Tens of thousands died in the bloodletting. But while the rebel leaders countenanced and encouraged it through the course of the war and beyond, within areas of Spain still nominally loyal to the Republic politicians could only look on in horror, unable to curb or control the autonomous militia groups. It would take several months for something like central authority to be re-established, and for the violence to be curtailed.
But by then the damage internationally had already been done. It’s possible that Britain and France would never have come to the aid of Spain’s Popular Front government, fearful of its more left-leaning tendencies, but the violence which broke out – particularly against members of the Church – gave Baldwin’s Conservative government a perfect excuse for not getting involved, still clinging to appeasement in an attempt to avoid a new European war. British embroilment in a Spanish fight between Left and Right was always going to be a very distant possibility. But denying weapons and support to ‘bloodthirsty revolutionaries’ was much easier than to a democratically elected government. France’s own Popular Front leaders were more inclined to send materiel, but pulled back after pressure from London.
Republican Spain was on its own. The rebels, meanwhile, had enjoyed support from Mussolini even before the war began, and now Hitler, responding to a personal envoy from Franco, followed suit. Crucially, he agreed to fly Juncker transport planes to Spanish Morocco in order to airlift the Legionarios and Regulares over to Seville, from where they could be used to invade Republican territory.
Denied support from the liberal democracies, the Republic had only one European country it could turn to, the Soviet Union (Mexico supported it from the beginning, but could offer little in terms of arms). In Moscow, Stalin hesitated, but eventually decided, in exchange for ‘looking after’ Spain’s huge gold reserves (the fourth-largest in the world at the time) to send over weaponry, including T-26 tanks and Polikarpov I-15 and I-16 planes. London and Paris may have wanted to limit the civil war to a local, purely Spanish affair, but by the end of the summer of 1936 it had escalated into a fully internationalised conflict.
Soviet aid for the Republic came not a moment too soon, arriving just as Franco’s Army of Africa swept north from Seville up the western side of the country in a rapid and very bloody advance towards the capital. The Republic had no organised army to defend itself with, and militiamen armed with a few rifles were no match for professionals. In a few weeks Madrid itself was in Franco’s sights. The war, it seemed, would soon be over; the Republican government fled to Valencia. But against all expectations – on either side – the capital didn’t fall, saved by a combination of sheer good luck, a well-organised defence by the loyalist military commanders in charge, the lack of expertise on the part of Franco’s troops in urban warfare, and the arrival in the nick of time of Soviet aid along with the International Brigades, several thousand antifascist volunteers from around the world.
What had looked to be a quick war would now turn into a much longer, and bloodier, affair.
EVERYONE’S SPAIN
Two factors ensured the defeat of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War: a lack of unity on its own side, and military inferiority. They were linked.
We talk about the ‘Republic’ during the war period as though it were a single identifiable thing, a coherent body which acted in a clearly directed fashion. Yet this is almost entirely wrong. Republican Spain was made up of a shattered spectrum of factions divided along political and regional lines whose only common feature was opposition to the military rebels trying to conquer the country. But that in itself was not enough.
It’s true that leading politicians on the Republican side still held office, there was still a president and a prime minister and a cabinet. But in the revolutionary fervour of the first few weeks of the war, these figures effectively lost control to the various armed militias who now became the real authorities. From a Republican perspective, the first year of the conflict is in part the story of how centralising forces fought to wrest power back from these irregulars in an attempt to recreate a functioning state, while simultaneously defending themselves against a military insurrection. It was no easy task, not least because the biggest single group on the so-called Republican side, the Anarchists, didn’t believe in the State to begin with. What’s more, the various factions were frequently divided among themselves, so hard-line and moderate Socialists could hardly look each other in the eye, while the Anarchist movement turned in on itself when four leading members did the impossible and joined the government in late 1936.
The three main militia groups – Anarchists, Socialists and Communists – learned to live with each other for a while and to a degree, but generally only managed to put their differences to one side when the military rebels were on their doorstep. One example came in November 1936, when Franco’s troops appeared to be on the verge of capturing Madrid. In an operation led by secret Moscow agents freshly arrived from the Soviet Union, Socialists and Communists grouped together to bus rebel prisoners away from the city centre, which was under their control, out to the surrounding countryside, dominated by the Anarchists. There, near a village called Paracuellos, the prisoners were shot dead and buried in unmarked graves in the single largest act of repression on the Republican side during the war – estimates vary, but as many as two thousand were murdered. But in a further example of how complicated political allegiances were, the massacres were only stopped when another Anarchist leader became the head of prisons and prevented any more sacas, as they were called, from taking place. Nominal political leaders, such as President Azaña, could only look on helplessly, meanwhile, and weep.
The political divide wasn’t simply about power and fiefdoms, however. A fundamental divide lay at its heart. On the one hand, Anarchists and libertarian left-wingers embraced social revolution, the breakdown of an organised state, and rejected any form of authority. In a society in which everyone was equal, no one could tell anyone else what to do. This reached its logical conclusion even on the front lines, where a strict command structure was tossed aside in favour of soldiers holding committee meetings to decide whether or not to attack the enemy. Farcical though this may seem, it was taken very seriously by its adherents, who were sometimes more prepared to shoot those on their own ‘side’ who might take away their liberties than the enemy in the opposite trenches.
At the other end of the extreme were moderate Republicans who believed in basic concepts of law and order and a functioning, if liberal, state. They found new friends in the Communists.
In the 1930s, Stalin had two main obsessions, both of which would impact Spain: wiping out his perceived political opponents through ‘purges’; and trying to forge alliances with the liberal democracies against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. To this end Communist groups outside the Soviet Union were told to lessen the revolutionary rhetoric and adopt a more ‘bourgeois’ appearance. Strict discipline and acceptance of authority became Communist watchwords. Far from allowing soldier committee meetings at the front, the Spanish Communists formed militia groups along traditional military lines with hierarchical command structures. Preaching a doctrine of order and unity, they quickly became attractive to many within the political class who had seen their power virtually disintegrate. What’s more, their militia formations proved themselves quite capable in battle. And with the addition of Soviet, Communist, aid arriving from Moscow, the rise of the Spanish Communist Party became inevitable.
In their way, however, stood the Anarchists, staunchly opposed to any form of authoritarianism, whether from Left or Right.
Things came to a head in May 1937 in the events which George Orwell describes in Homage to Catalonia. Although pitched by some as an attempt to impose unity on the fractured Republic, nothing exposed its lack of unity more than the spectacle of ‘a civil war within a civil war’, with libertarians and authoritarians battling it out for control of Barcelona. In the end, the authoritarians won. The Anarchists went into serious decline, while Communist
power increased.
Orwell, meanwhile, only just managed to escape Barcelona with his life. As a member of a non-Stalinist militia (the POUM), he was on the losing side. The left-wing repression he personally witnessed, however, had a powerful impact on him, providing the direct inspiration for his two most important books, Animal Farm and 1984. Viewed in conjunction, the novels both explain the recent past and predict the future. Their impact and influence on Western literature and political thinking cannot be overstated. What’s interesting is that, for a moment, in the shape of Orwell, Spain as Cassandra manages to escape her usual fate of having her visions of the future ignored. Orwell himself is not Spanish, he is not restricted by Cassandra’s curse, and therefore he is listened to, so much so that his predictions become fully embedded in Western popular culture. It is entirely within the patterns of Spanish history, and its long-standing tendency of being ahead of its Western neighbours, that the future of a profoundly persecuting society was already developing within her borders. But the unheard prophetess had to whisper her secret warning into the ear of the foreigner, who could then smuggle her message out and repeat it in his own words, to a wider, and this time more attentive, audience.
Back in Spain, the political division described in Homage to Catalonia was not the only split to damage the Republican side. True to form, the decline of central power led to a rise of regionalism. Some areas, such as the Basque Country, were barely part of the Republic even in name. The largely Catholic and socially conservative Basque people at the time had little in common with the free-love radicals charging around in Madrid and other cities. In fact, the one attractive feature of the Republic from a Basque point of view was its liberal ideas about regional autonomy, as opposed to the very strict centralism preached by the rebels. The gulf between the Basque Country and the rest of the Republic was intensified by its being cut off by a swathe of rebel-held territory, and yet it was geographically connected to Republican Santander in the west and beyond it to Asturias. These three enclaves along the Spanish northern coast, far from pulling together, however, behaved like the tiny kingdoms of the early ‘Reconquest’ period. Not surprisingly, the rebels found them easy pickings, conquering them one by one over the spring and summer of 1937, and in so doing capturing important steel and mining areas of the country (while their German and Italian allies experimented with mass aerial bombardment of civilian populations: the destruction of the Basque town of Guernica took place during this campaign in what was meant to be a belated birthday present for Hitler).
Other areas of Republican Spain also acted with near or sometimes total autonomy. Parts of the Aragonese countryside became totally Anarchist, with collectivised farms, the abolition of money (and the murder of local landowners) and a complete absence of State structures. In Barcelona, as Anarchist power waned, separatist politicians retook control. Eventually the Republican capital had to move there from Valencia in part as a brake on Catalan independence moves. Even when Madrid was facing its darkest hour, in November 1936, with rebel forces pushing into the southern suburbs and seemingly on the brink of victory, loyalist fighters from the rest of Spain were notable by their absence. The government ran off to Valencia, but few if any Valencians returned the favour by heading to Madrid to help in its defence. Catalan Anarchists led by the charismatic Buenaventura Durruti did put in an appearance,1 but their presence only further highlighted the lack of formations from other parts of the country. The taifas were back in all but name, and each region or town was far too busy thinking about its own problems to assist anyone else.
These core divisions within the Republican side made its ability to fight back against the rebels much harder. Yet this was further exacerbated by the fact that for the first year or so of the conflict the Republic had no army to speak of. As the military rebellion spread during the first few days of the war, one of the measures taken by the crumbling government was to disband the armed forces, thereby – theoretically – making it easier for soldiers loyal to the Republic to mutiny against any officers ordering them to attack it. The plan worked to an extent, but when the coup attempt led to a full-scale civil war, it meant that the Republic couldn’t send in regular formations against the highly trained troops from Morocco pushing deep into their territory. Attempts to turn the militia groups into more traditional-style military formations were seriously hampered by the libertarian approach to command structures as noted above. Attractive though the egalitarian ideals might be, in purely pragmatic terms having a committee meeting to decide on tactics is a questionable modus operandi when the enemy is about to storm your positions. And true to their beliefs, Anarchist militiamen were volunteers in the pure sense, meaning – in their eyes – that they could come and go from the front as they pleased. Which meant that the few effective military commanders present could never tell how many men they could count on from one minute to the next. The Communists were the exception to this, and their insistence on discipline and authority meant that many officers loyal to the Republic ended up joining the party. And as the Republic tried to create a proper army of its own, virtually from scratch, the Communists took a leading role.
Yet this process would take the Republic almost two years, during which time it lost huge amounts of territory and men. Soviet military aid only served to slow down eventual defeat. At times the arrival of the latest weaponry from Moscow gave the appearance of handing the Republic the advantage, for example when Polikarpov planes chased slower Italian and German aircraft from the skies above Madrid. But a telling detail shows how better hardware can only take you so far: Republican troops had Soviet T-26 tanks, superior to anything that the rebels were supplied with from their own allies, but by the end of the war there were more T-26s in rebel hands than in Republican, having been captured in battle and turned against their original users. Militarily, the rebels had the upper hand from the off, and while the imbalance was gradually reduced, it is questionable whether real parity was ever reached: when the Republic lost the Battle of the Ebro in late 1938 – the biggest battle of the war and a showcase for the Republic’s ‘proper’ army – it had precious little left with which to continue the fight, exhausted and increasingly hungry. Final defeat was already on the horizon.
Republican disunity and military weakness could not have been in greater contrast to the other side. The rebels’ control of the Army of Africa has already been mentioned, as have Hitler and Mussolini’s almost immediate supplies of arms and other support. Italian forces in Spain would eventually number as many as eighty thousand, while the Condor Legion saw up to twelve thousand German military personnel operational on Spanish soil. The story of the Civil War is not one of total military dominance of one side by the other: Madrid stayed in Republican hands until the end of the conflict, while rebel offensives at Jarama and Guadalajara, for example, were stopped or defeated. But a general pattern did emerge as the war progressed of Republicans launching offensives of their own, only to be pushed back and often losing more territory in the wake of defeat. Such was the case, for example, at Teruel and the Ebro. Ever more desperate to win the support of London and Paris to its struggle, the Republic chose to fight as conventional a war as possible, spurning the guerrilla tactics which had proved so useful against Napoleon. Yet these large battles only brought defeat, collapse in morale and final exhaustion. And the Brits and the French never did come to the Republic’s assistance.
The latter period of the Spanish Civil War (Nov 1938)
Meanwhile, the rebels had a ‘proper’ army from the start, and one which was prepared to use terror as a weapon. Massacres in the wake of rebel victories became the norm, first by the front-line troops, who were given fifteen minutes to loot, rape and murder at free will when they took a town or city. Moroccan Regulares were particularly keen to get hold of sewing machines to send back home, while their commanders openly bragged about the brutal way they treated women. Republican depictions at the time of the moros as bloodthirsty barbarians may be viewed as racist today,
but rebel leaders themselves, notably General Queipo de Llano, deliberately used a deep-rooted Spanish fear of the old enemy as a weapon. While the massacres, mutilations and mass rapes carried out by rebel forces spoke for themselves. The directive came from the very top: brutality was to be employed as much as traditional arms such as artillery and rifles. And in an early example of what was to come, over two thousand people in Badajoz were rounded up in September 1936 after its fall to the rebels and systematically shot.
Violencia Page 26