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

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 ‘Estamos perdidos. Cuando Marx puede más que las hormonas, no hay nada que hacer.’ (Julián Marías, Una vida presente Memorias I, p. 188.) I am most grateful to Javier Marías for sending me his father’s memoirs.

CHAPTER 1: Their Most Catholic Majesties

1 For this development in the Spanish army, see Julio Busquets, El Militar de Carrera en España, Barcelona, 1971, pp. 56–61.

2 78.7 per cent of all properties in Galicia were less than ten hectares. At the other end of the scale, the large landholdings of Andalucia (more than 100 hectares) occupied 52.4 per cent of the land. See Edward Malefakis, Reforma agraria y revolución campesina en la España del siglo XX, Barcelona, 1971.

3 These statistics are taken from Albert Carreras y Xavier Tafunell; Historia económica de la España contemporánea, Barcelona, 2004; Manuel Tuñónde Lara (ed.) Historia de España, vol. viii., Revolución burguesa oligarquía y constitucionalismo (1843–1923), Barcelona, 1983; Jordi Palafox, Atraso económico y democracia. La Segunda República y la economía española, 1892–1936, Barcelona, 1991; and Merce` Vilanova and Xavier Moreno, Atlas de la evolución del analfabetismo en Españade 1887 a 1981, Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Madrid, 1992.

4 See Carreras and Tafunell, Historia económica de la España contemporánea, pp. 201–4. Banks took such an active role in the financing of industrial companies that in 1921, the seven largest banks in Spain controlled half the capital of all Spanish limited companies.

5 Company profits reached four billion pesetas. A large part of this, converted into gold, sat in the reserves of the Banco de España. See Francisco Comín, Historia de la hacienda pública, Il (España 1808–1995), Barcelona, 1996, pp. 81 and 133.

CHAPTER 2: Royal Exit

1 Following an armed clash, the conservative government of Antonio Maura decided to send reservists to Morocco. In Barcelona, this produced spontaneous protests and a general strike lasted from 26 July to 1 August 1909, during which barricades were erected and 42 convents and churches were damaged or destroyed. See Joan Connelly Ullman, La Semana Trágica, Barcelona, 1972.

2 José Luis García Delgado and Santos Juliá (eds), La España del siglo XX, Madrid, 2003, pp. 309–11.

3 Javier Tusell (ed), Historia de España. 2. La Edad Contemporánea, Madrid, 1998, pp. 252–3.

4 Figure for 1915, Julio Busquets, El militar de carrera en España, Barcelona, 1967, p. 37.

5 Santos Julíá (ed.), La España del siglo XX, Madrid, 2003, p. 18.

6 This company which supplied electricity to Barcelona and the trams was in fact called the Barcelona Traction Light & Power company, but was known by its original name of la Cañadiense.

7 Between 1921 and 1923 some 152 people were killed in Barcelona. In 1923 the labour lawyer Francesc Layret and the anarcho-syndicalist Salvador Seguí were assassinated, and also the Archbishop of Saragossa, Cardinal Soldevilla.

8 Juan Díaz del Moral, Historia de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas, Madrid, 1973, pp. 265 ff.

9 Between 1917 and 1923 there were 23 major government crises and 30 lesser interruptions.

10 Using the Patronato del Circuito Nacional de Firmes Especiales, the dictatorship improved 2,500 kilometres of highway. For the hydroelectric projects, it set up the Confederaciónes Sindicales Hidrográficas del Ebro, Duero, Segura, Guadalquivir and Eastern Pyrenees, although only that of the Ebro went ahead under the supervision of the engineer Manuel Lorenzo Pardo, and the direction of the minister concerned, the Count de Guadalhorce. See Jose´ Luis García Delgado and Santos Juliá (eds), La España del siglo XX, pp. 319ff.

11 The exact results are not certain. See M. Martínez Cuadrado in Elecciónes y partidos politicos en España, 1808–1931, Madrid, 1969, vol. 2, pp. 1,000–1. In Madrid the republicans received three times more votes than the monarchists and four times more in Barcelona.

12 ‘Una fiesta popular que tomó el aire de una revolución’, Santos Juliá (ed.), LaEspaña del siglo XX, Madrid, 2003, p. 15.

13 ‘Mucho, antes de su caída, la Monarquíasehabía evaporado en la conciencia de los españoles’, Miguel Maura, Así cayó Alfonso XIII, Barcelona, 1966, p. 329.

CHAPTER 3: The Second Republic

1 The provisional government consisted of: Niceto Alcalá Zamora (DLR), president; Miguel Maura (DLR), minister of the interior; Alejandro Lerroux (PRR), minister of state; Diego Martínez Barrio (PRR), minister of communications; Manuel Azaña (AR), minister of war; Santiago Casares Quiroga (FRG), minister of marine; Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer (PCR), minister for economic affairs; álvaro de Albornoz (PRRS), minister of development; Marcelino Domingo (PRRS), minister of education; Fernando de los Ríos (PSOE), minister of justice; Indalecio Prieto (PSOE), minister of finance; Francisco Largo Caballero (PSOE), minister of labour and social security.

2 Exports fell by nearly half between 1930 and 1933, and industrial production declined by 17 per cent (Carreras and Tafunell, Historia económica de la España contemporánea, pp. 251–2.

3 For example in Italy, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and soon in Germany.

4 Between 1 April and 30 June 1931, 13 per cent of the total deposits in banks were transferred. The peseta fell 20 per cent in value.

5 Prieto introduced a tax on share dealings, investigated the flight of capital and arranged the import of cheaper oil from the Soviet Union instead of from US oil companies (Gabriel Jackson, La República española y la guerra civil, Barcelona, 1976, p. 54).

6 Those who took advantage of the ‘Azaña law’ included 84 generals and 8,738 officers. The plan was for the new army to consist of 7,600 officers and 105,000 men in the Peninsula and 1,700 officers and 42,000 men in North Africa(Michael Alpert, La reforma militar de Azaña, 1931–1933, Madrid, 1982).

7 The men of this 30,000-strong force, commanded by army officers, were never posted to their home province. Forbidden to mix with the local population, they were regarded as an occupying force of outsiders, which protected only the interests of the landowners and the clergy.

8 The Church had declared property to the value of 244 million pesetas, but its real wealth was in fact much greater. It possessed a well-organized structure of cultural institutions, media outlets, charities, societies and educational centres. It controlled primary education, part of secondary education and higher education through technical schools and universities. Between 1909 and 1931 under the monarchy, the Church had built 11,128 primary schools. The Republic in its first year built 9,600 (Jackson, La República española…, p. 74).

9 See Miguel Maura, Así cayó Alfonso XIII, pp. 293ff.

10 The Socialists obtained 117 seats; the Radicals, 94; the Radical-Socialists, 58; Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, 26; ORGA, 21. In all, the left and centre-left occupied 400 of the 470 seats in the Cortes (Nigel Townson, The Crisis of Democracy in Spain, Brighton, 2000, p. 57).

11 The Company of Jesus in Spain was finally dissolved on 24 January 1932. It had some 2,500 members in the country and considerable wealth in property and shares. Only its lawyers, of whom the Catholic politician Gil Robles was one, knew the exact size of its portfolio (Jackson, La República española…, pp. 71–2).

12 On 3 June 1931, Pope Pius XI published his encyclical Dilectissima nobis, which compared the situation in Spain with the persecution the Church had suffered in Mexico and the Soviet Union (Callahan, La Iglesia católica en España, p. 239).

13 See Pascual Carrión, La reforma agraria de la Segunda República y la situación actual de la agricultura española, Barcelona, 1973.

14 Manuel Azaña (AR), prime minister (president of the council of ministers) and minister of war; Jose ´ Giral (AR), minister of marine; Luis Zulueta (indep.), minister of state; Jaume Carner (AC), minister of finance; Santiago Casares Quiroga (ORGA), minister of interior; álvaro de Albornoz (PRRS), minister of justice; Marcelino Domingo (PRRS), agriculture, industry and commerce; Fernando de los Ríos (PSOE), education; Indalecio Prieto (PSOE), public works and Francisco Largo Caballero (PSOE), minister of labour.

15 In October 1931, the Alfonsine monarchists, headed by Antonio Goicoechea, set up Acción Nacional (which later became Acción Popular). Carlist monarchists, who supported their own pretender, Alfonso Carlos, belonged to their own organization, the Traditionalist Communión. Goicoechea later set up Renovación Española with other monarchists, such as Ramiro de Maeztu, Pedro Sáinz Rodríguez and José María Pemán. Gil Robles, who later split from Acción Nacional in March 1933, formed the major parliamentary Catholic coalition of the right, known as the CEDA, Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas.

16 The first manifestations of fascism in Spain existed in two reviews: La Gaceta literaria, edited by Ernesto Giménez Caballero, and La conquista del Estado, directed by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, and published by a group which joined itself with the very Catholic and conservative Juntas Castellanas de Acción Hispánica, founded by Onésimo Redondo. This union made up las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (JONS). There was also a strange fascist party, although Catholic and monarchist, the Partido Nacionalista Español, founded by Dr Jose´ María Albiñana, which almost immediately merged with the Bloque Nacional of Calvo Sotelo. Jose´ Antonio Primo de Rivera, Rafael Sánchez Mazas and Julio Ruiz de Alda started the Movimiento Español Sindicalista which in October 1933 would be refounded with the name: Falange Española.

17 Azaña appointed General Miguel Cabanellas as head of the Civil Guard in Sanjurjo’s place.

18 Emilio Esteban Infantes, General Sanjurjo, Barcelona, 1957, p. 235.

19 The law of agrarian reform applied only to Salamanca, Extremadura, La Mancha and Andalucia, where estates of more than 250 hectares accounted for more than half of all land. The slow process, opposed at every turn by landowners, exasperated the landless peasants. By the end of 1934 no more than 117,000 hectares had been expropriated and only 12,000 families out of the 200,000 planned for in the programme had been resettled (Carrión, La reforma agraria…p. 129).

20 Manuel Azaña, Discursos políticos, Barcelona, 2004, pp. 179–219.

21 Jerome R. Mintz, Los anarquistas de Casas Viejas, Diputación Provincial, Cádiz, 1994.

22 The CEDA obtained 24.4 per cent of the votes and the Partido Republicano Radical 22 per cent. In total, the right won 204 seats and the centre 170. The left won only 93, largely because of the weighting given in the electoral law to favour coalitions (Julio Gil Pecharromán, Historia de la Segunda República Española (1931–1936), Madrid, 2002, p. 179).

23 El Socialista, 3 January 1934, quoted Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union and Communism, London, 2004, p. 46.

24 Payne, ibid.

25 In 1933, both Salazar in Portugal and Dollfuss in Austria had introduced corporatist regimes, strongly influenced by Catholicism, and had suppressed socialist organizations. It was not surprising, therefore, that the PSOE should suspect Gil Robles, who had assumed some of the fascist imagery then fashionable, of similar intentions. But Largo Caballero completely rejected the warnings of moderates within his own party. Gil Robles, although initially impressed by Hitler and National Socialism in Germany, rapidly turned against it.

26 A. Saborit, Julián Besteiro, Buenos Aires 1967, pp. 238–40.

27 Azaña, Obras completas, vol. iv, Mexico, 1967, p. 652.

28 Marías, Una vida presente, p. 175.

29 ‘La aparación del juvenilismo, y por tanto de la violencia, en la política española.’ ibid. p. 148.

30 La Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (FNTT).

31 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, London, 1977, p. 133.

32 Santos Juliá, ‘Fracaso de una insurrección y derrota de una huelga: los hechos de octubre en Madrid’ in Estudios de historia social, 1984, p. 40.

33 Franco wrote in 1956: ‘La revolución de Asturias fue el primer paso para la implantación del comunismo en nuestra nación…La revolución había sido concienzudamente preparada por los agentes de Moscú’ (Jesús Palacios, La España totalitaria, Barcelona, 1999, p. 29).

34 Jackson, La República española y la guerra civil, Barcelona, 1976, p. 141.

35 The Spanish Foreign Legion (Tercio de Estranjeros) contained fewer foreigners than its French counterpart. Its basic unit was the bandera of several hundred men with their own light artillery. Its counterpart for Moroccan colonial troops serving as regulares was the tabor, which had only 250 men.

36 Quoted Bartolomé Bennassar, La guerre d’Espagne et ses lendemains, p. 51.

37 General Goded was made head of the air force and General Mola was given command of the army in Morocco.

38 Two Dutch businessmen, Strauss and Perl (whose two names created the new word ‘estra-perlo’) patented a game of roulette which they wanted to introduce to Spain. Since games of chance had been prohibited since the dictatorship of Primo Rivera, they tried to obtain authorization through bribery. The affair involved corrupt members of the Radical Party such as Sigfrido Blasco Ibáñez (son of the writer) and also Lerroux’s adopted son Aurelio.

39 This scandal involved payments by the entrepreneur Antonio Tayá who obtained a government contract which was not respected.

Chapter 4: The Popular Front

1 Quoted Bennassar p. 51.

2 José María Gil Robles, No fue posible la paz, Barcelona, 1968, p. 404. In Catalonia the alliance was represented by the Front Català d’Ordre which included the Lliga, Acció Popular de Catalunya, Renovación Española, Carlists, and Radicals.

3 ‘Armamento de la canalla, incendio de bancos y casas particulares, reparto de bienes y tierras, saqueos en forma, reparto de vuestras mujeres’ (Paul Preston, La destrucción de la democracia en España, Madrid, 1978, p. 279).

4 William J. Callahan, La Iglesia católica en España(1875–2002), Barcelona, 2002, pp. 262ff.

5 Ibid., pp. 263–4.

6 The Frente Popular included Izquierda Republicana, Unión Republicana, Partido Socialista Obrero Español, Juventudes Socialistas, Partido Comunista de España, Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, the Partido Sindicalista and the Unión General de Trabajadores. In Catalonia, the Esquerra Republicana, Acció Catalana Republicana, Partit Nacionalista Republicà Català, Unió Socialista de Catalunya, Unió de Rabassaires and the small communist groups made up the Front d’Esquerres. The PNV also applied, despite pressure from the Vatican to join the Bloque Nacional. In Galicia the Partido Galeguista joined the Popular Front without suffering a split with its right wing.

7 The figures vary bewilderingly. The left in Spain has always convinced itself that there were 30,000, but Stanley Payne has calculated that it was closer to 15,000. See La primera democracia española, p. 305, n. 21.

8 Diego Martínez Barrio, Páginas para la historia del Frente Popular, Madrid, 1937, p. 12.

9 See Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union and Communism, New Haven, 2004, pp. 67–8.

10 Ibid., p. 81.

11 Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern, New York, 1997, p. 132.

12 ‘Decisión sobre la cuestión española’, RTsKhIDNI 495/18/ quoted in Daniel Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética y la guerra civil española, Barcelona, 2004, p. 23.

13 Secretariat of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, 23 July 1936, RGASPI 495/18/1101, pp. 21–2.

14 Quoted Radosh and Habeck, Españatraicionada p. 8.

15 14 October 1936, RGASPI 495/74/199, p. 63.

16 Estimates of union membership figures vary considerably. Some historians put the UGT at 1.5 million and the CNT at 1.8 million, but others attribute much lower numbers to CNT and much higher to the UGT, for example Ramo ´ña, vol. vii, Madrid, 1973, p. 29.

17 The results were as follows based on a total number of voters of 9,864,783, which represented 72 per cent of the electoral register:

Popular Front: 4,654,116

Nacionalistas vascos: 125,714

Centre: 400,901

Right: 4,503,524

Of the more important parties, the PSOE won 99 seats; Izquierda Republicana (an amalgam of Acción Republicana, Partido Republicano Galeguista and the radical-socialists of Marcelino Domingo) 87 seats; Unión Republicana of Martínez Barrio (an offshoot from Lerroux’s Radical Party) 38; the Spanish Communist Party, 17; and Esquerra Republicana of Catalonia, 21. On the right, the CEDA kept 88 seats, the monarchists of the Bloque Nacional won 12; the Carlist Traditionalists, 10; the Catalan Lliga, 12; and the Radical Party, 5. In the middle, the Centrist Party of Portela Valladares won 16 seats and the Basque Nationalist Party, 10 (Javier Tusell, Las elecciónes del Frente Popular, Madrid, 1972, ii, pp. 190 and 243).

18 Miguel González, ‘La conjura del ‘36 contada por Franco’, El País, Madrid, 9 September 2001.

19 Manuel Azaña, Diarios completos, Barcelona, 2000, p. 933.

20 Teodoro Rodríguez, quoted in Callahan, op. cit., p. 259.

21 Ahora, Madrid, 21 February 1936.

22 Pedro C. González Cuevas, Acción española. Teología política y nacionalismo autoritario en España, 1913–1936, Madrid, 1998, pp. 172–4.

23 Ismael Saz, Mussolini contra la Sunda República, pp. 139ff.

24 Sheelagh Ellwood, Historia de Falange Española, Barcelona, 2001, pp. 65ff.

25 Martin Blinkhorn, Carlismo y contrarrevolución en España, 1931–1939, Barcelona, 1979, p. 288.

26 Ibid.

CHAPTER 5: The Fatal Paradox

1 Francisco Comín, Mauro Hernández and Enrique Llopis, op. cit., p. 285.

2 See M. Requena Gallego, Los sucesos de Yeste, Albacete, 1983.

3 Edward Malefakis, Reforma agraria y revolución campesina en la España del siglo XX, Barcelona, 1971, p. 434.

4 Unemployment in Spain at this time was around 17 per cent, but it was closer to 30 per cent in Andalucia. In the summer of 1936 out of a total population of 24 million, 796,341 were unemployed and of those 522,079 (65 per cent) were agricultural workers, (Ibid., p. 331).

5 ‘Cuando querrá el Dios del cielo que la justicia se vuelva/y los pobres coman pan y los ricos coman mierda’.

6 ‘¿No habéis oído gritar las muchachas españolas estos días “¡Hijos, sí; maridos, no!”?’ Jose´ Antonio Primo de Rivera, ‘Carta a los militares de España’ in Obras completas, pp. 669–74.

7 Indalecio Prieto, Discursos fundamentales, Madrid, 1976, pp. 272–3.

8 There was an unusually high turnout of 70 per cent, with nearly a million votes in favour and little more than 6,000 against.

9 Pedro Gómez Aparicio, Historia del periodismo español, Madrid, 1981, vol. iv, p. 467. Gabriel Jackson argues that the figure given for burned churches, considering that they were buildings made of stone, is highly improbable. In some cases people had merely lit a pile of newspapers on the steps as a gesture (Gabriel Jackson, La República española y la guerra civil, Barcelona, 1976, pp. 202–3).

10 José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Obras completas, pp. 645–53. These parallels seem bizarre, since if followed through, they suggest that General Franco would have fared little better than General Kornilov, whose failed coup d’état helped trigger the bolshevik revolution.

11 Gabriel Cardona, ‘Las operaciónes militares’ in M. Tuñón (ed.), La guerra civil española 50 años después, Barcelona, 1985, p. 205.

12 The majority of the plots were being organized by members of the Unión Militar Española (UME), founded in 1933 by Captain Barba Hernández (the one who had accused Azaña over the Casas Viejas affair) and by a Falangist, Lieutenant-Colonel Rodríguez Tarduchy. The UME consisted of serving and retired officers. They did not represent more than 10 per cent of the officer corps, but maintained excellent relations with the Carlists, with Renovación Española, with the Juventudes de Acción Popular, with the Falange and with plotting generals. The UME held aloof from the ridiculous plot which Colonel Varela had planned for 19 April. Varela ended up in prison in Cádiz and General Orgaz who supported him was confined in Las Palmas (Carlos Blanco Escolá, Falacias de la guerra civil. Un homenaje a la causa republicana, Barcelona, 2005, p. 72).

13 Sanjurjo was to be known as the chief–‘el Jefe’–and Valentín Galarza as the‘Técnico’.

14 ‘Instrucciónes y directivas para el arranque de la conspiración, primero, y de un posible alzamiento, después’, Felix Maiz, Mola, aquel hombre, Barcelona, 1976, pp. 62–4.

15 For details on Franco’s military career, see Paul Preston’s Franco, caudillo de España, Barcelona, 1994 and the highly critical Carlos Blanco Escolá, La incompetencia militar de Franco, Madrid, 2000, p. 21.

16 See also Juan Pablo Fusi, Franco, Madrid, 1985, p. 26, and Herbert R. Southworth, El lavado de cerebro de Francisco Franco, Barcelona, 2000, pp. 187ff.

17 The organization was created at the end of 1935 and its leading spirit was Captain Díaz Tendero, who was to die later in the concentration camp of Mauthausen.

18 Julio Busquets and Juan Carlos Losada, op. cit., pp. 63ff.

Chapter 6: The Rising of the Generals

1 Juan Campos, quoted by Ronald Fraser, Recuérdalo tú y recuérdalo a otros, p. 49.

2 Gustau Nerín, La guerra que vino de áfrica, Barcelona, 2005, p. 178.

3 Hugh Thomas, La guerra civil española, Barcelona, 1976, i, p. 239.

4 General Romerales would be sentenced to death by a court martial on 26 August, accused of ‘sedition’ and ‘treason’, J. Casanova et al., Morir, matar, sobrevivir, Barcelona, 2002, p. 62.

5 Luis Romero, Tres días de Julio, Barcelona, 1967, p. 12.

6 José Millán Astray, Franco el Caudillo, Salamanca, 1939, pp. 22–6.

7 J. Casanova et al., op. cit., p. 62.

8 Quoted in Manuel Tuñón de Lara, La España del siglo xx, Paris, 1966, p. 429.

9 Julián Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes de los españoles, Barcelona, 1977, p. 58.

10 See Francisco Espinosa, La columna de la muerte. El avance del ejército franquista de Sevilla a Badajoz, Barcelona, 2003, p. 4.

11 ABC de Sevilla, special supplement of 22 July 1936.

12 Quoted by Fraser, Recuérdalo tú…, pp. 205–6.

13 Quoted in Burnett Bolloten, La Revolución española, Barcelona, 1979, pp. 205–6.

14 Eduardo de Guzmán, Madrid rojo y negro, Barcelona, 1938, p. 37.

15 Hoy, México, D.F., 27 April 1940.

16 Marías, Una vida presente, pp. 190–1.

17 José Peirats, La CNT en la Revolución española, Paris, 1973, vol. i, p. 182.

18 On the subject of the time Franco took to reach Morocco out of prudence, see Carlos Blanco Escolá, La incompetencia militar de Franco, pp. 216–18 and also Paul Preston, Franco, pp. 187–90.

19 Carlos Blanco Escolá, Falacias de la guerra civil, p. 120.

20 DGFP, Wegener to Foreign Ministry, pp. 3–4.

21 Manuel Tuñon de Lara, Historia de España, vol. xii, pp. 456–9.

22 ‘Dame la boina/dame el fusil/que voy a matar más rojos/que flores tienen/mayo y abril’.

23 Gabriel Jackson, La República española…, p. 215.

24 Marcel Junod, Warrior without Weapons, New York, 1951, p. 98.

25 Ignacio Martín Jiménez, La guerra civil en Valladolid, 1936–1939, Valladolid, 2000, pp. 47ff.

26 There cannot have been very many. According to Josep Fontana no more than 346 civilians in Barcelona took up arms against the Republic (Visions de guerra de reraguardia, Barcelona, 1977, prologue).

27 ‘Soy el general Goded. Declaro ante el pueblo español que la suerte me ha sido adversa. En adelante, aquellos que quieran continuar la lucha no deben ya contar conmigo’, quoted in Tuñon, La España del siglo XX, p. 432.

CHAPTER 7: The Struggle for Control

1 Ian Gibson, Queipo de Llano, Barcelona, 1986, p. 76.

2 Luis Romero, Tres días de Julio, p. 50.

3 In 1919, when the French sent a squadron to the Black Sea during the Russian civil war to support the White Army, sailors of the battleships France and Jean Bart mutinied in support of the bolsheviks. Andre´ Marty, the French Comintern representative in Spain, had made an almost mythical reputation there when he played a leading part.

4 Voelckels to Foreign Ministry, Alicante, 16 October 1936, DGFP, p. 112.

5 Small bodies of troops had been flown before, including British soldiers sent from Cyprus to Iraq in 1932, but the transport of Franco’s troops across the Straits of Gibraltar is generally regarded as the first major air bridge.

6 H. R. Trevor-Roper (ed.), Las conversaciónes privadas de Hitler, Barcelona, 2004.

7 Santos Juliá (ed.), Victimas de la guerra civil, Madrid. 1999, pp. 87–8.

8 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicissitudes, p. 70; Fraser, Recuérdalo tú y recuérdalo a otros, pp. 80, 86–7.

9 Jack Lindsay, ‘On guard for Spain!’, Junta de Castilla y León, Salamanca, 1986, p. 132.

10 Luis Romero, op. cit., p. 555.

11 Ian Gibson, Granada en 1936 y el asesinato de García Lorca, Barcelona, 1979, p. 75.

12 Antonio Bahamonde, Un año con Queipo, or Memoirs of a Spanish Nationalist, London, 1939.

13 Ronald Fraser, op. cit., p. 152.

14 The rebels controlled approximately 235,000 square kilometres of the peninsular territory with eleven million people, and the Republic 270,000 with fourteen million.

15 The Army of Africa comprised 15,000 regulares and 4,000 legionnaires, as well as 12,000 members of the Sultan’s forces and 1,500 Ifni riflemen. See Gustau Nerín, La guerra que vino de áfrica, Barcelona, 2005, p. 170.

16 See Pierre Vilar, La guerra civil española, Barcelona, 1986, p. 66; Enrique Moradiellos, 1936. Los mitos de la guerra civil, Barcelona, 2004, p. 83; and Ramón Salas Larrazábal, Los datos exactos de la guerra civil, Madrid, 1980, pp. 62–3.

CHAPTER 8: The Red Terror

1 Callahan, La Iglesia católica en España, p. 282.

2 Schwendemann, Salamanca, 27 December 1936 to Foreign Ministry, DGFP, p.189.

3 The Rev. Dr Gerhard Ohlemüller, Secretary General of the Protestant World Council, protested to the Wilhelmstrasse on 28 November 1936, but the nationalist government refused to answer a German Foreign Ministry request to investigate (DGFP, pp. 144–5).

4 See José M. Sanabre Sanromá, Martirologio de la Iglesia en la diócesis de Barcelona durante la persecución religiosa, Barcelona 1943; Hilari Raguer, La espada y la cruz: La Iglesia, 1936–1939, Barcelona, 1977; La pólvora y el incienso, Barcelona, 2001; Julián Casanova, La iglesia de Franco, Madrid, 2001.

5 ‘Checa’ was the acronym for Chrezvichainaia Komissia, the ‘Extraordinary Commission’ to fight counter-revolutionary activities and sabotage. It was led by Feliks Dzherzhinsky, and became the forerunner of the OGPU, the NKVD and the KGB.

6 The official Francoist account, Causa general, states that there were more than 200 checas in Madrid alone. See Santos Juliá (ed.), Víctimas de la guerra civil.

7 Maria Casares, Residente privilégiée, Paris, 1980.

8 Santos Juliá, Víctimas…, p. 131.

9 Among the dead were the Falangists Julio Ruiz de Alda and Fernando Primo de Rivera; Jose´ María Albiñana, founder of the Nationalist Party, and the former ministers, Ramón Alvarez Valdés, Manuel Rico Avellot and José Martínez de Velasco and the old Melquíades Alvarez (Juliá, Victimas…, p. 73).

10 Manuel Azaña, ‘Cuaderno de la Pobleta’ in Diarios completos, pp. 943ff.

11 José Peirats, La CNT en la Revolución española, Toulouse, 1953, vol. i, p. 182.

12 La guerra civil a Catalunya (1936–1939), vol. i, p. 152.

13 For the repression by the left in Catalonia see J. M. Solé i Sabaté and J. Villarroya, La repressió a la reraguarda de Catalunya (1936–1939), Barcelona 1989, two volumes.

14 In Huelva the civil governor, Diego Jiménez Castellano, did all that he could to protect the right-wingers put behind bars. On 12 August, in La Nava de Santiago (Badajoz), the municipal council stopped a crowd from setting fire to the church with 63 right-wing prisoners inside (Francisco Espinosa, La columna de la muerte, pp. 165–6). In Zafra the mayor, González Barrero, saved the prisoners just before Major Castejón’s troops arrived, (Espinosa, La columna de la muerte, p. 30). In Pozoblanco the head teacher, Antonio Baena, prevented an attack on the town jail (Juliá, Víctimas…, p. 165).

15 Ibid., p. 412; see also G. Sánchez Recio, Justicia y guerra en España. Los tribunales populares, Alicante, 1991. Enrique Moradiellos raises the figure to 60,000 victims (1936. Los mitos de la guerra civil, p. 129).

CHAPTER 9: The White Terror

1 Mohammad Ibn Azzuz Akin, La actitud de los moros ante el Alzamiento, Algazara, 1997, p. 102.

2 Dionisio Ridruejo, Escrito en España, Buenos Aires, 1964, p. 94.

3 Casanova, Morir, matar…, p. 11.

4 Santos Juliá, Victimas…, p. 92.

5 This profession was one of the most heavily punished in the nationalist repression. Several hundred teachers were murdered in the first few weeks; 20 in Huelva, 21 in Burgos, 33 in Saragossa, 50 in León, etc. See Jesús Crespo, Purga de maestros en la guerra civil, Valladolid, 1987; F. Morente ‘La represió sobre el magisteri’ in Actes del IV Seminari sobre la República i la guerra civil, pp. 80 ff.

6 Santos Juliá, Victimas…, p. 94.

7 Julián Casanova, Morir, matar, sobrevivir, p. 106.

8 Ibid., p. 107.

9 Manuel Tuñón de Lara, La España del siglo XX, p. 451.

10 Jackson, La República española y la guerra civil, p. 271.

11 The same happened in Palencia, where the rising was immediately successful. In 1936 the freelance executions resulted in the death of 103 people, to which should be added the 169 sentences of death by military tribunals. In Soria 281 were killed and in Segovia, where little had happened before the war to justify the repression 358 were executed and another 2,282 imprisoned. See Jesús M. Palomares, La guerra civil en Palencia, Palencia 2002, pp. 121–44; Santiago Vega Sombría, De la esperanza a la persecución. La repressión franquista en la provincia de Segovia, Barcelona, 2005, p. 279.

12 Juliá, op. cit., p. 101.

13 Emilio Silva and Santiago Macías, Las fosas de Franco, Madrid, 2003, pp. 317ff.

14 Ibid., pp. 151ff.

15 Fraser, Recuérdalo tú, p. 369.

16 Ibid., p. 211.

17 Ibid., p. 213.

18 When, in September 1936, a Falangist column reached Andavalo, where many of the miners for Rio Tinto worked, they killed 315 of the inhabitants. See Luciano Suero Sánchez, Memorias de un campesino andaluz en la revolución española, Madrid, 1982, p. 84.

19 Espinosa, La columna de la muerte, p. 30.

20 For the events at Badajoz see Espinosa, La columna de la muerte;Mário Neves, A chacina de Badajoz, Lisbon, 1985; Julián Chaves, La guerra civil en Extremadura, Editora Regional de Extremadura, 1997; Alberto Reig Tapia, Memoria de la guerra civil, Madrid, 1999 and Justo Vila, Extremadura: La guerra civil, Badajoz, 1983. The journalists who gave the news to the world soon afterwards included: Mario Neves, Marcel Dany of Havas, Jacques Berthet of Temps, Jean d’Esme of l’Intransige´ant, Rene´ Brut a cameraman with Pathé Newsreels, Jay Allen of the Chicago Tribune and John T. Whitaker of the New York Herald Tribune.

21 The figure of 6,610 was compiled by Francisco Espinosa, but he added that the figure might well prove to be twice as high. La columna de la morte, p. 321.

22 John Whitaker, We Cannot Escape History. New York, 1943, quoted by Reig Tapia, Memoria de la guerra civil, pp 140–1.

23 Lorca was killed on 18 August along with the teacher Dióscoro Galindo González and the anarchist banderilleros Joaquín Arcollas and Francisco Galadí, in Fuente Grande, next to the gully of Víznar, where the bodies of hundreds of victims lay (Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca, vol. i, Barcelona, 1998, p. 485). Before ordering the killing of the poet, the new governor, Colonel Jose´ Valdés Guzmán, head of the Falangist squads, telephoned Queipo de Llano to consult him. He apparently replied, ‘Give him coffee, a lot of coffee.’ Café, it must be remembered, was formed by the initials of ‘Camaradas: Arriba Falange Española’. The death certificate stated: ‘died in the month of August 1936 as a result of war wounds’. See Ian Gibson, Granada en 1936 y el asesinato de Federico García Lorca, Barcelona, 1979.

24 TNA, FO 371/39742, 9903.

25 Juliá, Victimas…, p. 201.

26 A. Nadal Sànchez, Guerra civil en Málaga, Málaga, 1984.

27 See Ignacio Martín Jiménez, La guerra civil en Valladolid, 1936–1939, Valladolid, 2000.

28 Fraser, Recuérdalo tú…, p. 219.

29 Ibid., p. 217.

30 Juliá, Victimas…, pp. 411–12.

31 Article of 25 July 1936, quoted by Ian Gibson, Queipo de Llano, p. 83.

Chapter 10: The Nationalist Zone

1 The junta assumed ‘all the powers of the state and legitimately represented the country to foreign powers’ (Boletin Oficial del Estado of 25 July 1936).

2 Constancia de la Mora, Doble esplendor, Barcelona, 1977, p. 247.

3 Manuel Tuñón de Lara, La España del siglo xx, p. 479.

4 The full text of the pastoral letter is in Antonio Montero, Historia de la persecución religiosa en España, 1936–1939, Madrid, 1961.

5 Bahamonde, p. 34.

6 La Unión, Seville, 15 August 1936.

7 In October the Falange had 35,000 members, which represented 54 per cent of the nationalist militias and 19 per cent of the total nationalist forces, many more than the Carlist requetés.

8 Messerschmitt of the Export Cartel for War Matériel, 8 September 1936, DGFP, p. 88.

9 G. Sánchez Recio et al., Guerra civil y franquismo en Alicante, Alicante, 1990, p. 27; Gil Pecharromán, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, p. 455.

10 Voelckers to Foreign Ministry, 17 October, 1936, DGFP pp. 114–15.

11 Ellwood, Prietas las filas, pp. 90–1.

12 For Queipo’s direction of the Andalucian economy see Banco Exterior de España, Política commercial exterior en España(1931–1975), Madrid, 1979, pp. 144ff.

13 For a study of Millán Astray see Geoffrey Jensen, Irrational Triumph. Cultural Despair, Military Nationalism and the Ideological Origins of Franco’s Spain, Reno, 2002, pp. 140ff.

14 Cervantes’s satire on chivalry in Don Quixote was said to have been partially inspired from his wounds received at Lepanto in 1571.

15 No exact record of Unamuno’s speech was published. The Salamanca papers next day reported every other speech, but not his. This version was written down soon afterwards. See Emilio Salcedo, Vida de don Miguel, Salamanca, 1964; and Luis Portillo, ‘Unamuno’s Last Lecture’ in Cyril Connolly, The Golden Horizon, London, 1953.

CHAPTER 11: The Republican Zone

1 Pierre Vilar, La guerra civil española, Barcelona, 1986, p. 104.

2 The Spanish Communist Party in a report to the Comintern on 15 February 1937 claimed 250,00 members, ‘of whom 135,000 are at the front’ (RGASPI 495/120/259, p. 3).

3 Manuel Azaña, ‘La revolución abortada’ in Obras completas, México, 1967, vol. iii, p. 499.

4 Fernando Solano, La tragedia del Norte, Barcelona, 1938, p. 73.

5 The Basque government consisted of four PNV councillors, three from the PSOE, one for the ANV, one from Izquierda Republicana, one from Unión Republicana and one member of the PCE.

6 See Santiago de Pablo, Ludger Mees and José A. Rodríguez Ranz, El péndulo patriótico. Historia del Partido Nacionalista Vasco, II 1936–1979, Barcelona 2001.

7 John Langdon-Davies, Behind Spanish Barricades, London, 1937. p. 63.

8 For example, Josep Tarradellas, quoted in Walther L. Bernecker, Colectividades y revolución social, Barcelona, 1983, p. 386n.

9 Solidaridad Obrera, 18 July 1937.

10 Diego Abad de Santillán, Por qué perdimos la guerra, Buenos Aires, 1940, p. 169.

11 Bernecker, Colectividades y revolución social, pp. 437–48.

12 The committee went under its Catalan name of the Comitè Central de Milícies Antifeixistes. Of their five posts, the libertarians allocated three to representatives of the CNT (Durruti, García Oliver and Asens) and two to the FAI (Abad de Santilla ´n and Aurelio Fernández). Durruti and other libertarian leaders left for the front on 23 July, thus further reducing their influence (John Brademas, Anarcosindicalismo y revolución en España, 1930–1937, Barcelona, 1974, p. 175.)

13 Ossorio, Vida y Sacrificio de Companys, p. 172.

14 For the relationship between the Generalitat and the anarchists in the field of finance and industry, see Francesc Bonamusa in La guerra civil a Catalunya, vol. ii, pp. 54ff.

15 Fraser, Recuérdalo tú…, p. 393.

16 See Mary Nash, Mujeres libres: España, 1936–1939, Barcelona, 1975.

17 Sandie Holguín, República de ciudadanos, Barcelona, 2003, pp. 209ff.

18 RGASPI 495/120/259.

19 The UGT or UGT-CNT organized about 15 per cent of the collectives in New Castile and La Mancha, the majority in Estremadura, very few in Andalucia, about 20 per cent in Aragón and about 12 per cent in Catalonia.

20 The loss of markets and shortage of raw materials led to a 40 per cent decline in textile output, but engineering production increased by 60 per cent over the next nine months.

21 Josep Maria Bricall, ‘Les collectivitzacions’ in Anna Salles (ed.) Documents 1931–1939.

22 Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit, Michigan, 1963, p. 90.

23 Ibid., p. 103.

24 Brademas, Anarcosindicalismo, pp. 204–9.

25 José Borrás, Aragón en la revolución española, Viguera, Barcelona, 1983, pp. 174ff.

26 The areas expropriated for collectives included 65 per cent of the agricultural land in the province of Jaén, 56.9 per cent in Ciudad Real, 33 per cent in Albacete and only 13.18 per cent in the whole of the province of Valencia. See Aurora Bosch, Ugetistas libertarios. Guerra Civil y revolución en el País Valenciano, Valencia, 1983.

27 Borkenau, pp. 155–6.

28 G. Helsey, Anarcosindicalismo y estado en Aragón, 1930–1938, Madrid, 1994.

CHAPTER 12: The Army of Africa and the People’s Militias

1 Tuñón, La España del siglo xx, p. 438.

2 Jackson, La República…, p. 248.

3 Fraser, Recuérdalo tú…, p. 252.

4 Tuñón, La España del siglo xx, p. 474.

5 Kuznetsov, Bajo la bandera de la España republicana, p. 160.

6 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes…, p. 135.

7 Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit, p. 159.

8 Marty report to Comintern, 10 October 1936, RGVA 33987/3/832, pp. 70–107.

9 Espinosa, La columna…, p. 52.

10 Ibid. p. 77.

11 Nationalist historians claim that Yagüe fell ill on 20 September.

12 Reig Tapia, Memoria de la guerra civil, pp. 149–87.

13 Robert Mallett, Mussolini and the Origins of the Second World War, 1933–1940, London 2003, p. 101.

14 See H. R. Southworth, El mito de la cruzada de Franco, Barcelona, 1986, pp. 93–116; and Reig Tapia, pp. 149–87.

15 According to Luis Quintanilla, Los rehenes del Alcázar de Toledo, Paris, 1967, they were shot and their bodies used to block shell holes in the wall, but this too may have been a myth.

16 John Whitaker, We Cannot Escape History, pp. 113–114.

17 Isabelo Herreros, El Alcázar de Toledo. Mitología de la cruzada de Franco, Madrid, 1995, p. 75.

18 Preston, Franco, p. 235.

19 RGVA 33987/3/845, pp. 14, 17–18.

20 According to Hugh Thomas, Cortés’s men lived from robbing the local area (La guerra civil española, p. 334).

21 See Seidmann, A ras del suelo, pp. 59–61.

22 Abad de Santillán, Por qué perdimos la guerra, Madrid, 1975, p. 85.

23 Ramón Brusco, Les milícies antfeixistes i l’Exèrcit popular a Catalunya, 1936–1937, Lérida, 2003, pp. 81–98.

24 Bolloten, La revolución española, p. 368.

25 Bill Alexander, British Volunteers for Liberty, London, 1982, pp. 73–4.

26 Salas, Historia del ejército popular de la República, vol. i, pp. 1147–8.

CHAPTER 13: Arms and the Diplomats

1 Bennassar, La guerre d’Espagne et ses lendemains, Paris, 2005, p. 133.

2 Bachoud, Franco, Barcelona, 2000, p. 150.

3 D. W. Pike, Les franc¸ais et la guerre d’Espagne, Paris, 1975, p. 81.

4 Welczek to Foreign Ministry, DGFP, p. 4.

5 Wegener to Foreign Ministry, 25 July, 1936, DGFP, p. 9.

6 Howson, Armas para España, pp. 45–6.

7 On 7 and 8 August, thirteen fighters and six bombers were sent to Spain, but they were stripped of weapons and equipment. The French Potez bombers were in any case completely obsolete. Nationalist claims of large numbers of aircraft being sent earlier are without foundation.

8 Eden, Facing the Dictators, London, 1962, p. 402.

9 Balfour and Preston (eds), España y las grandes potencias, p. 81.

10 Director of Legal Department, Foreign Ministry, to the German Legation in Lisbon, 7 September 1936 (DGFP, p. 78).

11 Faupel to Wilhelmstrasse, 5 May 1937, DGFP, pp. 282–3.

12 J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London, 1920.

13 Kirkpatrick, Ivone, The Inner Circle, London, 1958.

14 Eden, Facing the Dictators, p. 433.

15 Bolín, Spain: The Vital Years, London, 1967.

16 Heiberg, Emperadodores del Mediterráneo, pp. 57–60.

17 Renzo de Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. ii, Lo stato totalitario, p. 366.

18 Coverdale, La intervención italiana en la guerra civil española, Madrid, 1979.

19 Johannes Bernhardt and Adolf Langenheim, both members of the Nazi Party and based in Morocco, were accompanied by one of General Kindelán’s officers, Captain Francisco Arranz Monasterio. For the seizure of the Lufthansa aircraft in Las Palmas to take General Orgaz to Tetuán, and then the arms delegation on to Berlin, see DGFP, pp. 7–8.

20 See Memorandum of the Director of the Political Department, Dr Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, arguing that ‘it is absolutely necessary that at this stage German governmental and Party authorities continue to refrain from any contact with the two officers. Arms deliveries to the rebels would become known very soon’ (Dieckhoff, 25 July 1936, DGFP, p. 11).

21 Angel Viñas and Carlos Collado Seidel, ‘Franco’s Request to the Third Reich for Military Assistance’ in Contemporary European History, II, 2 (2002), Cambridge University Press.

22 Howson, Armas para España, p. 35.

23 Balfour and Preston (eds), España y las grandes potencias, p. 100.

24 Viñas, Guerra, dinero, dictadura, p. 170.

25 Spanish industry had been dominated by foreign capital since its retarded start in the mid nineteenth century. The railways and basic services such as electricity, engineering and mining all depended on heavy foreign investment. American ITT owned the Spanish telephone system and Ford and General Motors had little competition in the motor industry. British companies owned the greatest share of Spanish business with nearly 20 per cent of all foreign capital investment. The United Kingdom was also the largest importer of Spanish goods, including over half of her iron ore (Comin, Hernández and Llopis (eds), Historia económica de España, p. 221.

26 J. R. Hubbard, ‘How Franco financed his war’ in Journal of Modern History, Chicago, 1953, p. 404.

27 In conversation with Charles Foltz, correspondent of Associated Press: The Masquerade in Spain, Boston, 1948, pp. 46–8.

28 AP RF 3/74/20, p. 51.

29 Radosh, Habeck and Sevostianov (eds), España traicionada, p. 56.

30 Blanco Escolá, Falacias de la guerra civil, p. 167.

31 RGVA 35082/1/185, p. 148.

CHAPTER 14: Sovereign States

1 Other influential officers present included Generals Orgaz, Kindelán, Dávila, Saliquet and Gil Yuste, as well as Colonels Muntaner and Moreno Calderón.

2 Iribarren, Mola, p. 232.

3 Gil Robles, No fue posible la paz, p. 776, n. 25.

4 Boletín Official del Estado of 30 September 1936. Paul Preston does not believe that Nicolás Franco actually deleted the words ‘del gobierno’ from the document drawn up by the lawyer, Jose´ Yanguas Messía, but thinks that the words were not read out. The qualification ‘for the duration of the war’ does appear to have been deleted by Franco himself. The important point is that the newspapersfaithfully published a verbatim version of the speech, not the text. The best account is in Preston, Franco, pp. 221–53.

5 ‘Caudillo’ was Franco’s new title, a Spanish term for leader roughly approximate to Führer or Duce.

6 The various departments of the Junta Técnica were divided between Burgos, Valladolid and Salamanca, where Franco set up his headquarters with the Secretariat-General and departments for foreign affairs, as well as press and propaganda directed by Millán Astray with the help of Ernesto Giménez Caballero. The poet and president of Acción Española, José María Pemán, took over the Commission of Culture and Education. There, with the assistance of Enrique Súñer, he began a systematic purge of university professors and lecturers.

7 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicissitudes, p. 153.

8 Koltsov, Ispanskii Dnevnik, quoted by Bolloten, La revolución española, p. 189.

9 RGVA 33987/3/852, p. 46.

10 Marty’s report to the Executive Committee of the Comintern, 10 October 1936, RGVA 33987/3/832, pp. 70–107, Radosh and Habeck, pp. 40–55.

11 The cabinet consisted of president of the council of ministers and minister of war: Francisco Largo Caballero; foreign affairs, Julio álvarez del Vayo; minister of the interior, Angel Galarza; finance, Juan Negrín; navy and air, Indalecio Prieto; industry and commerce, Anastasio de Gracia (all PSOE); justice, Mariano Ruiz Funes (Izquierda Republicana); agriculture, Vicente Uribe (communist); education, Jesús Hernández (communist); work and health, Josep Tomàs i Piera (Esquerra Republicana); communications and mercantile marine, Bernardo Giner de los Ríos (Unión Republicana); minister without portfolio, José Giral (Izquierda Republicana). A few days later Julio Just (Izquierda Republicana) became minister of works. Prieto wanted to bring the conservative Basque PNV into the central government and to strengthen Madrid’s influence in the north, but Aguirre, the Basque president, refused. The Basques wanted the statute of autonomy, frozen since 1934, passed as soon as possible. Manuel de Irujo joined the government as a minister without portfolio on 17 September, after the Basques had set up their own government (Santiago del Pablo (ed.), El péndulo patriótico, ii, pp. 15–18).

12 RGVA 33987/3/832 pp. 70–107.

13 Brusco, Les milícies antifeixistes i l’exèrcit popular, pp. 101–103.

14 Vilar, La guerra civil española, p. 103

15 RGVA 33987/3/832 p. 70

16 Pablo de Azcárate, Mi embajada en Londres, p. 141.

17 Eden, Facing the Dictators, pp. 415 and 408.

18 Bowers, Mission in Spain.

CHAPTER 15: The Soviet Union and the Spanish Republic

1 The PSUC in Catalonia increased during this period of a year from 5,000 members to 45,000 and the Communist Party of Euskadi from 3,000 to 22,000, which made an approximate total of 300,000, more than the PSOE and all the republican parties together. According to José Díaz, the breakdown was as follows:

industrial workers (including engineers and technicians): 87,660

agricultural workers: 62,250

landowning peasants: 76,700

middle class: 15,485

intellectuals: 7,045

women: 19,300

Total: 268 440

It is significant that the communists attracted more landowning peasants than agricultural workers (Joan Estruch, Historia oculta del PCE, Madrid, 2000, pp. 132–5.

2 Antonio Elorza and Marta Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas. La Internacional Comunista y España, 1919–1939, Barcelona, 1999, p. 305.

3 Ivo Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003, pp. 28 and 32.

4 The main works on the subject, making use of the former Soviet archives since 1992, include: R. Radosh, M. R. Habeck and G. Sevostiano (eds), Spain Betrayed, The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, Yale, 2001; Yury Rybalkin, Operatsiya ‘X’: Sovetskaya voennaya pomoshch respublikanskoi ispanii (1936–1939), Moscow, 2000; Daniel Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética y la guerra civil española. Una revisión crítica, Barcelona, 2003; Gerald Howson, Armas para España. La historia no contada de la guerra civil española, Barcelona 2000; Michael Seidman, A ras de suelo. Historia social de la República durante la guerra civil, Madrid, 2003; A. Elorza and M. Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas. La Internacional Comunista y España, 1919–1939, Barcelona, 1999; and of course the archives themselves have shed further light: principally, the RGVA, RGASPI and GARF.

5 Kowalsky, pp. 73–4.

6 Orlov was a nom de guerre. His NKVD name was Lev Lazarovich Nikolsky, but his real name was Felbin, Leiba Lazarovich. Most Jews who joined the NKVD were ordered to take less recognizably Jewish names (GARF R-9401/12/55, pp. 211–12).

7 From the papers of S. P. Litvinov, the radio operator for the IntelligenceDepartment of the Red Army and then the chief of radio communications at the Republican Tank Brigade under the command of D. G. Pavlov (Yury Rybalkin, Operatsiya‘X’, p. 39).

8 See Kowalsky, pp. 42ff.

9 Exact figures from Soviet files are hard to establish with all the conflicting sources, but in general terms the total war mate´riel supplied consisted of between 623 and 648 aircraft; between 331 and 347 tanks; between 714 and 1,228 field guns; between 338,000 and 498,000 rifles. See Howson, pp. 382–418 and Kowalsky, pp. 214–16. The Soviet Union sent six basic types of aircraft: the Polikarpov I-15 biplane fighter known in Spain as the Chato and the I-16 monoplane fighter known as the Mosca by the republicans and the Rata by the nationalists; the Tupolev SB-2 bomber known as the Katiuska and the light bomber cum reconnaissance aircraft, the Polikarpov R-5.

10 Howson, p. 181.

11 RGVA 35082/1/185, p. 352.

12 See ángel Viñas, El oro de Moscú, Barcelona, 1979 and Guerra, dinero, dictadura, Barcelona, 1984; and also Pablo Martín Aceña, El oro de Moscú y el oro de Berlin, Madrid, 2001.

13 Gabriel Jackson, however, argues that the idea of sending the gold to Moscow took the Soviet authorities by surprise and that Négrin had to explain the idea in detail to Rosenberg, the Soviet ambassador (Juan Negrín, p. 75).

14 Its value was 598 million gold pesetas, the equivalent of $195 million (Viñas, Guerra, dinero, dictadura, p. 170).

15 GARF 7733/36/27, pp. 25–6.

16 Viñas, El oro de Moscú, pp. 289–92. These figures do not, however, take into account the numismatic value of many of the coins, which was considerable in the case of old Spanish and Portuguese pieces.

17 During the course of 1937 another $256 million were transferred to the account of Eurobank in Paris. Another $131,500,000 served to pay the Soviet Union for the mate´riel which it had supplied. The balance of the gold from the Banco de España ran out early in 1938, according to the Soviet version, and in March of that year the Republic had to request from the USSR a credit of $70 million and in December another $85 million (Kowalsky, pp. 232–3).

18 Seidman, A ras de suelo, p. 112; Comín et al., Historia económica de España, p. 335.

19 RGASPI 17/120/263, pp. 2–3.

20 Ibid., pp. 16–1.

21 Antonov-Ovseyenko’s diary, RGASPI 17/120/84, pp. 58–79.

22 Antonov-Ovseyenko’s confession was published in Izvestia, 24 August 1936.

23 RGASPI 17/120/259, pp. 73–4.

24 RGASPI 17/120/84, pp. 75–6.

25 RGASPI 17/120/263, pp. 32.

26 Ibid., pp. 16–17.

CHAPTER 16: The International Brigades and the Soviet Advisers

1 Claims arising from French Communist Party sources that Maurice Thorez, their secretary-general had somehow put forward the idea at a Comintern meeting of 26 July appear to have been completely discredited. See Rémi Skoutelsky, L’Espoir guidait leurs pas. Les voluntaires franc¸aises dans les Brigades Internationales, 1936–1939, Paris, 1998, pp. 50–1.

2 Quoted in Elorza and Bizcarrondo, p. 303.

3 Andreu Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales, Barcelona, 1974, p. 449.

4 The most accurate figures by country, but still uncertain are as follows:

France: 8,962

Poland: 3,113

Italy: 3,002

United States: 2,341

Germany: 2,217

Balkan countries: 2,095

Great Britain: 1,843

Belgium: 1,722

Czechoslovakia: 1,066

Baltic states: 892

Austria: 872

Scandinavian countries: 799

Netherlands: 628

Hungary: 528

Canada: 512

Switzerland: 408

Portugal: 134

Others: 1,122

Michel Lefebvre and Re ´mi Skoutelsky, Las Brigadas Internacionales, Barcelona, 2003, p. 16.

5 Kowalsky, p. 267.

6 Esmond Romilly, Boadilla, London, 1971.

7 Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales, p. 80.

8 Jason Gurney, Crusade in Spain, London, 1974.

9 George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, London, 1968.

10 Abad de Santillán, Por qué perdimos la guerra, p. 175.

11 Bennassar believes that Marty was responsible for the death of the French commander Gaston Delassale and a dozen International Brigaders, ‘but not, however, of systematic executions’ (La guerre d’Espagne et les lendemains, p. 146). Soviet documents, on the other hand, indicate that Marty’s obsession with ‘fifth column’ infiltration and the executions of deserters and ‘cowards’ may well have contributed to the very high rate of executions.

12 Castells, p. 73n.

13 Commissariat XV International Brigade, Book of XV International Brigade, Madrid, 1938.

14 TsAMO 132/2642/77, p. 47.

15 RGASPI 545/3/309, p. 2.

16 RGVA 33987/3/870, p. 346.

17 The figures in Soviet files do not entirely agree, mainly because of differences in category definition. One of the clearest breakdowns states that in addition to the Red Army advisers attached to various headquarters, a total of 772 Soviet pilots, 351 tankists, 100 artillerists, 77 sailors, 166 signals experts, 141 military engineers and technicians, and 204 interpreters served in Spain (RGVA 33987/3/1143, p. 127). There were about 150 advisers in 1937 and about 250 in 1938. In January 1939 their number was reduced to 84 (RGVA 35082/1/15, pp. 47–9). For casualty figures, see G. F. Krivosheev (ed.), Rossiya i SSSR v voihakh 20 veka. Poteri vooruzhennykh sil (Russia and the USSR in the wars of the twentieth century. Losses of the armed forces), Moscow, 2001.

18 TsAMO 132/2642/192, p. 1.

19 Rybalkin, p. 56.

20 TsAMO 132/2642/192, p. 15.

21 Ibid., p. 32.

22 RGVA 35082/1/40, p. 78.

23 RGVA 9/29/315, p. 70; 33987/3/1149, p. 172.

24 RGVA 33987/3/960, pp. 180–9, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 127.

25 RGVA 35082/1/185, pp. 356 and 408.

26 See Rybalkin, pp. 38–42 and RGVA 33987/3/870, pp. 341–2; RGVA 33987/3/961 p. 166; RGVA 35082/1/18, pp. 49, 64–6; RGVA 33987/3/961, pp. 155–6; TsAMO 16/3148/5, pp. 23–5. According to Rybalkin, p. 42, the experience gained in this operation was later used in the Soviet planning and organization of transport during the Second World War and then later in 1962 when Soviet weapons and troops were transported to Cuba as part of Operation ‘Anadyr’, an enterprise directed by the then minister of defence, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, who had himself served in Spain.

27 RGASPI 545/3/302, p. 118.

CHAPTER 17: The Battle for Madrid

1 The first line, some 30 kilometres out from Madrid, linked Navalcarnero with Valdemoro passing by Batres, Griñón and Torrejón de Velasco. The second, about twenty kilometres out, consisted of Brunete, Villaviciosa, Móstoles, Fuenlabrada and Pinto; the third, at about ten kilometres out, went from Villaviciosa de Odón to Cerro de los á ngeles; and the fourth, at the gates of the capital, consisted of fortifying Pozuelo, la Casa de Campo, Campamento, Carabanchel, Villaverde and Vallecas (José Manuel Martínez Bande, La guerra en el norte, Madrid, 1969, p. 130.)

2 Preston, Franco, caudillo de España, p. 255.

3 These first mixed brigades came under the División Orgánica de Albacete, commanded by Colonel Segismundo Casado. The first was led by Major of Militia Enrique Líster; the second by Major Jesús Martínez de Aragón; the third, composed of carabineros, by José María Galán; the fourth, commanded by an infantry captain Eutiquiano Arellano, was made up of conscript soldiers; the fifth, also carabineros, was led by Fernando Sabio; and the sixth, of reserve soldiers based in Murcia, was commanded by Miguel Gallo Martínez.

4 Rodimtsev, Aleksadr Ilyich, Dobrovoltsy–internatsionalisty, Sverdlovsk, 1976, p. 31.

5 Louis Aragon, the French poet and communist, and his partner, Elsa Triolet, a writer, were regarded as ‘the royal couple’ of the French Communist Party. Koltsov, Ispansky dnevnik, Moscow, 1957, p. 199. Many people suspected Triolet of being an NKVD agent, but no documentary proof has emerged.

6 Francisco Largo Caballero, Arenga a las fuerzas armadas, 28 October 1936, reported in the daily press.

7 The republican tank force was formed on the basis of a brigade which arrived from the Belorussian military district, 60 per cent of the unit were Soviet ‘volunteer’ tankists. RGVA 31811/4/28, pp. 104–10. The brigade was commanded by Colonel D. G. Pavlov, who was executed in the 1941 as a scapegoat when the Wehrmacht smashed the Red Army in its invasion. Arman was not the son of Lenin’s close friend Inessa Armand, as some people think.

8 Ispansky dnevnik, Moscow, 1957, p. 231.

9 Letter from Federica Montseny to Bolloten: La revolución española, p. 288.

10 Ispansky dnevnik, p. 235.

11 Azaña, Diarios completos, p. 956.

12 For this massacre and those from other prisons, such as Antón, Porlier and Ventas, see Gibson, Paracuellos cómo fue, pp. 185ff., which gives a total figure of 2,400 murders between 7 November and 4 December 1936. Javier Cervera (Madrid en guerra. La ciudad clandestin, Madrid, pp. 84–103) states that there were more than 2,000 killed at Paracuellos and Torrejón.

13 See Martínez Reverte, La batalla de Madrid, Barcelona, 2004, pp. 226–7, 240. The document is reproduced pp. 577–81.

14 RGVA 35082/1/185, p. 365.

15 R. Salas Larrazábal, Historia del Ejército Popular, p. 574 and General Alonso Baquer, El Ebro. La batalla decisiva de los cien días, La Esfera, Madrid, 2003, p. 33.

16 ‘French direction had been unmistakably evident on the side of the reds in their whole tactical procedure’ (DGFP, p. 259).

17 Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s Interpreter, The Secret History of German Diplomacy, 1939–1945, London, 1951.

18 J. Delperrie, Las brigadas internacionales, Madrid, 1978, p. 94.

19 Hoy, Las Palmas, 24 July 1936.

20 Blanco Escolá, El general Rojo, p. 173.

21 Karl Anger, alias Dobrovolsky, RGVA 35082/1/189, p. 83.

22 RGVA 35082/1/95, pp. 33–58.

23 Rodimtsev, Dobrovoltsy–internatsionalisty, p. 46,

24 Koltsov, Ispansky dnevnik, Moscow, 1957, p. 279.

25 RGVA. 35082/1/189, p. 103.

26 A biographer of Durruti suggests that the doctors did not dare intervene surgically when they might have saved him. He died of an internal haemorrhage (Abel Paz, Durruti en la revolución española, Madrid, 2004, p. 678).

27 J. Salas Larrazábal, La guerra de España desde el aire, p. 140.

28 See Solé Sabaté, pp. 48–9.

29 BA-MA RL35/38.

30 Venid a ver la sangre por las calles,

venid a ver

la sangre por las calles,

venid a ver la sangre

por las calles! ‘Explico algunas cosas’ in Poesía política, Santiago de Chile, 1953, I, p. 60.

31 RGASPI 495/120/261, p. 14.

32 Cowles, Looking for Trouble, p. 18.

33 Dobrovolsky (Karl Anger), RGVA 35082/1/189, p. 126.

34 Richthofen, BA-MA RL 35/38. The request, supported by General Faupel, was rejected in Berlin on both political and technical grounds, principally the problem of shipping such a large body of men past Britain without being seen. See Dieckhoff’s memorandum of December 1936, DGFP, pp. 155–6, 162, 165 and168.

CHAPTER 18: The Metamorphosis of the War

1 Chargé d’affaires in Madrid, v. Tippelskirch to Foreign Ministry, 23 September 1936, DGFP, p. 94.

2 Faupel to Foreign Ministry, 10 December 1936, DGFP, p. 159.

3 Richthofen personal war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

4 Karl Anger (Dobrovolsky), RGVA 35082/1/189.

5 Koltsov, Ispansky dnevnik, p. 309.

6 RGVA 35082/1/185, pp. 400, 407.

7 Ibid., pp. 680–95.

8 Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales, pp. 130–1.

9 The Owl of Minerva, London, 1959.

10 Gillain, La Marseillaise, p. 16.

11 Preston, La guerra civil española, Barcelona, 1999, p. 125.

12 See Gabriele Ranzato, L’eclissi della democrazia. La guerra civile spagnola e le sue origine, Turín, 2004, pp. 372–3.

13 Diarios 1937–1943, Barcelona, 2004, p. 15.

14 When Villalba returned to nationalist Spain after the war, his claims of ‘negligencia deliberada’ were fully accepted and he was restored to the rank of full colonel, with pension. See ‘Rectificaciones’ in vol. iv of Crónica de la guerra española, Buenos Aires, 1966, p. 491.

15 Richthofen personal war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

16 Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit, p. 227.

17 23 March 1937, RGVA 33987/3/991, pp. 81–96, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 162.

18 RGVA 33987/3/960, pp. 180–9, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 127.

19 RGVA/33987/3/1010, p. 300.

20 Marchenko to Litvinov, 22 February 1937, RGVA 33987/3/960, pp. 303–15.

21 Brusco, p. 114.

22 El péndulo patriótico, vol. ii, p. 22.

23 ‘Adelante!’, Internatsionalnaya brigada, Moscow, 1937, pp. 106–18.

24 Krasnaya Zvezda, 15 September 1993.

25 Alpert, El Ejército de la República, p. 65.

26 Guerra, exilio y cárcel, Paris, 1976.

27 J. Martínez Reverte, La batalla de Madrid.

CHAPTER 19: The Battles of the Jarama and Guadalajara

1 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

2 Regler, The Great Crusade, pp. 243–63.

3 Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales, p. 166.

4 Wintringham, English Captain, London, 1939.

5 Alexander, British Volunteers, p. 95.

6 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

7 Kemp, Mine Were of Trouble, London, 1957.

8 RGVA 33987/3/912, pp. 127–8.

9 RGVA 35082/1/185, p. 379.

10 Sixten Rogeby, Spanska frontminnen, Arbetarkultur, Stockholm, 1938.

11 RGVA 35082/1/185, p. 361.

12 Salas, La guerra de España desde el aire, p. 164.

13 Marty to Dimitrov, 28 March 1937, RGVA 33987/3/991, pp. 150–88.

14 Blanco, La incompetencia militar de Franco, p. 344.

15 Segala, Trincee di Spagna, p. 116.

16 Renzo de Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. ii., Lo steto totalitario, p. 404.

17 Rodimtsev, Dobrovoltsy, p. 57.

18 Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales, p. 187.

19 Rodimtsev, op. cit., pp. 73–4.

20 RGASPI 533/6/102, p. 110.

21 Karl Anger (Dobrovolsky), RGVA 35082/1/189, p. 188.

22 Koltsov, Ispansky dnevnik p. 450.

23 Mi embajada en Londres, pp. 321–3.

24 Rodimtsev, pp. 94–6.

25 Mera, Guerra, exilio y cárcel, Paris, 1976.

26 Karl Anger (Dobrovolsky), RGVA 35082/1/189, p. 190.

27 Rodimtsev, p. 102.

28 RGVA 33987/3/1082, p. 206.

29 RGVA 33987/3/961, p. 123.

30 Two Wars and More to Come, p. 264.

31 Renzo de Felice, Lo stato totalitario p. 392.

32 Mussolini, probably echoing Franco’s own conviction that French regular officers were directing operations, told the German ambassador in Italy on 25 March that ‘French direction has been unmistakably evident on the side of the reds in their whole tactical procedure’ (DGFP, p. 259).

33 DGFP, p. 265.

CHAPTER 20: The War in the North

1 The government consisted of Aguirre, Jesús María Leizaola, Heliodoro de la Torre and Telesforo Monzón (all PNV); three socialists (Santiago Aznar, Juan Gracía and Juan de los Toyos); a member of ANV (Gonzalo Nárdiz), one from the Izquierda Republicana (Ramón Maria Aldasoro), another from Unión Republicana (Alfredo Espinosa) and Juan Astigarrabía, a communist.

2 S. de Pablo et al., El péndulo patrótico, vol. ii, p. 19.

3 Luis María Jiménez de Aberasturi, La guerra en el Norte, p. 118.

4 RGVA 35082/1/189, pp. 8–9.

5 Aberasturi, op. cit., p. 163. 6 BA-MA RL 35/3.

7 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38. 8 Ibid.

9 According to the republican chaplain, José María Basabilotra, people tried to seek refuge in the cemetery. Fraser, Recuérdalo tú…, pp. 549–50.

10 Vicente Talón, Memoria de la guerra de Euskadi, p. 398.

11 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Luis Michelena, quoted Fraser, Recuérdalo tú…, p 552.

16 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

17 Sole Sabaté and Villarroya state that three Savoia S-79s had already ropped 36 bombs of 50 kilograms each (España en llamas, pp. 84–5).

18 Between 200 and 300 according to V. Talón, Memoria…, pp. 34–5, and around 200 according to S. De Pablo, ‘La guerra civil en el País Vasco’.

19 See Southworth, Guernica, pp. 22–4, and Steer, The Tree of Gernika.

20 ángel Viñas, Guerra, dinerodictadura, p. 122.

21 ABC, 29 April 1937.

22 Ibid. A slightly different version was reported by Faupel, the German ambassador, on 5 May 1937. It included the sentence: ‘Aguirre planned the destruction of Guernica with the devilish intention of laying the blame before the enemy’s door and producing a storm of indignation among the already conquered and demoralized Basques’ (DGFP, p. 281).

23 A. Rovighi and F. Stefani, La participazione italiana alla guerra civile spagnola, Estado Mayor del Ejército, Roma, 1993, quoted by Ranzato, Leclissi della democrazia, p. 492.

24 Virginia Cowles, Looking for Trouble, p. 75.

25 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

26 For the destruction of Guernica see Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, The Day Guernica Died, London, 1975; H. R. Southworth, Guernica el mito; A. Viñas, Guerra, dinero, dictadura; and J. L. de la Granja and C. Garitaonandía (ed.), Gernika: 50 años después

27 Diarios completes, p. 974.

28 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

29 Aberasturi, La guerra en el norte, pp. 234–5.

30 The German ambassador in Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, reported as early as 13 January 1937 that ‘through the mediation of the Vatican negotiations are being carried on in the north with the Basque separatists at Bilbao’ (DGFP, p. 221).

31 Franco’s headquarters, however, announced: ‘Vizcaya front. This afternoon at 3.10 p.m. troops entered the capital of Vizcaya. Bilbao is once again part of Spain.’

32 For the ‘Pact of Santoña’, the relations between the Basque government and Valencia and the diplomatic discussion, see S. De Pablo, El péndulo patriótico, pp. 29–41.

33 Ciano, Diarios 1937–1943, p. 15.

CHAPTER 21: The Propaganda War and the Intellectuals

1 H. R. Southworth, El lavado de cerebro de Francisco Franco, pp. 21–186.

2 Blanco Escolá, Falacios de la guerra civil, p. 105.

3 The Catholic Church declared that the murdered priests were martyrs. This position continued right up to John Paul II’s visit to Spain in May 2003, when he maintained that the killing of priests was a ‘bloody and planned religious persecution’. In Madrid, he beatified the teacher Pedro Poveda, killed there on 27 July 1936. He still made no mention of the Basque priests killed by the nationalists (El País, 5 May, 2003).

4 ‘Carta colectiva del Episcopado español a los obispos del mundo entero’, 1 July 1937, quoted in Antonio Montero, Historia de la persecución religiosa en España, 1936–1939, Madrid, 1961.

5 Southworth, El mito, p. 169.

6 Luis Bolín, Spain: The Vital Years, London, 1967

7 Peter Kemp, Mine Were of Trouble, pp. 49–50.

8 Virgina Cowles, p. 77–80.

9 Peter Kemp, Mine Were of Trouble.

10 Arthur Koestler, Spanish Testament, London, 1937.

11 Southworth, El mito, p. 238.

12 Bennassar argues that ‘the two camps behaved like agencies of disinformation and rumour factories’ (La guerre d’Espagne et ses lendemains, p. 323).

13 Quoted in Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, p. 115.

14 For the part played by intellectuals in the Spanish Civil War, see among others: Southworth, El mito de la cruzada de Franco;R. álvarez and R. López (eds), Poesia anglo-norteamericana de la guerra civil española, Salamanca, 1986; Robert Payne, The Civil War in Spain, 1936–1939, London, 1962 and Francisco Rico (ed.), Historia y crítica de la literatura española, vol. 7, Barcelona, 1984.

15 ‘Authors Take Sides’, in New Left Review.

16 Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom, London, 1948.

17 Supporters included Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, Américo Castro, Pau Casals, Rodolfo Halffter, Blas Cabrera, Alberto Jime´nez Fraud, Josep Ferrater Mora, Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao, Pere Bosch Gimpera, Luís Buñuel, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. Writers and others who took an active role, either in the trenches or behind the lines, included Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, José Bergamín, León Felipe, Max Aub, José Moreno Villa, Ramón J. Sender, Miguel Hernández, Salvador Espriu, Juan Marichal, Francisco Ayala, Antonio Buero Vallejo, María Zambrano, Rafael Dieste, Juan Gil-Albert, Ramón Gaya, Teresa León, José Herrera Petere, Antonio Sanchez Barbudo, Manuel Altolaguirre, Emilio Prados, Pedro Garfias, Rosa Chacel, Antonio Agraz, Fe´lix Paredes, Leopoldo Urrutia, Lorenzo Varela, José María Morón, Benigno Bejarano, Eduardo Zamacois, Rafel Vidiella, Julio Sesto, A. Martínez de Luzenay, Silvia Mistral, Clemente Cimorra, Roger de Flor, Gabriel Baldrich, Manuel Cabanillas, Juan Usón (‘Juaninus’).

On the nationalist side supporters included Eugenio d’Ors, Manuel Machado, Jose´ María Pemán, Francisco Cossío, Concha Espina, José Muñoz San Román, Rafael García Serrano, Ricardo León, Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, Cecilio Benítez de Castro, Francisco Camba, Evaristo Casariego, Tomás Borrás, Josep Pla, Eduardo Marquina, Federico de Urrutia, Jose´ Camón Aznar, José María Castroviejo, Ignacio Agustí, Alvaro Cunqueiro, Pedro Laín Entralgo, JoséL. López Aranguren, Antonio Tovar, Luis Díez del Corral, Antonio Maravall, Gerardo Diego, Leopoldo Panero, Luis Rosales, Luis Felipe Vivanco, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Félix Ros, Pedro Muñoz Seca and of course the literary court of Jose´ Antonio Primo de Rivera: Rafael Sánchez Mazas, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Eugenio Montes, Agustín de Foxá, Jacinto Miquelarena, Pedro Mourlane Michelena, José María Alfaro, Luys Santa Marina, Samuel Ros and Dionisio Ridruejo.

18 AgustínSánchez Vidal in F. Rico, Historia y crítica de la literatura española vol. vii, p. 759.

19 On the intellectuals and the ‘cause of the people’ see Santos Juliá, Historias de las dos Españas, Madrid, 2004.

20 The Mangada column had Avance, the communists on the Somosierra front ¡No pasarán! and El miliciano rojo on the Aragón front; Octubre for the battalion of that name; Komsomol for the Communist Youth of La Mancha; socialists, anarchists and republicans all had their own. The International Brigades had a dozen of their own: Le Volontaire de la Liberté, Our Fight, Il Garibaldino and Freiheit Ka¨mpfer. Even the Scandinavian company with the Thaelmann Battalion produced its own paper, edited by a journalist called Lise, who had accompanied them to Spain (Conny Andersson in Sixten Rogeby, Spanska frontminnen, Arbetarkultur, 1938).

The nationalists, meanwhile had ABC in Seville; El Heraldo de Aragón in Saragossa; El Norte de Castilla in Valladolid; Ideal in Granada; the Gaceta regional in Salamanca; El Faro in Vigo, La Voz de Asturias in Oviedo; El Pensamiento Navarro in Pamplona and the Diario de Burgos. In the early part of the war the besieged nationalist garrison in Toledo had produced the roneoed El ´zar. The main Falangist publication was Arriba España!, but also Jerarquía; Fotos, which was close to Manuel Hedilla; Ve´rtice, published by the Delegacio ´n de Prensa y Propaganda; Fe in Seville; Patria in Granada; Odiel in Huelva; Sur in Malaga; Destino, the publication of the Catalans in Burgos and the satirical review Ametralladora. In November 1938 the nationalist administration created an official news service, EFE, financed by Juan March and other bankers. For the press on both sides see Rafael Abella, La vida cotidiana durante la guerra civil, Planeta, Barcelona, 1975.

21 Phrase used in El Socialista, October 1936.

22 Josep Renau, Carles Fontseré, Lorenzo Gomis, Ramón Gaya, José Bardasano, Josep Obiols, Lola Anglada, Martí Bas, José Luis Rey Vila (‘Sim’), Antoni Clavé, Emeterio Melendreras, Helios Gómez and Luis Quintanilla. On the nationalist side the best-known designers were Carlos Sáenz de Tejada, a great draughtsman, and Teodoro Delgado. See Jordi and Arnau Carulla, La guerra civil en 2.000 carteles, 2 vol, Barcelona, 1997; Carmen Grimau, El cartel republicano en la guerra civil, Madrid, 1979.

23 The republicans had Unión Radio, Radio España and the many transmitters belonging to political parties and trade unions. La Voz de España was the station for propaganda aimed abroad. The nationalists used Radio Tetuán, Radio Ceuta and Radio Sevilla (known as Queipo de Llano’s ‘plaything’), as well as the foreign broadcasts of their allies in Rome, Berlin and Lisbon. The radio station attached to the Generalissimo’s headquarters soon became the most important in nationalist Spain. When the nationalists conquered a sector of republican territory, they immediately put the radio station there to work for their own side. See C. Garitaonandía, ‘La radio republicana durante la guerra civil’ in Historia y memoria de la guerra civil, vol. i, pp. 391–400.

24 Most were by Ramon Biadiu: Delta de l’Ebre; Els tapers de la Costa; Transformació de la indústria al servei de la guerra and Vail d’Aran (Santos Zunzunegui and Eduardo González Calleja, Comunicación cultura y política durante la Il República y la guerra civil, vol. ii, Bilbao, 1990, pp. 475–493); see also Daniel Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética y la guerra civil española.

25 For the exhibition, see Manuel Aznar, Pensamiento literario y compromiso antifascista de la inteligencia española republicana, Barcelona, 1978.

26 André Malraux, Julián Benda, Tristan Tzara, André Chamson, Anna Seghers, Ilya Ehrenburg, Alexis Tolstoy, Stephen Spender, Malcolm Cowley, Jef Last, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Pitcairn, Eric Weinert, Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Guillén, Octavio Paz, César Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, Juan Marinello, Raúl González Tuñón, José Mancisidor, Enrique Díez Canedo, Antonio Machado, Rafael Alberti, Corpus Barga, Eugenio Imaz, Wenceslao Roces, Manuel Altolaguirre, Emilio Prados, Jose´ Bergamín, Juan Chabás, Juan Gil Albert and Miguel Herna Alca´ndez (International Anti-Fascist Congress of Writers in Spain, GARF 1117/04/37).

27 Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Oxford, 1968.

28 Churchill, Step by Step, p. 304.

CHAPTER 22: The Struggle for Power

1 Faupel to Wilhelmstrasse, 14 April 1937, DGFP, p. 269.

2 Cowles, p. 80.

3 In his last despatch of 9 April 1937 the Italian ambassador to Franco, Roberto Cantalupo, described with great clarity the Generalissimo’s plans to amalgamate the political parties and establish ‘his own position as future head of state, head of government and head of all the political and union organizations in the future totalitarian Spain’. Quoted by Ranzato, L’eclissi della democrazia, p. 527.

4 Decreto no. 255, published in the Boletín Oficial of 20 April 1937. The text was drafted by Serrano Súñer and Ernesto Jiménez Caballero who, needless to say, did not consult either Hedilla or Rodezno.

5 Ellwood, Prietas las filas, p. 111. The Carlists were in charge of only nine provincial organizations, while the Falangists took over twenty-two. See J. Tusell, Franco en la guerra civil, Tusquets, Barcelona, 1992.

6 Heleno Saña, El franquismo sin mitos. Conversaciones con Serrano Súñer, Barcelona, 1982, p. 69. Leonardo Painador, the prosecutor of the popular tribunal which condemned to death the two brothers of Serrano Súñer, was shot early in 1940 (Bullón and De Diego, Historias orales de la guerra civil, p. 191).

7 Manuel Hedilla, Testimonio, pp. 529–33.

8 TsAMO 132/2642/77, pp. 45–6.

9 Elorza and Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas, p. 341 and Dimitrov, Diarios, 20 March 1937, p. 58.

10 RGVA 33987/3/960, pp. 14–15.

11 RGVA 33987/3/961, pp. 34–56, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, pp. 403–4.

12 TsAMO 132/2642/192, p. 42, quoted in Rybalkin, p. 48.

13 Bolloten, La Revolución española, p. 322.

14 Frente Rojo, 17 April 1937, quoted Bolloten, p. 337.

15 Petrov, battalion commander, 17 May, 1937, RGVA 35082/1/185, p. 374.

16 A project of close collaboration between the PSOE and the Spanish Communist Party was first put forward by Ramón Lamoneda on 26 December 1936. This proposal consisted of creating a joint supervisory committee. See Graham, Socialism and War, p. 75.

17 Treball, 22 December, 1936. For the food supply situation in Barcelona, see E. Ucelay da Cal, La Catalunya populista. Imatge, cultura i politica en l’etapa republicana 1931–1939, Barcelona, 1982.

18 Treball, 8 April 1937.

19 Solidarid Obrera, 8 April 1937.

20 La Batalla, 11 April 1937.

21 See L. Trotsky, La revolución española 1930–1940, Barcelona, 1977, vol. i, p. 333.

22 Elorza and Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas, p. 364.

CHAPTER 23: The Civil War within the Civil War

1 See J. Pous and J. M. Solé, Anarquia i república a la Cerdanya (1936–1939), Barcelona, 1988.

2 Many suspected that the killing was a communist provocation, arguing that Roldán Cortada objected to the PSUC attacks against the CNT and the POUM. See Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 2003, p. 635; José Peirats, Los anarquistas en la crisis política española, Buenos Aires, 1964, pp. 241–3; and Felix Morrow, p. 87.

3 Bolloten, p. 557.

4 ‘Kein Wagen, der nicht zur CNT gehörte dürfte passieren und mehr als 200 Polizisten and Sturmgardisten wurden entwaffnet’ (12 May 1937, RGASPI 495/120/259, p. 4).

5 Orwell, Homage to Catalonia.

6 García Oliver’s address was astonishingly emotional and sentimental. He spoke twice of bending over the dead ‘to kiss them’. The libertarian rank and file referred scornfully to his speech as ‘the legend of the kiss’.

7 Gabriele Ranzato says that Berneri and Barbieri were killed probably by communists, but that one cannot rule out the theory of García Oliver that they might have been killed by agents of Mussolini’s secret police, the OVRA (L’eclessi della democrazia, p. 453). The simultaneous killing of prominent Catalan anarchists would, however, suggest that these crimes were more likely to have been the work of communists.

8 In an interview with John Brademas, Anarcosindicalismo y revolución…, p. 246.

9 Casanova, De la calle al frente, p. 222.

10 Personal account of Hidalgo de Cisneros in Bolloten, p. 570.

11 RGASPI 495/74/204, p. 129.

12 RGASPI 495/120/259, p. 117.

13 Ibid., p. 118.

14 RGASPI 495/120/261, p. 4.

15 Ibid., p. 6.

16 Faupel to Wilhelmstrasse, 11 May 1937, DGFP, p. 286.

17 For the establishment of republican justice in the face of revolutionary disorder see Franc¸ois Godicheau, La guerre d’Espagne. République et Révolution en Catalogne (1936–1939), Paris, 2004. Of the 3, 700 ‘anti-fascist prisoners’ still in jail in January 1939, 90 per cent were from the CNT-FAI.

18 The Pueblo Español (Montjuich), Vandellós, L’Hospitalet de l’Infant, Omelles de na Gaia, Concabella, Anglesrola and Falset. Franc¸ois Godicheau, ‘Los hechos de mayo de 1937 y los “presos antifascistas”: identificación de un fenómeno represivo’ in Historia social, n. 44, 2002, pp. 39 and 55, and La guerra civil a Catalunya (1936–1939) vol. ii, pp. 212ff.

19 JoséDíaz, Tres años de lucha, p. 433.

20 Helen Graham argues convincingly that the Spanish Communist Party and the republicans had worked closely together, with the joint aim of opposing Largo Caballero (Socialism and War, p. 91).

21 Ibid., pp. 100–2.

22 RGASPI 17/120/263, p. 32.

23 The other main portfolios were José Giral, minister of state; Bernardo Giner de los Ríos, public works; and Jaime Aiguader, minister of work and public assistance.

24 Diarios completos, pp. 959–60.

25 For the POUM and the Nin affair see Francesc Bonamusa, Andreu Nin y el movimiento comunista en España(1930–1937), Barcelona, 1977, and Elorza and Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas.

26 Diarios completos, p. 1054.

27 Diego Abad de Santillán, Por qué perdimos la guerra, Buenos Aires, 1940. See J. Pous and J. M. Solé, Anarquia i república a la Cerdanya (1936–1939), Barcelona, 1988.

CHAPTER 24: The Battle of Brunete

1 RGVA 33987/3/969, p. 266.

2 R. Salas Larrazábal, ‘Génesis y actuación del Ejército Popular de la República’ in Carr (ed.), Estudios sobre la República y la guerra civil española, p. 222.

3 ‘Mein Bruder ist ein Flieger / Unserm Volke fehlt’s an Raum / Und Grund und Boden zu kriegen, ist / Bei uns ein alter Traum. / Der Raum, den mein Bruder eroberte / Liegt in Guadarramamassiv. / Er ist lang einen Meter achtzig / Und einen Meter fünfzig tief (Bertolt Brecht, ‘Mein Bruder war ein Flieger’ in Gedichte 1931–1941, Frankfurt, 1961 p. 31.

4 Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales, p. 214.

5 RGVA 35082/1/95, pp. 33–58, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 436.

6 J. Salas Larrazábal, La guerra de España desde el aire, p. 222.

7 J. Salas, p. 223.

8 Nick Gillain, Le mercenaire, p. 59.

9 Castells, p. 217.

10 García Morato, who had fired his machine-guns at another black car, believed that he had killed Lukács, when in fact he had killed Doctor Heilbrun, the head of medical services.

11 RGVA 35082/1/95, pp. 35–58, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 436.

12 Castells, p. 225.

13 D. Kowalski, La Unión Soviética y la guerra civil española, p. 340.

14 Azaña, p. 1003.

15 Ibid., p. 1073.

16 Colonel Rudolf Xylander, September 1937, RGASPI 545/2/185, p. 9.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 F. Ciutat, Relatos y reflexiones de la guerra de España 1936–1939, Madrid, 1978, p. 71.

21 J. Salas, p. 241.

22 Colonel Rudolf Xylander, September 1937, RGASPI 545/2/185, p. 9.

23 Castells, p. 241.

24 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

25 BA-MA RL 35/42

26 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

27 Report G. Stern, 8 October 1937, RGVA 35082/1/21, p. 12.

28 RGVA 35082/1/95, pp. 33–58, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 437.

29 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

30 V. Rojo, España heroica, p. 87.

31 Alexander, p. 118.

32 RGVA 35082/1/95, pp. 33–58, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 440.

33 Rodimtsev, Dobrovoltsy.

34 Azaña, p. 1054.

35 Radosh and Habeck, p. 267.

36 Preston, Franco, pp. 355–6.

37 Castells, pp. 246–9.

38 RGVA 35082/1/42, pp. 249–55.

39 RGVA 33987/3/1149, p. 262.

40 Ibid., pp. 221–6, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 481.

41 23 June 1937, RGVA 33987/3/1056, pp. 27–8.

42 RGVA 35082/1/90, p. 533.

43 Meretskov and Simonov to Voroshilov, 21 August 1937, RGVAI 33987/3/1033.

44 RGVA 33987/3/1149, p. 261.

CHAPTER 25: The Beleaguered Republic

1 P. Azcárate, Mi embajada en Londres, pp. 145–9.

2 Ibid., p. 155.

3 Cowles, p. 80.

4 Chargé d’affaires in US to Wilhelmstrasse, DGFP, pp. 208–9.

5 J-F Berdah, La democracia asesinada, pp. 292–8.

6 Ciano, Diarios, p. 13.

7 Ibid., p. 19.

8 H. Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930–1939, London, 1966.

9 Ribbentrop to Wilhelmstrasse, 22 June 1937, DGFP, pp. 364–5 and 366–7.

10 Azcárate, p. 192.

11 Eden, Facing the Dictators, p. 412.

12 RGVA 33987/3/1015, pp. 92–113, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, pp. 219–33.

CHAPTER 26: The War in Aragón

1 Bolloten, La Revolución española, pp. 337–9.

2 Casanova, De la calle al frente, p. 233.

3 Fraser, Recuérdalo tú…, p. 481.

4 F. Mintz, L’autogestion dans l’Espagne révolutionnaire, Paris 1970; Bernecker, op. cit., Casanova, op. cit.

5 La revolución popular en el campo, p. 17, quoted in Bolloten, La Revolución española, pp. 339–40,

6 Líster, Nuestra guerra, pp. 151–5.

7 Antonio Cordón, Trayectoria, pp. 301–2.

8 TsAMO 132/2542/192, p. 61.

9 Blanco Escolá, Falacias de la guerra civil, p. 238.

10 Cordón, op. cit.

11 Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales…, p. 272.

12 TsAMO 132/2542/192, p. 61.

13 RGVA 33987/3/1149, pp. 211–26, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 484; and RGVA 33987/3/1149, p. 229.

14 M. Dunbar, The Book of the XV Brigade, p. 266. For the course of the battle see Cordón, pp. 302–14; Rojo, España heroica, pp. 115–27; and Martínez Bande, La gran ofensiva, pp. 77ff.

15 Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales, p. 283.

16 RGVA 33987/3/1149, pp. 211–26, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 483.

17 Mundo Obrero, 4 September 1937.

CHAPTER 27: The Destruction of the Northern Front and of Republican Idealism

1 Salas, La guerra de España desde el aire, p. 270.

2 It was at this point that the Council of Asturias ordered the evacuation of 1,200 children to the French port of Saint-Nazaire, from where they were taken to Leningrad. Already 14,000 children had been evacuated from the Basque country, most of them going to Britain, France, Belgium and the Soviet Union. In all, the republican government arranged the evacuation abroad of 33,000 children. See Alicia Altea, ‘Los niños de la guerra civil’ in Anales de Historia Contemporánea, 19, 2003, pp. 43ff.

3 Viñas, Guerra, dinero, dictadura, pp. 141–52.

4 Tuñón, Historia de España, vol. x, pp. 401–4.

5 El Socialista, 30 October 1937.

6 Salas, La guerra de España desde el aire, p. 272.

7 Thomas, La guerra civil española, p. 846.

8 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes de los españoles, p. 343.

9 Cordón, Trayectoria, p. 340.

10 Tuñón, Historia de España, vol. x, p. 400.

11 Graham, Socialism and War, pp. 130–1.

12 The SIM incorporated the intelligence and counter-intelligence services, especially the DEDIDE (Departamento Especial de Información del Estado) and the SIEP (Servicio de Información Especial Periférico). For the creation, organigram and evolution of the SIM see François Godicheau, ‘La le´gende noire du Service d’Information Militaire de la République dans la guerre civil espagnole, et l’idée de controˆle politique’ in Le Mouvement Social, No. 201, October–December 2002. Also D. Pastor Petit, La cinquena columna a Catalunya (1936–1939), Barcelona, 1978 and Los dossiers secretos de la guerra civil, Barcelona, 1978.

13 Skoutelski, Les Brigades Internationales, p. 254.

14 Azaña, Diarios completes, p. 1232.

15 Peirats, La CNT en la Revolución española, III, p. 278.

16 Franc¸ois Godicheau, ‘La légende noire du SIM…’, pp. 38–9.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., p. 46.

19 IKKI report, RGASPI. 495/120/261, p. 7.

20 Thomas, La guerra civil española, p. 722n.

21 RGVA 33987/3/1149, pp. 211–26.

22 Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales, pp. 258–9.

23 Ibid., p. 262.

24 Ibid., p. 265.

25 From the speech by the secretary of the Madrid branch of the Spanish Communist Party at the Plenum of Central Committee, December 1937, RGASPI 495/120/259, p. 112.

CHAPTER 28: The Battle of Teruel and Franco’s ‘Victorious Sword’

1 Among the ‘garrison’ or front-holding formations were V Army Corps in Aragón commanded by Moscardó; the Army of the South under Queipo de Llano, which included II and III Army Corps; the Army of the Centre, led by Saliquet, which consisted of I Corps on the Madrid Front and VII Corps along the Guadarrama. In the Army of Manoeuvre there were: the Moroccan Army Corps under Yagu ¨e, with the major part of the Foreign Legion and the regulares in Barrón’s 13th Division and Sáenz de Buruaga’s 150th Division; Solchaga’s Army Corps of Navarre with the Carlist requetés; Varela’s Army Corps of Castille and Aranda’s Army Corps of Galicia. After the fall of the Asturias the Italian CTV, now commanded by General Berti, was sent to Aragón as reserve force. These corps were massively strong, and on the republican side only V Corps and XVIII Corps were in any way comparable.

2 The nationalist squadrons were reorganized into 1st Hispanic Air Brigade under the command of Colonel Sáenz de Buruaga, with the fighter ace García Morato as chief of operations. The fighter squadrons had nine aircraft each and the bomber squadrons twelve (Sabaté y Villarroya, España en Ilamas, p. 17).

3 GARF 4459/12/4, p. 268.

4 Salas, La guerra…, pp. 282–3.

5 Ibid., p. 280.

6 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38; see also Ranzato, L’eclissi della democrazia, p. 553, for details of the row. The Italians suspected that Franco was hoping for an internal collapse of the Republic and was avoiding a military victory.

7 Vicente Rojo, Elementos del arte de la guerra, p. 433.

8 The main formations were the 11th Division (Líster), 25th (García Vivancos), 34th (Etelvmo Vega), 39th (Alba), 40th (Andrés Nieto), 41st (Menéndez) 42nd (Naira), 64th (Martínez Cartón), 68th (Triguero) and 70th (Hilamón Toral). In reserve were the 35th Division (Walter) and the 47th Division (Durán).

9 RGVA 35082/1/95, pp. 33–58, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, pp. 444, 459 and 448.

10 Ciutat, pp. 113–14.

11 A. Vetrov, Volontyory svobody, Moscow, 1972, p. 178.

12 RGVA 33987/3/912, p. 126.

13 Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales, p. 298.

14 Richthofen war diary, 15 December, BA-MA RL 35/38.

15 BA-MA RL35/39.

16 BA-MA RL 35/38.

17 Herbert Matthews, The Education of a Correspondent, New York, 1946.

18 Bernardo Aguilar, quoted by Pedro Corral, Si me quieres escribir, Barcelona, 2004.

19 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes…p. 358.

20 Corral, Si me quieres escribir, p. 160.

21 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes…, p. 354.

22 Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales…, pp. 298–9.

23 Salas, La guerra…, p. 292.

24 BA-MA RL35/39.

25 Ibid.

26 Salas, La guerra…, p. 294.

27 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes…, p. 354.

28 RGVA 33987/3/1149, pp. 211–26, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 484.

29 BA-MA RL35/39.

30 Crónica de la guerra de España, vol. iv, p. 442.

31 R. de la Cierva, Francisco Franco, un siglo de España, p. 56. Rey d’Harcourt was treated very badly by Franco. The republican government gave orders that the colonel should be taken to the rear with the local bishop, Anselmo Polanco, and his chaplain, Felipe Ripoll. The three men were executed on 7 February 1939 by republicans during the final collapse of Catalonia.

32 RGVA 35082/1/95, pp. 33–58, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 447.

33 Corral, Si me quieres escribir, p. 213.

34 BA-MA RL35/39.

35 Seidman, A ras de suelo, p. 243.

36 BA-MA RL35/39.

37 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes…, p. 354.

38 Palmiro Togliatti, Escritos sobre la guerra de España, Barcelona, 1980, p. 189.

39 Stepánov, Las causas de la derrota, p. 108.

40 ‘Count Rossi’ was a fascist whose real name was Aldobrando Bonaccorsi. Ciano put him in charge of the Balearic Islands, especially Mallorca. His crimes and reign of terror became infamous. Mussolini and Ciano wanted him to bring the local Falange under Italian fascist influence. See Ranzato, L’eclissi della democrazia, pp. 554ff.

41 Delperrié du Bayac, Les Brigades Internationales, Paris, 1985, p. 331. Von Thoma had four tank battalions, each of three companies with fourteen tanks. See Blanco Escolá, Falacias de la guerra civil, p. 241.

42 RGVA 33987/3/1149, pp. 211–226, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 485.

43 RGVA 33987/3/1149, p. 230.

44 BA-MA RL 35/40.

45 Stepánov, p. 109.

46 Skoutelsky, Les Brigades Internationales, p. 99.

47 José M. Maldonado, Alcañiz 1938. El bombardeo olvidado, Saragossa, 2003.

48 Tagüeña, Testimonio de do guerras, p. 107.

49 ABC of Seville, 16 April 1938.

CHAPTER 29: Hopes of Peace Destroyed

1 On 30 June 1936, Spanish banknotes in circulation amounted to 5,399 million pesetas. In April 1938 they reached 9,212 million in just the republican zone (Joan Sardà, Banco de España, p. 432). Exacerbated by military disasters and the export of the gold reserves, the republican peseta had fallen catastrophically. At the end of 1936 it had depreciated by 19.3 per cent of its value and one year later by 75 per cent. By the end of 1938 it had lost 97.6 per cent of its original value. In December 1936 the exchange rate was 42 pesetas to the pound sterling. A year later, just before the Battle of Teruel, the exchange rate was 226 to the pound sterling, but after the nationalist campaign in Aragón it fell to between 530 and 650 to the pound. See also, A. Carreras and X. Tafunell, Historia económica de la España contemporánea, Crítica, Barcelona, 2004, pp. 270–1; ángel Viñas et al., Política comercial exterior en España(1931–1975), Banco Exterior de España, Madrid, 1979.

2 The main arms-buying teams were headed by Dr Alejandro Otero Fernández (replaced later by Antonio Lara), Jose´ Calviño Ozores and Martí Esteve in Paris; Antonio Bolaños, Daniel Ovalle and Francisco Martínez Dorrién in Belgium; Carlos Pastor Krauel in Britain; A ´n Ordás, with Fernando de los Ríos, in Mexico and the US. They had to do business with traffickers such as Josef Veltjens, Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades, John Ball, Jack A. Billmeir, Stefan Czarnecki, Kazimierz Ziembinski, Stefan Katelbach and others of their type. See Howson, Armas para España.

3 The work by Professors Morten Heiberg and Mogens Pelt for their book, Los negocios de la guerra, has finally confirmed the details of an outrageous paradox which had previously just been suspected: Hermann Göring was selling weapons to republican Spain, while his own Luftwaffe fought for Franco.

4 Morten Heiberg and Mogens Pelt, Los negocios de la guerra. Howson estimates that Göring received the equivalent of one pound sterling for every one of the 750,000 rifles supplied by Bodosakis.

5 Colonel Ribbing’s report from Spain, General Staff, Former Secret Archive, Foreign Department, KA E III 26, vol., p. 20.

6 The nationalist debt to Nazi Germany rose to RM 372 million, but it was paid off over a long period and mainly in kind, through raw materials from mining and other produce.

7 Heiberg and Pelt, Los negocios de la guerra.

8 Howson, Armas para España.

9 See Chapter 19.

10 In five shipments, $15 million worth of silver was sold. Another $5 million was disposed of in other ways.

11 Viñas, Guerra, dinero, dictadura, p. 174.

12 For the whole episode see Villas, El oro de Moscú; Viñas, Guerra, dinero, dictadura; Howson, Armas para España and Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética y la guerra civil española, The Republic paid for: 5 Katiuska bombers; 26 Tupolev bombers; 121 I-16 (Moscas); 25 T-26 tanks; 149 75mm field guns; 32 anti-aircraft guns; 254 anti-tank guns; 4,158 machine-guns; 125,050 rifles; 237,349 shells; 132,559,672rounds of ammunition. All the arms and ammunition which left the Soviet Union after August 1938 never reached the Republic. Most of it was handed over to Franco at the end of the war by the French government. See Chapter 35 below.

13 AVP RF 18/84/144, p. 5.

14 Ibid., pp. 14–15.

15 Jackson, La República española…, p. 387.

16 Ibid., p. 388.

17 Rafael Abella, La vida cotidiana durante la guerra civil. La España republicana, Barcelona, 2004, p. 359.

18 Ciano, Diarios, p. 87.

19 Jackson, La República española…, p. 387.

20 Sole Sabaté and Villarroya, España en llamas, p. 170.

21 Ciano, Diarios, p. 109.

22 During the course of the war, Barcelona was bombed 113 times by the Aviazione Legionaria, 80 by the Condor Legion, (40 times between 21 and 25 January 1939) and once by the Brigada Aérea Hispana. Altogether, these bombing attacks caused 2,500 deaths, 1,200 of them between March and December 1938 (Joan Villarroya, Els bombardeigs de Barcelona durant la guerra civil, Barcelona, 1981).

23 Ibid.

24 He did the same thing in La Vanguardia under the pseudonym Juan Ventura, describing Prieto as an ‘impenitent pessimist’.

25 Mije, La Pasionaria and Díaz for the Spanish Communist Party; Mariano Vázquez and García Oliver for the CNT; Herrera and Escorza for the FAI; Vidarte and Pretel for the UGT; Serra Pàmies for the PSUC and Santiago Carrillo for the JSU.

26 To José Prat, under-secretary of the cabinet. Quoted by Miralles, Juan Negrín, p. 198.

27 Prieto always maintained (Cómo y por qué salí del Ministeri de Defensa Nacional and in his bitter correspondence with Negrín collected in Epistolario Prieto–Negrín) that Negrín forced him out of the ministry of defence at the insistence of the communists.

28 Those present included Negrín, Martínez Barrio as president of the Cortes, Lluís Companys as president of the Generalitat, Quemades of the Izquierda Republicana, González Peña of the PSOE, JoséDíaz of the PCE, Monzón of the PNV and Mariano Vázquez of the CNT.

29 Negrín appointed Méndez Aspe (Izquierda Republicana) as minister of finance, González Peña (PSOE) as minister of justice; Paulino Gómez Sáez (PSOE), minister of the interior; álvarez del Vayo (PSOE, but pro-communist) as minister of state; Giral (Izquierda Republicana) and Irujo (PNV) as ministers without portfolio; Giner de los Ríos (Unión Republicana) as minister of communications and transport; Velao (Izquierda Republicana) as minister of public works; Blanco (CNT) as minister of education (in the place of Jesús Hernández, PCE); and kept Ayguadé (ERC) as minister of work and Uribe (PCE) as minister of agriculture.

30 Eden, Facing the Dictators, p. 571.

31 Ciano, Diarios, p. 221.

32 Ibid., p. 117.

33 These were presented to the council of ministers on 30 April 1938. He described them as part of his new programme ‘for the knowledge of his compatriots and as an announcement to the world’, to emphasize the national character of his political programme and as the basis of a future compromise between all Spaniards.

34 Faupel to Wilhelmstrasse, 5 May 1937, DGFp. 282.

35 Faupel to Wilhelmstrasse, 11 May, 1937, DGFp. 284–5.

36 Faupel to Wilhelmstrasse, 23 May, 1937, DGFp. 294.

37 Faupel to Wilhelmstrasse, 11 May, 1937, DGFp. 284.

CHAPTER 30: Arriba España!

1 Luis Suárez, Franco: la historia y sus documentos, p. 94.

2 This first government was made up as follows: vice-president and minister for foreign affairs, General Gómez Jordana; minister of the interior and secretary-general of the council, Ramón Serrano Súñer; minister of justice, Tomás Domínguez; minister without portfolio, Count de Rodezno; minister of national defence, General Fidel Dávila; minister of public order, General Martínez Anido; minister of finance, Andrés Amado; minister of public works, Alfonso Peña Boeuf; minister of national education, Pedro Sáinz Rodríguez; minister of agriculture, Raimundo Fernández Cuesta; minister of organization and unions, Pedro González Bueno; minister of industry and commerce, Juan Antonio Suanzes.

3 Preston, Franco, caudillo de España, p. 371.

4 Carlos Fernández, El General Franco, p. 109.

5 Callahan, La Iglesia católica en España, p. 302.

6 Colonel Martín Pinillos, see Javier Rodrigo, Prisioneros de Franco.

7 Coal and steel production underwent a ‘rapid recovery and by 1938 volume output surpassed those of 1935’. See J. M. Bricall, ‘La economia española, 1936–1939’inTuñón de Lara, La guerra civil española 50 años después, p. 377.

8 Carreras and Tafunell, Historia económica de la España contemporánea, p. 267.

9 Abella, La vida cotidiana…, p. 241.

10 Luis Suárez, Franco: la historia y sus documentos, vol, iii, p. 67.

11 Rojo, Alerta los pueblos, p. 40.

12 8 September 1936, DGFP, p. 87.

13 Richthofen war diary, 21 November, 1937, BA-MA RL 35/38.

14 German ambassador in France to Wilhelmstrasse, 17 March 1938, DGFP, p. 621.

15 Richthofen war diary, 17 January 1939, BA-MA RL 35/38.

16 Ciano, Diarios, p. 166.

17 Ibid., p. 167.

18 Fraser, Recuérdalo tú…, p. 659.

19 Jesús Salas, La guerra de España desde el aire, p. 332.

20 Coverdale, La intervencíon italiana…, p. 317.

21 XVI Corps under Palacios, García Vallejo’s XVII, Vidal’s XIX, Durán’s XX, and Ibarrola’s XXII, as well as Group ‘A’ under Güemes and Group ‘B’ under Romero, together made up the Army of Levante under Colonel Leopoldo Menéndez.

22 Ciutat, Relatos y reflexiones, p. 199.

23 Preston, Franco, caudillo de España, p. 387.

24 Francisco Franco, Palabras del Caudillo, Vicesecretaría de Educación Popular, Madrid, 1943.

25 ‘Spain arise! Long live Spain!’

CHAPTER 31: The Battle of the Ebro

1 Franco cracked down on anybody who favoured negotiation with the enemy. He saw it as treason to the nationalist cause. See Saña, Serrano Súñer, p. 91.

2 V Corps consisted of the 11th, 45th and 46th Divisions; XV Corps of the 3rd, 3xh and 42nd Divisions; and XII Corps (commanded by Etelvino Vega) of the 16th and 44th Divisions.

3 Each division in theory had 10,000 men with 5,000 rifles, 255 machine-guns, 30 mortars, four anti-tank guns, three artillery groups of nine field guns, and a battalion of engineers to organize the crossing.

4 For the progress of the battle: see Francisco Cabrera Castillo, Del Ebro a Gandesa. La batalla del Ebro, Julio–noviembre 1938, Madrid, 2002; Julián Henríquez Caubín, La batalla del Ebro, México, 1966; J. M. Martínez Bande, La batalla del Ebro, Madrid, 1988; Lluís M. Mezquida i Gené, La batalla del Ebro, Tarragona, 2001; Estanislau Torres, La batalla de l’Ebre i la caiguda de Barcelona, Lérida, 1999; Gabriel Cardona and Juan Carlos Losada, Aunque me tires el Puente, Madrid, 2004; and above all, Jorge M. Reverte, La batalla del Ebro, Barcelona, 2003.

5 The 50th Division was commanded by Colonel Luís Campos Guereta and the 105th Division by Colonel Natalio López Bravo.

6 Francisco Franco Salgado, Mis conversaciónes privadas con Franco, pp. 262-3.

7 Blanco, La incompetencia militar…, p. 476.

8 Skoutelsky, L’espoir guidait leurs pas, p. 104.

9 Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales, pp. 355ff.

10 Fraser, Recuérdalo tú…, p. 661.

11 Jesús Salas, La guerra desde el aire, pp. 356ff.

12 Miguel Mateu, personal testimony.

13 Quoted by Reverte, La batalla del Ebro, p. 112.

14 Castells, Las Brigadas…, p. 358.

15 RGVA 33987/3/1149, p. 284.

16 Legion Condor Lageberichte BA-MA RL 35/5 H 7202.

17 Rolfe, The Lincoln Battalion, p. 131.

18 Legion Condor Lageberichte BA-MA RL 35/5 H 7162.

19 Reverte, La batalla del Ebro, p. 141.

20 BA-MA RL 35/5 H7197.

21 See Tagüeña, Testimonio de dos guerras, p. 230,

22 Ramón Salas, El Ejército Popular de la República, p. 1974.

23 Legion Condor Lageberichte BA-MA RL 35/5 H7175.

24 Reverte, La batalla del Ebro, p. 219.

25 Legion Condor, Lageberichte BA-MA RL 35/5 H7122.

26 Castells, Las Brigadas, p. 359.

27 Luís María de Lojendio, Operaciones militares de la guerra de España, Madrid, 1940.

28 Ciano, Diarios, p. 168.

29 Crónica, vol. v, p. 111.

30 Boletín del V Cuerpo del Ejército del Ebro.

31 Reverte, La batalla del Ebro, p. 564.

32 Togliatti, Escritos sobre la guerra de España, p. 253.

33 Stepánov, Las causas de la derrota…, p. 142.

CHAPTER 32: The Republic in the European Crisis

1 Azaña, Diarios completos, p. 1238.

2 Ibid., p. 1240.

3 Negrín to Rafael Méndez (Rafael Méndez in Indice, November–December 1971).

4 Azaña, Diarios completos, p. 1240.

5 Thomas, La guerra civil española, p. 911.

6 DGFP, p. 629.

7 Ciano, Diarios, p. 180.

8 Ibid., p. 183.

9 Azcárate, Mi embajada…, p. 240.

10 Colonel Ribbing’s report from Spain, General Staff, Former Secret Archive, Foreign Department, KA E III 26, vol. 1, p. 22.

11 Ibid.

12 Also in the United States, the FBI investigated US nationals who had served in the International Brigades, and later, during Senator McCarthy’s ‘witch-hunts’, Milton Woff, Alvah Bessie, Edwin Rolfe, John Gates, Robert Thompson, Irving Margollies and other members of the Lincoln Brigade were persecuted, with some imprisoned, while others found it very hard to obtain employment.

13 Finally in 1952, André Marty was expelled from the French Communist Party.

14 Ibárruri. Pamphlet published in Barcelona in 1938, quoted by Thomas, La guerra civil española, p. 916.

15 Castells, Las Brigadas…, pp. 383–4. Many of those communists who fought in Spain played important roles in their home countries during and after the war: Pietro Nenni, who became minister of foreign affairs in Italy; Luigi Longo, vice-president of the Italian Communist Party; Charles Tillon, minister for air in France between 1945 and 1948; Rol-Tanguy, the communist leader of the Paris uprising just before its liberation in August 1944; Enver Hodja, the dictator of Albania; Walter Ulbricht, the leader of East Germany; Josip Broz ‘Tito’, the leader of Yugoslavia; Erno Gerö, ‘Pedro’, minister of communications in Hungary; Ladislas Rajk, minister of the interior in Hungary and a number of others. Many would be purged. In Stalin’s eyes, service in Spain signified foreign contagion.

16 Colonel Ribbing’s report from Spain, General Staff, Former Secret Archive, Foreign Department, KA E III 26, vol. 1, p. 14.

17 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes, p. 487.

18 Gorkín, Arquer, Andrade, Escuder, Rebull, Adroher and Bonet.

19 15 December 1938, RGVA 35082/1/221, p. 2.

20 25 November 1938, RGVA 33987/3/1081, pp. 30–44, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 506.

21 RGVA 33987/3/1081, p. 16.

22 Ibid., p. 80, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, pp. 498–9.

CHAPTER 33: The Fall of Catalonia

1 The Army of the Centre had around 100,000 men, while the Estremadura front had 50,000 and Andalucia 20,000. The Army of Levante had 21 under-strength divisions and four and a half in reserve. At the beginning of December 1938 the People’s Army possessed no more than 225,000 rifles, 4,000 light machine-guns and 3,000 machine-guns (Ramón Salas, Historia del Ejército Popular).

2 Negrín could also count on the support of a small group within the CNT around Mariano Vázquez, a larger group within the UGT and a fraction of the PSOE, led by its general secretary, Ramón Lamoneda.

3 Saborit, Julián Besteiro, Buenos Aires, 1967, p. 421.

4 Stevenson to Lord Halifax, 31 October 1938 in BDFA, vol. 27, Spain, July 1936–January 1940, p. 222.

5 Miralles, Juan Negrín, p. 302.

6 Ibid., p. 303. Negrín had asked for this arms shipment on 11 November in a letter delivered personally to Stalin by Hidalgo de Cisneros. Five annexes to the letter listed their needs, including 2,150 field guns, 120 anti-aircraft guns, 400,000 rifles, 10,000 machine-guns, 260 fighters, 150 bombers, 300,000 shells and so on. The shipment left Murmansk and reached Bordeaux on 15 January, by which time Tarragona had already fallen. Only a small part crossed the frontier and the republicans did not even have time to open the crates.

7 Ciano, Diarios, p. 223.

8 Thomas, La guerra civil española, p. 940.

9 Ciano, Diarios, p. 235.

10 At the end of 1938 the nationalists and their allies mustered fourteen squadrons of Fiat CR 32 fighters and three squadrons of Messerschmitts with twelve aircraft each. Added to the Fiat force based in the Balearics, this gave them over 200 fighters (a total roughly equal to their combined bomber forces of Junkers 52s, Heinkel IIIs and Savoia-Marchettis).

11 Salas, La guerra de España, pp. 445–6.

12 Ibid., p. 404.

13 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Stepánov, Las causas de la derrota, p. 150.

17 Cordón, Trayectoria, p. 375.

18 Bolloten, La Revolución española, p. 932.

19 Rojo, ¡Alerta los pueblos!, p. 121.

20 Ibid., p. 125.

21 Quoted in Recuérdalo tú…, p. 674.

22 Abella, La vida cotidiana…La España republicana, p. 415.

23 Quan érem capitans, Barcelona, 1974, p. 149.

24 Guillermo Cabanellas, La guerra de los mil días, Barcelona, 1973, vol. ii, p. 1047.

25 Ciano, Diarios, p. 258.

26 Benet, Catalunya sota el règim franquista, Paris, 1973, vol. i, p. 222.

27 Fraser, Recuérdalo tú…, p. 674.

28 Benet, Catalunya sota el règim franquista, p. 229.

29 BA-MA RL 35/7.

30 Ibid.

31 Emil Voldemarovich Shteingold, ‘My Last 10 Days in Spain’, RGVA 35082/3/32, pp. 1–5.

32 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes…, p. 523.

33 Daladier had proposed that a free zone was established on Spanish soil in which to intern refugees, but this was rejected by Negrín as well as by Franco.

34 BA-MA RL 35/8.

35 BA-MA RL 35/7.

36 Regler, Owl of Minerva, p. 321.

CHAPTER 34: The Collapse of the Republic

1 Luis Romero, El final de la guerra, Barcelona, 1976, p. 134.

2 Ibid., pp. 124–5.

3 Elorza and Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas, p. 430.

4 Stepánov, Las causas de la derrota…, pp. 168–9.

5 Mundo Obrero, 12 February 1939.

6 Togliatti, Escritos sobre la guerra de España, p. 275.

7 Tuñón, Historia de España, vol. ix, p. 506.

8 ABC, Madrid, 14 February 1939.

9 Alpert, El ejército republicano, p. 313.

10 See Miralles, Juan Negrín, p. 311; Togliatti, Escritos…, p. 279; Elorza and Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas, p. 431.

11 Colonel Ribbing’s report from Spain, General Staff, Former Secret Archive, Foreign Department, KA E III 26, vol. 1, p. 22.

12 The gold handed over was worth almost $27 million. See Joan Sardà, El Banco de España, p. 452.

13 Memoirs, New York, 1948.

14 Azaña, Obras Completa, vol. iii, p. 567.

15 Also Colonel Moriones, of the Army of the Centre, Colonel Camacho, head of the air force in the zone, and General Bernal, commander of the naval base of Cartagena.

16 Casado’s first acquaintance with anarchists had come during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, when Casado was imprisoned and became friends with libertarians in jail. See Alpert, El ejército republicano, pp. 301ff.

17 Romero, El final de la guerra, p. 138.

18 See Luis Suárez, Francisco Franco, in preparation, and Martínez Bande, Los cien últimos días de la República.

19 Romero, El final de la guerra, p. 123.

20 Ibid., p. 138.

21 See Martínez Bande, Los cien últimos días de la República.

22 BA-MA RL 35/8.

23 For the most thorough account of the uprising, see Luis Romero, Desastre en Cartagena, Barcelona, 1971.

24 Other appointments included González Marín, CNT, finance; Miguel San Andre´s, Izquierda Republicana, justice and propaganda; Eduardo Val, CNT, communications and public works; José del Río, of Unión Republicana, education and health; and Antonio Pérez, of the UGT, labour. Melchor Rodríguez, of the CNT, became the new mayor of Madrid.

25 All the speeches are printed in full in Romero, El final de la guerra, pp. 261-8.

26 Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Retrato de un desconocido, p. 437.

27 Luis Romero, El final de la guerra, pp. 274–5.

28 Miralles, Juan Negrín, p. 324.

29 BA-MA RL 35/8.

30 Elorza and Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas, p. 434.

31 Togliatti, Escritos sobre la guerra de España, p. 297.

32 Tagüeña, Entre dos guerras, p. 310.

33 Marías, p. 248.

34 Tuñón, Historia de España, ix, p. 526.

35 BA-MA RL35/7.

36 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38.

37 Casado, The Last Days of Madrid, p. 259.

38 Marías, p. 255.

39 Marías, p. 261.

40 ABC, 2 April 1939, Romero, El final de la guerra, p. 421.

41 Ciano, Diarios, p. 276.

CHAPTER 35: The New Spain and the Franquist Gulag

1 Richthofen war diary, BA-MA RL 35/38. The Condor Legion reached Hamburg by ship on 31 May and on 6 June it paraded through Berlin.

2 Luis Suárez, Franco: la historia y sus documentos, iv, p. 33.

3 Among the other appointments were Esteban Bilbao, minister of justice; José Larraz, minister of finance; Vice-Admiral Moreno, minister of marine; Luis Alarcón de la Lastra, minister for industry and commerce; Joaquín Benjumea, minister of agriculture and labour; Juan Ibáñez Martín, minister of national education; Alfonso Peña Boeuf, minister of public works.

4 Javier Tusell, Dictadura franquista y democracia, p. 45.

5 This was overseen by the Servicio Nacional de Reforma Económica y Social de la Tierra, set up by the nationalists in 1938.

6 See Carlos Barciela (ed.) Autarquía y mercado negro, Barcelona 2003, pp. 55ff.

7 Glicerio Sánchez and Julio Tascón (eds), Los empresarios de Franco, Barcelona, 2003, p. 237ff.

8 See Elena San Román, Ejército e industria: el nacimiento del INI, Barcelona, 1999.

9 Franco statement to Henri Massis, published in Candide, 18 August 1938.

10 Suárez, Franco, pp. 119ff.

11 Joan Clavera (ed) Capitalismo español: De la autarquía a la estabilización, 1939–1959, Madrid, 1978, pp. 179ff.

12 Tusell, Dictadura franquista y democracia, p. 98.

13 Blinkhorn, Carlismo y contrarrevolución, p. 411.

14 Carreras and Tafunell, Historia económica de la España contemporánea, p. 277.

15 See for example, Robert Graham, A Nation Comes of Age, London, 1984.

16 Antonio F. Canales, La llarga postguerra, Barcelona, 1997, p. 178.

17 Kemp, Mine Were of Trouble, pp. 49–50.

18 Rodrigo, Cautivos, p. 209.

19 Ibid.

20 See Anne Applebaum, Gulag, London, 2003.

21 Casanova (ed.), Morir, matar, sobrevivir, p. 31.

22 Michael Richards, Un tiempo de silencio, p. 30; and Dionisio Ridruejo, Escrito en España, p. 93.

23 For example, around 5,000 were killed in the province of Valencia; 4,000 in Catalonia; in Madrid’s East Cemetery 2,663 executions were registered up to 1945; in Jaén, 1,280 up to 1950; in Albacete 1,026 between 1939 and 1953; and so on. Casanova, Morir, matar, sobrevivir, pp. 19ff; Santiago Vega Sombría, De la esperanza a la persecución, p. 279. Paul Preston has pointed out that 92,462 individually named victims have been identified in just 36 of Spain’s 50 provinces.

24 For example, in the notorious San Marcos prison in León, more than 800 died of hunger and cold.

25 Vinyes, Irredentas, p. 114.

26 Francisco Moreno, Víctimas de la guerra civil, p. 278.

27 Juana Doña, Desde la noche y la niebla.

28 Francisco Moreno, Víctimas de la guerra civil, p. 278.

29 Richards, Un tiempo de silencio; and Vinyes, Irredentas.

30 á ngela Cenarro, La sonrisa de Falange, in preparation.

CHAPTER 36: The Exiles and the Second World War

1 Between 1936 and 1938, there had been three waves of different sizes: the first in the summer of 1936; the second following the fall of Santander and the Asturias in June 1937; and the third as a result of the Aragón campaign in the spring of 1938. The first wave of 15,000 refugees came mainly from the Basque country when the nationalists attacked Irún and San Sebastían. The second amounted to 160,000, and the third of 14,000, including 7,000 men of the 42nd Division cut off in the Bielsa pocket in the Pyrenees. Of these three waves, most returned to republican territory, leaving just 40,000 in France at the end of 1938 (Dolores Pla Brugat, ‘El exilio republicano español’ in AULA Historia social, no. 13, Valencia, Spring, 2004; Bartolomé Bennassar, La guerre d’Espagne et ses lendemains, Paris, 2004, p. 363).

2 Mera was released from prison in 1946. He made contact with old friends from the CNT and then had to flee to France again, where he died in 1975.

3 Emil Voldemarovich Shteingold, ‘My Last 10 Days in Spain’, RGVA 35082/3/32 p. 1.

4 Antonio Soriano, E´ xodos, Historia oral del exilio republicano en Francia 1939–1945, Barcelona, 1989 p. 23.

5 Arthur Koestler, La lie de la terre, Paris, 1946, p. 148.

6 Candide, 8 February, 1939.

7 See Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, El exilio de los republicanos españoles en Francia; Bennassar, La guerre d’Espagne et ses lendemains; Tusell, Dictadura franquista y democracia, p. 36.

8 Dreyfus-Armand, p. 79; Tusell, Dictadura franquista y democracia, p. 36.

9 See Bennassar and Dreyfus-Armand, who do not agree over figures.

10 Junta de Auxilio a los Republicanos Españoles.

11 Manuel Ros, La guerra secreta de Franco, Barcelona, 2002, p. xxiv.

12 Suárez, Franco: la historia y sus documentos, vol. v, p. 87.

13 Ibid., pp. 153–4.

14 Heiberg, Emperadores del Mediterráneo; and Preston, Franco.

15 Preston, Franco, pp. 524–5.

16 Heiberg, Emperadores del Mediterráneo.

17 Ros, La guerra secreta de Franco, pp. 146–52; for the role of Captain Alan Hillgarth RN, see David Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service, pp. 237–8.

18 The Blue Division was withdrawn by an ever-cautious Franco in 1943, when the war was clearly going against the Axis. But 2,200 men stayed behind in the Legión Azul, which in turn would be dissolved in January 1944. Its survivors became the Legion Española de Voluntarios, although most were attached to SS units until the end of the war. Total Spanish losses in the Soviet Union out of 45,500 participants were approximately 5,000 dead, 8,700 wounded, 2,137 maimed, 1,600 cases of severe frostbite, 7,800 sick and 372 prisoners, who did not return to Spain until April 1954 aboard the Semiramis. The total cost of 613,500,000 pesetas was offset against the Spanish debt for the Condor Legion. See Xavier Moreno Juliá, La División Azul. Sangre española en Rusia, 1941–1945, Barcelona, 2005.

19 Helmut Heiber (ed.), Hitler y sus generales, Barcelona, 2005, p. 398.

CHAPTER 37: The Unfinished War

1 Pierre Vilar, La guerra civil española, p. 176.

2 They included Jorge Semprún, a member of the resistance who would later become minister of culture in the new democratic Spain after Franco’s death in 1975.

3 RGASPI 495/120/236, p. 57.

4 A. V. Elpatievsky, Ispanskaya emigratsiya v SSSR, Moscow, 2002.

5 Order of People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, 1942, No. 3498, 16 November 1942, Moscow, GARF P-9401/9/896.

6 GARF 2306/1/5991, p. 7.

7 GARF 307/1/272, p. 27.

8 Reconquista de España, supplement, 18 July 1944.

9 Daniel Arasa, La invasión de los maquis, Barcelona, 2004; Richards, Un tiempo de silencio; Serrano, Maquis; Francisco Moreno, La resistencia armada.

10 Casanova, Morir, matar, sobrevivir, p. 227; Antonio Telez, Sabaté, London, 1974, pp. 171–8.

11 The JEL, Junta Española de Liberación.

CHAPTER 38: Lost Causes

1 Valentín González (El Campesino), Listen Comrades, London, 1952.

2 BA-MA RL35/34.

3 RGVA 33987/3/991, p. 68.

4 Gurney, p. 175.

5 Goriev to Moscow, 25 September 1936, quoted in Radosh and Habeck (eds), Spain Betrayed, London 2002, p. 60.

6 RGVA 33987/3/832, p. 107.