FOUS (Federación Obrera de Unidad Sindical) – POUM-led trade union
FUE (Federación Universitaria de Estudiantes) – student union, founded in 1920s to combat the dictatorship, moved increasingly leftwards in 1930s
GEPCI (Gremis e Entitats de Petits Comerciants e Industrials) – PSUC-organized union for Catalan artisans, tradesmen and small manufacturers
SEU (Sindicato Español Universitario) – Falangist student union
STV (Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos) – Basque nationalist trade union
*UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores) – socialist
YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS
*JS (Juventudes Socialistas) – socialist youth
JC (Juventudes Comunistas) – communist youth
JSU (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas) – unified socialist youth, formed in 1936 from fusion of JS and JC
JCI (Juventud Comunista Ibérica) – POUM youth movement
FIJL (Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias) – anarchist youth
JAP (Juventudes de Acción Popular) – Catholic
Foreword
‘The subjective aspect of events, the “atmosphere” in which they took place, is also a condition of history … Indeed, can history be made real if (this aspect) is not resuscitated? Shall we leave the task solely to the novelist? …’
Pierre Vilar: ‘La guerra de 1936
en la historia contemporánea de España’
The appearance of a book on the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9 today requires some explanation. Major historical works over the past fifteen years or so have charted most of the features of that conflict, and it would be vain to hope to add anything new to the overall map of the period. But within the general and even detailed knowledge, one area has remained unarticulated: the subjective, a spectrum of the lived experiences of people who participated in the events. This is the purpose of the present book.
Oral history, as conceived here, is an attempt to reveal the intangible ‘atmosphere’ of events; to discover the outlook and motivations of the participants, willing or unwilling; to describe what civil war, revolution and counter-revolution felt like from inside both camps. The cause of the civil war lay deep within the formations of Spanish society; though rapidly internationalized, the war was fought out very largely by classes and sectors of that society. This book is rooted, therefore, in the Spanish experience.
Never more than at a time of extreme social crisis does the atmosphere become a determining factor in the way people respond to events. For, however intangible, it is never abstract or distant. It is what people feel. And what people feel lays the ground for their actions.
This is especially observable in a civil war. Clausewitz’s maxim on war can be reformulated for the circumstance: civil war is the continuation of politics – internal class politics – by other means. The political mobilization (or the broadening of a previous mobilization) of large masses of ‘ordinary’ people, brought on by a deepening social crisis, is a condition of it.
But it is often less in the unmediated articulation of these politics than in the (ideological) climate of the times that can be found many of the clues to social and individual behaviour in the conflict. It is in the latter that, seemingly, lie the sources which explain, for example, why individuals of the same class fought on opposing sides; why a man took up arms for the camp that was assassinating his relatives; why brother fought brother. The attempt to understand the atmosphere in which such events could occur can make accessible to us some of the realities and contradictions of the larger, impersonal movements of history. For the atmosphere does not hang above events like the ether; it is a social emanation, the result of very terrestrial struggles.
These observations have shaped the underlying pattern of the present work. But the creation of an intelligible ‘mosaic’ of more than 300 personal accounts has necessarily extended beyond this sphere. The attempt has been made to describe the major contours of the war through eyewitness narration. This, in turn, has required a particular narrative and analytical structure. The limitations of this type of oral history – and more especially of this particular book – must therefore be stressed.
Let me enumerate the most important of these. Oral history, in the sense practised here, is not a substitute for, but an adjunct of, traditional historiography; it functions within the interstices of the latter.1 The sum of micro experiences does not, of itself, make up an objective macro totality. The atmosphere, as I have indicated, does not explain the subsoil, but rather the reverse.
For this reason, in addition to that already advanced, the present book does not set out to provide a general history of the Spanish republic and civil war. It does, however, concentrate on what, forty years later, appear as some of the major issues. Within this framework there are further, specific limitations. The first is territorial. The personal accounts were deliberately sought in five regions: two on the republican side, two on the nationalist side, and one (which would be better stated as two) on both sides. These are, respectively: Madrid-rural Toledo and Barcelona–lower Aragon; Seville–Córdoba–surrounding countryside and Salamanca–Old Castile–Pamplona; finally, the ‘north’, Asturias and Vizcaya, which were captured by the nationalists halfway through the war. Excluded from the book, therefore, are two major areas: Galicia in the nationalist and the Levante in the republican rearguard.
Secondly, the book does not focus on the war at the front. After the first months, when direct civilian militia participation was all-important, it follows the fighting rather from the rearguard. In the circumstances this may seem a curious procedure. It is based on the conviction that the civil war was won as much in the rearguard as at the front and that the social and political issues at stake had their clearest expression in the former.
Thirdly, the international dimension is largely absent. The determination to present the war in its Spanish roots and as ‘lived’ by Spaniards is responsible. Apart from routine anathema of the fascist powers’ intervention and Anglo-French non-intervention, popular recollections of the international situation on the republican side tended to be slight. Soviet aid, the Moscow show trials, occasionally Munich. The situation was not much different in the opposing nationalist camp despite the presence of Italians and Germans. Although international aspects could never be kept totally out of the mind – propaganda did not allow it – the war for most Spaniards was a matter for Spaniards to resolve.
Fourthly, it does not concentrate on politics at governmental or leadership level. In this sense it is grass-roots history. It does, however, focus on the major socio-political forces in each of the areas selected. For this reason it may seem an overly ‘political’ book. Let me repeat: the civil war was about deeply political issues and the crisis which preceded it had polarized and politicized very large sectors of public opinion.
Oral history, I believe, should articulate the experiences of people who, historically speaking, would otherwise remain inarticulate (and in which sense alone the adjective ‘ordinary’ can be attached to them). In principle, therefore, I sought out people who had not occupied leadership posts, who had not written their memoirs, who did not have public or political reputations to defend. Rightly or wrongly, I believed such people would give a more direct and immediate feel of events. Usually, if they were members of a political or trade union organization, they were middle-level militants. Sometimes, tempted by the possibility, or led on by the reading of testimonial material, I ignored my own guidelines, as the reader will see. Almost invariably, I was glad to have done so. But by and large I preferred to adhere to the original concept.
I recorded some 2,750,000 words of interviews in just under two years. In collecting, and later selecting, material for this book (which uses less than 10 per cent of the original) I gave preference to concrete personal experience rather than to global opinion; struck out slander and – with a couple of exceptions – hearsay; and solicited political self-criticism rather than criticism of other parties
or organizations. I mention the latter because it is the source of another deficiency. The acerbity of the tone in which political polemic was, only too frequently, conducted is not, I now believe, sufficiently reproduced. The reader has only to compare the newspaper and other quotations which are scattered through the book to verify this. In part this is because the sharpness of tone has diminished with the years; but also because at the time I believed there was little to be gained by reverting to a style of polemic which, hopefully, had been transcended. I still believe this, but I signal its absence from the book.
I have, however, often let stand participants’ descriptions of the opposing side as ‘red’ or ‘fascist’. Misleading and often deliberately provocative, these labels have been retained because they summon up contemporary perceptions of the enemy. The solution I have adopted to the problem of names is as follows: those who rose to overthrow the republican regime on 18 July 1936, I have called insurgents until, in October of the same year, they formed their own regime; thereafter they become, in their own nomenclature, nationalists. The republican regime was plainly transformed into something new by the outbreak of war. I have frequently used the term ‘Popular Front’ to describe it in an initial period, although recognizing that it is not strictly accurate: while fighting on this side, the anarcho-syndicalists did not form part of the Popular Front before or during the war. Later, as bourgeois democratic principles were re-asserted by the central government, I have tended again to use the title republican.
Another question with particular relevance to this book is certain to arise in the reader’s mind. And that is: how are we to know that what people say is the truth? It is a justifiable question and can be answered without impugning the good faith of any of the participants: we cannot always know. Memory can be notoriously tricky, a long time has elapsed. It was not possible to check each assertion, every experience, unless documentary evidence existed. Where there seemed to me doubt and I had some documentary source to support it, I went back to the witness; if the matter still seemed uncertain I tended to omit it. Sometimes, however, an assertion of fact that is demonstrably untrue constitutes part of the atmosphere; in this case it is left to stand but, in one way or another, its validity is challenged shortly afterwards. On other occasions I have let statements stand that fall into neither of these categories. I was guided then by a sense that, even if some doubt might exist, the statement corresponded to a general climate of feeling which it was important to capture. The aim of the book, as I have said, was not to write another history of the civil war but a book about how people lived that war. It was their truth I wished to record. And what people thought – or what they thought they thought – also constitutes an historical fact. Inevitably, memories of thirty-five and forty years past have been ‘worked over’ in the intervening years; but much less, I am convinced, than might have been the case in other circumstances. This is due, first, to the nature of the war itself; secondly, to the political immobilism imposed by the victors in the post-war years and, lastly, to the fact that many participants were very young. Memories have ‘frozen’ as a result. Certainly, some of the participants have changed their views (and sometimes political affiliations) over the years. Rather than detract from their evidence, it tended to enhance it for me by focusing on it a critical light. Again, because of the need to make a coherent totality, it may seem as though this book is saying: this is ‘how it was’. But no. This is how it is remembered as having been.
Finally, the reader may well wonder whether a foreigner was best suited to inquire into matters so deeply Spanish. I often asked myself the same question; especially as much of the writing on the civil war has, perforce, been done by non-Spaniards. The answer, I believe, lies in uneven development: a Spanish publisher could not then afford the commercial and political risk of supporting a project which, after four and a half years’ full-time work, might be refused publication. The more advanced economies of the US and Britain, and the willingness of my publishers in both countries to take a gamble, made it possible for me to carry out. I trust that in the Spain of today this situation would no longer exist; for in the intervening period one epoch has ended and a new one begun.
*
These interviews were recorded in the twilight of the Franquista era, between June 1973 and May 1975: 95 per cent of them in Spain, the rest in France. No problems were put in my way. Apart from caution in rural areas, especially in Andalusia where there was still fear, people talked openly. It was a privileged moment in which to capture memories of a period distant enough to be history and yet near enough to be vividly remembered by a representative cross-section of participants. Six months after the last interview, Franco was dead. The dictatorial regime created by the victor of the civil war began to be dismantled. A new era was opening for Spain.
1. The debt owed to it by this work is so pervasive that, apart from the prologue, where the reader will find the major sources, I have not burdened the text with repeated acknowledgements.
* * *
History proceeds in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, and every one of them is in turn made into what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces, which give rise to one resultant – the historical event. This may in its turn again be regarded as the product of a power which operates as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else and what emerges is something that no one intended.
Engels to Joseph Bloch,
London, September 1890
* * *
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? …
So many reports
So many questions.
Questions from a Worker who Reads
(Bertolt Brecht)
* * *
* * *
Every day there are street demonstrations. What do all these vivas shouted by the crowds mean? They mean death! Death to the adversary; outrage and persecution for the opponent.
ABC, monarchist editorial (Seville, 4 March 1936)
* * *
Trust no one. In the supreme moments of history, leaders always counsel moderation and discipline. Fascism is the systematized criminality of powerful castes. It can only be overcome by destroying the bases of capitalist society.
Solidaridad Obrera, CNT (Barcelona, 2 June 1936)
* * *
The civil governor told journalists he had no news to communicate. No information about military movements is authorized.
Defensor de Córdoba, Catholic (Córdoba, 17 July 1936)
* * *
July 1936
Friday, 17 July
MADRID
Just received from Tetuán, Spanish Morocco, the telegram, with its banal saint’s day greetings, was signed Fernando Gutiérrez.
He counted the letters, seventeen, then hastened to pass the message on to General Mola in Pamplona: the army in Morocco would rise at 1700 hours.
MELILLA (Spanish Morocco)
Lt Julio DE LA TORRE, of the Spanish Foreign Legion, looked at his fellow officers; he saw that they, too, had seen the armed police outside. Lt Col. Seguí, the chief plotter in Morocco, who was giving his final orders, broke off in mid-sentence. In the momentary silence, the conspirators realized they had been betrayed.
The officers loaded their pistols, readied hand-grenades. While Col. Gazapo talked to the police lieutenant at the door of the map room, Lt DE LA TORRE leapt to the telephone.
—‘Report immediately with some legionarie
s to the Comisión de Límites,’ I told my sergeant at the post nearby. ‘We’re in danger.’ …
Fear of betrayal had already made them advance the hour of the rising to that evening. But now?
Within minutes the sergeant and about eight legionaries burst into the courtyard where they saw only armed police. There was a moment of indecision.
—I leapt out, pushing past those in the door. My heart was beating wildly, my body trembling. ‘Have faith in me! Load! Aim!’ I shouted, looking at my men. At moments like that you command with the eyes more than the voice. The legionaries aimed their rifles at the policemen; my pistol pointed straight at the police lieutenant’s heart. In our eyes they saw our determination. One of the policemen, with a look of terror, dropped his rifle. ‘Lieutenant, don’t shoot! We’ve got families!’
‘Surrender! Drop your weapons!’
They did. Neither we nor they could imagine the full consequences of our first victory. After that, it didn’t take long to capture the town. There was a bit of resistance, but the people fled when we brought in more troops …
MADRID
In the torrid afternoon heat, as oppressive as the political situation of the past week, parliamentary reporters gathered in the recessed Cortes, in search of news. While they were talking, the figure of Indalecio Prieto, the socialist leader, appeared unexpectedly. ‘The garrison in Melilla has risen,’ he said tersely. ‘The workers are being slaughtered –’ The reporters ran to the phone booths. Some tried putting calls through to Melilla. ‘The line is out of order,’ came the reply.
In his office, Alfredo LUNA, a newspaper editor and moderate republican, heard his reporter’s words with surprise. The seriousness of the situation had escaped him. ‘How wrong! Worse, how wrong of the government not to have realized it, not to have taken adequate precautions!’
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