The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (44 page)

A serious setback was avoided only because Mera was helped by local CNT members acting as spies and scouts who were able to advise him of the best places to throw a pontoon bridge across the swollen river. At dawn on the morning of 18 March his division crossed the pontoon bridge and occupied the heights above Brihuega. Heavy sleet shielded them from the enemy’s view, but it also caused the general offensive to be delayed. Mera had no alternative but to keep the division lying in the wet with instructions not to fire, hoping that the Italians would not discover them.

The weather did not start to clear until after midday; only then did the Chato and Katiuska squadrons become operational. Jurado gave the order for a general attack. Líster’s division advanced up the main road, supported again by T-26 tanks, and this force crashed into Bergonzoli’s
Littorio
Division, made up of regular troops. XI International Brigade also went on to the offensive. Karl Anger wrote excitedly of ‘the tap-dance of machine-guns’.
²⁶

On the republicans’ right flank, Mera’s division had almost managed to surround Brihuega when the enemy became seized by panic and fled. The CTV was saved from an even greater disaster by the fall of darkness, the more orderly retreat of the
Littorio
division and the number of Italian trucks available for their escape. Even so, their offensive had cost the Italians 5,000 casualties and the loss of a considerable quantity of weapons and vehicles. Captured Italian documents stated that many of their supposedly wounded soldiers were found to have nothing wrong with them under their bandages.

For the republicans, the end of the battle brought a moment of respite. Food was brought up on mules and wine was issued. Some of the men cooked paella in their trenches. Commissars issued three cigarettes to each man and trucks brought up new
alpargatas
to replace those shoes which had rotted in the mud and snow.
²⁷
Italian morale, on the other hand, was devastated and Mussolini was furious. Since Moscardó’s troops had suffered very few casualties, Franco’s officers refused to see the engagement as a nationalist defeat. They were scathing about their allies’ performance and composed a song to the tune of ‘
Faccetta nera’
which went: ‘Guadalajara is not Abyssinia; here the reds are chucking bombs which explode.’ It ended: ‘The retreat was a dreadful thing; one Italian even arrived in Badajoz.’

As the only publicized republican victory of the war, the battle became a propaganda trophy. The communists claimed that the town of Brihuega was captured by El Campesino’s brigade and even added several anecdotal touches. In fact, El Campesino arrived alone at dusk on a motorcycle and was fired at by outlying pickets from the 14th Division. He raced back to report that the town was still in enemy hands. Considering that Líster’s division was supposed to be advancing up the Saragossa road, El Campesino had no official reason for being anywhere near Brihuega. The communist version of events was dropped in later years after he was disgraced during his Soviet exile and sent to a labour camp.

In that dangerous year of 1937, Soviet officers were to disappear into camps much sooner than El Campesino. Stalinist spy mania was reaching a peak. Suspicions in Spain and suspicions back in the Soviet Union fed upon each other. Regimental Commissar A. Agaltsov reported to Moscow in 1937 that the ‘fascist intervention in Spain and Trotskyist–Bukharin gangs that are operating in our country are links of the same chain’.
²⁸
And some of the Soviet military advisers who returned from special mission in Spain accelerated the ‘mincing machine’ of the purges. G. Kulik, the commander of III Rifle Corps, wrote on 29 April 1937 to Voroshilov: ‘One cannot help asking oneself, how could this happen that the enemies of the people, traitors to my motherland, for whose interests I have fought at the front in Spain, could have managed to receive leading positions?…As a bolshevik, I don’t want the blood of our people to be shed unnecessarily because of the career makers, hidden traitors and mediocre leaders of troops, whom I have seen in the Spanish army. I consider it necessary that a careful review is conducted of all our commanders, in the first place, high-ranking ones, both in the army and in headquarters.’
²⁹
Stalin’s purge of the Red Army was under way.

The failure of the Guadalajara offensive was excellent for morale, but it was not the turning point which the Republic and its supporters abroad tried to portray. Herbert Matthews of the
New York Times
even wrote that ‘Guadalajara is for fascism what Bailén was for Napoleon’.
³⁰
From a political point of view, however, some argued that ‘Guadalajara aroused the enthusiasm of all anti-fascists…and represented a hard blow for the prestige of fascism and Mussolini’.
³¹
Yet, paradoxically, Mussolini’s desire for vengeance to wipe out the humiliation only tied him closer to Franco’s cause.
³²
As the Wilhelmstrasse put it, ‘The defeat was of no great military importance, to be sure, but on the other hand it had unfavourable psychological and political reactions which needed to be stamped out by a military victory.’
³³
Mussolini replaced Roatta with General Ettore Bastico and devoted even more money and armaments to the war at a terrible cost for Italy.

The only certain consequence for the nationalists was that Franco had to abandon his obsession with entering Madrid quickly and to adopt a longer-term strategy. After the casualties suffered at the Jarama, German advisers were able to argue more strongly for a programme of reducing vulnerable republican territories first. For a number of reasons the most attractive target was undoubtedly the northern republican zone along the Bay of Biscay.

The War in the North

T
he isolated northern zone along the Cantabrian coast was the logical military target for the nationalists after four unsuccessful attempts to cut short the war by capturing Madrid. The German advisers put strong pressure on Franco to change his strategy. A longer war would deflect attention from Hitler’s plans in Central Europe, but they were also interested in obtaining the steel and coal of the region for their accelerating armaments programme. In any case, Franco had finally realized that he could not muster sufficient troops to mount a decisive offensive around the capital where the Republic had the advantage of interior lines as well as numbers. The only way to improve the ratio of forces was to crush a weaker sector first in order to release troops for the tougher objectives in the centre. As both the Aragón and Andalucian fronts could be reinforced by the republicans fairly rapidly, the beleaguered northern zone was the obvious choice.

The northern zone had been left untouched by the centralization carried out by Largo Caballero’s government. The councils of Asturias and Santander still reflected the union-based organization which followed the rising, while the Basques regarded themselves as autonomous allies of the Republic. Although Basque volunteer units had fought at Oviedo, and Asturian and Santanderino militia helped in Vizcaya, the northern regions were not united, except in their objection to a centralized republican command. The Basques, in particular, rejected the idea that the ‘Army of Euzkadi’ should simply be part of the Army of the North, commanded ultimately from Valencia. Largo Caballero then agreed to this without telling General Llano de la Encomienda, the army commander.

On 1 October 1936 the statute of Basque autonomy had come before the Cortes sitting in Valencia. It took effect four days later. On 7 October the municipal councillors of the region met in the Casa de Juntas in Guernica, ‘the sacred city of the Basques’, in accordance with their ancient customs. The purpose of this meeting was to elect a president or
lehendakari
. The proceedings had been kept secret in case of air attack, and this small country town to the east of Bilbao was unmolested as José Antonio Aguirre, the 32-year-old leader of the Basque Nationalist Party, swore his oath in the Basque language under the oak tree of Guernica.

Afterwards he named his government, which included four members of the Basque Nationalist Party, three socialists, two republicans, a communist and a member of the social-democratic Basque Action. The Basque Nationalist Party, or PNV, whose motto was ‘God and our old law’, controlled the ministries of defence, finance, justice and the interior.
¹
The programme of the PNV made superficial concessions to the left, with its social-Christian doctrine, yet also insisted on the defence of religious freedom, the maintenance of public order and upheld the Basque people’s sense of national identity.
²
During its nine months of existence, the Basque government created the administrative structure of an independent state, with its own currency, its own flag–the red, green and white
ikurriña
and judicial system.

Telesforo Monzón, the minister of the interior, was a young aristocrat who some 40 years later became the leader of Herri Batasuna, the political front of the ETA guerrilla organization. His first move was to disband the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard. Then he started to recruit his new police force among Basque-speaking supporters. They were heavily armed, selected for their height and dressed in shiny leather uniforms. This elite corps, the Ertzaña, under the sole control of the PNV, was hardly reassuring to some of their left-wing allies, particularly the anarcho-syndicalist CNT.

Friction, however, came less from political than military differences. The CNT had shown in its furious assaults on the rebel-held buildings in San Sebastián during the rising, in its burning of Irún when it was almost surrounded by the nationalists and later in its intention to lay waste to San Sebastián before Mola’s troops occupied it, that it wished to fight a war to the finish. The CNT stated openly its preference for dying in the ruins rather than submitting to Franquist rule. The Basques, in line with the character of a mountain people, were content simply to defend themselves when directly attacked. They even had their symbolic Maloto tree on the border marking the point beyond which their forces should never advance. The Basque nationalists made it clear from the beginning of the civil war that, apart from their anti-fascist feelings, they were on the side of the Republic because it promised them autonomy. They proudly proclaimed their Catholic faith and attacked the anti-clericalism in other parts of republican territory. Nevertheless, their resistance to the military rising was supported by the great majority of their priests in spite of the unqualified backing of the Vatican and the Spanish Church for General Franco.

The Basque nationalists also pretended that there were no class divisions in Euzkadi. This had been partly true of agriculture, where feudalism had been weak, but the seafaring side of Basque life, dominated by local shipping magnates, with international empires, was scarcely classless. And in the nineteenth century industrialization attracted cheap labour from Castile, Galicia and Asturias. It was from this non-Basque workforce that the memberships of the socialist UGT, the CNT and the Communist Party were largely recruited. Indigenous workers were represented by the STV, Solidarity of Basque Workers.

The left believed fervently that the nationalists must be defeated. The Basque nationalists, on the other hand, seemed to know in their hearts that the republicans would be defeated. It may be that they learned the idea of being good losers from the English. At any rate, they treated their prisoners extremely well, sending many to France for release in the hope that this might induce the enemy to be a good winner. The nationalists made no reciprocal gestures to this attempt at ‘humanizing the war’, as Manuel de Irujo, the Basque minister in the central government, called it. They merely stepped up their campaign of hate, using such self-contradictory phrases as ‘soviet-separatists’ to describe the Basques.

To have the Catholic Basques as enemies was an embarrassment to the nationalist crusade and Franco was later to attack ‘these Christian democrats, less Christian than democrat, who, infected by a destructive liberalism, did not manage to understand this sublime page of religious persecution in Spain which, with its thousands of martyrs, is the most glorious the Church has suffered’. The Archbishop of Burgos called Basque priests ‘the dross of the Spanish clergy, in the pay of the reds’. The professor of moral theology at Salamanca, having described ‘the armed rising against the Popular Front’ as ‘the most holy war in history’, said ‘all who positively oppose the national government in present circumstances, trying to weaken its strength or diminish its power or obstruct its role, should be considered as traitors to the fatherland, infidels to religion and criminals to humanity’.

Cardinal Archbishop Goma also accused the Basque clergy of taking part in the fighting. Even though most modern military chaplains carry sidearms to protect the wounded, it would appear that only a few, if any, Basque priests were given a pistol, and there is no evidence that they used them. The primate also chose to overlook the fanatical Carlist chaplains on his own side. Many of these
requeté
almoners, purple tassels hanging from their large red berets, were in the tradition of the ferocious nineteenth-century Carlist priest, Santa Cruz, who used to absolve his prisoners en masse before shooting them. It was the Navarrese Carlists who were chosen as the main instrument to reduce their Basque neighbours in the spring of 1937.

There had been two major areas of action on the northern front during the winter. The fierce siege of Oviedo continued and a Basque offensive was mounted against Villarreal on 30 November 1936, when General Llano de la Encomienda secretly assembled nineteen infantry battalions, six batteries of artillery and some armoured vehicles. A breakthrough to capture Vitoria might have been achieved if they had not been spotted by a nationalist reconnaissance aircraft from Burgos. The nationalist counter-attack prevented the capture of Villarreal, but the Basques were left in control of the three mountains, Maroto, Albertia and Jarinto, whose peaks they proceeded to fortify. Establishing uncamouflaged defensive positions on peaks was to be one of their most serious mistakes. The Basques did not appreciate the ground-attack capabilities of fighters or the effects of bombing.