The Spanish Civil War (100 page)

The impact of other men and equipment in the first three months of the war is less easy to judge. In a country without any tanks to speak of before July, the few Panzers Mark I which came from Germany and the light Fiats from Italy certainly were more impressive than the huge CNT tanks, homemade in Barcelona. In the summer of 1936, the French aircraft—Potezes, Dewoitines and Blochs—were faster than the Heinkels and Junkers 52s of the Germans but they were handled less well and, already in the late summer, the Italians’ Fiat fighter—the CR-32—was showing itself a dependable new weapon in the air. The first Ansaldo tanks from Italy with light machine-guns were seen at the fall of Irún. But they were not decisive in that action.

The second important occasion in respect of foreign intervention was in November 1936, when the Russian assistance to the republic,
the arrival of the International Brigades, and the organized support of international communism helped to save Madrid. For a time, the heavy T-26 tanks, together with the Mosca and Chato fighters, dominated the battlefields.
¹
The Russians also sent many of their old ‘Pulemet Maxim’ machine-guns which were reliable and also the lighter Degtyareva Pekhotnii (DP), a good gun of its class. These were more serviceable than the Hotchkiss medium machine-guns bought from France. Russian advisers also probably played a positive part, though it is difficult to know exactly how much help they were.

Thirdly, the material sent by Mussolini and Hitler in 1937 probably prevented a collapse of nationalist morale when the rebel generals failed to capture the capital. The Condor Legion became a revolutionary force, in service of the counter-revolution admittedly, in the course of 1937. New, light Messerschmitt 109 fighters and Heinkel bombers, together with the new Savoia 79, won the air back for the nationalists from Brunete onwards, and the Panzers and Fiat Ansaldo tanks recovered the initiative. Probably equally important was the powerful German anti-aircraft ‘88’ (88-millimetre Flak 36), which remained the backbone of German defence from the moment that it first began to be effectively used in Spain in the winter of 1936–7. The new German ‘Maschinengewehr 34’ (MG 34) also made a considerable impact as a ‘general purpose machine-gun’—more so than the Italian equivalent, the Breda 30.

Fourthly, the opening of the French frontier to Russian and other foreign aid staved off defeat for the republic in the spring of 1938, after the success of the nationalists’ Aragon campaign.

Finally, if Franco had not exchanged so many mining rights for German arms in the autumn of 1938 he might not have been able to launch the Catalan campaign at Christmas of that year.
²
Had it not been for that, his army would have been as badly provided after the battles of the Ebro as was the republican army. In that case, the war might have ground to a
de facto
halt along the battle lines.
³

The German government knew by late 1938 that the fears which she had entertained earlier of a spread of the war in Spain into ‘a European conflagration’ were groundless, however flagrant a breach she might commit of the Non-Intervention Pact. For, after the Munich settlement, it seemed that Britain (and France) would never go to war over a European issue. This impression was confirmed by the carrying into effect in November 1938 of the Anglo-Italian Agreement. The Germans were also encouraged to think that they could act with impunity by the cooling of Russian interest in Spain in the autumn of 1938, and indeed by various gestures, especially after Munich, by the Soviet government towards Germany herself. But until Munich, German policy had been to refuse to commit enough forces or war material to Spain to secure the triumph of their nationalist protégés. The Germans believed that such a commitment would have risked the expansion of the Spanish war into a European one. Indeed, Germany and Russia shared a disinclination to risk a general war breaking out over Spain: once Russia became committed to the republic, in October 1936, any general war resulting from the Spanish conflict would surely have implicated her also. So Stalin had followed a policy similar to that of Hitler: prevention of his protégés’ defeat, without ensuring their victory; for to ensure a republican victory would have meant a commitment on a scale which would have risked general war.

All the first four occasions when intervention was critical were defensive ones, when the intervening powers sought to prevent the defeat of one side or the other. That was one reason why the war lasted so long. Hitler and Stalin both found good reasons to justify to themselves the continuance of the war. They could test new military ideas and new equipment. For each of them, victory might bring as many difficult questions as defeat. If the civil war were to continue such questions could be postponed. Mussolini, who sought glory in Spain, was dissatisfied. He sent as many troops as he could—too many, as his weakness at the time of the Anschluss showed. If either Germany or Russia had sent as many men to Spain as Italy did, a European war would have followed. But 50,000 Italian troops were neither numerous enough to win the war for Franco, nor to shock Europe into a general conflict. The last critical intervention, in late 1938, marked a policy of full commitment to the rebels by Germany in the knowledge that, if
France (and Britain) did not fight for Czechoslovakia, they would not do so for Spain. In addition while, throughout the war, the republic were persistently trying to ensure supplies or to convert their plants into war factories, nationalist supplies were more regular. Reliance on Germany and Italy avoided the need for a large war industry.

Technology and diplomacy interacted. The Spanish civil war was a conflict in the time of the ‘stressed skin’ revolution in the design of aircraft as it was one of ideologies. It was a war of revolutionary ideas in propaganda and means of communication, in which foreigners played as much a part as they did in the battles proper.

In a long war in the age of industry, supplies of energy are as important as arms. The Texas Oil Company and, to a lesser extent, Standard Oil of New Jersey, gave much help to Franco by their substantial supplies on credit. Nearly 3½ million tons of oil were delivered by these companies to the rebels during the civil war; while the republic imported 1½ million tons, mostly from Russia.
¹
The US also sent some lorries, at prices lower than were available from Germany or Italy: 12,000 from Ford, Studebaker and General Motors, while 3,000 came from Germany and Italy. The oil compensated for the lack of coal in the nationalist zone until the conquest of the Asturias in late 1937. (The war stimulated a drive towards the use of oil in industry, on the railways, and in shipping, which continued afterwards.) Nationalist commerce, meantime, was intelligently, if piratically, undertaken, with Franco able to sell where he wanted, without worrying about pre-war arrangements. Had the republic been able to purchase arms from, say, Britain, the US, and France then the war would have taken a different course, though it is fair to question whether the equipment from France would have been as good as that from Russia. The I-15 fighter was better than the Breguet, the Degtyareva than the Hotchkiss machine-gun and the T-26 and BT-5 tanks more powerful if more clumsy than the French equivalents.

The British government really sustained the policy of non-intervention, though it had been proposed by Blum. The French governments were too fearful of Germany to risk a breach with Britain. The head of the Quai d’Orsay, Alexis Léger, pointed out that a breach
would have been inevitable if the Popular Front government in France had become embroiled on the side of its ideological comrades in Spain.
¹
The French frontier was, therefore, only open for shipment of arms to Spain for short periods.
²
The British were, meantime, determined to prevent a general war from following from the civil war, though there was an undercurrent of sympathy for Franco in parts of the government and the Foreign Office (not Anthony Eden, however). Most Englishmen responsible for foreign policy wished that Spain would somehow vanish. When it was clear that the Non-Intervention Pact was being disregarded, it was cynical to insist on its maintenance. The cynicism brought the British government as little credit as it did advantage. A general war which broke out over Spain in 1936, 1937, or 1938 would have been fought in circumstances more favourable for the western democracies than that which came in 1939 over Poland. The alternative to the ‘farce of non-intervention’ was (as it was to Munich, to the reoccupation of the Rhineland, and to German rearmament) to stand firm and denounce the breach of the agreements. That policy had a chance of upsetting the dictator without a war. But, for reasons which derived from the worsening British economic position stretching back to the 1890s, it was not tried until September 1939 when the British Empire went to war for Poland. The battles in Spain were thus decided by the commodity of the discussion in the Non-Intervention Committee a thousand miles away. Eden became gradually aware of the unwisdom of appeasement, though in August 1936, when non-intervention began, he had, according to his own admission, ‘not learnt that it is dangerous to offer gestures to dictators, who are more likely to misinterpret than to follow them’.
³
It was hard for him to understand people who signed an agreement without intending to honour it. Before 1914, it would not have been done.

General von Thoma, commander of the German tank detachment in the civil war, later spoke of Spain as the ‘European Aldershot’.
⁴
The battle experience gained for Germany by the two technical arms, tanks
and aviation, was valuable. So, too, were the iron and other ores that Franco’s victory in the civil war made available to Germany. Blum, justifying, at his trial at Riom in 1942, the dispatch of French aircraft to Spain, also spoke of the Spanish war as a ‘test for French aviation’. But the French drew the wrong lessons from the war in Spain. They even believed a German émigré writer, Helmut Klotz, who, after a few weeks in Spain, wrote in his book,
Les Leçons militaires de la guerre civile en Espagne,
that the tank had been mastered by the anti-tank gun. The French general staff ignored the mechanized warfare which had been tested in Spain. This was to their disadvantage when Guderian’s Panzer divisions streamed across their northern plain in 1940. The Russians also drew false conclusions from their Spanish experience, though Prieto later described the Russians too as treating Spain as ‘a real-life military academy’.
¹
General Pavlov told Stalin that the Spanish war proved that tank formations could not play an independent operational role.
²
He may have given the advice to escape being branded as an admirer of Marshal Tukhachevsky, who had had faith in such formations. The large Russian army of heavy tanks was, probably in consequence, in 1939 distributed as an infantry support force. The success of German light tanks in Poland and France led to a return to Tukhachevsky’s system, but that came too late for the opening of the Russo-German war in 1941.

Both the Italian and Yugoslav communists found their time in Spain of inestimable help in the partisan fighting in their own countries in 1944–5. Even the British learned something: the
Illustrated London News
showed the way with an examination of the effects of the air raids in Barcelona entitled a ‘Study in Human Vivisection’. Copeman, ex-commander of the British Battalion of the International Brigade, found himself, within a few months of the end of the war in Spain, lecturing to the Royal Family at Windsor on air-raid precautions.
³
Medi
cine generally gained from the new methods of treatment of war casualties introduced into Spain by the republican army.
¹
Henceforth, in wars people have died from gunshot wounds in hundreds where previously they died in thousands.

The general implications of the Spanish Civil War in the rest of the world cannot, however, be measured in precise ways. Outside Spain, the war looked at first, when all the parties of the Left seemed to be cooperating, a moment of hope for a generation angry at the cynicism, indolence, and hypocrisy of an older generation with whom they were out of sympathy. The struggle gave birth to a burst of creative energy in many countries (as well as in Spain on both sides) which can be argued as comparable in quality to anything produced in the Second World War. The civil war destroyed the political hopes of a whole generation of Spaniards; but the civil war is symbolized nevertheless as much by the heroic actions before Madrid, as by the gathering together in the same angry gaols of dissidents on both sides: ‘we were 400 prisoners, mixed FAI, anarchist youth, priests, deserters, some officers, common criminals, vagabonds, drunks, homosexuals’.
²
Thus a sometime prisoner in a camp run by the SIM in Catalonia. Similar gatherings of dissident falangists, alongside anarchists, communists and freemasons, might be found in nationalist Spain. Crusades give opportunities for heroism as for brutality. But Nin and Hedilla were alike sacrificial victims of orthodoxy. The civil war had moments of glory. But it was essentially a tragedy and interruption in the life of a European people—the one major European people, it might be gloomily remembered, that before 1936 was too poor to have a modern armament industry.

1.
Spanish place names: The
following Spanish names have been anglicized:

Andalucía-Andalusia	Mallorca-Majorca
Aragón-Aragon	Menorca-Minorca
Castilla-Castile	Navarra-Navarre
Cataluña-Catalonia	Sevilla-Seville
La Coruña-Corunna	Zaragoza-Saragossa
Extremadura-Estremadura	Duero-Douro
	Tajo-Tagus

2. Catalan names are usually given in Spanish.

3.
References footnotes:
The first time a book is mentioned, the title and place and date of publication are given, following the full name of the author; subsequently, the name only of the author is given. Where a second (or third) book by the same author is mentioned, further references to both that book and the author’s first-mentioned book are given with a short title.

4. Names of political parties have mostly been translated, e.g., ‘Left Re-publican’ for Izquierda Republicana; but some have been left in their original form, e.g., Esquerra, Falange. Spanish titles of nobility have usually been left in the original, e.g., Conde de Rodezno, though where the person concerned was well known in England in his own right, he has been anglicized (e.g., Duke of Alba, not Duque de Alba). Other European titles have usually been anglicized (e.g., Count Ciano). Other names have been left as is usual in English historical works, e.g., Don Carlos, but Charles V.

5. In the civil war, the names of the contending parties have been usually called the nationalists and the republicans.

6. I have usually translated the Spanish ranks ‘
Teniente Coronel’
and
‘Coronel’
as simply Colonel: this abbreviation is normal in English, less permissible in Spanish. I hope the lieutenant colonels whom I have prematurely promoted will overlook this.