The Spanish Civil War (85 page)

unreal, since all participants see through the game of the other side, but only seldom express this openly. The non-intervention policy is so unstable, and is such an artificial creation, that everyone fears to cause its collapse by a clear ‘no’, and bear the responsibility. Therefore, unpleasant proposals are talked to death, instead of rejected. It proved
tactically clever to bring up belligerent rights at the same time as volunteers [he added], since that made it possible to drag out the discussion again and again.
¹

Woermann thought Britain was interested in the volunteers’ scheme only because it seemed the best way of removing Italy from the Balearics. Volunteers, he comforted his superiors, could not be withdrawn before May—and further delays would always be possible. Thus, with justified bitterness, the English communist Edgell Rickword satirized the committee in his poem ‘To the Wife of Any Non-Intervention Statesman’:

Permit me, Madam, to invade,

Briefly, your boudoir’s pleasant shade:

Invasion, though, is rather strong,

I volunteered, and came along.

So please don’t yell or make a scene

Or ring for James—to intervene.

The German foreign ministry replied to Woermann with equal cynicism. German policy was to prevent a republican victory (not necessarily to secure a nationalist one). Its aim was to gain time, deferring ‘for as long as possible the time when we might have to commit ourselves to a fundamental decision’.
²

Lord Plymouth, the indefatigable peace-maker, soon presented new ideas for the withdrawal of volunteers. The powers should choose between a proportionate and a numerical withdrawal. 20,000 or 15,000 men might represent a figure to be regarded as ‘substantial’.
³
Grandi and Woermann commented politely. More important talks were now going on in London than these, between Grandi, Eden, and Chamberlain. It became clear that these were indeed three-sided. Relations between Eden and Chamberlain had been bad since the latter’s damper, in Eden’s absence in January, to President Roosevelt’s plan for a general conference for peace.
⁴
Eden desired to make negotiations for an
Anglo-Italian Agreement conditional on the withdrawal of at least some volunteers from Spain. Chamberlain thought that that would waste too much time. On 18 February, Grandi refused to discuss separately the volunteers in Spain. He suggested ‘general conversations’ in Rome which would also discuss British recognition of the Italian empire in Abyssinia. Chamberlain agreed. Eden did not. So the latter resigned, with his under-secretary of state, Lord Cranborne, on the 20th, to the delight of Ciano and Mussolini—and also (according to Ciano) of Lord Perth.
¹

Shortly afterwards, on 6 March, the republic received the unexpected encouragement of a victory at sea. The main nationalist fleet, led by the cruisers
Baleares, Canarias
and
Almirante Cervera,
were sailing past Cartagena, at midnight on 5 March, in convoy with some merchant ships, on their way south from Palma. The republican cruisers
Libertad
and
Méndez Núñez,
and the destroyers
Lepanto, Sánchez Barcáiztegui,
and
Almirante Antequera,
under the direction of Captain González Ubieta, came broadside against this overconfident nationalist force. The republican destroyers loosed torpedoes and left the scene. The
Baleares
was hit amidships and blew up. HMS
Kempenfelt
and
Boreas,
on non-intervention patrol nearby, picked up 400 out of the 1,000 who were aboard and took them to the
Canarias.
The nationalist admiral, Manuel Vierna, went down with his ship, accompanied by 726 officers and men.
²

Franco was preparing his next offensive into Aragon. The attacking army would be commanded by Dávila, with Franco’s staff adviser, Colonel Vigón, as his chief of staff. Solchaga, Moscardó, Yagüe, and Aranda would command army corps, and so would the Italian General Berti. Divisions under García Escámez and García Valiño, now recognized as the outstanding younger commanders, would form the reserve. Varela, with the Army of Castile, would hold himself ready in the wings of the general attack, at Teruel. The Condor Legion also held itself in readiness. As for the German tanks, Franco wanted to parcel them out among the infantry—‘in the usual style of generals who belong to the old school’, von Thoma scornfully recalled. ‘I had to
fight …’ he said, ‘to use the tanks in a concentrated way.’
¹
But the nationalists had nearly two hundred of them and, as it happened, tactics scarcely mattered.

The attack, preceded by heavy artillery and aerial barrage, began on 7 March. The best troops of the republic were weary after Teruel. Their material was exhausted: half the men lacked even rifles. The Aragon front was broken at several points on the first day. The republicans had anticipated a new deadlock as after Brunete. Their front line troops had had no combat experience. Yagüe advanced down the right bank of the Ebro, sweeping all before him. On 10 March, Solchaga’s Navarrese won back Belchite. The 15th International Brigade were the last out of that dead town which fell easily, despite fortifications specially designed by the Russian Colonel Bielov (‘Popov’), who turned out more of an NKVD specialist than an engineer.
²
The Italians encountered momentary stiff resistance at Rudilla, and then, with the Black Arrows leading, broke through the line. ‘It is full speed ahead,’ crowed Ciano in Rome.
³
Lister wanted to cover his own responsibility by shooting some of those who commanded troops falling back. Since they were communists, this matter came up, it seems, at discussions within the communist party. The sentences were carried out, an Italian communist, Marcucci (‘Julio’), killing himself in Madrid in protest or perhaps in fear that, by his complaint at the central committee, he would himself be killed.
⁴
Aranda had to endure harder fighting, before breaking through, on 13 March, to capture Montalbán. The defence had, however, hardly begun. Rojo named Caspe as its centre and there assembled all the International Brigades.
But, even as he did so, news arrived of the Italian approach towards Alcañiz. Even where republican units fought effectively, they were obliged to fall back, due to the collapse of the units next to them. The rout appeared absolute. Desertions were frequent. Overhead, Heinkel 111s, with new Italian Savoias, bombarded the retreating republicans. These were protected by Messerschmitts and low-flying Fiats, with the help of Dornier 17 reconnaissance planes. Innumerable prisoners were taken, divisional commands were surrounded. General Walter narrowly escaped capture at Alcañiz. Marty came to the front, held a council of war of leading international communists but, despite some reorganization of commands (a Russian officer, Mikhail Kharchenko, took over the 13th Brigade), did nothing to stem the flood.
¹

On 16 March, three nationalist divisions, commanded by Barrón, Muñoz Grandes, and Bautista Sánchez from Varela’s Army of Castile, surrounded Caspe. In the south, Aranda captured Montalbán. On 17 March, Caspe fell, after two days of heavy fighting, in which the International Brigades, including the 15th, rallying, performed prodigies of valour. By now, the nationalist armies were seventy miles east of their starting-point eight days before. Before the natural defences of the broad rivers Ebro and Guadalupe, they allowed a pause for reorganization. But, on 22 March, the offensive began again, this time in the north, against those lines before Saragossa and Huesca, which had been held since August 1936 by the Catalan army. All the familiar fortifications were lost in a day. Generals Solchaga and Moscardó launched five attacks on the eighty miles from Huesca to Saragossa in one morning. Huesca was relieved at last.
²
Tardienta and Alcubierre fell. The next day, Yagüe crossed the Ebro and captured Pina, that
pueblo
where in 1936 Durruti had been frozen away by the silent hostility of the inhabitants. All those revolutionary Aragonese villages which, at the beginning of the war, had given birth to such a varied political anthropology now changed hands. Pursued by machine-gun fire from the air, the inhabitants of these collectives fled east, where they
joined an all-too-familiar stream, with their cattle, chickens, and carts carrying furniture. For, if deserters were now chiefly men who left the republic for the rebels, the refugees from rebel victories were countless. On 25 March, Yagüe captured Fraga, and then entered the golden land of Catalonia. At Lérida, the next town, El Campesino’s division made a brave and militarily valuable stand for a week. To the north,
Moscardó entered Barbastro. Further north still, Solchaga was pinned down in the Pyrenees. As they wound their way through the valleys, his columns presented an easy target to republican artillery and aircraft. To the south, however, Aranda, García Escámez, Berti, and García Valiño drove across the high plain known as the Maestrazgo, in southern Aragon, before preparing to advance to the Mediterranean. The fronts hardly existed. There were isolated acts of resistance by one or other of the republican units, as well as confusion, breakdown of communication, suspicion of treachery. Anarchist commanders (such as Miguel Yoldi, of the 24th Division) found themselves starved of munitions. Others (such as Máximo Franco, of the 127th Brigade) were arrested, due to communist distrust of anarchist leaders. Marty travelled about from headquarters to headquarters looking for traitors: he could not prevent the virtual disintegration of the International Brigades. There were arbitrary executions, sometimes of officers in front of their men, but usually, as a certain Captain Joaquín Frau put it, the ‘terror from enemy attacks from the air was greater than that inspired by the pistols of our own officers’.
¹
In general, the campaign seemed lost. It is unclear where the rout would end. While superior artillery and good leadership played its part in these rapid nationalist advances, air superiority was the most notable cause of victory. The plains of Aragon provided easy landing fields. Aeroplanes thus could carry out the onetime functions of cavalry in driving republican units from their positions, as in a charge. From these battles, the Germans learnt much about the use of fighters for the support of infantry; the Russians more reluctantly did the same.
²

31. The campaigns in Aragon and the Levante, March–July 1938

On 3 April, Lérida and Gandesa fell to the nationalist armies. One hundred and forty British and American members of the 15th International Brigade were taken prisoner. The remains of the Brigade had however, held back Yagüe for several days, permitting regroupment and some withdrawal of material.

On 3 April, Aranda’s troops saw the Mediterranean. A few days later, the Italians almost reached the sea at the mouth of the Ebro. They were held up at Tortosa by stiff resistance from Lister. Colonel Gastone Gambara, in field command of the Italians, reported differences with the Spanish. Ciano for once agreed that his countrymen were not blameless. ‘So often Italian officers show a stubborn and provincial intolerance, explicable only by their ignorance of the world,’ he remarked.
¹
To the north, the advance of the nationalists continued into Catalonia. By 8 April, Balaguer, Tremp, and Camarasa had fallen. This cut Barcelona off from her hydro-electric plants in the Pyrenean waterfalls. The effect on the declining industry of Barcelona was severe. The old steam-generating plants of the city had to be put back to work. But no attack on Catalonia was launched: Franco diverted his main effort towards the sea. This was a strategic mistake. His decision was perhaps taken to avoid an extension of the conflict, for his intelligence is said to have reported the likelihood of French intervention if ‘the Germans’ should reach the Pyrenees.
²
Even so, Yagüe knew that there was nothing much between himself and Barcelona. It was a blow to him, as to others, to have to turn away from the enemy capital. Still, on Good Friday, Alonso Vega, leading the 4th Navarrese Division, took Vinaroz, a fishing town known for its lampreys. He was thus able to make the sign of the Cross on the shores of the Mediterranean. His men waded out into the sea in exultation. The republic was cut in two. García Valiño’s forces turned north and cut off numerous republicans in the northern Maestrazgo. By 19 April, Franco held forty miles of the Mediterranean. This series of victories, following the anxious moments over Christmas at Teruel, did suggest that, as Serrano Súñer said in a speech on 3 April, ‘the war approaches its close’.
³

The collapse of the Aragon front caused Negrín to fly again to Paris to demand that the French government reopen the frontier, closed since January, when the premier, Chautemps, had formed a government without the socialists. Originally, Negrín had wanted to say that the republic was about to launch a great counter-attack which, if well supplied by French and other foreign arms, could sweep back the enemy. He was talked out of that idea by Prieto, who thought that he should tell the truth, and say that only an instant delivery of arms could stave off defeat.
¹

Negrín arrived in the French capital at an opportune moment.
²
For France, like the rest of Europe, was shaken by Hitler’s rape of Austria on 12 March, when those Junkers 52s which had played such an important part in the early days of the civil war, flew again, to carry German soldiers to Vienna.
³
On 10 March, Chautemps’s ministry had fallen, for no good reason save that the Prime Minister did not like foreign crises. Blum formed his second government, with the enlightened Joseph Paul-Boncour as his foreign secretary. Chamberlain noted that the new French government was one ‘in which one cannot have the
slightest confidence’.
¹
It was certainly weak. It was also outspoken. Even the cautious René Massigli, political director at the Quai d’Orsay, had gone so far as to call non-intervention ‘a farce’.
²
Pierre Comert, director of information at the same ministry, was overheard to say, ‘We will avenge Austria in Spain’.
³
(Hitler had, however, told Schuschnigg, the Austrian chancellor, that if he did not yield to German demands, Austria would become ‘another Spain’.)
⁴
At a meeting of the French national defence committee, on 15 March, Blum suggested that the French send an ultimatum to Franco. This would state: ‘If, within twenty-four hours, you have not renounced the support of foreign forces, France will … reserve the right to take all measures of intervention which she judges useful.’ General Gamelin pointed out, however, that the general staff did not have a separate plan of mobilization for the south-west of France. Daladier said that world war would follow any French intervention in Spain. Léger, still secretary-general of the Quai d’Orsay, warned that intervention would be a
casus belli
for Germany and Italy, while Britain would break with France.
⁵

On 17 March, the French cabinet agreed to Negrín’s request to open the frontier.
⁶
Blum wept in sympathy with the republic as arms, purchased from Russia, private adventurers, the Comintern, and some in France herself, began to flow across the Pyrenean frontier into Spain. But further steps were rejected.
⁷
The idea that a French motorized corps might go to the aid of Catalonia was rejected by the chiefs of staff when they realized that such a step would be accompanied by general mobilization. Blum was assured by Colonel Morell, the French military
attaché in Barcelona, ‘
Monsieur le Président du Conseil! Je n’ai qu’un mot à vous dire: un roi de France ferait la guerre.
’
¹
But Ribbentrop was right when, on 21 March, he told the Italian chargé in Berlin, Magistrati, that France would not intervene in Spain without Britain’s support. (He doubted that Chamberlain ‘was bent on a policy of adventure’.)
²

But there were some members of the British government who were perturbed: and Captain Liddell Hart, the military historian who was then a special adviser to the war office, wrote a memorandum to Hore-Belisha, the British secretary of state for war, on 21 March, in which he concluded that ‘A friendly Spain is desirable, a neutral Spain is vital … from a strategical point of view, the political outcome of the present struggle is not, and cannot be, a matter of indifference to us.’
³
But what could be done? The question of volunteers in Spain had brought Eden’s quarrel with Chamberlain to a head, but seemed otherwise certain to remain unresolved—as France at least hoped that it would be. Halfway through this ‘Second Triumphal Year’,
⁴
the Generalissimo would not mind losing the Italian infantry, said the Marqués de Magaz, his courteous ambassador in Berlin; but he did require the Condor Legion and the Italian ‘specialists’ (particularly the pilots in Majorca) till the end of the war. Mussolini as usual was worrying why his precious infantry was not used more, so he pettishly ordered the air force in Majorca to cease operations till it was.
⁵
For this reason, Barcelona enjoyed, at the start of March 1938, peace from aerial attack. Bruno Mussolini, the Duce’s son, was then withdrawn from the air force engaged in Spain, after twenty-seven sorties. He had volunteered to take part, but withdrew, on Franco’s suggestion, when (it was falsely reported) special efforts had been undertaken by the republic to shoot him down.
⁶

On 16 March, Barcelona was again heavily bombed by the Italians. The German ambassador in Salamanca, Stohrer, reported the effects as ‘terrible. All parts of the city were affected. There was no evidence of any attempt to hit military objectives.’
¹
The first raid came at about ten o’clock in the evening. Six Hydro-Heinkels (flown by Germans) flew across the city at 80 miles an hour and 1,200 feet up. Thereafter raids by Savoias as well followed at three-hourly intervals until three o’clock in the afternoon of 18 March. There were seventeen raids in all. About 1,300 were killed and 2,000 injured.
²
Ciano reported that, as with the raids in February, orders for the attacks were given by Mussolini and that ‘Franco knew nothing about them’. Stohrer reported Franco furious.
³
The Italians now had three aerodromes on Majorca which depended on the air ministry in Rome and whose pilots were able to act independently of the nationalist high command.
⁴
On 19 March, indeed, the Generalissimo asked for their suspension, for fear of ‘complications abroad’. This did not prevent Ciano from lying to the American ambassador in Rome that Italy had no control over Italian aircraft operating in Spain. Mussolini, thinking, like his own ex-General Douhet, that aircraft could win a war by terror, declared his delight that the Italians ‘should be horrifying the world by their aggressiveness for a change, instead of charming it by the guitar’.
⁵
The republic had the fighters to repel these attacks, but internal rivalry and jealousy prevented them from making the most of their material. Demoralization was considerable until the fighters were withdrawn from the front and organized as a coastal defence force under Major García Lacalle.
⁶

The consternation abroad was considerable. Meetings of protest were held in London.
⁷
The most eloquent protest was George Barker’s
fine poem ‘Elegy for Spain’. Even Cordell Hull abandoned his customary caution to express horror ‘on behalf of the whole US people’. But indiscriminate raids on republican towns continued. The contribution which they made to the nationalist cause was probably not, however, worth the trouble which they brought. For instance, the petrol-storage station in Barcelona was attacked thirty-seven times before it was hit. Nor did the attacks interfere seriously with the loading and unloading of republican supply ships in Mediterranean harbours.

At this period of military crisis, the loathsome SIM came into its own in Barcelona. Designed to find spies, it also sought ‘defeatists’, defined as those guilty of profiteering, food-hoarding, or robbery. Summary trials before the special tribunals (
tribunales de guardia
) followed these charges. The SIM apparently also undertook a brief private murder campaign of vengeance against some of the PSUC’s critics in Barcelona, particularly anarchists. Forty people had been ‘taken for a ride’ before the government intervened to end this development. The special prisons of the SIM in Barcelona, especially that in the convent of San Juan, nevertheless remained full of strange tortures which might have been devised by the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe. A spherical room painted in black, with a single light at the top, gave a feeling of vertigo. Some cells were so small that one could not sit down. Such tortures were applied indiscriminately to nationalist and republican (or anarchist and POUM) prisoners, particularly the latter. ‘During the last year of the civil war,’ the then councillor of justice in the Catalan government, the erudite Professor Bosch Gimpera, recalled, ‘we spent a good deal of the time struggling against the military tribunals and the SIM.’
¹
Difficulties arose over the composition of the
tribunales de guardia,
since the presiding judge found himself without power
vis-à-vis
other members of the court, who always included a military officer and a member of the SIM itself. Many cases were held by these
tribunales
which should have been tried by the ordinary courts.
²
The SIM
did discover a number of genuine agents; in the spring of 1938, for example, they found a list of the Falange which operated in Catalonia. Three thousand five hundred persons were detained and, after interrogation which included torture, proof of espionage was detected.
¹

On his return from Paris in March, Negrín found Barcelona heavy with gloom. The fountainhead of the defeatism was, as he expected, Prieto. Stretched in his armchair in the ministry of national defence, he would blandly announce to journalists and sycophants, in the tone of a victor: ‘We are lost!’ Prieto infected everyone with this pessimism, including the easily influenced but hard-working foreign minister, Giral, who expressed his gloom to the French ambassador, Labonne. (Admittedly, Giral was in close touch with Azaña, who was even more gloomy than Prieto was.) Almost before Negrín had returned, therefore, the French government was being informed by their representative in Barcelona that any war material which they might allow to be sent to Catalonia might fall into the hands of Franco—or Hitler. It required all Negrín’s skill to convince Labonne that he, at all events, was resolved to fight on. But what was to be done about Prieto?
²
A cabinet meeting had been arranged for 16 March, the day of the worst bombing in Barcelona, at the Pedralbes Palace, under Azaña’s chairmanship. Before it began, Negrín spoke to both Prieto and Zugazagoitia, Prieto’s friend, the ex-editor of
El Socialista,
and minister of the interior, and begged them to support him if, at the meeting of the cabinet, anyone should mention negotiations. Both agreed to do so, thinking that the Prime Minister himself was going to propose mediation. Prieto suggested that republican funds abroad might be blocked so as to help those forced into exile after peace. Negrín hastily replied ‘all that is taken care of’.

At a preliminary meeting of ministers before the cabinet, Negrín said that he understood that some of the ministers were for peace. No
one replied. Giral, the foreign minister, said that Labonne, the French ambassador, had offered the members of the government a refuge at the French Embassy in the event of collapse. The republican fleet, Labonne had added, could sail to Bizerta or to Toulon. This last made everyone angry, for they thought that the French were thinking only of themselves, desiring to remove from the Mediterranean a potentially hostile fleet in nationalist hands. The ministers then moved into Azaña’s room. There, the angry noise of a great multitude could be heard moving towards the palace. A demonstration was being held to protest against surrender, and Prieto. Organized by the communists and supported by one or two prominent
Negrinistas,
including even Mariano Vázquez, the secretary-general of the CNT, the crowd carried banners on which were written ‘Down with the treacherous ministers!’ and even ‘Down with the minister of national defence!’ The gates of the Pedralbes Palace gave way, and a large Barcelona mob arrived beneath the french-windows of Azaña’s room. Prieto, the object of the crowd’s anger, could thus hear La Pasionaria, his particular enemy, haranguing her followers. Negrín persuaded the crowd to go away, having reassured a delegation headed by La Pasionaria that the war would go on.
¹
Prieto later accused the Prime Minister of organizing this demonstration. Yet Prieto could not have made headway with negotiations. For the nationalists would only have accepted unconditional surrender. That would have included the freedom to exterminate the ‘absolute enemy’—the phrase used by Serrano Súñer to describe every shade of left-wing opinion, from liberal to anarchist.
²

Ten days later, at a meeting of the socialist party executive, on 26 March, in his own house, Negrín belittled the differences between Prieto and the communists. Zugazagoitia intervened. ‘Don Juan,’ he said, ‘masks off! At the front, our comrades are being murdered because they refuse to accept communist commands. As for Don Indalecio, look at the articles in the
Frente Rojo
and
La Vanguardia
by “Juan Ventura”, a
nom de plume
of the minister of education!’
³
La Vanguardia,
a republican
paper which supported Negrín, had that day named Prieto an ‘impenitent pessimist’. Negrín answered that he needed both the communists and Prieto. The next day,
Frente Rojo
published another article by Hernández, suggesting Prieto’s dismissal. Zugazagoitia protested, at a cabinet meeting that night, that that had been published after the censor had struck it out. Hernández replied that a minister could not be censored by officials. Negrín calmed both the opponents.
¹

Prieto’s prestige, along with his self-confidence, had diminished after the fall of Teruel, even though his friends assured him that that city had been abandoned by the communists in order to discredit him. The truth of these allegations may never be disentangled, though a conscious plot to abandon Teruel can be discounted. But the communists’ manoeuvre against Prieto had certainly begun some weeks before. On 24 February, Hernández’s first article appeared in
Frente Rojo,
denouncing ‘the defeatists’. The decision by the communists to launch a deadly campaign of propaganda against the defence minister must have been taken shortly before that.