The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (82 page)

After the liberation of France in 1944 the Spanish Communist Party prepared a double plan for its ‘reconquest’ of Spain–one was to invade across the Pyrenees, the other was to send small detachments of guerrillas into Spain to link up with other groups and organize a more co-ordinated resistance. The vain hope was that this would encourage the victorious Allies to take a more robust line against Franco’s regime. In September 1944 the communist leader Jesús Monzón gave the order to attack from the Valle de Arán, and from there advance on Lérida, with the idea of establishing a bridgehead in which a ‘government of national union’ could be set up to lead a mass rising across Spain. The operation was entrusted to the so-called 204th Division, which consisted of less than 4,000 men, under the command of Colonel Vicente López Tovar.

On 19 October, at six in the morning, they crossed the frontier while other diversionary attacks were carried out at different points along the Pyrenees. In this first stage the invading force managed to penetrate several dozen kilometres into Spain, occupying small villages, capturing a few Civil Guard posts and taking 300 prisoners. But following the usual republican mistake, they spent time laying siege to Viella, the main town of the Valle de Arán. Once again the nationalists reacted rapidly, sending in 40,000 Moroccan troops under Generals Yagüe, Garcia Valiño, Monasterio and Moscardó. López Tovar gave the order to withdraw back across the frontier on 28 October. The operation ended in a resounding defeat, with the loss of 200 killed and 800 taken prisoner. Another 200 managed to slip away into the interior of Spain.
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Similarly, the attempt to produce a rising, with so-called ‘corps’ and ‘guerrilla armies’, inside Spain failed dismally. But guerrilla activity still carried on. In Galicia it continued until 1950. In Asturias the movement was split by disagreements between socialists and communists. In Levante and upper Aragón the guerrilla groups were kept going by more small detachments crossing the French border to join them.

An attempt was made by Jesús Monzón in Madrid to set up a guerrilla army of the centre and operations started in urban areas, such as an attack on the Falangist headquarters in Cuatro Caminos. But the pitiless methods of the Civil Guard and the secret police took a heavy toll. In Catalonia the communist PSUC set up another ‘guerrilla army’, but this too was broken up in 1947, with 78 members tried before the largest court martial ever assembled in Spain. The most famous guerrillas in Catalonia, however, were anarchists such as Francisco Sabaté Llopart (‘El Quico’), Ramon Vila Capdevila (‘Caraquemada’), Luis Facerías and Marcelino Massana. Massana managed to flee to France in 1950. Facerías took refuge in Italy in 1952, but returned to Barcelona where he was killed by the police in August 1957.

‘Quico’ started his guerrilla activity in 1945, when on 20 October he managed to free three anarchist prisoners escorted by police. He spent periods in Spain, then rested in France before crossing the border again. In March 1949 he organized an attempted assassination of the brutal police commissioner Eduardo Quintela, but he attacked the wrong car and killed its occupants. On his return to France he was arrested by gendarmes and imprisoned until 1955. Later, towards the end of 1959, he returned to Spain, but in January 1960 the Civil Guard surrounded him and some companions in a farmhouse in the province of Gerona. The exchange of fire left a number wounded, including ‘Quico’ himself, yet he managed to break through the encirclement. He hijacked a train a few days later and escaped again, but his wound had become gangrenous. He sought medical help, but was recognized and was killed on 5 January. ‘Caraquemada’, his comrade, was surrounded on 6 August 1963 and shot by civil guards.
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The repression of the guerrillas between 1947 and 1949 was relentless. Altogether some 60,000 people were arrested during the decade following the civil war, yet in fact the guerrilla resistance involved only a tiny minority of the population, probably fewer than 8,000 within the whole of Spain. Among the very last survivors were Francisco Blancas, who led a group between Ciudad Real and Cáceres until 1955, when he fled to France; Patricio Serra in Badajoz who lasted until April 1954; and in the first and last stronghold of Galicia, Benigno Andradé, who was executed in July 1952, José Castro Veiga, shot down by the Civil Guard in March 1965, and Mario Rodríguez Losada, who finally escaped to France in August 1968. By then, foreign tourists packed the beaches of the southern coast and Franco’s Spain found itself being subverted more by new values from without than by the old ideologies within.

While the struggle continued in Spain, the republican leaders in exile had pursued their vicious and self-destructive rivalries abroad. In November 1943 Indalecio Prieto had set up a political coalition in Mexico which brought together the PSOE, Unión Republicana and the Catalan parties under the leadership of Martamp2;ñez Barrio.
¹¹
The anarchists and communists were excluded.

In August 1945, Negrín moved from London to Mexico to take part in the session of the Cortes in exile, called by Martínez Barrio at Prieto’s instigation. Negrín formally announced his resignation as president of the council of ministers, six years after the fact, and Martínez Barrio was elected president of a republic which had ceased to exist. Negrín put himself forward as the new head of government, but Prieto vetoed this and José Giral stepped forward to take on the task. In his phantom administration there were again no communists and no anarchists. Even with a Labour government in power in London, there was still no hope of achieving recognition by either Britain or France. Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, nevertheless arranged a meeting in October 1947 between Prieto and Gil Robles, the former leader of the CEDA, his enemy at the time of the rising of October 1934. After tense and difficult discussions, a pact was signed in Saint Jean de Luz near the Basque border. This demanded among other things an amnesty in Spain, the end of reprisals and the right of Spaniards to choose their own government. It was almost ten years since the same three points had been made at Figueras.

The pact was to have little effect. Five days after it was signed the son of Alfonso XIII, Don Juan, the Count of Barcelona, met Franco aboard the yacht
Azor
off San Sebastián. He agreed that his son, Prince Juan Carlos, would follow his studies in Spain under Franco’s tutelage. This boy, then less than ten years old, would become the Caudillo’s heir. But after Franco’s death in 1975 he would preside over Spain’s successful return to democracy and freedom.

Lost Causes

I
n June 1937, Cardinal Gomá had described the Spanish Civil War as ‘an armed plebiscite’. It was indeed an extension of politics by military means. Yet the violence of the conflict created a great impression abroad. Stereotypical assumptions about Hispanic passions were sometimes strengthened by the male Spaniard’s own image of himself. ‘I am not pretending’, El Campesino wrote later, ‘that I was not guilty of ugly things myself, or that I never caused needless sacrifice of human lives. I am a Spaniard. We look upon life as tragic. We despise death.’
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But such statements are not merely a grotesque self-indulgence, they are profoundly misleading. Violence is often the product of a distorted expression of fear. And the more that fear is suppressed out of a need to show bravery, the more explosive the result.

The cults of virility and death went hand in hand as the imagery of Queipo de Llano, the Falange and the Foreign Legion demonstrated. Nationalist leaders also revelled in the language of the stern patriarchal surgeon, whose diagnosis and proposed treatment for the country could not be questioned because the patient did not know what was best for him. Foreign contagions and cancers had to be cut out. National regeneration could only come through pain, in the medieval manner of trial by ordeal.

Ideological and religious invocations deliberately tried to make the violence abstract. There was said to have been a sweet-natured youth among Moscardó’s defenders at Toledo, who was called the Angel of the Alcázar because before firing his rifle he used to cry, ‘Kill without hate!’ This depersonalization existed on the republican side as well. David Antona, a CNT leader, said that ‘the bullets which ended the lives of the officers at the Montana barracks did not kill men, they killed a whole social system’. People were encouraged to submerge their identity and individual responsibility into causes with either mystical or superhuman auras. Carlist
requetés
were told that they would have a year less in purgatory for every red they killed, as if Christendom were still fighting the Moors. It was this dehumanization of the enemy which made the war so terrible, along, of course, with modern weapons and the tactics of terror aimed against civilian populations.

The destruction of Guernica became the internationally recognized symbol of the new horror, yet even more chilling were the motives behind the Nazi campaign in Spain. There has been a great debate over the comparative weight and timing of foreign intervention on either side during the war. But arguing over the exact numbers of aircraft, tanks and military advisers misses the point. So much depended on the standard of training and the quality of the equipment. There can be no doubt, for example, that German pilots and aeroplanes were considerably superior to their Soviet adversaries, a fact re-emphasized with terrifying effect in June 1941 when the Luftwaffe destroyed over 2,000 Soviet aircraft, most of them on the ground, in less than 48 hours. The Italian contribution to Franco’s victory was indeed large, but the haphazard nature of its bombing and its general unreliability rather diminished its military potential.

The Spanish Civil War, as the Nazi government recognized right from the start, offered the perfect testing ground for weaponry and tactics. The Red Army also saw the opportunities, but because of Stalinist military orthodoxy following Marshal Tukhachevsky’s execution, it was unable to take much advantage. The Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion, on the other hand, was meticulous in its reports on the effects of new weapons systems. For example, their squadrons discovered that during an offensive it was very effective to strafe enemy trenches as soon as the artillery bombardment ceased to keep the republicans’ heads down while the nationalist infantry charged the last few hundred metres. Enemy artillery positions were also attacked to prevent counter-battery fire, and bomber squadrons were directed against forming-up areas and rear communications to prevent reinforcements from being brought forward.

When it came to fighter tactics the Luftwaffe Messerschmitt squadrons abandoned the traditional V formation during the air battles over the Ebro. Their aircraft began to fight in double pairs instead, a tactic which RAF Fighter Command was forced to imitate two years later during the Battle of Britain. But perhaps the most important psychological weapon which the Condor Legion tested in Spain was the Junkers 87, or Stuka. During the advance across Aragón in the spring of 1938 the Condor Legion bombed towns and villages–including Albocacer, Ares del Maestre, Benasal and Villar de Canes–then photographed them carefully afterwards, from the air and on the ground, to measure bomb patterns and destruction caused. They were above all interested in assessing the accuracy of Stuka bombing with 500kg bombs. In Benasal, which they hit with nine 500kg bombs, they took many photographs of the large church there, which they had completely gutted. Much of this investigative work was carried out by Major Count Fugger, from an ancient family of Augsburg bankers.
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On the ground the Germans learned important lessons which aided them greatly over the next few years. Their tanks needed to be more heavily armed and concentrated in armoured divisions for ‘
Schwerpunkt’
breakthroughs. They also discovered in Spain the accuracy and power of their 88mm anti-aircraft gun when used against tank targets. It was later installed in the much feared Tiger tank. In fact, it was as a result of the war in Spain that the German army saw the need to increase the size and power of its tank force. In Spain, the Soviet tanks deployed there–the T26 and the BT-5–proved more effective than the German Panzer Mark I, while the Italian Fiat-Ansaldo miniature tank looked and performed more like a clockwork toy. Yet the Soviet advisers could not advocate modern armoured tactics after the show trial of Marshal Tukhachevsky, so their tank brigade was often misused, if not squandered.

The need for much closer liaison between advancing ground troops and their air support had also become obvious to both sides by the time of the Battle of Jarama, yet the Red Army refused to install radios in non-command tanks throughout the Second World War and for most of the Cold War. The only real lesson that Soviet advisers learned was on the advantage of concentrating centrally controlled, long-range artillery, a tactic which finally had a chance to pay off during the Battle of Stalingrad.
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One of the most debated questions is whether foreign intervention was decisive or not. Hitler’s decision to send Junkers 52 transports to help Franco carry the first detachments of
regulares
and Foreign Legion across the Straits of Gibraltar was certainly important, but it is hard to say that it was decisive. The republican navy’s incompetence and lack of initiative during the revolutionary chaos of the early weeks meant that the Army of Africa would have got across eventually. And since the republican forces were incapable of launching an offensive, time was not as crucial as it would otherwise have been. The argument that the rebellion of the generals would have collapsed in the summer of 1936 is unconvincing, unless one brings in that other form of intervention, the supply of ammunition from Portugal. Franco and his fellow rebel generals had gone too far to pull back, and so long as they had enough ammunition the battle would have continued until a critical mass of
africanistas
had reached the mainland.