The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  It was audacious of the republic, with the French frontier once more closed, to embark upon an offensive, in the summer of 1938, as the examples of Brunete, Belchite, and Teruel might have suggested to them. The pattern of those battles—the early success of the attack; containment by nationalist reinforcements, hurried from other fronts; and a nationalist counter-attack—was indeed followed in the battle of the Ebro, though on a larger scale, and with more terrible consequences than in those other engagements.1

  Still, at a quarter past midnight on the night of 24–25 July, with no moon, the crossing of the Ebro began. Units under Tagüeña started to cross the river between Mequinenza and Fayón. Lister and the 5th Army Corps began to cross at sixteen points in the great arc to the south between Fayón and Cherta, notably at Flix, Mora la Nueva, Miravet, and thirty miles further to the south, at Amposta, near the sea. Ninety boats (each of which carried 10 men), 3 pontoon bridges, and about 12 others had been assembled. The armoured accompaniment consisted of 22 T-26 tanks and 4 companies of armoured cars, armed with machine-guns, not cannon. More material would follow across the bridges, once these could safely be swung across the river. The first unit across in Lister’s Corps was the Hans Beimler Battalion of the 11th International Brigade, reconstructed, composed of Germans, Scandinavians and Catalans, whose commanders led the way with a cry of ‘Forward, sons of Negrín!’, in unfamiliar accents.2 The river Ebro is at Mora some hundred yards wide and runs through a fairly steep gorge.

  The other side of the river from Mequinenza to the sea was guarded at this time by the Army of Morocco, to whose command Yagüe had recently returned. The officers of the 50th Division, commanded by Colonel Campos, had sent reports that good troops had been assembled across the river, but the high command had discounted them. The front in Spain was 1,100 miles long and every rumour could not be investigated.1 At half-past two in the morning, Colonel Peñarredonda (in command of the sector of Mora) reported to Yagüe that the republicans had crossed the Ebro. Some of Peñarredonda’s men had heard firing from behind, while he and his divisional headquarters had lost contact with their flanks. This colonel was one of the most cruel in the nationalist army. He had a particular hatred of the International Brigades and, on his own responsibility, gave orders that any of them captured should be shot. He even instructed the English Captain Peter Kemp, serving in his battalion, to shoot a fellow Irishman as a special protest against intervention on either side.2 The 14th (Franco-Belgian) International Brigade meantime crossed the Ebro near Amposta, and engaged forces led by General López Bravo. This crossing failed, but it had been regarded as an advance of secondary importance. The battle, nevertheless, continued there for eighteen hours, after which those who remained retreated in disorder across the river as best they might, leaving six hundred dead and much material behind them. Higher up, the first stages of the attack were successful. All the riparian villages in the centre of the front had been occupied by daybreak. A huge bridgehead had been established. Those who crossed, including the 15th International Brigade, continued inland, to outflank, surround, and capture the demoralized troops of Peñarredonda. By evening, that officer had received permission to retreat, with those of his men whom he could take with him. The shaken colonel himself thereafter retired to Saragossa and was seen no more in the war. To the north, at Mequinenza, Tagüeña had advanced three miles from the Ebro. In the centre, Lister had advanced twenty-five miles, and almost reached the small town of Gandesa (it had a population of 3,396 in 1937). Between Gandesa and the river, all the main observation points on high ground were captured. Four thousand nationalist prisoners had been taken, many desertions following.

  Franco ordered the heavy reinforcement of the region by the divisions of Barrón, Alfredo Galera, Delgado Serrano, Rada, Alonso Vega, Castejón (from Andalusia), and Arias. Colonel Martínez de Campos recorded in his diary that, while with his artillery in the Sierra de Espadán, just north of Segorbe and Sagunto, he suddenly received orders to ‘halt the movements begun … the enemy has crossed the Ebro’.1 Franco at first considered permitting an advance so deep as to allow a pincer movement which would destroy the whole republican army. He was talked out of this, but kept the bridges under bombardment; he determined not to make any advance by infantry until artillery and aircraft had established complete command.

  The main battle occurred at Gandesa. This town was assaulted by Lister, day and night, during the hot days of the Aragon summer. On 1 August, the 15th International Brigade launched their most fierce attack upon Hill 481, named by them ‘The Pimple’, immediately before Gandesa. Once again the death-roll was heavy, as it had been inside Gandesa, during fighting for that town in March. Among those killed was Lewis Clive, socialist councillor in South Kensington, and David Haden Guest, a young communist philosopher from Cambridge.2 By 2 August, the republican advance had been contained. The front lay straight from Fayón to Cherta, along the base of the Ebro’s arc, but scooping eastwards to leave the nationalists with Villalba de los Arcos and Gandesa. In the north, the pocket between Mequinenza and Fayón was ten miles at its widest. Yagüe showed himself as gifted an organizer of defence as of advance. He was calm throughout. Nevertheless, technical weaknesses were probably the reasons for the republic’s failure to advance further. An iron bridge across the Ebro for the passage of heavy tanks took far too long to establish. The republican infantrymen had to go to the front on foot, because of a shortage of lorries. Furthermore, the nationalists were able to complete their defences of Gandesa, including trenches, without republican bombing, at a time when most of the nationalist fighters were still at Valencia (the bombers were busy bombing the Ebro bridges). Modesto had wanted to bomb Gandesa but he was thwarted by Colonel Visiedo, the chief of operations in the air ministry: Colonel García Lacalle, the republic’s fighter commander, who proposed the bombing, believed Visiedo, a conventional officer, to be little less than treacherous in this negative attitude but then accusations of treachery were almost as frequent as those of Trotskyism in the republican camp.1 On 14 August, the HISMA chief, Bernhardt, nevertheless, had to telegraph Göring for more ammunition for the invaluable 88-millimetre anti-aircraft guns, to meet the ‘acute military danger’.2 The orders issued by Lister and Tagüeña remained—‘vigilance, fortification and resistance’. These words were repeated throughout the following weeks. Officers and men were shot for retreating. Sergeants were ordered to kill their officers if they gave the command to retire without written orders from above. ‘If anyone loses an inch of ground,’ Lister ordered, ‘he must re-take it at the head of his men or be executed.’3

  33. The battle of the Ebro, July–November 1938

  Franco never permitted even a tactical setback to go unchallenged. He determined to press the republic back from the territory which it had won. Almost all the nationalist air force was concentrated on the Ebro: some three hundred aircraft altogether. Franco was criticized in this decision at the time by other generals such as Aranda. But the decision was his and characteristically so. Franco’s tactics were to make an intense artillery and aerial attack upon a given point, small in area, so that resistance would be impossible. Then an attack would be carried out by small bodies of men—perhaps only two battalions. The nationalist artillery commander here was the cultivated monarchist Martínez de Campos, who had been commander of artillery throughout the campaign in the north. The battle of the Ebro became, under his direction, a major artillery contest—the only occasion when in Spain the classic formula ‘artillery conquers the ground, infantry occupies it’ was fully applied.

  The first nationalist counter-attack in this manner came on 6 August, when Delgado Serrano reconquered the northern pocket between Mequinenza and Fayón. The republic left behind 900 dead, 1,600 rifles, and over 200 machine-guns. On 11 August, Alonso Vega and Galera mounted a counter-attack against the Sierra de Pandols, the blue slate mountains in the south of the front. By the 14th, Lister had surrendered the high point of Santa Magdalena. On the 19th, another coun
ter-attack was launched, by Yagüe, on the republican position on the north side of Mount Gaeta, with softer, undulating slopes, overgrown with ilex trees. This was also ultimately successful. On 3 September, an attack was made by the two army corps of Yagüe and García Valiño (the latter transferred from the Levante, and now in command of an ‘Army of the Maestrazgo’) composed of the divisions of Galera, Delgado Serrano, Arias, and Mohammed ‘el Mizzian’—the one Moroccan officer (he was a nephew of one of Spain’s once most truculent enemies) to rise to be a divisional commander in the nationalist army. Gandesa was partially relieved, and the nationalists also recaptured the village of Corbera in the cultivated valley between the Pandols and Mount Gaeta. In this way, the republic lost, after six weeks, about 120 square miles of the land which it had won.

  But these bare statements give an inaccurate picture of the relentless battle fought in the August heat. All day and every day the nationalist aeroplanes, sometimes two hundred at the same time, circled over the republican lines, with hardly any interference from the inadequate anti-aircraft defences and badly managed fighters of their opponents. Many of their Moscas and Chatos were destroyed on the ground, many were damaged, and many pilots were either killed or wounded; by this time, most of the best Russian pilots had been withdrawn. Nor had the republican command integrated the air force with the army’s needs. The republican local command of the air had been eclipsed by the start of August. That more than cancelled the advantage gained from their possession of the high ground. During the counter-offensive, the nationalist aircraft dropped 10,000 pounds of bombs every day. But the republican engineers, who repaired the bridges under bombardment, were tenacious. This period of the battle was perhaps most remarkable for the difficulty found in hitting small targets: five hundred bombs were needed to destroy one pontoon bridge.

  The republic was jubilant for some time after the Ebro attack. Even Azaña was for a time persuaded that the tide had turned. The crisis over Czechoslovakia also threatened a general European conflict, in which the Spanish war would presumably have been subsumed, as Negrín wanted. These favourable events did not, however, prevent a damaging governmental crisis. Fifty-eight death sentences for espionage or sabotage were pending, and were matters for dispute within the cabinet. The condemned were members of the espionage ring of a falangist named Villalta, which had recently been broken. As a result, Negrín demanded that all courts dealing with espionage and other crimes relating to the war should be placed under the ministry of war. He also wanted that ministry to deal with port administration; and finally he wanted the outright nationalization of the war industries. Now there certainly was confusion in the arms industries, sometimes the fault of the workers, sometimes of the state organization.1 In addition, the activities of the SIM in Catalonia had led to complaints, by Companys and others, that this police force was breaking the Catalan statute. The inconclusive result of this controversy had led Negrín to the decree of militarization. As for the scheme for nationalization, many were, really, partially unemployed—more so than before 19362—while many collectivized industries needed help: ‘collectivized factory requires capitalist partner’ ran an advertisement in a Barcelona factory.3 Many ministers (most of the non-communists) opposed the policies of Negrín. The Basque and Catalan ministers in the central government, Ayguadé and Irujo, thought that they should resign. The crisis lasted many days.4 The censorship prevented the reason for these two ministers’ attitudes becoming widely known: the most important newspaper in Barcelona, La Vanguardia, which defended Negrín, explained them as separatist plots. War commissars even let it be known that the Generalidad was backing a separatist revolt.5 Then Negrín left Barcelona for several days, no one knowing where he was. He had decided to precipitate a crisis, fearing that Azaña was thinking of sending for Julián Besteiro, who had stayed on in Madrid virtually as a private person, to form a government of mediation or surrender. For Azaña believed that, once a truce were reached, even if temporary, neither side would be able to resume the battle.1

  At length, Negrín arrived at the house of Companys, and asked himself to dinner. He told Companys that he was tired of not receiving adequate backing in Catalonia, and that he had decided to retire from politics in order to attend a biology congress at Zürich. He would before that present his resignation to Azaña, recommending that Companys should succeed him as Prime Minister. Companys, taken aback, tried to persuade Negrín to stay at his post. Negrín said that he realized that he had failed to establish good relations with Catalonia and admitted that he lacked subtlety. The conversation ended indecisively. The next day, Tarradellas and Sbert, the two senior members of the Esquerra in the Generalidad, both went to see Negrín. They assured the Prime Minister that they desired to arrange matters amicably with him. But Negrín seemed resolved to retire, saying to Sbert, ‘Tomorrow you will see how all this can be arranged. I shall be very happy in Zurich with my biologists.’ This was a political sleight-of-hand by Negrín. Companys was not a viable successor: adroit political manager that he once had been, he had by then lost many of his old Esquerra friends to the PSUC, others to exile, while he himself had lost heart after the government had moved to Barcelona. He was a broken man.

  Immediately afterwards, Negrín began telephoning around Barcelona, and formed a new ministry, leaving out Ayguadé and Irujo. For them, he substituted José Moix (a communist, though an anarchist until March 1933, when he had been expelled over an ideological dispute) and Tomás Bilbao (a Basque, member of a minority Basque party, Basque Nationalist Action, until then consul in Perpignan, and a strong Negrinista). The other ministers were the same as in April. Segundo Blanco, the anarchist, remained, though, in the eyes of his CNT comrades, he was already ‘one more Negrinista’.2 Negrín next went to Azaña, giving him the list of the new ministry, saying that, since this was a partial crisis, he had not felt it necessary to consult him; but that, if he wanted to reject the new ministry, he would have to bear in mind that Negrín had the army behind him (hundreds of telegrams had allegedly arrived from army commanders telling him of their support). He then submitted the decrees in his original programme, which had led to the crisis, to Azaña. Azaña rejected the one militarizing the tribunals, but accepted those approving the death sentences and nationalizing the arms industries. Thirteen out of the fifty-eight death sentences were carried out. The nationalization did not, however, alter the circumstances in the industries themselves.1 Surprisingly enough, Negrín did go to Zurich to his congress of physiologists; with results that will be seen later.2

  This continued compromise with the communists has damned Negrín. His personal secretary, Benigno Rodríguez, was a party member, having once been the editor of Milicia Popular, the organ of the Fifth Regiment. Yet, in August 1938, as before, the Prime Minister had had little alternative save to sup with the devil. His attempts to secure a mediated peace—which he had concealed from the communists—had been fruitless. The only victory that Franco would envisage was a total one. The only hope for the republic still seemed to be to continue to resist, until the general situation in Europe should explode. In the meantime, the most tenacious advocates of the policy of resistance remained the communists. There was no alternative to employing their services. Negrín did not take the communists into his confidence in his search for a negotiated peace. His political aim was that of Stalin himself—to be willing to play a double-game. To do this against the communists may be dangerous, but it might have been successfully achieved in so unorthodox a country as Spain.

  Meantime, the republic had accepted the British volunteer plan in principle. But they made reservations. They wished, for example, the Moroccans in the nationalist army to be classified as foreign volunteers, that ‘technicians’ should be withdrawn first, and that non-intervention should be made watertight by aerial control. The republic also deplored the grant of belligerent rights under the plan. The nationalists, for their part, demanded an immediate grant of belligerent rights, and the withdrawal of 10,000 volunteers f
rom each side afterwards. But that could not be supervised internationally, since ‘foreign observers would usurp, in a humiliating way, the sovereign rights of Spain’. The Non-Intervention Committee’s secretary, Francis Hemming, was then sent off to nationalist Spain to persuade Franco to change his mind. The nationalist note, as it stood, amounted to rejection. Azcárate wrote a personal letter to Vansittart, pointing out the injustice of maintaining non-intervention at all, when Germany and Italy were party to Franco’s rejection of the volunteer plan. The French-Spanish frontier had been closed in June in order to help persuade Franco to accept the plan. Could it not be reopened? Vansittart never answered.1

  General Berti was now talking to Franco on Mussolini’s orders. The Italians in Spain numbered at that time 48,000. Italy was willing to do almost anything to help: either to send two or three more divisions to Spain, or 10,000 more men to make up for losses, or withdraw partially or totally. Franco chose a partial withdrawal.2 So Mussolini decided to concentrate the Littorio and March 23rd Divisions into one large division and withdraw the other Italians. Britain’s attention could be drawn to this, and Ciano could argue that the Anglo-Italian Agreement should be put into effect.3 But Mussolini was angry with the Generalissimo over the Ebro battle. ‘Put on record in your diary,’ Mussolini thundered to Ciano, ‘that today, 29 August, I prophesy the defeat of Franco … The reds are fighters, Franco is not.’4