The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (55 page)

The Soviet advisers and communist leaders opposed the plan mainly for political reasons. They had invested a huge international propaganda effort in the defence of Madrid, to say nothing of sacrificing many of their best troops in four battles. They were, in fact, as obsessed with the capital as Franco had been over the previous six months. They therefore had informed Largo Caballero that neither their tanks nor their aircraft would support the Estremadura offensive and that General Miaja would not transfer any men from the capital for the operation. Instead, they wanted an offensive to the west of Madrid, attacking very close to where the battle of the Corunna road had been fought.

The dispute over the Estremadura offensive produced the first reaction of regular officers against communist control of the republican army. A number of them, who had at first welcomed communist ideas on discipline, now began to suspect the communists might be more interested in increasing their power than in winning the war. They were alarmed that military affairs could be manipulated for purely propagandistic reasons, and they were horrified by the Party’s infiltration of the command structure and its vitriolic campaigns against any officer who resisted.

The fall of Largo Caballero in May, and the appointment of Negrín as head of government, intensified the situation. Prieto, as minister of defence in charge of all three services, was prepared to collaborate closely with the communists and follow their advice on military operations. Yet he was to become one of their fiercest opponents later.

The situation in the north was critical, with the nationalists threatening Bilbao. Republican leaders decided on two operations, one in May and one in June, to take nationalist pressure off the Basques. The first, which was launched on 30 May, took place in the Sierra de Guadarrama. It consisted of an attack on La Granja de San Ildefonso ‘to seize Segovia by surprise in an energetic attack’, according to Prieto’s instructions. This offensive was later used by Hemingway as the background for his novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. Bertolt Brecht also set his only poem about the Spanish Civil War there.

My brother was a pilot,

He received a card one day,

He packed his belongings in a box

And southward took his way.

My brother is a conqueror,

Our people are short of space

And to gain more territory is

An ancient dream of the race.

The space that my brother conquered

Lies in the Guadarrama massif,

Its length is six feet, two inches,

Its depth four feet and a half.
³

Taking part in the republican operation were the 34th Division, under the command of José María Galán, the 35th Division under General Walter and Durán’s 69th Division, supported by artillery and Pavlov’s tank brigade. All these forces were under the command of Colonel Domingo Moriones, the head of I Corps.

At dawn on 30 May the attack began after a heavy bombardment of nationalist positions around the Cabeza Grande, Matabueyes and la Cruz de la Gallega. The infantry of the 69th Division launched its assault lacking air cover. The republican air force did not arrive until eleven in the morning, and then bombed republican positions.
⁴
Nevertheless, the 69th Division managed to occupy Cruz de la Gallega and continued its advance towards Cabeza Grande, from where it would be able to deploy direct fire on the Segovia road. Walter ordered XIV International Brigade to launch a frontal attack, which left the pinewood hillside scattered with corpses. Walter’s cynicism was revealed in a report back to Moscow in which he wrote, ‘the XIV, which heroically, but passively, allowed itself to be slaughtered over the course of five days’.
⁵

On 1 June Varela’s forces, with one division from Avila and the reinforcements which Barrón had brought from the Madrid front, counterattacked with strong support from bombers and fighters. They forced the republicans back from Cabeza Grande and threatened the whole advance on La Granja. The next day Walter was relieved from operational command of the offensive and on 6 June Colonel Moriones ordered his troops to withdraw to their start lines. According to Moriones, the attack cost 3,000 men, of whom 1,000 were from XIV International Brigade. And as for the original purpose of the operation, the nationalist assault on Bilbao was delayed by no more than two weeks at the most.

The operation failed partly because the nationalists appeared to have got wind of what was being prepared, but mainly because the republican command had greatly underestimated the speed of the nationalists’ reactions and the effectiveness of their air power. The nationalist Fiat fighter force, led by García Morato, even managed to machine-gun Moriones’s headquarters.
⁶
The Soviet pilots of the republican aircraft, on the other hand, demonstrated a distinct lack of aggressive action. Colonel Moriones in his report wrote, ‘Our own aircraft carried out bombing attacks from a great height and carelessly…our fighters kept at a respectable distance and rarely came down to machine-gun the enemy…enemy aircraft were highly active and extraordinarily effective.’
⁷

This action in the Guadarrama produced the first example of unrest in the ranks of the International Brigades as a result of being sacrificed for little benefit. And the brutality of their commanders when some of their men broke in the face of strafing by nationalist fighters was extreme. Captain Duchesne, who commanded the punishment company of XIV International Brigade, ‘designated five men at random and shot them, one after another, in the back of the head with his pistol in Soviet style’.
⁸

When the 69th Division retreated from Cabeza Grande, an infuriated Walter (before he was relieved) had ordered ‘the machine-gunning of those who pull back, executions on the spot, and the beating of stragglers’.
⁹

The second tactical operation to take pressure off the northern front was an attack on Huesca with the newly constituted Army of the East commanded by General Pozas. General Lukács was ordered up from Madrid with XII International Brigade, which included the
Garibaldi
Battalion, as well as four other brigades from the Central Front. He was put in charge of the operation, but found that many of the soldiers were badly armed, and that they would have little artillery or armoured support.

Lukács launched the offensive against Huesca on 12 June. The infantry had to attack across a kilometre of open ground. The nationalists, who were well dug in, forced them back with machine-gun fire and artillery. To compound the disaster, the vehicle in which General Lukács and his aides were travelling was hit by a shell. Lukács and his driver were killed, and Gustav Regler, the commissar of XII International Brigade, was badly wounded.
¹⁰

At dawn on 16 June the republican troops launched a new attack against the villages of Alerre and Chimillas, but the intensity of enemy fire forced them back. On 19 June, after another two days of desultory firing, the offensive was cancelled. The Navarrese brigades had just entered Bilbao. Walter reported that XII International Brigade’s performance ‘was nothing like what it had been during earlier battles.’
¹¹

The Huesca offensive, recounted by Gustav Regler in his book
The Great Crusade
, contributed to a defeatist mood in republican ranks. It had taken place soon after the events of May in a sector where there were many anarchist formations and the POUM’s 29th Division, which included the British
centuria
led by George Kopp, who had just been arrested and accused of espionage. Newspapers from Valencia and Barcelona were intercepted so that the troops should not hear of the denunciations of members of the POUM as traitors.
¹²

Total losses for the Huesca offensive rose to nearly three times those of the Segovia offensive. The losses among anarchist and POUM members were very heavy. (Orwell himself received a bullet through the throat, a wound which took him out of the war.) As it had been a communist-led operation and the nationalists appeared to have been forewarned, this only increased their suspicions and their bitterness.

The major operation, however, which the republican government planned to replace the Estremadura offensive, was to take place against Brunete, a village some 25 kilometres to the west of Madrid. The idea was to penetrate the weakly held nationalist lines and cut off the salient, which extended to the edge of the capital. The Communist Party had been carefully preparing the Brunete offensive to demonstrate its power and military effectiveness.

All five International Brigades and the communists’ best-known formations were given key roles, and every important officer had a Soviet adviser at his elbow. Miaja was overall commander. Under him were Modesto’s V Corps on the right with Líster’s 11th Division, El Campesino’s 46th Division, and Walter’s 35th Division; Jurado’s XVIII Corps on the left with 10th, 15th and 34th Divisions. (Jurado, the only non-communist senior commander, became ill and was replaced by Colonel Casado during the battle.) There was also a forward reserve of Kléber’s 45th Division and Durán’s 69th Division. In support of this force of 70,000 men, Miaja could count on 132 tanks, 43 other armoured vehicles, 217 field guns, 50 bombers and 90 fighters, although only 50 turned out be serviceable.
¹³
It was by far the largest concentration of strength yet seen in the war. To the south of Madrid, II Corps commanded by Colonel Romero was to attack towards Alcorcón to meet up with XVIII Corps. And II Corps was to make a diversionary attack in the area of Cuesta de la Reina. ‘If we cannot succeed with such forces,’ wrote Azaña with his usual lucid pessimism, ‘we will not be able to manage it anywhere.’
¹⁴

The great operation, however, concealed crucial weaknesses. The People’s Army supply services were not used to coping with such large numbers and the Segovia offensive had shown up the bad communications between commanders as well as their lack of initiative. This last defect, which was to prove so serious in the Brunete offensive, is usually attributed to a fear of making independent decisions among Party members. Such caution may seem surprising in aggressive 30-year-olds like Modesto and Líster. Yet among this new breed of formation commander only Modesto and El Campesino had seen service in Morocco as NCOs, while Líster had received some training in Moscow. Their first experience of military command had come during the sierra engagements of the previous summer. They had often shown themselves daring and resourceful at battalion level, but now they commanded formations with anything up to 30 battalions and had to cope with unfamiliar staff procedures. Azaña disliked the fact that these ‘crude guerrillas’, ‘improvised people, without knowledge’, pushed aside regular officers. Despite all their efforts, they could ‘not make up for their lack of competence’.
¹⁵
But if the new leaders of the People’s Army were intimidated by their responsibilities or conscious of their limitations, they certainly did not allow it to show. As with the International Brigades at the Jarama, ignorance was hidden behind a bluff confidence sustained by a ferocious discipline.

The offensive started in the early hours of 6 July, when the 34th Division from XVIII Corps attacked Villanueva de la Cañada. The Nationalist resistance was unexpectedly fierce, and when the troops seemed reluctant to keep going into the assault, Miaja gave orders to ‘take Cañada at all costs and if the infantry will not go forward place a battery of guns behind our own troops to make them’. Though outnumbered by nine to one, the defenders held off the republicans for a whole day.

Líster’s 11th Division swung past this action and attacked Brunete, defended by a very small nationalist force and a handful of medical orderlies.
¹⁶
He took the village on the morning of 7 July, but then failed to advance towards Sevilla la Nueva and Navalcarnero. He was concerned that El Campesino’s 46th Division had failed to crush the Falangist battalion defending Quijorna to his right rear. (A similar hold-up due to a brave defence occurred on XVIII Corp’s left flank at Villanueva del Pardillo.) Instead of advancing while the way ahead lay open. Líster and his Russian adviser, Rodimtsev, ordered their troops to dig in just south of Brunete, where they waited for El Campesino’s troops to finish off the Falangists in Quijorna. That took three days, partly because they had not surrounded it properly. This gave Varela time to send a Moroccan
tabor
of
regulares
to reinforce the Falangists.
¹⁷

In the meantime two republican reconnaissance soldiers captured by the nationalists admitted that Navalcamero was indeed the objective.
¹⁸
The town had no defences and no garrison, save a handful of civil guards and supply detachments. Líster’s delay saved the nationalists. Within 24 hours of the offensive starting, Varela could count on Barrón’s 13th Division and the next day Sáenz de Buruaga’s 150th Division arrived from the north in several hundred trucks, acquired on credit from the United States.
¹⁹

He ordered the 150th Division to attack between Brunete and Quijorna. This threat was met by Walter’s 35th Division, which filled the gap between Líster and El Campesino.

On the left flank 15th Division, supported by artillery and aircraft, attacked towards Villanueva de la Cañada and managed to take the village at ten o’clock that night, after heavy fighting against the nationalist division defending that sector. At the end of that first day the nationalist front had been forced back only in the centre, where part of Líster’s 11th Division advanced to within two kilometres of Sevilla la Nueva. Nationalist resistance around Quijorna and Villafranca del Castillo, held by no more than a
centuria
of Falangists from Salamanca,
²⁰
had been fierce. The republican advance could only be sustained if the enemy line was broken and the two attacking corps could join up. The republicans had a numerical advantage at this stage in men, artillery and aircraft. But Líster still did not dare advance further with both his flanks exposed.