The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (34 page)

The militias had suffered from similar disadvantages, but they had no pretensions to being an elite force arriving in the nick of time to save the situation. Nevertheless, the foreign innocents, who felt a ‘moment of awe’ on being handed a rifle, had several advantages over the Spanish militiamen on first going into battle. They had a slightly greater knowledge and understanding of modern military technology, they understood the value of trenches and, most important of all, they had men in their ranks who ‘had been through it before’. Spain’s neutrality in the Great War made the first shock of battle much more traumatic to the militia.

The Soviet authorities did everything they could to camouflage the number of Red Army personnel in Spain, even making some of them enlist as volunteers in the International Brigades. The most obvious examples were the commanders, Kléber, Gal, Copic and Walter, while in the Polish Dombrowski Battalion there was a significant nucleus of Red Army officers. Altogether thirty Soviet officers were sent to Spain as commanders in the International Brigades.
¹⁴
The Palafox Battalion appears to have had an even larger Soviet contingent than most. It was commanded by a Major Tkachev (‘Palafox’), most of the four companies were commanded by Red Army lieutenants and many of the men, it would appear, were Soviet citizens. ‘There was all sorts of nationalities in it,’ wrote one member in the official account, ‘such as Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, etc.’
¹⁵
In addition, a training centre for International Brigade officers was set up in Tiflis with a capacity for 60 infantry officers and 200 pilots.
¹⁶
The Soviet military advisers were ordered to keep out of range of artillery fire (
podalshe ot artillereiskogo ognia
), so that captured officers could not be paraded in front of the Non-Intervention Committee.

Although it is hard to establish exactly the number of Soviet personnel who served in the Spanish Civil War, it is clear from documents that there were never more than 800 present at any one time. The total appears to have been a maximum of 2,150, of whom 600 were noncombatant, including interpreters. There were, in addition, between 20 and 40 members of the NKVD and between 20 and 25 diplomats. Altogether, 189 were reported killed or missing: 129 officers, 43 NCOs and 17 soldiers.
¹⁷

On 16 October, in a coded telegram, Voroshilov, the People’s Commissar for Defence, ordered Gorev to ‘send advisers to work in divisions and brigades’.
¹⁸
The vain Voroshilov, who adopted the codename of ‘The Master’ for Operation X, was eager to impress Stalin. He hoped, while sitting in his office in Moscow with a map of Spain, to control events on the ground thousands of kilometres away.
¹⁹
Advisers, exasperated by his interference, started to refer to him ironically as ‘the great strategist’. Voroshilov started sending messages to Madrid telling the chief military adviser to ‘use his brains and display some will-power, so that the situation would start looking different’.
²⁰
He also threatened the most senior advisers that ‘if the aforementioned instruction is not implemented [on the concentration of forces to attack on the Madrid front], strict disciplinary measures will be taken against all of you.’
²¹

The trouble was that many of the advisers were so junior that they had as little experience of command as the Spanish officers they were supposed to advise. Colonel [later Marshal] R. Malinovsky (‘Malino’) wrote that advisers to some divisional commanders were ‘very good lieutenants, wonderful commanders of companies or squadrons, but, of course, were not ready to command a division–and how could one offer advice on something that one has no idea about?’
²²
Some advisers were extremely undiplomatic in the way they worked with republican officers and ‘rudely interfered in the operational orders given by the commanders’.
²³

Soviet advisers, however, were soon complaining bitterly in their reports back to Moscow about the incompetence and inertia with which they had to deal. ‘Sometimes my hands itch to take some of these bastards out of their offices and stand them up against a wall,’ wrote General Berzin to Voroshilov. ‘Such unpunished, unbridled sabotage of necessary measures, such sloppiness and irresponsibility as reign here in the general staff and in the bureaucracy of the administration at the front, I could never have imagined before. People simply do not carry out the orders of the war ministry, or they do the opposite and calmly continue to stay where they are.’
²⁴

One of the main problems in the relationship between Soviet personnel and their Spanish allies stemmed from a clash of very different cultures, political as well as social. Soviet soldiers had never had the opportunity to mix with foreigners, especially with ones who disagreed with Stalinist policy, and this was clearly a shock. A commissar with a Soviet tank battalion reported that the first ‘specific feature of the local situation which we had failed to take into account’ was the fact that ‘people around us belong to different political parties’. Another problem was the ‘practice of a completely open consumption of alcohol (wine is served with meals)’. Perhaps predictably, a number of Soviet advisers tended to over-exploit the opportunity. An aviation commissar reported that alcohol ‘was also a great threat’ for the Soviet pilots. ‘A local tradition is to drink wine with meals. There is always a lot of wine in our canteens. At first, our men got carried away.’

The tank battalion commissar was also shocked by the existence of legalized brothels in republican Spain. ‘I have to mention that it took a while for a number of our comrades to understand how disgraceful it is to visit brothels. About twenty men have visited prostitutes without permission before 3 December. After the party collective stopped these visits to brothels, discipline has changed dramatically for the better.’ Clearly few precautions were taken, since 22 men were infected with venereal diseases. He also reported on a ‘carefree and offensive attitude towards women: Morkevich, a Komsomol member and commander of a tank, offered 200 pesetas to one woman, who refused and reported this to the Antifascist Women’s Committee’.
²⁵

The small detachment of Soviet naval advisers, led by Kuznetsov, had one overriding priority. It was to organize the safe arrival of ships bringing armaments and ammunition from the Soviet Union. Each vessel was identified by a cypher, consisting of Y followed by a number, and given a different route. Those leaving the Crimea would pass through the Dardanelles, then find an island in the Aegean to carry out a superficial refit to change identity, including the name of the ship and flag of convenience. A fake funnel or superstructure would be added to camouflage the ship’s profile. Some pretended to carry tourists, with members of the crew strolling around in hats and pretending to take photographs. The captain was instructed to avoid crossing dangerous stretches in daylight.

Once into the central Mediterranean, the Y ships would keep close to the coast of Africa. They turned north towards Cartagena only when level with Algeria. The most dangerous part of the journey came towards the end, with Italian submarines as well as aircraft patrolling the blockade area. When 48 hours from their destination, Kuznetsov’s staff, who had been tracking the progress of each ship, arranged for Spanish republican warships to escort them in.
²⁶

One young Soviet sailor was clearly fired up with his mission, to judge by the poem he wrote:

I am a brave sailor from the Red Navy

I am exactly twenty years old.

I am sailing out into the vast expanse of the sea

To bring the Great October to the whole of the world.

Oh, our noise and uproar,

Resound against the bourgeois shores,

Our Soviet fleet is the stronghold.

All the working people, forward!
²⁷

The first ship with Soviet military supplies to reach Spain was the
Campeche
, which berthed in Cartagena on 4 October 1936. The second ship, the Soviet vessel
Komsomol
, reached Cartagena eight days later with the first shipment of T-26 tanks. These two shiploads arrived just in time to play a major part in the imminent battle for Madrid.

The Battle for Madrid

T
he success of the Army of Africa in putting to flight the militias had greatly raised the optimism of the nationalists and the expectations of their allies. Reports were sent to Germany that Madrid had no food reserves, no anti-aircraft defences and no fortifications. The militia were badly armed with old rifles of varying calibres and they had few machine guns that worked. The republican fighters and bombers, consisting mainly of French Dewoitines and Potez, were no match for the Heinkel and Fiat fighters. It was the combination of artillery fire and air attacks which had completely demoralized the militia columns. Even many regular officers began to shake uncontrollably when they heard aero engines.

It is often forgotten that the Spanish metropolitan army had no battle experience and the majority of its officers had not handled troops even on manoeuvres. This lack of training, as much as the instinctive dislike which most officers felt for the militia system, contributed to the chaotic retreat of the republican forces from Estremadura. As headquarters’ staff frequently retreated without attempting to warn their forward units, it was not surprising that militia groups, feeling abandoned, should make a run for it before they were cut off. In fact, with communications virtually non-existent, a formalized command structure could not have co-ordinated the different sectors, even if it had been run efficiently. General Carlos Masquelet attempted to establish defences close to Madrid, with four concentric defence lines, roughly ten kilometres apart. They were not continuous, but concentrated on the most important road junctions.
¹

The nationalist advance on the capital started at the end of the first week of October. The Army of Africa began a three-pronged attack: northwards from Toledo, north-eastwards along the Navalcarnero road and eastwards from San Martín de Valdeiglesias. Mola was given official command of the Madrid operation, which appears to have been a calculated ploy by Franco, in case anything went wrong,
²
while Colonel Varela was in command of the colonial troops. Yagüe was back with the Army of Africa, but in a subordinate position. The columns, composed of around 10,000 men each, were commanded by Lieutenant-Colonels Carlos Asensio, Fernando Barrón, Heli Rolando de Tella, Delgado Serrano, and Major Castejón while Colonel Monasterio commanded the cavalry. The left flank of the attack was strengthened by 10,000 men from Mola’s army, made up of Carlist
requetés
, Falangist militia and regular soldiers. The plan was for the nationalist forces to enter the capital on 12 October, the day of the Feast of the Spanish Race. Mola claimed that he would drink a cup of coffee that day on the Gran Vía and, although the attack on Madrid was delayed, even Franco’s staff began to prepare for a triumphal entry. The seemingly inevitable capture of Madrid would not only mean a crushing psychological blow to the republicans. It should guarantee belligerent rights, if not de facto recognition, from foreign powers.

After Navalcarnero on the north-east axis had fallen, Illescas on the Toledo road was occupied on 19 October. Torrejón, also on the Toledo road and some 30 kilometres from the capital, was taken several days later. The nationalists were not alone in believing that Madrid would fall to them rapidly. Foreign journalists and diplomats were sure that the advance of the Army of Africa, backed by squadrons of the Luftwaffe and Italian air force, could not be stopped. The Republic’s administration seemed paralysed by a strange mixture of frantic activity and inertia. Many blamed ‘sabotage by reactionary civil servants’, but however true, such charges did little more than divert attention from the government’s own chaos.

In the second half of October Largo Caballero began to issue decrees extending mobilization in an effort to improve Madrid’s defences; yet for much of the capital’s population the war still seemed remote. Militiamen, criticized for being on ‘excessive guard duty’ in the capital rather than at the front, tended to ignore official communiqués. Nor could the prime minister himself forget old rivalries. He refused to assign UGT construction workers to the digging of trenches in case they defected to the CNT. And yet the speed of the nationalist advance was such that on 18 October, when Caballero had tried to telephone the republican commander in Illescas, he had found himself talking to the nationalist commander who had just occupied the town.

Of the government decrees issued at this time, the one on 18 October was to have the most far-reaching effect. This announced the establishment of ‘mixed brigades’ of 4,000 men each. Although not implemented immediately, it marked the first major step away from militia columns towards a formalized army. The brigades were to consist of four battalions, with supporting artillery.
³
A few days later, XI and XII International Brigades were formed at Albacete under the command of Kléber and Lukács. The Republic soon had 80,000 men under arms, most of whom were to bear the brunt of defending Madrid.

Aleksandr Rodimtsev, one of the key commanders at Stalingrad six years later, described his arrival at the Madrid front at this inauspicious moment. He had come from Albacete by truck. Each time they had stopped on the way, village boys had admired their uniforms and stroked their pistol holsters. There had been an air attack on the convoy, and everyone had jumped out cursing in different languages. In Madrid he had reported to the war ministry, accompanied by an interpreter. He was taken to meet General Pozas, commander of the Army of the Centre, who was about to become a member of the Communist Party. Pozas warned him that discipline was weak in the militias. Soldiers went home from the front on their own accord.