The Spanish Civil War (49 page)

A few months later, the commissars seemed to be more assistant chiefs-of-staff than anything else: periodically they would ‘be sent round by the party to … deliver some sort of political discourse … By this time, the political commissar was simply a go-between who was sent to headquarters to complain about rations etc ….’
²

On the battlefield, in the north, the nationalist garrison in Oviedo, meantime, was relieved by a column from Galicia, and after many privations—and, indeed, only just in time to prevent its fall to the Asturian miners, who had already penetrated into the town.
³
But the miners continued to press hard, if ineffectively, at Oviedo for another
six months, since the garrison’s link with the outside world was a thin neck of land.

General Varela soon launched the next stage of his assault on Madrid. On 15 October, the whole twenty-mile front was driven forward ten miles. The road junction of Illescas, halfway between Toledo and Madrid, fell on 17 October. Largo Caballero telephoned the town to speak to his commanding officer, to be answered, to his horror, by Varela. The next day, the weary republican militias, brutalized by the savagery of their Moroccan and legionary opponents, and only partly believing the assurance of their commissars that Russian help was coming, launched a counter-attack upon Castejón at Chapinería. Six thousand militiamen broke Castejón’s lines, and surrounded the town by the morning of 19 October. Castejón then led a sally out of the town through its cemetery, and converted the republican counterattack into another defeat. On 20 October, another republican counter-attack, directed by Colonel Ramiro Otal, under Asensio Torrado (now a general),
¹
with Majors Rojo, Mena, and Modesto, leading 15,000 men, was launched at Illescas, where Barrón was established with his Moroccans and legionaries. The republican forces were brought up to the front by double-decker Madrid buses visible across the flat land from Barrón’s command post. Illescas was plastered by republican artillery bombardment, and the town surrounded. Monasterio’s cavalry and Tella’s column from Toledo were then thrown into the battle. The nationalists outflanked the militiamen, who were as usual driven back beyond their point of departure by 23 October.

The sound of battle could now be heard in Madrid. The government decided to move to a safer city. Their first choice was Barcelona, and President Azaña set off first, establishing himself in the parliament buildings in the Catalan capital. The government then changed their minds about leaving Madrid. Azaña remained where he was and the cabinet hastily announced that he had left for an extended tour of the front.
²
Henceforward, Azaña could be consulted only by telephone. He increasingly infuriated his ministers. He refused to listen to intelligence reports, which (not inaccurately) he named ‘bad detective stories’. His sincerity impelled him to speak the truth, even on tele
phone calls to other countries which could easily be tapped. When his cabinet expostulated, he would reply: ‘I am not to blame that I am of an analytic spirit and you are not.’
¹
Appalled by the murders and judicial assassinations carried out in the name of the republic, convinced that the republic would lose, contemptuous of Largo Caballero, Azaña now seemed more a liability than a leader.

In these nervous circumstances, a committee of the Popular Front and CNT was set up in Madrid to intensify the search for secret supporters of the nationalists. Illegal killings, which had almost ceased, broke out again. One so killed was, incredibly, Ramiro de Maeztu, once counted among the Generation of ’98, later a theorist of Spanish monarchism. He was arrested because he had the ‘face of a priest’. Another was Ramiro Ledesma, co-founder of Spanish fascism. Loyalty was everywhere suspect. Asensio Torrado was blamed for the defeat of Illescas, especially by the communists, but Largo Caballero admired him and insisted on giving him the post of under-secretary in the war office on 24 October, while General Pozas took command of the Army of the Centre.
²
Pozas, like many other non-political senior officers, was becoming more and more impressed by the communists. The same day, General Miaja, the old scapegoat for the collapse of the Córdoba offensive, was brought from Valencia and named commander in Madrid in succession to General Castelló, the ex-minister of war, whose mind was wandering. Miaja had denounced a recent rash of executions in Valencia, and he was apparently appointed to Madrid in order to save him from the consequences of that complaint.

The approach of battle to Madrid brought a measure of fraternity to anarchists and socialists in Catalonia. In Barcelona, at least, they sealed their differences, in a declaration of common purpose on 22 October, which was put into effect by a decree of the
Generalidad
two days later. While large firms (those employing over 100 workers) and firms owned by ‘fascists’ were to be collectivized without compensation, plants employing between 50 and 100 workers (actually a majority of Barcelona’s factories) could only be collectivized if that were requested by three-quarters of the employees. Still smaller firms were only collectivized at the owner’s request, unless they were involved in
war production. The
Generalidad
would have a representative on each factory council, and would appoint the council chairman on large collectives: and each collectivized plant would be run by a council chosen by the workers and have a two-year term of office. All collectives making the same things could be coordinated by one of fourteen councils of industry, which could also bring in private firms, where needed, in order ‘to harmonize production’. This decree was, in fact, the culmination of a hundred other legislative acts on the subject of collectivization. It meant less a free hand to the anarchists than an effort by the state to standardize, and hence control, the process of collectivization. Some of the things for which the decree provided had already been achieved. Juan Fábregas, councillor for the economy, and also president of a still anarchist-dominated economic council of Catalonia (under the
Generalidad,
theoretically), a new anarchist convert, was largely responsible. Coordination nevertheless remained in practice vague; there were no statistics and no records of sales. Cut off from both raw materials and markets, the Catalan textile industry was running down.
¹
The war industries were working but their transformation from peacetime uses was anything but easy.

The character of rebel Spain after three months of war was that of a new state, in which the trends were towards centralization, unity and hence, in war, efficiency; in the republic, the institutions of the old state were laboriously being revived, while such innovations as were introduced spelled continued dissipation of resources. In rebel Spain, a group of able generals in their forties were ruthlessly seeking a new world; in republican Spain, a number of elderly politicians sought to hold on to a wreck which had already been scuttled. For the presence of so many young men in the army and in the communist and socialist parties, not to speak of the anarchist movement, should not delude the observer into thinking that the republic offered much of a chance for youth. The revolution did; but republic and revolution were separate crafts.

The annual assembly of the League of Nations had, meantime, met in Geneva. That organization was crumbling. Its faults were patent. Although, in 1936, the League was not twenty years old, and its permanent headquarters, with its huge, optimistic murals by the Catalan painter Sert, had not yet been opened, the undertaking seemed already something from another age. Never, even at the time of its splendour (such as after the admission of Germany in 1925), had the League lost the character of an institution dominated by the victors of 1919. Nevertheless, until 1935, it had carried out its role as the expression of a world-wide desire for peace comparatively successfully. It had made peace between Greeks and Bulgars in 1925. It ended the Colombo-Peruvian War of 1934. It had abstained from resolution, true, over Manchuria in 1931. But that mistake did not seem irreparable. In 1935, however, the League failed to take effective action over Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia. It voted for sanctions, but not for any which had any effect. On 4 July 1936, even these had been abandoned. Mussolini’s African adventure was tacitly condoned.

The responsibility for all these retreats lay with the British and French governments, whose influence was supreme at the Palais des Nations. At the general assembly of 1936, the débâcle over Abyssinia had to be reviewed. But now there was also Spain. In the wings of the
assembly, on 24 September, Eden persuaded Dr Monteiro to bring Portugal into the Non-Intervention Committee. In his speech in the general debate which opened the assembly, Eden, however, did not mention Spain at all. Dr Carlos Saavedra Lamas, the Argentinian president of the assembly, supported by other Latin American delegations, sought to prevent the republic’s foreign minister, Alvarez del Vayo, from speaking on the civil war, since it was not on the agenda, though the general debate had usually been regarded as permitting discussion of anything. (Saavedra was pro-rebel.) But Alvarez del Vayo made his speech all the same, having been persuaded to be moderate by Eden. He deplored the fact that the Non-Intervention Agreement had placed his government on the same footing as the rebels: whereas, by international law, a government was entitled to buy arms abroad, while rebels were not. The republic would accept real non-intervention, but by that he meant freedom to buy arms.

This meeting at Geneva was not a happy one for the republic. It seemed evident that the Anglo-French policy was to subordinate Spain to the general European policies of these two governments. Azaña, Giral, Azcárate and all the ‘liberals’ in the government of the republic were disillusioned. Only Litvinov had spoken favourably for Spain. By that time, whether Litvinov knew it or not, Russia had decided to help Spain with arms as well as words. Indeed, the decision was taken some time in August since weapons began to reach Spain in mid-October.

The government of the republic had asked the Russian government to sell them arms while Giral was still Prime Minister. A delegation from Madrid reached Odessa at the end of August.
¹
By that time, it will be remembered, a strong Russian presence had been established in Madrid and Barcelona led by an experienced ambassador (Rosenberg) and an influential head of military mission (Berzin).
²
A few days later, a handful of Russian pilots started flying some of the new French aircraft which the republic had recently bought, ‘in conditions of inferiority for us’, making a considerable impression on their Spanish comrades: they were ‘truly extraordinary pilots’, Captain García La
calle described them.
¹
Some war material may also have arrived by late August, though none of it substantial—no Russian aircraft or tanks were to be seen till October.
²
Even with Britain and France backing non-intervention, there were alternatives to Russia in the US or in South America as suppliers of arms to the republic. But with German and Italian governmental assistance to Franco, a government, not just an arms manufacturer, was plainly desirable as a backer, and the Russian equipment was better qualitatively than anything to be found outside Britain or the US. Indeed, the Russian tanks and aircraft were as effective as, if not better than, anything in the world, as will be seen;
³
though neither Largo Caballero’s nor Giral’s cabinets knew that.

According to Walter Krivitsky, the Russian military intelligence ‘resident’ in The Hague, Stalin took a decision to help the Spanish republic on 31 August at a meeting of the Politburo in Moscow
⁴
and, from then on, both the Russian government and the Comintern, as well as their various secret and semi-espionage agents and organizations, began to prepare for a major military commitment. One reason for this decision was the mismanagement of the republican interests in Paris: the ambassador, Albornoz, and de los Ríos, together with the socialist deputy for Granada, Dr Alejandro Otero, were all enlightened men, but they were not good arms smugglers. La Pasionaria (with a delegation from Madrid) visited Paris at the end of August and found that the telephone operator at the Embassy in Paris (who had been in the same post under the monarchist ambassador, Quiñones de León)
told all the republic’s secrets to the nationalist representatives in Paris.
¹
At all events, Krivitsky in The Hague received instructions (on 2 September, according to him) to mobilize all possible facilities for the shipment of arms to Spain from Europe.
²
About ten days later, on 14 September, there was a meeting in Moscow to arrange the shipment of aid from Russia direct to Spain. The meeting was held, ominously, in the Lubianka and present, it seems, were Yagoda, still for another week or so head of the secret police (NKVD); General Frinovsky, at the time ‘commander of the military forces of the NKVD’; General S.P. Uritsky, chief of military intelligence in succession to Berzin, who was in Spain as head of the military mission; and A. A. Slutsky, an ‘amiable, courageous and humane’ man, who was chief of the foreign division of the NKVD. At this meeting, the NKVD was given an important supervisory role in the subsequent supply of arms and men in Spain, and it was agreed (or confirmed) that the superintending officer should be Alexander Orlov (his real name was Nikolsky), a ‘veteran officer’ in the NKVD, who had worked recruiting spies in England.
³
The shipment of arms was to be the work of Uritsky, who would set up a special agency to be directed by Captain Umansky, in Odessa; and this was shortly done.
⁴
But no one knew of this plan who did not absolutely have to: probably the Foreign Minister, Litvinov, and Russians in Spain such as Rosenberg and Koltsov remained in ignorance of these moves, as did the Comintern leaders (in Moscow or in Paris), most of whom continued to complain during September and early October that Stalin was continuing to ‘betray the Spanish Revolution’, in Trotsky’s
words from Norway.
¹
The Spanish government did not know that Russia was going to help them with arms until a short time before the ships carrying the material set off.

Russia had not embarked on adventures of this nature previously. She did not have a Mediterranean fleet. The supply routes would hence have to be kept secret. Given the geographical problems, and Stalin’s own internal problems (if that is not too modest a word for the Purges, then beginning in the top ranks of the Old Bolsheviks), the scheme to assist the republic was a risky one, whenever the decision was taken.

The first cargoes to Spain from Odessa must nevertheless have been put on board at the end of September. Thus, the German chargé in Moscow, Tippelskirch, on 28 September wrote an interesting dispatch that an expert had noted that ‘in the Black Sea harbour of Novorossik, access to the harbour area has been more severely restricted since the summer …’ The same observer (presumably an agent of the German consul in Odessa) felt ‘… there was more than food in the heavy crates composing the cargo of the
Neva
which left Odessa for Spain … So far, however, it has been impossible to obtain reliable reports of violation of the arms embargo by the Soviet government.’
²
Oil, yes. The republic had gone back to their old agreement with Russia (which the right-wing government had not renewed, in 1935) and Russia sent to Spain at least 30,000 tons of oil between 15 August and 15 September, 44,000 tons between then and 12 October.
³

But Stalin continued to have misgivings about helping the republic. To the Russian technicians whom he sent to Spain he gave the order ‘stay out of range of artillery fire’.
⁴
Russian supply ships must have left Odessa about 4 October at latest. Even at that date the decision may not have been firm, as a tale told by a French anarchist, Pierre Besnard, suggests: on 2 October, he reached Madrid with two representatives of an (unnamed) international arms dealing consortium. Besnard, Durruti and Largo Caballero met these two men and heard what they had to say; Largo promised to put the idea of buying arms from this consortium to the cabinet that afternoon. The cabinet agreed, and the next
day, 3 October, the details were worked out, Durruti again being present. On 4 October, Durruti was telephoned by the Russian ambassador, Rosenberg, who asked him to call on him; he could not do so since he had to return to the front. Some days later, Besnard was told that the republican government could not go through with the operation which he had initiated: the Russians had complained.
¹

The appropriate diplomatic frame was soon made for this important new commitment. Thus in London, the Soviet chargé, Kagan, sent a note almost in the form of an ultimatum to Lord Plymouth, the new British representative on the Non-Intervention Committee. Alleging that Italian aircraft had flown legionaries to the Spanish mainland on 20 September, Kagan said, on 7 October, that, if such violations of the Non-Intervention Pact did not cease, Russia would consider herself free from her obligations under the agreement. ‘If there is an agreement,’ wrote Kagan, ‘we want that agreement to be fulfilled. If the committee … can secure that … well and good. If it cannot, let the committee say so.’
²
The following day, 8 October, a Russian diplomat in Moscow told the American chargé that, unless the committee did show itself determined to bring about an immediate end of violations, Russia would withdraw, considering herself free to aid Spain with military equipment. This blunt change of policy infuriated the Foreign Office. ‘What’, they asked, ‘can Russia hope to gain by throwing over neutrality at this time?’ But the Russian action was supported on 9 October by the British Labour Party Conference, which passed a unanimous resolution declaring that Germany and Italy had broken their neutrality and calling for an investigation. That day, the meeting of the non-intervention committee lasted seven hours, the exchange of accusations between Kagan and Grandi astonishing the other diplomats. Lord Plymouth pointed out to Germany, Italy and Portugal the allegations of aid made by the Spanish government at Geneva. Kagan accused Portugal of allowing its territory to be used for nationalist operations, and demanded a commission to patrol the Spanish-Portuguese border. The Portuguese ambassador withdrew during the discussions of that proposal, which he considered insulting.
³

Russia now considered her position to be legally clear. At least sixteen Russian and other ships passed through the Bosphorus in early October carrying arms for Spain.
¹
The first to reach Cartagena was the
Komsomol,
carrying tanks, armoured-cars and some artillery, together with a group of tank specialists, headed by Colonel S. Krivoshein.
²
Perhaps, in all, a hundred tanks and a hundred aircraft arrived during these days, as well as a quantity of lorries, anti-aircraft guns, armoured-cars and other equipment, much of it new. The two types of Russian fighters sent to Spain, the I-15, a biplane known as ‘Chato’ or ‘snubnose’ in Spain, and the I-16, a new monoplane known in Spain as ‘Mosca’ (fly) (Rata to the nationalists), were the fastest in Europe, being in effect Russian versions of the American Curtiss and Boeing fighters.
³
The Chato had a maximum speed of 220 miles an hour, and four machine-guns, as well as the capacity to drop small 25-pound bombs.
⁴
The Mosca had only two machine-guns but was much faster, since its maximum speed was almost 300 miles an hour.
⁵
It also had a new device for swift climbing, a retractable undercarriage and a highly charged engine. Two groups of thirty-one aircraft each of these fighters were soon in service in Spain, almost all of them flown to begin with by Russian pilots. There also soon arrived three other aircraft: the SB-2 two-engined bomber, known as the Katiuska, built in 1933, which, since it had been designed as an ‘interceptor’ and could travel 250 miles an hour, did not require an escort;
⁶
the Natasha, another fast bomber;
⁷
and the Rasante, a low-flying aircraft used for machine-gunning.
⁸

These aircraft were faster and technically superior to the German and Italian equivalents, though the sturdy Fiat fighter was still sometimes able to outmanoeuvre the Chato, and the Junkers 52 remained a useful pack-horse for transport, though less so for bombing. The Heinkel 51s were of much less use henceforth.

Within a short time the hundred or so new Russian aircraft in Spain would give the republic command of the air. Something similar happened in respect of the Russian tanks, sent to Spain at the same time. These ten-ton T-26 tanks were heavily armoured, cannon-bearing machines, of a more formidable type than the three-ton Fiat Ansaldos and six-ton Panzer Mark 1s against them, which had no cannon, only machine-guns.
¹
Russian anti-tank guns (45 millimetre, based on the Vickers two-pounder) were also superior to any German models then available.
²

Russian personnel in Spain numbered five hundred by 1 November. They were field officers, pilots, tank specialists or flying instructors, with some translators. The head of the mission remained General Berzin (‘Grishin’) who, as has been seen,
³
had arrived in Madrid in September. The head of the air force was Colonel Jacob Smushkevich (‘General Douglas’). Largo Caballero later accused him of operating independently of the republican ministry of defence from the airbase of Los Llanos, and of being disdainful towards those Spaniards who were not communists.
⁴
His pilots included some, like Prokofiev, Kopets, and Schacht, who had been in Spain all September; and others who came now for the first time and who soon made themselves at home in the skies of Spain.
⁵
The future Marshals Malinovsky, Rokossovsky and Konev were all soon in Spain, as was General Kulik, ‘the victor of Tsaritsin’ in the Russian Civil War, who became an adviser to General Pozas, in command in the centre of Spain.
⁶
Most of these Russians
acted as ‘advisers’ to the republican commanders in their command posts, others stayed with technical arms, or in the headquarters of the Russian mission. The adviser in Madrid was to be the military attaché who had arrived in August, General Goriev, described by Ehrenburg as ‘intelligent, reserved, and, at the same time, passionate—I could even call him poetical … everybody believed in his lucky star’.
¹
The Russian tank base at Archena, a watering-place twenty miles inland from Cartagena, near Murcia, surrounded by olives, had a Spanish local organizer, Colonel Sánchez Paredes, who recruited tank drivers from the taxi and bus drivers of Madrid and Barcelona.
²
A fighter base and a bomber base for the Russians was established nearby at Alcantarilla. Other air bases were later organized at El Carmolí, near Madrid at Algete, and outside Alcalá de Henares, Some of these men came by sea, others by land—some even across central Europe.
³