The Spanish Civil War (88 page)

On 24 July 1938, Negrín told the republican war council in Barcelona that Valencia would be lost unless there were a diversionary attack elsewhere. General Rojo, chief of staff, therefore proposed to attack to the north of the nationalists’ salient to the Mediterranean. The plan was to force a passage across the broad river Ebro at several points, about seventy miles from the sea, in order first to confuse communications between the nationalists in the Levante and in Catalonia and secondly, if possible, restore land communications between Catalonia and the rest of republican Spain. To carry out this scheme, a new ‘Army of the Ebro’ had been constituted under Modesto, consisting of the 5th Army Corps under Lister, the 12th under Etelvino Vega and the 15th under Manuel Tagüeña. The 18th Army Corps, under José del Barrio, was in reserve. This force of 80,000 men was to be supported by 70–80 field batteries, and 27 anti-aircraft guns. The republicans’ air support had been much improved, thanks to the Supermosca and Superchato fighters manned by Spaniards who had been trained in Russia. All the proposed leading commanders of the Army of the Ebro were communists, corps commanders and divisional commanders alike, as well as, of course, Modesto. Indeed, these commanders met regularly, as party members, with the directorate of the party.
¹
The anarchists held only two brigade
commands out of twenty-seven in the whole Army of the Ebro.
¹
They were not, however, anything like so badly represented as that in other armies. For example, Colonel Perea, commander of the Army of the East, had always been sympathetic to the anarchists, while, of the five armies of the central zone, under Miaja, only one (the unimportant Army of Estremadura) was led by one who could be called even a communist sympathizer, Colonel Burrillo.
²
The others may not have been anarchists, but they were not communists.

In addition, the communists were not united: Modesto and Lister, the two outstanding military successes of the war, were on bad terms. Modesto was a sarcastic, despotic Andalusian, sometimes brutal, rarely candid, but a real military leader, with no political gifts or ambitions. Lister was a warm-hearted and ambitious orator, with a strong sense of friendship, undisciplined, and ready to lend himself to any propaganda activity, which he carried out well; sometimes harsh, he also tolerated innumerable mistakes by his subordinates if he liked them.
³
In addition, many new communists were really bourgeois in all but name. Other successful communist commanders had had their political attitudes formed exclusively by the war. No one knew what views they would have afterwards. The chief of staff of the army, Rojo, continued to seem to the anarchists all too tolerant of the communists, but he was a technician pure and simple. Bernal, the chief of transport, was a known anti-revolutionary. The socialist chief of administration of the army, Trifón Gómez, was a follower of Prieto’s, and had even been removed from the party directorate in 1934 when Largo Caballero began his move to the Left. Colonel Jurado, the artillery officer, now in charge of anti-aircraft, was thought by some to have backed the republic by accident. Manuel Albar, in charge of coordination of the different commissariats, and Alfonso Játiva, the sub-secretary of the navy, were men of Prieto. So too were Belarmino Tomás, the new commissar of the air, and Zugazagoitia, the secretary-general of defence—though his job scarcely existed.
⁴
Many other assignments in the ministry of war were still held, as they had been under Prieto, by politically neutral professional officers rather than by communists. For example, artillery was still directed by Colonel Fuentes, the officer who had seemed so anti-Russian to Major Voronov in November 1936; Colonel Montaud, one of the commanders of the Basque army, directed communications; Doctor José Puché, rector of the University of Valencia, a friend of Negrín, was head of the army medical corps; only Major Azcárate, a cousin of the ambassador, who controlled the engineering corps, and Colonel Sánchez Paredes, the tank specialist, could be regarded as close to the communist party. The sub-secretary in charge of arms purchase, the enigmatic socialist deputy for Granada, Alejandro Otero, seemed, on the other hand, a capitalist of wide imagination. The communist-led units received the lion’s share of the best arms; but they were the offensive ones.

In the Army of the Ebro, the rise of Manuel Tagüeña, still under thirty, but in command of an Army Corps, with no military experience before 1936, was symbolic of what befell the large number of young men, chiefly communists, or members of the united youth, who gained field command in the later stages of the civil war.
¹
Tagüeña’s communism was that of a patriotic fighting-man, not that of an ‘ideologue’.

These reorganized armies held on in republican Spain throughout 1938. The recovery after the defeats of the spring was a great achievement. The opening of the French frontier in March was partly responsible. The calling up of new classes of reserves was also important, as was the provision of new officers’ schools. The recovery was also the stubborn work of embattled men, most of them under twenty-five, who knew that they stood to lose all, including their lives, unless they worked until they dropped.

It was audacious of the republic, with the French frontier once more closed, to embark upon an offensive, in the summer of 1938, as the examples of Brunete, Belchite, and Teruel might have suggested to them. The pattern of those battles—the early success of the attack; containment by nationalist reinforcements, hurried from other fronts;
and a nationalist counter-attack—was indeed followed in the battle of the Ebro, though on a larger scale, and with more terrible consequences than in those other engagements.
¹

Still, at a quarter past midnight on the night of 24–25 July, with no moon, the crossing of the Ebro began. Units under Tagüeña started to cross the river between Mequinenza and Fayón. Lister and the 5th Army Corps began to cross at sixteen points in the great arc to the south between Fayón and Cherta, notably at Flix, Mora la Nueva, Miravet, and thirty miles further to the south, at Amposta, near the sea. Ninety boats (each of which carried 10 men), 3 pontoon bridges, and about 12 others had been assembled. The armoured accompaniment consisted of 22 T-26 tanks and 4 companies of armoured cars, armed with machine-guns, not cannon. More material would follow across the bridges, once these could safely be swung across the river. The first unit across in Lister’s Corps was the Hans Beimler Battalion of the 11th International Brigade, reconstructed, composed of Germans, Scandinavians and Catalans, whose commanders led the way with a cry of ‘Forward, sons of Negrín!’, in unfamiliar accents.
²
The river Ebro is at Mora some hundred yards wide and runs through a fairly steep gorge.

The other side of the river from Mequinenza to the sea was guarded at this time by the Army of Morocco, to whose command Yagüe had recently returned. The officers of the 50th Division, commanded by Colonel Campos, had sent reports that good troops had been assembled across the river, but the high command had dis
counted them. The front in Spain was 1,100 miles long and every rumour could not be investigated.
¹
At half-past two in the morning, Colonel Peñarredonda (in command of the sector of Mora) reported to Yagüe that the republicans had crossed the Ebro. Some of Peñarredonda’s men had heard firing from behind, while he and his divisional headquarters had lost contact with their flanks. This colonel was one of the most cruel in the nationalist army. He had a particular hatred of the International Brigades and, on his own responsibility, gave orders that any of them captured should be shot. He even instructed the English Captain Peter Kemp, serving in his battalion, to shoot a fellow Irishman as a special protest against intervention on either side.
²
The 14th (Franco-Belgian) International Brigade meantime crossed the Ebro near Amposta, and engaged forces led by General López Bravo. This crossing failed, but it had been regarded as an advance of secondary importance. The battle, nevertheless, continued there for eighteen hours, after which those who remained retreated in disorder across the river as best they might, leaving six hundred dead and much material behind them. Higher up, the first stages of the attack were successful. All the riparian villages in the centre of the front had been occupied by daybreak. A huge bridgehead had been established. Those who crossed, including the 15th International Brigade, continued inland, to outflank, surround, and capture the demoralized troops of Peñarredonda. By evening, that officer had received permission to retreat, with those of his men whom he could take with him. The shaken colonel himself thereafter retired to Saragossa and was seen no more in the war. To the north, at Mequinenza, Tagüeña had advanced three miles from the Ebro. In the centre, Lister had advanced twenty-five miles, and almost reached the small town of Gandesa (it had a population of 3,396 in 1937). Between Gandesa and the river, all the main observation points on high ground were captured. Four thousand nationalist prisoners had been taken, many desertions following.

Franco ordered the heavy reinforcement of the region by the divisions of Barrón, Alfredo Galera, Delgado Serrano, Rada, Alonso Vega,
Castejón (from Andalusia), and Arias. Colonel Martínez de Campos recorded in his diary that, while with his artillery in the Sierra de Espadán, just north of Segorbe and Sagunto, he suddenly received orders to ‘halt the movements begun … the enemy has crossed the Ebro’.
¹
Franco at first considered permitting an advance so deep as to allow a pincer movement which would destroy the whole republican army. He was talked out of this, but kept the bridges under bombardment; he determined not to make any advance by infantry until artillery and aircraft had established complete command.

The main battle occurred at Gandesa. This town was assaulted by Lister, day and night, during the hot days of the Aragon summer. On 1 August, the 15th International Brigade launched their most fierce attack upon Hill 481, named by them ‘The Pimple’, immediately before Gandesa. Once again the death-roll was heavy, as it had been inside Gandesa, during fighting for that town in March. Among those killed was Lewis Clive, socialist councillor in South Kensington, and David Haden Guest, a young communist philosopher from Cambridge.
²
By 2 August, the republican advance had been contained. The front lay straight from Fayón to Cherta, along the base of the Ebro’s arc, but scooping eastwards to leave the nationalists with Villalba de los Arcos and Gandesa. In the north, the pocket between Mequinenza and Fayón was ten miles at its widest. Yagüe showed himself as gifted an organizer of defence as of advance. He was calm throughout. Nevertheless, technical weaknesses were probably the reasons for the republic’s failure to advance further. An iron bridge across the Ebro for the passage of heavy tanks took far too long to establish. The republican infantrymen had to go to the front on foot, because of a shortage of lorries. Furthermore, the nationalists were able to complete their defences of Gandesa, including trenches, without republican bombing, at a time when most of the nationalist fighters were still at Valencia (the bombers were busy bombing the Ebro bridges). Modesto had wanted to bomb Gandesa but he was thwarted by Colonel Visiedo, the chief of operations in the air ministry: Colonel García Lacalle, the republic’s fighter commander, who proposed the bombing, believed Visiedo, a conventional officer, to be little less than treacherous in this negative
attitude but then accusations of treachery were almost as frequent as those of Trotskyism in the republican camp.
¹
On 14 August, the HISMA chief, Bernhardt, nevertheless, had to telegraph Göring for more ammunition for the invaluable 88-millimetre anti-aircraft guns, to meet the ‘acute military danger’.
²
The orders issued by Lister and Tagüeña remained—‘vigilance, fortification and resistance’. These words were repeated throughout the following weeks. Officers and men were shot for retreating. Sergeants were ordered to kill their officers if they gave the command to retire without written orders from above. ‘If anyone loses an inch of ground,’ Lister ordered, ‘he must re-take it at the head of his men or be executed.’
³

33. The battle of the Ebro, July–November 1938

Franco never permitted even a tactical setback to go unchallenged. He determined to press the republic back from the territory which it had won. Almost all the nationalist air force was concentrated on the Ebro: some three hundred aircraft altogether. Franco was criticized in this decision at the time by other generals such as Aranda. But the decision was his and characteristically so. Franco’s tactics were to make an intense artillery and aerial attack upon a given point, small in area, so that resistance would be impossible. Then an attack would be carried out by small bodies of men—perhaps only two battalions. The nationalist artillery commander here was the cultivated monarchist Martínez de Campos, who had been commander of artillery throughout the campaign in the north. The battle of the Ebro became, under his direction, a major artillery contest—the only occasion when in Spain the classic formula ‘artillery conquers the ground, infantry occupies it’ was fully applied.