The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (64 page)

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In the first ten days of the Aragón offensive the nationalists took the centre-right of the front to depths varying from 50 to 100 kilometres. On 22 March they began their assault on the sector from the Ebro up to Huesca. Moscardó’s Corps and Solchaga’s Carlist divisions pushed down south-eastwards, while Yagüe crossed the Ebro to take the retreating republicans in their rear left flank. With the whole of central Aragón now captured the advance to the sea was launched at the end of March.

On 14 March advance units of the Italian CTV entered Alcañiz, which eleven days before had been smashed by fourteen Savoia-Marchettis dropping 10,000 kilos of bombs, killing 200 people. The nationalist
Heraldo de Aragón
announced that the town had been ‘set on fire by the reds before fleeing’. The Aviazione Legionaria now had its own Guernica.
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The nationalists halted briefly on 22 March to regroup. Its next action was to be to the north of the Ebro towards Lérida. Moscardó’s Aragón Corps, and Solchaga’s Navarrese divisions continued to push to the south-east and took Barbastro and Monzón, while Yagüe, having crossed the Ebro near Quinto on 23 March, chased the republicans withdrawing on his left flank. The same day the nationalist command ordered the bombing of Lérida to prepare for their attack.

For the republicans it was a retreat which slowed only when the enemy paused to rest. The withdrawal of a flank formation set off a panic; in the confusion nobody seemed to warn his neighbouring unit. Rations and ammunition seldom got through. And all the time the enemy fighters harried the retreating troops like hounds. Circuses of fighters dived in turn to drop grenades and strafe the republicans. The old fear of being cut off, which had broken the militias in the early days of the war, now affected the People’s Army. The senior communist officer, Manuel Tagüeña, reported that by 1 April the 35th and 45th International Divisions near Mora del Ebro had ‘completely lost all capacity to fight’.
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On 3 April the former POUM stronghold of Lérida fell to Yagu ¨e’s troops, but the Italians were held for a time by Líster’s 11th Division at Tortosa, which had been reduced to rubble by bombing. The Aragón and Navarre Corps seized the reservoirs of Tremp and Camarasa with the hydroelectric plants which provided power to industry in Barcelona. Balaguer fell on 6 April after a terrible bombardment by 100 aircraft. Berti, with the CTV and Monasterio’s cavalry entered Gandesa, where they were welcomed by the Duchesses of Montpensier and Montealegre and the Countesses of Bailén and Gamazo, waiting to pay homage to the victorious troops.

Meanwhile Aranda’s Galician Corps, together with the 4th Navarrese Division, fought on towards the coast just below the Ebro’s mouth. On 15 April they took the seaside town of Vinaroz, thus establishing a corridor which separated Catalonia from the rest of republican Spain. On that day, which was Good Friday, the Carlist
requetés
waded into the sea as if it were the River Jordan. All the nationalist press competed in describing how General Alonso Vega dipped his fingers in the water and crossed himself. The nationalists believed that the end of their Crusade was near, because ‘the victorious sword of Franco had cut in two the Spain occupied by the reds’.
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Hopes of Peace Destroyed

D
uring that spring of 1938, while the nationalist Army of Manoeuvre was overrunning Aragón, the Republic faced a growing economic crisis and low morale in the rear areas. There was distrust between political groups, fear of the SIM secret police and resentment against the authoritarian nature of Negrín’s government, acute food shortages, profiteering and defeatism. At the same time the population of Barcelona–now the capital of the Republic–suffered from the heaviest bombing raids of the war.

The republican zone lived in a spiral of hyperinflation. The cost of living had tripled in less than two years of war.
¹
The greatest burden on the economy at the beginning of the war had been the militia wage bill. The rate of pay, however, was not raised from the original ten pesetas a day, despite the high level of inflation, so that by the winter of 1936 arms purchases from abroad had become by far the greatest expenditure. Spain had no arms industry, apart from small factories in the Basque country and Asturias. It was therefore unrealistic to expect metallurgical industries in Catalonia to be able to convert themselves for war production when the expertise was lacking. In fact, it was remarkable what their factories managed to improvise during the first six months of the war, when the central government, determined to take control from the CNT collectives and the Generalitat, refused to provide foreign exchange for the purchase of machinery from abroad.

All the arms which the Republic needed had to be purchased abroad, with payment in advance in gold or hard currency. From the moment it was known that the Republic’s gold reserves had been transferred to France and the Soviet Union, a form of gold fever started in Europe among governments, and above all arms dealers, who saw the chance of huge profits at little risk.

Right from the start of the conflict the republican authorities, ignorant of the arms trade, had created a seller’s market in Europe and North America by their obvious desperation. On 8 August 1936 Álvaro de Albornoz, the republican ambassador in Paris, signed a contract with the Société Éuropéenne d’Études et d’Entreprises, giving it exclusive rights ‘for the purchase in France and other countries of all products’, committing the Republic to pay a commission of 7.5 per cent for its services. Yet this company was largely owned by merchant banks (such as Worms et Cie and the Ottoman Bank), newspapers (
Le Temps
and
Le Matin
) and major industrialists such as Schneider-Creusot, all of whom supported General Franco.

Republican purchasers found themselves facing a barrier of blackmail, when government ministers and senior officials demanded huge bribes, ranging from $25,000 to $275,000 for their signature on export licences and other documents. Sometimes they took the money and then blocked the shipment later.
²
Because of the non-intervention policy, the Republic was entirely vulnerable to such tricks. And often when the weapons–paid for in advance–finally arrived, the crates contained inferior or even unserviceable weaponry. The necessity of obtaining arms wherever they were available meant equipping the People’s Army with a wide variety of calibres involving many different types of ammunition. A very large proportion, perhaps even half, of the weapons purchased never arrived, either because of fraud, or the blockade, with torpedoings at sea and the bombing of ports.

Spanish governments had purchased weapons from Germany since well before the arrival of the Nazis in power. The colonial army in Morocco had demanded mustard gas to use against the Riffian tribes, who later became their most effective auxiliaries. Yet during the civil war the Republic purchased arms from Nazi Germany, General Franco’s most important ally. Recent research
³
has now shown that what was long suspected is true: Colonel-General Hermann Göring, Minister President of Prussia and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, was selling weapons to the Republic while his own men were fighting for Franco.

On 1 October 1936 the Welsh cargo ship
Bramhill
reached Alicante, having come from Hamburg with a consignment of 19,000 rifles, 101 machine-guns and more than 28 million cartridges, all ordered by the CNT in Barcelona for its militia columns. The presence of the
Bramhill
in Alicante was observed by officers on HMS
Woolwich
. Her captain immediately informed the Foreign Office, which investigated the matter. The German government made excuses, saying that Hamburg was a free port, yet it was clear that this cargo had arrived with official blessing. The Foreign Office left the matter there. In fact, the architect of this secret sale of arms to the Republic was Hermann Göring. He used as intermediaries the well-known arms trafficker Josef Veltjens, who had already sold arms to General Mola before the rising, but above all Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades, a piratical Greek on close terms with the country’s dictator, Metaxas. Bodosakis-Athanasiades was the chief shareholder and chief executive of Poudreries et Cartoucheries Helléniques SA, whose main associate and backer was Rheinmetall-Borsig which, in turn, was controlled by Göring personally.

Bodosakis passed the demands for weapons which he received to Rheinmetall-Borsig and the Metaxas government provided end-user certificates stating that the equipment was destined for the Greek army. When the shipment reached Greece, Bodosakis transferred it to another vessel supposedly sailing to Mexico, but in fact to Spain. As Bodosakis was dealing with the nationalists as well as the Republic, he had to split shipments between vessels, with the best and latest weapons destined for the nationalists and the oldest and least serviceable for the republicans.

In 1937 and 1938, when the sale of German weapons to the Republic was reaching its peak, Bodosakis’s company was ordering shipments from Rheinmetall-Borsig worth anything up to 40 million Reichmarks (£3.2 million at the time). These consignments were almost all for the Republic and one can be fairly sure that Bodosakis was charging five or six times what he had paid Göring. It is more than likely that he then had to pay a significant share of his immense profits to Göring personally, rather than to Rheinmetall-Borsig, and this was on top of payments to the Metaxas regime and other officials.
⁴

There was even a Soviet angle to this very free market trade between Nazi Germany and republican Spain. In November 1937 Bodosakis travelled to Barcelona in a Soviet aircraft, accompanied by George Rosenberg, son of the purged Soviet ambassador. Rosenberg, who was a shipping agent and wheeler-dealer, and Bodosakis came to sign a contract with the Republic for £2.1 million to supply ammunition. On this occasion, as on all others, they insisted on full payment in hard currency in advance. The supply of German weaponry to the Republic continued until the very end of the war, as the international commission for the repatriation of foreign volunteers established in January 1939.
⁵

The nationalists, exasperated by this extraordinary racket, protested on many occasions to the German authorities.
⁶
They identified eighteen vessels with such shipments to republican ports between 3 January 1937 and 11 May 1938, but received little explanation. As far as Hermann Göring was concerned, republican hard currency was as good as nationalist.
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The decoration of Karinhall, his country house of magnificent vulgarity north of Berlin, was no doubt subsidized by his enormous profits from the Spanish Civil War.

The Republic could not go on paying for their weapons in gold and hard currency.
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By early 1938 the current accounts in gold in Paris and Moscow were running low.
⁹
In April Negrín started to sell in the United States the silver of the Banco de España. This was bitterly contested by the Burgos government, which had engaged as its lawyer John Foster Dulles (later the US Secretary of State under Eisenhower), but their attempt failed. On 29 April Francisco Méndez Aspe, the minister of finance, signed the decree of authorization.
¹⁰
That summer the government introduced regulations to requisition jewels and precious metals, and confiscate property of ‘declared enemies of the Republic’ for resale. All these sales of silver, jewels and other property raised $31 million, yet the Republic was spending $27 million a month,
excluding
the costs of Soviet arms shipments.
¹¹

The only hope lay in approaching the Soviet Union again. In March, the Republic had been granted a credit of $70 million, negotiated by Pascua, the ambassador in Moscow, the previous autumn at 3 per cent interest, with half repaid in gold. This had forced a second despatch of gold to the Soviet Union. Now another credit was requested, this time for $85 million, mostly for purchasing Soviet arms. The Republic had to wait a long time for a reply and by then it would be too late.
¹²

Many requests for military assistance from the republican government were simply ignored by Stalin. When the situation became especially hard in the spring of 1938, appeals to the Soviet Union were ignored. ‘I passed Negrín’s request for help to the respective institution (the Politburo),’ wrote Litvinov on 29 April to Marchenko, the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Spain, ‘but no decision has been made so far.’
¹³
Finally, Litvinov wrote on 7 August to Marchenko in Barcelona, ‘So far no decisions have been adopted on the requests from Ispanpra [Spanish government]. I think that the reason for this delay is that the answer is going to be negative.’
¹⁴
Some arms shipments continued, but Stalin had lost interest in Spain because of the situation in Europe and in the Far East. It was quite clear that the republican government was going to lose and he had other priorities.

As well as the huge cost of importing arms, the Republic had to buy oil, supplies of all sorts, and now food after the loss of Aragón’s agricultural regions. Chickpeas and lentils bought from Mexico became the staple of the republican zone’s diet. Food shortages were serious everywhere, but Barcelona had to cope with refugees from Aragón, in addition to those who had come earlier in the war from Andalucia, Estremadura and Castile, now a million in total.
¹⁵
The scenes of peasants from the Aragónese collectives, herding in livestock and bringing their few belongings on carts as they fled from the nationalists, were even more pathetic than those in Madrid during the autumn of 1936. Food queues were worse than ever and women were killed and maimed during the bombing raids because they would not give up their places. The daily ration of 150 grammes of rice, beans or, more usually, lentils (known as Dr Negrín’s little pills) could not prevent the effects of vitamin and protein deficiency among those unable to afford black market prices. Children, especially the increasing number of war orphans (the Quakers reported that there were 25,000 in Barcelona alone), suffered from rickets. In 1938 the death rate for children and the old doubled.
¹⁶