The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (69 page)

The largest air battles of the whole war then took place over the Ebro front. On 31 July alone, no less than 300 missions were flown with aircraft mixed in dogfights and attacking bombers to prevent them dropping their loads on comrades on the ground. ‘The place stank because of the corpses,’ wrote Edwin Rolfe, an American International Brigader. ‘Enemy bombers returned to our position in the valley killing the wounded being evacuated and the stretcher-bearers, and attacking the wells…The bullets whistled over our heads, red tracers which seemed to move slowly through the air…It was the longest day of my life.’
¹⁷

The experience was terrifying for those on the ground, but the last four weeks had also been disastrous for the Republic in the air, despite their absence from the Ebro front. The Condor Legion and the nationalists claimed for the month of July alone 76 republican aircraft destroyed and nine probables. But the Battle of the Ebro provided an even better opportunity for the nationalists and their allies to destroy the republican air force once and for all.
¹⁸

Rojo, Modesto and Tagüeña estimated that everything which had happened up to this point was a tactical victory. They had no doubt about the effect of the battle on an international audience as well as on the republican zone. But in fact the only thing they had achieved was to send their bull into the ring, with little chance of survival. Even if they had taken Gandesa, there would have been no further chance to advance because of the rapid concentration of nationalist troops against them. In this first week they had exhausted all their advantages, of surprise, speed and audacity.
¹⁹
Once again a great republican offensive collapsed without achieving its aims because of a lack of follow-through due to wasting time on crushing points of enemy resistance instead of pushing on towards the main objective. Yagüe’s rapid reaction to the attack had given the nationalists enough time to bring up eight divisions of reinforcements. The situation of the republicans was even worse than that at Brunete. They had the river behind them and this created a far greater problem in bringing forward supplies and ammunition. There was also even less water for drinking.

On 1 August Modesto ordered the Army of the Ebro to go on to the defensive. They had lost 12,000 men to gain an area of desolate, scorched terrain of no strategic value. The heat increased. On 4 August the Condor Legion recorded temperatures of 37 degrees in the shade and 57 in the sun. Even the night brought little relief.
²⁰
For the republicans, defence was hardly an easy option. It was impossible to dig trenches in the iron-hard earth and rocky landscape of the Terra Alta. They could protect themselves only with parapets and sangars made from stones, and they soon found that artillery shells were far more lethal in such surroundings than in open countryside for each explosion turned stones into shrapnel.

To continue the battle in such circumstances had no military justification at all, especially when the Republic was so vulnerable and there was no hope of achieving the original purpose of the offensive. But instead of withdrawing their best troops in good order to fight again, the republican command continued to send more men across the Ebro. And all this was because Negrín believed that the eyes of Europe were upon them and he could not acknowledge a defeat. Once again, political and propaganda considerations led to yet another self-inflicted disaster. The only consolation, perhaps, was that Franco was obsessed with destroying the force which had taken nationalist territory. The Army of the Ebro was thus saved the logical nationalist counter, an attack across the Segre in the rear of its right flank.
²¹

Committed to a ‘blind battle of sheep’,
²²
the nationalist forces were obliged to launch six counter-offensives against the republican positions. The first, which began on 6 August, was aimed against the bridgehead of Fayón defended by the 42nd Division. Over two days the Condor Legion flew 40 sorties against this target and dropped a total of 50 tons of bombs. ‘The red losses are very high,’ its war diary noted.
²³
This onslaught lasted until 10 August, when the nationalists forced the republicans back across the river. The next attack, which began on 11 August, targeted the 11th Division in the Sierra de Pàndols. This was a bad decision, considering that the republicans occupied the high ground and could inflict heavy casualties on those climbing to the attack. For the next week the Condor Legion concentrated all its forces, including the Stukas, against bridges again to cut off supplies. Perhaps the nationalists counted on the fact that Líster’s men were exhausted, dehydrated in the high temperatures and almost starving due to the interruption of their supplies. The shortage of water meant that they had to urinate into the water jackets round the barrels of their Maxim machine-guns.

During the day the bombs, shells and bullets never seemed to cease. The republicans had no choice but to wait for nightfall. Bodies could not be buried and there was no shade in that treeless waste.
²⁴
The troops took it, the propaganda version goes, because they were disciplined anti-fascist fighters. The sceptic, on the other hand, might ponder the cold hysteria of commanders like Modesto and Líster, who were willing to shoot anyone ‘who loses an inch of ground’. Their stubborn bravery, however, was more likely to have been an inarticulate expression of their hatred of the enemy.

On 13 August, during the nationalist assault on the Sierra de Pàndols, a deadly battle developed in the skies above the Terra Alta between the republican air force and nationalist fighters: three squadrons of Messerschmitts and a swarm of Fiats took on Chatos and Supermoscas, an up-gunned and up-engined version of the Soviet monoplane. Meanwhile the Heinkel 111s of the Condor Legion and the Junkers 52s of the Brigada Aérea Hispana continued to bomb the river crossings, when they were not acting as ‘flying artillery’ to hammer troop positions in the sierra.

The aerial battles were an unequal duel, with the republicans outnumbered by at least two to one. While the Moscas and Chatos in V formations fought with Fiats in the old-fashioned way, the Messerschmitt squadrons were trying out new tactics. They fought in pairs, a system later adopted by both sides during the Battle of Britain. The great danger in such chaotic air battles was from collision or fire from friendly aircraft. The great nationalist air ace García Morato was shot down for the first time in the war by one of his own pilots.

On 18 August the nationalists again opened dams on the Segre. The wall of water, raising the level of the river by 3.5 metres, carried away the bridges at Flix, Móra d’Ebre and Ginestar. The next day ‘the long-awaited’ nationalist counter-attack began against the main Ebro bridgehead, with six divisions and a cavalry brigade. Condor Legion 88mm guns supported the ground troops, while the Stukas went for republican artillery batteries. The Heinkel 111
Kampfgruppe
attacked the bridges again. The greatest success went to the Messerschmitt squadron, which shot down four Moscas (or Ratas as the nationalists called them) on that one day for no losses. One of the pilots was Oberleutnant Werner Mölders, later a great Luftwaffe ace of the Second World War. Having achieved fourteen kills in Spain, the highest score on the nationalist side, he became the first Luftwaffe fighter pilot to be credited with a hundred victories.
²⁵
Yagu ¨e ordered his troops against the republican positions round Vilalba dels Arcs and captured the heights of Gaeta. This time the nationalist planes dropped leaflets calling on the republicans to surrender, followed by heavy bombs. Over five days of fierce fighting Yagüe’s divisions were hurled against well-defended positions manned by experienced troops who could deal with the waves of infantry. Nationalist tactics were often no better than those of the commanders on the republican side.

On 26 August Modesto was promoted to colonel, the first officer from the militia to achieve such rank. But the Army of the Ebro could do no more than hold on. Visits were paid by the friendly journalists of former battles: Hemingway, Matthews and Capa, but also Joseph North of the New York
Daily Worker
, Daniel Roosevelt of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
, Louis Fischer of
The Nation
and the German poet Ernst Toller.
²⁶

From the Coll del Moro, where Yagüe had his command post, General Franco studied the battlefield through his binoculars: on the right the Sierra de Pàndols; in the middle Gandesa and the sierras of Cavalls and Lavall de la Torre; Corbera on the left and beyond flowed the River Ebro on its last stretch to the sea. ‘All within 35 kilometres’, Franco said euphorically to his aide, Luis M. de Lojendio, ‘I have the best of the red army trapped.’
²⁷
But in Italy Mussolini did not see things in the same way. ‘Today, 29 August,’ he said to Ciano, ‘I predict the defeat of Franco. That man either does not know how to make war or doesn’t want to.’
²⁸

On 31 August the nationalists launched their third counter-offensive. It was aimed between Puig de l’Àliga and the road from Alcañiz to Tarragona. They wanted to take the Sierra de Cavalls at any cost and advance towards Corbera d’Ebre. Their frontline troops had now been reinforced with García Valiño’s Maestrazgo Corps and stood at eight divisions, 300 guns, 500 aircraft and 100 tanks. Facing them were the 35th Division between Corbera and Gandesa, the 11th Division around Cavalls and the 43rd Division in Puig de l’Àliga. (According to Tagüeña, the telephone line from corps headquarters had to be repaired 83 times in a morning because of shell bursts.) Republican soldiers hung pieces of wood from their necks to bite on during the bombardments. Shell-shock and battle fatigue appear to have been far more prevalent on the republican than on the nationalist side, which was hardly surprising with the intensity of air bombardment.

On 3 September, exactly a year before the outbreak of the Second World War, the nationalists launched their fourth attack, this time against Líster’s men in the sierra. After hammering the republican lines relentlessly with their artillery, the nationalists advanced from Gandesa towards la Venta de Camposines and captured Corbera the following day. They had deployed 300 field guns on that sector as well as the German 88mm anti-aircraft guns firing directly at ground targets.
²⁹

During this attack Yagüe’s forces managed to break the republican line on the boundary between the sectors of V Corps and XV Corps. Modesto had no choice but to throw in his only reserve, the 35th Division, to seal the breach. Modesto’s orders at this time emphasize the madness of the republican decision to hold on. ‘Not a single position must be lost. If the enemy takes one, there must be a rapid counterattack and as much fighting as necessary, but always making sure that it remains in republican hands. Not a metre of ground to the enemy!’
³⁰

Two weeks later, between 19 and 26 September, the nationalists fought their way from rock to rock to take the heights of the Sierra de Cavalls, held by the exhausted soldiers of Modesto’s army. Rojo was desperate because Menéndez, the commander of the Army of the Levante, and Miaja did nothing to launch an offensive on their side of the corridor to alleviate pressure on the Army of the Ebro. On 2 October, after capturing the heights of Lavall, the nationalists reached La Venta de Camposines. And a couple of weeks later they captured in a night attack Point 666, the key to the Sierra de Pàndols. They totally cleared the defensive position of Cavalls, leaving republican formations exposed, and carried out a pincer movement, with Yagüe attacking towards La Faterella and García Valiña gave the order to blow it up. ‘A dry explosion, a flash, a thundering from fragments of iron falling into the water announced the end of the Battle of the Ebro, 113 days after its beginning.’
³¹
General Rojo supported Tagüeño in the direction of Ascó and Flix.

The republicans, after losing huge casualties, were left with only a small strip of territory on the right bank of the Ebro. At 4.30 in the morning of 16 November, taking advantage of a heavy river mist, the last men of the 35th Division recrossed the Ebro by the iron bridge at Flix. Fifteen minutes later Tagüeña’s decision to withdraw.

The mistake was not to have done it at least 100 days earlier. Modesto’s Army of the Ebro had virtually ceased to exist. Its remnants returned to the same positions which they had occupied on 24 July.

The Terra Alta had been a harsh battlefield for a pitiless conflict–a summer counterpart to the winter horrors of Teruel. The nationalists had lost 60,000 casualties, the republicans 75,000, of whom 30,000 died, many of them unburied in the sierras which Modesto’s army had been forced to abandon. Apart from the terrible loss of human life, almost all the weapons needed for the defence of Catalonia had been lost on this grotesque gamble.

Non-communist officers were the most vocal critics of the Ebro campaign and the way it had been handled. General Gámir Ulibarri argued that the fall of Catalonia had taken place on the Ebro. Others, such as Colonel Perea, the commander of the Army of the East, who was furious with Rojo, had harsh words for the lack of military sense in the whole operation. The Comintern agents, on the other hand, tried to blame Rojo and the general staff. Togliatti informed Moscow that the Army of the Ebro had received no support from the central front because of ‘sabotage and the malevolent action of General Miaja and the other commanders of the centre’.
³²

Following the distorting pattern of his usual Stalinist paranoia, Stepánov attacked the general staff and Rojo for having prolonged the operation, ‘calculating that by exhausting the Army of the Ebro, they would debilitate and incapacitate it’.
³³
The fact that the whole strategy had been agreed between Negrín and the communists, and the army had been commanded by a communist who refused to retreat, were of course ignored. So was the fact that the whole plan had been ill thought-out. To attack a sector so close to the bulk of the nationalist Army of Manoeuvre meant that the enemy could counter-attack rapidly; and to choose to fight with a large river just behind your front line when the enemy had a crushing air superiority to smash your supply lines was idiotic; to refuse to pull back after a week when it was clear that you had no chance of achieving your objective was bound to lead to the useless sacrifice of an army which could not be replaced. It was beyond military stupidity, it was the mad delusion of propaganda.