The Spanish Civil War (99 page)

The anarchists believed that the war would have been won if the proletarian revolution had been fully carried out in its first days. But in those areas where revolution was put before military preparation, such as west Andalusia and Estremadura, the Army of Africa cut through its enemies as a knife through butter. The fighting between anarchists and communists began early; throughout the spring of 1937, communists were shooting anarchists and
POUMistas.
This unedifying stanza in the epic of the Spanish revolution culminated in the May Days. There followed the communist repression of the Council of Aragon. Finally, the war ended, bizarrely, as it had begun, with a professional officer rising against the government to avoid communism. The republic was thus much hampered by the disputes between those who supported it. Even when the communists, through superior skill, had gained a prominent position, the silent suspicion which they inspired sapped morale. The ‘golden century’ of Spain had been wracked by the hatred of old christians or Jewish converts. Similarly, the intellectual renaissance of the Spanish working class in the twentieth century was characterized by equal tension between Marxists and Bakuninists, to give communism and anarchism an appropriately personal colouring. (The ‘liberals’ backed first the one, then the other.) Did all the parties feel so strongly about their own policies that defeat itself seemed preferable to a surrender of the purity of their individual views? It would be more truthful to say simply that no one was able to forge a unity out of the republican warring tribes as Franco was able to do among the nationalists. Politicians spoke of the petty caliphates of the early middle ages to describe the political, as well as the territorial, divisions of the republic: General Llano de la Encomienda’s lost cheese on the ‘frontier’ between Asturias and Santander was a symbol of the disunity.
¹
Negrín did his best. But such a policy meant making use of the communist party. The non-intervention policy of the western democracies forced Negrín to a dangerous reliance on Russia. It would have been inconceivable not to have used the fighting qualities of the communists. But some aspects
of communist behaviour, in particular their inhumanity and untruthfulness, poisoned the lifeblood of the republican cause.

A real revolutionary state, such as Russia became in 1919, rather than a revolutionary anarchist society, might, it is true, have made war more effectively. But that would have necessitated the capture of power by a communist party stronger than that which did exist; and such a thing would have been even less to the anarchists’ liking. Further, given the character of Europe at that time, not to speak of Spain, it is doubtful if a revolutionary republic would have been allowed to enjoy its triumph peacefully.

How easy to feel sympathy for the anarchist leaders in their dilemmas during the war! Anarchism had a creative and original contribution to make to Spanish society. No doubt, an anarchist revolution of a full-blooded style was impossible unless a much higher percentage of the population were favourable.
¹
But a less full-blooded revolution could perhaps have existed alongside a mixed society. Anarchists simply killed too many people at the beginning of the civil war. It was also the moderate Juan Peiró who wrote, in October 1938, that ‘on the first day after the military victory’ over fascism, the libertarian struggle would begin again against Marxism and the middle class. He nevertheless ‘hoped to avoid a civil war among the Left’; a scarcely comforting remark, after two years of conflict.
²
To some extent, too, the anarchists, who were nothing if not honest, created their own enemies. People who had never read a word of Marx joined the communists since they sought security against the anarchist gangs of July 1936, in which hardened criminals worked hand in hand with idealists. The bourgeois members of the Spanish communist party defended their property through that party; they were not negligible. From the angle of the 1990s, and the modern industrial state of large corporations, as from the state enterprises of modern Russia, the petty bourgeoisie of old Spain, with the numerous small firms, do not seem the worst enemies that the Spanish working class has ever had.

Tragically, the one department of republican politics where Negrín, with backing from Azaña, was able to bring unity—the relation of central with autonomous authority in Catalonia—brought disillusion.
It was also an error not to maintain, or revive, constitutional life. The Prime Minister should have been regularly and rigorously questioned in the Cortes, once order had been restored. The lack of a vigorous democratic life reflected on the efficiency, as well as the good name, of the republic. The opposition should have been able to question the successive ministers on the conduct of the war even if elections would have been difficult.

Franco was fortunate: if the Czech crisis had led in 1938 to a world war, rather than to Munich, a French army might have intervened to save the republic. Had it not been for Colonel Casado’s
coup d’état,
the war might have lingered on into the summer of 1939. The Anglo-French guarantee to Poland came at the end of March and their pursuit of a Russian alliance began in May. It will be thus seen how close Negrín was to realizing his aim of drawing the logical conclusion from the fact of foreign intervention in the conflict, and subsuming the Spanish in the European war.

Franco was obstinate in opposing the idea of mediation. A compromise peace would almost certainly have been welcomed by a majority of Spaniards had they been consulted at any moment after August 1936. Azaña and Negrín began to pursue this chimera from the middle of 1937. It goes without saying that such a compromise would have saved thousands of lives. The saving of life as such was, however, never an important consideration for Franco, who profited from his victory to carry on with his odious policy of
limpieza:
the ‘cleaning up’ of Spain from the doctrines which he considered evil. Franco and Serrano Súñer considered that their alliance with Germany and Italy was bringing them into touch with the wave of the future, which seemed likely then to triumph in Europe. The
limpieza
did not work: ‘French’ ideas have long since returned to Spain, along with
ragoût,
Marxists, anarchists, and even democrats. A mediated peace would thus not only have been humane: it would have recognized the possibilities open in the long run to Spain in the twentieth century in a way which Franco’s pursuit of the absolute monarchy could not, either in the war or the peace of exhaustion that followed. If the nationalists had not made evident their desire to punish many people after their victory, the war could have been brought to an end a year before it did.
¹
But with ‘
anti-
España
’, they wanted no compromise, any more than they had wanted one with Abd-el-Krim; and the ‘crusade of liberation’ was indeed fought as if it were a great colonial war, led by men such as Sanjurjo, Mola, Kindelán, Varela, Yagüe and Franco himself, all of whose political imaginations had been formed in the sun of Morocco. The tragedy was that it was an imperial war carried out at home. The ‘language of empire’ in the mountains of Aragon sounded a strange tongue.

The Pyrenees make Spain and Portugal more an island than a peninsula. Sea power is certain to affect a Spanish war. At the beginning, the republic had most of the fleet. The nationalists brought the two new cruisers
Canarias
and
Baleares
to Gibraltar in September 1936 and, though they lost their only battleship, the
España,
off Santander in April 1937, dominated the Cantabrian coast as well that summer. The republic’s only battleship, the
Jaime I,
blew up in June 1937. Though the republic continued to have three cruisers until the end of the war, not to speak of fourteen destroyers, the nationalists maintained their effective superiority, with four ex-Italian destroyers and two new destroyers of their own. When the
Baleares
was sunk in March 1938, it was almost made up for by the
Navarra,
converted from the old
República.
Altogether, the nationalists sank 48 republican merchant ships (to the republic’s capture of 22) and 44 foreign (some 240,000 tons), and captured 202 republican merchant ships and 23 foreign ones (330,000 tons—together with 150,000 tons of cargo confiscated).
¹
In respect of all small ships, the nationalists always had an advantage. The nationalists were able, with their allies’ help, to impose a successful blockade. The history of the republican fleet was inglorious; that of the nationalist, distinguished. The republicans were so short of officers that they never took advantage of their superiority in numbers of vessels. They were also short of oil at sea in the last year (though not in the air force).

The republic also began the war with an advantage in the air. In the first two or three months, whatever the numbers were, the Junkers, Fiats and Savoias from Germany and Italy were superior in practice to the French help to the republic. The large consignments of Russian aircraft, particularly Moscas and Chatos, gave the republic an aerial superiority in the winter of 1936, but in 1937 Messerschmitts, new Heinkels
and new Savoias tipped the balance back. The Russian aircraft were also often used timidly by both Russians and their Spanish pupils. They lost many. In the north, and during most of 1938, the nationalists had overwhelming aerial superiority, but, during the early stages of the battle of the Ebro, the new Russian Supermoscas and Superchatos made an impression. The rebels used about 1,300 planes in the war, the republic probably about 1,500.
¹
These were substantial figures: the German air force in 1937, for example, numbered only about 2,000 while the British and French about 1,500 and 3,000 respectively.
²

The history of the Spanish war is partly the history of the abuse of technology: the Buick in which García Lorca travelled to his death at Viznar, the cars which ‘took people for a ride’—a sad euphemism borrowed from films—on the republican side, the telephone on which Moscardó spoke to his son and the telephone building which the communist police determined to capture in Barcelona were the bric-à-brac of a half industrialized society in which power was ultimately gained by the men whose use of these gadgets was more adroit. Queipo de Llano’s successful use of the microphone with his graphic language was symbolic of how old Spain triumphed, with new weapons.

Franco’s army was better organized than that of his enemies. Political unity gave him unity of command. Nationalist forces were more disciplined than their opponents and their logistical arrangements excellent, as seen in the ease with which reserves were moved from one front to another. German technical training, particularly in signals, played a considerable part. But equally important was the availability of so many middle-class young men as
alféreces provisionales,
provisional lieutenants, whose education made them more effective than the junior republican officers. The republican achievement in assembling an army at all was considerable. But they failed to make as much use as they might have done of the regular officers available to them. The militias of the people’s army were heroic in defence, often unimaginative in attack. The failure of the militia on the Aragon front against a thin nationalist line makes nonsense of the anarchist complaints on the subject of a regular army. On the other hand, the people’s army did turn out to be as conventional and as bureaucratic as the anarchists-
feared.
¹
In the end, General Matallana was probably right when he told Negrín in 1939 that ‘though the army had learned some defensive tactics, they were incapable of retreat or counter-attack’.
²
Franco’s deficiencies were less organizational than errors of judgement; time and again, at Brunete, Teruel and the Ebro, he insisted on fighting for the few miles that had been lost rather than cut his losses or seek to turn the enemy’s flank. These frontal counter-attacks were wasteful in terms of lives, as they always are in war. His greatest strategic mistake was probably not to have advanced on Barcelona in April 1938. Is it possible that he, as his enemies (particularly monarchists) have suggested, prolonged the war deliberately, to ensure his own political advantage? It seems improbable; as over Toledo in 1936, Franco could not have known that such a risky decision would have benefited him in the end. In April 1938, the international situation might have caused things to turn out badly for him. If there had been world war over Czechoslovakia, at the time of Munich, Spain would surely have been swept into it, with Franco’s Spain in the front line. Franco’s decision not to attack Barcelona until he had destroyed the republican army in the south was fully in character, and indeed can be justified on political as well as strategic grounds.
³
Nobody could have known that Barcelona would fall without a fight.

The financial management of the war was a success for the nationalists, a disaster for the republic. The former paid for their war effort by delaying the interest both on the national debt and on most of the debt due on the war; by ruthlessly reducing unnecessary spending; by new taxes; by the establishment of a new Bank of Spain, which lent to the nationalist authorities 9,000 million pesetas; and, of course, by foreign aid, which was not paid for until afterwards. The republic had recourse to similar financial methods (for example, a delay on interest on debt) but they undertook a formidable expansion of the currency, vast governmental spending, with substantial inflation, as well as severe rationing which did not prevent considerable scarcity of food from late 1937 onwards.
⁴

Foreign intervention was, of course, of great importance in the war, as could easily be seen if one were to look up, for example, at the sky over the battles of Brunete or the Ebro, covered as it was with aircraft made in Russia, Germany and Italy. The same thing could be seen as Hotchkiss and Degtyareva machine-guns clashed with Bredas and Mausers. The fuel-bearers of the conflict interacted and it is not satisfactory, in order to reach an estimate of their significance, simply to add up what they severally gave or sold.
¹
There were many occasions when the timing of certain foreign supplies was critical. First, the supply of Junkers 52s by Germany in July 1936 helped Franco to lift the Army of Africa across the Straits of Gibraltar. To say simply that the nationalists would have lost the war had it not been for that begs too many questions. Some troops had been flown over before the Junkers arrived and, sooner or later, the rebels would have discovered the incompetence of the republican fleet; as indeed they did, when they gained control over the Straits at the end of September with the action of the
Canarias.
Still, the war would have taken a different course if the Army of Africa had not reached the mainland so fast. This help had a greater effect than the simultaneous purchase of aircraft by the republic from France, whatever the quantity or quality of the latter. The Junkers 52 (‘Iron Annie’) cast its shadow over much of Europe between 1936 and 1945, never more than when it did so over the sea separating that continent from Africa in 1936.