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. (p.476)
This is a wonderfully sensible, thorough, intelligent and powerful history of the Spanish Civil War.
The war started on 17 July 1936 when the Spanish Army mounted a military coup against the democratically elected Republican government. The coup, although carefully planned and co-ordinated between units of the Spanish Army in Spain’s colony in Morocco and on the mainland, managed to seize key towns and areas across western Spain but failed in its bid to swiftly overthrow the government. Instead republican forces, spearheaded by socialist and anarchist trade unions, seized villages, towns and cities in central and eastern Spain, including the capital Madrid and Barcelona, Spain’s second city, and capital of the separatist region of Catalonia.
Both parts of divided Spain then undertook a quick holocaust of enemy supporters, the nationalist army executing large numbers of ‘reds’ and trade unionists in their territory, the ‘republicans’ doing the same in their parts. Beevor analyses these numbers in some detail and hesitantly concludes that the nationalists ending up killing as many as ten times the number as the republicans, especially when you factor in that the execution of ‘reds’, trade unionists and anyone who opposed them continued long after the war finished on 1 April 1939, continued through the Second World War (in which Spain was neutral) and right up to the death of General Franco in 1975. Possibly as many as 200,000 Spaniards were killed by Franco’s forces in non-military executions, suicides, tortures to death and so on (p.450).
Meanwhile nationalist propaganda exaggerated and invented republican atrocities, quickly putting out stories about churches being burned to the ground (often true since the Catholic church was seen as the number one defender of the entrenched, exploitative, landowning aristocracy), priests being murdered (true in some numbers, apparently) and nuns systematically raped (this story, though salaciously retailed across the world’s media, appears never to have happened).
By the winter of 1936 battle lines had hardened across a divided Spain (the book has plenty of maps showing the general battle lines and detailed maps of specific battles) and both sides settled in for what looked like becoming a protracted war.
At this point Beevor’s account tends to alternate between detailed accounts of specific (bloody) battles, analyses of the complicated internal politics on both the nationalist and republican sides, and explanations of how the war was internationalised.
1. International war
Immediately the two Fascist dictators in Europe, Hitler and Mussolini, grasped the significance of the war and saw ways to exploit it. Mussolini sent airplanes and pilots and his fleet patrolled the Mediterranean coast of Spain to prevent arms getting to the republican east of the country. He wanted to crush communism in Spain, establish a western ally, and assert the Italian navy’s power in the Mediterranean. Hitler shared the same motives and was in addition delighted at the opportunity to give his Luftwaffe and army real war experience, in advance of his plans for conquest in Europe. German military advisors, and especially the notorious Condor Legion of planes and pilots, gave the nationalist invaluable help. It was the Condor Legion which carpet bombed Guernica, capital of the Basque country in the north, on 26 April 1937, and machine gunned men, women and children fleeing from the burning city.
The legitimate republican government appealed to the western democracies, namely Britain, France and America but – and this makes shameful reading – Britain, terrified of both Hitler and Stalin, led the way in creating the spurious and one-sided ‘Non-Intervention Committee’, arranging with the French and Americans not to supply arms or support to either side, so long as the Axis powers didn’t either. This deprived the republican government of much needed weapons and material, and the British stuck to their non-intervention, even when documentary proof was presented showing without doubt the huge amounts of aid the nationalists were receiving from Germany and Italy.
Worse, Beevor shows (in chapter 13 ‘Arms and the diplomats’) that there were many active fascist-sympathisers at the highest levels of the American and British governments and that, although the majority of the populations of both countries supported the republicans, key leaders in business and politics were both mortally afraid of a socialist/communist victory and actively sympathised with the nationalists’ aims of re-establishing order and religion. Credit, oil and business facilities were made available to the nationalists. In fact, Beevor quotes a Spanish diplomat who claimed, after the war, that
‘without American petroleum and American trucks and American credit, we could never have won the civil war.’ (quoted page 155)
Worst of all, the hypocritical refusal of the democracies to help a fellow democracy, forced the Spanish government into total reliance on aid from Stalin’s Soviet Union, which certainly sent tanks and airplanes, along with drivers, pilots and military advisors – but the price of this aid was submission to the communist way of doing things, planting commissars and secret police into every unit of the ramshackle popular army and the anarchist and socialist militias.
2. The battles
In the entire war the republicans only won one major engagement. In every other military engagement they were hamstrung by lack of arms, ammunition, lack of experience and training, lack of discipline and coherence across a hodge-podge of different forces but probably, as Beevor shows in harrowing detail, appalling military incompetence and terrible decision-making. In the second half of the war republican military decisions tended to be made on the basis of what would provide big, propaganda-friendly victories, largely at the command of the Soviet Union and its military advisors.
But Beevor shows how the war coincided with the height of Stalin’s paranoia, which was finding expression in the series of show trials taking place in Moscow in 1936 and 1937, in which hundreds of old Bolsheviks, having been tortured into submission, were forced to admit that they were anti-Soviet spies, tools of international imperialism, or Trotskyite saboteurs and so on. Partly these were a way of focusing the attention of the Soviet public away from the very obvious failures of Soviet economic policy such as the disastrous famine in the Ukraine in 1933 and the ongoing food shortages and lack of goods. Partly it was an almost medieval response to the failure of the Soviet experiment which had an almost medieval aspect – if there’s a famine, blame the witches or the Jews, and burn them. Partly Stalin was clinically paranoid and believed there were endless conspiracies against him.
A vital element of the general madness was that the Red Army had in the 1930s under the innovatory General Mikhail Tukhachevsky been developing a new modern way of fighting which integrated fast-moving tank forces, supported by airplane attacks and accompanied by well-organised infantry. As part of his mad purges of the Red Army Stalin had Tukhachevsky and everyone who propounded these new theories executed, and labelled the whole approach Trotskyist deviationism etc.
In fact Tukhachevsky was developing the same Blitzkrieg technique of fast-moving co-ordinated attacks which Hitler was to use to such effect in the Second World War. But his execution led to all thinking in that direction being banned, and Soviet military advisors fell back on the old, tried and completely discredited tactics of the Great War – big set piece battles where 19th century artillery barrages softened up the enemy before floods of infantry advanced over no man’s land to be slaughtered in their thousands.
Tragically, because the Western democracies effectively abandoned republican Spain, these discredited tactics along with the paranoia, the universal presence of the secret police who arrested huge numbers and carted them off for interrogation, torture and execution, were imported lock, stock and two smoking barrels into the republican forces.
The result was that the Soviet advisors again and again bullied the republicans into launching unnecessary and grandiose set-piece battles (in a bid to win glory and curry favour with Moscow) using out-of-date tactics, which the hodge-podge of republican forces were badly-suited to carrying out (because they required immaculate military precision) and in which they were invariably slaughtered in wave after wave of futile head-on attacks. Thus the massive defeats at the battles of Brunete and the Ebro.
And when wretched defeat and withdrawal (often simple routs when the bloodied survivors turned tail and ran) inevitably occurred, the commissars and Soviet advisors and NKVD secret police all blamed the defeat on Trotskyite traitors, fifth columnists, saboteurs etc and intensified their persecution of their own side.
Beevor gives scores of examples of the political commissars just lining up surviving troops and shooting a set number (in the back of the head) in punishment for their ‘cowardice’ i.e. their refusal to follow obviously incompetent and suicidal orders.
Beevor points out several times that the best way to use the scattered, less organised and badly equipped republican army would have been to mount an organised defence of existing republican territory while despatching large numbers of guerrilla fighters to harass and wear down nationalist forces from the sides and rear. This more unconventional approach might have kept the situation in a stalemate until the general European war – which everyone was expecting – broke out and the republican side could have hoped for a change in the position of Britain, France and America to open support.
3. Internal politics
Alongside the lack of international support, probably the key factor for the republican side was how splintered it was. Beevor spends a lot of time clearly explaining the nature and aims of the different factions. In fact the first fifty or so pages give a history of Spain from the Napoleonic Wars onwards which show how the fundamental divide between Catholic, landowning, aristocratic Spain grew apart from urban, working class, often atheist Spain, increasingly influenced by new socialist ideals crossing the Pyrenees from France and then, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, from Russia. The three years from 1918 to 1920 saw a wave of political strife in the Asturias and Catalonia which became known as the ‘three years of bolshevism’ (p.17) In 1932 the army in the form of General Sanjurjo tried to stage a coup against the republican government, but it was poorly planned, led to massive strikes by the left and was easily quashed.
A strike of Asturian miners in October 1934 quickly spread across northern Spain, turning into a general strike and then an attempt at the revolutionary government. The most intense political mobilisation took place in Catalonia and its capital Barcelona and led to street fighting, before being crushed by 19 October.
The nationalists, the army, the upper classes and the small fascist groups all feared that another attempt at revolution was just a question of time and it was this fear which lay behind the army coup of August 1936.
But in fact the republican side was hopelessly divided. There were regional differences, with both Catalonia and the Basque country thinking that the war would lead to their independence, while conservative socialist groupings in the central government wanted to resist any such independence.
And then the left was amazingly divided, between socialists, who had their own trade unionists, anarchists ditto, an initially small communist party, the larger liberal parties representing the middle classes, and a wide variety of colourful splinter groups, as well as various parties in the would-be independent nations of Basque and Catalonia.
Trying to reconcile the widely divergent aspirations of all these groups was probably impossible right from the start, but it was fatally injured by something which George Orwell and other foreign visitors realised straightaway: which is that the army coup didn’t just prompt the socialists and anarchists to rise up to defend the essentially bourgeois government; it triggered the very social revolution they feared. The anarchists of Catalonia were the fiercest revolutionaries and they burned down churches, abolished bourgeois forms and terminology in the towns (no more senor and senorita, no more ties and posh hats) and in the countryside instituted a wide-ranging policy of forming workers’ collectives. All this had been tried and planned for some time and happened very quickly.
But meanwhile the central government contained bourgeois liberal elements who were terrified of this revolution and sought in countless ways to undermine and defeat it.
The situation would have been complicated enough, without the heavy-handed intervention of the Soviet Union. The main thrust of George Orwell’s classic account of his time spent as a volunteer fighting on the republican side was that he saw at close quarters the surprising fact that Stalin’s communist party formed a reactionary element in this mix. This is easily enough to explain but devastating in its implications:
The struggle between two of the founding Bolshevik leaders, Stalin and Trotsky in the late 1920s, was that Stalin was convinced the new communist state must consolidate its existence and pursue ‘socialism in one country’. Trotsky, in contrast, advocated permanent and global revolution, arguing that one communist nation just couldn’t exist when surrounded by a sea of capitalist opponents. Trotsky lost the argument, he and his followers fled Russia, in Trotsky’s case to Mexico, where he was assassinated on Stalin’s orders in 1940. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Stalin became (justifiably) concerned about the spread of overtly anti-communist Fascism in Europe, with Fascist governments in Germany and Italy and authoritarian government in East European countries like Romania and Poland. Given this line-up of ideologically opposed and militarily strong enemies, Stalin realised he needed to cultivate friends wherever he could find them and so pursued a policy of friendship with France and as much friendship as he could muster with Britain. If it came to war, he would need them as allies (as indeed happened). Therefore Stalin did NOT want there to be a successful communist revolution in Spain; that’s the last thing he wanted, as it would terrify France and Britain to have a revolution on their doorstep, push them away from Russia and towards the Axis powers. Therefore Stalin used his centralised organs of state, the Communist International (the Comintern), his military advisors, the political commissars, his ambassadors and the NKVD secret police, to all promulgate the Party line that Spain was NOT ready for a proletarian revolution but must work unite in a ‘Popular Front’, a broad alliance of all left-of-centre parties to oppose Fascism. (The same line being peddled by the Stalin-controlled communist party in France.)
It took some time for the idealistic workers and peasants of Spain, for the anarchist and socialist politicians, activists and trade unions, and for the tens of thousands of volunteers who came from across Europe and America to fight for liberty and revolution etc, to grasp the fact that the full weight of Stalin’s communist machine was aligned against them. Sure, the party kept on spouting communist slogans but, on the ground, it worked tirelessly to seize control of the key ministries, to outflank Spanish politicians, taking every opportunity to suppress the genuinely revolutionary anarchist movement.
The repression of genuine revolutionary spirit took a step forward when the nine or so security and counter-intelligence agencies on the republican side were consolidated into the Servicio de Investigacion Militar or S.I.M. which quickly came under the control of the communists and carried out the latest Soviet tactics i.e. setting up secret prisons in Madrid and Barcelona, arbitrary late-night arrests of suspects who were then tortured using beatings, mock executions, disorientation and sensory-deprivation techniques. (p.340)
From this perspective, the history of the war is the story of the relentless rise to power, on the back of threats, violence, torture, secret police and also thanks to the being the only viable source of invaluable planes, tanks and munitions – of the anti-revolutionary communist party.
But although he was good at gaining power, Stalin was far from being all-wise, as his track record in the USSR showed. Just as his policy of forced collectivisation led to mass starvation in the Ukraine and elsewhere across the one-time bread baskets of Russia, so the implementation of anti-revolutionary repression in Spain had counter-productive effects. Not only did communist advisors force the republican army into wrong-headed tactics (as explained above), but the stranglehold of communist policy and terror had the effect of demoralising the huge numbers of socialists and anarchists who formed the backbone of the militias which originally formed so enthusiastically to combat the coup back in August 1936.
Thus morale plummeted as military defeat was followed by communist witch hunts, tortures, imprisonments and executions. Scattered mutinies were put down with mass executions. Volunteers from abroad found they couldn’t return to their home countries, anyone who tried was executed. In fact, the Soviets implemented far and wide the only way they knew how to run anything which was to execute anyone who opposed them or might oppose them or gave voice to any criticism of them. Or just anyone they didn’t like.
This parlous plight was well established by late 1937 and only got worse as the war lumbered into 1938, via the catastrophic battle of Teruel (December 15, 1937 – February 22, 1938) a strategically unimportant town which saw ferocious street fighting in sub-zero temperatures during which the place changed hands several times. The eventual loss of Teruel, with the loss of over 60,000 men, permanently undermined republican morale.
There was still a lot more fighting to go but, psychologically, many republicans of all stripes had given up; many leftists were horrified and disillusioned at witnessing Stalinist lies, violence, torture and pointless executions from close up. Beevor describes how this loss of morale led to defeatism even at the highest levels – from the spring of 1938 the republican minister of war Indalecio Prieto began telling all his colleagues the war was lost; and Beevor details the futile attempts of the Prime Minister, Juan Negrín, to formulate negotiating positions for a peace settlement. None of the republicans realised that Franco didn’t want peace. He wanted complete, unconditional, crushing victory.
After the terrible Battle of Teruel over Christmas 1937-8, the next main military event was the nationalists’ storming campaign through Aragon which brought them to the Mediterranean sea, cutting Catalonia off from the rest of republican Spain, in March-April 1938. Catalonia, with its capital Barcelona, was now isolated.
Beevor then hangs his head and describes the republican effort to score a big propaganda victory by launching the Battle of the Ebro, which lasted 113 days from July to November 1938, a mad folly which led to the virtual obliteration of the popular army amid the usual round of recriminations.
To attack a sector so close to the bulk of the Army of Manoeuvre meant that the enemy could counter-attack rapidly; to choose to fight with a large river behind your front line when the enemy had a crushing air superiority to smash your supply lines was idiotic; and to refuse to pull back after a week when it was clear that you had no chance of achieving your objectives 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. (p.400)
Long before this bitter battle was over, republicans of all stripes realised that they had lost.
4. The nationalists
This summary has tended to ignore the nationalist side, partly because the republican story is more complex and fraught. Suffice to say that the nationalists were also divided among various parties. Supported by the Catholic Church (and with the express blessing of the Pope), the big landowners, all business owners and hugely helped by the backing of Italy and Germany, nonetheless there were still complex rival factions among the nationalists which Beevor explains with clarity and persuasiveness.
I was particularly struck by the ferocity of the Carlists, a party loyal to a very old vision of a Catholic monarchist Spain, originally founded to support the royal line descended from Don Carlos, Count of Molina (1788–1855), after disputes over the succession laws and widespread dissatisfaction with the Alfonsine line of the House of Bourbon. The Alfonsine line had in fact come to an end with the forced abdication of king Alfonso XIII in 1931, the abdication which created the Spanish republic and gave the Carlists hope that their man would one day be restored. (In the event this wasn’t to be and Alfonso XIII’s son, Prince Juan met Franco after the war, when Franco needed to broaden support for his regime, and they agreed that Juan’s ten-year-old son, Juan Carlos, should become Franco’s ward and heir. Indeed the little boy would become King Juan Carlos upon Franco’s death, in 1975.)
Beevor also explains the origin of the Falange – Spanish for Phalanx – a frighteningly violent, extreme right-wing party, founded in 1934 and led by José Antonio Primo de Rivera. These and other right-wing parties had their own leaders, rivalries and differing ideologies. Beevor describes them in careful detail and then explains how Franco cleverly played them all.
Beevor shows how cautious, canny and ruthless General Francisco Franco was. Franco had seen action in the 1934 revolution, but the main thing about him was he had been in charge of the Spanish Army in Morocco, and the important thing about this was that the Moroccan force was the only part of the Spanish army which had any kind of battle experience. The army in mainland Spain had never fought a battle, never fired a shot in anger, for Spain did not take part in the First World War. Only the African Army had experience of maintaining discipline under fire and of close-quarters fighting. This gave rise to a mystique surrounding the africanistas, something Franco exploited militarily and politically (p.16).
Beevor shows how Franco never moved until he was completely confident of victory. This goes for his political manoeuvres as much as his military campaigns. Essentially the war was won because the nationalist chain of command was centralised and efficient, and worked smoothly with its German and Italian supporters. But Franco still had to wait patiently until the time was right for him to assert his authority as the leading general among all the others who had staged the coup. This he did by ensuring it was his forces who led the liberation of Toledo. Toledo contained the Alcázar fortress, held by nationalist but besieged by republican forces since the start of the coup. Like Mafeking during the Boer War, its eventual liberation led to widespread rejoicing. And enthusiastic hailing of Franco as its saviour.
On 21 September 1936, at a meeting of his fellow generals at Salamanca airport, Franco, with preparatory work done by his devoted brother-in-law and other supporters, managed to get himself appointed chief military commander with the title Generalísimo.
On 29 September, after the final relief of the Alcázar, Franco proclaimed himself Caudillo (meaning ‘chieftain’, the Spanish equivalent of the Italian Duce and the German Führer). At the same time the disparate nationalist forces – falangist, Carlist, Alfonsist – were amalgamated into one governing nationalist party.
A few days later, on October 1, 1936 Franco’s title of Caudillo was confirmed at a big parade of army and state in the nationalist capital of Burgos. Although some nationalist parties demurred at this rapid consolidation of Franco’s power, their leaders were quickly dealt with, and the entire nationalist mind-set in any case valued strong central authority, so most of the officers and soldiers on the nationalist side were predisposed to accept one strong central command. From now on, that command was Franco’s.
5. Defeat and aftermath
The last 100 pages of this large-format, 470-page book make hard reading because it is so depressing to watch the republican side slowly being ground down, losing territory, pushed back, fighting among themselves, with Stalin’s SIM arresting, torturing and executing anyone who queried what turned out to be the hopeless Russian tactics.
The nationalists regrouped and re-equipped after victory in the Battle of the Ebro in November 1938. Then launched a swift campaign to seize Catalonia in January and February 1939. Nationalist forces entered one-time revolutionary Barcelona on 26 January, and by the end of February all Catalonia was in their hands. (It is interesting to learn that Franco hesitated before attacking Catalonia, convinced right to the end that the French were planning to invade and seize it, against all the advice of his own generals and to the frustration of the hard-headed Richtofen. Of course, the terrified French never had any such plan.) This left only Madrid and the area to the south-east still in republican hands.
In March, what was left of the republican army in Madrid staged a coup against prime minister Juan Negrín, who fled to France. But communist forces around Madrid staged a counter-coup against the army, so, once again, the republicans were fighting among themselves when the nationalists launched their final military assault, capturing Madrid on 28 March. By 31 March the nationalists controlled all Spanish territory. Franco proclaimed victory in a radio speech aired on 1 April 1939, as the final republican forces surrendered, and it is that day which goes down in history as marking the end of the war.
What began as a military coup designed to quickly seize power ended up lasting two years and 254 days, with as many as a million deaths, if you combine civilian with military casualties.
General Franco was installed as dictator of Spain and immediately began issuing laws rolling back all the reforms of the republican regime and brutally centralising all aspects of Spanish life. The Basque and Spanish languages were banned. All media became state controlled, as did all industry, railways and other infrastructure. Secret police were everywhere. Even a few unwise words of criticism in conversation could land you in prison or worse.
Franco remained dictator of Spain until his death in 1975. Beevor’s book follows the aftermath of the war, with sections on the wretched conditions refugees to France endured in miserable transit camps.
I thought Franco cannily kept Spain out of the Second World War so was surprised to learn here that he in fact made repeated overtures to join the war on the Axis side. However, he made such extortionate demands for weaponry from Germany, and also demanded to be given France’s colonies in Africa i.e. the rest of Morocco as well as west African colonies – that the Nazi regime was put off and repeatedly refused the offer.
Once the Axis powers began to lose, in 1943, Franco shifted his official position back from Axis support to neutrality (much to Hitler’s disgust).
At the end of the war his regime, so clearly authoritarian and militaristic and with all kinds of ties to the defeated Axis, might have struggled to survive, had it not been for the start of the Cold War between America and Russia. Ironically, it was (the threat from) communist Russia which led the West (i.e. America) to consider an authoritarian but stable Spain better than a chaotic and possibly communist one.
Thus Spain remained in a state of suspended animation until the old dictator’s death in 1975. The country took a generation to recover from the devastation of total war, with cities, towns and villages laid waste, its people, infrastructure and culture scarred for decades. Arguably, many these scars last to this day.
Footnotes
Spanish boasting Criticism of the overweening and unfounded arrogance of the Spanish on both sides crops up in several places. Beevor more than once quotes foreign military experts as well as Spanish officers, who all agree that the Spanish were too proud to dig trenches i.e. holes in the ground. Having not experienced the Great War, most Spanish thought war consisted of valiant charges and heroic stands and refused to hide in holes. The result, especially on the republican side, was that they were mown down or strafed to pieces in their tens of thousands.
The Germans, with their emphasis on efficiency, were particularly appalled at the discrepancy between Spanish vainglory and their chaotic practice. Beevor goes right back to the Duke of Wellington who led the British forces in the Peninsular campaign against Napoleon (1807-1814) and who remarked of the preening Spanish officers assigned to his staff, that ‘the national weakness was boasting of Spain’s greatness’ (quoted page 158). For Richtofen, writing in his war diary, nothing at all had changed in 130 years.
New version, new sources Beevor wrote and published an earlier version of this book in 1982. This new longer version benefits from the opening of archives across Europe, particularly in the Soviet Union. Thus accounts of battles and political struggles are backed up by extensive quotations especially from newly accessible Soviet sources.
Still, the most gripping single source is Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen who was sent as an air force adviser to the nationalists and wrote a daily diary commenting on all aspects of the war. He is scathing about the incompetence of the Spanish and Italians and exults in the destructiveness of the German forces, especially his beloved Condor Legion.
Beevor points out that Richtofen pioneered the close co-ordination of armoured forces, infantry and air planes, and developed a new technique of close ground-to-air communications which proved vital in Nazi victories of the Second World War. He was a great destroyer of cities. In Spain his Condor Legion destroyed Durango and Guernica. He went on to be responsible for the destruction of Rotterdam, Belgrade, and Heraklion in Crete, before co-ordinating the bombing of Stalingrad in which some 40,000 civilians died (p.212).
The twentieth century was the great era of mass murderers. It is like looking out over a limitless expanse of burned and bleeding bodies. How can anyone possibly claim that human beings are a rational species?
Comrades! Work and fight for the Revolution!
War art The war saw an outburst of art and propaganda on both sides. Beevor points out it was the first war in which control of telegraph, telephone and radio were important. The republican side produced many stirring posters, poems and songs. But no amount of art could make up for a) the lack of foreign backing b) the consequent lack of guns, artillery and planes c) the lack of military training and experience d) the vicious, self-destructive in-fighting led by the communists and e) the idiotic military decisions which led to defeat after defeat.
Books & Boots 
Jose De Juan
/ August 1, 2017Great read.