The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  After the meeting at Bayreuth, a department in the German air ministry, special unit (Sonderstab) ‘W’, was set up by the state secretary of the air ministry, Erhard Milch, under General Wilberg, to superintend the recruitment of ‘volunteers’ and the dispatch of materials.2 Two holding companies were also established, through which other material from Germany to Spain would be sent, along with all payment or Spanish raw materials sent in exchange. These companies were HISMA (Compañia Hispano-Marroquí de Transportes), which was under the direction of the astute Bernhardt, and ROWAK (Rohstoff-und Waren-Einkaufsgesellschaft).3 If a German trader wished to sell anything to Spain, he would have to sell it first to ROWAK; HISMA would market it. A fleet of ships was assembled, and the navy instructed to provide protection. Twenty Junkers 52s (the tough, standard transport aeroplane or bomber) and six Heinkel 51s (a less reliable fighter) were sent to Morocco, with eighty-six men, mostly Luftwaffe reservists: the first Junkers arrived on 29 July. Some of the former’s engines were specially refitted to enable them to reach Spain, though half only went by air, half by sea.4 At the same time, a ‘tourist group’ (Reisegesellschafts-union) of Germans for Spain was set up under Major Alexander von Scheele, a veteran of the First World War who had once emigrated to the Chaco and had recently returned. These men left Hamburg for Cádiz on 29 July with the Heinkels and half the Junkers in the merchant ship Usamoro. Milch bade them good-bye personally. They arrived on 1 August.5 These were followed by engineers, other technicians, and some more fighters.6 Scheele later became the military head of HISMA; Bernhardt, the general manager at Seville; and Colonel von Thoma, commander of the ground troops and tanks, which began to arrive in about a month. Von Thoma and his officers set out partly to train the Spaniards, partly to gain battle experience themselves. He found, he says, the Spaniards quick to learn—and quick to forget.1

  Henceforward, for two years and more, four transport aircraft were dispatched to Spain from Germany each week. Cargo boats were sent on an average every five days.2 Bernhardt arrived back in Spain on the first Junker on 28 July. The nationalist commander in the air, General Kindelán, said to him: ‘You are just a comedian trying to make money’. Bernhardt expostulated and told him to tell Franco of his suspicions. The Junkers immediately went into action to help the air lift. The next day or so, after the rest of the aircraft had arrived, Bernhardt went to tell both Queipo de Llano and Mola that the German help would go only to Franco. Queipo took the information with a laugh, while Mola’s face fell; he knew what the news meant for him.3

  These arrangements were made within a week of the request made to Hitler by Franco through Bernhardt. The German foreign ministry was taken by surprise. On 28 July, Dumont, at the Spanish desk in Berlin, was still minuting that the ministry was against intervention.4 This view was shared by the war minister, Field-Marshal von Blomberg, and by General von Fritsch, the chief of staff. They thought Unternehmen Feuerzauber, ‘Operation Magic Fire’, as the Spanish adventure was known, militarily wasteful. Ribbentrop, Hitler’s adviser on foreign affairs, shared these doubts.5 Both the German foreign and economics ministries were, therefore, kept in the dark about HISMA and ROWAK until mid-October—though the finance ministry knew from the start, since it gave ROWAK a credit of 3 million reichsmarks.6 Nevertheless, the foreign ministry acquiesced without protest in the decisions taken against their advice.7 When the Spanish embassy complained to the German counsellor in Madrid that German aircraft had been reported at Tetuán, the terse note ‘not to be answered’ was scrawled on the copy of the protest which arrived at the foreign ministry.1 Everything was kept secret. The air ace Adolf Galland described how ‘one or other of our comrades [in the Luftwaffe] vanished suddenly into thin air … After about six months he would return, sunburnt and in high spirits.’2

  Nearly all the Germans who went to Spain, especially as pilots, were young Nazis who believed that, in the words of one of their songs, ‘We shall be marching onwards, if all else crashes about us: Our foes are the reds, the bolshevizers of the world.’3 Most seem to have been genuine volunteers.

  It was through Portugal that much German aid was arranged. The role played by that country in the Spanish war was simple. Less clerical than the Portuguese corporative régime, the Spanish nationalists stood for much the same things as ‘gracious Salazar’, as the South African poet Roy Campbell would refer to the dictator in Lisbon.4 The Portuguese government feared an invasion if the Left should win.5 They were not tempted by the superficially attractive idea of encouraging the disintegration of Spain into small caliphates.6 The military aid which Salazar could give the nationalists was small. But he offered them other things as valuable: a place in which to plot; a refuge; and a means of communicating between their two zones at the start of the civil war. Nicolás Franco, the general’s eldest brother, was permitted to establish his headquarters for the purchase of arms at Lisbon. The republican ambassador in that capital, the eminent historian and exforeign minister, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, abandoned by his staff, swiftly became a prisoner in his own embassy. Salazar remarked on 1 August that he proposed to help the rebels ‘with all available means’—including the intervention of the Portuguese army, if that should be necessary.1 As a result, Spanish republicans who escaped into Portuguese territory were often handed over to the nationalists—such as, for instance, Andrés de Castro, a republican lawyer, with twenty-four fugitives from Vigo, who were shot on the International Bridge at Tuy.2 The Portuguese press served the nationalists from the start. On 20 August, the German chargé d’affaires at Lisbon reported that war material brought from Germany in the steamships Wigbert and Kamerun had been dispatched onwards to Spain most smoothly. Salazar, he said, had removed ‘all difficulties … by his personal initiative and handling of details’.3

  The same day that Hitler agreed to help Franco, Gaston Monmousseau, the French communist railwaymen’s leader and chief of the European office of the communist trade-union organization, the Profintern, apparently presided over a joint meeting of the executive committees of that body and of the Comintern.4 It was decided that 1,000 million francs should be sought to aid the Spanish government, of which the unions of Russia would contribute nine-tenths. The administration of the fund was to be carried out by a committee composed of Thorez, leader of the French communist party, Togliatti, La Pasionaria, Largo Caballero, and José Díaz.5 An intense propaganda campaign in addition would be organized throughout Europe and America for aid to the republic. A number of organizations for aid were set up, nominally humanitarian and independent, in fact dominated by communists. Paris, and the artful Willi Muenzenberg, remained the centre of this activity. The most important of these groups was International Red Help, which had been active in assisting the revolutionaries of the Left since 1934. On 30 July, a huge meeting was held in the Salle Wagram in Paris at which Malraux, back from Spain, was the star speaker in a series of speeches which, punctuated by the ‘Marseillaise’, ‘La Carmagnole’ and ‘La Jeune Garde’, called for ‘volunteers and for contributions to aid Spain in her fight for liberty’. Afterwards, a Comité International de l’Aide au Peuple Espagnol was formed, of which the philanthropist Victor Basch was president.1 This shortly had branches in nearly every country. For the time being, these organizations concerned themselves only with the provision of money, food, and medical supplies, not military aid. The committees’ nominal leaders were usually distinguished, if innocent, but served by communist secretaries. But there was as yet no military aid from Russia. When the Spanish communists complained, Togliatti harshly remarked: ‘Russia regards her security as the apple of her eye. A false move on her part could upset the balance of power and unleash a war in East Europe.’2 At the same time, the (non-communist) International Federation of Trade Unions and the Labour Socialist International also met, in Brussels, on 28 July, deciding also to make an international appeal for funds for Spain—though this met with limited success, £45,000 only being raised by September.3

  The first reaction to the
Spanish war was soon to be observed across the Atlantic.4 Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Cuba had welcomed many recent immigrants from Spain, and all the countries of Latin and South America felt concerned by the events in ‘la madre patria’. There was strong feeling for the nationalists in Brazil and the Canadian province of Quebec, where, as in Spain, there were fascist organizations in a Catholic background. The government of Chile was strongly pro-nationalist. The Mexican government from the start supported the Spanish republic, as might be expected from a country whose constitution was itself a protest against clerical and aristocratic privilege. In Venezuela, Rómulo Betancourt’s illegal reformist party, Democratic Action, took shape around the idea of support for the Spanish republic, while the Cuban Left felt as moved by the drama in Spain as by any event since their own revolution in 1933: Spaniards were important in the commercial life of Havana.

  The United States was preparing to endorse the achievements of Roosevelt’s first term of office in the presidential elections of 1936. International affairs then seemed far away to most Americans. Neutrality in all ‘adventures’ in Europe was the policy of both Republican and Democratic parties. During the Abyssinian crisis, in May 1935, a Neutrality Act had been passed in Congress, rendering it illegal for American citizens to sell or transport arms to belligerents, once the President had proclaimed there to be a state of war. Although this act was not intended to apply to civil wars, the American government behaved from the start of the Spanish conflict as if it did, although President Roosevelt had sympathy for the republic—a point of view held more vigorously by the American ambassador in Spain, Claude Bowers, a journalist and biographer (of Jefferson) by profession. Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the treasury, Henry Wallace, secretary for agriculture, Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, and Sumner Welles, the assistant secretary of state, were also republican champions. But the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, had only sympathy for the cause of impartiality, and usually had his way. On the other hand, some companies such as the Texas Oil Company had a free hand to help Franco, as will shortly be seen.1

  Public opinion in the US became, however, almost as moved by the Spanish war as it was in Europe. A torrent of propaganda poured from the Spanish government’s information bureau in New York and from the ‘Peninsular News Service’, the nationalist headquarters in the same city. American newspapers took sides in the war with as great vehemence as did those in Britain and France. American Catholics attacked reporters of republican sympathies and liberals attacked those who wrote in apology for the nationalists. On the New York Times, this discrepancy of view extended to two of its own newspapermen, W. P. Carney, who wrote from among the nationalists, and Herbert Matthews, among the republicans.1 American socialist and liberal intellectuals took the cause of republican Spain to their hearts as they had never taken any foreign cause, and the anti-fascist (pro-Soviet) organizations already in existence grew in strength.2

  On 29 July, meantime, out of the first consignment of twelve Savoia 81 bombers3 sent by Mussolini from Elmas (Cagliari), under Colonel Ruggero Bonomi, to help the nationalists, one made a forced landing at Berkane in French Morocco, one crashed at Zaida in Algeria, and a third crashed into the sea thirty miles offshore. An inquiry by General Denain, a former French air minister, showed that the aircraft had had their Italian colours painted out, had been fitted with four machineguns, had left Sardinia at dawn, and had been manned by Italian air-force men in civilian clothes. A survivor admitted that the expedition was being made to assist the Spanish rebels.4 By that time, the other Savoias were at Franco’s headquarters, under Bonomi, with a personal friend of Mussolini’s, the pilot Ettore Muti, among his men.

  Now, earlier, on 29 July, the Quai d’Orsay had denied that the French government had sent any war material to the Spanish republic: and Blum and Delbos repeated the denial to the foreign affairs committee of the Senate on the 30th. On 2 August, there was a stormy meeting of the French cabinet. Cot argued that the proof of Italian help to the rebels showed that the policy of non-intervention had failed. Delbos, on the prompting of Léger and ‘in consideration of the British position’, argued that all countries who might aid one or other of the combatants in Spain should be approached for a general agreement on non-intervention. The cabinet announced that they had decided to appeal urgently to ‘interested governments’—Britain and Italy in the first instance—for a ‘Non-Intervention Pact’. This plan was welcomed by the British, who made it their business to ensure its success.5 Nevertheless, despite these denials, and perhaps unknown to some of the French cabinet, Pierre Cot, Jean Moulin, Malraux and their friends were already dispatching shipments to Spain of some of the newest military aeroplanes—including Marcel Bloch (Dassault) bombers built in 1935, Potez 54 bombers just entering into service and Dewoitine 371 fighters. These aircraft were flown to aerodromes in the south of France such as Montaudran (Toulouse) or Ubarière (Perpignan), where they were either taken over by Spanish pilots or flown to Spain by French pilots in reserve.1 They were received at Prat de Llobregat, Barcelona, by Abel Guides, a French pilot nominated for the post by Cot. Altogether, by 8 August, some seventy aircraft had been sent, about forty or fifty from the government, about twenty or thirty through private arms dealers or impresarios, such as Malraux.2 The first aircraft probably left on 31 July. It had not been, in the end, so easy to persuade the directors of the Breguet and Potez works to help the Spaniards, and only the directors of Dewoitine sent material with any enthusiasm, along with those at the Hotchkiss machine-gun works.3 The value of this aid was anyway rather debatable since the Potezes, though they could carry 2,000 pounds of bombs, were slow: they could only fly at 100 miles an hour and could only operate with a crew of seven; they were hence nicknamed ‘collective flying coffins’.4 The Dewoitines (at 180 miles an hour) were faster than the Nieuports, but they arrived without armaments and were not easy to make ready for war.

  Recruitment of French technicians, as of pilots, followed. Specialized workmen, for example, were secured in France for the naval repair workshops at Cartagena and Valencia. The French radical politician Senator Boussutrot organized recruitment of pilots (some to be paid the enormous sum of 50,000 pesetas a month). The lives of these men were insured at 500,000 pesetas, with, appropriately, an insurance company of which Boussutrot was director.1 At the same time, the four Fokker aircraft bought by Franco in England and held up at Bordeaux were returned whence they had come; and soon the imaginative André Malraux obtained the right to form and command in action an air squadron of foreigners. He collected some twenty aircraft, mostly Potez 54 bombers, but also the onetime private plane of the Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia, a few mechanics, an interpreter, a transport manager, and a dozen pilots. Some of these were idealists, such as the communist commissar Julien Segnaire, and some were mercenaries. Most were French, but there were a few Italians and later some Americans, Germans and an Englishman. The ‘Escuadrilla España’, as Malraux called his squadron, was first based in Barcelona, then moved to Barajas outside Madrid, being active on the front in August in Estremadura; the pilots lived in Madrid. Gaston Cusin, a trade unionist in the cabinet of the French Minister of Finance (Vincent Auriol), had organized by August a secret department of the French state whose aim was to help the Spanish Republic.2

  In the revolutionary columns on the ground there were also by August many foreigners, particularly German and Italian émigrés, communists and socialists, who had come to the ‘People’s Olympiad’ at Barcelona. Italian anarchists had been settled in Barcelona for many years, and some of them fought in the battle for the telephone exchange there. An Austrian anarchist died in the battle for the Atarazanas barracks, and perhaps two hundred foreigners in all took part in the fighting in July in Catalonia. The Italians soon formed themselves into the Gastone-Sozzi Battalion,1 and the Germans, under Hans Beimler, a communist ex-deputy of the Reichstag, into the Thaelmann ‘Centuria’.2 A number of French and Belgians formed a
Paris Battalion. These men (and some women) were of no particular political grouping, though communists predominated. In late August, another Italian group, the Giustizia e Libertà Column, led by the leader of the group of Italian social democrats of that name, Carlo Rosselli, who had been active among Italian exiles in Paris since his escape from a fascist gaol, fought near Huesca. The first English volunteers in Spain were Sam Masters and Nat Cohen, communist ‘garment workers’ from East London who were bicycling in France at the time of the rising. In Barcelona, they organized a ‘centuria’ named after the English communist, Tom Mann. The first Englishman who went to the front was apparently John Cornford, a twenty-year-old communist research student in history at Trinity College, Cambridge, the great-grandson of Charles Darwin and son of a professor of ancient philosophy.3 Surprisingly, for a communist, he joined a POUM column on the Aragon front, at Leciñena on 13 August. This was because he had brought no papers with him proving his ‘anti-fascist identity’, and was thus refused membership of the PSUC column.4 The first English volunteer to be killed was a woman, Felicia Browne, a communist painter, shot in Aragon on 25 August. Previously living on the Costa Brava, she had fought in the street-battles in Barcelona, whither she had gone to attend the People’s Olympiad. Altogether these early ‘volunteers for liberty’ in Aragon or Catalonia probably numbered 1,000–1,500.1