The Spanish Civil War (67 page)

From the start, the wilder volunteers had met difficulties with the communist authorities, if only for drunkenness. But trouble was frequent.
²
Those who wished to return home were not permitted to do so.
Some complained that they had volunteered on the assumption that they could go home in three months’ time. But they had no documents to prove it. Here the principles of a volunteer army fighting for ideals conflicted with military requirements. The punishment for attempted escape was at least confinement in a ‘re-education camp’, for whose rigours idealistic, but easily disgusted, young men from Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian countries were ill-prepared. But there were desertions all the same. The Foreign Office in London negotiated a settlement which exempted British volunteers from the death penalty if they were detected trying to flee, but that was several times imposed on perhaps as many as fifty others.
¹
The communist leadership of the Brigades showed itself harsh to humanitarian needs, though the organizers, such as Marty in particular, lived well.
²
Uniforms were so scarce that the British Battalion seemed almost in rags.
³

While some Anglo-Saxons became disillusioned, Eastern European volunteers continued to flow into Spain, many through Tito’s ‘secret railway.’ Some were arrested on the way, since to volunteer for Spain was illegal in the non-intervention countries.
⁴
The right-wing governments of the Balkans and East Europe made every effort to enforce this. Nevertheless, the recruitment continued; in the universities or slums of central Europe or the Balkans, Spain seemed an exotic arena with the liberty of the world in the balance; thus, while Tito continued to operate from Paris, the communist writer Djilas acted as controller in Belgrade of the flow of volunteers from Yugoslavia.
⁵
Most of the
volunteers received, of course, from their Brigade journals and other reading matter, a mainly communist interpretation of the war and of the troubles of the republic: the POUM thus appeared in this literature, if at all, as no better than fascists.

Stephen Spender, the poet who had been an active apologist for the republic, arrived at this time, in search of a former secretary, who had volunteered for the Brigades and who, being disillusioned, had tried to escape. For a time, it seemed that this man might be shot. In the style of a novel by Kafka, Spender dined with the commissars of the British Battalion who were his judges and who were persuaded to relent.
¹
The
Candide
-like story of young Coope also shortly engaged the attention of England. He was a boy of eighteen, who volunteered for the Brigades after hearing a speech by the labour politician, Ellen Wilkinson, but who later escaped from them via a ship which left him in Greece. The boy’s father went out to Spain to search for him and had to join the Brigade to do so.

The American battalions of the International Brigade were also visited by kind friends from home.
²
At one bedside, in a hospital financed by American sympathizers, Ernest Hemingway comforted a casualty by literary talk.
³
‘They tell me Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis are coming over too’, said a wounded American, a would-be writer. ‘Yes,’ said Hemingway, ‘and when they come, I’ll bring them up to see you.’ ‘Good boy, Ernest,’ said the man in the bed. ‘You don’t mind if I call you Ernest?’ ‘Hell, no,’ replied Hemingway.
⁴
This was a refreshing can
dour in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name seemed to be truthfully given—to deceive whom was never clear, unless it was the republican Spaniards, for whom these Gómezes, Pablos, Martínezes, speaking in Slav accents, seemed to be playing a sinister game rather than a
ruse de guerre.

The foreign-financed medical service, with their experienced and dedicated doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers, played almost as great a part as the International Brigades. Thus American medical aid had six hospitals in Spain, British medical aid, five. In these units, pacifists could serve the cause without a bad conscience, as could poets without military training. It was in one such unit that the best of the English poets of the day, W. H. Auden, served as a stretcher-bearer. But he went home ‘after a very short visit of which he never spoke’.
¹
Later, in June, a dependants’ aid committee was formed in Britain for the welfare of the families of British volunteers in Spain. This was organized by Charlotte Haldane. Her secretarial staff were all communists, but the body was sponsored by uncommitted persons such as the sixty-year-old Red Duchess of Atholl (then a conservative MP, who later ruined herself politically by her championship of the republic),
²
Sir Norman Angell, Victor Gollancz, Professor Harold Laski, Sean O’Casey, H. G. Wells, and Sybil Thorndike; along with some social democratic labour politicians, such as Attlee or Emmanuel Shinwell.
³
Meanwhile, the United States government, in search of the purest neutrality, promulgated regulations which prevented the gathering of funds for either of the two Spanish parties, unless these were for
bona fide
relief purposes. But none of the twenty-six bodies which regis
tered under these arrangements was refused a licence, and much money was found.

22. Division of Spain, March 1937

What was the reason for the passionate interest in the Spanish cause by so many who knew little of Spain before 1936? Virginia Woolf, when her nephew, Julian Bell, went to Spain, wrote:

I keep asking myself, without finding an answer, what did he feel about Spain? What made him feel it necessary, knowing, as he did, how it must torture Nessa [his mother] to go?… I suppose it’s a fever in the blood of the younger generation which we can’t possibly understand. I have never known anyone of my generation have that feeling about a war … And though I understand that this is a ‘cause’, can be called the cause of liberty and so on, still my natural reaction is to fight intellectually; if I were any use, I should write against it … Perhaps it was restlessness, curiosity, some gift that had never been used in private life and a conviction, part emotional about Spain … I’m sometimes angry with him; yet feel it was fine, as all strong feelings are fine; yet they are also wrong somehow; one must control feeling with reason.
¹

The answer to Virginia Woolf’s question was that men such as Bell saw the Spanish war as a microcosm of European discontents, a way of fighting fascism, whether or no that dark cloud had reached their own land. Spain also assuaged a longing for action widely felt among the young for whom the civil war seemed, unlike the war of 1914–18, just.

On 22 March 1937, Franco put new plans to his air chief, General Kindelán. The front of Madrid would be reorganized defensively. Mola would embark on a campaign against the Basques, and would receive the bulk of the nationalist aviation and such artillery as could be spared.
¹
This plan represented a stern realization that Madrid could not immediately be taken, and that the war could not be won quickly, even though, as a result of a vast recruiting campaign, the nationalists under arms would soon approach 300,000 men.
²
The republican northern territories were a tempting prize: not only were they politically divided and less well supplied than the centre, but they included the iron in the Basque country, and the coal in Asturias, as well as steel and chemical plants.
³

In Mola’s army, an essential role was played by the newly organized Navarre Division, whose men had been active in Guipúzcoa the previous year. This division comprised 18,000 men divided into four brigades led by Colonels García Valiño, Alonso Vega, Cayuela and La
torre. They were by now a match for the other older shock units of ‘Foreign’ legionaries (among whom some ex-anarchists and leftists were to be found, proving their loyalty by exposure to danger).
¹
Many thought that Bilbao could be taken within three weeks of the start of operations. For Mola knew the deployment of his enemies, through the treachery of Major Alejandro Goicoechea, a Basque officer who had taken part in the building of Bilbao’s defences, the so-called ‘ring of iron’, and who had driven over to the nationalists in his motor-car early in March.
²
No doubt he also knew something of the lack of contact and understanding between the Basques and the republican government in the centre: the Basques were, after all, fighting for independence, not for the revolution or for Spanish democracy. Furthermore, the ring of iron consisted of two lines about 200–300 yards apart, lacking depth and protection on the flank, and standing on the hilltops without camouflage.

Some days before the Basque war began, a sea-fight occurred outside Bilbao which was a rehearsal of what was to follow. A merchant ship laden with war material for Bilbao was intercepted by the nationalist cruiser
Canarias
five miles from the shore. Three small Basque trawlers fought the cruiser until they had lost two-thirds of their crew and had been almost shot to pieces. Of this struggle, the English poet Cecil Day-Lewis, then a communist, wrote his celebrated narrative poem, ‘
Nabarra
’, beginning:

Freedom is more than a word, more than the base coinage

Of statesmen, the tyrant’s dishonoured cheque, or the dreamer’s mad

Inflated currency. She is mortal, we know, and made

In the image of simple men who have no taste for carnage

But sooner kill and are killed than see that image betrayed.

Mola’s offensive began on 31 March. The attack was directed in the field by General Solchaga. The monarchist friend of Germany, Gen
eral Vigón, was Mola’s chief of staff and the well-educated Colonel Martínez de Campos was chief of the artillery, with 200 guns.

23. The campaign in Vizcaya, March–June 1937

The Navarrese brigades were established between Vergara and Villarreal, on the borders of the two Basque provinces of Vizcaya and Alava. They were heavily armed. Together with them was a new unit, the Black Arrows, numbering 8,000 Spaniards with Italian officers, headed by Colonel Sandro Piazzoni. In support, 80 German aircraft were assembled at Vitoria, and another 70 Italian and Spanish planes at other northern nationalist aerodromes.
¹
The nationalist fleet, in
cluding the old battleship
Jaime I,
the cruisers
Canarias
and
Almirante Cervera,
and the destroyer
Velasco,
could establish, with many smaller vessels, an effective blockade.

The republican Army of the North was still commanded by General Llano de la Encomienda, the loyal commander of the army in Barcelona in July 1936. He was pessimistic of victory since, though his charge covered the republican forces along the Cantabrian coast, there was still no unity among the Basques, Asturians, and Santanderinos, nor even the pretence of it. The commissar-general of the army was the Asturian socialist González Peña: the commissar in the Basque country, the communist deputy Jesús Larrañaga; in Asturias, the anarchist Francisco Martínez; and in Santander, Antonio Somarriba, a socialist. This coalition did not work. Even the communist Larrañaga was at the mercy of conflicting opinions, since the Basques distrusted him as a communist, the communists as a Basque who at home, unlike Aguirre, spoke Basque. The inspector-general of the Army of the North, General Martínez Cabrera, the recently dismissed chief of staff in the centre of Spain, did not have a good name. Largo Caballero had privately assured the Basques that the Army of the North did not really exist and that he recognized the Basque army, the ‘army of Euzkadi’ which was nominally a part of Llano de la Encomienda’s command, as the main military organization in the north of Spain.
¹
Llano de la Encomienda had been forced to the humiliation of sending a telegram asking the Prime Minister whether that was indeed so. He moved his headquarters to Santander in February and had little thereafter to do with the day-to-day business of the campaign. His troops altogether theoretically numbered 150,000. In theory, too, he had over 250 pieces of artillery, but they were divided, with 75 in Vizcaya, 130 in Asturias and 50 in Santander. He had a few T-26 Russian tanks, and a few Renault tanks from France, but these were fewer than those of
their opponents. Against the strong nationalist navy, the republic in the north could call on only two destroyers offshore and three submarines. The Basques had only about 25 to 30 aircraft. Republican bombers in the centre of Spain had too short range to help the northern battlefield and most were not moved. (Some fighters, however, were soon dispatched.) The equipment of the armies of the north was not as good as it might have been, considering that the republic controlled the arms factories of Trubia, Eibar, and Reinosa, the munitions and explosive plants of Galdacano, Guernica and La Manoya, not to speak of the several steel plants of Vizcaya. But levels of production had fallen, not risen, in the war.

The Basques had raised forty-six infantry battalions, totalling about 30,000. Of these, twenty-seven were Basque nationalists (known as
gudaris
), eight socialists, the remainder mixed communists, socialist-communist youth, left republicans, and anarchists. This army was attended by a corps of almoners, composed of eighty-two priests, whose duties, unique in the republican army, were to celebrate mass, to watch the
gudaris’
morality, to be present at the last moments of the dying, and to ‘form the minds of the conscripts in the christian tradition’. There were also about ten battalions of Asturians, who were unpopular with the Basques due to their thefts of cattle, their seduction of local girls and even occasionally their murderous behaviour: thus the priest of Abadiano was apparently shot by the Asturians as they passed through.
¹

Mola issued a preliminary ultimatum reminiscent of the Athenians’ threat to Melos: ‘I have decided to terminate rapidly the war in the north: those not guilty of assassinations and who surrender their arms will have their lives and property spared. But, if submission is not immediate, I will raze all Vizcaya to the ground, beginning with the industries of war.’
²

On 31 March, this threat, intended to have psychological importance, began to be put into practice. Junkers 52s of the Condor Legion bombed the country town of Durango, a road and railway junction between Bilbao and the front. One bomb killed 14 nuns in the chapel of Santa Susana. The Jesuit church was bombed at the moment the priest
was communicating the Body of Christ. In the church of Santa María, the priest was killed while elevating the Host. The rest of the town was machine-gunned. 127 civilians, including 2 priests and 13 nuns, were killed that day, and 121 died later in hospitals.
¹

Durango had previously been known as the town where Don Carlos had decreed, in 1834, that all foreigners taken in arms against him should be executed without trial. From 1937, it enjoyed the equally cruel renown of being the first defenceless town in Europe to be mercilessly bombed.

The same day, after heavy and well coordinated air and artillery bombardment, the nationalist Colonel Alonso Vega advanced on the right of the front to capture the three mountains of Maroto, Albertia, and Jarindo. North of Villarreal, in the centre of the front, violent fighting occurred in the suburbs of Ochandiano. This battle continued until 4 April. Forty to fifty aircraft bombed the town each day. The Navarrese nearly encircled it. Terrified of being cut off and so falling alive into the hands of the enemy, the Basques withdrew, leaving six hundred dead. Four hundred prisoners were taken. After 4 April, there was a pause in the offensive, due to heavy rain. Mola reorganized his troops for the next phase of the campaign, which had already seemed likely to be longer than he had at first prophesied. General von Sperrle complained.
²

The Basques fortified their new positions, and made further adjustments to the ring of iron. The tactical use of aerial bombardment, however inaccurate, had caused much alarm, and increased hatred for Germany. More men were mobilized, and some further war material arrived, so that, by 10 April, the Basques had 140 pieces of artillery.
³
The arrival of General Goriev, the outstanding Russian officer in Spain, as military adviser, with some other Russian personnel, did not, however, seem to improve matters, despite that soldier’s high reputation in Madrid.
⁴

On 6 April, the nationalists announced that they would prevent food supplies from entering republican ports in north Spain.
¹
The British steamer
Thorpehall,
with a cargo of provisions for Bilbao from Santander, was accordingly stopped five miles offshore by the nationalist cruiser
Almirante Cervera
and the armed trawler
Galerna.
Eventually, the
Thorpehall
was allowed to pass, since the nationalist vessels showed a disinclination to quarrel with two British destroyers, HMS
Blanche
and
Brazen,
which hastened to the scene.

This event raised in an acute form the whole matter of blockade. In the early part of the war, the republican government had declared a blockade of certain nationalist ports. The British had considered that the declaration applied to too large a territory and, ‘in order to be valid,’ blockade ‘had to be effective.’
²
Thus, if a Spanish warship had stopped any merchantmen on the high seas, Britain would have regarded the action as incorrect. British ships would have to be protected against such interference. Britain furthermore only recognized a three-mile limit off the coast, whereas Spain insisted on six miles. The complexity of the situation was such that naval orders were amended so often as to place an intolerable burden on junior officers.

The new nationalist action exacerbated the complexity of the position of the British government. By international law, a blockade (including the right of search on the high seas) could be carried out by recognized belligerents. But because they did not wish to subject British merchantmen to search by Spanish naval vessels, Baldwin and his ministers were opposed to the recognition of the two Spanish warring parties as belligerents. The situation was further complicated by the fact that many foreign vessels flew British flags to try to avoid detention and secure protection. As the British cabinet were aware, many merchantmen were ‘virtually blockade-runners who took the risk for
the high freights’.
¹
But the nationalists now had command of the seas. If, therefore, belligerent rights were granted, it would be nationalist naval vessels which would mostly be doing the intercepting, and British merchantmen which would mostly suffer. But if belligerent rights were not accepted, British ships would be entitled to ask for the aid of the Royal Navy if they were interfered with (outside the Basque territorial waters). How much less trouble, therefore, it would be if there were no British merchant ships going to Basque ports at all!

This last reflection, perhaps made subconsciously, probably disposed the captain of HMS
Blanche
and the commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet to conclude that the nationalist blockade was effective. Sir Henry Chilton reported the same from Hendaye. There were similar reports: not only was the nationalist navy outside Bilbao able to prevent the entry of all merchantmen; but Basque territorial waters were mined. Thus (reported Chilton and the Navy) it would be dangerous for British merchant ships to try to enter Bilbao. Inside the three-mile limit, of course, the Royal Navy had no right to protect merchantmen. So the Admiralty instructed all British merchant vessels, within a hundred miles of Bilbao, to repair to the French fishing port of St Jean de Luz, and to await further orders. The following day, Chilton was told by Major Julián Troncoso, the nationalist military governor of Irún, on instructions from Burgos, that Franco was determined to make the blockade effective. The voyage of four British merchantmen known to be bearing food cargoes and now at St Jean de Luz would, in particular, be prevented by force. Meantime, more mines would be laid across Bilbao harbour.
²
This determined statement reached London on the morning of Saturday, 10 April. It caused Baldwin to summon the cabinet for Sunday. Back from their weekends, then came to London, among others, Duff Cooper, secretary of state for war, Sir Samuel Hoare, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary, and Eden, the Foreign Secretary. As a result, the Board of Trade ‘warned’ British ships not to go to Bilbao, and intimated that the Navy could not help them if they tried to do so. The Admiralty also sent the battleship
Hood,
pride of the fleet, to ‘some
where in the neighbourhood of Bilbao, in order that the British forces in that region might not be inferior to those of General Franco’. Baldwin explained, to an angry House of Commons on the following Monday, that there were risks against which it was impossible to protect British shipping.
¹
The government was concerned less with the abstract principle of the freedom of the seas than the important matter of the 60,000 tons of iron ore which normally Britain imported from Basque ports.
²
In fact, the ports themselves of northern Spain were free of mines and there was reason to suppose that they would continue to be, for mines would hinder the nationalists’ own use of the ports in the event of their victory. But the approaches to the ports had been mined.