The Spanish Civil War (126 page)

1.
L. Fischer, p. 443.

2.
NIS,
eleventh meeting. 12 November 1936 was the day of Baldwin’s famous admission to the House of Commons that he had ‘been less than candid’ to the electorate over rearmament for fear of losing the election.

1.
Note by Eden to the cabinet, 21 November (in
CAB
24/265).

2.
Eden, p. 413.

3.
Note to commander-in-chief, Mediterranean, 20 November 1936, from the foreign secretary.

4.
This was on 18 November. The previous day Germany and Japan had affirmed their friendship in the Anti-Comintern Pact, ostensibly directed against communism but in reality an offensive military alliance. Italy joined a year later. On 24 November, the poet Robert Graves, previously (like Bernanos) resident in Majorca, called on Churchill begging him to denounce German and Italian policy in the western Mediterranean:
Churchill: Both sides have imbrued their hands in blood. You wish for intervention? The country wouldn’t stand it.
Graves: Not intervention in the sense of taking sides … but of safeguarding British interest in the Mediterranean.
(Robert Graves and Alan Hodge,
The Long Weekend,
London, 1940, p. 411.)

1.
It did not sink but, due to the lack of a good dry dock in republican hands, was not repaired until 1938.

2.
USD,
1936, vol. II, p. 576.

3.
GD,
p. 139; Ciano,
Diplomatic Papers,
pp. 75–7.

4.
The IMAM Ro. 37 bis, to give it its full name, was a versatile aircraft of maximum 200 miles an hour at a height of 20,000 feet. It was used for observation, light bombing, machine-gunning from a low level, as well as aerial photography.

5.
Fagnani even ordered the nationalist ace-pilot, Angel Salas Larrazábal, to be arrested when he refused an order not to fly over enemy territory in a Fiat. Salas did not suffer from this, but many Italian pilots had been killed and their aircraft destroyed by the Russians by now. See,
inter alia,
Emilio Faldella,
Venti mesi di guerra in Spagna
(Florence, 1939), p. 80. Other Italians with more elaborate equipment, including thirty-eight tanks, were incorporated into the Legion (Belforte, vol. I, p. 51).

1.
Serrano Súñer, pp. 44–7.

2.
GD,
p. 159.

3.
See below, p. 618. Faupel’s opposite number in Berlin would be the Marqués de Magaz, once vice-president of Primo de Rivera’s military directorate, who had lost a son in the Model Prison.

4.
Whealey, in Carr,
The Republic,
p. 219, quoting from General Warlimont’s interrogation.

5.
GD,
pp. 159–60.

1.
FD,
vol. IV, p. 89.

2.
Ibid.,
p. 97; also
USD,
1936, vol. II, pp. 578–81.

3.
NIS,
twelfth meeting.

4.
GD,
pp. 158–9; Eden, p. 416. Cf. Salvador de Madariaga,
Memorias
(
1921–36
), Madrid, 1974, p. 374.

5.
GD,
p. 165. The (London)
Observer,
under Garvin, a vigorous opponent of the republic, was foolish enough on this day to publish a dispatch saying there were 21,000 Russians in Madrid. Rumour thus fed on rumour, and truth seemed relative.

1.
Mussolini’s facsimile letter of appointment to Roatta is published in Alcofar Nassaes,
CTV,
facing p. 32.

1.
NIS
(c), seventeenth meeting. At an important meeting on 21 December, Hitler, Göring, Warlimont, Blomberg and Fritsch rejected more demands, pressed in person by Faupel, for the dispatch of three German divisions to finish off the war. See Gerhard Weinberg,
The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany
(Chicago, 1970), p. 297, basing himself on Warlimont’s post-war testimony.

2.
GD,
p. 180.

3.
Ibid.,
p. 186. The Germans believed that the British wanted primarily to safeguard their commercial interests in Spain. To this end, Faupel reported, not only did the commercial counsellor at the British Embassy, Pack, frequently visit Burgos, but Chilton kept the nationalist authorities so well informed as to what was going on that the text of a statement to be made by Eden at 3
P.M
. in the House of Commons was communicated to Franco by 10 o’clock in the morning of that day (
GD,
p. 181). Chilton was still very pro-nationalist. ‘I hope,’ he soon told US Ambassador Bowers, ‘that they send in enough Germans to finish the war’ (
USD,
1937, vol. I, p. 225).

4.
It was expected that the agreement would lead to detailed negotiations, but these did not begin till 1938 (when they caused the fall of Eden—see below, pp. 775–76).

1.
Eden, p. 432.

2.
FD,
vol. IV, p. 71.

3.
The Italian ministry of air noted on 23 January that ‘by January, Italy had 211 pilots, 238 “specialists”, 777 ground officers, 995 NCOs, and 14,752 troops’. (Qu. Cattell,
Soviet Diplomacy,
p. 4.)

4.
FD,
vol. IV, pp. 71 and 451. The dispatch on pp. 451–4 is helpful. See also
ibid.,
p. 563. Pay was thus over 175 lire a week, while a bricklayer in Rome would have got about 150 lire. Hourly wages for agricultural wages in Italy was 1 lira an hour. See Coverdale,
Journal of Contemporary History,
January 1974, p. 74.

5.
USD,
1936, vol. II, p. 625.

1.
L. Fischer, p. 387.

2.
Edwin Rolfe,
The Lincoln Battalion
(New York, 1939), p. 18. This group arrived on 6 January at their base at Villanueva de la Jara, near Albacete, in the flat plain of La Mancha, whose bleakness recalled home to two from Wisconsin among them. Since they were accompanied by a number of Cubans, easy relations were soon opened with the villagers. The Cubans were led by Rudolfo de Armas, accompanied by the experienced communist leader Joaquín Ordóqui, who was later, under Fidel Castro, to have a strange history. Among them was a youthful communist, Rolando Masferrer, afterwards famous as a political gangster and senator. Other Cubans included some sixty members of the murdered labour leader Antonio Guiteras’s paramilitary organization, Joven Cuba. A list of Cubans who fought in Spain would also include others of those who dominated the gangster politics of that island between 1933 and 1959.

3.
The passports of these men may have played as great a part in history as the men themselves. For the NKVD secured the passports of many dead (and some alive) members of the International Brigade, and they were dispatched to Moscow: here a pile of nearly a hundred of them, ‘mainly American’, were observed by Krivitsky (
op. cit.,
p. 114). Then new bearers were issued with them, and entered America as, apparently, reformed citizens. One of these was probably the Catalan Mercader, the alleged murderer of Trotsky. See Robert Murphy,
Diplomat among Warriors
(London, 1964), p. 50, for an American diplomat’s attempt to retrieve these passports.

4.
The ‘Vimalert enterprise’ had sold aircraft engines to Russia in 1930 (Traina, p. 80).

1.
This decision was apparently reached without discussion by the US cabinet. The secretary of the interior (
The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes,
London, 1955, p. 569) stated: ‘I am sure that, if this question had been thrown to the cabinet for serious debate, there would have been opposition to it.’

2.
Representative Bernard later introduced a resolution demanding support of the republic, suggesting at least equal restrictions against the governments of Germany and Italy.

3.
The Spanish consul-general in New York later denied that any money was due to these men. Acosta was a famous flier, having flown with Admiral Byrd in the
America,
across the Atlantic in 1927.

1.
Cervera, pp. 87–8; see Gerald Howson,
Arms for Spain
(London, 1998) p. 182; Senator Nye later accused the owners of a steamship company in New York of spying for Franco and causing the arrest of the
Mar Cantábrico.

2.
Taylor, pp. 75–95. There was also the Catholic vote, upon which FDR relied. Norman Thomas told the author that he felt this the most important reason for the embargo in FDR’s mind.

3.
Cervera, pp. 29–30;
FD,
vol. IV, p. 405.

4.
See Gordón Ordás,
Mi politica fuera de España
(Mexico, 1965), vol. I.

5.
GD,
pp. 210–12.

1.
Eden, pp. 434–6.

2.
Memorandum, 8 January,
CAB
/266.
CAB
/80(37) shows Eden to have been influenced by the requisitioning of the Tharsis Copper and Sulphur Co. and the Río Tinto Co., and the dispatch of pyrites and copper to Germany, whereas no copper had been received by Río Tinto at its refinery at Port Talbot since July.

1.
FD,
vol. IV, pp. 457–9.

2.
USD,
1937, vol. III, pp. 217ff.;
GD,
pp. 215ff.

3.
Al-Lal el Fasi,
Los movimientos de independencia en el Magreb árabe
(Cairo, 1948), p. 198.

1.
Miravitlles, p. 119.

2.
See Hernández, p. 75; Alvarez del Vayo,
Freedom’s Battle,
p. 238.

3.
Azaña, vol. IV, p. 66.

4.
GD,
p. 225.

5.
Ibid.,
p. 226.

6.
Paul Schmidt,
Hitler’s Interpreter
(London, 1951), p. 62; Ciano,
Diplomatic Papers,
pp. 85–6.

1.
Weizsäcker, p. 113.

2.
GD,
p. 237.

3.
Ibid.,
p. 243.

4.
Ibid.,
pp. 241–2.

1.
Britain’s 16 per cent was cut by £64,000, the estimated cost of the Portuguese frontier control. The background to the plan is described in Maisky’s chapter ‘Words, words—and mountains of paper’,
Notebooks,
p. 94f.

2.
See
NIS
(c), twenty-second to fortieth meetings;
NIS,
fifteenth and sixteenth meetings.

1.
His
nom de guerre
was taken from the surname of his wife. One of the young officers close to Marshal Badoglio, Roatta had been military attaché to France.

2.
Letter from an officer of artillery to Alcofar Nassaes, in
CTV,
p. 58.

1.
Kindelán, p. 63; Alcofar Nassaes, p. 64.

2.
GD,
pp. 231, 236.

3.
Martínez Bande,
La campaña de Andalucia,
p. 146.

4.
Ibarruri, pp. 359–60.

1.
The most careful account is Martínez Bande,
La campaña de Andalucía,
p. 139f.

1.
Cervera, p. 73.

2.
Bahamonde, p. 117. Santos Julia, et al., estimates deaths at 2,537 in the city, 1937–40 (p. 411).

3.
He had been in Spain in August and posed as a nationalist sympathizer until recognized by a German fighting for Franco. He was later exchanged, through the good offices of Dr Junod, for the beautiful wife of the nationalist pilot Major la Haya. The British government intervened in 1937 to help Koestler, because of his relationship with the
News Chronicle,
although Eden told the House of Commons he did not know what nationality Koestler was. He was, of course, Hungarian, and had been working for the Comintern in Paris since 1934. For a nationalist account of Koestler’s case, see Bolín, p. 248f; for the Red Cross exchange, see Junod, p. 124. I discussed these events with Koestler himself, c. 1965.

4.
Cantalupo, p. 137. One city prosecutor in Málaga was a young lawyer, Arias Navarro, who had been imprisoned for six months, and who now began a career which would end in his becoming Prime Minister of Spain in 1973.

1.
Galinsoga, p. 285. The hand was returned to Ronda after 1975.

2.
For the battle of Málaga, see Borkenau, p. 211f.; Aznar, p. 339f.; Koestler,
Invisible Writing,
p. 338f.; T. C. Worsley,
Behind the Battle, passim;
Dr Bethune’s diary in Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon,
The Scalpel, Not the Sword
(London, 1954); R. Salas, vol. I, p. 803; Fraser,
In Hiding,
especially p. 149f.

3.
Lacouture, pp. 247–8.

4.
Ibarruri, p. 360.

5.
The anarchists disliked Asensio as a disciplined opponent of libertarian activity on the battlefield. Prieto and the Left republicans disliked him because Largo Caballero admired him.

1.
Lister, p. 100. Pavlov’s aide, Kravchenko (‘Antonio’), had been at the Lenin School in Moscow with Lister. Lister had Malinovski (‘Malino’) as his own adviser in this battle. Malinovski says that he had to give his advice very tactfully, so that Lister never really could feel that he was being dictated to (
Bajo la bandera,
p. 28). The Russian adviser to Pozas, Kulik, another future if ill-fated marshal (‘Kupper’ in Spain), also seems to have played a prominent part. The anarchist 70th Brigade had Major Petrov as their adviser (sometimes acting as commander) and the future Russian Marshal Rodimstev (‘Pablito’) was with the 9th Brigade as a machine-gun expert.

1.
See Martínez Bande,
La lucha,
p. 91; General Batov, in
Bajo la bandera,
p. 242.

2.
Garcia Lacalle refers to the precision of these anti-aircraft guns as ‘
the
revelation of the war’ (p. 483).

1.
Jason Gurney,
Crusade in Spain
(London, 1974), p. 63; Wintringham, p. 16. The leader of the British Battalion in training had been Wilfred Macartney, a flamboyant journalist of the Left, who was not a communist—though he had been to prison in England for giving military secrets to Russia. He had to abandon command of the battalion because he was shot in the leg by Peter Kerrigan, commissar of the British in Spain, who was apparently cleaning his gun.

2.
So named after the riots in Paris on 6 February 1934, but actually formed by coincidence on 6 February 1936.

3.
Fred Copeman,
Reason in Revolt
(London, 1948), p. 83.

4.
Eoin O’Duffy,
Crusade in Spain
(London, 1938), p. 135. O’Duffy had been commissioner of the Irish Civic Guards till relieved of that post by De Valera in 1932. The Blue Shirts had been founded by ex-President Cosgrave after his defeat by De Valera in 1932. About half the rank and file, and nearly all the officers of O’Duffy’s group in Spain were Blue Shirts. Those who were not were chiefly out-of-work adventurers. (See the pamphlet by Seumas McKee,
I Was a Franco Soldier,
London, 1938.) For IRA membership see O’Duffy’s book. At least one present, Captain Diarmid O’Sullivan, had been in the rising of 1916.

1.
See Gurney, p. 73.

2.
Stephen Spender and John Lehmann,
Poems for Spain
(London, 1939), pp. 33–4.

3.
Wintringham, p. 151f.

4.
His real name was Christopher St John Sprigg. He had written seven detective stories, five books on aviation, and three more works on philosophy and economics, including the famous
Illusion and Reality,
which put forward succinctly the Marxist view of aesthetics.

1.
At the same time, the hated Colonel Gal was promoted to the rank of general, to command a division. He was replaced with the 15th Brigade by Vladimir Čopić, a Croatian chess addict and musician, who had briefly been a communist deputy in Yugoslavia, and who later, under the name of ‘Senko’, had been one of the leading members of the Yugoslav communist party in Moscow.

2.
O’Duffy, p. 157.

1.
Conforti, p. 29. Roatta was promoted general after Málaga.

2.
See Jesús Salas, p. 123, and Joaquin García Morato,
Guerra en el aire
(Madrid, 1940), p. 101. The caution of the Russian commanders—what would Stalin say if all these aircraft were lost?—caused them to hold their machines on the ground for the rest of this battle, thereby greatly assisting nationalist morale.

3.
Life
(iv, 28 March 1938, qu. Guttman, p. 98) estimated that 10 per cent of the American volunteers were Jewish; ‘I know what Hitler is doing to my people’ was a normal explanation for volunteering. I discussed Merriman with his contemporary, J. K. Galbraith.

1.
Rolfe, pp. 57–71; Wintringham, p. 259.

2.
Rolfe, p. 71. The best account of the Lincoln Battalion is Cecil Eby’s
Between the Bullet and the Lie
(New York, 1969).

3.
The sources for this battle include Rojo,
España heroica,
pp. 54–69; Longo, pp. 208–38; Lister, p. 97f.; Wintringham, p. 151f.; R. Salas, vol. I, pp. 740–80; J. Salas, p. 160f.; and Martínez Bande,
La lucha,
p. 73f.

1.
Thanks to the kindness of Mr F. W. Deakin, then warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, I was able to see the report on Guadalajara sent to Rome by the Italian commander, General Roatta, in the library of St Antony’s. There is a useful study of this battle by John Coverdale,
Journal of Contemporary History,
January 1974 (‘The Battle of Guadalajara’). See also Lojendio, pp. 212ff; Aznar, pp. 380ff; Regler,
The Owl of Minerva;
Koltsov, pp. 350–53; Rojo, pp. 72–86; Longo, pp. 291–318; and Martinez Bande,
La lucha,
vol. III. The accounts of two Russian officers, Rodimstev and Batov, can be seen in
Bajo la bandera.
Italian accounts include that of Faldella.

2.
Cantalupo, pp. 85–6, 147ff. Farinacci made no attempt to bring the ambassador Cantalupo into these discussions, and the two only met accidentally at a bull-fight. Farinacci had been known before the march on Rome in 1922 as the particularly brutal fascist
Ras
of Cremona.

1.
Mussolini founded three towns of this name.

2.
Rojo,
Así fue la defensa de Madrid,
p. 176; letter from García Lacalle, previously cited.

1.
Pacciardi had been wounded at the Jarama.

1.
GD,
p. 251.

1.
Spanish White Book
(Geneva, 1937), p. 275.

2.
Lister, p. 110. See Rodimstev’s account in
Bajo la bandera,
p. 280f. Among those killed on this day was ‘Consul General’ (a rank in the fascist militias) Luizzi, ex-head of the Black Shirts of Udine. He was a battalion commander under Nuvoloni.

3.
The documents captured at Guadalajara included many poignant letters from Italian wives and mothers to their serving sons or husbands. One wife wrote: ‘What a beautiful honeymoon mine has been! Two days of marriage and twenty-five months of interminable waiting. First comes the country, I know, and afterwards love, but I am an egoist, and with reason, for you were one of the first volunteers to go to Africa, and are among the last to return. I pray God that one day He will make it possible for you both to serve the country and also provide bread for your family.’ (Document No. 267 in the folio presented to the League of Nations.) A mother wrote: ‘Dear Armando, I can only pray that God and the saints keep you and if you return in good health we can go back to Rome and open the shop.’ Other documents give lists of those shot as cowards for giving themselves self-inflicted wounds, and for bandaging themselves, when they had nothing wrong with them.

1.
Actually, several attempts at offensives were made in Orgaz’s sector, without success. O’Duffy’s Irishmen went into action on 13 March: the killed included Sergeant-Major Gaselee of Dublin and two
légionnaires
from Kerry.

2.
The report of the meeting on 17 March which resulted in this nomination can be seen in Martínez Bande,
La lucha en torno,
pp. 154–73.

3.
Regler,
The Great Crusade,
pp. 315ff. See Rodimstev, p. 306, Aznar, p. 113, and Conforti, p. 297.

1.
See discussion in Coverdale,
op. cit.,
p. 67f. I follow Conforti’s analysis, p. 376, for the republican losses, Martínez Bande’s for the Italian losses and the Ufficio Spagna’s for wounded and prisoners. Large quantities of Italian equipment were also captured: Lister says it reached 65 cannons, 13 mortars, 500 machine-guns, over 3,000 rifles, 10 tanks. The ‘Garibaldi’ treated their Italian prisoners-of-war badly; did they kill them all? Possibly. (See Junod, p. 119.) See the inventory of the republican army published by Martínez Bande in
La lucha,
p. 227f.

2.
Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Spanish War’, in
Fact,
June 1937. See Carlos Baker,
Ernest Hemingway
(London, 1969), p. 360f. The author of
Death in the Afternoon
thereafter took an active part in the war on the republican side, exceeding the duties of a mere reporter by, for instance, instructing young Spaniards in the use of rifles. The first visit of Hemingway to the 12th International Brigade was a great occasion, the Hungarian General Lukács sending a message to the nearby village for its girls to attend the banquet he was giving (Regler,
Owl of Minerva,
p. 298).

3.
Herbert Matthews,
Two Wars and More to Come
(New York, 1938), p. 264.

4.
García Lacalle, p. 239.

1.
Coverdale,
op. cit.,
p. 72.

2.
GD,
pp. 258–60.

3.
Zugazagoitia, p. 241.

4.
F. Miksche,
Blitzkrieg
(Harmondsworth, 1944), p. 37.

1.
Cattell,
Soviet Diplomacy,
p. 73.

2.
NIS,
nineteenth meeting.

1.
Haldane made three visits to republican Spain and henceforth he was in Britain a vigorous supporter of the ‘Aid to Spain’ movement, being then an ‘open supporter’ of the communists, though not yet a member, as he subsequently became (Ronald Clark,
JBS,
London, 1968, p. 115f.). For a picture of this scientist, ‘pathetically anxious’ to be of service, see Gurney, p. 77. Haldane’s concern, and that of his wife, Charlotte, in Spain had been begun by the enlistment of her sixteen-year-old son in the International Brigade. Mrs Haldane also visited Spain, but her main work was to act as matron for the reception of British volunteers for the International Brigades at the staging point in Paris.

2.
Venereal disease was high among French volunteers, chiefly because no one had taken precautions against its spread. The British leaders gave lectures to their troops on contraception.

1.
Geoffrey Thompson,
Front Line Diplomat
(London, 1959), p. 118. Copeman recalled the execution later in the war of two British volunteers. See, for example, Eby,
Between the Bullet and the Lie,
for instances (also later in the war) of executions of Americans at the front. The number of Frenchmen shot by Marty’s orders has always been a matter of speculation. See Delperrie, p. 778, for a summary of the evidence.

2.
Though, in an effort to put the Popular Front policy fully into effect, cell meetings of the communist party inside the International Brigades ceased about this time for about nine months.

3.
Nor were international relations inside the Brigades always happy. For instance, Gal, now a general, gave a banquet one night for the 15th Brigade. On his right at dinner he placed the new brigade commissar, George Aitken. On his left sat the new commander, Čopić. The chief of staff, Colonel Klaus, a Prussian who had fought as an officer in the First World War, was placed next to Čopić down the table. Klaus was so angry at this that he walked out and had to be brought back under armed guard. (Recollection of George Aitken.)

4.
These laws were passed as part of the Non-Intervention Control Agreement.

5.
Vladimir Dedijer,
Tito Speaks
(London, 1953), pp. 106–8.

1.
Spender, p. 212.

2.
There were now two American battalions, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, commanded by Martin Hourihan from Pennsylvania, and the George Washington Battalion, led by a Yugoslav American, Mirko Marković (Marcovich)—more Yugoslav, actually, than American.