The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  1. Jason Gurney, Crusade in Spain (London, 1974), p. 63; Wintringham, p. 16. The leader of the British Battalion in training had been Wilfred Macartney, a flamboyant journalist of the Left, who was not a communist—though he had been to prison in England for giving military secrets to Russia. He had to abandon command of the battalion because he was shot in the leg by Peter Kerrigan, commissar of the British in Spain, who was apparently cleaning his gun.

  2. So named after the riots in Paris on 6 February 1934, but actually formed by coincidence on 6 February 1936.

  3. Fred Copeman, Reason in Revolt (London, 1948), p. 83.

  4. Eoin O’Duffy, Crusade in Spain (London, 1938), p. 135. O’Duffy had been commissioner of the Irish Civic Guards till relieved of that post by De Valera in 1932. The Blue Shirts had been founded by ex-President Cosgrave after his defeat by De Valera in 1932. About half the rank and file, and nearly all the officers of O’Duffy’s group in Spain were Blue Shirts. Those who were not were chiefly out-of-work adventurers. (See the pamphlet by Seumas McKee, I Was a Franco Soldier, London, 1938.) For IRA membership see O’Duffy’s book. At least one present, Captain Diarmid O’Sullivan, had been in the rising of 1916.

  1. See Gurney, p. 73.

  2. Stephen Spender and John Lehmann, Poems for Spain (London, 1939), pp. 33–4.

  3. Wintringham, p. 151f.

  4. His real name was Christopher St John Sprigg. He had written seven detective stories, five books on aviation, and three more works on philosophy and economics, including the famous Illusion and Reality, which put forward succinctly the Marxist view of aesthetics.

  1. At the same time, the hated Colonel Gal was promoted to the rank of general, to command a division. He was replaced with the 15th Brigade by Vladimir Čopić, a Croatian chess addict and musician, who had briefly been a communist deputy in Yugoslavia, and who later, under the name of ‘Senko’, had been one of the leading members of the Yugoslav communist party in Moscow.

  2. O’Duffy, p. 157.

  1. Conforti, p. 29. Roatta was promoted general after Málaga.

  2. See Jesús Salas, p. 123, and Joaquin García Morato, Guerra en el aire (Madrid, 1940), p. 101. The caution of the Russian commanders—what would Stalin say if all these aircraft were lost?—caused them to hold their machines on the ground for the rest of this battle, thereby greatly assisting nationalist morale.

  3. Life (iv, 28 March 1938, qu. Guttman, p. 98) estimated that 10 per cent of the American volunteers were Jewish; ‘I know what Hitler is doing to my people’ was a normal explanation for volunteering. I discussed Merriman with his contemporary, J. K. Galbraith.

  1. Rolfe, pp. 57–71; Wintringham, p. 259.

  2. Rolfe, p. 71. The best account of the Lincoln Battalion is Cecil Eby’s Between the Bullet and the Lie (New York, 1969).

  3. The sources for this battle include Rojo, España heroica, pp. 54–69; Longo, pp. 208–38; Lister, p. 97f.; Wintringham, p. 151f.; R. Salas, vol. I, pp. 740–80; J. Salas, p. 160f.; and Martínez Bande, La lucha, p. 73f.

  1. Thanks to the kindness of Mr F. W. Deakin, then warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, I was able to see the report on Guadalajara sent to Rome by the Italian commander, General Roatta, in the library of St Antony’s. There is a useful study of this battle by John Coverdale, Journal of Contemporary History, January 1974 (‘The Battle of Guadalajara’). See also Lojendio, pp. 212ff; Aznar, pp. 380ff; Regler, The Owl of Minerva; Koltsov, pp. 350–53; Rojo, pp. 72–86; Longo, pp. 291–318; and Martinez Bande, La lucha, vol. III. The accounts of two Russian officers, Rodimstev and Batov, can be seen in Bajo la bandera. Italian accounts include that of Faldella.

  2. Cantalupo, pp. 85–6, 147ff. Farinacci made no attempt to bring the ambassador Cantalupo into these discussions, and the two only met accidentally at a bull-fight. Farinacci had been known before the march on Rome in 1922 as the particularly brutal fascist Ras of Cremona.

  1. Mussolini founded three towns of this name.

  2. Rojo, Así fue la defensa de Madrid, p. 176; letter from García Lacalle, previously cited.

  1. Pacciardi had been wounded at the Jarama.

  1. GD, p. 251.

  1. Spanish White Book (Geneva, 1937), p. 275.

  2. Lister, p. 110. See Rodimstev’s account in Bajo la bandera, p. 280f. Among those killed on this day was ‘Consul General’ (a rank in the fascist militias) Luizzi, ex-head of the Black Shirts of Udine. He was a battalion commander under Nuvoloni.

  3. The documents captured at Guadalajara included many poignant letters from Italian wives and mothers to their serving sons or husbands. One wife wrote: ‘What a beautiful honeymoon mine has been! Two days of marriage and twenty-five months of interminable waiting. First comes the country, I know, and afterwards love, but I am an egoist, and with reason, for you were one of the first volunteers to go to Africa, and are among the last to return. I pray God that one day He will make it possible for you both to serve the country and also provide bread for your family.’ (Document No. 267 in the folio presented to the League of Nations.) A mother wrote: ‘Dear Armando, I can only pray that God and the saints keep you and if you return in good health we can go back to Rome and open the shop.’ Other documents give lists of those shot as cowards for giving themselves self-inflicted wounds, and for bandaging themselves, when they had nothing wrong with them.

  1. Actually, several attempts at offensives were made in Orgaz’s sector, without success. O’Duffy’s Irishmen went into action on 13 March: the killed included Sergeant-Major Gaselee of Dublin and two légionnaires from Kerry.

  2. The report of the meeting on 17 March which resulted in this nomination can be seen in Martínez Bande, La lucha en torno, pp. 154–73.

  3. Regler, The Great Crusade, pp. 315ff. See Rodimstev, p. 306, Aznar, p. 113, and Conforti, p. 297.

  1. See discussion in Coverdale, op. cit., p. 67f. I follow Conforti’s analysis, p. 376, for the republican losses, Martínez Bande’s for the Italian losses and the Ufficio Spagna’s for wounded and prisoners. Large quantities of Italian equipment were also captured: Lister says it reached 65 cannons, 13 mortars, 500 machine-guns, over 3,000 rifles, 10 tanks. The ‘Garibaldi’ treated their Italian prisoners-of-war badly; did they kill them all? Possibly. (See Junod, p. 119.) See the inventory of the republican army published by Martínez Bande in La lucha, p. 227f.

  2. Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Spanish War’, in Fact, June 1937. See Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway (London, 1969), p. 360f. The author of Death in the Afternoon thereafter took an active part in the war on the republican side, exceeding the duties of a mere reporter by, for instance, instructing young Spaniards in the use of rifles. The first visit of Hemingway to the 12th International Brigade was a great occasion, the Hungarian General Lukács sending a message to the nearby village for its girls to attend the banquet he was giving (Regler, Owl of Minerva, p. 298).

  3. Herbert Matthews, Two Wars and More to Come (New York, 1938), p. 264.

  4. García Lacalle, p. 239.

  1. Coverdale, op. cit., p. 72.

  2. GD, pp. 258–60.

  3. Zugazagoitia, p. 241.

  4. F. Miksche, Blitzkrieg (Harmondsworth, 1944), p. 37.

  1. Cattell, Soviet Diplomacy, p. 73.

  2. NIS, nineteenth meeting.

  1. Haldane made three visits to republican Spain and henceforth he was in Britain a vigorous supporter of the ‘Aid to Spain’ movement, being then an ‘open supporter’ of the communists, though not yet a member, as he subsequently became (Ronald Clark, JBS, London, 1968, p. 115f.). For a picture of this scientist, ‘pathetically anxious’ to be of service, see Gurney, p. 77. Haldane’s concern, and that of his wife, Charlotte, in Spain had been begun by the enlistment of her sixteen-year-old son in the International Brigade. Mrs Haldane also visited Spain, but her main work was to act as matron for the reception of British volunteers for the International Brigades at the staging point in Paris.

  2. Venereal disease was high among French volunteers, chiefly because no
one had taken precautions against its spread. The British leaders gave lectures to their troops on contraception.

  1. Geoffrey Thompson, Front Line Diplomat (London, 1959), p. 118. Copeman recalled the execution later in the war of two British volunteers. See, for example, Eby, Between the Bullet and the Lie, for instances (also later in the war) of executions of Americans at the front. The number of Frenchmen shot by Marty’s orders has always been a matter of speculation. See Delperrie, p. 778, for a summary of the evidence.

  2. Though, in an effort to put the Popular Front policy fully into effect, cell meetings of the communist party inside the International Brigades ceased about this time for about nine months.

  3. Nor were international relations inside the Brigades always happy. For instance, Gal, now a general, gave a banquet one night for the 15th Brigade. On his right at dinner he placed the new brigade commissar, George Aitken. On his left sat the new commander, Čopić. The chief of staff, Colonel Klaus, a Prussian who had fought as an officer in the First World War, was placed next to Čopić down the table. Klaus was so angry at this that he walked out and had to be brought back under armed guard. (Recollection of George Aitken.)

  4. These laws were passed as part of the Non-Intervention Control Agreement.

  5. Vladimir Dedijer, Tito Speaks (London, 1953), pp. 106–8.

  1. Spender, p. 212.

  2. There were now two American battalions, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, commanded by Martin Hourihan from Pennsylvania, and the George Washington Battalion, led by a Yugoslav American, Mirko Marković (Marcovich)—more Yugoslav, actually, than American.

  3. The American Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, headed by Dr Cannon of Harvard Medical School, had raised $100,000. For a time, the State Department refused, under the Embargo Act, to permit even doctors and nurses to go to Spain. Later, they relented. Another US fund was ‘The North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy’, headed by Bishop McConnell. The two committees amalgamated in 1938.

  4. Hemingway, The Spanish War. Hemingway shortly became busy assisting with the Dutch communist Joris Ivens’s propaganda film, The Spanish Earth. The poet Archibald MacLeish, Dos Passos and Lillian Hellman were all involved in this (a successor to Spain in Flames, on which Hemingway had also worked, with Prudencia Pereda, a Spanish novelist in New York). Given these talents, it is surprising that the film was no better. (Dos Passos had just then had a great success with his novel USA.)

  1. Spender, World within World, p. 247. See though Auden’s article in the New Statesman, 20 January 1937. The experience of Auden in Spain is similar to that of Simone Weil. Both (unlike everyone else who visited Spain) were uninformative when they arrived home. Simone Weil, who spent some time in Catalonia in August–October 1936, underwent conversion as a result of her experiences. She had been appalled by the murders behind the republican lines.

  2. Her Penguin Special, Searchlight on Spain (Harmondsworth, 1938), was the most successful of all the propaganda books on the Spanish war. In 1938, she resigned her conservative seat and stood as an independent conservative in protest against non-intervention. She lost the ensuing by-election, despite the help of Gerald Brenan, Ch. 23 of whose Personal Record gives a vivid picture of the campaign.

  3. Charlotte Haldane, Truth Will Out (London, 1949), p. 106. Gollancz and Laski were the directors, with John Strachey, of the famous Left Book Club, whose 50,000 members were a shadow political movement for the Popular Front in England.

  1. Qu. Stansky and Abrahams, pp. 398–9.

  35

  1. Kindelán, p. 76.

  2. About March 1937, republican and nationalist troops theoretically numbered about 110,000 to 80,000 in both the north and the centre, about 80,000 to 30,000 in Aragon, and 60,000 to 50,000 in Andalusia and Estremadura (F. Ciutat, qu. Payne, The Spanish Revolution, p. 330). But see p. 526 above for qualifications to these figures.

  3. See report published in Martínez Bande, Vizcaya (Madrid, 1971), p. 223f.

  1. Apparently, in early 1937 one group of CNT in the Legion tried to rebel and release the prisoners in Saragossa. The plot miscarried and all were shot (see Payne, Politics, p. 390).

  2. See his report in Martinez Bande, op. cit., pp. 229–38. He later became famous in Franco’s Spain as an engineer of another sort: he designed the Talgo, the low-slung Madrid-Irún express train. He was luckier than his assistant, Captain Pablo Murga, shot as a spy in November 1936. (See Martínez Bande, La guerra en el norte, pp. 161–2.)

  1. Aznar, p. 397. The Condor Legion at this time was composed of (1) a combat group of two squadrons of Heinkel 51s and one of the new fast Messerschmitt 109s, and one or two fighters; the commander of this group was von Merhard; (2) a bomber group of two squadrons of Junkers 52s and Heinkel 111s, commanded by Major Fuchs; (3) a squadron of reconnaissance aircraft commanded by Major Kessel; (4) a squadron of light bombers (Henschel 123s); (5) a squadron of Heinkel 59 seaplanes; (6) a squadron of Junkers 52s, for transport; (7) anti-aircraft batteries. The Legion continued to have altogether 100 aircraft. Sperrle remained the commander (Jesús Salas, pp. 212–13).

  1. Twelve questions put by Llano de la Encomienda to Aguirre on 9 January are published in R. Salas, vol. III, p. 2840. Question No. 7 was characteristic: ‘the clothing and equipment belongs to Euzkadi or to the Army of the North? If it is of the latter, can the central staff intervene in its distribution?’ The Basque section of this army numbered 36,000 in March, being increased ultimately to 100,000 by June (Martínez Bande, Vizcaya, p. 36).

  1. Martínez Bande, Vizcaya, p. 135.

  2. Qu. Aznar, vol. II, p. 133.

  1. Steer, p. 162.

  2. Alcofar Nassaes, p. 112; see also Sancho Piazzoni, Las tropas Flechas Negras (Barcelona, 1942). GD, p. 269.

  3. Martínez Bande, Vizcaya, p. 35.

  4. Koltsov, p. 397; Castro Delgado, p. 517f. There were also disputes within the Basque communist party: Astigarrabía and Urondo (director of public works) were closer to the Basque government than others outside it such as Ormazábal, Larrañaga, and Monzón (Ibarruri, p. 388; Castro Delgado, p. 525).

  1. British ships carried most of the trade to and from Spain. British exports to Spain fell during 1937. Coal exports went down by 37 per cent, machinery by 90 per cent, motor-cars by 95 per cent, cutlery by 90 per cent (figures for all Spain, since the Board of Trade did not separate statistics for the two zones). British imports, however, increased, except in respect of nuts and potatoes. For those British persons who worried about their investments in Spain, that genius manqué of the epoch, Brian Howard, wrote a poem urging them to

  Spare a thought, a thought for all these Spanish tombs,

  And for a people in danger, grieving in breaking rooms,

  For a people in danger, shooting from falling homes.

  2. FO, 371/205/33.

  1. CAB, 23/88, meeting of 7 April, remark of Runciman, president of the Board of Trade.

  2. Nationalist note of 9 April, referred to by Eden in the House of Commons, 19 April (Hansard, House of Commons, vol. 322, col. 1404).

  1. Eden, p. 462; CAB, 15/37, 11 April 1937 (Hansard, House of Commons, vol. 322, col. 597).

  2. CAB, 16(37): meeting on 14 April 1937.

  3. CAB, 23/87.

  4. Anthony Eden, Foreign Affairs (Speeches) (London, 1938), pp. 189–90 (speech of 12 April).

  5. So he confided to his private secretary, Oliver Harvey (John Harvey, The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, 1937–1900, London, 1970, p. 34).

  1. All this debate, which was punctuated by points of order, cries of ‘withdraw’, and other interruptions, is to be seen in Hansard, House of Commons, vol. 322, cols. 1029–142. See Harvey, p. 39. ‘It is very difficult to get facts out of the Admiralty’, Eden’s private secretary added.

  2. Special profits (up to 100 per cent more than usual) were earned by British shipowners who ran the risk of helping to provision the republic.

  1. Eden, Facing the Dictators, p. 441.

  1. These
Heinkels had begun to arrive in Spain in February. Their first use had been a raid on Barajas and Alcalá de Henares on 9 March. Von Moreau was an ‘ace’ pilot who had successfully dropped supplies into the Alcázar at Toledo in September 1936.

  2. See below, p. 658, for this aircraft.

  3. For these details, see Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, Guernica (New York, 1975), pp. 206–13. The authors had access to the diary of Von Richthofen, the chief of staff of the Condor Legion, and other Condor Legion memories. The oak was destroyed in the Napoleonic wars but there was a stump and new shoots thereafter.

  1. See Le Clergé basque, pp. 151–3, and Vicente Talón’s Arde Guernica, the first edition of which (Madrid, 1970) was an important breakthrough in the writing of contemporary history in Spain. Talón’s account is accepted in R. Salas, vol. II, p. 1386 and p. 2864f. (vol. III). For a general study of the impact of Guernica, see Herbert Southworth’s La Destruction de Guernica (Paris, 1975). An account free of varnish can be seen in Martínez Bande, Vizcaya, p. 106f. The number of persons killed is extremely difficult to establish. Estimates vary from 1,600 to 100. Talón discusses the figures (p. 91f.) and suggests 200. But even the nationalist commission of inquiry suggested that 70 per cent of the houses were totally destroyed, 20 per cent seriously damaged, and only 10 per cent left moderately well off.

  2. See Appendix 8 for the British Consul’s report. The Basque account was confirmed by conversations which I had in Guernica in the summer of 1959 and with Father Alberto Onaindía, who was present. I also discussed Guernica with Noel Monks, of the Daily Mail, and Jesús María de Leizaola. In 1945, the Basque government in exile attempted to bring a case against Germany at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. The attempt was unsuccessful, since no events which occurred before 1939 were taken into account at Nuremberg.

  3. For the visit of foreign journalists between 29 April and 3 May see Southworth, p. 90.

  1. Virginia Cowles, Looking for Trouble (London, 1941), p. 71.

  2. Galland, p. 26.