The Spanish Civil War (40 page)

The total of men under arms in 1936 was, on paper, just over 100,000 in the army in the Peninsula and 30,000 in Morocco, together with 33,000 civil guards, 14,000 carabineers and 18,000 assault guards. But in Spain figures on paper are never the last word since, as usual, about a third of the conscripts were on leave: men would be called up in February, given three months’ training, and then given leave at least for the summer, perhaps for the rest of their time of national service. Thus, the total in the Spanish army had been about 66,000, of whom some 34,000 were in the republican zone (together with some 12,000 ‘on leave’) and some 32,000 in the rebel zone (along with 13,200 ‘on leave’). In addition, the Army of Africa, of some 30,000, was wholly with the rebels. Probably about 18,000 civil guards were with the government, against 14,000 with the rebels; 12,000 assault guards with the government, 5,000 with the rebels; and 4,000 carabineers with the government, 10,000 with the rebels. As for the air force, 3,000 were probably with the government and 2,000 with the rebels; while, in respect of the navy, the figures might be 13,000 loyal and 7,000 rebellious.
²

Such estimates ignore the equally large numbers of men, also on both sides, who were ‘loyal’ or ‘rebellious’ only by accident of geography. Nor do men mean much, in modern war, if considered apart from their weapons, organization, leadership and training. For example, the 30,000 men in the Legion and in the Moroccan regiments were an excellent force if they could only be carried to the mainland. The conscripts on the Peninsula were often illiterate and as ignorant of discipline as were
the anarchists. In addition, many of the regular officers and NCOs who sided with the republic were not African veterans, and hence had little combat experience. Out of about 12,000 officers who were either on active service or retired, about 7,000 probably sided with, or were available to, the rebels (including officers in the civil guard and including some 2,750 in Africa). Some 5,000 officers were in what became the republican zone of Spain at the beginning of the war. Fifteen hundred of these were shot and another 1,500 dismissed from the army. Some 1,000 hid in embassies or elsewhere and perhaps escaped to nationalist Spain. There were also many retired officers, of whom some were happy to be asked to serve again in the army, even if some were disloyal.
¹

As for arms, there were probably over half a million rifles or portable arms in Spain and Morocco: the civil guard, assault guards and local police in the Basque country and Catalonia had about 100,000 rifles, the army about 400,000. The navy had some 30,000 rifles, the air force 6,000. These were mostly Mausers of 1893 vintage. There were also some 3,000 automatic rifles, made in Spain, of Trapote type, and 1,650 Hotchkiss machine-guns, bought from France. Of these, the government, after the rebellion, had probably a little over half the rifles (perhaps 275,000) and perhaps a third of the automatic weapons. No one knows how many militarily useful weapons there were before the war in private hands or with political parties. The government retained about 400 out of the 1,000 pieces of artillery in the country, as well as the arms factories at Trubia in Asturias, Reinosa in Santander and Placencia de las Armas in the Basque country. All the artillery was old-fashioned, mostly made by Schneider, but nevertheless not easily co-ordinated: Howitzers ranged from 105 to 155 millimetre, cannon from 70 to 150 millimetre; coastal artillery was larger. But in the arms factories, ammunition and explosives plants (at Toledo, Murcia, Galdacano, Guernica, Eibar and La Manjoya), there were possibilities of renewal and new production. As for tanks there were but twenty of them in Spain in 1936: the rebels held onto eight of these, the republic twelve. By and large, the government did not lack weapons in 1936. What they lacked was military leadership, organization, workmanship and discipline.

There were some 400 aircraft in the country: about a hundred were civil aircraft, either private planes, or aircraft used for the post.
¹
The navy had about one hundred aircraft, mostly seaplanes,
²
while the air force proper (a division of the army and commanded by regular army officers) had 50 fighters, 100 reconnaissance aircraft, and 30 light bombers.
³
Many (perhaps a third) of the military aircraft were in bad repair, were unarmed or could not fly for some other reason. In consequence, about two hundred serviceable aircraft turned out to be in government hands in July 1936, while the rebels had a few less than a hundred.
⁴
The government retained Spain’s four fighter squadrons, based at Getafe and Barcelona, and one patrol squadron;
⁵
the rebels had no full squadrons, only about ten fighters, which chanced to be at one of the few airfields to fall into their hands. The ninety Breguet XIX reconnaissance aircraft were divided nearly equally between the two sides. The republic had five Fokker bombers, as opposed to the rebels’ three (including the one which brought the first legionaries to Seville), and four De Havilland Dragon bombers, as opposed to the rebels’ one (the aircraft which had taken the ill-fated General Núñez de Prado to Barcelona). The republic retained the four Douglas DC2s, and some Dornier Wal bombers bought by the army the previous year, as well as most of the naval aircraft. The postal aircraft and some fifty light aircraft remained with the government but the rebels had about a dozen useful sporting aircraft belonging to the Aeroclub of Andalusia. Reserves of bombs and munitions on both sides were negligible. Of air
force pilots, there were some 150 republicans to about 90 nationalists, but the rebels could call on some private or retired fliers, such as King Alfonso’s brilliant cousin, the Infante Antonio de Orleans, who had fought as a bomber pilot in Morocco before 1914.
¹

As for the navy, the government had there, it seemed, a greater superiority than in the other arms, since they held the battleship
Jaime I,
three cruisers (the
Libertad,
the
Miguel de Cervantes
and the
Méndez Núñez
), twenty modern destroyers and twelve submarines. The rebels had only the
Jaime I
’s twin, the battleship
España,
then in dry dock, the cruisers
República
²
(an old ship) and
Almirante Cervera,
one destroyer,
El Velasco,
five gunboats, two submarines and some coastguard ships.

The government’s advantage was only apparent. The rebels had the main naval dockyard at El Ferrol, where two new cruisers, the
Canarias
and the
Baleares,
were nearing completion, along with Spain’s only two minelayers. They had also a small naval base at Cádiz and a harbour at Algeciras. Against this, the republic had only the small naval building yard at Cartagena, and no dry dock suitable for their cruisers: Mahon, in Minorca, had a floating-dock adequate for destroyers and submarines, but not for bigger craft. More important, the revolution in the fleet meant that the republic could count on only two admirals out of nineteen, two captains of ships of the line out of thirty-one, seven captains of frigates out of sixty-five, and only thirteen captains of corvette out of 128. These few officers were also demoralized by the murder of many of their comrades and the insecurity of their own position. But other matters favoured the republicans at sea. The ports of Barcelona and Bilbao could be fitted out to serve a navy, and they had over two-thirds of the merchant fleet of Spain (some 1,000 ships, many of which could be refitted for war).

If there was going to be a long fight, the republic seemed in a strong position from an economic point of view: they had most of Spain’s industry, in Catalonia and the Basque country, the seat of Spanish clothing manufacture and of its iron and steel. In Asturias, they controlled the coal of the country, and they had the chemical and explosives plants. They had the gold reserves of the Bank of Spain. They had also the two cities of Spain with a population over a million (Madrid and Barcelona), and five out of the nine others which exceeded 100,000.
¹
They perhaps controlled a population of some 14 million, as opposed to 10 million with the rebels, and, while Burgos and Pamplona and perhaps some other cities in the north might be enthusiastic for the rising, Saragossa, Seville, Granada and Córdoba were far from it. The government probably held two-thirds of the 200,000 motor-cars then in Spain, most of the 60,000 buses and lorries, much of the 4,000 railway engines and the 100,000 rolling stock. The cereal-growing areas of Spain were, on the other hand, almost equally divided, even if, after some weeks, nationalist advances would give the rebels two-thirds of the wheat-growing areas. The rebels had the sheep of Castile and Estremadura, the pigs of Galicia and Estremadura, as well as the beef cattle of Galicia and Castile. Cheese and butter production, the cotton, sugar, and potato regions, the flax, and the fishing industries were also mostly with the rebels. The government had, on the other hand, the best olive- and wine-growing areas, of La Mancha and Catalonia (though not Rioja), and the fruit, rice and vegetable regions on the Mediterranean coast. The nationalists had much of the forests, including the corks of Estremadura and the wooded hills of Galicia; they had also the tin, the copper and the manganese which partially compensated for the republic’s control of the iron. But republican Spain had Almadén, with its mercury. The government controlled about 240,000 square miles, the rebels only 110,000. But the rebels’ possession of Morocco, the two archipelagos of the Canaries and the Balearics (except for Minorca), together with most of the territory adjoining friendly Portugal, gave them a strategic advantage. On the other hand, the republic had the two main entry points for rail and road to France, as well as the north coast.

Both contestants, independently, began in this balanced, if tragic, situation to think of procuring decisive help from abroad. Both, also independently, thought that this help could come best in the form of aircraft (though Mola was short of ammunition and could not advance in late July primarily for that reason). The aeroplane was the unknown factor. It seemed the weapon of the future. Hence the unfolding war became the first serious war in the air (as it had been the first rebellion of the telephone age).

For many generations, Spain had played little part in international conflicts, and foreign affairs had played a minor part in domestic politics. During the first years of the republic, Spain had been a conscientious member of the League of Nations, though Gil Robles had criticized the League’s condemnation of Mussolini. Now, if the Spanish Civil War became an international crisis, if both sides were soon accusing the other of causing a foreign invasion, if cries of ‘We don’t want foreigners here’ were to ring out as battle slogans in the lonely valleys of Aragon, and if nearly everyone from abroad who has written of the war records some Spaniard, on one side or the other, wishing that the ‘foreigners’ would leave the Spaniards to fight their own battles, it was the Spaniards themselves who, to begin with, sought aid from outside, not the powers of Europe who insisted on intervening.
¹

These appeals were the culmination of several generations of ambiguity in the feelings of Spaniards towards the outside world. Was Europe to be emulated, or kept at a distance? If the first, should the inspiration be martial Germany or peaceful England? Unamuno thought that to ‘japonize’ Spain would ruin all chances of national revival. Such ‘Africanism’ endeared Unamuno to the Right, which had looked on all
reformers as frenchified (
afrancesado
) since 1808. But no one was consistent. Those who accused socialists of being ‘anti-Spanish’ spent the summers in Biarritz. If Catholics saw an international plot in freemasonry, freemasons were equally justified in believing that those loyal to the church of Rome were concerned in as great a conspiracy directed by the Pope. The middle classes of Spain had, of course, commercial connections with other countries. The famous International Telegraph and Telephone Company owned the Spanish telephone system.
¹
Other American interests (totalling $80 million) were General Motors, Ford, Firestone Rubber, and some cotton stocks.
²

The British Río Tinto Company had extensive holdings in copper and pyrites, while the Tarsis Company of Glasgow also had large holdings in Spanish copper. The Armstrong Company owned a third of Spanish cork. The waterworks of Seville were also British-owned. Britain, the largest foreign investor, held about £40 million ($194 million) invested in Spain, out of a total of £200 million ($970 million) foreign capital in all.
³

The French controlled the lead mines at Peñarroya and San Plato, and had built the railways. Their total investment was about £28 million ($135 million). The Belgians also had large holdings in Spanish timber, tramways, and railways, and in the coal mines of Asturias. A Canadian company had organized the distribution of electricity in Catalonia. These, the most important of many foreign investments, were extensive interests in a country as little developed as Spain.

The US, Germany, Britain and France provided respectively 34, 28, 22 and 12 per cent of Spanish imports and Britain, Germany, France and the US took 43, 26, 12 and 10 per cent of her exports. Spanish iron ore had been a standard item in the British iron and steel industry for many years—57 per cent of Spanish production went to Britain in 1935—and ore for Britain occupied most of the Spanish merchant marine. Then the Falange, for all its nationalism, was certainly no more
representative of the Spanish tradition than, say, the anarchists; and, while there was an increase in Russian propaganda in Spain before the civil war, there was also much information about Nazi Germany. The Nazi party had a following of some 600 among the German colony in Spain, which numbered about 13,000.
¹
The Spanish section of the German Labour Front had over fifty branches. German tourist offices and bookshops proliferated during the months before the civil war, though the Nazis were chiefly active in checking the behaviour of German officials and diplomats. When so many ‘solutions’ to Spain’s troubles were being canvassed, the example of Nazi Germany, the disciplined enemy of decadent France, naturally exercised a powerful influence over the imaginations of young Spanish middle-class people; while several monarchist officers had good memories of relations with Germany in the 1920s.

In a broad sense, the Spanish Civil War was the consequence of the working of general European ideas upon Spain. Each of the leading political ideas of Europe since the sixteenth century has been received with enthusiasm by one group of Spaniards and opposed by another, without any desire for compromise being shown by either side: the universalist roman Catholicism of the Habsburgs, the absolutism of the Bourbons, French revolutionary liberalism, romantic separatism, socialism, anarchism, communism, and fascism. It was inevitable, therefore, that the war which began in 1936 should become a European crisis. As in the war of the Spanish Succession, the War of Independence, and during the First Carlist War, the prestige, the wealth and, in some instances, the people of the rest of Europe became, during 1936, intimately connected with the Spanish conflict. General European ideas had brought Spaniards to the pitch of war. European powers became entangled in the war at the Spaniards’ request. The same great powers were then responsible for much of its course, above all for assisting one side or the other when they seemed to be losing. Throughout the civil war, the alternate repugnance and attraction
which the rest of Europe has always had for Spain, and Spain for the rest of Europe, was reflected in the international implications of the fighting.
¹

On the night of 19 July, José Giral, the new Prime Minister of the republic, sent a telegram,
en clair,
to the Prime Minister of France: ‘Surprised by a dangerous military
coup.
Beg of you to help us immediately with arms and aeroplanes. Fraternally yours Giral.’
²
The fact that Giral sought to communicate direct with his French colleague is explained by the comradely signature. For it seemed certain that Léon Blum, the new socialist French Prime Minister, would be more sympathetic to an appeal for help than the Spanish ambassador in Paris, Juan de Cárdenas, a diplomat of the old school.
³
(The latter’s replacement by the Left Republican politician Álvaro de Albornoz had already been announced.)

Léon Blum, that passionate and sensitive Frenchman, had been Prime Minister of France only since 5 June, at the head of a ministry of socialists and radicals which enjoyed the support of the communists. Like the Spanish government, it had been formed as a result of a Popular Front electoral alliance. Though pacifist by inclination and anxious to proceed with the redress of social problems at home, Blum and his colleagues knew that the predicament of the Spanish republic was important to France. For, at this time, in Paris, Lyon, and in all the cities of France, there were many street clashes between Left and Right, between the socialists or communists and fascist groups, such as La Croix du Feu and L’Action Française. Blum’s sympathy for the republic was buttressed by strategic calculations, since a nationalist Spain would presumably be hostile to France. When, therefore, Blum received Giral’s telegram, on the morning of 20 July, he summoned the foreign
secretary, Yvon Delbos, and Edouard Daladier, his war minister. Both these men were radicals. Although they might have been supposed likely to sympathize less with the Spanish republic than the socialist members of the cabinet, they immediately agreed to help Giral.

Meantime, late on 19 July, Luis Bolín, on behalf of General Franco, still in the Dragon Rapide, and still piloted by the Englishman Captain Bebb, flew to Biarritz and then on to Rome to make a formal request to the Italian government for twelve bombers, three fighters, and a certain number of bombs. This request by Franco was counter-signed by Sanjurjo in Lisbon.
¹
At the same time, a nationalist communiqué proudly announced that ‘the interests of Spain are not alone at stake as our trumpet-call sounds across the Straits of Gibraltar’;
²
while the British authorities in Gibraltar placed at the disposal of General Kindelán, the most senior air-force officer to side with the rebels, telephone lines upon which he and his friends could speak direct to Berlin and to Rome in subsequent weeks.
³

On 21 July, the first reaction to the Spanish crisis also apparently occurred in Moscow. A joint meeting was held of the secretariats of the Comintern and Profintern (the body set up to coordinate communist activity in western trade unions). There was support for the idea of aid to the republic, and a new meeting was arranged for 26 July.
⁴

The reaction of Stalin towards the outbreak of the Spanish war (whatever part the Spanish communists had played before) was dictated by the question of how it would affect the current needs of Russian foreign policy. If, as in the case of China in 1926, communist opportunities would have to be sacrificed, then sacrificed they would be: the aims of communism could not be different from those of Russia. Fear of war had caused Stalin to emerge from his isolation of the late 1920s to enter the League
of Nations in 1934, and to conclude the pact with France in 1935. Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister, had spoken eloquently in the League for collective security.
¹
A nationalist victory in the civil war in Spain would mean that France would be surrounded on three sides by potentially hostile countries. That would make it easier for Germany to attack Russia without fearing French attacks in her rear. For that reason alone, Stalin had a strong interest in the prevention of a nationalist victory.

The Spanish war also afforded to the Spanish communist party, with its discipline, its skill at propaganda, and its prestige deriving from its connection with Russia, great opportunities, but at that time no one could foresee quite how powerful that party would grow. At the same time, overweening communist behaviour would alarm Britain and France. For that reason Stalin did not send orders to the Spanish communist party and his chief agents there, Codovilla and Stepanov, to make full use of every opportunity to gain control of the Spanish republic. He also hesitated about sending arms to Spain.
²
He was then about to embark upon a new stage of the purge of the old bolsheviks. That perhaps caused the Russian dictator to listen with unusual attention to the leaders of the Comintern at this time. Dimitrov, Togliatti and Marty, to take only three of the most important international communists then in Moscow, must have had their own feelings as to what should be the communist reaction to the war in Spain. They could point out how, while Stalin delayed, Trotsky was already naming him ‘liquidator and traitor of the Spanish revolution, abettor of Hitler and Mussolini’. With crablike caution, therefore, Stalin apparently reached one decision about Spain: he would not permit the republic to lose, even though he would not necessarily help it to win. The continuance of the war would keep him free to act in any way. It might even make possible a world war in which France, Britain, Germany, and Italy would destroy themselves, with Russia,
the arbiter, staying outside.
¹
Thus the Russian government would support the agitation for aid to Spain, for the time being only in food and raw materials, and ensure that Russian factory workers made a ‘contribution’. The Comintern representatives in Spain would be reinforced. The able, courteous, educated and ruthless leader of the Italian communist party in exile, Togliatti, for some time previously director of Spanish and Italian affairs in the Comintern, thus soon went to Spain, using the name ‘Alfredo’, as director of tactics of the Spanish communist party.
²
The Livornese communist Ettore Quaglierini occupied himself with the publications of the Spanish communist party and helped their fellow countryman, Vidali (‘Carlos’), with the projection of the Fifth Regiment as a model of military efficiency. One more communist international leader was the Hungarian Ernö Gerö, ‘Pedro’ or ‘Gueré’, who became responsible for the guidance of the communists in Catalonia.
³
The Bulgarian Stepanov and Codovilla, the two Comintern representatives who had been in Spain for some years, remained.
⁴
The combination of a swiftly growing party and an inexperienced leadership gave special importance to
the international functionaries. Men like Stepanov strutted across the stage of Spanish revolutionary history as if they were gods, disdainful of Spaniards, breathing mystery and power, but actually cynical, fearful of Stalin, and bureaucratic. Stepanov himself, protected by a staff of secretaries such as ‘Angelita’, a ‘real demon, beautiful but cold and cruel’, and ‘Carmen the Fat’, a Russian who became head of the cadre section of the united youth, established a virtual tyranny over the central committee of the party.
¹

The western European propaganda section of the Comintern, under its brilliant German communist chief, Willi Muenzenberg, also became active in its headquarters in Paris in linking the cause of the Spanish republic with its general anti-fascist crusade.
²
The Spanish war was indeed a godsend to agitators for the Popular Front and the anti-fascist, hence pro-Soviet, cause. ‘
A notre secours, à votre secours,
’ pleaded Romain Rolland, the French novelist whose activities expressed the short-lived alliance between literature, pacifism and friendship with Russia, ‘
au secours de l’Espagne!
’
³

While these matters were being haltingly mooted in Moscow and Paris, Franco’s agent, the journalist Bolín, reached Rome, on 21 July. The next day, he and the Marqués de Viana, a monarchist (who had just come from ex-King Alfonso in Vienna), saw Count Ciano, the Italian foreign minister. Some years later, Ciano told Hitler that the Spaniards said that twelve transport aircraft would enable Franco to win the war in a few days.
⁴

With Franco’s first emissaries, Ciano was enthusiastic, but Mussolini had to be consulted. It was not clear to the Duce what connection Franco had with the monarchist plotters to whom he, Mussolini, had pledged help in 1934.
⁵
Nor apparently did Franco know of that arrangement. It
was not until Mola sent the monarchist Goicoechea, the leading figure in the events of 1934, to Rome on 24 July, that the Italians agreed to listen seriously to the Spanish rebels.
¹
But, also on 22 July, Franco made his first approach to Germany for help. On his behalf, Colonel Beigbeder, an ex-military attaché in Berlin, who had installed himself in the department of native affairs at Tetuán, sent a ‘very urgent request’ to General Kuhlenthal, German military attaché in Paris, accredited also to Madrid, for ‘ten transport aircraft, with maximum seating capacity’, to be purchased through German private firms and brought by German pilots to Spanish Morocco.
²
These were needed to supplement the old Breguets in getting the Army of Africa across the Straits. (Beigbeder was aware of past German links with Spain in matters of arms supply. He and Kuhlenthal had travelled in Morocco in 1935 and Kuhlenthal had known Franco since the days of the revolution in Asturias.)