The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  The battle of the University City continued until 23 November. By this time, three-quarters of the area was in Mola’s hands. The Clinical and Santa Cristina Hospitals, with the Institutes of Hygiene and Cancer, were his furthermost points of penetration. His advance towards the Plaza de la Moncloa was prevented by the continued defence in the Hall of Philosophy and Letters. The two almost exhausted armies now dug trenches and built fortifications. The nationalists realized that any further advance into Madrid would cost too much. The republicans understood that a dislodgement of their enemies would be equally difficult. The Russian aircraft, though used timidly, with few long-distance bombing attacks, were adequate to give the republic full protection. A sombre meeting of nationalist commanders met at Leganés, on 23 November, under Franco’s chairmanship. The rebel generals agreed that they should call off the frontal attack on Madrid. The next attacks would be attempts at encirclement. Thus there could be no hope for Mola of a cup of coffee in the Gran Via’s Café Molinero.4

  The question of how many were killed in these famous battles in Madrid remains a matter of controversy. Though the deaths were fewer than might be supposed, given the 30–40,000 involved on both sides, the casualties on both sides probably amounted to about 10,000.1

  Madrid now settled down to what was described as a siege, though only part of the city was invested. Measures continued against the Fifth Column, especially those suspected of firing at nights from ‘phantom cars’—an act of sabotage planned by a chief of the falangists in the Faculty of Medicine, Ignacio Arevalo, who was shortly killed. The police knocked one night at the Finnish Embassy in the Calle Fernando el Santo, to be refused admittance. From inside, someone opened fire (one policeman being hit). Finally breaking in, the police, headed by the young communist director of security, Serrano Poncela, and the ubiquitous Koltsov, found 525 Spanish bourgeois persons within. The Embassy officials, save one Spanish-born employee, had all left for Valencia.2 Another characteristic event at the start of the winter was the murder of the Baron de Borchgrave, the Belgian chargé. He had persuaded several of his compatriots in the International Brigade to desert. One night, his body, with two others, was discovered outside Madrid.3 By then, nearly all the embassies in Madrid had been removed to Valencia, the American one being the last; yet the situation remained diplomatically odd since, while the ambassadors lingered on at St Jean de Luz as if the summer were lasting forever, small staffs of officials remained in Madrid to look after right-wing refugees.

  On 13 December, the nationalists sought to continue an offensive tentatively begun ten days earlier, aiming to cut off the republicans in the Guadarramas and ultimately to surround Madrid from the north.4 The battle took the form of a struggle by the nationalists to reach the Madrid-Corunna road some miles short of El Escorial. General Orgaz, newly appointed supreme commander of the Madrid front in place of Mola, directed operations. Varela commanded in the field. Beneath him were assembled 18,000 infantry and cavalry, organized into four mobile brigades under García Escámez, Barrón, Sáenz de Buruaga, and Monasterio.1 The nationalists began, as usual, with a heavy artillery bombardment. On 14 December, the advance began on Boadilla del Monte, a lonely pueblo in the plain of Castile (though less than twenty miles from Madrid) dominated by a small monastery. By night, the town had fallen. The republican defence there consisted of a series of heterogeneous battalions under Major Barceló, a republican army officer who, like many other regular soldiers, had joined the communist party since he was attracted by its discipline. A detachment of Russian tanks, under General Pavlov, recently appointed to take over command from Krivoshein of the tanks sent from Russia to Spain, and both International Brigades, were flung into the battle. (The two British volunteer groups attached to the Thaelmann and the Commune de Paris Battalions, Cornford’s group and Romilly’s, met for the first time beneath the ilex trees on the road to Boadilla.) The nationalists retired from Boadilla, and the Dombrowsky and Thaelmann Battalions entered it. Then the nationalists surrounded them. A terrible fight ensued. Casualties on both sides were high. The Dombrowsky and Thaelmann Battalions left seventy-eight corpses behind in the town itself. All but two of the ten still remaining English members of the Thaelmann Battalion’s first company were killed.1 Another violent hand-to-hand battle occurred for the nearby castle of the Duque de Sueca, held by republican members of the civil guard, who eventually retired leaving behind a hundred bodies. After this, the nationalists, having won only Boadilla and Villanueva de la Cañada, five miles to the north, called off their attack.

  17. The battles of Boadilla and the Corunna Road, December 1936

  No sooner had these battles been concluded than the republic launched an abortive attack on the Córdoba front. A new republican Army of the South had just been organized under General Martínez Monje, with the Russian Meretzkov as adviser, commanding columns which were about to be transformed into Mixed Brigades. A minor nationalist advance had begun, and the republic judged it wise to respond vigorously. It was during this battle that the famous communiqué was apparently issued: ‘During the day the advance continued without the loss of any territory’. By this time, the British volunteers for the International Brigade had been numerous enough to permit the formation of a full British ‘No. 1 Company’, 145 strong, now attached to the French, Marseillaise, Battalion of the newly organized 14th International Brigade, commanded by the Polish General ‘Walter’ (Šwierczewski).1 These Anglo-Saxons were commanded by Captain George Nathan, who, having risen to the rank of CSM during the First World War, had then become briefly an officer in the Brigade of Guards. He genuinely found himself as a leader in Spain—resourceful, brave as a lion, and respected by all.2 One section of the British was composed of Irishmen who all had, it was said, ‘experience of warfare in Ireland’. Their chivalrous leader, Frank Ryan, had been a radical member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) since 1918.3 The company left by train for the Andújar front on Christmas Eve and fought with the rest of the Brigade between 28 and 29 December, without success, to capture the small village of Lopera. In this battle died Ralph Fox, the commissar of the company, and communist poet.4 Another promising English poet, John Cornford, was also killed, on the day following his twenty-first birthday.5 In the same action died Pepe, ‘El Algabeño’, the aide of Queipo de Llano, bull-fighter turned falangist, and now column commander. He died as he had lived, violently; ‘we killed a lot of people, it’s true’, he once admitted, ‘but they had the last rights and could confess. They no. You can see the difference.’6 The consequence of this action was the rebel capture of some 1,000 square miles of good land, some towns, and the hydro-electric station at El Carpio. In their retreat, as usual, the republicans shot any prisoners which they had made of the Right, especially at Montoro.

  After the failure of the action, André Marty appeared at General Walter’s headquarters, and Major Gaston Delasalle, commander of the Marseillaise Battalion, was accused of spying for the nationalists, tried, and shot. The major died protesting his innocence, shouting imprecations at Marty and begging the intervention of the Alsatian Colonel Putz, the president of the council of war which had condemned him. If Delasalle was a spy for anyone, however, which seems doubtful, it would presumably have been for the government of France and not for Franco.1

  After Christmas, a new attempt was made by the nationalists to cut the Madrid-Corunna road. The columns engaged in the battle of Boadilla had been reinforced by new conscripted troops and falangists who had been trained by German officers at Cáceres. These were faced by a republican army reorganized on the Madrid front as an army corps (Miaja in command), with five divisions, led respectively by Nino Nanetti (an Italian communist who, arriving in Barcelona, had led a battalion of Catalan youth at Huesca in August), Modesto (the Spanish communist ex-NCO of Africa and the organizer of the Fifth Regiment) and regular Colonels Perea, Prada and José María Galán. The brunt of the nationalist attack was faced by Modesto’s division, composed of new Mixed Brigades led by El Campesin
o, Luis Barceló, Cipriano Mera, and Gustavo Durán. Mera was the leading anarchist commander produced by the war, while Durán had been a composer—for films mostly—who found himself as a commander, and had, before Christmas, been ‘Kléber’s’ chief of staff.1 On 3 January, the attack began. Barrón advanced along the road from Villanueva de la Cañada and, on 4 January, reached the first houses of Las Rozas, on the Madrid–El Escorial railway. On the right, García Escámez and Sáenz de Buruaga fought against tenacious resistance at Pozuelo. The advance was slow, since the number of summer villas in the area afforded good cover to the defenders. Kléber sent as reinforcements the Commune de Paris Battalion to Pozuelo and the Edgar André and Thaelmann Battalions to Las Rozas. On 5 January, after a day of inaction due to heavy fog, a new nationalist attack began. Bombing was followed by the advance of tanks and mobile artillery, then by the first two infantry waves, and then by more tanks. The republican front broke everywhere. This blitzkrieg attack was of interest to those German officers on the nationalist side who, with ruthless objectivity, continued to regard Spain as a ‘European Aldershot’.

  A little earlier, at Pozuelo, six Russian armoured cars, with 37-millimetre guns based originally on German Rheinmetall design, had put twenty-five light German Mercedes tanks out of action—an occurrence which ultimately caused many modifications in German armament manufacture.2 Now, the brigades of Barceló, El Campesino, and Cipriano Mera lost touch with each other, and munitions ran out. Miaja, in general command, was forced to send blank rounds to the front on the assumption that men who heard their rifles firing would go on defending themselves. He even staged a mock execution of deserters to prevent weakness in the trenches. The sense of impending disaster caused the transfer of Lister’s brigade from Madrid, and persuaded Largo Caballero to send the 14th International Brigade up from Córdoba.

  But the nationalist advance continued. Orgaz’s columns reached the main road at Las Rozas and beyond Pozuelo (though the town itself held on). But Orgaz’s columns suffered heavy casualties from the machine-guns of the International Brigade. On the 6th, the Thaelmann Battalion was sent to hold out at Las Rozas, and not to retreat an inch farther. These orders were later revised, but by then messages could not get through, since the battalion was surrounded. All day the Thaelmann Battalion held their ground, against tanks, aerial attack and infantry. The Moors—there was probably still a Moroccan majority in the nationalist assault force—stormed several of their trenches and bayoneted the wounded whom they found there. But the Germans did not give way. The next day, Kléber sent a new order to the battalion, to advance. The survivors had reluctantly to send back the following message: ‘Impossible. The Thaelmann Battalion has been destroyed.’1 Walter, leader of No. 1 Company of the Thaelmann Battalion,2 had during this battle the eerie experience of coming upon the body of a Condor Legion pilot with whom he had once served in the same air squadron.3

  By 9 January, the nationalists had conquered, at great cost, seven miles of the converted highway, from just beyond the last houses of Madrid at the Puerta de Hierro to Las Rozas. On 10 January, there arrived in Madrid the 14th and 12th International Brigades, including the British No. 1 Company, commanded now by Jock Cunningham, a communist since 1920 when he had been gaoled for leading a mutiny of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Jamaica.1 Nathan commanded the Marseillaise Battalion in succession to the ill-fated Delasalle. A German group of the 14th Brigade asked for twelve hours’ sleep after their forty-eight-hour journey following on their battles at Córdoba. Walter, their Polish commander, appealed to them: ‘The government has called for the best troops. That is you. Or could there have been a mistake with regard to the 14th Brigade?’ The recalcitrant troops went on to the front, this being perhaps the first time in history that a Polish commander has rebuked a German force. The next day, the republic counter-attacked in heavy mist (unusual in Madrid) and fierce cold. The 12th International Brigade reached Majadahonda and the 14th, Las Rozas—a battalion of the latter being lost in the mist and never being seen again. Russian tanks, led in person by General Pavlov, drove about, destroying men but unable to gain ground. The battle continued till 15 January, when each side dug fortifications. Both had lost 15,000 men in ten days. Orgaz retained his seven miles of main road, Miaja had prevented the isolation of the Sierras. The military stalemate thus appeared complete.2 The rebels had observed that their opponents’ power of resistance had increased and attributed that to the existence of ‘foreign professional commanders’3 as well as to discipline and new armaments.

  The remainder of the 1,300-mile front was meantime quiet, since neither side had enough modern weapons for more than one battle at the same time. The republicans had men enough but many of these were, in the mind of the general staff, too unreliable (as in Aragon), too badly trained (as in the south), or too poorly armed (as along the Cantabrian coast). The fronts themselves still consisted in most places simply of ‘a system of narrow trenches hewn out of the rock with primitive loopholes made out of piles of limestone’. Twelve sentries might be ‘at various points in the trench, in front of which was the barbed-wire, and then the hillside slid down to a seemingly bottomless ravine: opposite lay naked hills’.1 On every hilltop, in Aragon, for example, there seemed to be a knot of ragged, dirty men, nationalist or republican, ‘shivering round their flag’, with bullets occasionally wandering between them—and sometimes voices, encouraging desertion, painting a rosy picture of the comforts to be had on the other side, and shouting insults. Nationalists would, indeed, desert, sometimes five a night, before a single company’s sector. The republic offered every deserter from their enemies 50 pesetas, and 100 if they brought their arms with them—not a particularly enticing reward. There were also instances of desertion by republicans though, at this stage in the war, the balance was probably in the republic’s favour. In most cases the deserters, however, were men who had been caught in the wrong place at the start of the war, had pretended to belong to the side for which they were fighting to save their lives, and had been waiting, ever since, for an opportunity to cross the lines.

  Dr Junod, the indefatigable humanitarian of the Red Cross, had established himself at St Jean de Luz in order to try to effect exchanges of prisoners, mostly persons apprehended at the beginning of the war rather than soldiers. Red Cross branch offices were set up in Salamanca and Valencia which communicated through Geneva. Lists of prisoners were compiled and, occasionally, individuals would be exchanged by Red Cross agencies between prisoners in one camp or the other and their relations. Giral, who became the republican minister in charge of the possible exchange of prisoners, proposed an exchange of 10,000—but the nationalists were unhelpful, and only a few hundred were exchanged.2 Friends and enemies rubbed shoulders in the Red Cross offices, irreconcilable even in their sorrow. Dr Junod told later the story of Isabella, a fierce monarchist, on behalf of whose brother he had pestered the republican authorities for months. At last the news came: ‘Executed with ten others. Buried in the cemetery.’ Tearless but deadly pale, she passed on her way out Carlota, whose fiancé had been missing. Each knew the story of the other. They saw each other and they understood at once. With the same movement of contempt and hatred, they avoided each other as they passed. But Carlota said afterwards: ‘At least she can visit his grave. But I shall never know, never.’1

  The character of the winter of 1936 in Spain was, however, best expressed by the long convoy of lorries, laden with food brought by the nationalists to feed Madrid once it had fallen. Their contents slowly rotted in the snow and rain. A mile away, behind the republican lines, the people of Madrid stoically put up with rice, bread, and increasing hunger, the consequence of the killing of herds and immediate consumption during the first days of revolution, and of general economic dislocation, as well as the presence, in the republican zone, of a million refugees who had fled during the course of the autumn from one province after another.

  29

  The repercussions of one event in particular ext
ended over both sides of these battle lines. This was the trial of José Antonio. The decision to bring the leader of the Falange (who had now been in Alicante gaol since 6 July, remarkably well treated by an admiring prison staff) to trial seems to have been inspired by the fear that, if the ‘military rebellion’ were to collapse, one of their greatest enemies would go unscathed.

  Plans for an exchange for José Antonio had failed; the government seem not to have been able to accept such an arrangement for fear of their own followers. An adventurous attempt to rescue José Antonio by means of a coup de main in Alicante had failed, though both the honorary German consul, Von Knobloch, and Admiral Carls, on the battleship Graf Spee, had been ready to help. The falangist leader of militias, Agustín Aznar, arrived in disguise in Alicante on the German torpedo boat Ildis, sought to suborn the local CNT, but ultimately failed to find anyone in Alicante who would help him, even for 8 million pesetas.1 Later, José Antonio made an offer to try to negotiate peace in the civil war by flying to Salamanca, leaving his relations in gaol as hostages against his return. The government refused.1

  José Antonio’s trial was held correctly before a magistrate and he was able to defend himself by reading out editorials from Arriba to prove that his views differed from those of Franco or the monarchists. During the trial, a militiaman appeared as a witness for the prosecution. ‘Do you hate the defendant?’ asked José Antonio, who was defending himself. ‘With all my heart’, replied the witness. Dignified throughout, the founder of the Falange was condemned to death. For his brother Miguel and his brother’s wife, a similar sentence was asked. José Antonio, with the chivalry which his enemies never denied him, appealed on their behalf. ‘Life is not a firework one lets off at the end of a garden party’, he concluded. As a result, they received terms of imprisonment. No such clemency was possible for José Antonio himself. Princess Bibesco, who, as the wife of the ex-Roumanian minister in Madrid had been friendly with Azaña, telephoned the president to beg him to prevent the execution. Azaña gloomily answered that he could do nothing since he also was a prisoner,2 though he had twice previously saved José Antonio’s life by intervening with the civil governor of Alicante, Jesús Monzón.3 According to Largo Caballero, the death sentence came up in the cabinet for confirmation on 20 November, but even as the discussion was going on, the news came of the technically insubordinate act of execution, the local bosses at Alicante having been afraid that the sentence would be commuted.4 The anarchists had been opposed to the death sentence, since they granted that José Antonio was ‘a Spanish patriot in search of solutions for his country’.5 All the ministers apparently would have voted for the commutation of the sentence. Indeed, the execution of José Antonio was a boon to Franco in the long run, since he was the one other leader of character on the Spanish Right who remained after the holocaust of July. But no action was taken against the Alicante authorities; indeed, many sentences were still carried out without governmental consultation.1