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

The New Spain and the Franquist Gulag

On 19 May 1939 the grand victory parade of nationalist Spain took place in Madrid along the Castellana, now renamed the Avenida del Generalissimo. A huge construction of wood and cardboard had been erected to form a triumphal arch on which the word ‘Victory’ was displayed. On each side the name ‘FRANCO’ was repeated three times, and linked with the heraldic arms of the Catholic monarchs.

Franco took the salute at this march past from a large tribune. He wore the uniform of captain-general, but the dark blue collar of a Falangist shirt could be seen underneath and on his head the red beret of the Carlists. Below him in front of the stand his personal bodyguard of Moroccan cavalry was drawn up.

Altogether 120,000 soldiers–including legionnaires, regulares, Falangists and requetés–took part in the parade, with artillery and tanks. The rear was brought up by Portuguese viriatos and the Condor Legion. The German contingent was led by Colonel von Richthofen. ‘I am driving at the front,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The spectators go wild. “¡Viva Alemania!”’¹ In the sky above, aircraft formed the initials of ‘Viva Franco’.

The next day Cardinal Gomá, primate of Spain, gave Franco the wooden cross to kiss at the door of the church of Santa Bárbara, where the Caudillo entered under a canopy, as the kings of Spain used to do. In the middle of a solemn ceremony, imbued with heavy medieval imagery, Franco laid his victorious sword in front of the miraculous Christ of Lepanto, brought especially from Barcelona for the occasion. All the trappings and incantations represented the sentiments and self-image of the crusading conqueror. In his struggle to defeat the Marxist hydra Franco had been fighting against the past as well as the present: against the nineteenth century poisoned by liberalism; against the eighteenth century which had produced the Enlightenment and Freemasonry; and against the defeats of the seventeenth century. Only in an earlier period could the Caudillo find the roots of a great and united Spain, the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella.

Franco was now master in his own country, but he could not ignore the debts to barons and clans who had helped him achieve the victory. In feudal style, he knew that he could maintain the loyalty of his generals by making them ministers, under-secretaries and military governors. But there were a few–Kindelán, Varela, Aranda–who only accepted his power as a form of regency until the Alphonsine line was restored. Others, such as Queipo de Llano or Yagüe, had their own plans.

Franco heard from Beigbeder that Queipo was openly conspiring to install a military junta. With the garrulous viceroy of Andalucia, he did not have to wait long for Queipo to make a mistake. On 17 July, at the celebrations of the third anniversary of the rising, he presented the cross of San Fernando to the city of Valladolid. This irritated Queipo, since he considered that Seville (personified by himself) had played a far more important role in the rising. Queipo could not desist from making the most disobliging remarks in all directions about ‘Paca, the fat-arsed’. Franco summoned him to Burgos for consultations and at the same time sent General Saliquet to Seville to take command there as soon as Queipo arrived to see his Caudillo. Queipo was promptly sent off on a military mission to Rome. He had lost his power base.²

On 8 August, in a move to consolidate his political position, Franco issued the law of the head of state, which gave him the right to sanction laws or decrees in cases of emergency, without deliberation by the council of ministers. Two days later Franco approved the formation of his second government with another master stroke. He made Colonel Juan Beigbeder minister of foreign affairs; Ramón Serrano Súñer minister of the interior;

General Varela minister of the army; but then, to everyone’s stupefaction, he made General Yagüe minister of air. This dismayed both Yagüe and especially Kindelán, who had commanded the air force throughout the war. Kindelán was sent to the Balearic Isles as military governor, where he would find it difficult to conspire with other monarchists. And Yagu ¨e, given a task which he was unlikely to perform well, would find it difficult to be a credible standard-bearer for the Falangists.³ No doubt Serrano Súñer played a part, for he was still advising his brother-in-law on most appointments and would continue to play the most influential role until 1942.

The generals, after almost three exhausting years under arms and in the field, were now content with a more sedentary role in the political barracks of Franquist Spain. The country, however, was in a terrible state. Its economy was in ruins, with both agrarian and industrial production below the already low levels of 1935. This did not take into account the massive destruction of the country’s infrastructure–railways, roads, bridges, ports, power lines and telephone systems. Some 60 per cent of rolling stock had been lost and 40 per cent of the merchant fleet.

A quarter of a million buildings had been destroyed and a similar number severely damaged.⁴ The new state had almost no foreign exchange and had lost all its gold reserves, so the monetary system was in chaos. There were also the war debts to the nationalists’ allies to be paid off. And the loss of manpower, some 3.5 per cent of the working population, did not take into account the prisoners and the exiles.

One of the regime’s first priorities was to return land to its former owners, not just the farms taken over during the revolution of 1936, but also those affected by the agrarian reforms under the Republic.⁵ Wages were fixed and in the countryside were reduced to half of what they had been under the Republic. They would not again reach the level of 1931 until 1956. The sale of agricultural production was controlled by the state, which fixed prices. This, of course, encouraged the black market to flourish, whatever the punishments threatened under military tribunals. In Madrid, a kilo of flour was selling at 12 pesetas as opposed to the official price of 1.25. Beans, meat, olive oil, all were selling at prices up to more than three times the official level.⁶ The opportunities for corruption escalated rapidly in such conditions. Meanwhile, the lack of tools and the failure to invest in farm machinery meant that agricultural production fell over a number of years, with disastrous results in 1941 and 1945, when many areas were close to famine.

State control of industry was designed to create a form of autarchy, in which priority was given to military needs in case Spain found itself involved in a European war. Owners and managers returned to find themselves in a form of barracks dirigisme. They could control their workforces, since strikes were outlawed, militants purged and working hours extended at fixed salaries; but the factory owners had little say in obtaining raw materials or the sale of their finished product.⁷

On 25 September 1941 the decree of the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI), the main mechanism for economic control and autarchy, was established.⁸ It covered almost everything: war production, mineral prospection, coal, iron and steel, copper and non-ferrous metals, chemicals, explosives, rubber etc. The INI intervened in aircraft production and later in all types of vehicles, as well as synthetic oil production, a concept which greatly appealed to Franco, who saw autarchy as a particularly Spanish virtue as well as a necessity. The fact that it was far from cost-efficient does not appear to have dawned on him or his ministers until 1950. He proclaimed that ‘Spain is a privileged country which can survive on its own. We have everything we need to live and our production is sufficiently abundant to assure our survival. We do not need to import anything.’⁹ Autarchy would only diminish after the bulk of the nationalist debts to Germany and Italy had been settled. To pay its debts to Germany required, between 1939 and 1943, the equivalent of 12 per cent of the value of all its imports and 3 per cent in the case of Italy.¹⁰

Franco also liked the idea of cheap energy and agricultural irrigation from hydroelectric dams, the great projects which had appealed to Calvo Sotelo during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship and nearly bankrupted Spain. On 7 October 1939 he launched a plan for their construction and republican prisoners of war were put to work. The financing of such projects as well as much of the nationalist economy had created a very close relationship between the regime and the five major Spanish banks. In return for their co-operation they were protected from competition–no new banks were set up in Spain until 1962–and given great power in the economy, allowing them to amass huge profits and create veritable commercial empires.¹² As one historian wrote, ‘The architectural symbol of the new Spain was not the church, as Carlists wanted before the war, but the bank.’¹³

This anti-communist state also proceeded to nationalize the railway network, paying its owners in shares which were worth nothing.¹⁴ At a time when the shortage of petrol and its high cost appeared to favour railways, the RENFE managed to achieve pitiful results due to appalling management. Some commentators have observed that the effects of Franco’s nationalization programme were very similar to those of Soviet satellite states after 1945.¹⁵

Another paradoxical parallel between Franquism and Stalinist Russia was the obsessive fear of foreign ideological contagion. While most of the senior Soviet advisers from Spain were being forced to confess by the NKVD to treasonous contacts abroad and then shot, in nationalist Spain the rhetoric called for drastic surgery to save the body politic. The Bishop of Vic called for ‘a scalpel to drain the pus from Spain’s entrails’.¹⁶ Franco’s press attaché, the Count de Alba y Yeltes, said during the war to one Englishman that they had to rid Spain of the virus of bolshevism, if necessary by eliminating a third of the male population of Spain.¹⁷ Now that the nationalists had almost all the republican prisoners in their power, they could embark on their thorough cleansing.

Prison camps were set up all over the country. Including temporary and transit camps, there were 190 of them, holding between 367,000 and half a million inmates.¹⁸ During the final offensive 45,000 had been taken in the central zone, 60,000 in the south and 35,000 in Levante.¹⁹ When the summer of 1939 arrived, numbers had to be reduced, especially in the temporary camps. Some prisoners were given provisional liberty, 90,000 were sent off to 121 labour battalions, and 8,000 put to work in military workshops. Executions, suicides and escapes also reduced the total. Certain ‘special’ camps were maintained, such as those at Miranda de Ebro and San Pedro de Cardeña, for foreign combatants in the International Brigades. Some of those prisoners were sent off to rebuild Belchite–‘You destroyed Belchite and you will rebuild it,’ they were told.

In January 1940 the supervision of prison camps came under General Camilo Alonso Vega, the director-general of services in the ministry of the army. Alonso Vega, who had been head of the Civil Guard, later became minister of the interior. Those condemned by military tribunals were sent to military penal colonies for reconstruction work, or to mine coal in Asturias, León and the Basque country; some had to extract mercury, and many thousands were sent to dig canals and work on other projects close to Franco’s heart. Much of this forced labour proved far from cost-effective, as was the case in Beria’s Gulag,²⁰ but later the work was subcontracted to various companies who made better use of the unpaid labour than the military authorities. Prisoners were also hired out to landowners who were able to improve their properties with irrigation and other schemes impossible before. The rest who remained in prison, 270,719 of them according to ministry of justice figures, were spread around jails with a capacity for only 20,000.

The 150,000 republicans, who returned across the French frontier to nationalist Spain, found a society still in a state of war, even though the trenches had been abandoned. Repressive laws, such as that of 26 April 1940, insisted on exacting revenge for everything that had happened ‘in the red zone since 18 July 1936, until the liberation’. Investigations were aimed not just at crimes against the person, but also those of a ‘moral’ nature committed ‘against religion, culture, art and the national patrimony’.²¹

The ‘attribution of responsibilities’ was aimed at ‘the physical destruction of the cadres of the parties of the Popular Front, of the workers’ unions and the Masonic organizations’ and the ‘extirpation of the political forces which had sponsored and sustained the Republic’.²² We do not have a final figure for the Franquist terror, but recent researches in more than half the provinces of Spain indicates a minimum there of 35,000 official executions.²³ This suggests that the generally accepted figure of 50,000 after the war may be low. If one adds on the unofficial and random killings, and those who died during the war from execution, suicide, hunger and sickness in prison,²⁴ the total figure probably approaches 200,000.

Once again, another unanswerable question needs to be asked. If the Republic had won, how many would have been executed and might have died in their camps? As several historians have pointed out, the winner of a civil war always kills more than the losers. Everything would have depended on the republican regime which would have emerged. If it had been a communist regime, then to judge by other communist dictatorships, it would have been very high because of the paranoid nature of the system. But in Spain, much would also have depended on whether it was a Stalinist version, or whether a more Spanish variety would have evolved, as Negrín seemed to think.

The Caudillo used to read through the sentences of death when taking his coffee after a meal, often in the presence of his personal priest, José María Bulart. He would write an ‘E’ against those he decided should be executed, and a ‘C’ when commuting the sentence. For those who he considered needed to be made a conspicuous example, he wrote ‘garrote y prensa’ (garroting and press coverage). After coffee, his aide would send off the sentences to be passed to the military governor of each region of each province, who would communicate them by telegram to the head of the prison. The sentences would then be read out in the central gallery of the prison. Some officials enjoyed reading out the first name, then pausing if it was a common one, such as José or Juan, to strike fear into all those who bore it, before adding the family name. In the woman’s prison of Amorebieta one of the nuns who acted as warders would perform this duty.²⁵

Those who escaped a death sentence faced many years of terrible conditions in one of the 500 penitentiaries. The director of the Model Prison of Barcelona, Isidro Castrillón López, said to his charges, ‘You should know that a prisoner is a ten millionth part of shit.’²⁶ Prisoners were made to suffer from thirst as well as hunger. Sometimes they received no more than the equivalent of a small can of water in three days. There were epidemics of typhus and dysentery even in prisons holding mothers and small children where washing facilities hardly existed and the smell was overpowering.²⁷ The poet Miguel Hernández suffered from pneumonia in the prison of Palencia, bronchitis in the prison of Ocaña, and typhus and tuberculosis, of which he died, in Alicante prison.

Even by the standards of many prison systems, the corruption among warders and indeed senior officials was striking. In the penal colony of San Simón in Pontevedra provisional liberty was sold and, most appalling of all, a death sentence could be given to somebody else if a very large sum was paid. The family of a doctor from Vigo struggled desperately to raise the 400,000 pesetas which a senior official had demanded for this service.²⁸ Those captured after 1 April 1939 were known as the ‘posteriores’. They were often political militants or members of the guerrilla resistance to the regime. Many of them were subjected to terrible tortures, near-drowning in ‘la bañera’ or electric shocks, to force them to give the names of others in their organization. Both posteriores and anteriores were sometimes lined up on identity parades for widows of nationalist victims, accompanied by Falangists. Any suspected of having been involved in the death of a husband were simply ‘disappeared’.

The notion of a bolshevik infection, as an explanation of left-wing views, was given a spurious scientific basis. Major Antonio Vallejo Nágera, a professor of psychiatry at Madrid University, had founded in the summer of 1938 a centre of psychological investigation with fourteen clinics in the nationalist zone to study the ‘psiquismo del fanatismo marxista’. His conclusions were that the only way to prevent the racial dissolution of Spanishness was the removal of children from suspect parents to be schooled in nationalist values. In 1943 there were 12,043 children taken from their mothers and handed over to the Falangist Auxilio Social, to orphanages and to religious organizations. Some of these children were passed on for adoption to selected families, a pattern followed thirty years later in Argentina under the military dictatorship there.²⁹

Nationalist Spain was little more than an open prison for all those who did not sympathize with the regime. Various departments of secret police were set up. Franco’s obsession with Freemasonry even led to the creation of the Servicio de Información Especial Antimasónico in March 1940. Freemasons, in his view, were responsible for the loss of the Spanish empire, the fall of the monarchy and numerous ‘state crimes’ during the period of the Republic. On 29 March 1941 a law for the ‘Security of the State’ was introduced, which targeted illegal propaganda, criminal association including strikes and the spreading of rumours unfavourable to the regime, all of which were regarded as tantamount to ‘military rebellion’. Later, in April 1947, the law for the Repression of Banditry and Terrorism, aimed at the guerrilla resistance, represented a further turn of the screw on individual liberties.

The mania for total mastery of everything extended even to the nationalist movement itself. The state political movement combining the Falange and Carlists, the FET y de las Jons, was given a crucial role in the network of repression and social control. Serrano Súñer made sure that the ‘old shirts’, with their anti-capitalist rhetoric, should not offend the military and the rich. Franco was given total authority–‘before God and History’–to direct its ideology. Prominent Falangist ‘old shirts’ were sent abroad as ambassadors or given out-of-the-way posts in Spain. Candidates for membership of the national council of the movement were carefully chosen for their blind obedience to the Caudillo. At the end of the civil war in 1939, the party had 650,000 members. By 1945 this figure had almost doubled. As in Germany and the Soviet Union, it was essential to become a member if you wanted promotion within the bureaucracy which directed every aspect of national life.

In September 1939 the Spanish University Union was founded, to which every student in higher education had to belong. The universities themselves were turned into an extension of the state bureaucracy. Youth and even employers’ organizations were treated in a similar fashion. The Falangist trade union, the Organización Sindical, which wielded immense power, had little interest in the rights of workers. Its task was to ensure that the labour force ran on almost military lines in the service of the state. Women, meanwhile, were expected to stay at home, unless they were involved in the Feminine Section, an evolution of the Falangist charity, Winter Help, copied from the Nazi Winterhilfe. The primary role of such an organization was to train women in their household tasks and obedience to their husbands. In a counterpart to national service in the armed forces, young women had to work for Auxilio Social for six months, either looking after the children in its institutions or serving in the equivalent of soup kitchens.³⁰

The defeat of the republicans also obliged them to submit themselves to the authority of the Church as well as to their temporal masters. Franco had been extremely generous in restoring all the Church’s privileges and wealth, as well as its power in education, but in return he expected the priesthood to act virtually as another arm of the state. With Church control over primary schools re-established, Franco’s minister for education purged thousands of teachers and hundreds of university lecturers and professors who were thought to have fallen under Masonic, Jewish or Marxist influences. Universities were controlled by the Falange, but with strong guidance from ecclesiastical authorities. The precepts of the nationalist movement were imposed on all subjects from history to architecture. Censorship of cultural life in all its forms was also rigorously exercised. This had started with the Law of the Press in 1938. Military and ecclesiastical censors went through libraries, destroying forbidden works.

Those republicans who had not been arrested and those freed from prison discovered that their life was still severely restricted. Many found it impossible to take up their previous employment. Priority was always given to former members of the nationalist armies. And there was also the risk of being denounced to the authorities by a jealous neighbour or a rival. The population was encouraged to accuse people as part of its patriotic duty. Concierges and caretakers became police spies, as in every dictatorship, and priests noted those who did not turn up to mass. They were regarded as part of what was called ‘the sixth column’, traitors to the cause by thought rather than by identifiable deed.

All this made the struggle for survival even harder. For example, those regarded as politically unreliable were not allowed to open a shop. Unable to scrape a living in their home town, many emigrated to the larger cities where they were unknown. The post-civil war years formed a period of great suffering and little hope of change. Franco’s regime appeared impregnable.

The Exiles and the Second World War

The 450,000 republicans who crossed the French frontier in February 1939 as Catalonia fell were not the first refugees from the civil war.¹ Nor were they the last. Another 15,000, who managed to escape from Mediterranean ports in March during the final collapse of the Republic, reached the French colony of Tunisia, where they were interned in the camps of Getta and Gafsa near Tunis, and in others near Bizerta and Argelia. The conditions were described as sub-human. The French colonial authorities did not welcome this influx of ‘reds’. One of the many prisoners there was Cipriano Mera, the former bricklayer who had became commander of IV Corps and Casado’s military companion in the coup. Like many other republicans, Mera was handed over to nationalist Spain after the fall of France in 1940, but his sentence of death was commuted.²

Those refugees who had crossed the frontier in February and March 1939 were divided between the women, children, the old and the sick on one hand, and soldiers and men of military age on the other. The former, some 170,000, went to camps at Prats de Molló, La Tour-de-Carol, Le Boulu, Bourg-Madame and Arles-sur-Tech, and later were spread over 70 French départements. The latter were interned in improvised camps mostly on the beaches of south-west France.

The places to which the defeated republicans were sent consisted of stretches of coast, wet, salty and without any protection from the wind. The first camp to open, in the middle of February, was at Argelès-sur-Mer. It was little more than a marshland divided into rectangles of a hectare apiece and surrounded by a perimeter of barbed wire guarded by Senegalese troops. There was a shortage of drinking water, many resorted to drinking sea water, and nothing was done to provide washing facilities or latrines. The food they received was scarce and of bad quality. The men suffered from scabies and lice. The 77,000 refugees, many without proper clothing, belongings, money or food, had to build huts for the sick and wounded. The rest dug into the sand to shelter from the wind. Only after the first few weeks were they given drinking water in cans and wood to make latrines next to the sea.

Emil Shteingold, the Latvian International Brigader, described the largest, Saint-Cyprien, where up to 90,000 men were herded. ‘Imagine a gloomy sandy spit of land with no vegetation, which was about two kilometres long, and about 400–500 metres wide. It was washed by the Mediterranean Sea on one side and ended up in a swamp on the other. This area was fenced by barbed wire and divided into square corrals. Machine-guns were placed along the perimeter of the camp. A latrine was erected on the beach, which consisted of a long log fixed on piles, under which the tide flowed back and forth. This was how we were welcomed by republican France with its socialist government. As a sign of gratitude for this warm welcome, we decided to call the latrine area “The Daladier Boulevard”…The sand looked dry, but it was only dry on the surface. We had to sleep out on it in groups of five to ten men. Some of the greatcoats and blankets we put underneath, and with other coats and blankets we covered ourselves. It was not a good idea to turn from one side to another, as the wet side would freeze in the cold wind, and this could lead to pneumonia…Wounded and sick men were brought here, too. The mortality was very high, it reached 100 people every day.’³

The other camps in the south were fairly similar and new ones opened up. In April, Basques, aviators and International Brigaders were transferred to Gurs. Barcare`s was slightly better, because the people sent there had indicated their willingness to be repatriated to Spain. The much smaller Bram, near Carcassone, was one of the very few good ones. It even had a sanatorium of 80 beds. In an attempt to improve the wretched conditions in the large camps, the French authorities tried to move some of their inmates to the initial sorting camps of Arles and Prats de Mollo in the mountains, but they had to stop the practice because too many died literally of cold.⁴

The camp of Vernet-les-Bains, situated between Saverdun and Foix, was a punishment camp from the First World War cut off from the outside world. About 50 hectares in area, and divided into three sections all surrounded by barbed-wire fences, it held those republicans the French authorities considered ‘a danger to public safety’, among them the survivors of the 26th Division, the old Durruti column and 150 International Brigaders segregated in a sector known as the ‘leper colony’. Under the Vichy government the camp passed to the Germans, who rebuilt it according to their own concentration camp guidelines. Yet Arthur Koestler wrote that ‘from a point of view of food, installations and hygiene, Vernet was worse than a Nazi concentration camp’.⁵ In such conditions it was predictable that many thousands of refugees should have died. Suspected male political activists in other camps were transferred to the Templar castle of Collioure and women militants to the camp of Rieucros.

The French authorities had never prepared for such an influx, but even when the scale of the human disaster was apparent, they were very slow and reluctant to move. This was not entirely surprising since the cost of looking after so many refugees rose to seven million francs a day. The right-wing press constantly attacked Daladier’s government for having allowed in so many left-wingers and Candide complained about feeding them.⁶ The French authorities encouraged refugees to return to Spain and surrender themselves to the nationalists. Only those with relations in France and who were prepared to sign a form that they would never ask for state aid were allowed out of the camps. The alternatives, apart from returning to Spain, were re-emigration to the New World or any other country that would accept them; or to ‘volunteer’ for the French Foreign Legion or the labour battalions, which were being used on improving fortifications and other projects as the threat of war increased.⁷

By the end of 1939 between 140,000 and 180,000 had decided to go back to Spain and take their chances.⁸ Some 300,000 chose exile in France, in other European countries or in Latin America. The Mexican government of President Lázaro Cárdenas had already welcomed children evacuated from the republican zone. Thousands more of all ages were to follow in different waves, including José Giral and General Miaja. Some went to Chile, then under a popular front government, others to Dominica and then on to Venezuela and Cuba. Argentina allowed in only 2,500, giving priority to Basques. In Europe Belgium took 5,000, but Britain restricted immigration to only a few hundred. The Soviet Union took no more than 3,000 and most of those were senior members of the Spanish Communist Party. Of the 50,000 to 60,000 who stayed in France, most were enrolled in Companies of Foreign Workers, a semi-militarized organization, which put them to work in the mines, war industry or in agriculture.⁹

Republican leaders seldom suffered the same rigours and frustrations of the ordinary exiles. Azaña, badly stricken with heart disease, died at Montauban on 4 November 1940. Juan Negrín and Indalecio Prieto, the former friends who had become bitter enemies, continued their struggle in France. Although Negrín had summoned a meeting of the permanent delegation of the Cortes in Paris on 31 March 1939, Prieto organized another on 27 July to dissolve formally the government of the Republic, but Negrín refused to accept the vote.

The confrontation became increasingly bitter when Prieto and the permanent delegation set up the JARE, the Council for Aid to Spanish Republicans.¹⁰ Prieto demanded that Negrín hand over control of the valuables and currency which the republican government held in Europe and North America, among them the famous ‘treasure’ of the yacht Vita. Negrín had allocated this to his own organization, the SERE, the Service of Evacuation for Spanish Republicans. The treasure–jewels, bonds and other valuables worth some $300 million–came from the confiscations ordered against nationalist supporters by the People’s Tribunal of Civil Responsibilities. It was stored on the Vita, which had been Alfonso XIII’s private yacht and was guarded by a detachment of Negrín’s carabineros.

The Vita sailed from le Havre for Mexico and reached Veracruz a few days earlier than expected. As a result, Dr José Puche, a confidant of Negrín’s, was not at the dockside to take charge of the contents. Enrique Puente, the commander of the carabineros, telephoned Prieto to ask him what he should do and Prieto seized the whole consignment with the approval of President Cárdenas. The treasure was taken to Mexico City under the control of the JARE, and thus Prieto made off with it from under the noses of Negrín and the communists.

Yet even after this blow, Negrín and his associates never exactly found themselves in a state of poverty. He personally controlled a trust made up of funds confiscated under his government and was able to buy a large country house near London where he lived until 1945, providing lodgings there for up to a dozen republican politicians. Other leaders were not nearly so fortunate. Once France was occupied by German troops in the summer of 1940, General Franco asked Marshal Pétain to extradite 3,617 republican leaders. The Vichy regime agreed to very few, but it did hand over to the Gestapo seven leaders, including the president of the Generalitat, Lluis Companys; Joan Peiró, the former anarchist minister; Francisco Cruz Salido and Julian Zugazagoitia. These four were executed, the other three sentenced to life imprisonment. Largo Caballero was captured by the Gestapo and, after being interrogated in Berlin, was sent to the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. He was barely alive at the liberation in 1945 and died soon afterwards.

Foreign communists in France followed Comintern orders and were obliged to remain silent when the Nazi–Soviet pact was signed in August. Those left in Spain tried to set up underground organizations, but the Franquist secret police managed to smash one network after another, usually as the result of extracting names under torture.

The Second World War was to put Franco’s statecraft to its greatest challenge. When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Franco issued a decree imposing ‘the strictest neutrality on Spanish subjects’. Yet two months later, on 31 October, he summoned the Junta de Defensa Nacional to announce that he had decided on an ambitious plan to rearm the forces and increase the army to 150 divisions through conscription. This would mean a target of two million men under arms. He ordered the general staff to prepare to close the Straits of Gibraltar by concentrating artillery on the coast there. He also wanted them to reinforce the army in Morocco in readiness to invade the much larger French zone. The navy was to prepare a blockade of French maritime traffic in the Mediterranean, including their North African ports and to interrupt British shipping, if necessary by blockading the Portuguese coast as well.¹¹

Spanish coasts and territorial waters were put at the disposal of the German Kriegsmarine, which apart from its base in Cádiz, was to resupply 21 submarines from Vigo. Tankers and supply ships would come and go replenishing the U-boats. Italian ships and submarines, watching the Straits of Gibraltar, routinely used Spanish territorial waters, both on the Mediterranean and Atlantic sides.¹²

In April 1940 Mussolini decided to enter the war on the German side. On 12 June, during the Fall of France, Franco changed from neutrality to a state of ‘non-belligerency’. Forty-eight hours later he ordered the occupation of Tangier. That same day, in a meeting with the German ambassador von Stohrer, he passed a message to Hitler expressing his desire to enter the war if the Führer had need of him. In mid July he sent General Vigón to see Hitler and Ribbentrop, then at the Chaâteau de Acoz in Belgium, to communicate his desire to enter the war on the side of the Axis. He wanted to negotiate the conditions. As well as arms, fuel, ammunition and food, he wanted in compensation: ‘Morocco, Oran, the Sahara as far as the twentieth parallel, and the coastal zone of Guinea as far as the Niger delta’.¹³

The Nazis, stupefied at the price Franco put on entering the war, showed little enthusiasm, but a few days later Hitler sent a message via Richthofen that he should prepare to collaborate in an imminent operation against Gibraltar, which would coincide with Operation Sealion, the invasion of Britain. Richthofen and Vigón met to co-ordinate plans of attack, but on 31 July Sealion was suspended because Admiral Raeder warned the Führer that the Kriegsmarine could not guarantee success.

Hitler’s attention soon started to turn towards his ultimate ambition, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Offering Spain as a bastion for the Axis in the Atlantic, Franco wrote to Mussolini on 15 August, asking him to intercede with Hitler to persuade him to agree to his conditions so that Spain could enter the war ‘at the favourable moment’. But Hitler did not want to give Franco power over the western Mediterranean, since the sea was to be maintained as the preserve of Italy.¹⁴

Hitler decided to have a private meeting with Franco on 23 October at Hendaye on the French frontier. Unfortunately, Franco was travelling by the Spanish railway system and arrived late, which deeply irritated the Nazi leader. Hitler again refused to give in to Franco’s claims over the French empire in North Africa. He was due to see Marshal Pétain the following day and wanted to consolidate the Vichy regime’s collaboration. In the end a protocol was drawn up stating that Franco would enter the war when requested, that Gibraltar would be given to Spain and vague affirmations were made about compensating him with some undefined African territories at a later date.

In December Hitler sent Canaris to see Franco to tell him that the Wehrmacht was preparing a force of fifteen divisions to seize Gibraltar in Operation Felix. Franco expressed his concern that the British would reply by attacking the Canary Islands and demanded guarantees. Hitler was furious when he heard of Franco’s ‘treason’ to the agreement made in Hendaye. On 6 February 1941 Hitler sent Franco another letter, polite but imperative. This crossed with a memorandum from Franco asking for so much artillery, spare parts, signals equipment, trucks, locomotives and wagons, that German civil servants considered the list beyond the capacity of Germany.¹⁵ Hitler then wrote to Mussolini asking him to arrange things with Franco, thinking that the ‘Latin charlatans’ would understand each other.

Mussolini had a meeting with Franco on 12 February in the Villa Margherita at Bordighera. Serrano Suñer, now minister for foreign affairs, was also present. Franco said that he was afraid of entering the war too late and complained that the Germans were so slow giving him the weapons that he needed. Mussolini told Hitler of the results of the meeting and recommended that Franco should not be pushed any further. It is certainly possible that Mussolini did not want Franco as a rival in the Mediterranean.¹⁶

On their return to Madrid Serrano Suñer, who had recently met Hitler and had held five meetings with Ribbentrop, felt himself to be the man of the moment. But he failed to realize how much he was hated by the Spanish generals and by the ‘old shirts’ of the Falange. In recent months the British secret service had been paying large bribes to the more monarchist and religious generals to encourage them to oppose Franco and his brother-in-law. From the middle of 1940 to the end of 1941 some thirty generals between them had received $13 million and continued to be given more. Aranda alone was given $2 million in 1942. The financial arrangements were made by the great smuggler, Juan March, who had now allied himself with the British.¹⁷ General Vigón had a private interview with the Caudillo in which he warned him of the deep resentment of generals at the enormous power which Serrano Suñer had accumulated, and added that rumours were running around Spain saying that it was his brother-in-law who controlled everything.

Even some Falangists began to turn against Serrano Suñer, but others were determined to increase their power. The situation was becoming dangerous, because German agents were encouraging them. Serrano Suñer felt that his best way to advance was to put increased pressure on Franco to enter the war as soon as possible. The Germans in that spring of 1941 had just conquered Yugoslavia and Greece, and captured Crete.

Franco moved in stages with a series of changes at the top level. Serrano Suñer found that not only had he lost the ministry of the interior and control of the Movement, but his conduct of foreign affairs was being questioned in government circles. Then, on 22 June, the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. Two days later Falangists launched themselves on to the streets in a great demonstration shouting slogans against ‘atheist communism’. Serrano Suñer thought that this was his chance. In uniform, he made a speech from the balcony of the General Secretariat of the Movement which overlooked the Calle de Alcalá: ‘Russia is guilty! Guilty of our civil war!…The extermination of Russia is demanded by history and by the future of Europe!’ The Falangist demonstrators, in a bellicose frenzy, went on to yell at the British Embassy, ‘Gibraltar is Spanish!’

Serrano Suñer thought that he could recover all his power if he managed to channel the onrush of Falangist energy. A move then occurred to him, which seemed to offer a resounding triumph in the eyes of Spaniards and Germans alike. He went to see Franco and spoke to him of the need to form a division of volunteer Falangists to go to Russia alongside the Wehrmacht to fight the ‘apocalyptic beast’. But the senior generals, using Varela as their spokesman, made it clear that they opposed Serrano’s attempt to meddle in military affairs, especially since this also involved the Falange. Franco once again adopted a double-edged solution. He would agree to a Falangist volunteer division, but it should be commanded by one of his generals.

On 13 July the ‘División Española de Voluntarios’, usually known as the ‘División Azul’, or Blue Division, began to leave for the training camp of Grafenwöhr in Germany. Commanded by General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, it became the 250th Infantry Division in the German army and was sent to the Volkhov front near Lake Ilmen, east of Leningrad.¹⁸ A few days after their departure Franco made a speech on the anniversary of the rising in which he linked Spain’s destiny to Nazi victory and said that the Allies had lost. This speech, combined with the despatch of the Blue Division, alarmed the British and they began to prepare Operation Pilgrim, the invasion of the Canary Islands. In the end, Churchill cancelled it, but increased the pressure on Franco’s regime by reducing oil and wheat deliveries, and demanding that exports of wolfram to Germany should cease.

Even after Hitler’s check before Moscow in December 1941, and the entry of the United States into the war, Serrano Suñer became increasingly confident. But on 16 August 1942, just as Hitler’s armies began to advance on Stalingrad and strike into the Caucasus, a curious incident happened in Bilbao. During a religious festival at the shrine of the Virgin of Begona, a confrontation took place between Carlist traditionalists and Falangists. The clash developed from insults and shoving into something more deadly. A Falangist Juan Domíngo threw a hand grenade, which wounded 30 people. General Varela, a traditionalist, took the disturbance as an assassination attempt against himself, and announced that it constituted ‘an attack against the whole army’ and sent telegrams to all the captaincy-generals. Domíngo was accused of being an agent provocateur in the service of the British and was executed. For Franco, this presented the perfect occasion for his policy of divide and rule. On 3 September he accepted Varela’s resignation in protest at the ‘Falangization’ of the regime, but to balance the account he also dismissed Serrano Suñer. He replaced him as foreign minister with General Gómez-Jordana, an anglophile. His brother-in-law’s political career was at an end.

When the Allies launched Operation Torch, their landings in North Africa, in November 1942, Gibraltar was used as their main base. Roosevelt sent Franco a letter to reassure him about Allied intentions towards Spain and its possessions in Morocco. Meanwhile the British encouraged Kindelán to put pressure on Franco to restore the monarchy, but without success. Franco, under pressure abroad and at home, could only contemplate the collapse of his imperial dreams and of the hopes of the Axis. After the Allied success in North Africa, which completely changed the balance of power in the western Mediterranean, Field Marshal Paulus capitulated at Stalingrad at the end of January 1943. Then, in July, the Red Army during the Battle of Kursk smashed the Wehrmacht’s armoured strength and the Allies landed in Sicily, which soon led to the fall of Mussolini. The following summer saw the Allied invasion of Normandy and the destruction of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Centre in Belorussia. France was liberated by the end of August, and at the end of the year the last major German offensive was crushed in the Ardennes. In May 1945, the Third Reich finally collapsed.

Franco had adapted to these dramatic geopolitical changes by modifying his policy towards the Allies, using Gómez-Jordana. On 16 March 1943 he had opened the Franquist version of the Cortes with a speech calling for an agreement with the Allies to defend ‘Western civilization’ from the Soviets and in November his withdrawal of the Blue Division was accompanied by a return to neutrality from his position of ‘nonbelligerency’. In May 1944 he closed the German consulate in Tangier and halted exports of wolfram to Germany. In August, following the death of Jordana, he appointed José Felix de Lequerica as foreign minister, who showed the same obsequious approach to the Allies that Serrano Suñer had adopted towards the Axis.

At home, he adopted a tougher policy. Following the pressure to restore the monarchy in June 1943, he declared to his senior generals that this was a Masonic conspiracy designed to subvert the regime of 18 July 1936. And in September of that year he dismissed a group of monarchist generals, afraid that he might face the same downfall as Mussolini at the hands of the Fascist Grand Council. On 4 November 1944 he gave an interview to United Press in which he declared that nationalist Spain had never been fascist or national socialist and had never been allied to the Axis powers. When Hitler heard of this he said that ‘the nerve of señor Franco’ had no limits.¹⁹

Once the Second World War was over, Franco on 17 July 1945 issued a decree on the Rights of Spaniards, which conceded a general pardon for political prisoners from the civil war. He calmed the large landowners and senior generals alike, and turned once more to the Church. On 18 July 1945 he formed a new government, giving key posts to Catholic politicians, thus achieving a transition to national Catholicism which sidelined the Movement. On 13 December 1946, the United Nations Organization recommended the withdrawal of ambassadors from Spain, yet the start of the Cold War, which was to last over forty years, would prove the salvation of his regime. On 17 April 1948 General Franco ended the state of war in Spain. It was nearly twelve years after the beginning of the civil war.

The Unfinished War

For many Spanish republicans, especially those in France, the Second World War had been an equally tough continuation of the civil war. Once the war began, many republican refugees enlisted to fight against the common enemy. One of the formations which contained the highest proportion of Spanish republicans (1,000 out of 2,500) was the 13th Half-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion. Many other units, French and British, had Spaniards fighting in their ranks, in North Africa and elsewhere. A company of Spanish republicans fought with Colonel Robert Laycock’s commandos in the final phase of the battle of Crete.

Perhaps the best-known contingent with the 3rd March Battalion of Chad, fought in General Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division all the way to Paris. The 9th Company–known as ‘La Nueve’, even by the French–under the command of Captain Raymond Dronne, were the first to enter the French capital to the sound of pealing bells on the night of 23 August 1944. Their tanks bore such names as Madrid, Teruel, Ebro, Guernica and Don Quixote.¹

Their less fortunate companions in France were either sent to camps in Germany or used as forced labour by the Organisation Todt. In Mauthausen the 7,200 Spaniards were made to wear a triangle of Falangist blue on their striped uniforms, even though they were ‘reds’. Some 5,000 of them died there. Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg and Auschwitz also held many Spanish republican prisoners.²

In the Soviet Union some 700 Spanish republicans served in the Red Army and an equal number as partisans. Many others attempted to enlist but were told that they had fought in their own war and would serve the Soviet Union better by working in factories.³ Altogether 46 pilots, most of whom had been training in the Soviet Union at the end of the civil war, were sent to aviation regiments after appealing to La Pasionaria and other communist leaders of ‘the Moscow emigration’ to intercede on their behalf.⁴ More surprisingly, considering the Stalinist suspicion of foreign communists, 119 Spanish men and six women served in the OMSBON (the Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade of Special Designation of the NKVD of the USSR), which was the key praetorian unit in Moscow to defend the Kremlin. Six of them were officers and one became a company commander.⁵

Others served in the 1st Special Air Brigade of NKVD Frontier Guards, stationed at Bykovo twenty kilometres south of Moscow, ready to defend the Soviet capital. Another 700 joined partisan units in the German rear, many of them parachuted in. They included a group of Catalans led by José Fusimaña, while another detachment of eighteen fought with Medvedev, one of the most renowned of all the Soviet partisan leaders.⁶ A number of republican soldiers who spoke good Russian served in the front-line Red Army as if they were Soviet citizens. La Pasionaria’s son, Rubén Ruiz Ibárruri, was made a Hero of the Soviet Union and died in the fighting before Stalingrad, while two others were awarded the Order of Lenin. It is also said that 150 Spanish orphans took part in the defence of Leningrad.⁷

Many other republican refugees fought in the French resistance and the Forces Francçaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). During the first phase, until November 1942, their networks co-operated with Allied intelligence and helped with the escape routes for shot-down aircrews. Libertarians and poumistas were also active, such as Francisco Ponzán, (‘Francçois Vidal’), a former anarchist member of the Council of Aragón, who took part in the Pat O’Leary group. Captured by the Germans in August 1944, he was shot and his body was burned in a wood. Josep Rovira of the POUM managed to escape.

During 1943 and the first half of 1944 there was a certain unification of Spanish resistance groups under Spanish communist direction in the south-west of France. In the last phase of the resistance in France, republican groups formed an important element during what became a virtual civil war against the Vichy Milice. As soon as the fighting in France was over they began looking at the Spanish frontier, expecting the imminent collapse of the Franquist regime.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and following Comintern orders, the Spanish Communist Party had made urgent calls from Independent Spanish Radio and from Radio Toulouse to establish an anti-fascist front of all Spanish republican forces, including the CNT. The communists called this the Unión Nacional Española and it became the political arm of XIV Guerrilla Corps. From the start of 1944, XIV Corps controlled almost all Spanish units in 31 départements in the southern half of France. In May 1944 its name was changed to the Group of Spanish Guerrillas, and over the following months it took over all Spanish state property, consuls and trade councils in the region, hoisting the republican flag. The UNE called for a general mobilization on both sides of the border ready to ‘reorganize our patriotic army for the reconquest of Spain’.⁸ But Franco’s Spain would never be overthrown.

Those who had taken to the hills, ‘los hombres de la sierra’, having escaped from prison or labour battalions, formed small, scattered groups which could not communicate effectively. Yet the first examples of armed resistance to nationalist conquest had started from the very beginning of the civil war. In Galicia, where so many had escaped the brutal Falangist repression, groups had formed in the hills, especially the Sierra do Eixe. In 1937 there were some 3,000 fugitives around Vigo and Tuy. There were other bands in León, Asturias, Santander, Cáceres, Badajoz, Granada, Ronda and Huelva, but they too were improvised and acted more for reasons of survival than as a co-ordinated resistance force. Most of those in the south were annihilated in 1937, but in the north the struggle continued until the end of the war and beyond. When the Asturias front had collapsed in 1937, over 2,000 soldiers fled to the mountains and the nationalists needed to deploy fifteen tabors of regulares and eight battalions of infantry for many months hunting them down.

In the central zone during the war the fugitives grouped themselves in the mountains of Toledo under a former socialist mayor, Jesús Gómez Recio, and the communist José Manzanero, who had also escaped from prison, in his case on the day he was due to be executed after terrible tortures. From 1941, after many of the groups had been broken, the Civil Guard became the principal force engaged in anti-guerrilla operations. The guerrillas, having to survive by stealing food, often alienated the local population and helped the Franquist regime in its attempts to brand them as common brigands. The police also sent agents, pretending to have escaped from prison, to infiltrate their groups.

After the liberation of France in 1944 the Spanish Communist Party prepared a double plan for its ‘reconquest’ of Spain–one was to invade across the Pyrenees, the other was to send small detachments of guerrillas into Spain to link up with other groups and organize a more co-ordinated resistance. The vain hope was that this would encourage the victorious Allies to take a more robust line against Franco’s regime. In September 1944 the communist leader Jesús Monzón gave the order to attack from the Valle de Arán, and from there advance on Lérida, with the idea of establishing a bridgehead in which a ‘government of national union’ could be set up to lead a mass rising across Spain. The operation was entrusted to the so-called 204th Division, which consisted of less than 4,000 men, under the command of Colonel Vicente López Tovar.

On 19 October, at six in the morning, they crossed the frontier while other diversionary attacks were carried out at different points along the Pyrenees. In this first stage the invading force managed to penetrate several dozen kilometres into Spain, occupying small villages, capturing a few Civil Guard posts and taking 300 prisoners. But following the usual republican mistake, they spent time laying siege to Viella, the main town of the Valle de Arán. Once again the nationalists reacted rapidly, sending in 40,000 Moroccan troops under Generals Yagüe, Garcia Valiño, Monasterio and Moscardó. López Tovar gave the order to withdraw back across the frontier on 28 October. The operation ended in a resounding defeat, with the loss of 200 killed and 800 taken prisoner. Another 200 managed to slip away into the interior of Spain.⁹ Similarly, the attempt to produce a rising, with so-called ‘corps’ and ‘guerrilla armies’, inside Spain failed dismally. But guerrilla activity still carried on. In Galicia it continued until 1950. In Asturias the movement was split by disagreements between socialists and communists. In Levante and upper Aragón the guerrilla groups were kept going by more small detachments crossing the French border to join them.

An attempt was made by Jesús Monzón in Madrid to set up a guerrilla army of the centre and operations started in urban areas, such as an attack on the Falangist headquarters in Cuatro Caminos. But the pitiless methods of the Civil Guard and the secret police took a heavy toll. In Catalonia the communist PSUC set up another ‘guerrilla army’, but this too was broken up in 1947, with 78 members tried before the largest court martial ever assembled in Spain. The most famous guerrillas in Catalonia, however, were anarchists such as Francisco Sabaté Llopart (‘El Quico’), Ramon Vila Capdevila (‘Caraquemada’), Luis Facerías and Marcelino Massana. Massana managed to flee to France in 1950. Facerías took refuge in Italy in 1952, but returned to Barcelona where he was killed by the police in August 1957.

‘Quico’ started his guerrilla activity in 1945, when on 20 October he managed to free three anarchist prisoners escorted by police. He spent periods in Spain, then rested in France before crossing the border again. In March 1949 he organized an attempted assassination of the brutal police commissioner Eduardo Quintela, but he attacked the wrong car and killed its occupants. On his return to France he was arrested by gendarmes and imprisoned until 1955. Later, towards the end of 1959, he returned to Spain, but in January 1960 the Civil Guard surrounded him and some companions in a farmhouse in the province of Gerona. The exchange of fire left a number wounded, including ‘Quico’ himself, yet he managed to break through the encirclement. He hijacked a train a few days later and escaped again, but his wound had become gangrenous. He sought medical help, but was recognized and was killed on 5 January. ‘Caraquemada’, his comrade, was surrounded on 6 August 1963 and shot by civil guards.¹⁰

The repression of the guerrillas between 1947 and 1949 was relentless. Altogether some 60,000 people were arrested during the decade following the civil war, yet in fact the guerrilla resistance involved only a tiny minority of the population, probably fewer than 8,000 within the whole of Spain. Among the very last survivors were Francisco Blancas, who led a group between Ciudad Real and Cáceres until 1955, when he fled to France; Patricio Serra in Badajoz who lasted until April 1954; and in the first and last stronghold of Galicia, Benigno Andradé, who was executed in July 1952, José Castro Veiga, shot down by the Civil Guard in March 1965, and Mario Rodríguez Losada, who finally escaped to France in August 1968. By then, foreign tourists packed the beaches of the southern coast and Franco’s Spain found itself being subverted more by new values from without than by the old ideologies within.

While the struggle continued in Spain, the republican leaders in exile had pursued their vicious and self-destructive rivalries abroad. In November 1943 Indalecio Prieto had set up a political coalition in Mexico which brought together the PSOE, Unión Republicana and the Catalan parties under the leadership of Martamp2;ñez Barrio.¹¹ The anarchists and communists were excluded.

In August 1945, Negrín moved from London to Mexico to take part in the session of the Cortes in exile, called by Martínez Barrio at Prieto’s instigation. Negrín formally announced his resignation as president of the council of ministers, six years after the fact, and Martínez Barrio was elected president of a republic which had ceased to exist. Negrín put himself forward as the new head of government, but Prieto vetoed this and José Giral stepped forward to take on the task. In his phantom administration there were again no communists and no anarchists. Even with a Labour government in power in London, there was still no hope of achieving recognition by either Britain or France. Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, nevertheless arranged a meeting in October 1947 between Prieto and Gil Robles, the former leader of the CEDA, his enemy at the time of the rising of October 1934. After tense and difficult discussions, a pact was signed in Saint Jean de Luz near the Basque border. This demanded among other things an amnesty in Spain, the end of reprisals and the right of Spaniards to choose their own government. It was almost ten years since the same three points had been made at Figueras.

The pact was to have little effect. Five days after it was signed the son of Alfonso XIII, Don Juan, the Count of Barcelona, met Franco aboard the yacht Azor off San Sebastián. He agreed that his son, Prince Juan Carlos, would follow his studies in Spain under Franco’s tutelage. This boy, then less than ten years old, would become the Caudillo’s heir. But after Franco’s death in 1975 he would preside over Spain’s successful return to democracy and freedom.

Lost Causes

In June 1937, Cardinal Gomá had described the Spanish Civil War as ‘an armed plebiscite’. It was indeed an extension of politics by military means. Yet the violence of the conflict created a great impression abroad. Stereotypical assumptions about Hispanic passions were sometimes strengthened by the male Spaniard’s own image of himself. ‘I am not pretending’, El Campesino wrote later, ‘that I was not guilty of ugly things myself, or that I never caused needless sacrifice of human lives. I am a Spaniard. We look upon life as tragic. We despise death.’¹ But such statements are not merely a grotesque self-indulgence, they are profoundly misleading. Violence is often the product of a distorted expression of fear. And the more that fear is suppressed out of a need to show bravery, the more explosive the result.

The cults of virility and death went hand in hand as the imagery of Queipo de Llano, the Falange and the Foreign Legion demonstrated. Nationalist leaders also revelled in the language of the stern patriarchal surgeon, whose diagnosis and proposed treatment for the country could not be questioned because the patient did not know what was best for him. Foreign contagions and cancers had to be cut out. National regeneration could only come through pain, in the medieval manner of trial by ordeal.

Ideological and religious invocations deliberately tried to make the violence abstract. There was said to have been a sweet-natured youth among Moscardó’s defenders at Toledo, who was called the Angel of the Alcázar because before firing his rifle he used to cry, ‘Kill without hate!’ This depersonalization existed on the republican side as well. David Antona, a CNT leader, said that ‘the bullets which ended the lives of the officers at the Montana barracks did not kill men, they killed a whole social system’. People were encouraged to submerge their identity and individual responsibility into causes with either mystical or superhuman auras. Carlist requetés were told that they would have a year less in purgatory for every red they killed, as if Christendom were still fighting the Moors. It was this dehumanization of the enemy which made the war so terrible, along, of course, with modern weapons and the tactics of terror aimed against civilian populations.

The destruction of Guernica became the internationally recognized symbol of the new horror, yet even more chilling were the motives behind the Nazi campaign in Spain. There has been a great debate over the comparative weight and timing of foreign intervention on either side during the war. But arguing over the exact numbers of aircraft, tanks and military advisers misses the point. So much depended on the standard of training and the quality of the equipment. There can be no doubt, for example, that German pilots and aeroplanes were considerably superior to their Soviet adversaries, a fact re-emphasized with terrifying effect in June 1941 when the Luftwaffe destroyed over 2,000 Soviet aircraft, most of them on the ground, in less than 48 hours. The Italian contribution to Franco’s victory was indeed large, but the haphazard nature of its bombing and its general unreliability rather diminished its military potential.

The Spanish Civil War, as the Nazi government recognized right from the start, offered the perfect testing ground for weaponry and tactics. The Red Army also saw the opportunities, but because of Stalinist military orthodoxy following Marshal Tukhachevsky’s execution, it was unable to take much advantage. The Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion, on the other hand, was meticulous in its reports on the effects of new weapons systems. For example, their squadrons discovered that during an offensive it was very effective to strafe enemy trenches as soon as the artillery bombardment ceased to keep the republicans’ heads down while the nationalist infantry charged the last few hundred metres. Enemy artillery positions were also attacked to prevent counter-battery fire, and bomber squadrons were directed against forming-up areas and rear communications to prevent reinforcements from being brought forward.

When it came to fighter tactics the Luftwaffe Messerschmitt squadrons abandoned the traditional V formation during the air battles over the Ebro. Their aircraft began to fight in double pairs instead, a tactic which RAF Fighter Command was forced to imitate two years later during the Battle of Britain. But perhaps the most important psychological weapon which the Condor Legion tested in Spain was the Junkers 87, or Stuka. During the advance across Aragón in the spring of 1938 the Condor Legion bombed towns and villages–including Albocacer, Ares del Maestre, Benasal and Villar de Canes–then photographed them carefully afterwards, from the air and on the ground, to measure bomb patterns and destruction caused. They were above all interested in assessing the accuracy of Stuka bombing with 500kg bombs. In Benasal, which they hit with nine 500kg bombs, they took many photographs of the large church there, which they had completely gutted. Much of this investigative work was carried out by Major Count Fugger, from an ancient family of Augsburg bankers.²

On the ground the Germans learned important lessons which aided them greatly over the next few years. Their tanks needed to be more heavily armed and concentrated in armoured divisions for ‘Schwerpunkt’ breakthroughs. They also discovered in Spain the accuracy and power of their 88mm anti-aircraft gun when used against tank targets. It was later installed in the much feared Tiger tank. In fact, it was as a result of the war in Spain that the German army saw the need to increase the size and power of its tank force. In Spain, the Soviet tanks deployed there–the T26 and the BT-5–proved more effective than the German Panzer Mark I, while the Italian Fiat-Ansaldo miniature tank looked and performed more like a clockwork toy. Yet the Soviet advisers could not advocate modern armoured tactics after the show trial of Marshal Tukhachevsky, so their tank brigade was often misused, if not squandered.

The need for much closer liaison between advancing ground troops and their air support had also become obvious to both sides by the time of the Battle of Jarama, yet the Red Army refused to install radios in non-command tanks throughout the Second World War and for most of the Cold War. The only real lesson that Soviet advisers learned was on the advantage of concentrating centrally controlled, long-range artillery, a tactic which finally had a chance to pay off during the Battle of Stalingrad.³

One of the most debated questions is whether foreign intervention was decisive or not. Hitler’s decision to send Junkers 52 transports to help Franco carry the first detachments of regulares and Foreign Legion across the Straits of Gibraltar was certainly important, but it is hard to say that it was decisive. The republican navy’s incompetence and lack of initiative during the revolutionary chaos of the early weeks meant that the Army of Africa would have got across eventually. And since the republican forces were incapable of launching an offensive, time was not as crucial as it would otherwise have been. The argument that the rebellion of the generals would have collapsed in the summer of 1936 is unconvincing, unless one brings in that other form of intervention, the supply of ammunition from Portugal. Franco and his fellow rebel generals had gone too far to pull back, and so long as they had enough ammunition the battle would have continued until a critical mass of africanistas had reached the mainland.

Soviet intervention may well have helped save Madrid for the Republic in November 1936, as Franquist historians claim, but overall, there can be no doubt that German and Italian forces greatly shortened the war in the nationalists’ favour. To say that they won the war for Franco entirely would be going too far. The Condor Legion above all accelerated the conquest of the north, a development which enabled the nationalists to concentrate their forces in the centre of Spain. But the truly devastating effectiveness of the Condor Legion came in countering the major republican offensives of 1937 and 1938, battles which were to break the back of the republican armed forces. These perfect opportunities for the deployment of air power to maximum effect were, however, provided by the disastrous leadership of the communist commanders and their Soviet advisers.

The organization and objectives which the People’s Army assumed in the winter of 1936 were moulded more by internal and external political pressures than by military considerations. The communists’ demands for a unified command and discipline were entirely logical from a military point of view (while, of course, presenting them with the best way to seize the levers of power). But the idea that the only possible strategy consisted of set-piece offensives, straight out of French training manuals from the First World War, proved to be almost as grave a liability as the militias’ belief in the triumph of revolutionary morale. Even worse, the decisions to take the offensive were not guided by coherent thinking. In almost all cases these attacks were vain attempts to take the pressure off other threatened sectors and were launched for propaganda considerations. Once the attack had achieved surprise, the People’s Army commanders then allowed the momentum of the offensive to be lost by besieging villages and small towns. In a matter of a few days the nationalists managed to redeploy their troops and the Condor Legion.

The Condor Legion, as its war diaries confirm, found that Soviet pilots and the republican air force lacked confidence in combat and proved more of a nuisance than a danger. So its squadrons were able to bomb and strafe the People’s Army’s elite formations at will, since they were usually trapped in a small area on a completely exposed terrain. Yet the republican leadership, even though all surprise and momentum had been lost, could not withdraw its precious troops and tanks, because of the grossly exaggerated propaganda claims that had been made when announcing the offensive. Thus the Battles of Brunete, Belchite, Teruel and the Ebro were all disastrous repetitions. To make matters far worse, the Stalinist paranoia of the Soviet advisers and Spanish communist leaders attributed all reverses to Trotskyite treason and ‘fifth columnists’. Preposterous theories were concocted, innocent officers and soldiers arrested and shot, and reports were sent back to Moscow which revealed delusions that went well over the edge of sanity. It is hardly surprising that republican morale suffered so desperately.

The only two successes the Republic enjoyed were Guadalajara, a victory which resulted basically from a collapse in Italian morale, and the defence of the XYZ line in the summer of 1938. The latter proved to be the most cost-effective battle of the whole war for the republicans, inflicting four times as many casualties as they received. It has presumably received so little attention because none of the star communist formations was involved and little propaganda effort was attached to a battle that did not conform to ‘the active war policy of the Negrín government’.

All this suggests that a far more effective conduct of the war would have been to combine a strong defensive strategy with short, sharp probing attacks at different points to confuse the nationalists. The People’s Army’s tank forces should have been held back in an armoured reserve ready to counter-attack any nationalist breakthrough. The Republic could not simply have abandoned orthodox warfare for unorthodox, as some militia idealists dreamed. The conditions for a universal guerrilla war simply did not exist. The best-suited regions, with the right terrain, were insufficient to have stretched nationalist forces beyond capacity. But on thinly held fronts, many more nationalist troops could have been held down by commando actions. This would have hampered General Franco’s brutally unsubtle strategy far more effectively. Franco did not so much win the war: the republican commanders, with the odds already stacked heavily against them, squandered the courage and sacrifice of their troops and lost it.

The British-inspired policy of non-intervention has, not surprisingly, generated a great deal of passion and moral outrage. For republicans, it seemed unthinkable that the legitimately elected government of a country should not be allowed to buy arms to defend itself. There can also be little doubt about the hypocrisy of maintaining a policy which was manifestly failing to work, while the committee in London, including the three main interventionist powers, Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, pretended otherwise. The main anger is understandably reserved for the British government which, even if it did not officially propose the non-intervention plan, was certainly the main force behind it. The motives of the two prime ministers, Baldwin and Chamberlain, and the two foreign secretaries, Eden and Halifax, are frequently ascribed to a conservative plot to support Franco. Although extremely plausible, considering their personal friendships and tastes, this is probably a distortion of the truth.

None of them had any sympathy for the left-wing, if not revolutionary, nature of republican Spain, and certainly in the early days, they would have preferred a rapid nationalist success rather than what they saw as a slide towards the horrors of bolshevism. But their principal concerns lay elsewhere. They no more wanted Spain to be controlled by Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, Britain’s chief rival in the Mediterranean, than for the country to fall under Soviet influence. Above all, they were deeply concerned that the Spanish conflagration would prove to be another Sarajevo, creating a widening ripple of involvement which would turn into the next European war. The British Foreign Office was nevertheless totally wrong to assume the lofty role of international policeman when it was secretly prepared to sacrifice the Spanish people, just as it sacrificed the Czechs in 1938.

One must also look at the effective results of the non-intervention policy, which prevented the Republic from purchasing arms openly. The republicans’ greatest needs were for aircraft, tanks and automatic weapons. French equipment was generally of poor quality and the British aircraft available at that date were obsolete. Probably the only country capable of satisfying their needs, apart from the Soviet Union, was the United States. Roosevelt and Cordell Hull may have been influenced by the non-intervention agreement, but it was the Catholic lobby that led Congress to block arms supplies to the Republic. Thus, apart from a few aircraft purchases, Mexican rifles and ammunition, and Czechoslovakian machine-guns bought privately, it might appear that, even without the Non-Intervention Committee the Republic had no alternative to the Soviet monopoly of arms supplies. Nevertheless, the decision to send Stalin the Republic’s gold reserves was one of the most critical of the war.

The archbishop of Burgos, who justified the cruelty of the war as being ultimately less cruel because it meant a shorter conflict, was clearly wrong, both morally and logically. Neither side could be terrified into submission. The polarization of political beliefs meant that both parties felt that everything in which they believed, as well as their very existence, was at stake. This transmuted fear into desperate bravery. The war was only likely to end when a decisive lack of troops, armaments and munitions demonstrated that defeat was inescapable. This came about for the Republic after its catastrophic defeat on the Ebro.

The only possible reason for continuing the struggle would have been to achieve better surrender terms from Franco, but this was a vain hope. Negrín failed utterly with his thirteen points and there were no grounds to expect that Franco was likely to shift his position; in fact, he was bound to become even more inflexible the closer he came to victory. Any decision to fight on could lead only to a useless loss of life. An International Brigader wrote later, ‘It was all very fine for the left in Europe and America to beat their breasts and demand that the common people of Spain should fight to the last man, but once it had become apparent that the war could not be won it should have been terminated.’⁴ Whether or not an earlier surrender might have mitigated the vicious revenge of the victors is impossible to say, but it is doubtful. All one can be sure of is that it would have saved many of the tens of thousands of lives lost in the hopeless battle for Catalonia.

Little more need be said about the Franquist vengeance, a process which was frequently justified on the basis of sentences for ‘military rebellion’, a reversal of judicial logic that speaks for itself. Facts gathered so painstakingly by Spanish historians over recent years leave little further doubt about its scale or its cruelty. The only question left to answer covers the thought processes of those who perpetrated such a regime. But to speculate about the mental state of such oppressors, whether Nazi, Soviet or nationalist, is to risk assuming the dubious mantle of a long-distance psychiatrist.

The repression extended throughout the population as a whole, creating a terrible claustrophobia, exceeded only by the harshness of living conditions imposed by the regime. One of the great debates of recent years has been the degree to which Franco’s policy of autarchy and centralized financial direction laid the ground for Spain’s subsequent economic transformation. The argument for the economic policy established under Franco is very hard to fathom since it created a deadening form of state control which some commentators have compared to the Soviet satellite states of the Cold War years. In the case of Franco’s Spain, however, the degree of corruption and waste was perhaps equalled only by Ceauşescu’s Romania. The partial economic liberalization which came about in the 1960s was in many ways more a case of accident due to foreign influences than of design.

The pertinent question, however, is what would a republican victory have produced? If the People’s Army had achieved victory in, say, 1937 or 1938, what form of government would have ensued–the left-liberal administration of early 1936 or a hard-line communist regime? The accelerated collapse of the republican government in the spring and summer of 1936 and the onset of civil war, which triggered the revolutionary upheaval, followed a different path from the chaos that ensued from the First World War. Yet there was one similarity to the Russian revolution: this was the communist determination to eliminate their left-wing allies once the war had been won against the right. In September 1936, soon after his arrival, General Vladimir Goriev reported to Moscow: ‘A struggle against the anarchists is absolutely inevitable after victory over the whites. This struggle will be very severe.’⁵ André Marty, the Comintern representative, stated on 10 October, ‘After victory we will get even with them [the anarchists], all the more so since at that point we will have a strong army.’⁶ And Pravda declared on 10 December that the ‘cleaning up of Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist elements will be carried out with the same energy as in the USSR.’ As numerous reports back to Moscow made clear, the Popular Front strategy was merely a strategy ‘for the moment’. The Comintern representatives in Spain were clearly seeking communist hegemony in Spain and, even though this was not in line with Stalin’s general strategy, it is significant that no reproof or warning about this from Dimitrov appears in the communications between Moscow and Spain.

Stalinists, by the very nature of their own ideology, were not prepared to share power with anybody else in the longer term. Only one factor was likely to mitigate this in Spain, and that was the question of the Soviet Union’s interests elsewhere on the international stage. Stalin had already demonstrated his readiness to sacrifice a foreign communist party if it happened to be in the interests of the ‘Socialist Motherland’. In the case of Spain, it was mainly events in central Europe which determined Soviet policy. The British appeasement of Hitler in 1938 over his demands on Czechoslovakia prompted Stalin to prepare a new course, even if that eventually meant an alliance with Hitler himself. The post-war years would have been desperate, whatever government was in power. But everything afterwards would have depended on the form of regime which emerged. A fully democratic government would presumably have received Marshall Plan aid from the United States in 1948. Then, with a reasonably unfettered economy, recovery would almost certainly have begun by 1950, like elsewhere in Western Europe. But with an authoritarian leftist, perhaps overtly communist, government, Spain would probably have been left in a similar state to those Central European or Balkan people’s republics until after 1989.

The Spanish Civil War is, however, best remembered in entirely human terms: the clash of beliefs, the ferocity, the generosity and selfishness, the hypocrisy of diplomats and ministers, the betrayal of ideals and political manoeuvres and, above all, the bravery and self-sacrifice of those who fought on both sides. But history, which is never tidy, must always end with questions. Conclusions are much too convenient.