The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (38 page)

The troops, and particularly the International Brigades, received visits in their trenches from the large numbers of foreigners brought to Madrid by the siege. These groups included journalists and a few war tourists, as well as politically committed supporters of the Republic. Some of the visitors were there for ‘pseudo-military excitement’ as one International Brigader described it. On visits to the front line they would often borrow a rifle or even a machine-gun to fire off a few rounds at the nationalist lines. Ernest Hemingway was a good example of the genre and, much as the men may have liked seeing new faces, especially famous ones, they became less enthusiastic when the thrill seekers provoked enemy bombardments.

By the end of November the struggle for Madrid had settled into a cold, hungry siege, punctuated by bombardment, air raids and the occasional flare-up. In Carabanchel, where the front line cut through the middle of streets, a strange deadly struggle continued, with sniping, flame-thrower attacks and tunnelling under houses to lay dynamite. The Carlists lost most of a company in one explosion. Nevertheless, the enthusiastic commitment of Madrid’s population diminished as the immediate danger receded. This was accompanied by the gradual replacement of the committees by centralized control. The activities of the communist secret police continued even after the danger was past, which also damaged morale. Anarchist militiamen clashed violently with communist authorities and attempts were made to censor the anarchist press. It was the beginning of a process which led to a major explosion in May of the next year, the start of a virtual civil war within the civil war.

At this time the communists made their first open move against the POUM, as mutual accusations between the Marxist rivals increased. The POUM had outraged the communists on 15 November, when its newspaper,
La Batalla
, analysed Russian policy too accurately. ‘Stalin’s concern’, the article said, ‘is not really the fate of the Spanish and international proletariat, but the protection of the Soviet government in accordance with the policy of pacts made by certain others.’ Soviet advisers immediately accused
La Batalla
of having ‘sold out to international fascism’. With the great increase in direct Soviet control, the Party line in Spain began to reflect the witch-hunt for Trotskyists in the USSR. Having kept them off the Madrid junta, the communists now stopped pay and supplies to the small POUM force on the Madrid front. The POUM militia in the region thus had no option but to disband and its members joined either UGT or CNT units.

The capital was saved and political passions aroused through much of the world, but it had certainly not proved ‘the grave of fascism’ as the communist slogan had hoped. The battle of Madrid marked only a change in the war. Checking the nationalists there turned a
coup d’état
into a full-scale civil war with international ramifications, almost a world war by proxy. This meant that even more help was needed from abroad. On 2 December 1936, Colonel von Richthofen recorded in his diary: ‘Salamanca wants German ground troops–at least two divisions.’ [In fact, one German and one Italian.]
³⁴
But a cautious Hitler decided to restrict his aid to Franco to the Condor Legion.

PART FOUR

World War by Proxy

The Metamorphosis of the War

H
istory seldom proceeds in straight lines. In December 1936 a series of battles, more in the style of the First World War, began around Madrid, yet the last of the militia defeats, in the pattern of the previous summer, did not take place until February 1937, in the brief Malaga campaign.

Generalissimo Franco became trapped in an unimaginative strategy. The enormous expectations aroused in October for what German diplomats cynically called ‘the bullfight’,
¹
and the failure to take Madrid in November, created an obsessive determination. He insisted to Faupel, the new German chargé d’affaires, ‘I will take Madrid; then all of Spain, including Catalonia, will fall into my hands more or less without a fight.’ Faupel described the statement as ‘an estimate of the situation that I cannot describe as anything but frivolous’.
²

After Varela’s attacks had been checked and the bombing had failed to break the morale of the city, there were basically three options left. One was to try to encircle Madrid from the north-west, and at least cut off water supplies and electricity from the Sierra de Guadarrama. This was to be the first target for the nationalists. The other was to strike eastwards across the River Jarama from their large salient south of the capital. Republican territory around Madrid was like a peninsula, vulnerable at its base formed by the corridor of land along the Valencia road. This would be the second offensive. And with the central front curling back round the Sierra de Guadarrama and across the province of Guadalajara, there was the possibility of striking down at the Valencia road from the north-east. This would be the sector for the third nationalist offensive in March 1937.

On 29 November 1936 Varela launched the first of a series of attacks on the Corunna road to the north-west of Madrid. The intention was to achieve a breakthrough towards the sierra, before swinging right to the north of the capital. This first attack, mounted with some 3,000 Legion and Moroccan troops, supported by tanks, artillery and Junkers 52 bombers, was directed against the Pozuelo sector. The republican brigade retreated in disorder, but the line was re-established by a counter-attack backed by T-26s. Both sides then redeployed so as to reinforce their fronts to the west of Madrid.

The German tanks, however, do not appear to have been used very effectively by their Spanish nationalist crews. ‘Inexplicable tank operations,’ wrote Richthofen scathingly in his war diary on 2 December. ‘German panzer personnel drive the tanks up to the combat zone, then Spaniards take over. They take the tanks for a ride and fiddle around.’ He also observed the republican air force. ‘Red pilots avoid coming in range of our flak,’ he noted four days later.
³
Richthofen, a cousin of the famous Red Baron air ace, was a hard, arrogant man, disliked by German and Spanish officers alike. He was to become infamous as the destroyer of many towns and cities: Durango and Guernica in Spain, then Rotterdam, Belgrade, Canea and Heraklion in Crete, followed by many cities in the Soviet Union, most notably of all, Stalingrad, where 40,000 civilians were killed.

On the nationalist side General Orgaz was put in charge of the central front, where a renewed offensive began on 16 December, after a 48-hour delay due to weather conditions. Varela retained the field command with 17,000 men divided into four columns. The first objective, after a heavy bombardment with 155mm artillery, was the village of Boadilla del Monte, some twenty kilometres west of Madrid. It was captured that night and the general staff in Madrid, realizing that they faced a major offensive rather than a diversion, sent XI and XII International Brigades, backed by the bulk of Pavlov’s T-26 tanks. XI Brigade counter-attacked at Boadilla, only to find themselves virtually cut off in the village. The nationalists withdrew to take advantage of such a clearly defined artillery target and attacked again with their infantry. The International Brigades established defensive positions within the thick walls of country houses belonging to rich
madrileños
. They resisted desperately and on 19 December the slaughter was enormous on both sides. The next day Orgaz halted the offensive, having gained only a few kilometres. He lacked reserves and the republicans enjoyed numerical superiority.

Karl Anger, one of the Serbs in XI International Brigade, described their arrival in the village of Majadahonda just south of the Corunna highway at the start of the fighting. ‘It was still an untouched little place, far from beautiful, a little dirty because of poverty, but warm, quiet and sweet, like a lamb. We filled it with our troops, services, guns, trucks, armoured vehicles, and all things that an army drags behind it during a campaign. Quiet Majadahonda became crowded, noisy and dirty, as if on a market day. On the first morning after our departure enemy aircraft started dropping bombs on the village. The inhabitants scattered, abandoning all their property. Livestock, pigs, unmade beds and unattended houses. On the first evening and first morning there still was life at Majadahonda. One could see mysterious silhouettes of young Spanish girls behind the poorly lit windows of houses. The next day the windows were already black, gaping–frightening holes in the shells of the houses. Only stray dogs, supply people and stragglers were left in the village, and also a woman who had gone mad. She screamed terribly on a moonlit night in an empty house, and the screams echoed frighteningly in the dead moonlit streets.’
⁴

It is also important to understand the chaos which resulted in the driving sleet and the winter darkness. The International Brigades lacked intelligence on the enemy. They had no maps or compasses, and blundered around just managing to avoid attacking each other. A battalion would start digging its trenches, only to find later that they were completely out of line with the neighbouring units. Language problems within the International Brigades did not help. Anger, a Serbian within a German battalion, also indicates in his account the extraordinary mixture of nationalities and of motives within the International Brigades. ‘In Majadahonda we were joined by a young Chinese volunteer, the first Chinese to join us. On the next day, when we had just started thinking how to incorporate him better into our Serbian team, he was brought back with both his legs smashed to bits. We hadn’t even had time to learn his name.’ He went on to add that ‘in all the International Brigades, including the first [i.e. XI International] brigade, there was a number of former Russian White Guardists or sons of White Guardists’. These were the desperately homesick Russian émigrés hoping to earn a safe passage back to the Soviet Union.

When nationalist reinforcements arrived towards the end of December, Orgaz prepared to relaunch his unimaginative offensive along the same axis. During the breathing space the republican general staff had redeployed their units in the Pozuelo-Brunete sector in a very uncoordinated manner and without attending to the supply of ammunition. When the nationalist offensive was relaunched on 3 January 1937 the republican right flank fell back in disorder. At first the republican troops on the left managed to hold Pozuelo, in a battle ‘which was the most complete chaos’. Koltsov said that ‘despite all their heroism, our units suffered from the confusion, stupidity, and perhaps treason in headquarters’.
⁵

Varela then concentrated most of his eight batteries of 105mm and 155mm artillery, together with his tanks and available air power, on the
pueblo
. The republican defence collapsed and the retreat of Modesto’s formation, based on the former 5th Regiment, became virtually a rout as men lost all sense of direction in the fog. General Miaja gave the 10th Brigade the task of disarming all those who fled. The only mitigating factor was the destruction of two companies of German light tanks with the 37mm guns of Russian armoured cars. The superiority of Soviet armoured vehicles in Spain later influenced the Wehrmacht’s development of heavier tanks.

The ammunition supply was appalling. On average only a handful of rounds per man remained, while some battalions had run out altogether. The fault lay partly with Miaja and his staff for reacting so slowly to the problem, but mainly with Largo Caballero and officers in the ministry of war in Valencia. Largo Caballero replied to Miaja’s request for more ammunition with the accusation that he was simply trying to cover up his responsibility for the defeat.

While the whole republican sector looked as if it were about to collapse, Miaja placed machine-guns at crossroads on the way to Madrid to stop desertion. He ordered in XII International and Líster’s Brigade. In addition XIV International Brigade was brought all the way round from the Córdoba front. On 7 January Kléber ordered the Thaelmann Battalion to hold the enemy near Las Rozas, telling them ‘not to retreat a single centimetre under any circumstances’. In a stand of sacrificial bravery they followed his order to the letter. Only 35 men survived.

Once reinforcements arrived, the front line eventually stabilized. Both sides were exhausted and by mid-January the battle was over, the opposing armies having established themselves in defensive positions. The nationalists had overrun the Corunna road from the edge of Madrid to almost a third of the way to San Lorenzo del Escorial, but the Republic had prevented any encirclement of Madrid from the west flank. Each had suffered around 15,000 casualties in the process.

The two battles for the Corunna road, as they were sometimes called, proved a hard testing ground for French and other volunteers with the tank brigade. The French arrived with what Soviet advisers regarded as an insouciant manner. ‘From the very first days’, the report back to Moscow stated, ‘the French disliked the discipline here. They said, “What kind of life is this, one isn’t allowed to drink wine, or go to the brothel, and one has to get up early.” They particularly disliked getting up at reveille and going on 25-kilometre marches. But when we explained to them, they understood and proved themselves to be heroes on the field of battle. And when they came back from the battle, they declared, “We don’t regard ourselves as Frenchmen, we are internationalists and anti-fascists.”’ The report admitted that fighting conditions were terrible for the tank crews. ‘Men get very tired. After a day’s work, men leave the tanks as if drunk, most of them suffer from a shortage of oxygen in their tanks. In some cases they vomit, in some cases they are in a very nervous state.’
⁶

The Soviet woman commissar of the tank brigade’s medical unit described the far superior medical facilities provided for Soviet advisers in comparison to the terrible conditions in the makeshift hospital in El Escorial for Spanish soldiers. The tank brigade commander, presumably Pavlov, showed an unusual commitment to the care of his men–especially rare in the Red Army. It went beyond just getting trained tankists, who were badly needed, back into their tanks. The commissar’s work and observations also provide some of the very few Soviet accounts of battle shock cases.