The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (56 page)

While Líster waited, General Gal’s 15th Division advanced strongly on Boadilla del Monte. But on their line of advance his men came across a small hill, which they called ‘Mosquito hill’ because of the whistling bullets. It was to form as terrible a memory as ‘Suicide Hill’ at the Jarama. The troops of Asensio were waiting for them, supported by two Navarrese brigades, as well as the Galician 108th Division, which had just arrived. A desperate battle ensued, which cost many casualties on both sides. Oliver Law, the black commander of the Americans’ Washington Battalion, was killed that night and buried there. Meanwhile, republican troops had finally occupied Quijorna, which by then was little more than a pile of smoking ruins.

Although at the start of the battle the republican air force enjoyed air superiority, with up to thirty fighters in each sortie, the nationalists dominated the skies from 11 July.
²¹
Their aircraft, first the Junkers 52s, Fiats and Heinkels 51s piloted by Spanish airmen, then the Condor Legion, hammered the eight republican divisions concentrated on less than 200 square kilometres of the bare Castilian plain. The first target of the nationalist planes were the T-26 tanks, which presented easy prey in the open. Within two days, once the nationalists had established their maximum rhythm of sorties, the republicans were left with only 38 armoured vehicles. Day and night, Junkers 52s and Heinkel 111s bombed the republican lines at will. From 12 July the Condor Legion deployed its Messerschmitt 109s, flown by pilots such as Adolf Galland, later one of the great Second World War aces. The Chatos and Moscas did not stand a chance against them. On that day ‘more than 200 aircraft could be seen in the air at the same time’.
²²

On 10 July XII International Brigade finally took Villanueva del Pardillo, which had been bravely defended by a battalion of the San Quentin infantry regiment. Meanwhile the nationalists counter-attacked to the south-east between Quijorna and Brunete with 10th and 150th Divisions. They had come up against General Walter’s 35th Division, which had been pushed forward to seal the gap between the troops of El Campesino and Líster. During this fighting 3,000 republican soldiers were killed and the International Brigades were totally exhausted.
²³
On 16 July a bomb splinter hit George Nathan, the commander of the British battalion, in the shoulder and he died a few hours later. His devastated comrades buried him on the banks of the Guadarrama.

Republican troops were also desperately short of ammunition and without water in the July heat. Miaja’s staff had woefully underestimated the resupply needs for such a battle. The lessons of the La Granja offensive had not been learned. The Castilian landscape, bleached a pale brown by the sun, became a furnace, especially for the tank troops. The inside of each vehicle was like an oven. The infantry also suffered from the lack of vegetation for camouflage and the difficulty of digging trenches in the baked earth. Corpses, swollen and black from the sun, lay in all directions and the stretcher-bearers suffered heavy casualties trying to remove the wounded.

During that week, little ground was lost or gained in a terrible stalemate. But then on 18 July, the anniversary of the rising, the nationalist infantry, supported by 60 batteries of artillery and aircraft, attacked on all sectors. Richthofen, who had hurried back from his leave to take command of the Condor Legion squadrons, recorded, ‘18 July. Attack on the red infantry who are much better than expected. Air attacks very good despite strongest red flak as never experienced before. 4 Brigade gets ahead well. Heavy losses on both sides. 4 Brigade has lost eighteen officers by lunchtime and about 400 men. Art[illery] shot badly. Three waved bombing attack went off well, but it did not help. Right wing did not engage at all as art[illery] still not in position.
Manaña!
’
²⁴

‘19 July,’ he wrote the next day, ‘Red flyers drop heavy bombs even on their own red infantry! Their command post also got its share. The reds have attacked 4 Brigade heavily but they are beaten back. Red attacks to the south at Brunete. Right wing cannot move forward. Our flyers are deployed against the red positions around Brunete.

‘20 July. We fly and attack red airfields to keep the opponents down. Richthofen and Sander [Sperrle] with Franco for a big conference with his generals, army commander, and aviation General Kindelán. Clean up here and then quickly back to the north. Franco hopes that the heavy losses are demoralizing the reds. Franco demands that Richthofen concentrates on heavy artillery.’ What emerged clearly once again was that the German and nationalist pilots were far better trained and more resourceful than their opponents. Even the Heinkel 51, which was inferior to the Soviet aircraft, was inflicting greater losses. Nationalist aircraft attacked the International Brigades near the River Guadarrama. That day Julian Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf, died, having arrived in Spain only a month before.

The Condor Legion’s bombers and fighters had little trouble finding targets on the exposed plain. While the Heinkel 111s flew sorties against artillery batteries, headquarters and forming-up areas, the Heinkel 51s strafed, bombed and shot up republican tanks using their 20mm cannon. In addition each fighter carried a load of six ten-kilo fragmentation bombs. Flying wing-tip to wing-tip, they released their loads simultaneously. Trenches, unless dug in a zigzag pattern, provided little protection. One German squadron leader boasted that in a 200-metre stretch of trench, 120 bodies had been found after one of their attacks.
²⁵

From 23 July nationalist troops, supported by concentrated artillery fire, tanks and aircraft, went over to the offensive. The next day they reached the edge of Brunete. ‘Because of bombing attacks,’ wrote Richthofen, ‘the terrain is full of smoke and visibility is bad. As the mist clears, there is a red counter-attack. Red flyers in the air very strong. Heavy infantry losses on our side. Today for the first time all aircrew are deployed. As the red infantry is thrown back by this deployment of air power, seven new battalions arrive to support them.’
²⁶

The ‘red infantry’ thrown back was presumably Líster’s division which, despite its reputation for iron discipline, collapsed on 24 July, as the chief Soviet adviser reported back to Moscow later: ‘Líster’s division lost its head and fled. We managed with great difficulty to bring it back under control and prevent soldiers fleeing from their units. The toughest repressive measures had to be applied. About 400 of those fleeing were shot on 24 July.’
²⁷
‘There was a general panic and flight,’ Walter reported to Moscow. ‘The International Brigades, except for XI and units of XV, which held their positions, were not much slower in their inexplicable but hasty movement backwards.’
²⁸

‘All the red attacks have been rebuffed,’ Richthofen noted exultantly next day. ‘Countless red casualties, which are already decomposing in the heat. Everywhere shot-up red tanks. A great sight! Our Heinkel 51s and Spanish fighters attack north of Brunete.’ Two days later he claimed the victory as one for the Condor Legion and the nationalist air force: ‘The situation here has been saved by the aircrews. The ground forces are not up to it.’
²⁹

The general staff and the communists proclaimed that the Brunete offensive was a masterpiece of planning. General Rojo even suggested that it had ‘a beautiful technical rigorousness, almost perfect’.
³⁰
This was optimistic to say the least. Brunete was intended to be an encirclement operation, taking the enemy by surprise, in many ways a foretaste of the Second World War. The theory of ‘deep penetration’, using tank units as armoured fists, had already been developed by the finest minds in the Red Army. The tactic had been used by Arman’s attack at Seseña the previous autumn. But there was no question of using such a technique at Brunete in July 1937. Marshal Tukhachevsky, its greatest proponent, had been tortured into confessing to treason and espionage for the Germans. A month before the battle of Brunete he had been tried and executed along with seven colleagues. They were shot in sequence just after they left the courtroom. No Soviet adviser, therefore, dared follow his tactical theories.

The divisions were spread out and so were the tanks. And instead of leaving strong points to be dealt with by a second line, the breakthrough force was allowed to halt. Most astonishing of all was that the attack from the north was supposed to be met by another attack coming from the southern suburbs of Madrid towards Alcorcón to complete the encirclement. This never got off the ground, so the plan was rendered virtually useless from the start. Not only did the planners grossly underestimate the enemy’s ability to react quickly, they also failed to foresee that as soon as the nationalists achieved air superiority their already overstretched supply system would collapse.

As well as the basic problems of staff failures and republican inferiority in the air, communications between headquarters were disastrously bad. Field telephone lines were continually cut by shelling and runners could not be expected to get through when there was no cover. But these natural hazards of warfare without radios were compounded by the lack of initiative shown by republican commanders. Nationalist field commanders, on the other hand, reacted instinctively and rapidly to the situation as it developed and did not wait for orders from above. Nor did they blindly follow instructions that were out of date when circumstances on the ground had changed dramatically.

Matters were not helped on the republican side by the failure of the staff to provide maps. The International Brigades found that they had to draw them for themselves.
³¹
The problems of command and control were also made far worse by the way commanders under pressure would claim to have reached a particular point when they were nowhere near it. (This emerged as a common failing in the Red Army later during the Second World War.) Some republican commanders, out of vanity, lied to their superiors deliberately. For example, El Campesino shamelessly exaggerated nationalist casualties in Quijorna, when it finally fell, to justify his initial lack of success. Líster, in his report, quadrupled the number of enemy defending Brunete and even claimed at one point that his troops had reached Navalcarnero, when in fact they were twelve kilometres short of it. When Mera’s 14th Division moved towards Brunete to replace the 11th Division, Líster claimed not to know that the village had been retaken by the enemy. Miaja’s chief of staff, Colonel Matallana, thought that Líster’s men were still occupying some small hills beyond it.

Prieto, who was at Miaja’s headquarters when Mera complained that his orders did not correspond to the reality on the ground, became even more furious at the commander-in-chief’s protests that he had been misled. General Walter, in his usual scathing terms, reported that the reason why the 11th Division’s commanders ‘were so touchingly ill informed about the dispositions of their own battalions’ was because Líster had far too many officers on his staff.
³²
Yet Modesto, the commander of V Corps, may have been trying to save the reputation of the most famous communist formation from responsibility for the loss of Brunete. After the battle, Líster was ordered to ‘withdraw his division for retraining and reinforcements’, which was perhaps necessary after the 400 executions. Rodimtsev, his military adviser, was summoned to a suburb of Madrid to see ‘Comrade Malino[vsky] who wanted to know how things were’.
³³

Nevertheless, the major factor in the disaster, as in the Segovia offensive, lay in the air superiority of the nationalists. Prieto rightly stated that the Achilles heel of the People’s Army consisted of ‘the commanders and the air force’.
³⁴
The whole of the Republic’s Brunete offensive managed to achieve an advance of only 50 square kilometres at the cost of 25,000 casualties, the loss of 80 per cent of its armoured force and a third of the fighter aircraft assigned to the front.
³⁵
The loss of equipment was particularly serious at a time when the blockade of republican ports was becoming much more effective. The nationalists suffered 17,000 casualties, but a much lower proportion were killed, and their losses in equipment and aircraft were far lighter.

The first great offensive of the Republic, which had taken little pressure off the northern zone, perhaps a respite of five weeks, signified a major setback. The blow to morale, with the loss of many of their best troops, was exacerbated by the knowledge that the nationalists were soon to achieve parity in ground forces. Franco declared that the battle was over on 25 July, the day of Santiago, the patron saint of the Spanish army, and claimed that Saint James had given them victory. If at that moment he was tempted to exploit republican weakness around Madrid and attack again towards the capital, General Vigón took on the task of persuading him that it was essential to liquidate the northern zone first.
³⁶

Flying in the face of reality, the communists declared to the world at large that Brunete had been a victory. In XV International Brigade, commissars told their men that it ‘had totally vindicated the active war policy of the Negrín government following the laissez-faire attitude of Largo Caballero’. The premature and wildly exaggerated claims about the operation’s success in the first two days had forced Miaja and his staff to persist at horrendous cost rather than admit failure. The communists defended the operational plan furiously, but such a concentration of slow-moving forces on a restricted front enabled the nationalists to profit from the vastly superior ground-attack potential of their combined air forces. With both Avila and Talavera airfields less than 30 minutes’ flying time from Brunete, they were able to establish a bombing shuttle and fighter sortie rhythm, which the advocates of the offensive must have seriously underestimated.