by Hugh Thomas
1. Ciano, Diaries 1937–8, p. 132.
2. See CAB (163) 38. For Reichenau, see R. J. O’Neill, The German Army and the Nazi Party, 1933–1939 (London, 1966), p. 194. The lesson the Germans had drawn was that Franco did not have enough motor vehicles to enable Blitzkrieg.
3. CAB, 32 (38) of 13 July.
1. GD, pp. 675–81. For commentary, see Harper, p. 98f.
2. GD, p. 689.
3. According to R. Salas (vol. II, p. 1870), the republic refused to buy from the US the T-6 fighter, which would have had a considerable effect. But how would they have paid, and was it desirable to change from one supplier to another in mid-war?
4. Aznar, p. 704; Buckley, p. 375.
1. GD, p. 711.
2. Professor Bosch Gimpera gave me a copy of this letter.
3. Evidence of Professor Bosch Gimpera.
4. Azaña, op. cit., p. 880.
5. NIS, twenty-ninth meeting; NIS (c), ninety-third meeting.
1. GD, p. 725.
2. Cattell, Soviet Diplomacy, p. 119.
3. Ansaldo, p. 63, says that this attack was the result of a personal initiative of Franco. Certain alarmists in nationalist Spain were convinced that the Germans were at the back of this campaign, in order to prolong the war.
4. The first head of this was Luis Bolín, who bought twelve school buses from the US for the purpose (cf. Bolín, p. 302).
1. See R. Salas, vol. IV, pp. 3284–6.
2. Buckley, pp. 379–81.
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1. Lister, p. 220.
1. Peirats, vol. III, p. 230.
2. These were the Armies of the Centre (Casado), the Levante (Hernández Saravia), of ‘Manoeuvre’ (Menéndez) and Andalusia (Moriones).
3. For an excellent pen-picture of the two, see Tagüeña, p. 187.
4. It is interesting that a job was found for Tomás, who had been so unsuccessful but so presumptuous in the presidency of the Council of Asturias. The nationalists would have hesitated at such an act of kindness rewarding incompetence.
1. An active member of the socialist youth before the war, Tagüeña fought in the Sierra in July and on the Tagus front in September, in Madrid in October, succeeding Fernando de Rosa, and became, in the winter of 1936–7, one of the first commanders of a Mixed Brigade. He joined the communist party in November 1936. His great success had been in the Aragon front in retreat in March.
1. For the battle of the Ebro, see Luis María Mezquida, La batalla del Ebro (Tarragona, 1963–7); Julián Henríquez, La batalla del Ebro (Mexico, 1944); and the versions given by Tagüeña, Lister, Martínez de Campos, Kindelán, Rojo and Henry Buckley in their often-cited books. For the battle plan, see R. Salas, vol. IV, pp. 3287–97. Mezquida’s volumes have the merit of incorporating a large number of personal testimonies from junior ranks. For an impression of the war in the air, see García Lacalle, p. 381f. For an odd eye-witness account, see Francisco Pérez López, A Guerrilla Diary of the Spanish Civil War (London, 1972). See also R. Salas, vol. II, p. 1967f. I benefited from discussing this battle with the then Colonel Martínez de Campos and Manuel Tagüeña, and from correspondence with Colonel García Lacalle.
2. Reconquista (newspaper of the Army of the Ebro). The preparation of this offensive is well described in Tagüeña, p. 200f. Equally important, in these first days of the battle of the Ebro, was the reconstituted French 14th Brigade, led by Marcel Sagnier, commissar Henri Tanguy. See Delperrie de Bayac, p. 354f. The pontoon bridges and inflatable rubber boats were bought in France. Did the French military advise on their use, as implied by General Barroso to Hills (p. 319)? There is no evidence.
1. Compare the western front in 1918, which was only 400 miles.
2. Kemp, p. 172. He was wounded by a stray shell just before the battle began. For months previously he had been facing a onetime contemporary of his at Trinity College, Cambridge, Malcolm Dunbar, chief of staff to the 15th International Brigade.
1. Martínez de Campos, p. 154.
2. Haden Guest had been the inspiration of a whole generation of communists at Cambridge. Clive had rowed for Oxford University in the early 1930s.
1. Letter from Lacalle, July 1964.
2. GD, p. 735. Immediately before the start of the Ebro battle, the Spanish nationalist ambassador in Berlin, the Marqués de Magaz, had complained that the German government were selling arms to the republic. Rifles at £1 apiece and also aircraft had been sold by Germany nominally to China and Greece, in fact to republican Spain. Magaz alleged that Göring knew of the transaction, wishing to prolong the civil war by this trickery. After two months, Germany denied that their government was implicated. (Documents quoted in The International Brigades, p. 44.)
3. Aznar, pp. 744–5, prints several republican orders later captured which show that this threat was often carried out.
1. See Peirats, vol. III, pp. 197–205.
2. The average in Barcelona was 80,000 compared with 50,000 in January 1936.
3. Qu. Azaña, vol. III, p. 511.
4. On 9 August, Prieto attacked Negrín before the national committee of the Spanish socialist party. The speech was published as ‘How and why I left the ministry of defence’. See Yo y Moscú, pp. 137–227.
5. A secret FAI circular of September 1938 pointed out that of 7,000 promotions in the army since May, 5,500 had been communists (Peirats, vol. III, p. 225).
1. Zugazagoitia, pp. 438–40. See comment by Jackson, p. 457. By that time, Azaña’s diary is too fragmentary for much use to be made of it.
2. Zugazagoitia, p. 90.
1. The above owes much to Professor Bosch Gimpera. See also Zugazagoitia. I also discussed the event with Irujo. The rumour that at this time the Basques and Catalans sought a negotiated peace by asking the help of Bonnet and Halifax is false (it is reported as a fact in USD, 1938, vol. I, p. 239).
2. See below, p. 826.
1. Azcárate, p. 174. Azcárate thought that Halifax saw the injustice of the discrimination, but could do nothing to counter Chamberlain’s desire not to offend Italy.
2. GD, pp. 765–6.
3. This plan was not accepted by Franco till the end of September.
4. Ciano, Diaries 1937–8, p. 148.
1. GD, p. 742.
2. Ibid., p. 747.
3. The US consul-general in Geneva reported that Negrín’s discussion was with the Duke of Alba (USD, 1938, vol. I, p. 239). Bosch Gimpera and Juan Negrín Jr. told me explicitly that it was a German. Negrín also told this to Prieto’s secretary, Victor Salazar (Convulsiones, vol. III, p. 2222), with the clear intention that he should pass on the news. It is difficult to believe that Hitler’s emissary, whoever he was, said, as Prieto reported, that Hitler was willing to transfer his support to Negrín from Franco on the condition that Negrín set up a Nazi-style state. Perhaps it should be added that Negrín always had a line open to Berlin, through the beautiful singer Emerita Esparza, who travelled several times from Barcelona to Berlin in the course of the war, staying with Negrín in the Pedralbes Palace in Barcelona. Was she a spy? For whom?
4. Ciano, Diaries 1937–8, p. 159.
5. GD, p. 479. Salazar had urged Franco to this attitude. See Kay, p. 117.
1. Ciano, Diaries 1937–8, p. 163.
2. Ibid., pp. 167–8; Feiling, p. 376.
3. GD, p. 754.
4. Ibid., p. 756.
5. Comment of Francisco Giral.
1. GD, p. 758. He had been counsellor in Madrid in 1936.
2. ibid., p. 760.
3. Médiation en Espagne (Paris, 1938).
4. GD, pp. 776, 784–6. See below, p. 837.
5. See above, p. 326. On 25 December 1937, a French journalist, Luciani, representing several French papers in Moscow, had been summoned by Litvinov, to be told that the Kremlin had ‘established contacts’ to initiate a German-Russian rapprochement. Litvinov told Luciani to tell his ambassador. But though he did so, no one took the message seriously. See Le Monde, 19 February 1969, qu. Suárez, p. 25.
6. See above
, p. 809.
1. The number of Russians in Spain had diminished, for Spanish pilots had been trained to fly the aircraft the Russians had given them: the Russian military mission seems to have been much smaller; and even Orlov, the NKVD representative, had defected, on 12 July 1938, fleeing first to Canada, then to the US (see his testimony before the internal security sub-committee of the Senate, 14–15 February 1957: Hearings, p. 3421).
2. A leader of the revolt in the Asturias in 1934, Valledor had also fought in Asturias in 1936–7. He had escaped from a labour batallion in nationalist Spain in 1938.
3. Rolfe, p. 234.
1. Vincent Sheean, The Eleventh Hour (London, 1939), p. 237.
1. From a pamphlet printed in Barcelona 1938. The same day, Colonel Ramón Franco, Franco’s brother, who had been for some time aerial commander of the nationalists in the Balearics, was shot down and killed in his hydroplane (J. Salas, p. 384).
2. Nenni, p. 172.
3. Three hundred five members of the British Battalion were greeted, amid excitement, at Victoria Station on 7 December by Attlee, Sir Stafford Cripps, William Gallacher, Tom Mann, and Will Lawther. Sam Wild then gave the battalion its last dismissal. The Dependants’ Aid Committee looked after the families of those killed as best it could.
1. Toynbee, Survey (London, 1938), vol. I, pp. 392–3. The secretary to this commission was Noël Field, ex–State Department official, League official and future victim, or hero, of the cold war. He already was, or considered himself, in 1938, a Russian agent. See Flora Lewis, The Man Who Disappeared (London, 1965).
1. Hemingway had gone back to America earlier in the year, having finished his bad play, The Fifth Column, in the Hotel Florida. One night in the summer, however, the friends of the republic were happy to hear on the wireless the announcement: ‘The writer, Ernest Hemingway, has suddenly left his home in Key West. He was last seen in New York, boarding a ship, without hat or baggage, to rejoin the Spanish republican troops at the front.’ (Regler, Owl of Minerva, p. 298.) Hemingway was disillusioned with ‘the carnival of treachery and rottenness on both sides’ by now (Baker, p. 401). See his The Denunciation and The Butterfly and the Tank.
2. Lister, p. 214; Tagüeña, p. 261; R. Salas, vol. II, p. 2021, and vol. IV, p. 3303. The latter gives deaths at 4,007, wounded 37,712, and ill 15,238, a total of 56,957. It would be reasonable to suppose that 10 per cent of the wounded and sick later died.
3. Gambara, a young officer in the First World War, had fought in Ethiopia as chief of staff to Bastico. He was to become chief of staff to Graziani in 1943 in Mussolini’s ill-fated republic of Salò. The Cuerpo de Ejército Legionario under Gambara consisted of the Littorio Division (General Bitossi), the Frecce Nere (Colonel Babini), the Frecce Azzurre (Colonel la Ferla), the ‘Flechas Verdes’ (Colonel Battisti), and an artillery section, headed by General D’Amico. The corps had some 58 batteries (Aznar, p. 609). The Italians comprised now 26,000 NCOs and men, 2,000 officers (Belforte, p. 118). See Alcofar Nassaes, CTV, p. 176.
1. Ciano, Diaries 1937–8, pp. 180–81.
2. The Times, 5 November 1938.
3. The aim of the Anglo-Italian Agreement was to wean Italy from Germany. Halifax wrote to Sir Eric Phipps in Paris: ‘Although we do not expect to detach Italy from the Axis, we believe the agreement will increase Mussolini’s power of manoeuvre and so make him less dependent on Hitler and, therefore, freer to resume the classic Italian role of balancing between Germany and the western Powers’ (British Foreign Policy, 3rd series, vol. III, No. 285). Mussolini’s response was to launch a renewed campaign for the cession of the French territories of Nice, Savoy and Corsica.
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1. This psychological war is excellently analysed in Abella, p. 369f. This radio station in Salamanca was directed by Jacinto Miquelarena, whose brief ‘Comentarios’ were well edited. An ex–radical socialist, Joaquin Pérez Madrigal, had an amusing programme entitled ‘La Flota Republicana’. He also gave details of the menus in the restaurants of Salamanca designed to make mouths water in Barcelona. Whether that had a good effect on the half-starving anti-republicans in republican territory is doubtful. See his nine volumes of apologia, Memorias de un converso (Madrid, 1943).
1. GD, p. 796.
2. One alleged plot concerned the British consul in San Sebastián, Harold Goodman, in whose suitcase secret nationalist documents were found. Was it a police plant or an attempt by the republic to gain information? A servant killed himself; perhaps, therefore, the latter. Thompson, p. 145, considered the Gestapo responsible: ‘what spy would draw a trench system on a sheet?’
3. Payne, The Spanish Revolution, p. 193. Yet this Catholicism had strange bedfellows: ‘Caminos de la guerra española; caminos del imperio hispano; caminos del Islam; trinidad que resulta en la sola meta del afán sin horizontes’. Thus Antonio Olmedo in ABC de Sevilla, 5 April 1938. (Paths of the Spanish war; paths of the Spanish empire; paths of Islam; trinity resulting in the sole goal of struggle without end.)
1. GD, pp. 795–6. The date of the agreement was 19 November. See Harper, p. 112.
1. See comment by Harper, p. 117, and Salas Larrazábal in Palacio Atard, p. 123. In ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’, Orwell wrote, ‘though the war may end soon or may drag on for years, it will end with Spain divided up either by actual frontiers or into economic zones’.
2. The nationalist army was composed of sixty-one infantry divisions (840,000 men), 15,323 cavalry, 19,013 artillery, 119,594 auxiliary services, 35,000 Moroccans (with Spanish officers), 32,000 CTV (half Spanish), and 5,000 Condor Legion: total—1,065,041. (Bolín’s figures, p. 349.)
3. Sainz Rodríguez went down to Seville to find out his real plans and to calm him (Sainz Rodríguez, p. 271).
1. Peirats, vol. III, p. 278.
2. Diario de Sesiones, 30 September 1938.
3. Lawrence Fernsworth, New York Times, 23 March 1938, qu. Jackson, p. 458.
1. A. Toynbee, Survey, 1938, vol. I, pp. 271, 389.
2. The exact figures here were 700 grammes of bread dropping to 400, 250 of meat to 150, 200 of vegetables to 180.
3. Bosch Gimpera, Memorandum No. 2.
4. See discussion in Jackson, p. 447, and also Norah Curtis and Cyril Dilby, Malnutrition (London, 1944), p. 46f.
1. Campo Libre, 14 January 1939, gives the following figures for sowing in the season 1938–9:
2. Eight million quintals.
3. See conversation between Trifón Gómez and Azaña, Azaña, op. cit., vol. IV, p. 900.
4. Soviet army records, qu. Payne, The Spanish Revolution, p. 344.
5. Bricall, pp. 48 and 101.
1. Bricall, p. 55.
2. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes (Paris, 1939), p. 210.
1. Gorkin, pp. 268–80; Peirats, vol. III, pp. 297–300. See also Suárez’s general account of the trial. One of the POUM leaders, David Rey, was freed. He was shot by Franco after the end of the war. After the end of this trial, three leading anarchists—Federica Montseny, Abad de Santillán and García Birlán—visited Azaña to denounce Negrín as a dictator and demand a change of government. But Azaña, as usual, would do nothing definite, though apparently agreeing with his visitors (Peirats, vol. III, p. 318).
2. He did eventually do so, in France.
3. GD, p. 796.
1. USD, 1938, vol. I, p. 255. I discussed the failure of this plan with A. A. Berle in 1963.
2. Though the Chetwode commission (see above, p. 831) persuaded the nationalists to delay 400 executions.
3. J. Salas has (p. 432) 197 fighters, 93 ‘aviones de cooperación’, 179 bombers.
4. Franco’s headquarters staff in 1938 was directed by the now General Francisco Martín Moreno, beneath whom were Colonels Villanueva, Ungría, Barroso, Villegas and Medrano (organization, information, operations, services, maps): the essential if forgotten men in the organization of Franco’s war. Cervera and Kindelán continued as chief of staff of the navy and head of the air force, while Generals García Pallasar
and García de Pruneda directed the artillery and the engineers. See Martínez Bande, Los cien últimos dias de la república (Barcelona, 1972), p. 39.
5. Aznar, pp. 814–15.
1. García Lacalle, p. 445. Many aircraft were short of machine-guns.
2. Zugazagoitia, p. 447. The English editor Kingsley Martin told Negrín in December that Churchill had ‘changed his mind’ over the Spanish republic. ‘Too late’, said Negrín. (Kingsley Martin, p. 136.)
3. See the accusations in De la Cierva, Historia ilustrada, vol. II, pp. 474–5. Matallana certainly was in touch with the nationalists two months later.
4. García Lacalle, p. 431.
1. See Hidalgo de Cisneros, vol. II, pp. 445–52. García Lacalle, by then head of the republican fighters, urged this visit to Moscow in November. Hidalgo agreed, and undertook to go. Weeks later, Lacalle returned from the front and found him still there. Hidalgo explained that he had not gone because Negrín and he had thought that the under-secretary, a communist of long standing, Núñez Maza, should go. Lacalle returned to the front, picturing yet again an emissary to be already in Moscow. Weeks later, which again seemed like years, Lacalle returned to find Núñez Maza still in Barcelona because he believed this to be a manoeuvre by Hidalgo to remove him from his job. Hidalgo de Cisneros then went: too late (letter from García Lacalle, July 1964).
2. See Buckley; Alvarez del Vayo, Freedom’s Battle, p. 262f.; Aznar, p. 816f.; Rojo, España heroica; Lojendio, p. 547f.
3. A. Santamaria, Operazione Spagna, 1936–1939 (Rome, 1965), p. 115.
1. Ciano, Diaries 1939–43, p. 5.
2. Ibid., p. 10.
3. Alvarez del Vayo, Freedom’s Battle, p. 262; Azaña, vol. IV, p. 907.
1. Azaña, vol. IV, p. 906.
1. Azaña, vol. III, p. 537. According to Azaña, the government left behind all the papers relating to espionage in nationalist Spain. This was fatal for many.
2. Vicente Rojo, ¡Alerta los pueblos! (Buenos Aires, 1939), p. 173.
3. García Lacalle, p. 490.