AN HISTORICAL ESSAY ON MODERN SPAIN
RICHARD
HERR
Chapter 13
Civil War
1. For a rising that had been planned with a need for secrecy, the pronunciamiento of Saturday, July 18 and Sunday, July 19, 1936 was surprisingly well coordinated. Captains general and other military leaders in each command came out in favor of the rebellion and proclaimed martial law. The Republican government, although warned of the plot, was caught by surprise. Prime minister Casares Quiroga resigned late at night on July 18. President Azana was torn between various alternatives. On the one hand, he could look for a conservative who might be able to negotiate with the generals in revolt. On the other, he could expand the government to the left to include the Socialists in preparation for forceful resistance. He tried both, but after twenty-four hours of effort, both had failed. The leading generals in Spain, including Mola, reached by telephone, refused to negotiate, and Largo Caballero still vetoed a coalition government. On July 19, Jose Giral, a close friend of Azana, formed another all-Republican government.
Since most of the army and the Civil Guard went rapidly over to the uprising, the first reaction of the workers' organizations was to demand that the government open the arsenals and distribute arms to the syndicates and other organized workers' groups. This Azana and other responsible leaders feared to do, still frightened by Largo Caballero's revolutionary rhetoric. Nevertheless by Sunday militias of the workers' parties in Madrid and Barcelona obtained enough arms, privately or from cooperative military commanders, to attack the buildings held by the armed forces. In both cities they defeated the [189] insurgents. The insurrection also failed in Bilbao and Valencia without much fighting. In Seville, however, where workers also reacted energetically and obtained arms, a daring general, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, made good use of the radio to sow confusion and fear among the workers and attacked them with the forces at his disposal. By Monday he controlled the city, a vital victory, for its airport was to provide a bridgehead for the troops in Morocco. Following Seville, the other major cities of Andalusia except Jaén and Malaga fell rapidly to the revolt.
By Monday, July 20, it was clear that the generals had failed in their plan to take all Spain without serious opposition. Thanks to the workers' organizations rather than the government, the major cities except Seville and Zaragoza were still in Republican hands. Lines were confused, but the rising had captured Old Castile, Galicia, Navarre, Aragon, and most of Andalusia, while the Republic held the Mediterranean coast, a wide strip running across Spain from the east coast to the frontier of Portugal at Badajoz and including Madrid, and Asturias and the Basque Provinces in the north. Neither side could immediately crush the other; the issue could only be settled by war.
Having succeeded in withstanding the first assault, the Republic could look forward to eventual mastery of the rising. Except for ten thousand well-trained Requetes of the Carlists and thirty thousand civil guards, the generals had few troops in Spain. Their best forces were in Africa, securely controlled by Franco, who had flown to Morocco on July 19. He needed the navy or air force to get his troops to the peninsula, but most of their units had remained loyal to the Republic. Naval seamen had mutinied and murdered the officers who had favored the rising.
At this point foreign intervention became decisive. The generals had been in touch with Hitler and Mussolini, seeking aid. As soon as these heads of government saw that the rising had a chance of success, they sent what the generals most needed: aircraft. Italian bombers and German transports arrived in Morocco before the end of the month. By early August, these planes had taken control of the Strait of Gibraltar from the Spanish navy and were ferrying precious troops into Seville. Some twenty thousand Moorish troops and soldiers of the Foreign Legion thus reached Andalusia. Called the Army of Africa, they were the best-trained forces on either side. Under the command of General Franco, they rapidly assured control of western Andalusia and moved north, capturing Badajoz on August 14. From the outset neither side was giving quarter in the war, and as the Moors advanced they executed all men believed to have borne arms against them. In Badajoz the victorious Moorish troops, after suffering heavy casualties inflicted by a determined Republican militia, herded all men suspected of resistance into the bull ring and shot them down with machine [190] guns. Perhaps two thousand perished. Although different from earlier reprisals only in the numbers involved, the massacre of Badajoz, when reported and exaggerated in the world press, caused anger and horror among the Republicans and roused much of world opinion against the insurgents.
After the fall of Badajoz, Franco's army advancing from the south made a junction with that of the north on September 8, and thereafter western Spain fell rapidly into insurgent hands. The Nationalists, as the insurgents came to be known generally, turned next to the relief of the garrison of Toledo, which, as the world press widely publicized, had been besieged since the outbreak of the war. The workers' militias had here defeated the pronunciamiento, but some 1300 soldiers, civil guards, and Falangists together with their families and a hundred hostages had shut themselves into the sixteenth century palace of Charles V, the Alcazar, and were under siege by the workers. A square building with strong walls, it was able to withstand the light artillery available to the militia. The attackers tunneled under it and exploded mines, but the defenders held out. The son of the commander, Colonel Jose Moscardo, was in Republican hands. The attackers warned Moscardo they would execute his son if he did not surrender. Moscardo refused and they carried out their threat. Finally, on September 28, a column of the Army of Africa drove into Toledo and rescued the garrison. The heroic defense of the Alcazar of Toledo became the outstanding legend of the Nationalist cause.
The Badajoz massacre and the execution of Moscard6's son were but two examples of the ferocious cruelty that marked the Civil War, especially in its opening stages. When Nationalist forces captured cities and towns they systematically hunted out anyone bearing arms against them, those who had belonged to workers' and other leftists organizations, freemasons, anyone who had favored the Popular Front. The numbers of such persons were enormous; and though all of course did not die, vast numbers did, shot without trial, on mere hearsay. In Granada, for instance, gangs of youthful Falangists, including girls, rounded up suspects by the hundreds, drove them in trucks to deserted spots outside the city, and shot them and buried them in shallow graves. Perhaps eight or ten thousand Granadinos died in this way. Among them was its native bard, Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain's most gifted poet of modern times. His support of the Republic in cultural matters was notorious, but who was responsible for his death remains a mystery.(1) Nationalist mass executions, not always so debauched, continued through the war as their troops advanced. How many died will never be known and estimates vary with the viewpoint of the [191] writer. Gabriel Jackson's carefully thought out estimate is two hundred thousand, almost 1 percent of the population.(2)
On the other side rapidly formed workers' committees took over control of the areas loyal to the Republic and conducted purges of their own. The gruesome task rapidly got out of hand. Each workers' group drew up its own list of suspects, political opponents, unpopular employers, persons whose social class or party affiliation marked them out as enemies of the Republic or the proletariat. Armed representatives of the workers' organizations and even groups of young activists without any formal authorization seized many of these persons in their homes at night, drove them outside city limits, and shot them, leaving their bodies for early risers to discover. Prominent bourgeois and Catholic families in Madrid, Barcelona, and elsewhere in the Republican zone lived in terror during the first weeks of the war, and hundreds of their members were "taken for a ride" (dar un paseo); while in small towns local landowners, priests, and civil guards were shot, often by outsiders who came through in gangs. A vast number of churches was also burned and looted, usually by anarchists.
There are no better figures on Republican executions than on Nationalist. After a careful analysis of the claims on both sides and the little available data, Jackson has estimated that 17,000 died at Republican hands in the first three months, and 3000 later.(3) Over a third of these were priests and monks, who were easily identified by their dress. Since there were few mass executions, the figure is reasonable. It contrasts sharply with the claim of 86,000 deaths made later by the Franco government and even more with the ridiculous reports of 300,000 to 400,000 assassinations carried at the time in the foreign press. For various reasons, the number was much smaller than that killed by the Nationalists. The Republican government never condoned the massacres as Nationalist commanders did, so that the paseos were never systematic. Members of the upper classes were fewer by far than those of workers' groups, and many had the means to escape or took refuge in foreign embassies. Finally, after the beginning of the war, the Republicans hardly ever advanced into new areas.
The uncontrolled terror on both sides represented an explosion of the tensions and hatreds that had built up since 1934, a form of collective hysteria and momentary intoxication at all levels of authority and society, rather than the product of a national character imbued with violence, as many foreign observers maintained who did not know its background. Fittingly exaggerated by the domestic and foreign press, it was the most sensational news to come out of Spain. Hardly anywhere did the reports find an impartial audience, for world [192] developments of the past years had conditioned men's minds to accept congenial stories and discount the uncongenial. Everywhere conservatives and Catholics, both ordinary persons and government leaders, were horrified by tales of the "red" terror, and their sympathies went out to the insurgents. Those who hated Mussolini and Hitler for personal or ideological reasons became incensed at the Nationalist uprising and executions, which they labeled "fascist." Thus almost at once the Spanish Civil War became a major world event, dividing people outside Spain as well as inside.
2. The failure of either side to achieve a rapid victory left both with the problem of establishing a viable wartime government. Within the Republican zone, Giral's ministry had nominal authority, but it lost all control over events. The police had disappeared, and most of the army and civil guards had gone over to the insurgents. Real authority fell to local committees representing the armed workers, which sprang up in the first days after the pronunciamiento in the same fashion as municipal juntas had appeared during nineteenth-century revolutions. The most powerful was the committee of Barcelona, called the Central Committee of the Antifascist Militias of Catalonia, established on July 21. It had fifteen members representing eight leftwing groups including the anarchist CNT and FAI, the socialist UGT, the Catalan Esquerra, and two new groups which were to play important roles, the PSUC (Partit Socialist Unificat de Catalunya, a coalition of the Socialist and Communist parties of Catalonia established in the heat of the rising) and the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, a group of anti-Stalinist Marxists formed in February 1936 under Andres Nin, one of the original Spanish Communists). Companys, president of the Generalitat, offered to let it replace the Catalan government, since it represented the forces that had put down the rising in the city. The committee allowed him to remain in office to preserve a show of legality, but henceforth real authority belonged to it. Similar committees took over most cities in Republican Spain. Where the ayunta-miento was Socialist, the committee usually consisted of its members with the addition of workers' representatives. In Catalonia members of the CNT and FAI dominated the local committees, though the spirit of proletarian brotherhood often brought in the PSUC and POUM as well. Only Madrid avoided a new authority to rival the established government, but even here the militias acted without regard for the minis-try.
The committees had three immediate objectives: to create an armed force capable of opposing the armies of the generals, to estabish police authority and end the uncontrolled murder of suspected enemies, [193] and to carry through the social revolution that the anarchists and Largo Caballero Socialists had been preaching. By early August they began to achieve the second aim. They did not end the terror, nor did they intend to, but they set up courts and judges (often workers) who tried the arrested suspects. These courts gained fearful notoriety among their enemies, especially the "chekas" of Madrid, yet they acquitted many suspects and occasionally turned on false accusers and condemned them to death.
Dominated as they were by the most radical elements on the Republican side, the committees also carried out a collectivist revolution. Before the uprising Largo Caballero's Socialist followers and the anarchists had inspired widespread belief in the imminence of the proletarian revolution. Now that the "fascists" had attacked the Republic, the revolution would be their just punishment, was the workers' attitude. The revolution took different forms from place to place. In Barcelona ad hoc committees representing the CNT and UGT ran public services, hotels, and the major factories. They draped the buildings with red flags or red-and-black anarchist flags. Middle-class people found it wise to dress like workers in blue overalls (the proletarian mono) and say "tú" instead of "usted" and "!salud!" instead of "!adiós!" Madrid, where the UGT was stronger, was less prone to collectivizing and populism, but the authorities confiscated foreign businesses, and workers' committees directed by the ministry of war ran enterprises which could supply military needs. There was much talk of collectivizing farming, but the most suitable region for such a program was Andalusia, and most of it was in insurgent hands. In the Mancha the agrarian laborers collectivized several hundred large estates. Elsewhere the rural revolution meant establishing local cooperatives and confiscating the property of the larger landowners, who had fled or been shot. In sum there was no consistent plan for the revolution, only proliferating attempts to realize the many Utopian plans to do away with capitalist exploitation that the different parties had been preaching. That in many instances they worked, and that factories began to turn out arms, can be credited to the tremendous dedication and effort of the workers, who overcame initial confusion and the disappearance of engineers and managers. Eventually, when the enthusiasm waned, unexpected difficulties of unplanned collectivization became apparent.
The third task of the local committees was to create and arm revolutionary militias to oppose the forces of insurrection. On July 24, the Central Committee of Barcelona established the first column of militia under the command of Buenaventura Durruti, a famous anarchist terrorist who had participated in the assassination of the archbishop of Zaragoza in 1923 and had spent years in prison and in exile. When the Durruti column marched toward Aragon to reconquer Zaragoza, it executed priests and landowners on the way and established [194] local agrarian collectives. Other left-wing columns soon followed it to the Aragon front. In Madrid the various labor organizations established their own militias which went north to the Sierra de Guadarrama to stop the troops of Mola. Elsewhere local committees also established their militias who defended their towns or went forward to face the "fascists."
The early militias were a makeshift and ineffectual military force. They were usually commanded by political or union leaders who lacked military training. They did not know how to take cover, fight in open country, or retreat in order. When they met units of the regular army or were strafed by planes, they frequently broke in panic and were mowed down or captured and executed; but they proved courageous and effective as guerrillas in the mountains or in house-to-house fighting in cities. Most of them were organized "democratically," without the usual distinction among ranks. When the Giral government suggested in August drafting men to form a regular army, the CNT of Barcelona replied: "We want to be militias of liberty, not soldiers in uniform. The army has proved a danger to the country; only popular militias protect public liberties. Militias, yes; soldiers, never!"(4)
With revolutionary committees assuming local authority and various militias doing the fighting, one of the most difficult problems facing the Republican government was to establish unity of direction in order to oppose the insurgents effectively. The internal history of the Republican zone during the first year of the war is above all the story of how the constitutional government slowly gathered back into its hands the strands of power. The problem was urgent, for the Republican side desperately needed help from abroad and the apparent disappearance of the central government in face of the triumphant social revolution was discrediting the Republic. Giral's strongest argument for foreign help was his claim to head the legally elected government of Spain. Aware of this, the local committees seldom overtly disregarded his ministry, but he lacked the stature to command their respect.
The only person who could head a government that would be both legitimate and have authority over the militant workers was Largo Caballero. Slowly he abandoned his ideological opposition to a coalition ministry, which had hurt the Popular Front since its beginning. On September 4, Giral resigned and Azana named Largo Caballero head of a coalition government composed of Socialists--including the moderates Prieto and Juan Negrin--Republicans, Communists, Catalan Es-querra, and a Basque nationalist.
There remained the anarchists, who were supreme in Catalonia, [195] controlling its Central Committee. The person who managed to tame them was Companys. Since the war began he had worked patiently to bring authority back to the Generalitat, and on September 26 he obtained an anarchist agreement to join a new ministry of the Generalitat and abolish the Central Committee. A little over a month later, on November 4, Largo Caballero succeeded in getting the anarchists to enter his own ministry, taking four positions. The move was urgent, for by now Madrid was in imminent danger, and everyone felt that the fall of Madrid would be a mortal blow for the Republic.
The Nationalist side also experienced confusion and lack of unity, but never to the extent the Republic did, and it found a permanent solution much sooner. Since the military were in control from the outset, the question became which general should be supreme commander. The leading figure of the rising, General Sanjurjo, who was in Lisbon, was killed on July 20 in the crash of a small plane that had been sent to bring him to Spain. Mola in Navarre, Queipo de Llano in Seville, and Franco in Africa and later Andalusia remained to direct the uprising. After Sanjurjo's death Mola took over the direction, for he had inspired the plotting within Spain. On July 24, Mola established a Junta of National Defense at Burgos, consisting of generals headed by the elderly Miguel Cabanellas. It did not include the generals in the south or representatives of the civilian groups that had supported the rising, the Carlists and the Falange. It had as little authority in the next months as Giral had on his side.
After the armies of the north and south had met on September 8, various generals began to call for a single command. Mola and Franco were the logical candidates, but of the two Franco had clearly become the more impressive. He had behind him the best fighting force, the Army of Africa, had reconquered southern and western Spain, and was favored by Germany and Italy, on whom the Nationalists depended for continuing supplies. Nevertheless, personal rivalries held up a final decision until September 29. On that day the Burgos junta and other senior officers accepted Franco as generalísimo and "head of the government." Two days later, the official proclamation appeared, with Franco's title mysteriously changed to "Head of State" (Jefe del Estado) as well as generalísimo, with "the absolute powers of the state." Thus supreme military and civil authority had been joined in one man.
Spain and the world knew little about Franco beyond his name, for unlike many generals he had stayed out of politics until July 1936. The Republicans and many foreign observers felt he was but a tool of Hitler and Mussolini. Not for years would the world realize that Franco never would be subservient to anyone but was one of the most independent and astute figures to come to power in modern times. Nationalist Spain had created a military dictator.
3. [196] The first months of the war had divided Spain in two. The front lines had become clear by October. Despite bitter fighting, they were to change only slowly in the next year. As in July, the Nationalists held most of Andalusia except Jaén and Malaga, all of Old Castile, Galicia, and Navarre, and most of Aragon, and they had added New Castile west of Madrid and Extremadura. The Republicans held Asturias and the Basque Provinces in the north; Catalonia, Valencia, and the Mediterranean coast in the east and south; and a large section stretching inward from the Mediterranean to include eastern Andalusia, eastern New Castile with Madrid, and eastern Aragon. Roughly, arid, agricultural Spain had fallen to the insurgents. The industrial north and east, the bigger cities except Seville and Zaragoza, and the countryside dependent on them were in Republican hands. Spain had divided along lines familiar since the eighteenth century.
Spain had divided along other familiar lines as well, lines solidified by the terror on both sides since the outbreak of the war. Favoring the Republic were those persons who had supported the Popular Front. They included the organized workers of the cities who belonged to the proletarian parties and were caught up in the enthusiasm of their cause. In the countryside many peasants and landless laborers felt the same way. This was especially true in the south, where the anarchists and the UGT had extended their following under the Republic. Large segments of the middle class favored the Republic: a majority of the intellectuals who had experienced the revival of the Generation of '98 and the Institución Libre, including the mass of university professors, many professional people, and those devoted to the autonomy of Catalonia and the Basque Provinces. Essentially the Loyalists, as they came to be known abroad, were the heirs to the groups that had developed in opposition to the established order after 1875, who had been frustrated in 1917, and finally achieved their victory in 1931. Those who had favored the Republic in 1931 out of convenience rather than conviction--members of the former monarchist parties, army officers, moderate Catholics--had fallen away, leaving the convinced hard core of republican support to fight for the Republic.
On the other hand, the groups that had supported the former monarchy--the church, the army, the large landowners--on the whole welcomed the rising. The leading industrialists and bankers joined them, frightened by the revolutionary threats of the left-wing leaders and the armed might of the workers. Middle-class people of Catholic upbringing and sympathy soon desired the victory of Franco, especially if members of their family had suffered in the terror. The most militant Catholics were the Carlists, now known officially as the Traditionalists, [197] whose well-disciplined Requetes provided valuable support in the early battles in the north. Equally committed, though different in outlook, was the Falange, whose principles were not religious or conservative but favored social legislation, cooperation of all classes, and national grandeur. These groups offered as heterogeneous a body of supporters as did those of the Republic, tied together by their fear and hatred of the proletarian parties of the Popular Front.
That the majority of the clergy should support the insurgents was a foregone conclusion, for the polarization of Spaniards had taken place around the religious issue. Churches were closed and priests killed by the thousands in the Republican zone. The hierarchy acclaimed the army's rising as a religious crusade. Cardinal Isidro Goma, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain, proclaimed: "We deny that this is a war of classes. The workers' claims are only a pretext. It is the love of the God of our fathers that has led half of Spain to take up arms. On one side the fields have become temples; on the other side thousands of priests assassinated, churches destroyed, a satanic fury."(5) The church worked to convince Spaniards and the world that the real rebels were the Republicans in the service of international Communism, a myth that was to be maintained officially after the war. Largo Caballero's speeches before the war and the acts of the local committees leant credibility to this story. Typical of the church's statements is a prominent memorial tablet in the Cathedral of Jaén which is dedicated to "The Reverend Diocesan Priests assassinated in the Marxist Revolution, July 1936-March 1939." Beneath this heading are the names of the bishop and 124 priests of the province. Franco, himself a devout Catholic, welcomed the support of the clergy and made the church a partner in the crusade. Catholic youths, Carlists and others, were to fight and die as heroically for the Nationalist cause as did the young idealists on the Republican side.
Only one shadow darkened this alliance. Many Basque priests took the side of the Republic, along with their fellow citizens who were fighting for the autonomy of their homeland. The Nationalists executed about twelve Basque priests whom they captured. Cardinal Goma interceded with Franco to prevent further executions of this kind, but he condemned their choice: "It is not permitted to divide the Catholic forces in the face of the common enemy. . . . The alliance is monstrous when the enemy is that modern monster, Marxism or Communism, the hydra with seven heads, synthesis of all heresies."(6)
The Falange was a quite different ally. It had grown phenomenally in recent months. In February 1936 it had five thousand members, in [198] August one million, and it was to boast two million members before the end of the war. Many young militants joined its ranks in the early stages of the war, including not a few former anarchists and Communists caught in insurgent territory who were attracted by its philosophy of violence and social reform and by the safety it offered from their past record. Azana had imprisoned its founder, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, in March 1936 as an enemy of the Republic, and in November the Communist civil governor of Alicante, where Jose Antonio was imprisoned, acting without approval of Largo Caballero's ministry, had him tried and executed for helping prepare the revolt. Other central figures of the Falange also died. Without its leaders and ideologically opposed to most of the insurgents, the Falange was groping for its proper role in the insurrection. Meanwhile many young Falangists were fighting and dying valiantly in the front lines.
The dominant force in the rising was without question the army. The plotting had been done by high officers who scorned politicians and, like the generals of the nineteenth century, believed it their duty to save the country from disorder. Most military officers supported the generals, and they controlled the professional soldiers beneath them. The new ideologies were anathema to the officers. An extreme example of their spirit was furnished by General Millan Astray, one-time commander of the Foreign Legion and now director of the press and propaganda for the Nationalists. On October 12, 1936 Unamuno, who had been reappointed rector of the university of Salamanca by the Republic, chaired a celebration at which Millan Astray was the main speaker. Unamuno had welcomed the Republic in 1931, but in July 1936 he supported the uprising, which he hoped would end the draft toward violence and confusion. From the audience came repeatedly the Foreign Legion's cry: "Long live death!" Unamuno was horrified, and said that it was insufficient for the generals to conquer; they must also convince. Millan Astray turned on the aged intellectual, screaming, "Down with intelligence!" The next day Unamuno learned he was no longer rector. He died before Christmas in sorrow over the fate of his country.
Although the groups behind the rising included most of the heirs of the Moderado order, they were few in number by comparison with the defenders of the Republic. With many of the middle class and most of the city workers fighting for the Republic and the rural lower classes either hostile to the generals or uncommitted, the advancing insurgent forces felt themselves in a conquered country. They resorted to terror to eliminate all possible enemies, as the Spanish armies had been used to doing in the African Rif. Like Napoleon in 1808, they chose to treat militias as outlaws in revolt, to be executed if caught, not as soldiers entitled to the rules of war. Anyone caught with arms, or showing signs of having fought the advancing armies, was shot. In this way, through mass terror and executions, the insurgents assured [199] themselves of safety behind the lines. When they could, the Republican militias fled before the onslaught.
There remained vast numbers who were still emotionally uncommitted to either side. Many in the cities continued to long for a restoration of peace and tranquility. Many peasants also fell into this group, those who had not been reached by the UGT or the anarchists. The Republic's agrarian policy had not been successful. Except in Andalusia, the Republican cause did not generate wide enthusiasm among peasants. In the Republican zone, many peasants were being forced into collectives they did not appreciate. But throughout the Nationalist zone, farmers were at peace, and the Nationalists promised to protect rural property, provide loans for peasants, and prevent foreclosure of mortgages. Many peasants still loved their priests and were ready to believe that the cities had been infested by dangerous doctrines. Thus the countryside did not actively oppose the Nationalist armies. The number of young men who volunteered to serve Franco was far below that of the volunteers who filled the Republican armies. He was forced to institute conscription early in the war, and by the end of 1937 the draft was general in the Nationalist zone. Through conscription Franco was able to increase his army, which numbered at most 250,000 at the end of 1936, to 500,000 a year later. Once they were drafted, however, the young, mostly apolitical, peasants could be counted on not to desert. Unlike 1808, peasant guerrillas did not appear to fight for the legitimate order. Only in a few instances in Asturias and Andalusia did Loyalists escape to the hills to become guerrillas. The passivity of the peasantry thus became one of the key factors in the eventual Nationalist victory, as it had been earlier in the political control of the caciques.
4. The search for a stable central authority on both sides was motivated in large part by the desire to create a favorable impression abroad. The policy of foreign powers was crucial to the Civil War from the outset. While Franco was receiving critical help from Italy and Germany, on July 19 Giral telegraphed Leon Blum, head of the recently elected French Popular Front government, asking for arms and airplanes. Blum, leader of the French Socialists, was immediately sympathetic, but the members of his government who represented the French middle class reacted unfavorably. The British government, in the hands of the Conservative party, when informed, cautioned Blum against getting involved. The attitude of Great Britain affected French policy directly, for France depended on Britain to help it against the threat of Germany, currently rearming under Hitler's National Socialist government. The British Conservatives cared little about the fate of Spanish workers, but the assassination of upper-class Spaniards dismayed them and they [200] were worried over the large British investments in Spain: the copper mines of the Rio Tinto, the sherry vineyards, the iron mines of the north, and the public utilities. Where the Republic was in control, especially in Catalonia under the anarchists, the local committees had collectivized foreign concerns. Six months later Largo Caballero promised to indemnify foreign investors, but by then points of view had hardened that would not change. What the Nationalists would do was not clear, but just as they protected peasant property they could be counted on to leave foreign enterprises alone. Eventually Franco also forced foreign companies to turn over to his war chest all foreign exchange their exports produced. During the war, no profit came to their owners, but the properties were not confiscated. Franco was too smart to frighten foreign investors, and from the outset he had the sympathy of financial circles in England, France, the United States, and elsewhere. The position of the British government echoed the sentiments of persons with interests in Spain. The possibility of a Communist power at the western end of the Mediterranean also disturbed London. Since the British government, by its threat of friendship with Hitler, could determine French policy, its position became the deciding factor in the policy of the democracies toward the war. Indirectly through the Western governments, foreign investors, rather than the church or the large landowners, proved to be the critical supporters of the Nationalists.
Faced with British opposition, Blum backtracked. After allowing some airplanes to reach Spain, he ordered the frontier closed to military shipments on August 8. To salve its conscience, the French government proposed to the major European powers a policy of nonintervention-- that no military aid be given to either side, although accepted international policy was not to blockade recognized governments. Britain accepted, and so did Italy and Germany, meanwhile continuing to ship arms to Franco. Russia, as self-appointed leader of the world revolution, was sympathetic to the Republic, but it also agreed. On September 9, an international Non-Intervention Committee met to enforce the agreement. The Republican government promptly presented evidence of German, Italian, and Portuguese aid to the Nationalists, but the commission chose to reject the evidence--the majority of the governments it represented were sympathetic to the insurgents. The Republicans hoped to stir the world against this injustice by an appeal to the League of Nations. The League had virtually abandoned Ethiopia to the Italian conquerors in 1935, however, and the Spanish Republic's appeal was a wasted effort.
The attitude of the Western powers provoked Russia to ignore the nonintervention agreement and begin shipment of arms to Spain in October. Nonintervention was never to work. Hitler and Mussolini sent arms, airplanes, and troops to Franco, in return for much needed minerals. Russia sent arms and technical advisors to the Republic, paid [201] for with the gold reserve of the Spanish government. The only significant effect of the nonintervention policy was to prevent the Republicans from buying arms in Western Europe, thereby placing the Republican government in a position where it had to follow the dictates of Moscow.
While the democratic powers shilly-shallied, private volunteers came from abroad to offer their lives to the Republic. They had been slipping across the Pyrenees since the outset of the war, despite the French closing of the frontier. Throughout Western Europe and America, the war caught the imagination of militant workers and left-wing intellectuals and students. The Spanish people, in their eyes, were rising to crush fascism, the gravest modern threat to freedom and social justice. They could remember that after the bright dawn of 1918-19, the democracies of Europe had collapsed one by one. Mussolini took over Italy in 1922, followed by Primo de Rivera in Spain in 1923 and Pilsudski in Poland in 1926. Yugoslavia fell in 1929, Germany in 1933, Austria in 1934. Mussolini conquered the heroic and independent African people of Ethiopia in 1935. Nowhere in Europe had there been serious resistance. The Italian, German, and Austrian socialist leaders had been imprisoned or murdered or had fled. The proclamation of the Spanish Republic in 1931 had been one of the few causes for hope. Now the Spanish people were the first to stand up and fight for their freedom against the Fasces and the Swastika. Just as Spain had galvanized Europe against Napoleon in 1808, so now it did against the totalitarian menace of the twentieth century. Well-known poets and novelists came and publicized the Loyalist cause. Among them, Ernest Hemingway created For Whom the Bell Tolls out of his experiences, Andre Malraux wrote Man's Hope, and George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Large numbers of lovers of democracy and partisans of world social revolution became personally committed to the outcome in Spain. The attitude of their governments angered them, for this was the final betrayal of the democratic idealism of 1918. Their estrangement has continued to this day, only temporarily interrupted by the Second World War.
At first the foreign volunteers joined the workers' militias, but as their numbers grew and the war became the center of world attention, leaders of the Communist International determined to provide direction and support for the volunteers. They organized what they called the International Brigades. They established headquarters for recruitment in Paris, made arrangements for clandestine passage of the volunteers into Spain, and set up a training center at Albacete. Refugees from Mussolini and Hitler, antifascists from central and eastern Europe, militant leftists, idealistic students, and unemployed workers from France, England, and the United States joined the International Brigades and went to Spain. The arrival of their first contingents coincided with the unloading of Russian arms. By the beginning of November they were ready to face the forces of Franco. Compared to the Spanish [202] workers' militias they were an elite corps, many of them veterans, with trained officers at their head. Their first column reached Madrid on November 8, consisting mostly of Germans and Italians, who marched impressively up the main avenues and created a sensation in the now beleaguered city. They were none too soon, for the critical battle of the year had begun that morning.
5. Since the capture of Toledo, the Nationalist forces had been preparing an assault on Madrid. They had not met effective resistance elsewhere, and they counted on its easy fall, which would signal the death of the Republic. Germany and Italy had promised to recognize the Franco government as soon as it captured Madrid. Nor was the fate of Madrid foreseen differently by the Republicans. Despite the Strong protest of the anarchists who had just joined his ministry, Largo Caballero moved his government to Valencia on November 6, giving military authority over Madrid to a loyal general, Jose Miaja, and political authority to a Junta of Defense representing, once again, the proletarian organizations. This time, however, the controlling voice in the Junta belonged to the Spanish Communist Party, whose prestige had been raised by the arrival of Russian arms and by its having created the only effective militia in Madrid, the "Fifth Regiment."
Communist speakers, led by the charismatic Asturian miner's wife, Dolores Ibarruri, known as La Pasionaria, roused Madrileños to a fever of determination. They appealed to the workers of Madrid to imitate those of Petrograd (November 7 was the anniversary of the Russian Revolution), with slogans like "Madrid will be the tomb of Fascism, and "They shall not pass!" The Madrid militias, stiffened by the International Brigades, withstood the violent assault launched by the Moors and Requetes on November 8, and they continued to do so in succeeding days, dying in the trenches and defending buildings room by room. The attacking forces launched air raids and artillery bombardments on the defenseless city. The bitterest fighting occurred in the Ciudad Universitaria, lying on the northwest outskirts of Madrid, whose modern edifices, the pride of the Republic, soon lay in ruins. During the fighting, Republican troops appeared from elsewhere, notably the Durruti column from Aragon. Slowly, the tenacity of the defenders produced the unexpected miracle. After ten days the attacking forces had made virtually no headway and had to stop exhausted. Madrid had lived through one of the most highly charged emotional experiences in history. In Spain and abroad, a Republican victory suddenly seemed possible. Germany and Italy finally recognized Franco as the legitimate head of Spain on November 18, but his government was still in Burgos.
[203] The Nationalists' failure before Madrid was a blow to their prestige, and they were determined to avenge the insult. Twice more during the ensuing winter, they attempted to take the city. They now counted on hitting it from behind, cutting off the road to Valencia, its only supply line. In February 1937 they attacked southeast of Madrid across the Jarama river. After a week of heroic combat which decimated Republican troops and International Brigades on one side and Moors and Foreign Legionnaires on the other, the Loyalists halted the offensive. Russian planes and tanks and intensive military training had at last built a Republican army that could fight effectively in open country. A month later a Nationalist assault came from the northeast, aimed at Guadalajara. The major force was thirty thousand Italian soldiers, sent by Mussolini, with the latest equipment. Within a week the Italians were in full flight, the laughing stock of the world, routed by a snowstorm and the Republican army and International Brigades. Madrid had proved impregnable, but now Mussolini also had an insult to avenge.
6. The winter 1936-37 produced critical developments on the Republican side. Unity of purpose and spiritual brotherhood among the different parties defending the Republic reached a zenith during the battle of Madrid, when anarchists, independent Marxist POUM militias, Communists, and Socialists fought side by side. Thereafter, however, this unity began to deteriorate. Largo Caballero, despite his earlier calls for revolution, now worked constantly to bring authority back into the hands of the central government and to cooperate with the middle-class supporters of the Republic. He promised indemnities to former owners of nationalized businesses, both foreign and domestic, and he stated that only the expropriation of lands taken from active opponents of the Republic would be recognized. Most important for the military future of the Republic, he gradually forced the workers' militias into a regular army. Officer ranks were established and division numbers appeared. The anarchists resisted stubbornly, but Largo had an unanswerable argument, for his government controlled the supply of weapons and ammunition.
Ever since October the major source of military supplies had been Russia. Cooperation with Russia became essential to the Republican government, with the result that both the Russian ambassador, Marcel Rosenberg, and the Spanish Communist Party had increasing influence over Republican policies. The Communists received credit for the defense of Madrid and they had the prestige of the Russian Revolution behind them. From thirty thousand members in July 1936, the party expanded to over a million a year later. Most of these recruits were from [204] nonrevolutionary groups--peasants, small businessmen, intellectuals, civil servants. For the Communists urged an end to the social revolution in the interest of winning the war. They denounced the separatist activities of the anarchists and the revolutionary elan of the left-wing UGT. The anti-Stalinist POUM were their mortal enemies. They provided Largo Caballero with firm support for his reestablishment of central control, but they went further and extended their own power within the Republican zone. Their main target was the army. To gain control of the army they used the mechanism of political commissars, instituted by the government in October 1936 on the model of those of the Red Army in Russia. They were assigned to military units to instruct the soldiers in political doctrine and to be right-hand men, and watchdogs, of the commanding officers. Not by accident most of the commissars were Communists, and their association with the party and thus with the source of supplies gave them such authority that frequently they rivaled the generals. Largo Caballero had destroyed one threat to the authority of the state only to spawn another, which he resented no less for the Communists' claim to be helping him.
In this way the defenders of the Republic became divided between the partisans of revolution and the partisans of order. Many leaders of the CNT and the UGT still favored immediate revolution, and behind them were the mass of workers who had welcomed Largo Cabal-lero's ministry and were becoming increasingly disillusioned with his policies. Their stronghold was in Barcelona and the Catalan government. The Republicans like Azana, right-wing Socialists like Prieto, and the Communists represented the partisans of order. They had the support of Russia, which since encouraging the formation of Popular Front governments wanted to appear as the international leader of the defense of parliamentary democracy against fascist totalitarianism. Furthermore the partisans of order argued that only by postponing a social revolution and guaranteeing property could the Republic induce the Western democracies to sell it arms. Reneging on the promise of a social revolution might kill the spirit that had saved Madrid, but the prospect of revolution diminished the chances of help from abroad. The desire to placate foreign investors became as decisive in Republican policies as it was in Franco's.
By early 1937 Largo Caballero was trying desperately to keep the two sides together. He resisted attempts of the Communists to dictate Spanish policy, and he rejected a Russian proposal to unite the Communist and Socialist parties of all Spain as they had been in Catalonia. This independence determined the Communists to get rid of him. A serious incident in Barcelona gave them the opportunity they wanted. On May 3 assault guards, under orders from a Communist member of the Generalitat, tried to take over control of the main telephone building, which the anarchists had occupied and run since the outbreak of the [205] war. Through it passed government communications with Catalonia and the outside world. The anarchists, jittery over the extension of central authority, resisted the guards with gunfire. A running battle rapidly developed in Barcelona between anarchists and anti-Stalinist POUM on one side, and police and assault guards on the other. Eventually government forces from Valencia crushed the anarchists. The Communists in the ministry demanded exemplary punishment of the rising and suppression of the POUM, which they accused of being in the service of Franco's "fascists." Largo Caballero refused to punish any group that had fought the enemies of the Republic, whereupon the Communist ministers resigned on May 13, causing a cabinet crisis. President Azana urged Largo Caballero to accept a Communist demand to name Prieto minister of war, an office Largo held himself, but Largo refused out of principle to accept their terms, and resigned.
To head the next ministry Azana selected a moderate Socialist who was acceptable to the Communists, Juan Negrin. His cabinet embodied the triumph of the policy of order. Negrin destroyed the remaining power of the anarchists in Catalonia, and he forced their last militias to enter the regular army. He acceded to the Communist demand to suppress the POUM and arrest its leaders. The revolution that the workers' parties had inaugurated in July and August 1936 had been checked, not by Franco but by the Republic itself. In this development the Communists had played the key role, and behind them stood Russia, striving to gain French and British sympathy against Hitler's Germany. The anarchists of Catalonia and the left-wing Socialists who had followed Largo Caballero in 1936 bitterly resented his fall. They would continue to fight and die for the Republic, but some of their spontaneous enthusiasm was lost.
7. Negrin was to remain at the head of the government until the end of the war. In terms of personnel, his ministry was the most competent the Republic had during the war. Son of a wealthy family, educated in Germany, a professor of medicine at the University of Madrid, he was the polar opposite of the plebian Largo Caballero. He was intelligent, determined, and optimistic by temperament; at forty-seven he was hardly older than Franco. Through the deepest crises of the next years he maintained confidence in ultimate success, and he transmitted this spirit to the Republican soldiers, who performed acts of incredible heroism, both in attack and defense. As war minister he had Prieto, the best organizer the republic had produced. Giral, the former prime minister, acted as foreign minister. In outlook, education, and appearance, the Negrin cabinet would have been at home in Paris or London.
Negrin's policies were motivated by a desire to win the domestic [206] support of the moderate classes and the favor of the foreign democracies. For the first time in the Republican sector he permitted private religious services and gave them protection. Several conservative deputies reappeared at a meeting of the Cortes on October 1, 1937. Except for the fact (a fundamental one) that Negrin promised to preserve the Republican constitution and parliamentary government, to some Loyalists there seemed little difference between the practices of his government and those of the generals they were fighting. When he became too clearly opposed to local autonomy, the Catalan and Basque members of his ministry resigned, in August 1938.
The democracies were not to be impressed by anything the Spanish government did. A new Blum ministry opened the French frontier briefly in 1938, only to have the next prime minister, Edouard Daladier, close it a few months later. Otherwise the nonintervention policy continued, and Germany and Italy continued to supply Franco. Negrin had no alternative but to accept Soviet supplies and accompanying dictates.
Thus to many the Negrin ministry took on the appearance of a Soviet lackey. It silenced criticism in the press of itself or the Russian government. The Communists seemed irresistible. Acting without knowledge of the ministry, Spanish and Russian Communist agents got hold of the arrested leader of the POUM, the well-known anti-Stalinist, Andres Nin. Unknown to anyone, they tortured and killed him. When their deed came out, the non-Communist left was aghast and Negrin was outraged. In August 1937 he formed a secret police, the Servicio de Investigation Militar (SIM), to centralize counterespionage under his authority. He attempted to keep the SIM out of Communist hands, placing it under Prieto, but by 1938 they had gained control of it. Yet despite appearances, neither Negrin nor Prieto was the kind of person who would become a Russian tool. Maneuvering adroitly, they succeeded in ousting Largo Caballero from the position he had held for almost twenty years as president of the UGT, but they continued his rejection of Russian proposals to merge the Socialist and Communist parties of Spain.
A man of iron determination, Negrin refused to see the Republican armies always on the defensive. He believed they must attack if they were to win domestic and foreign confidence, but he never found the means to match the enemy. Slowly Franco, with his superior armaments from abroad and adequate food supply, wore down and drove back the Republicans. Having found Madrid impregnable and realizing that the war had become one of attrition, he turned to the other fronts. In the spring, summer, and fall of 1937, Nationalist troops, supported by Italian ground forces and German aviation, slowly destroyed the resistance in the north, where the coastal provinces had remained loyal to the Republic, the Basques fighting for their autonomy under Catholic [207] middle-class leadership, and Asturias under revolutionary miners. There was little Negrin could do to help these regions. In the course of the assault, on April 26, 1937, German planes ferociously bombed Guernica, the medieval Basque capital, testing the effect of terror on a civilian population. The experiment horrified world opinion and was the inspiration for Picasso's most powerful painting, "Guernica," which recalled Goya's "Disasters of War." Yet Bilbao fell on June 12. To relieve pressure on the north, the Republicans attacked west of Madrid at Brunete in July under a scorching sun with their best forces, including the International Brigades. After a short advance, they were held and then slowly driven back to their starting lines. The fighting was desperate on both sides, but the Nationalists had more adequate reserves of arms and men. Their advance in the north hardly faltered. Santander fell on August 26, and on October 21 the last Republican troops surrendered in Asturias.
Fighting turned next to the Aragon front, which was henceforth the scene of all important campaigns. In December 1937 the Republicans attacked an enemy salient threatening Valencia. They captured Teruel building by building. But again lack of firepower, airplanes, and reserves prevented them from exploiting their advance. By February 1938 the Nationalists were able to recapture Teruel. Meanwhile the Nationalists had been building up their forces in Aragon, while the Republicans had worn out their best manpower. Generously supplied with German planes and tanks, Franco opened a massive offensive on March 9 down the Ebro River toward the Mediterranean Sea. The Republicans, outmanned and outgunned, were powerless against his armies. Franco's forces reached the coast on April 15, 1938, and the Republican sector was split in two.
By now leading Republicans came to the conclusion that defeat was inevitable. These included Prieto and President Azana. Negrin, however, was in no mood for defeatism, and the Communists supported his position. On April 5 Prieto and Giral left the cabinet. Negrin was losing the support of the moderates, who began to see in him a possible dictator, closely tied to a Soviet lead string. And yet the war continued, inspired by Negrin's indomitable spirit.
Negrin continued to believe it imperative to regain the initiative if he were to save the Republic, or even to achieve a reasonable peace. On July 24, 1938 fifty thousand well-trained Republican troops with the best available material launched an offensive south across the Ebro River about fifty miles from the sea, hoping to cut a major Nationalist supply line and surround the enemy troops that had reached the coast. The surprise attack was fully successful, despite bitter and heroic resistance on the Nationalist side. But as before, when the Nationalists brought up equipment and reserves they were able to stop the Republicans, this time near Gandesa. The Republicans dug in and held [208] desperately for three months, but their weary soldiers finally evacuated their salient south of the Ebro early in November. Suffering themselves from tremendous losses among their best troops, the Nationalists pled with the Germans to send more equipment to end the war.
8. The final blow to the hopes of the Republic came, not on the Ebro, but from abroad. By 1938 the specter of Hitler's Germany haunted Europe, and international attention shifted from Spain to Germany. In March 1938 German troops occupied and annexed Austria, and Hitler began to demand those parts of Czechoslovakia where the Germans were a majority. The Czechs were prepared to resist, with Russia behind them, but Britain under Neville Chamberlain and France under Daladier wanted to avoid war at all costs. Meeting with Hitler and Mussolini at Munich on September 15, 1938, the two Western leaders agreed to Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Given such a British and French attitude, the Spanish Republicans knew no help would come to them; while Russia, stung by not being consulted, realized she would never win Western support against the German threat. Her aid to Spain virtually stopped after Munich. Hoping to stir the League of Nations to order out the German and Italian troops in Franco's army, Negrin sent home the International Brigades. On November 15, the foreign volunteers who were still alive paraded through Barcelona, while Negrin gave them thanks and La Pasionaria saluted them: "You can go proudly! You are history! You are legend!"(7) Mussolini in response withdrew some Italian soldiers but left the majority in Spain. Hitler heeded Franco's pleas for more arms on condition that Germany get critical Spanish mining rights.
The Republicans at last stood unaided against the Nationalists still well supplied by Germany and Italy. Yet Negrin refused to give in, convinced now that a general European war was inevitable and that when it broke out the democracies would become allies of the Spanish Republic. Now that Russia had abandoned the Republic he moved to reduce Communist influence, hoping to revive Republican unity. His personal courage kept the Republic at war through the winter.
Franco launched his final offensive against the Catalan front on December 23. Negrin sought to resist at all costs, but there was little serious fighting. Franco's superiority in equipment was overwhelming and the Republican troops were exhausted. Behind the lines Barcelona was hungry, cold, continually bombed, and in a defeatist mood. The policies of Negrin and the Communists had weakened its loyalty to the [209] Republic. There would be no second Madrid. The city which had withstood hopeless sieges in 1652 and 1714 was occupied at the end of January 1939 with hardly a shot in its defense. Many Italian soldiers were among the victors. Barcelona was Mussolini's revenge for Guadalajara. The Republican government and some half million refugees, soldiers and civilians, streamed north across the French frontier. By February 12 the Catalan front had ceased to exist.
The central front remained, including Madrid, Valencia, and much of central and southern Spain. There had been little fighting here since 1937. Negrin flew back to Valencia to continue the war. This time, however, he asked too much. In Toulouse, Azana resigned as president when he learned that Britain and France had recognized Franco on February 27. In Madrid a junta of civilians and generals, led by the moderate Socialist Julian Besteiro and Colonel Segismundo Casado, an old partisan of Largo Caballero, denied Negrin's authority and opened negotiations with Franco. They sought to gain an honorable surrender and the assurance of no reprisals. Confident now of prompt victory, Franco refused to negotiate with anyone, promising only not to punish soldiers and others who had served the Republican cause without committing crimes. Republican garrisons surrendered between March 28 and 31. General Franco proclaimed complete victory on April 1, 1939, two years and nearly nine months after the war began. Five months later the international war that Negrin had awaited broke out on the Polish-German frontier.
The Republic which had come in with such high hopes eight years earlier had perished after one of the bitterest struggles of modern times. Many were responsible for its death. It had been killed largely by the indifference and hostility of foreign democracies, which in their concern for their own safety in a world apparently gone mad could not worry about the well-being of a second-rate power. Foreign investors, who were one of the groups to establish control over Spain in the nineteenth century, did their part to bring about the policy of nonintervention. When the Second World War began, new Western leaders would denounce the policy of appeasement, too late, however, to undo the sacrifice of the majority of committed Spaniards, who had favored the Republic. But Spaniards too made possible Franco's victory. The Republicans were torn between enacting a social revolution which would inspire the working classes and defending parliamentary democracy and property to reassure the middle classes and foreign powers. They ended by satisfying no one. Furthermore, Franco could count, as conservatives before him had, on the landowners, on most industrialists, and on those who still cherished the Catholic religion. He could also count on most of the countryside, where the population was isolated from modern ideas and for whom the workers in the cities could be painted as atheistic reds, enemies of civilization. To large numbers of peasants, the city [210] workers were "they," not "we," and this alienation went far toward explaining the tranquility that Franco had behind his lines. There was no maquis as in France during the Second World War, no guerrilla warfare similar to that of Algeria in the 1950's. The cities, where people were in contact with new ideas, fought virtually alone. Boycotted by most of the world, without food supplies or needed raw materials, with little support in the countryside, they lost.
Nevertheless, the war demonstrated that Spanish society was evolving in a permanent manner. The political authority of the oligarchy had collapsed during the First World War. Primo de Rivera had come in to shore it up with a military dictatorship, and he succeeded without outside help. Under the Republic with a free parliamentary government, modern Spain had been able to dominate the old order, although the match was close. The Civil War showed that the oligarchy and the armed forces could no longer control Spain. Without outside help, they would have lost. The nineteenth century could not be restored, for modern economy and modem ideology had changed Spain too much. A new balance was being created. The Civil War was an attempt to check the natural evolution by force of arms. For more than ten years after his victory, Franco would keep the weaker side in power by terror and military power; but eventually, to prevent the country from dying a slow death, he would have to recognize the forces of modernization.
1. Gerald Brenan, The Face of Spain (London: Turnstile Press, 1950), pp. 127-48.
4. Quoted in Pierre Broue and Emile Temime, La Revolution et la guerre d'Espagne (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1961), p. 130.
5. Quoted in F. G. Bruguera, Histoire contemporaine d'Espagne 1789-1950 (Paris: Editions Ophrys, 1953), p. 426.
7. Quoted in Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), p. 558.