The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (47 page)

The republican forces were assigned new positions along the line of the River Nervión, which curves around Bilbao to the east. With the imminent arrival of the nationalist forces the right-wing fifth columnists in Arenas, on the east of the river’s mouth, started shooting into the streets in their excitement. The anarchist Malatesta Battalion, positioned on the other side of the river, stormed across and dealt with them rapidly. Their final action before withdrawing was to set fire to the church. The commander knew that its priest was a nationalist sympathizer; he was his brother.

The city was under continual artillery bombardment. Eventually the republican forces had to withdraw because they were threatened on their southern flank, where troops under the Italian commissar, Nino Nanetti, had withdrawn without blowing the bridge behind them. The fifth columnists in the city had another shock when they gathered in the main square with monarchist flags to greet the Carlist troops. A Basque tank suddenly appeared round the corner, fired at some nationalist flags hanging from balconies and disappeared. At five in the afternoon the 5th Navarrese Brigade under Colonel Juan Bautista Sánchez entered Bilbao. The cheers for the nationalists when they arrived sounded hollow in the half-empty city.
³¹

The nationalist casualties for the campaign were high–about 30,000–but the proportion of fatalities was low. The Basques and their allies suffered only slightly more in total, but their death rate was nearly a third, mainly due to air attacks. The Basque army had operated in a markedly different way from the republican army in the centre. There was far less waste of men’s lives through futile counter-attacks over open ground.

The nationalist conquerors held summary court martials in the newly occupied territory, and thousands, including many priests, were sentenced to prison. There were, however, fewer executions than usual, because of the strength of feeling that Guernica had provoked abroad. Nothing, however, stopped the conquerors’ resolution to crush every aspect of Basque nationalism. The Basque flag, the
ikurriña
, was outlawed and use of the Basque language suppressed. Threatening notices were displayed: ‘If you are Spanish, speak Spanish.’ Regionalist feelings in any form were portrayed as the cancer of the Spanish body politic.

The units which retreated along the coast to Santander were demoralized. They knew that it was only a matter of time before Santander and the Asturias fell as well. They were at least given a chance to reorganize, when the nationalist advance was delayed by the major republican offensive at Brunete in the Madrid sector on 6 July. Once this had been repulsed, General Dávila redeployed his troops. They included six Carlist brigades under General Solchaga, the Italian force now commanded by General Bastico, which comprised Bergonzoli’s
Littorio
Division, the
March 23rd
Division, the
Black Flames
and the mixed
Black Arrows
. The air support consisted of more than 200 planes, split between the Condor Legion, the Legionary Air Force and the nationalist squadrons, which were being given the Heinkel 51s as Messerschmitts arrived in greater numbers.

General Gámir Ulibarri’s force of some 80,000 men had not only less infantry than the nationalists, but also only 40 operational fighters and bombers, many of which were obsolete. On the opening day of the offensive, 14 August, Solchaga’s Carlist brigades attacked from the east and smashed through the 54th Division. The Italians were held up by fierce resistance in the Cantabrian mountains to the south-west, but with overwhelming artillery and air support they captured the Escudo pass two days later. The three republican divisions sent to hold the breach were not quick enough and the breakthrough was complete.

Many of the republican formations then carried out a fighting retreat into the mountains of Asturias. The remainder were bottled up in the area of Santander and the small port of Santoña. In Santander the desperation was so great that many men sought oblivion in drink. Officers organized parties of soldiers to go round destroying the wine stocks. The general staff arranged to escape in ships, but the small boats were swamped by panic-stricken men and many capsized. The 122nd and 136th Battalions tried to organize a defence, but apathy seemed to take over once the last chance of escape had gone. They waited for the nationalists and their firing squads. Since many nationalist supporters had been killed in the previous year, mainly on the orders of the socialist Neila, little mercy was expected.

In Santoña, the Basques arranged surrender terms for their
gudaris
with the Italian commander of the
Black Arrows
, Colonel Farina. These had already been discussed in Rome between Count Ciano and Basque PNV representatives, who felt that the Valencia government had let them down badly. It was agreed that there would be no reprisals and that no Basque soldier would be forced to fight on the nationalist side. Spanish officers announced immediately that this agreement was invalid and Basque soldiers were taken off British ships in the port at gunpoint. Summary trials followed and a large proportion of the officers and many soldiers were executed. It was this dishonouring of the articles of surrender which the Basque ETA guerrillas advanced in later years as a reason why the Republic of Euzkadi was still at war with the Franquist state.
³²

Mussolini and Count Ciano were overjoyed at this ‘great victory’. Ciano wanted ‘flags and guns captured from the Basques. I envy the French their Invalides and the Germans their Military Museums. A flag taken from the enemy is worth more than any picture.’
³³
They felt that their decision to keep Italian troops in Spain after the débâcle of Brihuega had been vindicated. Their jubilation was premature, however, for approximately half of the republican forces had pulled back into the Asturian mountains, where there was to be a much tougher campaign lasting until the end of October, followed by a further five months of ferocious guerrilla warfare. Franco was not able to bring down the Army of the North as quickly as he had hoped.

The relative speed of the nationalists’ victory in the Basque campaign was due to the Condor Legion’s contribution. The Nazi government did not delay in taking payment. German engineers moved into the factories and steel mills which the Basque nationalists had refused to destroy and most of the industrial production went to Germany to pay the Luftwaffe’s expenses for destroying the region. Franco, on the other hand, had to wait longer for his benefits, although he knew that the reduction of the north would eventually give him infantry parity in the centre and south. Combined with his increasing superiority in air and artillery support, it would ensure ultimate victory, unless a European conflict broke out first. The war was now little more than straight pounding and he could pound the hardest, for this campaign had shown that his allies possessed far better means of delivering high explosive than his enemies’ allies.

The Propaganda War and the Intellectuals

‘H
^istory
to the defeated’, wrote W.H. Auden in his poem, ‘Spain 1937’, ‘may say Alas but cannot help or pardon.’ The Spanish Civil War is one of the comparatively few cases when the most widely accepted version of events has been written more persuasively by the losers of the conflict than by the winners. This development was of course decisively influenced by the subsequent defeat of the nationalists’ Axis allies. At the time, however, the Republic may have won many battles for international public opinion, but the nationalists won the key engagement by concentrating on a select and powerful audience in Britain and the United States. They played on the fear of communism in an appeal to conservative and religious feelings, and their audience’s suspicions about the Republic were confirmed by Soviet military aid.

The nationalists argued that they represented the cause of Christianity, order and Western civilization against ‘Asiatic Communism’. To bolster this version of events, they alleged, on the basis of forged documents,
¹
that the communists had planned a revolution with 150,000 shock troops and 100,000 reserves in 1936, a coup which the nationalist rising had pre-empted. They declared that the election results of February 1936 were invalid, even though CEDA and monarchist leaders had accepted the results at the time. They concentrated on presenting life in the republican zone as a perpetual massacre of priests, nuns and innocents, accompanied by a frenzied destruction of churches and works of art. And to justify their failure to take Madrid, they claimed that half a million foreign communists were fighting in Spain.
²

The republican government’s oversimplified case was that it had been elected legally in February 1936 and was then attacked by reactionary generals aided by the Axis dictatorships. Thus the Republic represented the cause of democracy, freedom and enlightenment against fascism. The Republic’s foreign propaganda emphasized that their government was the only legal and democratic one in Spain. This was of course true, when compared with the illegality and authoritarianism of their opponents, but liberal and left-of-centre politicians had hardly respected their own constitution at times. The rising of October 1934, in which Prieto and Largo Caballero had participated, greatly undermined their case against the rebels.

The passionate supporters of the Republic refused to acknowledge that the left’s threat to extinguish the bourgeoisie and the pre-revolutionary situation which was developing in the spring of 1936 was bound to react to defend itself. The unspeakable horrors of the Russian civil war and the Soviet system of oppression that emerged–the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Largo Caballero had demanded–was a lesson unlikely to be forgotten. And once the war had started, the Republic’s democratic credentials began to look increasingly tattered when the Cortes was reduced to a symbolic body with no control over the government. Then, from the middle of 1937, the administration of Juan Negrín developed marked authoritarian tendencies. Criticism of the prime minister and the Communist Party virtually became an act of treason.

Both sides had a very selective and manipulative view of history. In later years supporters of the Republic held that the Spanish conflict represented the start of the Second World War. The Franquists, on the other hand, said it was simply the prelude to a third world war between Western civilization and communism, and that any Nazi or fascist aid they received was incidental.

The Republic’s need to convince the outside world of the justice of its cause was greatly increased by the effects of British foreign policy. In addition, the already strained political atmosphere of the 1930s and the internationalized aspect of the civil war made foreign opinion seem of paramount importance to the outcome. The Spanish workers and peasants believed, with innocent earnestness, that if the situation were explained abroad, Western governments must come to their aid against the Axis dictatorships. Foreign visitors were asked how it was possible that in a democracy like America, where the majority of the population supported the Republic (over 70 per cent according to opinion polls), the government refused it arms for self-defence. Republican leaders were much more aware of the reasons for the actions of Western governments, but even they were wrong in believing that the British and French governments would eventually be forced to accept that their interests lay in a strong anti-Axis policy before it was too late.

Under such circumstances it was inevitable that journalists and famous writers should be courted by the Republic. There was a great deal of ground to be made up after the first reports of the ‘red massacres’, and the tide started to turn in the Republic’s favour only in November 1936 with the bombing of working-class areas and the San Carlos hospital during the battle for Madrid. Five months later the destruction of Guernica gave the Republic its greatest victory in the propaganda war, particularly since the Basques were conservative and Catholics. The non-interventionist policy of Western governments, however, remained unaffected.

In July 1936 the Catholic press abroad sprang to the support of the Nationalist rising and castigated the anti-clericalism of the Republic, the desecration of churches and the killing of priests. The most sensational accusation was the raping of nuns, a similar fabrication dating back to the Middle Ages, when it was used to justify the slaughter of Jews. Two unsubstantiated incidents became the basis for a general campaign of astonishing virulence. The nationalists were on firmer ground when they condemned the murder of priests and they were supported by the Pope, who declared the priests to be martyrs.
³

On 1 July 1937 Cardinal Gomá issued an open letter to ‘the Bishops of the whole World’ calling for Church support of the nationalist cause, a letter in which he stated, somewhat defensively, that the war was ‘not a crusade, but a political and social war with repercussions of a religious nature’.
⁴
Only Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer and Bishop Mateo Múgica failed to sign it. This was in contrast to the statement of the Archbishop of Valencia a month earlier that ‘the war has been called by the Sacred Heart of Jesus and this Adorable Heart has given power to the arms of Franco’s soldiers’. In addition, the Bishop of Segovia had said that the war was ‘a hundred times more important and holy than the
Reconquista
’ and the Bishop of Pamplona called it the ‘loftiest crusade that the centuries have ever seen…a crusade in which divine intervention on our side is evident’. Leaflets with photomontages of Christ flanked by Generals Mola and Franco were issued to nationalist troops.

The political role of the Church was ignored when the religious victims were made into martyrs, although some Catholic writers abroad made the connexion. One was François Mauriac, who turned against the right-wing cause after a nationalist officer told him, ‘Medicine is in short supply and costly. Do you honestly think that we’d waste it for no purpose?…We have got to kill them in the end, so there is no point in curing them.’
⁵
‘For millions of Spaniards,’ Mauriac wrote to Ramon Serrano Súñer derided him as ‘a converted Jew’. The publication in 1938 of Georges Bernanos’s book,
Les Grandes Cimetie`res sous la Lune
, which described the nationalist terror on Majorca, greatly strengthened the liberal Catholic reaction against the Church’s official support for Franco.