division defending that sector. At the end of that first day the nationalist front had been forced back only in the centre, where part of Líster’s 11th Division advanced to within two kilometres of Sevilla la Nueva. Nationalist resistance around Quijorna and Villafranca del Castillo, held by no more than a centuria of Falangists from Salamanca,²⁰ had been fierce. The republican advance could only be sustained if the enemy line was broken and the two attacking corps could join up. The republicans had a numerical advantage at this stage in men, artillery and aircraft. But Líster still did not dare advance further with both his flanks exposed.

While Líster waited, General Gal’s 15th Division advanced strongly on Boadilla del Monte. But on their line of advance his men came across a small hill, which they called ‘Mosquito hill’ because of the whistling bullets. It was to form as terrible a memory as ‘Suicide Hill’ at the Jarama. The troops of Asensio were waiting for them, supported by two Navarrese brigades, as well as the Galician 108th Division, which had just arrived. A desperate battle ensued, which cost many casualties on both sides. Oliver Law, the black commander of the Americans’ Washington Battalion, was killed that night and buried there. Meanwhile, republican troops had finally occupied Quijorna, which by then was little more than a pile of smoking ruins.

Although at the start of the battle the republican air force enjoyed air superiority, with up to thirty fighters in each sortie, the nationalists dominated the skies from 11 July.²¹ Their aircraft, first the Junkers 52s, Fiats and Heinkels 51s piloted by Spanish airmen, then the Condor Legion, hammered the eight republican divisions concentrated on less than 200 square kilometres of the bare Castilian plain. The first target of the nationalist planes were the T-26 tanks, which presented easy prey in the open. Within two days, once the nationalists had established their maximum rhythm of sorties, the republicans were left with only 38 armoured vehicles. Day and night, Junkers 52s and Heinkel 111s bombed the republican lines at will. From 12 July the Condor Legion deployed its Messerschmitt 109s, flown by pilots such as Adolf Galland, later one of the great Second World War aces. The Chatos and Moscas did not stand a chance against them. On that day ‘more than 200 aircraft could be seen in the air at the same time’.²²

On 10 July XII International Brigade finally took Villanueva del Pardillo, which had been bravely defended by a battalion of the San Quentin infantry regiment. Meanwhile the nationalists counter-attacked to the south-east between Quijorna and Brunete with 10th and 150th Divisions. They had come up against General Walter’s 35th Division, which had been pushed forward to seal the gap between the troops of El Campesino and Líster. During this fighting 3,000 republican soldiers were killed and the International Brigades were totally exhausted.²³ On 16 July a bomb splinter hit George Nathan, the commander of the British battalion, in the shoulder and he died a few hours later. His devastated comrades buried him on the banks of the Guadarrama.

Republican troops were also desperately short of ammunition and without water in the July heat. Miaja’s staff had woefully underestimated the resupply needs for such a battle. The lessons of the La Granja offensive had not been learned. The Castilian landscape, bleached a pale brown by the sun, became a furnace, especially for the tank troops. The inside of each vehicle was like an oven. The infantry also suffered from the lack of vegetation for camouflage and the difficulty of digging trenches in the baked earth. Corpses, swollen and black from the sun, lay in all directions and the stretcher-bearers suffered heavy casualties trying to remove the wounded.

During that week, little ground was lost or gained in a terrible stalemate. But then on 18 July, the anniversary of the rising, the nationalist infantry, supported by 60 batteries of artillery and aircraft, attacked on all sectors. Richthofen, who had hurried back from his leave to take command of the Condor Legion squadrons, recorded, ‘18 July. Attack on the red infantry who are much better than expected. Air attacks very good despite strongest red flak as never experienced before. 4 Brigade gets ahead well. Heavy losses on both sides. 4 Brigade has lost eighteen officers by lunchtime and about 400 men. Art[illery] shot badly. Three waved bombing attack went off well, but it did not help. Right wing did not engage at all as art[illery] still not in position. Manaña!’²⁴

‘19 July,’ he wrote the next day, ‘Red flyers drop heavy bombs even on their own red infantry! Their command post also got its share. The reds have attacked 4 Brigade heavily but they are beaten back. Red attacks to the south at Brunete. Right wing cannot move forward. Our flyers are deployed against the red positions around Brunete.

‘20 July. We fly and attack red airfields to keep the opponents down. Richthofen and Sander [Sperrle] with Franco for a big conference with his generals, army commander, and aviation General Kindelán. Clean up here and then quickly back to the north. Franco hopes that the heavy losses are demoralizing the reds. Franco demands that Richthofen concentrates on heavy artillery.’ What emerged clearly once again was that the German and nationalist pilots were far better trained and more resourceful than their opponents. Even the Heinkel 51, which was inferior to the Soviet aircraft, was inflicting greater losses. Nationalist aircraft attacked the International Brigades near the River Guadarrama. That day Julian Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf, died, having arrived in Spain only a month before.

The Condor Legion’s bombers and fighters had little trouble finding targets on the exposed plain. While the Heinkel 111s flew sorties against artillery batteries, headquarters and forming-up areas, the Heinkel 51s strafed, bombed and shot up republican tanks using their 20mm cannon. In addition each fighter carried a load of six ten-kilo fragmentation bombs. Flying wing-tip to wing-tip, they released their loads simultaneously. Trenches, unless dug in a zigzag pattern, provided little protection. One German squadron leader boasted that in a 200-metre stretch of trench, 120 bodies had been found after one of their attacks.²⁵

From 23 July nationalist troops, supported by concentrated artillery fire, tanks and aircraft, went over to the offensive. The next day they reached the edge of Brunete. ‘Because of bombing attacks,’ wrote Richthofen, ‘the terrain is full of smoke and visibility is bad. As the mist clears, there is a red counter-attack. Red flyers in the air very strong. Heavy infantry losses on our side. Today for the first time all aircrew are deployed. As the red infantry is thrown back by this deployment of air power, seven new battalions arrive to support them.’²⁶

The ‘red infantry’ thrown back was presumably Líster’s division which, despite its reputation for iron discipline, collapsed on 24 July, as the chief Soviet adviser reported back to Moscow later: ‘Líster’s division lost its head and fled. We managed with great difficulty to bring it back under control and prevent soldiers fleeing from their units. The toughest repressive measures had to be applied. About 400 of those fleeing were shot on 24 July.’²⁷ ‘There was a general panic and flight,’ Walter reported to Moscow. ‘The International Brigades, except for XI and units of XV, which held their positions, were not much slower in their inexplicable but hasty movement backwards.’²⁸

‘All the red attacks have been rebuffed,’ Richthofen noted exultantly next day. ‘Countless red casualties, which are already decomposing in the heat. Everywhere shot-up red tanks. A great sight! Our Heinkel 51s and Spanish fighters attack north of Brunete.’ Two days later he claimed the victory as one for the Condor Legion and the nationalist air force: ‘The situation here has been saved by the aircrews. The ground forces are not up to it.’²⁹

The general staff and the communists proclaimed that the Brunete offensive was a masterpiece of planning. General Rojo even suggested that it had ‘a beautiful technical rigorousness, almost perfect’.³⁰ This was optimistic to say the least. Brunete was intended to be an encirclement operation, taking the enemy by surprise, in many ways a foretaste of the Second World War. The theory of ‘deep penetration’, using tank units as armoured fists, had already been developed by the finest minds in the Red Army. The tactic had been used by Arman’s attack at Seseña the previous autumn. But there was no question of using such a technique at Brunete in July 1937. Marshal Tukhachevsky, its greatest proponent, had been tortured into confessing to treason and espionage for the Germans. A month before the battle of Brunete he had been tried and executed along with seven colleagues. They were shot in sequence just after they left the courtroom. No Soviet adviser, therefore, dared follow his tactical theories.

The divisions were spread out and so were the tanks. And instead of leaving strong points to be dealt with by a second line, the breakthrough force was allowed to halt. Most astonishing of all was that the attack from the north was supposed to be met by another attack coming from the southern suburbs of Madrid towards Alcorcón to complete the encirclement. This never got off the ground, so the plan was rendered virtually useless from the start. Not only did the planners grossly underestimate the enemy’s ability to react quickly, they also failed to foresee that as soon as the nationalists achieved air superiority their already overstretched supply system would collapse.

As well as the basic problems of staff failures and republican inferiority in the air, communications between headquarters were disastrously bad. Field telephone lines were continually cut by shelling and runners could not be expected to get through when there was no cover. But these natural hazards of warfare without radios were compounded by the lack of initiative shown by republican commanders. Nationalist field commanders, on the other hand, reacted instinctively and rapidly to the situation as it developed and did not wait for orders from above. Nor did they blindly follow instructions that were out of date when circumstances on the ground had changed dramatically.

Matters were not helped on the republican side by the failure of the staff to provide maps. The International Brigades found that they had to draw them for themselves.³¹ The problems of command and control were also made far worse by the way commanders under pressure would claim to have reached a particular point when they were nowhere near it. (This emerged as a common failing in the Red Army later during the Second World War.) Some republican commanders, out of vanity, lied to their superiors deliberately. For example, El Campesino shamelessly exaggerated nationalist casualties in Quijorna, when it finally fell, to justify his initial lack of success. Líster, in his report, quadrupled the number of enemy defending Brunete and even claimed at one point that his troops had reached Navalcarnero, when in fact they were twelve kilometres short of it. When Mera’s 14th Division moved towards Brunete to replace the 11th Division, Líster claimed not to know that the village had been retaken by the enemy. Miaja’s chief of staff, Colonel Matallana, thought that Líster’s men were still occupying some small hills beyond it.

Prieto, who was at Miaja’s headquarters when Mera complained that his orders did not correspond to the reality on the ground, became even more furious at the commander-in-chief’s protests that he had been misled. General Walter, in his usual scathing terms, reported that the reason why the 11th Division’s commanders ‘were so touchingly ill informed about the dispositions of their own battalions’ was because Líster had far too many officers on his staff.³² Yet Modesto, the commander of V Corps, may have been trying to save the reputation of the most famous communist formation from responsibility for the loss of Brunete. After the battle, Líster was ordered to ‘withdraw his division for retraining and reinforcements’, which was perhaps necessary after the 400 executions. Rodimtsev, his military adviser, was summoned to a suburb of Madrid to see ‘Comrade Malino[vsky] who wanted to know how things were’.³³

Nevertheless, the major factor in the disaster, as in the Segovia offensive, lay in the air superiority of the nationalists. Prieto rightly stated that the Achilles heel of the People’s Army consisted of ‘the commanders and the air force’.³⁴ The whole of the Republic’s Brunete offensive managed to achieve an advance of only 50 square kilometres at the cost of 25,000 casualties, the loss of 80 per cent of its armoured force and a third of the fighter aircraft assigned to the front.³⁵ The loss of equipment was particularly serious at a time when the blockade of republican ports was becoming much more effective. The nationalists suffered 17,000 casualties, but a much lower proportion were killed, and their losses in equipment and aircraft were far lighter.

The first great offensive of the Republic, which had taken little pressure off the northern zone, perhaps a respite of five weeks, signified a major setback. The blow to morale, with the loss of many of their best troops, was exacerbated by the knowledge that the nationalists were soon to achieve parity in ground forces. Franco declared that the battle was over on 25 July, the day of Santiago, the patron saint of the Spanish army, and claimed that Saint James had given them victory. If at that moment he was tempted to exploit republican weakness around Madrid and attack again towards the capital, General Vigón took on the task of persuading him that it was essential to liquidate the northern zone first.³⁶

Flying in the face of reality, the communists declared to the world at large that Brunete had been a victory. In XV International Brigade, commissars told their men that it ‘had totally vindicated the active war policy of the Negrín government following the laissez-faire attitude of Largo Caballero’. The premature and wildly exaggerated claims about the operation’s success in the first two days had forced Miaja and his staff to persist at horrendous cost rather than admit failure. The communists defended the operational plan furiously, but such a concentration of slow-moving forces on a restricted front enabled the nationalists to profit from the vastly superior ground-attack potential of their combined air forces. With both Avila and Talavera airfields less than 30 minutes’ flying time from Brunete, they were able to establish a bombing shuttle and fighter sortie rhythm, which the advocates of the offensive must have seriously underestimated.

The communists’ obsession with propaganda, often at the expense of their men’s lives, contributed to the growing unrest within the International Brigades. The minor mutinies which broke out among the Americans, the British and the Poles of XIII International Brigade were described in reports back to Moscow as ‘unpleasant events’. Members of the Lincoln Battalion were forced back to duty at pistol point, while the British, who were down to 80 men, accused Gal of incompetence and only returned to the front when Walter Tapsell, their commander, was threatened with execution. The Poles, who had been at the front for several months without respite, decided to return to Madrid. The brigade commander, Vincenzo Bianco (‘Krieger’), attempted to crush the revolt by hitting the men and shooting one of them in the head. The International Brigade cavalry detachment, which had done nothing during the battle, was brought in to restore order and prevent anyone leaving the front. Meanwhile, Modesto had resorted to deploying machine-guns behind the line with orders to open fire on anyone who retreated on whatever pretext. The troops were angry about the enormous losses, above all because they suspected that most of them had served no purpose in a senseless butchery.³⁷

Soviet reports emphasize the appalling state in which the International Brigades found themselves after Brunete. They had suffered 4,300 casualties out of a strength of 13,353, and nearly 5,000 men were in hospital.³⁸ International volunteers now formed around only 10 per cent of the strength of the XI Brigade. The rest were Spaniards who naturally resented being commanded by foreign officers who could not speak their language. XIV and XV Brigades were both reduced from four to less than two battalions. Gómez, the head of the International Brigade camp at Albacete, reported to the Red Army’s intelligence directorate in Moscow that the performance of the brigades at Brunete had been affected by ‘the systematic work of the fifth column’.³⁹

The degree of paranoia at this time of Trotskyist witch-hunting is almost incredible. Every blunder, of which there were many, was attributed to deliberate sabotage. General Walter was so convinced that the brigades had been infiltrated that, like Modesto, he set up machine-guns behind the lines to prevent battalions from surrendering to the enemy. ‘On the first night of the operation’, he reported to Moscow, ‘it was necessary to disarm and arrest the entire company of one of the brigade’s battalions. Eighteen men from it, led by a lieutenant and three noncommissioned officers, were shot by sentence of an army tribunal for organizing the company’s defection to the enemy. The divisional commissar and brigade commander (anarchists) were shot by Líster on the second night of the operation for refusal to obey a military order and for persuading the command staff to surrender. Moreover, during the course of 22 days, while the brigade was in the front line, up to twenty enemy agents were exposed and removed from the division. A good half of these were officers. The surrender of Brunete and the flight of many brigades were to a significant extent the result of panic sown by the “fifth column” that the fascists had spread around our forces.’⁴⁰

Morale in all cases was extremely bad, as General Kléber reported back to Moscow: ‘I have begun to worry a great deal about the state of the International Brigades. There is a lot going on there: the attitude of Spaniards towards them and of their attitude towards Spaniards; the questions about morale; the chauvinism of certain nationalities (especially, the French, Poles and Italians); the desire for repatriation; the presence of enemies in the ranks of the International Brigades. It is crucial that a big man be despatched quickly from the big house especially for the purpose of providing some leadership in this matter.’⁴¹

A further report added that ‘the International Brigades are considered to be a foreign body, a band of intruders…by the vast majority of political leaders, soldiers, civil servants and political parties in republican Spain’. Meanwhile, the foreign volunteers felt ‘that they have been treated like a foreign legion ready to be sacrificed’, because they were always selected for the most dangerous attacks, and saw it as ‘a concerted effort to annihilate and sacrifice the international contingents’. Some International Brigades had been at the front ‘for 150 consecutive days’. In XIII International Brigade, Captain Roehr ‘committed suicide in battle because he could no longer accept the responsibility of demanding renewed effort from his exhausted men, and at the same time felt he did not have the right to demand rest for his men from his superiors’.⁴²

Another report to Voroshilov, passed on to Stalin, noted ‘a pessimistic mood and the lack of confidence in victory (the latter has especially strengthened since the operation at Brunete)’. Many Brigaders felt cheated. They had volunteered for six months and were not being allowed home.⁴³ Most striking of all was the fact that the International Brigades had established their own ‘concentration camp’, called Camp Lukács. No less than 4,000 men were sent to this camp in the course of three months from 1 August.⁴⁴

The Beleaguered Republic

Although the ‘active war-policy’ of Negrín’s government had not started auspiciously, the new prime minister hoped that his cabinet’s moderate and disciplined image would succeed in persuading Western governments to change their policy towards Spain. He managed to impress Eden and Churchill, but the former had scarcely six months left before his resignation in protest at Chamberlain’s policy, while the latter remained ‘in the wilderness’ until after the end of the war.

The British government had continued to keep France in the noninterventionist camp by working on its fear of isolation in the face of Hitler. The Non-Intervention Committee, with eight countries participating, had approved on 8 March a new control plan to observe Spanish land and sea frontiers, and control the flow of arms and volunteers. Naval patrols were to watch the Spanish shores, with the Germans and Italians taking responsibility for the Mediterranean coastline.¹

The diplomatic charade of non-intervention received a severe shock on 23 March 1937, when Count Grandi, the Italian ambassador, openly admitted to the Non-intervention Committee that there were Italian forces in Spain and asserted that none of them would be withdrawn until the war was won.² Even so German and Italian intervention continued to be ‘unrecognized’. The only practical step taken had been a measure on foreign enlistments, which meant that each of the signatories passed laws preventing private citizens from volunteering. This, of course, would stop those trying to join the International Brigades, while the Axis powers’ contribution of military units was ignored. In addition, the only effective control on importing war material proved to be the Pyrenean frontier, so again only the Republic suffered. Yet even this did not satisfy the nationalists. In Salamanca, Virginia Cowles encountered a great sense of bitterness against the British government, based on the firm belief that non-intervention was ‘a communist plot to weaken Franco by excluding foreign aid’.³

The isolationism of the United States helped the nationalists, who were aided by many influential sympathizers in Washington. Roosevelt’s government had tacitly upheld the non-intervention policy from the beginning. Then, in January 1937, when aircraft were to be shipped to Spain by the Vimalert company of New Jersey, Congress introduced legislation to prevent it. The vote in both houses was overwhelmingly in favour of the ban, but a technical error in the Senate gave the Vimalert company time to load the aircraft and aero engines on the Mar Canta

´brico in New York harbour. The ship sailed on 6 January, just over 24 hours before the resolution became law. This Spanish merchantman took on more matériel in Mexico and then, disguised as British, made for Basque waters. The deception was no use, for the nationalist cruiser Canarias put to sea from El Ferrol on 4 March to await it. The Mar Cantábrico was captured on 8 March and all the Spanish seamen were executed. It is still not known who warned the nationalists of its route, but the German embassy in Washington DC had passed a considerable quantity of intelligence on the subject back to Berlin.⁴

On 20 April the scheme to patrol ports and frontiers came into effect. Naval patrols furnished by Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy watched the coasts. The uselessness of the scheme was shown by the fact that not a single breach of the agreement was reported by the time it collapsed in the autumn. The incidents with the greatest potential danger in this period occurred on 24 and 29 May, when the port of Palma de Mallorca was attacked by Russian-piloted bombers from Valencia. On 24 May there were near misses on two Italian warships, the Quarto and the Mirabello, the German destroyer Albatross and the British destroyer HMS Hardy.

On 29 May republican aircraft in another raid dropped a bomb which hit the Italian battleship Barletta, killing six members of the crew. The same day two direct hits were made on the German battleship Deutschland, killing twenty sailors and wounding 73. Hitler, on hearing the news, worked himself up into a fit of terrifying proportions. Neurath only just managed to persuade the Führer not to declare war on the Republic. Hitler instead ordered units of the German navy, including the Admiral Scheer, to bombard the undefended town of Almeria in reprisal. The local authorities there estimated that more than 200 shells were fired at the town, killing twenty people, wounding 50 and destroying 40 buildings.

Prieto wanted the republican air force to attack all German warships in reply, which would have constituted a declaration of war. The communists were greatly alarmed and radioed Moscow for instructions. Stalin, not unexpectedly, was entirely opposed to Prieto’s suggestion, since provocation of Hitler alarmed him more than anything else. It was later rumoured that orders had been given to liquidate Prieto if he persisted. In the council of ministers, Giral and Hernández formally opposed the plan. Negrín and Azaña decided to send protest notes to the secretary-general of the League of Nations and to the French and British foreign ministries. But both the Foreign Office and the Quai d’Orsay felt that the Germans had been justified in their response. A

´ lvarez del Vayo then demanded an extraordinary meeting of the League of Nations, but with no success.⁵

On 30 May Germany and Italy withdrew from the Non-intervention Committee. Neville Chamberlain, who had become prime minister on 17 May, tried to calm Hitler with ‘definite and considered’ attempts to persuade Germany to return to the committee. The Germans, realizing that they could take further advantage of the situation, claimed on 15 June that an unidentified submarine had fired torpedoes at their cruiser Leipzig off Oran, and they demanded sanctions against the Republic. They used this incident as their justification for withdrawing from the naval patrol. The Republic denied any part in the event.

The German and Italian policy on Spain was even more closely coordinated than that of England and France. Having recognized the Burgos regime the previous November, they recommended that belligerent rights should be granted to both sides so that non-intervention controls should no longer be needed. The British were opposed to the granting of belligerent rights, which would mean interference with British shipping. The French government (now led by Camille Chautemps, but still containing Blum and Delbos) knew that nationalist naval power, with covert help from Italian submarines, could blockade the Republic into surrender. Negrín visited Paris and received a sympathetic hearing. The French promised that they would not concede belligerent rights to the nationalists. But the British government suggested a compromise formula, which involved granting belligerent rights only when foreign troops had been withdrawn. This was then amended to ‘substantial reductions’, which led to haggling over figures and percentages.

At the end of July the Italians began a random campaign of maritime attacks from Majorca, with ‘Legionary’ submarines and bombers. In August alone they sank 200,000 tons of shipping bound for republican Spain, including eight British and eighteen other neutral merchantmen. On 23 August Ciano made notes of a visit from the British chargé d’affaires in Rome: ‘Ingram made a friendly démarche about the torpedo attacks in the Mediterranean. I replied quite brazenly. He went away almost satisfied.’⁶ On 31 July the Italian submarine Iride fired torpedoes at the British destroyer HMS Havock north of Alicante. On 3 September Ciano wrote, ‘Full orchestra–France, Russia, Britain. The theme–piracy in the Mediterranean. Guilty–the fascists. The Duce is very calm. He looks in the direction of London and he doesn’t believe that the English want a collision with us.’⁷ It was not surprising that Mussolini made such an assumption. Lord Perth, the British ambassador, was later described (perhaps optimistically) by Ciano as ‘a genuine convert’, a man who had ‘come to understand and even to love fascism’. In any case Chamberlain, ignoring Eden’s advice, wrote to Mussolini directly in the friendliest terms, thinking he could woo him away from Hitler. Meanwhile, he had instructed Perth to start working towards a treaty of friendship with Mussolini. He was also to use as a personal envoy his sister-in-law, Lady Chamberlain, who proudly wore fascist badges and insignia.

There were the beginnings of a small group in the Conservative Party and its supporters who were sensitive to the dangers of Chamberlain’s policy. Harold Nicolson, who was one of them, agreed with Duff Cooper that ‘the second German war began in July 1936, when the Germans started with their intervention in Spain’. He went on to say that ‘the propertied classes in this country with their insane pro-Franco business have placed us in a very dangerous position’.⁸ The only area where the Conservative government was prepared to display a semblance of firmness was in the Mediterranean, the sea lane to the Empire. Its main concern was that Axis bases should not exist on Spanish territory once the civil war was over.

On 22 June Eden argued in the wake of the Leipzig incident that ‘submarines of the patrol powers in Spanish waters (including the western Mediterranean) should not proceed submerged, and that the Spanish parties should be informed that they must follow this procedure’.⁹ The patrol powers would then be justified in attacking any submarines under the surface. This proposal was blocked by the Italians with German support as ‘pointless’. Their ‘Legionary’ submarines would have been the most at risk. The French, no doubt using Eden’s proposal, called a conference at Nyon on the shore of Lake Geneva to discuss the situation in the Mediterranean, but Italy and Germany refused to attend. The Nazi government claimed that the Leipzig incident had still not been resolved, and the Italians protested at the Soviet Union’s direct accusation of continued submarine attacks. The British and French governments ‘regretted this decision’, adding that they would keep the Axis powers informed of what happened.

Neurath warned Ciano that British naval intelligence had intercepted signals traffic between Italian submarines. Knowing there was little to fear, Ciano replied that they would be more careful in future. The Nyon conference decided with remarkable speed that any submerged submarines located near a torpedoing incident would be attacked by the naval forces of the signatories.¹⁰ Nothing, however, was said of air or surface attacks. That had to be added later at the League of Nations in Geneva. The British then proceeded to make such large provisos in an attempt to persuade the Italians to join the agreement that the whole exercise was rendered virtually worthless. Mussolini boasted to Hitler that he would carry on with his ‘torpedoing operations’.

On 16 September Negrín took part in the League of Nations debate over events in the Mediterranean. He demanded an end to the farce, but his words had no effect. He continued to argue that maintaining the fiction of non-intervention was tantamount to assisting the war and demanded that the aggression of Germany and Italy be officially recognized. Only the Mexican and Soviet governments supported him.

At the League of Nations that autumn, Eden tried to justify the non-intervention policy by claiming, untruthfully, that it had reduced the inflow of foreign forces. The British government also tried to prevent the Spanish Republic from publishing details of Italian intervention. Eden admitted that ‘it would be idle to deny that there have been wide breaches of the agreement’, but he went on to recommend the maintenance of the non-intervention agreement because ‘a leaky dam may yet serve its purpose’.¹¹ For the nationalists it proved no barrier at all. Eventually, the League decided that if it ‘cannot be made to work in the near future, the members of the League will consider ending the policy of non-intervention’. The Spanish republican representative asked for a more precise definition of ‘the near future’. The French foreign minister, Delbos, hoped it meant not more than ten days and the British representative replied ‘probably an earlier date than the Spanish delegate thinks’. The near future had still not arrived eighteen months later when the Spanish Republic ceased to exist.

British Conservative politicians may have started to see the republican government in a more positive light, but they had no idea of the power struggle going on behind the scenes in Valencia. Senior communists and Soviet advisers were in a state of anger and alarm as they found former political allies turning against them.

On 30 July Dimitrov passed to Voroshilov a report from a senior Soviet official in Valencia about the state of relations within the Negrín government. This document reveals the determination of the communists to seize total power in Spain. ‘The honeymoon is over…The government family is far from what might characterize it: friendship, love and peace…It is true that with this government our party has more opportunities for work, for exerting pressure on government policy, than it had with the preceding government. But we are still far from the desirable minimum.’ Again a bitter attack was launched against Prieto for having freed Rovira, the POUM commander, from prison. Prieto even ordered that the POUM’s 29th Division be rearmed, but the communists had already managed through their members in the army to disband it entirely.

Prieto, the report continued, ‘is afraid that the Popular Army, headed by commanders who come from among the people [i.e. loyal communists], hardened in battle, represents a huge revolutionary force and, as a result of this, will play a decisive role in determining the economic and social life, the political system of a future Spain’. Prieto therefore was trying to prevent political activity, ‘especially communist activity, and in this the professional military, including Rojo, supports him. He at least wants the command staff not to consist of active revolutionaries. This policy of Prieto is fundamentally linked to his overall political conception, which does not allow the development of the Spanish revolution to step beyond the limits of a classical bourgeois-democratic republic…I must add that Prieto’s conception about the army is completely supported by Martínez Barrio and the Republicans…The Republicans are beginning more and more to change their relationship with the Communist Party. Not long ago they regarded the Communist Party with great respect. In June this began to change.’ This was presumably influenced by the disappearance of Andreu Nin.

The report then described Zugazagoitia, the socialist minister of the interior, as ‘a disguised Trotskyist’: ‘It was he who sabotaged the pursuit of the POUMists. What is more: he himself organized and supported a number of campaigns of a blackmailing nature, provocations whose goal is to turn the Trotskyist spy affair against the party. He forbade and prevented the publication of materials exposing the connection between Nin and the POUMists and Franco’s general staff. It was he who removed Ortega, the communist, from his post as the director general of public security.’ The attacks continued against other ministers. Irujo, the Basque minister of justice, ‘acts like a real fascist…Together with Zugazagoitia, Irujo does everything possible and impossible to save the Trotskyists and to sabotage trials against them. And he will do everything possible to acquit them.’

The report also accused Giral, the minister of foreign affairs, of infiltrating Trotskyists into his ministry. Negrín was the only one to support the Communist Party, but he was not strong enough. ‘Our party insisted on the following three points: to carry out a purge of the military apparatus and to help promote to the top ranks the commanders who come from among the people, and to put a stop to the anti-communist campaign; to carry out tirelessly a purge of Trotskyist elements in the rear; once and for all to stop indulging the press, groups and individuals who are carrying out a slanderous campaign against the USSR. If he will not do this, then the Party is strong enough, understands well enough the responsibility that it bears, and will find the necessary means and measures to protect the interests of the people.’ The survey of the political situation concluded with the statement: ‘The popular revolution cannot end successfully if the Communist Party does not take power into its own hands.’¹²

The War in Aragón

After the failure of the Brunete offensive in July, the republican general staff finally admitted that nothing could be achieved by major operations in the central region. But even though another attack on such a massive scale could not be considered after their losses in matériel, a further effort to help Santander and Asturias was demanded. If the republican forces in the north could hold out until the winter snows blocked the passes of the Cordillera Cantábrica, Franco would not be able to bring down his Navarrese, Galician and Italian troops (which would bring him numerical parity) or the major part of his air power before the late spring of 1938.

The Aragón front was chosen for the next republican attack. The reasons for deciding on the east rather than the south-west were primarily political. The communists and their senior supporters in the army could not select Estremadura, because it would be a virtual admission that the Brunete strategy had been wrong and Largo Caballero’s project right. The major reason, however, for switching the emphasis of the war to the east was the intention of Negrín’s government and the communists to establish complete control over Catalonia and Aragón.

In the wake of the May events in Barcelona, the central government had taken over responsibility for public order in Catalonia, dissolved the Generalitat’s Council of Defence, which had been run by the anarchists since its inception, and appointed General Pozas to command the newly designated Army of the East. This represented the first stage in ending the Generalitat’s independence and anarchist power in Catalonia. The next stage in reasserting central government control was to be the crushing of the Council of Aragón by bringing in communist troops and placing the three anarchist divisions under overall communist command. The composition of republican forces in the east was changed radically in the summer of 1937. Before Brunete the only communist formation in the region had been the PSUC’s 27th (Carlos Marx) Division, but during the last days of July and the first part of August all the elite communist formations were transferred from the central front, including Kléber’s 45th Division and Modesto’s V Corps (with Líster’s 11th Division, Walter’s 35th Division and El Campesino’s 46th Division). For the first time the anarchists were threatened in their ‘Spanish Ukraine’.

At the end of July, after the battle of Brunete, the communists launched a propaganda offensive against the Council of Aragón’s president, Joaquín Ascaso, who was a controversial and flamboyant figure. The communists accused him of acting like a Mafia chieftain. His libertarian supporters, on the other hand, defended him vigorously when he was accused of smuggling jewellery out of the country. Ferocious attacks were made on the system of self-managed agricultural collectives in the main Party newspapers Mundo Obrero and Frente Rojo, because it ran counter to the ‘controlled democracy’ which Negrín and the communists advocated.

At the end of July the carabineros, which Negrín had built up when finance minister, were used to harass the collectives by confiscating their produce. Then, on 11 August, the central government dissolved the Council of Aragón by decree while its members were gathering in the last of the harvest. The anarchist 25th, 26th and 28th Divisions were kept occupied at the front and cut off from news of what was happening, so that Líster’s 11th Division, backed by the 27th and 30th Divisions, could be sent against the anarchist and joint CNT-UGT collectives. These ‘manoeuvres’, as they were officially described, involved mass arrests and the forcible disbandment of the Council of Aragón along with all its component organizations. CNT offices were seized and destroyed, and the collectives’ machinery, transport, tools and seed grain were given to the small proprietors whom the communists had encouraged to resist the co-operatives.¹

The anarchist members of the Council were the first to be arrested and they were fortunate not to have been shot out of hand. Around 100 of them were put in the prison of Caspe, and were still there when the nationalists occupied the town in March 1938.² The communists counted on arranging a show trial for Ascaso, but he had to be released on 18 September when they could produce no evidence. (La Pasionaria tried to revive the accusations in 1968, saying that Ascaso had fled to South America where he was living in luxury on his booty. He was, in fact, still working as a servant in a hotel in Venezuela.)

The justification for this operation (whose ‘very harsh measures’ shocked even some Party members) was that since all the collectives had been established by force, Líster was merely liberating the peasants. There had undoubtedly been pressure, and no doubt force was used on some occasions in the fervour after the rising. But the very fact that every village was a mixture of collectivists and individualists shows that peasants had not been forced into communal farming at the point of a gun.³ It is estimated that there were up to 200,000 people belonging to the collectives and 150,000 individualists.⁴ Perhaps the most eloquent testimony against the communists is the number of collectives that managed to re-establish themselves after Líster’s forces had left. Meanwhile, the degree to which food production was disrupted and permanently damaged became a matter for bitter debate. José Silva, the head of the Institute of Agrarian Reform, later embarrassed his communist colleagues considerably when he admitted that the operation had been ‘a very grave mistake, which produced a tremendous disorganization in the countryside’.⁵

The exact part in these events played by the non-communist members of Negrín’s government, especially Prieto, is the subject of dispute. Negrín himself backed the communist action without reservation, while the liberals and the other right socialists continued to support measures which destroyed ‘cantonalism’ and increased centralized power. Prieto, the minister of defence, and Zugazagoitia, the minister of the interior, certainly gave instructions for the dismantling of the Council of Aragón and were prepared to use force if necessary. But Prieto denied Líster’s claim that he was given carte blanche to destroy the collectives as well.⁶ In any case the libertarian revolt, which the authorities had feared, did not take place.

The events in Aragón also caused the rift between the CNT leadership and its mass membership to widen. The weakness of the CNT leaders in their refusal to condemn Líster’s action outright provoked much frustration and anger. The only attempt to restrain the communist action came from Mariano Vázquez, the CNT secretary-general, who asked Prieto to transfer Mera’s division to Aragón immediately. But he was satisfied by the minister of defence’s reply that he had already reprimanded Líster. (Vázquez, a ‘reformist’ syndicalist and the chief advocate within the CNT of complete obedience to government orders, was a great admirer of Negrín, who is said to have despised him.) The CNT leaders claimed that they had prevented death sentences from being carried out by the special communist military tribunals, but the prospect of three anarchist divisions turning their guns against Líster’s troops probably carried greater weight. In any case the whole episode represented a considerable increase in communist power and a corresponding blow to anarchist confidence.

While these events took place, Rojo had been preparing a new operation to be undertaken by the Army of the East. The objective was to distract the nationalists from their final offensive in the north by attacking Saragossa. The recapture of this regional capital offered more than just symbolic significance. It was also the communications centre of the whole Aragón front. The first year of the war in this part of Spain had emphasized that the possession of a key town was of far greater importance than the control of wide areas of open countryside. The nationalists had only the 51st, 52nd and 105th Divisions spread across 300 kilometres of front, with the majority of their troops concentrated in towns.

General Pozas and his chief of staff, Antonio Cordón, set up their headquarters at Bujaraloz. Their plan was to break through at seven different points on the central 100-kilometre stretch between Zuera and Belchite. The object of splitting their attacking forces was to divide any nationalist counter-attack and to offer fewer targets for bombing and strafing shuttles than at Brunete. On the north flank the 27th Division would attack Zuera, before swinging left on Saragossa itself. In the right centre Kléber’s 45th Division was to attack south-eastwards from the Sierra de Alcubierre towards Saragossa. Meanwhile, the 26th Division and part of the 43rd Division would attack from Pina, cross the Ebro and cut the highway from Quinto to Saragossa.

The main weight of the offensive, with Modesto’s V Corps including Líster’s 11th Division and Walter’s 35th Division, was concentrated up the south side of the Ebro valley. Líster’s 11th Division would thrust along the southern bank towards Saragossa, spearheaded by nearly all the T-26 and BT-5 tanks allocated to the offensive.⁷ The BT-5s had been grouped in the International Tank Regiment commanded by Colonel Kondratiev. All the drivers were members of the Red Army.⁸ The majority of the 200 republican aircraft on the front were also reserved for the Ebro valley attack. They greatly outnumbered the nationalists’ obsolete Heinkel 46 light bombers and Heinkel 51 fighters.⁹

The republicans enjoyed an overwhelming local superiority, both on the ground and in the air. Modesto was certain that the operation was bound to be successful. The general staff orders emphasized that the opposing troops were of low quality, that the nationalists had few reserves in Saragossa and that an uprising would take place in the city to help them.¹⁰ Modesto seemed to be more interested that Líster’s division, supported by the tanks, would have the glory of being the first formation to enter the city than in considering contingency plans in case the operation did not turn out to be the walkover he expected. It had been only six weeks since Brunete and Modesto appears to have forgotten what happened there, unless he believed the propaganda that had turned defeat into a victory.

The offensive in Aragón began on 24 August, the day the nationalists were on the point of entering Santander on the north coast, so the main point of the attack was lost. To maintain the advantage of surprise, there was no artillery bombardment nor attacks by the republican air force.¹¹

In the north, the 27th Division occupied Zuera towards midday. Kléber launched his 45th Division into the attack and reached Villamajor de Gállego, some six kilometres from Saragossa, and halted there because he lacked intelligence on enemy defences. The troops of the 25th Division took Codó after overcoming the fierce resistance of Carlists from the tercio of Nuestra Señora de Montserrat, which blocked the road from Belchite to Medina. Meanwhile, Líster with his 11th Division advanced on Fuentes de Ebro but failed to capture it. They took time trying to smash one defensive position after another. An attached cavalry brigade was shattered in the process and lost all its fighting capacity. The most disastrous part of this action affected the International Tank Regiment, which the infantry failed to support when it broke through. Almost all the BT-5s were destroyed. A furious Modesto blamed Líster for the disaster and from then on the mutual hatred of the two great communist leaders became a major problem. This too was blamed on ‘the interference of fascist elements who roused mutual hostility between the two and thus weakened the strength of V Corps’.¹² A more rational report to Moscow, however, put the blame on ‘the open sabotage of Líster, who did not want to be subordinate to Modesto’.¹³

Quinto was attacked by the 25th Division, which managed to take it on 26 August, despite the nationalist troops’ courageous defence of the chapel of Bonastre. With the 11th Division locked in a stalemate in Fuentes de Ebro, the 35th Division had to be sent to its aid. Republican commanders were obsessed once again with crushing every defensive position, when they should have forged ahead towards the main objective and left them to second-line troops. At this point Modesto proposed changing the original plan of taking Saragossa into one of capturing Belchite, which was defended by only a few hundred men. These nationalist defenders had good machine-gun positions, some of them made in ferro-concrete and others in specially prepared houses, as well as the seminary and church of San Agustín.

The attack on Belchite began at ten in the morning on 1 September. It was supported by artillery and aircraft flown by the first Spanish pilots to graduate from training schools in the Soviet Union. Much of the town was reduced to rubble. Then the tanks advanced, a very unwise manoeuvre, since they were extremely vulnerable in streets partially blocked by collapsed buildings. The next day resistance was crushed in the seminary and the fighting revolved around the church of San Agustín. The Calle Mayor became the main line of fire while the nationalists defended their positions in the calle Goya and the town hall from behind sandbagged emplacements. The desperate fighting continued until 6 September when the whole of Belchite was a smoking ruin of death, smashed masonry, dust and corpses, both human and animal. The ‘nauseating stench’ drifted out over the countryside around.¹⁴

The whole operation had lasted thirteen days, during which the republican troops lacked water in stifling heat amid the overwhelming smell of rotting bodies so powerful that those who had gas masks wore them in spite of the temperature.¹⁵ The delays caused by the nationalists’ fierce defence of Quinto and Codó had given them time to bring up Barrón’s 13th Division and Sáenz de Buruaga’s 150th Division. This was a repeat of the republicans’ mistakes at Brunete. They wasted totally unnecessary numbers of men and time reducing resistance points that should have been contained and bypassed. The small nationalist garrisons never posed a serious threat to Modesto’s rearguard if he had continued the advance. In the end this huge effort by the republicans, who enjoyed overwhelming superiority, succeeded only in advancing ten kilometres and taking a handful of villages and small towns. It was a total failure in its main objectives of taking Saragossa and diverting the nationalists from their campaign in the north.

Once again the Republic suffered a considerable loss of badly needed armament, especially the tanks. And once more Stalinist paranoia blamed the failure on a ‘Trotskyist’ fifth column. General Walter considered the situation worse than at Brunete. ‘The 35th Division’s medical unit’, he reported, ‘registered several instances of wounded internationalists who were in Spanish hospitals for treatment dying because of maliciously negligent or completely unnecessary surgical operations and diagnoses and methods of treating the sick that were patently the work of wreckers.’ In addition, ‘a large-scale Trotskyist spy and terrorist organization’ was suspected in XIV International Brigade. They were supposedly planning to murder Hans Sanje, its commander, and Walter himself. Walter called the NKVD in Barcelona to come to investigate, but ‘Brigade Commander Sanje took it upon himself to carry out the investigation. He went to work so ardently and clumsily that the arrested man, a French lieutenant, quickly died during interrogation, taking with him the secret of the organization.’¹⁶

General Pozas held Walter responsible for the failure of the operation, by concentrating on secondary objectives and not the main one. Prieto was furious at the handling of the battle and his bitter criticism aroused the Party’s anger against him. Along with a growing number of senior officers, he had begun to recognize that communist direction of the war effort was destroying the Popular Army with prestige operations which it could not afford and triumphalist propaganda that was counterproductive. The Catalonia press claimed on 4 September, while the fighting still raged in Belchite, that ‘an intelligent and relevant act of the government has given for the first time mobility to all battle fronts. The Spanish people are starting to sense the longed-for and welcome consequences of an efficient policy of national unity facing the fascist invasion.¹⁷

The Aragón offensive had certainly come too late to help the defence of Santander. Nor did it delay the start of the third and final stage of the war in the north. Well aware of the importance of reducing the remaining Asturian territory before winter set in, General Dávila redeployed his forces rapidly to continue the advance westwards from Santander.

The Destruction of the Northern Front and of Republican Idealism

On 29 August, while the battle of Belchite was reaching its height, the Provincial Council of Asturias assumed all military and civil powers. It proclaimed itself to be the Sovereign Council of the Asturias, under the presidency of Belarmino Tomás. Its first act was to replace General Gámir Ulibarri with Colonel Adolfo Prada, who took command of the remnants of the Army of the North, now less than 40,000 men strong.

Prada’s chief of staff was Major Francisco Ciutat and its main formation was XIV Corps, commanded by Francisco Galán. The republican air force in the north was down to two flights of Moscas and less than a squadron of Chatos.¹ Republican territory was now reduced to some 90 kilometres deep between Gijón and La Robla, and 120 kilometres along the coast, with the Oviedo salient sticking into the western flank.

Dávila’s attack on this last piece of republican resistance in the north came from the east and south-east aimed at Gijón. His force was at least twice the size of the republicans’ and included Solchaga’s four Carlist brigades, three Galician divisions under Aranda and the Italian CTV. They were supported by 250 aircraft, including the Condor Legion.

Nevertheless, the advance, which began on 1 September, averaged less than a kilometre a day, even with the nationalists’ crushing air superiority. The Picos de Europa and the Cordillera Cantábrica gave the republican defenders excellent terrain to hold back the enemy and they did so with remarkable bravery. It has been said that they fought so desperately only because the nationalist blockade gave them no hope of escape, but this can never have been more than one factor. When most of the senior officers managed to escape in small boats, the rank and file fought even more fiercely.

Solchaga’s Carlists did not reach Llanes until 5 September. These Navarrese brigades then launched themselves against the El Mazuco pass, which they seized and lost and then recaptured, then lost again. The defence of the pass, led by a CNT worker from La Felguera, continued for 33 days. The Carlists finally took it at bayonet point, suffering many losses. Meanwhile, the Condor Legion relentlessly bombed and strafed the republican rear,² finding it too difficult to hit their mountain positions with conventional bombs. The German squadrons experimented with a prototype of napalm, consisting of cans of petrol attached to incendiary bombs.

On 18 September Solchaga’s Carlists opened the bloodiest part of the whole campaign. After fierce fighting, the 1st Navarre Brigade managed to enter Ribadesella; on 1 October the 5th Navarre Brigade occupied Covadonga; and ten days later they cleared the west bank of the upper Sella. On 14 October Arriondas fell. In the meantime Colonel Muñoz Grandes managed to break through Tama, one of the best fortified positions of the Asturian miners, and advance to Campo de Caso, thus sealing the encirclement. The Condor Legion completed the work, machine-gunning the republicans falling back on Gijón. On 20 October Solchaga’s forces joined up with those of Aranda.³

The republican government in Valencia instructed Colonel Prada to begin a general evacuation, but Franco’s fleet, waiting for the collapse, asked the Condor Legion to bomb the republican destroyer Císcar, sent to take off as many people as possible. The Císcar sank and foreign ships were intercepted by the nationalist warships. Many senior officials and officers managed to escape on gunboats and other small vessels to France. Yet the bulk of the republican troops continued fighting ferociously until the afternoon of 21 October, when the 4th Navarre Brigade entered Gijón. Part of the republican troops slipped away into the mountains where they joined up with remnants of units which had escaped from Santander. Guerrilla warfare continued in the Cordillera for another six months, tying down considerable bodies of nationalist troops.

Once the Nationalists had taken Gijón, the process of ‘cleaning up the reds’ began in earnest throughout the region. The bullring in Gijón filled with prisoners, as did the Luarca theatre and other buildings in the city. The execution squads worked without rest.⁴ The northern front had ceased to exist. For Prieto, the basic cause of the defeat lay in the lack of a unified command.⁵ The minister of defence promoted Rojo to general and offered his resignation to Negrín who refused to accept it.

The real effects of the conquest of the north were not to become apparent until the new year, when the nationalists started to deploy the Carlist formations, the Italian corps and Aranda’s Galician troops in the southern zone. Nationalist warships in the Bay of Biscay were transferred to the Mediterranean, increasing its control of the coastline there. A new naval and air command under Admiral Francisco Moreno was set up in Palma de Mallorca.⁶ But for Franco, one of the most important gains lay in the coal and other mines, much of whose produce would go to paying his debt to Nazi Germany.

The considerable growth in nationalist manpower at this time was assisted by drafting more than 100,000 prisoners from the northern campaign into their infantry units as well as labour battalions. This manner of increasing their forces was not always successful, because a large proportion deserted as soon as they reached the front line. There were at least two cases of rebellion caused by left-wingers in their ranks. At Saragossa anarchists drafted into the Foreign Legion started a revolt and attempted to release their comrades from prison. And 200 sailors in El Ferrol, chiefly on the España, had been discovered preparing a mutiny during the previous winter. In both cases all those involved were executed.

Meanwhile in republican Spain the autumn of 1937 witnessed the continued decline of anarchist power, the isolation of the Catalan nationalists, discord in socialist ranks and the development of the secret police. Negrín’s government presided over these developments and as a result of communist power the repression of dissenters was far greater than it had been during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. The prime minister’s pretended ignorance of secret police activities was unconvincing while, as Hugh Thomas has pointed out, his attempt to restrict political activity through censorship, banning and arrests was parallel to Franco’s establishment of a state machine where ideological divergence was also contained.⁷ Nevertheless, most of the Republic’s supporters abroad who had defended the left-wing cause on the grounds of liberty and democracy made no protest at these developments.

The need to collaborate with the Soviet Union, together with the seriousness of the military situation, was later used by Negrín’s supporters to justify the actions of his administration. But it was Negrín who had persuaded Largo Caballero to send the gold reserves to Moscow, so he bore a major responsibility for the Republic’s subservience to Stalin in the first place. Yet during his administration the flow of Soviet military aid decreased dramatically. This was partly the result of the nationalists’ naval blockade, but it was also a consequence of Stalin’s increasing desire to extricate himself from Spain when he realized that the British and French governments were not going to challenge the Axis. And now the Soviet Union was helping China against Japanese aggression. Paradoxically, Stalin’s unease was probably increased by Negrín’s obvious hope that the Republic would be saved by a European war.

President Azaña had encouraged the prime minister’s firm rule in the early days of his administration, but his attitude was to change when he came to understand Negrín’s character better. Both men disliked Companys and Azaña supported Negrín’s plans to bring Catalonia under central government control. The president still resented Companys’s initial success in increasing the Generalitat’s independence during the turmoil of the rising. The reduction of Catalonia’s identity was both symbolized and effected by moving the Republic’s government from Valencia to Barcelona, and Negrín took every opportunity to emphasize the Generalitat’s reduced status.⁸ ‘Negrín avoided almost any direct contact with Companys,’ wrote the communist Antonio Cordón, then under-secretary for the army. ‘I don’t remember any event or ceremony in which they took part together.’⁹

Largo Caballero realized after his fall from power that the Socialist Party and the UGT were in an even worse state than he imagined. He still had his loyal supporters, especially the inner circle of Luis Araquistáin, Carlos de Baráibar and Wenceslao Carrillo (the father of Santiago Carrillo). But many right socialists, a powerful faction within the UGT, and the majority of the Joint Socialist Youth were collaborating closely with the communists.¹⁰ Some groups responded to their call for unification. A joint newspaper, Verdad (meaning ‘truth’ and intended as a Spanish Pravda), had been founded in Valencia. It was the first to praise the socialists in Jaén, who had established their own party of socialist-communist unification called the PSU (United Socialist Party).

The PSOE newspaper, El Socialista, and even Largo Caballero’s Claridad, had already been taken over by the pro-communist wing of the party. But the most disturbing event for Largo Caballero came at the end of September, when his supporters were disqualified from voting at the national plenum of the UGT. Nevertheless, many pro-communist socialists, including even Negrín, still held back from the fateful step of outright union with the PCE. Largo Caballero’s speech on 17 October (the first he had been allowed to make since May) explained the fall of his government and gave strong warnings of the dangers the party faced. Largo Caballero did not, however, recover any power, for he was kept off the executive committee, and his supporters on it remained in a minority. At the end of October he moved to Barcelona where, in a form of internal exile, he busied himself in minor affairs.¹¹

Probably the most ominous of all the developments in republican territory at this time was the rationalization of the security services, on 9 August 1937, into the SIM, Servicio de Investigación Militar.¹² Prieto had been the architect of this restructuring to increase central control. He believed that the fragmented growth of counter-espionage organizations was uncontrolled and inefficient. One intelligence chief complained that ‘everyone in our rearguard carried on counter-espionage’. Independent services with their own networks of agents were run by the army, the Directorate-General of Security, the carabineros, the foreign ministry, the Generalitat and the Basque government in exile (now based in Barcelona). Even the International Brigades had their own NKVD-run branch of heretic hunters based at Albacete. Its chief, ‘Moreno’, was a Yugoslav from the Soviet Union who was shot on his return.¹³

The new department was out of its creator’s control as soon as it was constituted in August, since the communists had started to infiltrate and control the police and security services in the autumn of 1936. The first directors, the socialists Ángel Díaz Baza and Prudencio Sayagüés, were not up to the work, while others such as Gustavo Durán, whom Prieto named chief of the SIM for the Army of the Centre, had to be removed because he recruited only communists. The next director was Colonel Manuel Uribarri, who reported solely to Soviet agents and managed to flee to France with a booty of 100,000 francs.¹⁴ Only the following year was communist control reduced. The organization did indeed manage to destroy a number of nationalist networks–‘Concepción’, ‘Círculo Azul’, ‘Capitán Mora’, ‘Cruces de fuego’ and others–but there can be no doubt that during its first eight months of existence the SIM, later described as ‘the Russian syphilis’ by the German writer Gustav Regler, was a sinister tool in the hands of Orlov and his NKVD men.

SIM officers included both unquestioningly loyal Party members and the ambitious. Its unchallenged power attracted opportunists of every sort to its ranks. The core of executive officers then created a network of agents through bribery and blackmail. They even managed to plant their organization in resolutely anti-communist formations as a result of their control of transfer and promotion. For example, a nineteen-yearold rifleman in the 119th Brigade was suborned and then promoted overnight to become the SIM chief of the whole formation with a greater power of life and death than its commander.¹⁵

Because of the destruction of records, it is difficult to know the total number of agents employed by the SIM. There were said to have been 6,000 in Madrid alone and its official payroll was 22 million pesetas. Its six military and five civilian sections, including the ‘Z Brigade’, covered every facet of life and its agents were present in every district and command.¹⁶ The most feared section was the Special Brigade, which was responsible for interrogation. When its infamous reputation became known abroad, it simply changed its name. The government insisted that it had been disbanded, but in fact there was an increase in the number of its victims who ‘crossed over to the enemy’ (the euphemism for death under torture or secret execution). It worked with a network of ‘invisible’ agents both at the front and in the rear.¹⁷

In the central region the SIM made use of mainly secret prisons which had belonged to the DEDIDE. The first was the religious college of San Lorenzo, which held 200 suspects. The second was Work Camp No. 1 in Cuenca. Those who had the misfortune to be held there are united in their evidence: maltreatment, the use of cold and hunger to extract confessions, punishment cells called ‘the icebox’ and the ‘fridge’, in which prisoners were left naked with water up to their knees, or they were sprayed with freezing water during winter months.¹⁸

In Barcelona the SIM had two main prisons, one in the Calle Zaragoza, the second in the Seminario Conciliar, although it also used other locations, such as the Portal de l’A

´ ngel, which held 300 people in the summer of 1937, the so-called ‘Nestlé dairy’, the Hotel Colón, one in the Calle Vallmajor and others. Interrogators worked ruthlessly to extract confessions which matched their conspiracy theories. In September 1937 the security organs in Barcelona reported that they had exposed ‘an espionage organization even larger than the one in Madrid. This organization, too, was set up by Catalonian Trotskyists. Its identifying sign was the letter TS and each one of its agents had a personal identification number. Documents that were found in the mattress of one of its members show that this gang had committed a number of sabotage acts and that it was preparing assassination attempts against some top leaders of the People’s Front and the Republican Army.’ It then went on to give a list of the republican leaders targeted for assassination, perhaps in the hope of encouraging non-communist ministers to support them.¹⁹

Under NKVD direction, the SIM performed inhuman atrocities. The nationalists exploited and exaggerated this, creating a black legend. Yet although all documents were destroyed, there can be no doubt from oral testimony, and from the continual denunciations of Manuel de Irujo and Pere Bosch Gimpera, that the Soviets were applying their ‘scientific’ methods of interrogation. The SIM’s interrogation methods had evolved beyond beatings with rubber piping, hot and cold water treatment and mock executions which had been carried out in the early days. Cell floors were specially constructed with the sharp corners of bricks pointing upwards so that the naked prisoners were in constant pain. Strange metallic sounds, colours, lights and sloping floors were used as disorientation and sensory-deprivation techniques. If these failed, or if the interrogators were in a hurry, there was always the ‘electric chair’ and the ‘noise box’ but they risked sending prisoners mad too quickly.

There are no reliable estimates of the total number of SIM prisoners, nor of the proportions, though it seems fairly certain that there were more republicans than nationalists. It was alleged that any critics of Soviet military incompetence, such as foreign volunteer pilots, were as likely to find themselves accused of treason as a person who opposed the communists on ideological grounds. The minister of Justice, Manuel de Irujo, resigned on 10 August 1938 in protest, although he remained in government as a minister without portfolio. Many other leading republicans were appalled by such judicial practices and above all by the SIM. Negrín simply dismissed critical accounts of SIM activity as enemy propaganda. Only in 1949 did he admit that he had been wrong to the American journalist Henry Buckley.²⁰

The communists had been remarkably successful in creating a large degree of control over the government, the bureaucracy and the machinery of public order, while retaining a token presence of only two minor ministries in the cabinet–a requirement of Soviet foreign policy. They had made themselves indispensable to the centrist politicians who had wanted to restore state power and who were now too involved in the process to protest. Nevertheless, a reaction against communist power was starting to develop, especially within the army.

In the autumn of 1937 communist propaganda was making great claims about the progress of the People’s Army. It is true that there had been improvements at unit level. But few commanders or staff officers had displayed competence or tactical sense, and the supply organization was still corrupt and inefficient. Above all, damage to morale had been increased by events behind the lines. Communist preferment and proselytizing at the front had reached such levels that former communist supporters among the regular officers were horrified. Prieto was shaken when he heard that non-communist wounded were often refused medical aid. Battalion commanders who rejected invitations to join the Party found weapon replacements, rations or even their men’s pay cut off. Those who succumbed were given priority over non-communists. They were promoted and their reputations were boosted in despatches and press accounts.

Co-operation was withheld from even the most senior non-communist officers. Colonel Casado, when in command of the Army of Andalucia, was not allowed to know the location of airfields or the availability of aircraft on his front. Commissars given recruitment targets to fulfil by the Party hierarchy went to any lengths to achieve them. Prieto later stated that socialists in communist units who refused to join the Party were frequently shot on false charges such as cowardice or desertion. After the battle of Brunete, 250 men from El Campesino’s division sought protection in the ranks of Mera’s 14th Division because of the treatment they had suffered for not becoming communists. Mera refused to return them when El Campesino arrived in a fury at his headquarters. General Miaja, though officially a communist, backed him against a Party member.

Perhaps the most dramatic deterioration in morale after mid 1937 occurred in the ranks of the International Brigades, who in October had lost 2,000 men through a typhus epidemic.²¹ There had always been non-communists in their ranks who refused to swallow the Party line, but now even committed communists were questioning their position. At the beginning of 1937 the Irish had nearly mutinied after the Lopera débaˆcle, when they were prevented at the last moment from forming their own company. The American mutiny at the Jarama in the early spring had been successful, though that was seen as an aberration which had been put right. Some Italians from the Garibaldi Battalion deserted to join the liberal and anarchist Giustizia e Libertá column. During the Segovia offensive XIV International Brigade had refused to continue useless frontal attacks on La Granja and foreigners in a penal battalion mutinied when ordered to shoot deserters.

The anger at futile slaughter was accompanied by a growing unease at the existence of ‘re-education’ camps, run by Soviet officers and guarded by Spanish communists armed with the latest automatic rifles. At these camps labour was organized on a Stakhanovite basis, with food distribution linked to achieving or exceeding work norms. The prisoners were mostly those who wanted to return home for various reasons and had been refused. (It was not known until later that several Brigaders in this category were locked up in mental hospitals, a typically Soviet measure.) One of the most sordid camps was at Júcar, some 40 kilometres from Albacete, where disillusioned British, American and Scandinavian volunteers were held. Some British members were saved from execution by the intervention of the Foreign Office, but those from other nationalities were locked up in the prisons of Albacete, Murcia, Valencia and Barcelona.²²

The persistent trouble in the International Brigades also stemmed from the fact that volunteers, to whom no length of service had ever been mentioned, assumed that they were free to leave after a certain time. Their passports had been taken away on enlistment and many of them were sent to Moscow by diplomatic bag for use by NKVD agents abroad. Brigade leaders who became so alarmed by the stories of unrest filtering home imposed increasingly stringent measures of discipline. Letters were censored and anyone who criticized the competence of the Party leadership faced prison camps, or even firing squads. Leave was often cancelled and some volunteers who, without authorization, took a few of the days owing to them were shot for desertion when they returned to their unit. The feeling of being trapped by an organization with which they had lost sympathy made a few volunteers even cross the lines to the nationalists. Others tried such unoriginal devices as putting a bullet through their own foot when cleaning a rifle.

Comintern organizers were becoming disturbed, for accounts of conditions had started to stem the flow of volunteers from abroad. Fresh volunteers were shocked by the cynicism of the veterans, who laughed at the idealism of newcomers while remembering their own with bitterness. Some of the new arrivals at Albacete were literally shanghaied. Foreign specialists, or mechanics who had agreed to come for a specific purpose only, found themselves pressganged and threatened with the penalty for desertion if they refused.²³ Even sailors on shore leave from foreign merchantmen in republican ports were seized as ‘deserters’ from the brigades and sent to Albacete under guard. On 23 September 1937, Prieto issued a decree incorporating the International Brigades into the Spanish Foreign Legion, which brought them under the Spanish Code of Military Justice. He also established a regulation that International Brigade officers in any one unit should not exceed Spanish officers by more than 50 per cent.²⁴

The greatest jolt to the attitudes of those in the International Brigades was the persecution of the POUM. Communist ranting against the POUM continued unabated. ‘We have in our country’, declared one Party orator late in 1937, ‘a long chain of very recent facts that prove that Trotskyists have long been engaged in these grotesque criminal activities and as the difficulties increase and decisive battles approach, they start, more and more openly, to popularize the enemy’s slogans, to sow the seeds of defeatism, mistrust and split among the masses, and engage more actively than ever in espionage, provocation, sabotage and crime.’²⁵

The Party’s version of events was so obviously dishonest that only those terrified of the truth could believe it. The majority, however, realizing that they had been duped, resented the insult to their intelligence. They had to hold their tongues while in Spain so as to avoid the attentions of the SIM. Then, when they did reach home they usually remained silent, rather than undermine the republican cause as a whole. Those who spoke out, like Orwell, found the doors of left-wing publishers closed to them.

Uncritical supporters of the Republic were forced to justify the Moscow line. Nevertheless, the attempt to export the show-trial mentality to Spain ignored the fact that, however authoritarian Negrín’s government might be, it was not totalitarian. As a result, the sealed maze of distorting mirrors that had replaced reality in the Soviet Union was not duplicated in Spain.