The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (83 page)

Soviet intervention may well have helped save Madrid for the Republic in November 1936, as Franquist historians claim, but overall, there can be no doubt that German and Italian forces greatly shortened the war in the nationalists’ favour. To say that they won the war for Franco entirely would be going too far. The Condor Legion above all accelerated the conquest of the north, a development which enabled the nationalists to concentrate their forces in the centre of Spain. But the truly devastating effectiveness of the Condor Legion came in countering the major republican offensives of 1937 and 1938, battles which were to break the back of the republican armed forces. These perfect opportunities for the deployment of air power to maximum effect were, however, provided by the disastrous leadership of the communist commanders and their Soviet advisers.

The organization and objectives which the People’s Army assumed in the winter of 1936 were moulded more by internal and external political pressures than by military considerations. The communists’ demands for a unified command and discipline were entirely logical from a military point of view (while, of course, presenting them with the best way to seize the levers of power). But the idea that the only possible strategy consisted of set-piece offensives, straight out of French training manuals from the First World War, proved to be almost as grave a liability as the militias’ belief in the triumph of revolutionary morale. Even worse, the decisions to take the offensive were not guided by coherent thinking. In almost all cases these attacks were vain attempts to take the pressure off other threatened sectors and were launched for propaganda considerations. Once the attack had achieved surprise, the People’s Army commanders then allowed the momentum of the offensive to be lost by besieging villages and small towns. In a matter of a few days the nationalists managed to redeploy their troops and the Condor Legion.

The Condor Legion, as its war diaries confirm, found that Soviet pilots and the republican air force lacked confidence in combat and proved more of a nuisance than a danger. So its squadrons were able to bomb and strafe the People’s Army’s elite formations at will, since they were usually trapped in a small area on a completely exposed terrain. Yet the republican leadership, even though all surprise and momentum had been lost, could not withdraw its precious troops and tanks, because of the grossly exaggerated propaganda claims that had been made when announcing the offensive. Thus the Battles of Brunete, Belchite, Teruel and the Ebro were all disastrous repetitions. To make matters far worse, the Stalinist paranoia of the Soviet advisers and Spanish communist leaders attributed all reverses to Trotskyite treason and ‘fifth columnists’. Preposterous theories were concocted, innocent officers and soldiers arrested and shot, and reports were sent back to Moscow which revealed delusions that went well over the edge of sanity. It is hardly surprising that republican morale suffered so desperately.

The only two successes the Republic enjoyed were Guadalajara, a victory which resulted basically from a collapse in Italian morale, and the defence of the XYZ line in the summer of 1938. The latter proved to be the most cost-effective battle of the whole war for the republicans, inflicting four times as many casualties as they received. It has presumably received so little attention because none of the star communist formations was involved and little propaganda effort was attached to a battle that did not conform to ‘the active war policy of the Negrín government’.

All this suggests that a far more effective conduct of the war would have been to combine a strong defensive strategy with short, sharp probing attacks at different points to confuse the nationalists. The People’s Army’s tank forces should have been held back in an armoured reserve ready to counter-attack any nationalist breakthrough. The Republic could not simply have abandoned orthodox warfare for unorthodox, as some militia idealists dreamed. The conditions for a universal guerrilla war simply did not exist. The best-suited regions, with the right terrain, were insufficient to have stretched nationalist forces beyond capacity. But on thinly held fronts, many more nationalist troops could have been held down by commando actions. This would have hampered General Franco’s brutally unsubtle strategy far more effectively. Franco did not so much win the war: the republican commanders, with the odds already stacked heavily against them, squandered the courage and sacrifice of their troops and lost it.

The British-inspired policy of non-intervention has, not surprisingly, generated a great deal of passion and moral outrage. For republicans, it seemed unthinkable that the legitimately elected government of a country should not be allowed to buy arms to defend itself. There can also be little doubt about the hypocrisy of maintaining a policy which was manifestly failing to work, while the committee in London, including the three main interventionist powers, Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, pretended otherwise. The main anger is understandably reserved for the British government which, even if it did not officially propose the non-intervention plan, was certainly the main force behind it. The motives of the two prime ministers, Baldwin and Chamberlain, and the two foreign secretaries, Eden and Halifax, are frequently ascribed to a conservative plot to support Franco. Although extremely plausible, considering their personal friendships and tastes, this is probably a distortion of the truth.

None of them had any sympathy for the left-wing, if not revolutionary, nature of republican Spain, and certainly in the early days, they would have preferred a rapid nationalist success rather than what they saw as a slide towards the horrors of bolshevism. But their principal concerns lay elsewhere. They no more wanted Spain to be controlled by Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, Britain’s chief rival in the Mediterranean, than for the country to fall under Soviet influence. Above all, they were deeply concerned that the Spanish conflagration would prove to be another Sarajevo, creating a widening ripple of involvement which would turn into the next European war. The British Foreign Office was nevertheless totally wrong to assume the lofty role of international policeman when it was secretly prepared to sacrifice the Spanish people, just as it sacrificed the Czechs in 1938.

One must also look at the effective results of the non-intervention policy, which prevented the Republic from purchasing arms openly. The republicans’ greatest needs were for aircraft, tanks and automatic weapons. French equipment was generally of poor quality and the British aircraft available at that date were obsolete. Probably the only country capable of satisfying their needs, apart from the Soviet Union, was the United States. Roosevelt and Cordell Hull may have been influenced by the non-intervention agreement, but it was the Catholic lobby that led Congress to block arms supplies to the Republic. Thus, apart from a few aircraft purchases, Mexican rifles and ammunition, and Czechoslovakian machine-guns bought privately, it might appear that, even without the Non-Intervention Committee the Republic had no alternative to the Soviet monopoly of arms supplies. Nevertheless, the decision to send Stalin the Republic’s gold reserves was one of the most critical of the war.

The archbishop of Burgos, who justified the cruelty of the war as being ultimately less cruel because it meant a shorter conflict, was clearly wrong, both morally and logically. Neither side could be terrified into submission. The polarization of political beliefs meant that both parties felt that everything in which they believed, as well as their very existence, was at stake. This transmuted fear into desperate bravery. The war was only likely to end when a decisive lack of troops, armaments and munitions demonstrated that defeat was inescapable. This came about for the Republic after its catastrophic defeat on the Ebro.

The only possible reason for continuing the struggle would have been to achieve better surrender terms from Franco, but this was a vain hope. Negrín failed utterly with his thirteen points and there were no grounds to expect that Franco was likely to shift his position; in fact, he was bound to become even more inflexible the closer he came to victory. Any decision to fight on could lead only to a useless loss of life. An International Brigader wrote later, ‘It was all very fine for the left in Europe and America to beat their breasts and demand that the common people of Spain should fight to the last man, but once it had become apparent that the war could not be won it should have been terminated.’
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Whether or not an earlier surrender might have mitigated the vicious revenge of the victors is impossible to say, but it is doubtful. All one can be sure of is that it would have saved many of the tens of thousands of lives lost in the hopeless battle for Catalonia.

Little more need be said about the Franquist vengeance, a process which was frequently justified on the basis of sentences for ‘military rebellion’, a reversal of judicial logic that speaks for itself. Facts gathered so painstakingly by Spanish historians over recent years leave little further doubt about its scale or its cruelty. The only question left to answer covers the thought processes of those who perpetrated such a regime. But to speculate about the mental state of such oppressors, whether Nazi, Soviet or nationalist, is to risk assuming the dubious mantle of a long-distance psychiatrist.

The repression extended throughout the population as a whole, creating a terrible claustrophobia, exceeded only by the harshness of living conditions imposed by the regime. One of the great debates of recent years has been the degree to which Franco’s policy of autarchy and centralized financial direction laid the ground for Spain’s subsequent economic transformation. The argument for the economic policy established under Franco is very hard to fathom since it created a deadening form of state control which some commentators have compared to the Soviet satellite states of the Cold War years. In the case of Franco’s Spain, however, the degree of corruption and waste was perhaps equalled only by Ceauşescu’s Romania. The partial economic liberalization which came about in the 1960s was in many ways more a case of accident due to foreign influences than of design.

The pertinent question, however, is what would a republican victory have produced? If the People’s Army had achieved victory in, say, 1937 or 1938, what form of government would have ensued–the left-liberal administration of early 1936 or a hard-line communist regime? The accelerated collapse of the republican government in the spring and summer of 1936 and the onset of civil war, which triggered the revolutionary upheaval, followed a different path from the chaos that ensued from the First World War. Yet there was one similarity to the Russian revolution: this was the communist determination to eliminate their left-wing allies once the war had been won against the right. In September 1936, soon after his arrival, General Vladimir Goriev reported to Moscow: ‘A struggle against the anarchists is absolutely inevitable after victory over the whites. This struggle will be very severe.’
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André Marty, the Comintern representative, stated on 10 October, ‘After victory we will get even with them [the anarchists], all the more so since at that point we will have a strong army.’
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And
Pravda
declared on 10 December that the ‘cleaning up of Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist elements will be carried out with the same energy as in the USSR.’ As numerous reports back to Moscow made clear, the Popular Front strategy was merely a strategy ‘for the moment’. The Comintern representatives in Spain were clearly seeking communist hegemony in Spain and, even though this was not in line with Stalin’s general strategy, it is significant that no reproof or warning about this from Dimitrov appears in the communications between Moscow and Spain.

Stalinists, by the very nature of their own ideology, were not prepared to share power with anybody else in the longer term. Only one factor was likely to mitigate this in Spain, and that was the question of the Soviet Union’s interests elsewhere on the international stage. Stalin had already demonstrated his readiness to sacrifice a foreign communist party if it happened to be in the interests of the ‘Socialist Motherland’. In the case of Spain, it was mainly events in central Europe which determined Soviet policy. The British appeasement of Hitler in 1938 over his demands on Czechoslovakia prompted Stalin to prepare a new course, even if that eventually meant an alliance with Hitler himself. The post-war years would have been desperate, whatever government was in power. But everything afterwards would have depended on the form of regime which emerged. A fully democratic government would presumably have received Marshall Plan aid from the United States in 1948. Then, with a reasonably unfettered economy, recovery would almost certainly have begun by 1950, like elsewhere in Western Europe. But with an authoritarian leftist, perhaps overtly communist, government, Spain would probably have been left in a similar state to those Central European or Balkan people’s republics until after 1989.

The Spanish Civil War is, however, best remembered in entirely human terms: the clash of beliefs, the ferocity, the generosity and selfishness, the hypocrisy of diplomats and ministers, the betrayal of ideals and political manoeuvres and, above all, the bravery and self-sacrifice of those who fought on both sides. But history, which is never tidy, must always end with questions. Conclusions are much too convenient.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Abellán, José Luis (ed.),
El exilio español de 1939
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Acosta, Gonzalo, et al.,
El canal de los presos. Trabajos forzados: de la represión polĺtica a la explotación económica
, Barcelona, 2004