The Spanish Civil War (65 page)

Republican control of the air was, meantime, maintained over the battlefield, though the Condor Legion’s 88-millimetre anti-aircraft batteries (their accuracy was phenomenal) limited the extent to which this could be turned into a real help to an offensive.
²
Still, the old Ger
man Junkers were driven out of the sky by Russian
Chatos,
while the Russian tank brigade was concentrated before the town of Arganda in the north of the front.

19. The battle of the Jarama, February 1937

This battle was the first fight of the 15th International Brigade, commanded by Colonel ‘Gal’ (Janos Galicz), a naturalized Russian of Austro-Hungarian birth, like ‘Kléber’ and ‘Lukacs’ (and probably active in the international brigades in the Red Army in 1919–20). Gal was incompetent, bad-tempered, and hated. The central figure in the formation of the Brigade, however, was the English chief of staff, Captain Nathan. The commissar was a French communist, Jean Chaintron
(‘Barthel’). The Brigade comprised volunteers from twenty-six nations. The first battalion of the Brigade were six hundred Englishmen of the Saklatvala Battalion—called after the Indian communist of that name who had been a member of parliament in the twenties, though usually known as the British Battalion. In command was the ‘English Captain’, Tom Wintringham, a communist from the middle class, an editor of the
Left Review
and military correspondent of the
Daily Worker,
an ‘indefatigable military theorist’, though with ‘little actual experience of war’.
¹
The political commissar was, first, David Springhall, a communist later tried for espionage and then an experienced and independent-minded Scottish communist, George Aitken. The company commanders and the political commissars were mostly communists. The other battalions of the 15th Brigade were 800 mixed Balkans (including 160 Greeks), of the Dimitrov Battalion; 800 French and Belgians, of the 6th of February
²
(or Franco-Belgian) Battalion; and 550 Americans, the ‘Abraham Lincoln Battalion’, including a number of blacks, which was, however, still in training. Irishmen were tactfully divided between the Abraham Lincoln and the British Battalions.
³

Some of these last were, like Frank Ryan, members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). To those knowledgeable of the ironies of Irish politics, it will come as no surprise that at that same moment another Irish group of volunteers (also including other members of the IRA) were, by this time, also making their way to the front on the nationalist side. Their commander, General Eoin O’Duffy, headed an Irish fascist movement, the Blue Shirts. He doubtless hoped that the exploits of his six hundred men in Spain would bring him to political eminence in his own country. At this moment, they had completed training at Cáceres and had received orders to advance to the Jarama.
⁴
Thus for
some the Spanish Civil War must have been a war within the Irish Republican Army.

The British Battalion bore the brunt of Asensio’s and Sáenz de Buruaga’s assault on 12 February. They defended the so-called Suicide Hill for seven hours against artillery and machine-gun fire from Pingarrón high above them, with a ‘total lack of maps’, and with perhaps three-quarters of the battalion never having held a loaded weapon in their hands before. It was a brave performance.
¹
Nearly all the nationalist reserves were flung into the battle, while Lister, with his experienced 1st Brigade, arrived on the left of the British Battalion. A British volunteer, John Lepper, described the scene:

Death stalked the olive trees

Picking his men

His leaden finger beckoned

Again and again.
²

The battle continued the whole of the 12th. The International Brigades suffered heavy losses, including most of their officers. A mere two hundred and twenty-five out of the original six hundred members of the British Battalion were left at the end of the day.
³
Wintringham, the battalion commander, was wounded, while Christopher Caudwell, a promising writer, was among the dead.
⁴
One company of the British Battalion was tricked into capture by admitting to their trenches a group of Moroccans who advanced singing the ‘International’.

It is easy to dwell on the exploits of the members of the International Brigades in this and other battles since their achievements are amply chronicled, and since the fact of their presence was so unusual.
But militarily more important at the Jarama were the Russian aircraft and tanks, which held the ground and controlled the air. Russian direction of the republican artillery was also important. The divisions between Miaja and Pozas were responisble for some confusion, and only when Miaja was given equal rank to Pozas, as the commander of an army, were his reserve forces fully committed.
¹
Meantime, the legionaries and Moroccans, despite initiative and good leadership, were, by 16 February, driven into a defensive posture once they had captured the heights beyond the Jarama.

On 16 February, General O’Duffy’s Irish nationalists reached the Jarama front at Ciempozuelos. No sooner were they in position than they observed a force advancing towards them. The Irish officers concluded they were friends, and went to meet them. Eight paces from the captain of the advancing troops, the Spanish liaison officer with the Irish saluted and announced:
‘Bandera Irlandesa del Tercio!’
The captain advancing drew his revolver, fired, and, in a few moments, the exchange became gereral. The Irishmen lost four killed, including the Spanish liaison officer. It then transpired that their opponents were indeed nationalists, from the Canary Isles. An inquiry was held, by which the Irish were held blameless and the Canary Islanders allotted all responsibility. But thereafter the Irish were quartered at Ciempozuelos, and they saw little further action.
²

Franco also had some difficulties with another ally: Italy. On 12 February, Roatta’s chief of staff, Colonel Faldella, had come up from Andalusia and suggested another great Italian attack, so that they could add to the glory gained at Málaga. A large new contingent of regular Italian troops had arrived in Spain, under General Bergonzoli, in early February. What now about a thrust from Teruel to the sea? Faldella saw Major Barroso on Franco’s staff, and, the next day, Franco himself. Franco complained bitterly:

First, I was told that companies of volunteers were coming to be included in the Spanish battalions. I agreed. Then I was asked to form
Italian battalions and I agreed. Next, senior officers and a general arrived to command them, and, finally, already formed units began to arrive. Now you want to gather all these troops to fight together, under General Roatta, when my plans were quite different.
¹

Franco really wanted to distribute the Italians all over Spain. But he did not wish to antagonize Mussolini, so he again agreed. The Italians, volunteers and regular troops, would be allowed to form a single army under the name of CTV (Comando Truppe Volontarie) and fight on one front, though it would be to the north-east of Madrid, not where Roatta desired. Franco had still not given up hope of ending the war that winter by capturing the capital.

On 17 February, meanwhile, the reorganized republican army mounted a counter-attack. One division pushed Barrón back across the Valencia road. Another, from the north, crossed the Manzanares west of Marañosa. But an air combat on the 18th in which the famous nationalist air ace, Joaquín García Morato, played a decisive personal part, had temporarily given the nationalists aerial control. Under García Morato, the Italian Fiat fighters were showing themselves as good as the Chatos provided they were flown with courage and imagination, and at least eight Russian fighters were brought down.
²
At the same time, General Gal, the new divisional commander controlling the International Brigades, was unsuccessful in his attacks, on the 23rd and 27th, on the nationalists’ front between Pingarrón and San Martin.

Here the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, 450 strong, saw their first action. Their commander was Robert Merriman, twenty-eight years old, the son of a lumberjack, who had worked his way through the University of Nevada to a lectureship at the University of California. He had come to Europe on a travelling scholarship to investigate agricultural problems. Alone of the Brigades, a majority of the Americans was composed of students. Seamen were the next largest group.
³
The Americans
seemed innocent beside the rest of the Brigades. They did not come from war-torn cities now ruled by dictators, as did many of their comrades. Few of them had served in the American army. They were younger than most of those in other Brigades. Yet they fought with gallantry, without artillery cover, and quite as unprepared as the British had been a week previously. A hundred and twenty were killed, a hundred and seventy-five wounded. Among those killed was Charles Donnelly, a young Irish poet of promise.
¹
Well might the survivors later sing, to the tune of ‘Red River Valley’:

There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama

It’s a place that we all know too well,

For ’tis there that we wasted our manhood.

And most of our old age as well.
²

Henceforward, as had occurred in the battle for the Corunna road, each side was too strong to be attacked. Franco now tried to hasten the Italians to start their offensive to the north-east of Madrid in order to draw off the republican thrust, but they would not, or could not, hurry. Fortifications were, therefore, prepared. The battle of Jarama resulted in a stalemate, in which the republicans had lost land to the depth of ten miles along a front of some fifteen miles, but had retained the Valencia road. Both sides, therefore, claimed a victory but both had really suffered defeats. The republicans had more than 10,000 casualties (some 1,000 deaths, probably 7,000 wounded, some 3,500 sick), and the nationalists about 6,000.
³
The differences between the republican commanders, the toughness of the fighting, the sure sign that, even with substantial Russian aid (which, for a time, was technically superior to that of the nationalists), the war would be long, caused widespread gloom.

Franco’s Italian allies were now preparing, as planned, to attack Madrid from the north-east. Their goal was Guadalajara, the capital of
the province of that name, thirty miles from Madrid. They hoped that Orgaz would continue the Jarama offensive, and, if possible, meet the advance from the north-east at Alcalá de Henares, finally encircling Madrid. The attack on Guadalajara was undertaken on the right by the Soria Division under Moscardó, the hero of the Alcázar, with 15,000 fresh Moroccans, and some Carlists. On the left, 35,000 Italians fought under Roatta.
¹
These were three divisions of fascist Black Shirts: the ‘Dio lo vuole’ Division, under General Rossi; the Black Flames, under General Coppi; and the Black Arrows, under General Nuvoloni. There was, too, the Littorio Division, a regular Italian army division, under General Bergonzoli. These were supported by 80 tanks and 200 pieces of mobile artillery, together with a chemical warfare company, a flame-thrower company, 8 armoured cars, 16 anti-aircraft guns, and 2,000 lorries. This force was accompanied by 50 fighters and 12 reconnaissance aircraft. The importance of the plan from Mussolini’s point of view was that all Italians would act together, so that the victory to be gained would redound to the Italian credit.

The start of the offensive was accompanied by a bizarre proposal from Mussolini to Franco, put by the secretary of the fascist party, Roberto Farinacci, that Spain’s troubles might, after the victory, be solved by the assumption of the Spanish throne by the Duke of Aosta, viceroy of Abyssinia, cousin of the King of Italy and grandson of the ill-fated Amedeo I of Spain.
²

Out of those fighting, the Littorio Division, though a regular unit of the Italian army, had been put together out of conscripted men, labourers who had desired to go to Abyssinia, many of them in their thirties or older, some not knowing where they were going—perhaps
to take part in the crowd scenes of the projected film
Scipio in Africa.
All concentrated in the new town of Littorio, under regular officers.
¹
Though inexperienced as a unit, they had good equipment.

Guadalajara in peacetime was a stagnant provincial capital commanding the gorge through which the river Henares runs swiftly down from the Guadarramas. The front was then held by the new republican 12th Division. It was broken at the first assault by Coppi’s Black Flames, a group composed of trucks and armoured cars, operating with the tactics later celebrated as the Blitzkrieg. At the same time, Moscardó broke through the republican lines on the Soria road. But in mid-morning, the temperature lowered, and rain fell. Sleet, ice, and fog followed. Many of the Italians were in colonial uniform, ready for the tropics. Their aircraft were unable to leave their improvised run-ways. The republican air force, in control of the air, on the other hand, destroyed the Italian morale almost at the start, General Smushkevich’s headquarters being nearby at Alcalá de Henares. The battle was indeed the occasion for ‘the most rapid and orderly concentration of forces ever carried out by the republicans’.
²
The vile weather, as well as the fatigue of the men, prevented Orgaz from embarking on his attack in the Jarama valley. On the next day, the 9th, the Italian advance began again, despite bad weather. Coppi’s Black Flames entered Almadrones and then moved to the left flank to widen the gap in the republican lines, so capturing Masegaso. Nuvoloni and the Black Arrows took over in the centre, but the commander called a halt at night: a decision subsequently criticized, for it was crucial. Many of his men were either old or inexperienced in war, as well as being cold; and, as with all the Italian troops, the training had been bad. Moscardó, however, continued to advance and captured Cogolludo. The situation appeared for a time critical for the republic. This provided an opportunity for the communists to insist on the dismissal of another of their
bêtes noires,
Martínez Cabrera, republican chief of staff; he was replaced by Colonel Rojo, the chief of staff in Madrid. Though never a communist, Rojo was a competent technician, able to appreciate the military advantages of collaboration with the communist party. By the evening, a 4th Army Corps had been hastily assembled from the best
republican regiments, under the overall command of Colonel Jurado, an able regular artillery officer. The 11th Division, led by Lister, and including the German 11th International Brigade, and El Campesino’s Brigade, was in the woods along the road from Trijueque to Torija. Along the Brihuega-Torija road, the anarchist Cipriano Mera established himself, with the 14th Division, which included Lukács’s 12th International Brigade, headed by the Garibaldi Battalion. A third republican division, the 12th, was in the rear under a regular officer, an engineer, Colonel Lacalle. The old, partly walled town of Brihuega (a collective with 125 participating families) lay halfway between the two armies. Here, in 1710, the French General Vendôme had defeated Lord Stanhope, in the last engagement of the War of the Spanish Succession. Here again, an international battle occurred.