The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  The cost of a year’s operation of the non-intervention scheme was estimated at £898,000. Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia would each pay 16 per cent (£143,680), while the other twenty-two countries divided the remaining 20 per cent.1 The naval patrol would be undertaken by the four participants at their own expense. The scheme was finally agreed on 8 March. An international board, with Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Russia (and later Poland, Greece, and Norway) represented, and with the Dutch Vice-Admiral van Dulm as chairman, would administer the scheme. Britain would be responsible for the Portuguese-Spanish frontier. One hundred and thirty observers, headed by a chief administrator (the Danish Colonel Lunn), would be on the French frontier, and 550 observers on ships sailing for Spanish ports, headed by Rear-Admiral Oliver, would supervise all unloading of cargoes. The naval patrol would be controlled by Britain from the French frontier to Cape Busto, in Asturias and from the Portuguese frontier on the Algarve to Cape Gata. France would patrol from Cape Busto to the Portuguese frontier, the Spanish Moroccan coast, Ibiza, and Majorca. Germany was to be responsible for the east coast of Spain from Cape Gata to Cape Oropesa, and Italy from Cape Oropesa to the French frontier. Minorca was also the responsibility of Italy. The setting up of the scheme, and the legislation needed in the various countries to ensure that their citizens complied, took until 20 April. The observers and the non-intervention patrol ships were by then in place. The non-intervention flag, two black balls on a white ground, waved hopefully henceforward off the harbours of Spain.2

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  In the spring of 1937, three battles were fought in Spain: at Málaga, on the river Jarama near Madrid, and outside the city of Guadalajara, also close to the capital. The first, a skirmish only, was a victory for Franco; the second was a stalemate; and the third was a moral victory for the republic.

  Málaga, with 100,000 inhabitants, is the chief city of a narrow plain running between the sea and the Sierra Nevada. Its superb climate and natural harbour have given it three thousand years of commercial eminence. At the start of 1937, the front, from a point on the coast twenty miles from Gibraltar, ran inland to Ronda and continued along the mountains to Granada. The republic thus held a coastal strip twenty miles wide, with Málaga as its centre. The only road linking the territory with the rest of republican Spain to the north was blocked by a flood at Motril. Málaga itself had been bombed and the workers had earlier destroyed the fashionable district of La Caleta. The place, therefore, presented an appearance of desolation. The authorities had behaved as if they were a republic separate from the rest of Spain, but had organized themselves inadequately: hence it was said that the central government wished ‘to hear nothing of Málaga’. But, formally, Málaga was under the care of the new republican Army of the South, headed by General Martínez Monje. He had a Russian adviser, Major Meretskov (a future marshal). His forces had begun to be organized as Mixed Brigades, but the process had not gone far.

  A nationalist offensive began in this region on 17 January, directed by Queipo de Llano, leading their similarly named Army of the South. Colonel the Duque de Sevilla, a Bourbon and second cousin of the ex-King, was in field command. He began by cutting off the westerly part of republican territory as far as, and including, Marbella, in the first three days. Next, troops from the garrison at Granada under Colonel Muñoz advanced to capture Alhama and the surrounding territory, to the north of Málaga. Both these two preliminary attacks were accomplished without resistance.

  Though refugees from the newly lost territory crowded into the city and slept on the stone floor of the cathedral, the republican command at Málaga had no suspicion, apparently, that these events foreshadowed a general campaign. Nor was anything done from Valencia to reinforce Málaga. Since the road was cut at Motril, artillery could not, anyway, have been sent. Largo Caballero was considering an attack from the Madrid-Valencia road on the nationalists south of Madrid.

  To the immediate north of Málaga, the mechanized forces of the Italian Black Shirts, nine battalions in all, rather more than 10,000 men, were now assembled under Colonel Roatta (‘Mancini’).1 He had Colonels Emilio Faldella and Rossi as chief of staff and field commander respectively. (Roatta himself continued as chief of Italian intelligence while he was temporarily, as he supposed, in Spain.) Some of his troops were ex-fascists of the days of the march on Rome in 1922, most were new volunteers, though, as one of them later wrote, while all were legally volunteers, few were really so: they were ‘voluntarios sin voluntad’.2 The Italian ‘legionary’ air force of 100 aeroplanes was in support. Unlike the pilots of July–August 1936 (who had worn Foreign Legion uniforms), these Italians had a uniform of their own, and operated entirely independently, so that they could, if possible, realize the symbolic victory desired by Mussolini. Roatta had set up a base at Seville, where he gathered together his equipment, including many good lorries of Italian make, such as Fiat, Lancia and Isota Fraschini. His men had the same Mauser rifle used by the Spanish army, along with machine-guns, artillery and mortars of the First World War. Roatta at first had desired to mount an offensive from Teruel to the sea, but he had been talked out of the idea by Franco, who persuaded him to take part in the campaign for Málaga long coveted by Queipo de Llano.1 Just before the campaign began, Mussolini told Franco that he could send no further aid after the forthcoming Non-Intervention Agreement. Franco replied, on 25 January, that, since non-intervention control could not cover states such as Mexico, who were not party to the agreement, it should be rejected. He also gave a new list of war needs. Faupel and Roatta called on Franco to ask which of these were the most urgent. ‘All,’ said Franco. To secure this, the Generalissimo said that he would agree to set up a joint Italian-German general staff, consisting of five German and five Italian officers. The two allies went away to discuss this suggestion. Meanwhile, the Málaga campaign got under way.2

  The republican commander at Málaga was Colonel Villalba, the turncoat of Barbastro, and recently transferred from Catalonia. A Russian colonel, who went under the name of ‘Kremen’, sat in Villalba’s office trying to give him orders, but these were unwelcome, and the communication between the two was slight. Nor was Villalba’s understanding good with his supreme commander, Martínez Monje (who paid Málaga a short visit in January), nor the chief of the general staff in Valencia, Martínez Cabrera. Villalba’s troops numbered about 12,000, but he had only about 8,000 rifles and only 16 pieces of artillery.3 Ammunition was also short. The militia were nevertheless confident, and warmly supported by the local peasants. For example, outside Málaga, in a pueblo too poor to have had large estates, Dr Borkenau was assured by one such that he was fighting for ‘liberty’. In the city of Málaga itself, morale was low, discipline bad, brutality frequent. The political prisoners had been abominably treated in gaol. At the end of January, the communist deputy and commissar Cayetano Bolívar went to Valencia to explain to Largo Caballero the disorganization of the defenders: but Largo Caballero was not disposed to help, allegedly replying, ‘Not a rifle nor a cartridge more for Málaga’.4

  18. The fighting for Málaga, February 1937

  On 3 February, the attack on Málaga began in earnest.1 Three battalions under the Duque de Sevilla advanced from the Ronda sector, meeting fierce resistance. On the morning of 5 February, the Italian Black Shirts began their advance. Panic developed in Málaga, partly because of the fear of being cut off. Villalba was unable to communicate a fighting spirit, and his conventional temperament was not such as to make him believe that a civilian population could fight to the death. In these circumstances, after the initial breakthrough, the nationalist advance continued with rhythmic regularity, along the roads. On 6 February, the Italians reached the heights of Ventas de Zafarraya, dominating the escape road to Almería. Roatta was wounded by one of the few shots fired in anger, though so lightly that he did not give up his command. Villalba ordered a general evacuation, believing the last moment to have been reached. In fact, the nationalists did not cut the road of re
treat. They cleverly avoided the fight of desperation upon which an encircled city would inevitably embark. The republican high command, the political and trade-union leaders, and others who feared the consequences of nationalist occupation, struggled to escape up the coast, though a flood at Motril made the passage difficult. The fortunate fled in the few available motor-cars, the remainder on foot. The Canarias, Baleares, and Velasco bombarded the city, but the republican fleet continued inactive.1 In the evening of 7 February, the Italians reached the outskirts of Málaga. The next day, with the Spaniards under the Duque de Sevilla, they entered the desolate town. The Italians had lost 130 dead (4 officers) and 424 wounded.

  There ensued the most ferocious proscription that had occurred in Spain since the fall of Badajoz. It was fired by the recollection of the 2,500 who had been killed in Málaga under the revolution, the destruction of churches and the looting of private houses. Thousands of republican sympathizers were left behind, some being immediately shot, the rest imprisoned. One eye-witness alleged that 4,000 people were killed in the first week after the fall of the city. That was an exaggeration. But certainly many were shot without trial on the beach, others after brief trial by the newly established council of war.2 The only republican journalist left behind, Arthur Koestler, then of the News Chronicle, and a communist was imprisoned in Seville for several months, being much of the time under sentence of death as a suspected spy—an accusation for which there was some evidence.3 The Italian ambassador, Cantalupo, at Franco’s court complained that Italian troops had been discredited by the executions at Málaga, and Ciano ordered him to visit the town to see what was going on. He found rich women desecrating republican graves and later wrote to his master that he had personally secured reprieves for nineteen freemasons and the dismissal of two over-severe judges.4 Among the loot was the alleged hand of St Teresa of Avila seized from a convent in Ronda, and found in the suitcase of Colonel Villalba. It was dispatched to the headquarters of Franco, who henceforth kept it at his bedside.1

  On the long coast road to Almería, nationalist tanks and aircraft caught up with the refugees. Many were shot. Many of those who escaped lay down exhausted and starving.2 The attempted defence of this tragic exodus from the air was the last fight in which Malraux’s air squadron took part: the machines were by now mostly wrecked, the pilots mostly dead or wounded, and Malraux henceforth gave himself up to publicity, rather than combat, for the republic. The remains of the Escuadrilla España were integrated into the republican air force.3

  This defeat led to the fall also, on 21 February, of Asensio Torrado, the under-secretary of war and Largo Caballero’s favourite general, whom the communists accused of being in a Valencian night-club while Málaga was about to collapse. The two communist ministers in the government also complained that the cabinet had spent four hours discussing the problems of the glass industry at the height of the military crisis.4 Largo Caballero had saved Asensio from disgrace in October when he had previously been pilloried as the ‘general of defeat’; he was unable to do the same again, for the whole cabinet wanted his dismissal as a scapegoat, though he was no more blameworthy than others.5 Asensio was succeeded as under-secretary for war by Baráibar, editor of Claridad, an intimate of Largo’s who, in the event, was no more helpful to the communists than Asensio had been. This affair became one more bone of contention between them and the ‘Spanish Lenin’. It also caused a final quarrel between Largo Caballero and his old friend, Alvarez del Vayo, who supported the communists in this instance, as in most others.

  Meanwhile, Queipo de Llano chafed at the restriction placed upon him by Franco that he should not proceed any further than Málaga. It was an error, since the rest of eastern Andalusia, including Almería, could probably have been taken without fighting. The capture of Málaga, however, gave the nationalists a Mediterranean port, thus enabling the blockade to be extended. The battle also cut the length of the front.

  The events in Málaga coincided with a new nationalist offensive to the south-east of Madrid. The nationalists attacked in the valley of the Jarama with five mobile columns (now known as brigades) under Varela’s direction, each with a regiment of Moroccans and Foreign Legionaries, under García Escámez, Sáenz de Buruaga, Barrón, Asensio Cabanillas, and Rada (the Carlists’ old instructor), supported by six 155-millimetre batteries and a Condor Legion artillery group of new, as yet untested, 88-millimetre guns. The aim of the offensive was to cut the Madrid-Valencia road. It was undertaken along a ten-mile front running north to south from a line some hundred yards to the east of the Madrid-Andalusia road. The republicans had been planning an attack in the same area, but nothing had come of it, since Miaja had been reluctant to let any troops leave Madrid.

  The attack, a surprise to the republic, began on 6 February. García Escámez drove furiously into the little town of Ciempozuelos, defended by the newly formed republican 15th Brigade, whose advance elements were overwhelmed. Rada advanced in the north to capture a 2,000-foot peak, La Marañosa, where two republican battalions fought almost to the last man. On 7 February, Barrón reached the junction of the rivers Jarama and Manzanares, just short of the road junction at Vaciamadrid, bringing the Madrid-Valencia highroad under fire. The republican defence was hampered by a number of new Brigades, who had been intended to take part in the projected offensive, and now found themselves in retreat. On 8 February, Miaja sent the well-trained, and reorganized, 11th Division, headed by the communist Lister, to aid General Pozas, the commander of the Army of the Centre. (Lister, in his memoirs, describes the Russian general Pavlov as the ‘soul of republican resistance’ during these days.)1 Two republican defence commands were hastily put together, the first belonging to Miaja’s army and commanded by the communist Modesto; the second, dependent on Pozas’s Army of the Centre, was commanded by Colonel Burillo. On 9 February, the republican defence was reorganized all along the heights on the east bank of the Jarama. At dawn on 11 February, however, the nationalists succeeded in forcing the Jarama. A tabor of Moroccans (under Major Molero) silently worked their way in the dark to the Pindoque railway bridge, halfway between Ciempozuelos and San Martín de la Vega, another small white-washed village at the foot of the hills, where they knifed the sentries of the French André Marty Battalion (now of the 14th Brigade) one by one.1 Immediately, the rest of Barrón’s brigade crossed the river. The Pindoque Bridge was blown up by mines operated from the local republican command-post but, having risen a few feet in the air, descended on the same spot and so still afforded a crossing. The Italians of the Garibaldi Battalion, from high ground, concentrated their fire on the bridgehead and held up any further advance. Farther south still, Asensio had at dawn stormed San Martín de la Vega. Machine-guns held him up all day at the bridge there, but, at nightfall, he got across by a stratagem similar to that practiced at dawn at the Pindoque Bridge. A detachment of Moroccans killed the Spaniards on guard. Asensio spent the night consolidating his position and, the next day, the 12th, stormed the heights of Pingarrón, on the other side of the river. Sáenz de Buruaga’s brigade also crossed at San Martín and joined Asensio in the centre of the front. During the next two days, however, little further ground was gained by the attackers, the 14th being a day of hard fighting without result.

  Republican control of the air was, meantime, maintained over the battlefield, though the Condor Legion’s 88-millimetre anti-aircraft batteries (their accuracy was phenomenal) limited the extent to which this could be turned into a real help to an offensive.2 Still, the old German Junkers were driven out of the sky by Russian Chatos, while the Russian tank brigade was concentrated before the town of Arganda in the north of the front.

  19. The battle of the Jarama, February 1937

  This battle was the first fight of the 15th International Brigade, commanded by Colonel ‘Gal’ (Janos Galicz), a naturalized Russian of Austro-Hungarian birth, like ‘Kléber’ and ‘Lukacs’ (and probably active in the international brigades in the Red Army in 1919–20). Gal was incompetent,
bad-tempered, and hated. The central figure in the formation of the Brigade, however, was the English chief of staff, Captain Nathan. The commissar was a French communist, Jean Chaintron (‘Barthel’). The Brigade comprised volunteers from twenty-six nations. The first battalion of the Brigade were six hundred Englishmen of the Saklatvala Battalion—called after the Indian communist of that name who had been a member of parliament in the twenties, though usually known as the British Battalion. In command was the ‘English Captain’, Tom Wintringham, a communist from the middle class, an editor of the Left Review and military correspondent of the Daily Worker, an ‘indefatigable military theorist’, though with ‘little actual experience of war’.1 The political commissar was, first, David Springhall, a communist later tried for espionage and then an experienced and independent-minded Scottish communist, George Aitken. The company commanders and the political commissars were mostly communists. The other battalions of the 15th Brigade were 800 mixed Balkans (including 160 Greeks), of the Dimitrov Battalion; 800 French and Belgians, of the 6th of February2 (or Franco-Belgian) Battalion; and 550 Americans, the ‘Abraham Lincoln Battalion’, including a number of blacks, which was, however, still in training. Irishmen were tactfully divided between the Abraham Lincoln and the British Battalions.3

  Some of these last were, like Frank Ryan, members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). To those knowledgeable of the ironies of Irish politics, it will come as no surprise that at that same moment another Irish group of volunteers (also including other members of the IRA) were, by this time, also making their way to the front on the nationalist side. Their commander, General Eoin O’Duffy, headed an Irish fascist movement, the Blue Shirts. He doubtless hoped that the exploits of his six hundred men in Spain would bring him to political eminence in his own country. At this moment, they had completed training at Cáceres and had received orders to advance to the Jarama.4 Thus for some the Spanish Civil War must have been a war within the Irish Republican Army.