The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (40 page)

By the end of 1936 the nationalist army’s strength approached 200,000 men, with over half this figure made up by the Carlist and Falangist forces. The Army of Africa was increased to over 60,000 men by early 1937, chiefly as a result of intense recruiting in the Rif. Foreign volunteers also joined the Legion. The largest group was Portuguese and consisted of about 12,000 men known as the
Viriatos
. There was also a detachment of right-wing French volunteers and 600 Irish blueshirts under General Eoin O’Duffy, but their contribution was small. They were withdrawn after only one action in which they found themselves attacked by their own side.
¹¹

In January Franco set up a joint German-Italian general staff in the hope of deflecting criticism from his allies over the way the war was being conducted. He simply intended it as a sop so as to be able to request more military aid, and implicate his advisers in the responsibility of any reverse. The nationalists’ most valuable assistance undoubtedly came from the increased German contribution. The Nazi government had reacted quickly in early November to the appearance of Russian weaponry. Hitler evidently did not realize that Stalin was afraid of provoking him and that he was unwilling to let Spanish affairs embarrass Soviet foreign policy. The first contingents of the Condor Legion arrived in Spain in mid November. General Sperrle was the overall commander and Colonel von Richthofen the commander of Luftwaffe operations. German air power in Spain grew to four fighter squadrons of Heinkel 51 biplanes (to be replaced gradually with Messerschmitt 109s in the early summer of 1937) and four squadrons of Junkers 52 bombers. Other aircraft were sent out later; in fact, all the important machines used by the Luftwaffe at the beginning of the Second World War were tested in Spain.

The Wehrmacht reinforcements came under Colonel von Thoma’s command and included anti-tank and heavy machine-gun detachments, artillery and the equivalent of two Panzer battalions. This tank force of 106 Mark I Panzers assembled at Cubas north of Toledo. Their large black berets bore a badge based on the skull motif of the Death’s-Head Hussars of the old Prussian army. In support there were 20mm flak batteries and 88mm anti-aircraft guns. The signals corps, too, helped with equipment and training. There was a large contingent of engineers and civilian instructors, who later included Gestapo ‘advisers’, as well as a naval advisory staff, based on the pocket battleships
Deutschland
and
Admiral Scheer
, both of which stayed in western Mediterranean waters. On 16 November, 5,000 German servicemen disembarked in Cádiz and another 7,000 arrived ten days later.
¹²

The great increase in Italian aid followed the secret pact signed by Franco on 28 November at Salamanca. The Caudillo agreed to Mussolini’s policy of Italian primacy in the Mediterranean in return for military aid ‘to restore political and social order in the country’. During the first months of the war the Italian pilots flying the Savoia 81s and Fiat fighters had in theory been attached to the Spanish Foreign Legion, whose uniform they wore. But in his desire for glory Mussolini now wanted an independent command and recognizable Italian formations in the land battles. As a result the CTV (Corps of Volunteer Troops) was organized. Its commander, General Mario Roatta, formerly of Italian military intelligence, had been Admiral Canaris’s counterpart. Roatta had already been to Spain at the beginning of the war with the German liaison officer, Colonel Warlimont.

The Italian infantry sent to Spain consisted mainly of fascist militia, many of whom had been drafted or press-ganged. Having been told that they were going to Abyssinia, they arrived in Spain in midwinter wearing tropical uniforms. The CTV’s strength later reached a total of about 50,000 men, but many Spaniards were transferred to their formations and fought under Italian officers. The number of Fiat Ansaldo miniature tanks was greatly increased, but these were little better than closed-in Bren gun carriers. Italian field guns were of good quality, though old, but then artillery has always been the strongest section of Italian military industry. The ‘Legionary Air Force’, so called to summon up images of imperial Rome, was increased to some 5,000 men. Many more Fiat fighters and Savoia bombers were also sent. Their principal base was Majorca, from where they could attack shipping and, in Ciano’s words, ‘terrorize Valencia and Barcelona’.
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This reorganization left Franco’s air force commander, General Kindelán, in a similar position to his republican counterpart, Hidalgo de Cisneros, who, even after he became a communist, was lucky if the Russian General ‘Duglas’ told him what was happening.

The Málaga campaign, the Italian CTV’s first action in Spain, took place while the opposing armies in the Madrid region were preparing for the next round. The southern extremity of the republican zone was no more than a long strip between sea and mountain, stretching from Motril to Estepona within 50 kilometres of Gibraltar. Only the overriding priority given to the assault on Madrid had delayed the nationalists from attacking it earlier. Quiepo de Llano had grown particularly impatient at what he regarded as a continuing insult to his control of Andalucia. The nationalist field command was given to a Borbón prince, Colonel the Duke of Seville. Franco asked Roatta to join this offensive with his 10,000 fascist militiamen and the Legionary Air Force in close support. It was a clever move, since victory was certain, and Mussolini would therefore be encouraged to continue his aid at a time when he had suddenly become worried about international opinion.

If any campaign was fated to be lost by the Republic it was this one. The terrain and the elongated sector meant that the nationalists could cut it almost wherever and whenever they wanted. The state of the defence was pitiful, for Málaga had led a revolutionary existence cut off from the reality of the war. Within the town there was strong antagonism between the communists and the CNT, while in the countryside the predominantly anarchist peasants were immersed in their collectives. The mountain range provided a most dangerous sense of security.

The republican forces consisted of no more than 12,000 militiamen, a third of whom had no rifles. There was little ammunition even for those who were armed. This state of affairs was largely the result of the deliberate neglect of the government, which disliked the continuing independence of the province. Largo Caballero is reputed to have said ‘not a round more for Málaga’. The performance of Colonel Villalba, the commander, moreover, was more than just unimpressive. There are strong grounds for believing that he sabotaged the defence deliberately, since he was treated so well by the nationalists after the defeat of the Republic.
¹⁴

The Duke of Seville’s offensive began slowly in mid January with the capture of small pieces of territory. The first major section to be seized was the extreme south-west, including Marbella. Then a small force from Granada occupied a chunk of territory to the north-east of Málaga, endangering its communication with Motril, which lay at the exit of the bottleneck. Yet the attack on Málaga itself in the first week of February still came as a surprise. The Duke of Seville’s force advanced up the coast, rolling back the militia detachments with ease; the blackshirt militia under Roatta cut down to the sea; and the Granada force pushed further towards the coast road, although they left this escape route open so as not to provoke resistance. Within three days the nationalist and Italian forces had entered the outskirts of Málaga, after a naval bombardment by units of the nationalist fleet, backed by the
Admiral Graf Spee
. The republican warships at Cartagena never even left port.

The weather hampered operations and the Condor Legion could do little to help until almost the end. ‘At last the fighter squadrons can get off the ground,’ wrote Richthofen on 6 February. ‘Italians advancing with difficulty. One He 51 shot down. Italians are standing still four kilometres short of Málaga. Spaniards want fighters here there and everywhere. And today again in Saragossa because a red [aircraft] was there. That’s not how it should be. Today the Legion Condor had its fourteenth casualty.’ But just two days later, on 8 February, he was able to write: ‘Málaga taken! Great victory fiesta in white Spain.’
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Descriptions of the fleeing civilians and exhausted militiamen along the coast are harrowing.
¹⁶
Crazed mothers nursed dead babies and the old and weak died by the roadside. It seemed to the writer Arthur Koestler and his host Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell who had a house in Málaga, as if only a few solitary figures were left in the abandoned landscape of the city. Smoke drifted upwards from houses ruined in the shelling. In the shock of defeat odd militiamen waited apathetically to be put up against a wall. The nationalist revenge in Málaga was perhaps the most horrific of the war, judging by the British consul’s report of 20,000 executions between 1937 and 1944. The nationalist prosecutor in Málaga, Carlos Arias Navarro, eventually became the last prime minister under Franco and the man inherited by King Juan Carlos in 1975.

The Málaga disaster brought tensions to a head between the communists and Largo Caballero, whom the Comintern and Soviet advisers referred to in their reports to Moscow as ‘the Old Man’. They were furious at Caballero’s attempts to restrict communist power within the army, partly because he could not forgive their successful infiltration of the Socialist Youth and the consequent loss of the whole organization to the PCE. André Marty even suggested later that Caballero and Prieto were in the pocket of the British who were urging them to resist the communists.
¹⁷

‘He [Caballero] fears the exceptional influence that the Party has in a significant part of the army and strives to limit this,’ Berzin reported to Moscow on 12 January 1937. He went on to claim that General Asensio, the assistant minister for war, and General Cabrera, the chief of staff, ‘despite repeated exposures of their sabotage in the carrying out of useful measures for fortified fronts, up to now enjoy great trust from the premier and war minister, left socialist Largo Caballero. Some of them have not been exposed, but are undoubtedly agents of Franco…The fall of Málaga in particular was, for the most part, caused by treason.’ He levelled similar accusations against the anarchists and the ‘counterrevolutionary Trotskyists’ of the POUM, a leitmotif in almost every report back to Moscow. ‘It goes without saying that it is impossible to win the war against the rebels if these scum within the republican camp are not liquidated.’
¹⁸
Colonel Krivoshein, in a report forwarded to Stalin by Voroshilov, concluded that ‘the Communist Party ought to come to power even by force, if necessary’.
¹⁹

The communists were also outraged by the ‘impudently slanderous position’ taken by Prieto, the minister for the navy, ‘at the last council of ministers (where he in essence repeated almost word for word the attacks of the Trotskyist
La Batalla
against the Soviet Union)’.
²⁰

The transformation of the militia columns into a formalized army started in earnest in December 1936. At the beginning of 1937 republican forces totalled about 320,000 men, although only about half this number were at the various fronts at any one time. These forces were split among the central and southern zone with about 130,000, the three northern zones (Euzkadi, Santander and the Asturias) with over 100,000 and Aragón with about 30,000. The remaining 80,000 or so in rearguard areas included the Assault Guard, the National Republican Guard, formed from loyal civil guards, the
carabinero
frontier police and the MVR, the Militias of Rearguard Vigilance, which were a government incorporation of irregular forces. The
carabineros
came under Negrín, the minister of finance, who built them up as a personal force to about 40,000 strong. The main reason for lack of precision in army figures is inaccurate reporting, both of ration returns (minor and major frauds were carried out by staff and quartermasters) and of unit strengths (commanding officers sometimes adjusted the figures for personal and political reasons).

These greatly increased figures were achieved mainly by increasing the call-up of the classes of 1933, 1934 and 1935. It is impossible to gauge what proportion of the intake was prompted by idealism, circumstances, or even hunger, for the rations were considerably better than those which the civilian population enjoyed. An English International Brigader in hospital later observed that the local people were so desperate that they would eat what they had left on their plates, even if it had been chewed. Meanwhile, with a mixture of encouragement, manipulation and blackmail, the militias were forced into the command structure already prepared on paper. Columns were turned into battalions and brigades during the winter of 1936. In the spring of 1937 divisions and even army corps started to be formed.

The other development which went ahead rapidly was the practice of attaching commissars to every brigade and battalion headquarters. The commissars’ official role was to watch over regular commanders and look after the welfare of the troops. However, Álvarez del Vayo, the foreign minister and secret communist supporter, persuaded Largo Caballero to make him commissar-general and with his assistance the communists managed to take control of this powerful branch. By the spring, 125 out of 168 battalion commissars were from the Party itself (PCE and PSUC) or from the Joint Socialist Youth.

The Generalitat in Catalonia followed the policy of the central government, but at the same time it tried to establish the eastern forces as an independent Catalan army. This was an ambitious policy, intensely disliked by the central government. The communists refrained from criticizing the Generalitat, since their policy was to aid Companys, the Catalan president, to assert state power at the expense of the anarchists. Once that was close to being achieved, they would use their Catalan PSUC to help bring the Generalitat under central government control. On 6 December, the
Diari Oficial de la Generalitat
published the decree creating the Exe`rcit Nacional de Catalunya, an army composed of three divisions instead of mixed brigades. But in February 1937, when the Generalitat called up the classes of 1934 and 1935, it also had to place its army under the control of the central general staff.
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