by Hugh Thomas
3. Lister had been appointed on 10 October and was succeeded in the Fifth Regiment by Modesto. The Regiment was dissolved on 21 January 1937.
1. Each brigade was to be 3,800 strong, including three battalions of about 500 men each, four batteries of three or four cannon, 120 machine-guns, 104 mortars, a stock of 2,200 rifles, and a communications and engineer detachment. In fact, this design was rarely achieved: most Mixed Brigades only had one machine-gun company.
2. Martín Blázquez (p. 299) was impressed with García Oliver’s competence in organizing the officer schools.
3. Militias commanders were theoretically not able to rise above the rank of major.
1. Guarner Memorandum, p. 5.
2. Orwell, loc. cit.
3. He had been sentenced to life imprisonment for failing to defend the factory.
4. Peirats, vol. II, p. 215.
5. This was the estimate of the acute French military attaché, FD, vol. V, p. 597.
1. Voronov (Bajo la bandera, p. 71) says 90 per cent. I think the figure was lower though only 14 per cent were with the republic in 1938. By the winter of 1936, the old artillery of July 1936 was being replaced by French, English, and German, and some Russian artillery, as well as some Russian anti-aircraft batteries. Subsequently schools of artillery were also opened at Lorca and at Barcelona. The Barcelona school was later still merged with the one at Lorca, to the anger of the Catalans.
2. Hidalgo de Cisneros, vol. II, p. 123. Constancia de la Mora worked in the censorship department. See her Doble esplendor (Mexico, 1944).
1. Manuel Benavides, La escuadra la mandan los cabos (Mexico, 1944), p. 376.
2. Bajo la bandera, p. 142.
3. Russian officers who served with the republican fleet included S. Ramishvili (at Cartagena naval base); V. Drozd (with the destroyer flotilla); Nikolai Eguipko and Burmistrov, commanders of two submarines; V. Alafuzov, on the cruiser Libertad; N. Ostriakov (killed at Sebastopol) and I. Proskinov, both with the diminutive fleet air arm.
1. See J. Trueta, Treatment of War Wounds and Fractures (London, 1939); The Principles and Practice of War Surgery (London, 1943); The Atlas of Traumatic Surgery (Oxford, 1947); and the life of Bethune by Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon, The Scalpel, Not the Sword (London, 1954), p. 102f. Bethune died in 1949 running a mobile operating unit with the Chinese communists. The antibiotic came in only in 1943. See also Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. I, p. 323. Dr Manuel Bastos of Madrid had introduced the plaster cast and exposure by ‘window’ in Asturias in 1934.
2. The benefit of the government’s move to Catalonia in late 1937 was considerable in this respect. Trueta’s work derived from that of Winnett Orr. Other important work in the civil war was done by d’Harcourt and Bofill, on frostbite and the use of sulphonamides in treatment, and also by González Aguilar in neurosurgical methods.
32
1. Figures in report of the Institute of Agrarian Reform, May 1938, qu. Payne, The Spanish Revolution, p. 241; also Leval, p. 80; figures are chiefly from anarchist sources and, therefore, perhaps over favourable to them. Other sources include A. Pérez Baró, Trenta mesos de collectivisme a Catalunya (Barcelona, 1970). Andalusia must have had 1,000 collectives during the war but, shortly, republican Andalusia was limited to Jaén and Almeria. There had also been many more collectives in Estremadura.
1. See Peirats, vol. I, pp. 317–19.
2. Leval, p. 183.
3. Except for some collectives in the Ebro and in the market-garden area of the Llobregat plain.
4. Malefakis’s figure, p. 386.
1. Campo Libre, 11 September 1937.
2. Leval, p. 88.
3. Campo Libre, 29 January 1938. Alcázar de Cervantes was the new name for Alcázar de San Juan.
4. Leval, p. 134.
5. Lister, p. 157.
1. Campo Libre, 18 December 1937.
2. Peirats, vol. I, pp. 321–2.
3. Ibid., pp. 334–5.
1. Souchy, p. 30.
2. Instance quoted by Broué and Témime, op. cit.
3. Peirats, vol. I, p. 336.
4. Ibid., pp. 311–13, 320.
5. Campo Libre, 29 January 1937.
6. Peirats, vol. I, pp. 333–4.
7. Leval, p. 220. Some of the urban or industrial collectives imposed a six-month limit on their council’s duration. Leval gives an account of such a general assembly at Tamarite de Litera, Huesca (pp. 221–2). The meeting was held of 600 in the cinema, about 100 women, at 10 P.M.
1. Testimony of Jaime de Piniés, London, February 1973.
2. Campo Libre, 9 October 1937. Figures in the ministry of agriculture’s publication Economia Politica, Publication 60, series C, No. 33. The 1936 figures take into account the production in the republican area only. The fact that the figures indicate a drop in production in Catalonia and the Levante suggests an intention of veracity, since this would hardly have been invented by a communist ministry of agriculture, with greater communist strength in those areas than in the centre and in Aragon.
3. Campo Libre, 2 October 1937. The error of addition in the right-hand top column is in the original. A fanega is a measure equivalent to 1.6 bushels and an arroba is equivalent to either 11.5 kilos or 4 gallons.
1. Alianza internacional de trabajadores.
2. Campo Libre, 2 October 1937.
1. Wages in selected collectives:
1. Campo Libre, 11 June 1938.
2. Ibid., 30 July 1937. The basis for 1935 figures is not known: were they real figures or those kept for tax purposes? In this instance, quite possibly the former, since the Conde’s old manager and agent joined the new council of administration.
1. Peirats, vol. I, p. 320.
2. Castro Delgado (pp. 379–82) recalled that his three priorities on taking over the Institute for Agrarian Reform were to destroy the agrarian reform teams staffed by socialists; to force employers to accept that the rhythm of war was different from that of peace; and to enrol as many people as possible for the communist party.
33
1. L. Fischer, p. 443.
2. NIS, eleventh meeting. 12 November 1936 was the day of Baldwin’s famous admission to the House of Commons that he had ‘been less than candid’ to the electorate over rearmament for fear of losing the election.
1. Note by Eden to the cabinet, 21 November (in CAB 24/265).
2. Eden, p. 413.
3. Note to commander-in-chief, Mediterranean, 20 November 1936, from the foreign secretary.
4. This was on 18 November. The previous day Germany and Japan had affirmed their friendship in the Anti-Comintern Pact, ostensibly directed against communism but in reality an offensive military alliance. Italy joined a year later. On 24 November, the poet Robert Graves, previously (like Bernanos) resident in Majorca, called on Churchill begging him to denounce German and Italian policy in the western Mediterranean:
Churchill: Both sides have imbrued their hands in blood. You wish for intervention? The country wouldn’t stand it.
Graves: Not intervention in the sense of taking sides … but of safeguarding British interest in the Mediterranean.
(Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend, London, 1940, p. 411.)
1. It did not sink but, due to the lack of a good dry dock in republican hands, was not repaired until 1938.
2. USD, 1936, vol. II, p. 576.
3. GD, p. 139; Ciano, Diplomatic Papers, pp. 75–7.
4. The IMAM Ro. 37 bis, to give it its full name, was a versatile aircraft of maximum 200 miles an hour at a height of 20,000 feet. It was used for observation, light bombing, machine-gunning from a low level, as well as aerial photography.
5. Fagnani even ordered the nationalist ace-pilot, Angel Salas Larrazábal, to be arrested when he refused an order not to fly over enemy territory in a Fiat. Salas did not suffer from this, but many Italian pilots had been killed and their aircraft destroyed by the Russians by now. See, inter alia, Emilio Faldella, Venti mesi di guerra in Spagna (Florence, 1939), p. 80. Oth
er Italians with more elaborate equipment, including thirty-eight tanks, were incorporated into the Legion (Belforte, vol. I, p. 51).
1. Serrano Súñer, pp. 44–7.
2. GD, p. 159.
3. See below, p. 618. Faupel’s opposite number in Berlin would be the Marqués de Magaz, once vice-president of Primo de Rivera’s military directorate, who had lost a son in the Model Prison.
4. Whealey, in Carr, The Republic, p. 219, quoting from General Warlimont’s interrogation.
5. GD, pp. 159–60.
1. FD, vol. IV, p. 89.
2. Ibid., p. 97; also USD, 1936, vol. II, pp. 578–81.
3. NIS, twelfth meeting.
4. GD, pp. 158–9; Eden, p. 416. Cf. Salvador de Madariaga, Memorias (1921–36), Madrid, 1974, p. 374.
5. GD, p. 165. The (London) Observer, under Garvin, a vigorous opponent of the republic, was foolish enough on this day to publish a dispatch saying there were 21,000 Russians in Madrid. Rumour thus fed on rumour, and truth seemed relative.
1. Mussolini’s facsimile letter of appointment to Roatta is published in Alcofar Nassaes, CTV, facing p. 32.
1. NIS (c), seventeenth meeting. At an important meeting on 21 December, Hitler, Göring, Warlimont, Blomberg and Fritsch rejected more demands, pressed in person by Faupel, for the dispatch of three German divisions to finish off the war. See Gerhard Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany (Chicago, 1970), p. 297, basing himself on Warlimont’s post-war testimony.
2. GD, p. 180.
3. Ibid., p. 186. The Germans believed that the British wanted primarily to safeguard their commercial interests in Spain. To this end, Faupel reported, not only did the commercial counsellor at the British Embassy, Pack, frequently visit Burgos, but Chilton kept the nationalist authorities so well informed as to what was going on that the text of a statement to be made by Eden at 3 P.M. in the House of Commons was communicated to Franco by 10 o’clock in the morning of that day (GD, p. 181). Chilton was still very pro-nationalist. ‘I hope,’ he soon told US Ambassador Bowers, ‘that they send in enough Germans to finish the war’ (USD, 1937, vol. I, p. 225).
4. It was expected that the agreement would lead to detailed negotiations, but these did not begin till 1938 (when they caused the fall of Eden—see below, pp. 775–76).
1. Eden, p. 432.
2. FD, vol. IV, p. 71.
3. The Italian ministry of air noted on 23 January that ‘by January, Italy had 211 pilots, 238 “specialists”, 777 ground officers, 995 NCOs, and 14,752 troops’. (Qu. Cattell, Soviet Diplomacy, p. 4.)
4. FD, vol. IV, pp. 71 and 451. The dispatch on pp. 451–4 is helpful. See also ibid., p. 563. Pay was thus over 175 lire a week, while a bricklayer in Rome would have got about 150 lire. Hourly wages for agricultural wages in Italy was 1 lira an hour. See Coverdale, Journal of Contemporary History, January 1974, p. 74.
5. USD, 1936, vol. II, p. 625.
1. L. Fischer, p. 387.
2. Edwin Rolfe, The Lincoln Battalion (New York, 1939), p. 18. This group arrived on 6 January at their base at Villanueva de la Jara, near Albacete, in the flat plain of La Mancha, whose bleakness recalled home to two from Wisconsin among them. Since they were accompanied by a number of Cubans, easy relations were soon opened with the villagers. The Cubans were led by Rudolfo de Armas, accompanied by the experienced communist leader Joaquín Ordóqui, who was later, under Fidel Castro, to have a strange history. Among them was a youthful communist, Rolando Masferrer, afterwards famous as a political gangster and senator. Other Cubans included some sixty members of the murdered labour leader Antonio Guiteras’s paramilitary organization, Joven Cuba. A list of Cubans who fought in Spain would also include others of those who dominated the gangster politics of that island between 1933 and 1959.
3. The passports of these men may have played as great a part in history as the men themselves. For the NKVD secured the passports of many dead (and some alive) members of the International Brigade, and they were dispatched to Moscow: here a pile of nearly a hundred of them, ‘mainly American’, were observed by Krivitsky (op. cit., p. 114). Then new bearers were issued with them, and entered America as, apparently, reformed citizens. One of these was probably the Catalan Mercader, the alleged murderer of Trotsky. See Robert Murphy, Diplomat among Warriors (London, 1964), p. 50, for an American diplomat’s attempt to retrieve these passports.
4. The ‘Vimalert enterprise’ had sold aircraft engines to Russia in 1930 (Traina, p. 80).
1. This decision was apparently reached without discussion by the US cabinet. The secretary of the interior (The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes, London, 1955, p. 569) stated: ‘I am sure that, if this question had been thrown to the cabinet for serious debate, there would have been opposition to it.’
2. Representative Bernard later introduced a resolution demanding support of the republic, suggesting at least equal restrictions against the governments of Germany and Italy.
3. The Spanish consul-general in New York later denied that any money was due to these men. Acosta was a famous flier, having flown with Admiral Byrd in the America, across the Atlantic in 1927.
1. Cervera, pp. 87–8; see Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain (London, 1998) p. 182; Senator Nye later accused the owners of a steamship company in New York of spying for Franco and causing the arrest of the Mar Cantábrico.
2. Taylor, pp. 75–95. There was also the Catholic vote, upon which FDR relied. Norman Thomas told the author that he felt this the most important reason for the embargo in FDR’s mind.
3. Cervera, pp. 29–30; FD, vol. IV, p. 405.
4. See Gordón Ordás, Mi politica fuera de España (Mexico, 1965), vol. I.
5. GD, pp. 210–12.
1. Eden, pp. 434–6.
2. Memorandum, 8 January, CAB/266. CAB/80(37) shows Eden to have been influenced by the requisitioning of the Tharsis Copper and Sulphur Co. and the Río Tinto Co., and the dispatch of pyrites and copper to Germany, whereas no copper had been received by Río Tinto at its refinery at Port Talbot since July.
1. FD, vol. IV, pp. 457–9.
2. USD, 1937, vol. III, pp. 217ff.; GD, pp. 215ff.
3. Al-Lal el Fasi, Los movimientos de independencia en el Magreb árabe (Cairo, 1948), p. 198.
1. Miravitlles, p. 119.
2. See Hernández, p. 75; Alvarez del Vayo, Freedom’s Battle, p. 238.
3. Azaña, vol. IV, p. 66.
4. GD, p. 225.
5. Ibid., p. 226.
6. Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s Interpreter (London, 1951), p. 62; Ciano, Diplomatic Papers, pp. 85–6.
1. Weizsäcker, p. 113.
2. GD, p. 237.
3. Ibid., p. 243.
4. Ibid., pp. 241–2.
1. Britain’s 16 per cent was cut by £64,000, the estimated cost of the Portuguese frontier control. The background to the plan is described in Maisky’s chapter ‘Words, words—and mountains of paper’, Notebooks, p. 94f.
2. See NIS (c), twenty-second to fortieth meetings; NIS, fifteenth and sixteenth meetings.
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1. His nom de guerre was taken from the surname of his wife. One of the young officers close to Marshal Badoglio, Roatta had been military attaché to France.
2. Letter from an officer of artillery to Alcofar Nassaes, in CTV, p. 58.
1. Kindelán, p. 63; Alcofar Nassaes, p. 64.
2. GD, pp. 231, 236.
3. Martínez Bande, La campaña de Andalucia, p. 146.
4. Ibarruri, pp. 359–60.
1. The most careful account is Martínez Bande, La campaña de Andalucía, p. 139f.
1. Cervera, p. 73.
2. Bahamonde, p. 117. Santos Julia, et al., estimates deaths at 2,537 in the city, 1937–40 (p. 411).
3. He had been in Spain in August and posed as a nationalist sympathizer until recognized by a German fighting for Franco. He was later exchanged, through the good offices of Dr Junod, for the beautiful wife of the nationalist pilot Major la Haya. The British government intervened in 1937 to help Koestler, b
ecause of his relationship with the News Chronicle, although Eden told the House of Commons he did not know what nationality Koestler was. He was, of course, Hungarian, and had been working for the Comintern in Paris since 1934. For a nationalist account of Koestler’s case, see Bolín, p. 248f; for the Red Cross exchange, see Junod, p. 124. I discussed these events with Koestler himself, c. 1965.
4. Cantalupo, p. 137. One city prosecutor in Málaga was a young lawyer, Arias Navarro, who had been imprisoned for six months, and who now began a career which would end in his becoming Prime Minister of Spain in 1973.
1. Galinsoga, p. 285. The hand was returned to Ronda after 1975.
2. For the battle of Málaga, see Borkenau, p. 211f.; Aznar, p. 339f.; Koestler, Invisible Writing, p. 338f.; T. C. Worsley, Behind the Battle, passim; Dr Bethune’s diary in Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon, The Scalpel, Not the Sword (London, 1954); R. Salas, vol. I, p. 803; Fraser, In Hiding, especially p. 149f.
3. Lacouture, pp. 247–8.
4. Ibarruri, p. 360.
5. The anarchists disliked Asensio as a disciplined opponent of libertarian activity on the battlefield. Prieto and the Left republicans disliked him because Largo Caballero admired him.
1. Lister, p. 100. Pavlov’s aide, Kravchenko (‘Antonio’), had been at the Lenin School in Moscow with Lister. Lister had Malinovski (‘Malino’) as his own adviser in this battle. Malinovski says that he had to give his advice very tactfully, so that Lister never really could feel that he was being dictated to (Bajo la bandera, p. 28). The Russian adviser to Pozas, Kulik, another future if ill-fated marshal (‘Kupper’ in Spain), also seems to have played a prominent part. The anarchist 70th Brigade had Major Petrov as their adviser (sometimes acting as commander) and the future Russian Marshal Rodimstev (‘Pablito’) was with the 9th Brigade as a machine-gun expert.
1. See Martínez Bande, La lucha, p. 91; General Batov, in Bajo la bandera, p. 242.
2. Garcia Lacalle refers to the precision of these anti-aircraft guns as ‘the revelation of the war’ (p. 483).