The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (39 page)

‘Medical vehicles of International Brigades are rushing along the highway. Some of them are painted in a mosaic-like pattern of green–yellow–black–grey, they blend in with the general surroundings. Medical transport is a weak spot here. There are few ambulances and most of them are modified little trucks or assembled from odd bits and pieces. Most of them have enough space for only four stretchers. Two tanks are crawling up from a turn of the road. In the second one is the body of mechanic-driver Ulyanov, who was killed on the spot by a direct hit on his tank. Malyshev and Starkov were wounded.

‘The field hospital [for tankists and the International Brigades] is stationed in a big room in one of the houses in a forest nature reserve. Double mattresses with clean linen and blankets have been put on the floor. There is a stove, they feed firewood into it, keeping up the temperature which is important for those who had come back from the front. During the whole operation near Las Rosas there had been a severe fog, penetrating one’s entire system…Besides water and soap, the hospital has petrol and alcohol–to wash the tankists’ faces and hands…The doctor and I go to the main hospital, to look for our wounded men. The hospital in Escorial is overflowing with wounded…I take note of the types of wounds while passing through the wards and the hall where the wounded men are received. Most of the wounded men are infantry, wounded by artillery shells. Wounds from bullets–in the back and sides.

‘During the night of 14 January I found the corpse of a Frenchman in the room next to Starkov. He had been brought back from the battle unconscious, with a heavy wound. The nurse told me that he had shouted in French, “Comrades, look out! Shells are coming from the left.” He then started to sing the “Internationale” and died. He had no documents on him. The nurse and I did not have a camera to take a photo of this dead unknown comrade. Upstairs, in an empty ward, lies a dying Italian, wounded in the neck. In the ward next to him there’s a wounded Moroccan, with a heavy wound in his leg. He does not talk and rejects food…It is unbelievably cold in the hospital. We cover Starkov [whose leg had been amputated] with several blankets, dress him in warm underwear which we’ve brought from brigade headquarters. The brigade commander asked if he could get anything for Starkov. I asked Starkov and then informed the brigade commander that he would like to have a watch. The brigade commander ordered us to take Starkov his own watch…All the wounded tankists who are now in hospitals in Madrid are sent food on a daily basis from brigade headquarters: canned milk, cocoa, oranges, apples, chocolates, sausage, cookies…In Madrid we have found the full collections of works by Gorky and Chekhov. The wounded men are supplied with newspapers and magazines, commissars keep visiting them.

‘Types of wounds varied from day to day at the front field hospitals and also at hospitals in Madrid. In the wards and operation theatres, which I visited directly after the battles, I happened to see some Spanish infantrymen who were wounded in the back, rear, backs of their legs, and shoulders. At first aid stations at the front we sometimes came across cases of “self-inflicted wounds” among Spanish infantrymen, who, while seized with animal fear, had shot through their own arms and legs, in order to be taken to hospital.’

The woman commissar also recounted the case of a tank crewman called Soloviev, with a broken right arm, who ‘developed abnormal psychic reactions’, clearly a euphemism for battle shock or what we know today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Soloviev was evacuated on 15 January to the Palace Hotel in Madrid, the Soviet fortress base. His ravings were perhaps an interesting product of propaganda. ‘Soloviev would become extremely agitated, he would talk and talk of his recollections. He spoke incessantly about his training and his time in the Red Army, mentioned the names of commanders, sites of their camps, location of units, then turned to the Spanish Civil War, matériel and people dispatched on ships, and about anarchists and Trotskyists. On the order of the brigade commander, Soloviev was moved into a separate room…On 20 January he showed symptoms of sharp delirium: “Anarchists came here during the night, and they took me upstairs!” “Anarchists will slaughter us all, they came for me, they told me about it last night!” The brigade commander ordered us to evacuate Soloviev from Madrid. Although his fits of delirium have become more frequent, we evacuate Soloviev in one of the brigade’s ambulances. We take him to a hospital in Archena. In this hospital, he can be isolated from the outside world and will get the necessary treatment. While he was at “Palas Hotel” [sic], no strangers were allowed into his ward. Political workers from the brigade kept visiting Soloviev and controlling his state.’
⁷

It is important at this point to understand what fighting in the field was like for the militiamen who had now become part of the People’s Army. The majority were industrial workers who had little experience of the country. Even those who had done military service knew few of the old campaigner’s tricks for making life more bearable in general and more durable in battle. Their columns and new ‘mixed brigades’ were marched or driven out of Madrid in commandeered trucks. Maps were so scarce that they were seldom available at company level and few could read them properly when they were issued. Once at the position which they had been ordered to defend, the soldiers, equipped with little more than a rifle, ammunition pouches and a blanket, started to dig trenches with bayonets and bare hands. They did not bother with latrines, since that would only have meant more digging in the stony Spanish earth and visiting them involved a dangerous journey. In most cases they simply used their trenches, a practice which horrified International Brigaders, accustomed to the First World War idea of digging everything into the ground.

The Castilian winter is renowned for the cold winds coming down off the sierras, and the militias froze in their trenches, often having little more to wear than their boiler suits and rope-soled canvas
alpargatas
, which rotted quickly. With mud everywhere it was impossible to keep clean, owing to the lack of water tankers to bring up fresh water and the general scarcity of soap.

In theory each battalion had a machine-gun company in addition to its three rifle companies, but only the International Brigades or picked communist formations had anything approaching the full establishment. Automatic weapons were the key to repulsing frontal attacks and the lack of them, and of experienced operators, put the People’s Army at a grave disadvantage. The Moroccan
regulares
became well known as the most effective machine-gunners in the war in addition to their other remarkable ability to use dead ground. The barren terrain in which they had fought the Spanish so successfully in the colonial wars had taught them to take maximum advantage of the slightest fold in the ground. Not only did this reduce their casualties enormously, but together with their reputation for knife work, it inspired a tremendous fear in republican troops. Their skill often enabled them to creep in between carelessly sited positions and take the defenders by surprise.

Nationalist generals, most of whom proved as rigidly conventional as their republican counterparts, did not make full use of the
regulares
. The majority of the fighting was limited to set-piece offensives, which were often assaults across an open no man’s land, with attack followed by counter-attack. The only discernible difference from First World War tactics was the growing co-ordination between infantry and armour, together with the integration of artillery and air bombardment. This development, however, was almost entirely restricted to the nationalist side and their Condor Legion advisers.

The new breed of republican commander emerging at this time was young, aggressive, ruthless and personally brave, but as utterly conventional and unimaginative as the old officers of the metropolitan army. The outstanding examples of this type, such as Modesto and Líster, were communists from the 5th Regiment. Some, like Manuel Tagüeña, became communists in the early months of the war, having started in Socialist Youth battalions which had affiliated to the 5th Regiment during the fighting in the sierra the previous summer. Their rigidly traditional approach to tactics and their military formality were strongly influenced by Stalinist orthodoxy. The purging of Marshal Tukhachevsky and his supporters who advocated the new approach to armoured warfare returned communist military theory to the political safety of obsolete tactics. In Russia saluting had been reintroduced and the 5th Regiment followed suit. The officers of XI International Brigade had even carried swords when marching up the Gran Víaon 8 November. The exhortation of the new republican brigades may have been revolutionary in language, but the manoeuvring was Tsarist.

After the battle of the Corunna road Kléber left for Moscow in the company of André Marty, having been relieved of his command. It has been said that jealous Spanish communists made him the scapegoat for the Pozuelo collapse, while others, such as Borkenau, believed that Miaja resented Kléber rivalling him as the hero of Madrid. Whatever the explanation, Kléber had become much less flamboyant when he returned to Spain in June to command a division. Despite the idealized portraits of many foreign journalists, who ‘played him up sensationally’ as one of them admitted, Kléber never really exceeded the level of a tough First World War commander who was unsparing with the lives of his men.

In between the two parts of the Corunna road offensive, the republicans had fought an unsuccessful action in the south when Queipo de Llano’s forces advanced to capture the rich olive-growing area of Andújar. It was a singularly inauspicious start for the new XIV International Brigade under General ‘Walter’, a Polish communist, who later commanded the Second Polish Army in the Red Army’s Berlin operation. This brigade included the French Marseillaise Battalion, which had a British company. The main action, around a village called Lopera just after Christmas, became famous for the death of the two English communist poets John Cornford and Ralph Fox, and for a frightening foretaste of International Brigade justice.

The battle began on the morning of 28 December and finished 36 hours later. Walter had been ordered to retake Lopera, but he had no telephone communications with his units and no air or artillery support. The nationalists decimated their ranks with machine-gun fire, mortars and artillery. XIV International Brigade was virtually untrained. Like the militia in similar circumstances, many of its men turned and ran on being surprised by machine-gun fire. Some 800 corpses were left under the olive trees and 500 men deserted the front line.
⁸
The commanding officer of the Marseillaise Battalion, Major Gaston Delasalle, was arrested and accused, not only of incompetence and cowardice, but also of being a ‘fascist spy’. He was found guilty by a court martial hastily gathered by André Marty. Ilya Ehrenburg later described Marty as speaking, and occasionally acting, ‘like a mentally sick man’, and Gustav Regler remarked that Marty preferred to shoot anyone on suspicion, rather than waste time with what he called ‘petit bourgeois indecision’.
⁹
Some Brigaders, however, admired him greatly. ‘A true revolutionary,’ Sommerfield called him, ‘compounded of patience, granite firmness and absolute unswerving determination.’ Tom Wintringham, who later commanded the British battalion, described the proceedings as ‘a thoroughly fair court martial’. But Nick Gillain, serving in XIV International Brigade, wrote later, ‘The guards dragged the condemned man out of the court room, while he continued to protest his innocence. There was the sound of two or three shots. Then, a man came back into the room and placed on the table a watch and some money…Revolutionary justice had been carried out.’
¹⁰

The nationalists and their Axis backers began to adjust themselves to a protracted war. Hitler was not surprised by the turn of events, informed as he was by accurate assessments from Voelckers, the German chargé d’affaires. He was also unperturbed by the long pessimistic reports from his ambassador to Franco, Faupel, and the Condor Legion commander, General Sperrle, because an extended war suited his purposes better. It would distract attention from his expansionist plans in central Europe. Mussolini, on the other hand, was eager to win military glory in Europe, but his mood fluctuated wildly according to the performance of his troops.

The most urgent task facing Franco’s staff was to create a trained army of sufficient size. German assistance in this task was almost as important as their combat contribution. The Falangist militia trained by Condor Legion officers at Cáceres in Estremadura bore little resemblance to the gangs of
señoritos
involved in the summer fighting. The Carlist
requetés
, the nationalists’ most effective troops after the Army of Africa, now numbered about 60,000. At least half of them came from Navarre, which led to the Carlist claim that ‘Navarre had saved Spain’. This arrogance, combined with open contempt for the Castilian Church, which they thought corrupt and pharisaical, did not make them popular with their allies. The famed discipline of the
requetés
derived, not from strong respect for hierarchy, but from the self-discipline of the hill farmer. (Their leader, Fal Conde, exaggerated when he described Carlism as a movement guided from below, but it was a uniquely populist form of royalism.) Their medieval crusading faith made them fearless. Colonel Rada described his
requetés
as men ‘with faith in victory, with faith in God; one hand holding a grenade, the other a rosary’.

In early December 1936 the Carlist war council decided to establish a ‘Royal Military Academy’ to ensure a supply of trained Carlist officers. Franco, jealous of their strength, declared that such an unauthorized move would be considered an act against the nationalist movement. The war council backed down and Fal Conde went into exile in Portugal. The Caudillo followed up this victory with a decree which subordinated all political militias to the code of military justice and the army chain of command.