A CONCISE HISTORY OF
THESPANISH CIVIL WAR
PAUL PRESTON

Map

Dedication

This book is dedicated to

the men and women of the International Brigades

who fought and died fighting fascism in Spain

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Map

Dedication

List of Plates

Preface

Introduction: The Civil War Sixty Years On

1 A Divided Society: Spain before 1930

2 The Leftist Challenge, 1931–1933

3 Confrontation and Conspiracy, 1934–1936

4 ‘The Map of Spain Bleeds’: From Coup d’Etat to Civil War

5 ‘Behind The Gentleman’s Agreement’: The Great Powers Betray Spain

6 ‘Madrid is the Heart’: The Central Epic

7 Politics Behind the Lines: Reaction and Terror in the City of God

8 Politics Behind the Lines: Revolution and Terror in the City of the Devil

9 Defeat by Instalments

Epilogue

Plates

Keep Reading

Principal Characters

Glossary

List of Abbreviations

Bibliographical Essay

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

List of Plates

1. Civilians killed on 19 July 1936 combating the uprising in Barcelona.

2. Nationalist propaganda linking Franco’s cause both to Spain’s imperial past and to contemporary Fascism and Nazism.

3. Official poster celebrating Franco’s victory.

4. Popular rejoicing in the Plaza de Cibeles in Madrid at the establishment of the Second Republic on 14 April 1931.

5. Church burnings of May 1931 in Madrid.

6. José María Gil Robles, leader of the Catholic authoritarian party, the CEDA.

7. José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of Falange Española, idealised as Jefe Nacional.

8. The official portrait of the Manuel Azaña, successively Minister of War, Prime Minister and President of the Republic.

9. Monarchists give the fascist salute at the funeral of their assassinated leader, José Calvo Sotelo.

10. The De Havilland D.H.89 Dragon Rapide hired by Luis Bolín in Croydon to take Franco to Morocco.

11. Franco in Tetuán, shortly after his arrival from the Canary Islands.

12. Diego Martínez Barno, briefly Prime Minister on 19 July 1936.

13. General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano.

14. British International Brigaders return to the front after convalescence.

15. Republican militiamen settle in the main square of Toledo for a long siege of the Alcázar.

16. Generals of the Nationalist Junta de Defensa arriving for the meeting at which Franco was chosen as commander-in-chief.

17. Franco haranguing the survivors of the siege of the Alcázar de Toledo on 29 September 1936.

18. General José Moscardó, commander of the Alcázar of Toledo, revisiting the ruins.

19. The ‘Cockney Express’, a van sent from London with food for besieged Madrid.

20. A Republican column in the Sierra de Guadarama.

21. Spanish Republican militia of the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores.

22. The encircling Francoist forces subject Madrid to massive bombardment.

23. The citizens of Madrid shelter from bombardments in the undergound (Metro).

24. Letter from General ‘Mancini’ (the pseudonym used by Roatta) congratulating Italian troops for their capture of Malaga.

25. Basque refugee children stuff mattresses with straw at a camp near Southampton.

26. Italian volunteers of the Garibaldi Battalion of the International Brigades fought Mussolini’s Corpo di Truppe Volontarie at Guadalajara.

27. Nationalist Safe-conduct issued to a German pilot of the Condor Legion.

28. An ambulance bought by black Americans.

29. The glorification of Franco, stressing the links with the imperial past and the links with contemporary fascism.

30. Franco, his wife, the Archbishop of Santiago and other Church dignitaries giving the fascist salute.

31. A priest saying mass for Nationalist troops in the village square of Posada (Santander).

32. Manuel Hedilla.

33. Dolores Ibárruri, ‘La Pasionaria’, with Santiago Alvarez.

34. Colonel Enrique Líster consulting with Juan Modesto.

35. Franco, Serrano Suñer and Mola in Burgos, May 1937.

36. Belchite, near Zaragoza, the site of a Republican counter-offensive in August and September 1937.

37. Italian troops entering Santander on 26 August 1937.

38. The Fascist press claiming the capture of Santander for Mussolini and reporting Franco’s praise for the Italian troops.

39. Republican troops during the street-fighting in Teruel in January 1938.

40. Nationalist troops singing the fascist anthem on reaching the Mediterranean.

41. A boat being trundled to the banks of the Ebro for the crossing on 24 July 1938.

42. The farewell parade in Barcelona for the departing International Brigades on 29 October 1938.

43. General Juan Yagüe leading his occupying troops into Barcelona on 26 January 1939.

44. Republican refugees being herded into camps in France.

45. Dr Juan Negrín with General Vicente Rojo.

46. Julián Besteiro reading the manifesto of the Junta created by Colonel Casado.

47. Middle class women rejoicing at Franco’s capture of Madrid in March 1939.

48. Bill Alexander, Commander of the British Battalion of the International Brigades in 1938.

49. Bill Alexander at the unveiling in London of the monument to the Brigades on 5 October 1985.

50. The banner presented by the women of Barcelona to the British Battalion at the farewell parade.

51. The medal awarded to all International Brigaders by the Spanish Republican Government.

Preface

There have been several thousand books on the Spanish Civil War and many of them are extremely long. The present volume aims to provide the new reader with a manageable guide to the labyrinth. It is interpretative rather than descriptive although ample use has been made of quotation to give a flavour of the period. It is not a book which sets out to find a perfect balance between both sides. I lived for several years under Franco’s dictatorship. It was impossible not to be aware of the repression of workers and students, the censorship and the prisons. As late as 1975 political prisoners were still being executed. Despite what Franco supporters claim, I do not believe that Spain derived any benefit from the military rising of 1936 and the Nationalist victory of 1939. Many years devoted to the study of Spain before and during the 1930s have convinced me that, while many mistakes were made, the Spanish Republic was an attempt to provide a better way of life for the humbler members of a repressive society. Accordingly, there is little sympathy here for the Spanish right, but I hope there is some understanding. This new edition takes into account the very considerable body of research which had been published since its first appearance in 1986. It also draws on my own ongoing research on Franco and on Mussolini’s role in the Spanish Civil War.

My early interest in Spain was stimulated by the postgraduate seminar run at the University of Reading by Hugh Thomas. I have learned an enormous amount during my friendship with Herbert Southworth who has always been prodigal with his hospitality and his knowledge. I also derived a lot from conversations over many years with Raymond Carr, Norman Cooper, Denis Smyth, Angel Viñas, Julian Casanova, Manuel González García, Jerónimo Gonzalo and Martin Blinkhorn. More recently, the historiography of the Spanish Civil War has been profoundly changed by the research of Angela Cenarro, Helen Graham, Gerald Howson, Enrique Moradiellos, Alberto Reig Tapia and Ismael Saz. I have gained greatly from reading their work and many hours of conversation.

My friends Paul Heywood and Sheelagh Ellwood gave me marvellous support during the writing of the first edition. Their role in this second version has been assumed by Helen Graham. I remain grateful to Juliet Gardiner who initially encouraged me to undertake this book and then saw it through the press with common sense and sparkling good humour. In that regard, the book has been more fortunate than it deserves, for this second edition has also found a model editor, patient, sensitive and generous, in Philip Gwyn Jones of HarperCollins. My wife Gabrielle is, as ever, my shrewdest critic. With such a team of friends to help, it seems astonishing that any book could still have shortcomings. Unfortunately, it does and they are mine.

INTRODUCTION
The Civil War Sixty Years On

In geographical and human scale, let alone technological horrors, the Spanish Civil War has been dwarfed by later conflicts. Nonetheless, it has generated over fifteen thousand books, a literary epitaph which puts it on a par with the Second World War. In part, that reflects the extent to which even after 1939 the war continued to be fought between Franco’s victorious Nationalists and the defeated and exiled Republicans. Even more, certainly as far as foreigners were concerned, the survival of interest in the Spanish tragedy was closely connected with the sheer longevity of its victor. General Franco’s uninterrupted enjoyment of a dictatorial power seized with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini was an infuriating affront to opponents of fascism the world over. Moreover, the destruction of democracy in Spain was not allowed to become just another fading remnant of the humiliations of the period of appeasement. Far from trying to heal the wounds of civil strife, Franco worked harder than anyone to keep the war a live and burning issue both inside and outside Spain.

Reminders of Francoism’s victory over international communism were frequently used to curry favour with the outside world. This was most dramatically the case immediately after the Second World War when frantic efforts were made to dissociate Franco from his erstwhile Axis allies. This was done by stressing his enmity to communism and playing down his equally vehement opposition to liberal democracy and socialism. Throughout the Cold War, the irrefutable anti-communism of the Nationalist side in the Civil War was used to build a picture of Franco as the bulwark of the Western system, the ‘Sentinel of the West’ in the phrase coined by his propagandists. Within Spain itself, memories of the war and of the bloody repression which followed it were carefully nurtured in order to maintain what has been called ‘the pact of blood’. The dictator was supported by an uneasy coalition of the highly privileged, landowners, industrialists and bankers, of what might be called the ‘service classes’ of Francoism, those members of the middle and working classes who, for whatever reasons, opportunism, conviction or wartime geographical loyalty, threw in their lot with the regime, and finally of those ordinary Spanish Catholics who supported the Nationalists as the defenders of religion and law and order. Reminders of the war were useful to rally the wavering loyalty of any or all of of these groups.

The privileged usually remained aloof from the dictatorship and disdainful of its propaganda. However, those who were implicated in the regime’s networks of corruption and repression, the beneficiaries of the killings and the pillage, were especially susceptible to hints that only Franco stood between them and the revenge of their victims. In any case, for many who worked for the dictator, as policemen, Civil Guards, as humble serenos (night-watchmen) or porteros (doormen), in the giant bureaucracy of Franco’s single party, the Movimiento, in its trade union organization, or in its huge press network, the Civil War was a crucial part of their curriculum vitae and of their value system. They were to make up what in the 1970s came to be known as the bunker, the die-hard Francoists who were prepared to fight for the values of the Civil War from the rubble of the Chancellery. A similar, and more dangerous, commitment came from the praetorian defenders of the legacy of what Spanish rightists refer to broadly as el 18 de julio (from the date of the military rising of 1936). Army officers had been educated since 1939 in Academies where they were taught that the military existed to defend Spain from communism, anarchism, socialism, parliamentary democracy and regionalists who wanted to destroy Spain’s unity. Accordingly, after Franco’s death the bunker and its military supporters were to attempt once more to destroy democracy in Spain in the name of the Nationalist victory in the Civil War.

For these ultra-rightists, Nationalist propaganda efforts to maintain the hatreds of the Civil War were perhaps gratuitous. However, the regime clearly thought it essential for the less partisan Spaniards who rendered Franco a passive support ranging from the grudging to the enthusiastic. The Catholics and members of the middle classes who had been appalled by the view of Republican disorder and anti-clericalism generated by the rightist press were induced to turn a blind eye to the more distasteful aspects of a bloody dictatorship by constant and exaggerated reminders of the war. Within months of the end of hostilities, a massive ‘History of the Crusade’ was being published in weekly parts, glorifying the heroism of the victors and portraying the vanquished as the dupes of Moscow, as either squalidly self-interested or the blood-crazed perpetrators of sadistic atrocities. Until well into the 1960s, a stream of publications, many aimed at children, presented the war as a religious crusade against Communist barbarism.

Beyond the hermetically sealed frontiers of Franco’s Spain, the defeated Republicans and their foreign sympathizers rejected the Francoist interpretation that the Civil War had been a battle of the forces of order and true religion against a Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy. Instead, they maintained consistently that the war was the struggle of an oppressed people seeking a decent way of life against the opposition of Spain’s backward landed and industrial oligarchies and their Nazi and Fascist allies. Unfortunately, bitterly divided over the reasons for their defeat, they could not present as monolithically coherent a view of the war as did their Francoist opponents. In a way which weakened their collective voice, but immeasurably enriched the literature of the Spanish Civil War, they were side-tracked into vociferous debate about whether they might have beaten the Nationalists if only they had unleashed the popular revolutionary war advocated by anarchists and Trotskyists as opposed to mounting the conventional war effort imposed by the all-powerful Communists of the PCE (Partido Comunista de España).

Thereafter, the debate over ‘war or revolution’ engaged Republican sympathizers unable to come to terms with the leftist defeat. During the Cold War, it was used successfully to disseminate the idea that it was the Stalinist suffocation of the revolution in Spain which led to Franco’s victory. Several works on the Spanish Civil War were sponsored by the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom to propagate this idea. The success of an unholy alliance of anarchists, Trotskyists and Cold Warriors, has obscured the fact that Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Chamberlain were responsible for the Nationalist victory, not Stalin. Nevertheless, new generations have continued to discover the Spanish Civil War, sometimes scouring for parallels, in the light of national liberation struggles in Vietnam, Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua, sometimes just seeking in the Spanish experience the idealism and sacrifice associated so singularly lacking from modern politics.

The relevance of the Civil War to Franco’s supporters and to left-wingers throughout the world does not fully explain the much wider fascination which the Spanish conflict still exercises today. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam, it can only seem like small beer. As Raymond Carr has pointed out, compared to Hiroshima or Dresden, the bombing of Guernica seems ‘a minor act of vandalism’. Yet it has provoked more savage polemic than virtually any incident in the Second World War. That is not as some would have because of the power of Picasso’s painting but because Guernica was the first total destruction of an undefended civilian target by aerial bombardment. Accordingly, the Spanish Civil War is burned into the European consciousness not simply as a rehearsal for the bigger world war to come, but because it presaged the opening of the flood-gates to a new and horrific form of modern warfare that was universally dreaded.

It was because they shared the collective fear of what defeat for the Spanish Republic might mean that men and women, workers and intellectuals, went to join the International Brigades. The left saw clearly in 1936 what for another three years even the democratic right chose to ignore – that Spain was the last bulwark against the horrors of Hitlerism. In a Europe still unaware of the crimes of Stalin, the Communist-organized brigades seemed to be fighting for much that was worth saving in terms of democratic rights and trade union freedoms. The volunteers believed that by fighting fascism in Spain they were also fighting it in their own countries. Hindsight about the sordid power struggles in the Republican zone between the Communists on the one hand and the Socialists, the anarchists and the Trotskyist POUM on the other cannot diminish the idealism of the individuals concerned. There remains something intensely tragic about Italian and German refugees from Mussolini and Hitler finally being able to take up arms against their persecutors only to be defeated again.

To dwell on the impact of the horrors of the Spanish war and on the importance of the defence against fascism is to miss one of the most positive factors of the Republican experience – the attempt to drag Spain into the twentieth century. In the drab Europe of the depression years, what was happening in Republican Spain seemed to be an exciting experiment. Orwell’s celebrated comment acknowledged this: ‘I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for’. The cultural and educational achievements of the Spanish Republic were only the best-known aspects of a social revolution which had an impact on the contemporary world which Cuba and Chile never quite attained in the 1960s. Spain was not only nearby, but its social experiments were taking place in a context of widespread disillusion with the failures of capitalism. By 1945, the fight against the Axis had become linked with the preservation of the old world. During the Spanish Civil War, however, the struggle against fascism was still seen as merely the first step to building a new egalitarian world out of the depression. In the event, the exigencies of the war effort and internecine conflict stood in the way of the full flowering of the industrial and agrarian collectives of the Republican zone. Nevertheless, there was, and is, something inspiring about the way in which the Spanish working class faced the dual tasks of war against the old order and of construction of the new. The anarchist leader, Buenaventura Durruti, best expressed this spirit when he told a reporter, ‘We are not afraid of ruins, we are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.’

All of this is perhaps to suggest that interest in the Spanish Civil War is made up of nostalgia on the part of contemporaries of right and left and political romanticism on the part of the young. After all, there is a strong case to be made for presenting the Spanish Civil War as the ‘the last great cause’. It was not for nothing that the Civil War inspired the greatest writers of its day in a manner not repeated in any subsequent war. However, nostalgia and romanticism aside, it is impossible to exaggerate the sheer historical importance of the Spanish war. Beyond its climactic impact on Spain itself, the war was very much the nodal point of the 1930s. Baldwin and Blum, Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin and Trotsky all had substantial parts in the Spanish drama. The Rome-Berlin Axis was clinched in Spain at the same time as the inadequacies of appeasement were ruthlessly exposed. It was above all a Spanish war, or rather a series of Spanish wars, yet it was also the great international battleground of fascism and Communism. And while Colonel Von Richthofen practised in the Basque Country the Blitzkrieg techniques he was later to perfect in Poland, agents of the NKVD re-enacted the Moscow trials on the quasi-Trotskyists of the POUM.

Nor is the Spanish conflict without its contemporary relevance. The war arose in part out of the violent opposition of the privileged and their foreign allies to the reformist attempts of liberal Republican-Socialist governments to ameliorate the daily living conditions of the most wretched members of society. The parallels with Chile in the 1970s or Nicaragua in the 1980s hardly need emphasizing. Equally, the ease with which the Spanish Republic was destabilised by skilfully provoked disorder had sombre echoes in Italy, and even Spain, in the 1980s. Fortunately, Spanish democracy survived in 1981 the attempts to overthrow it made by military men nostalgic for a Francoist Spain of victors and vanquished. The Spanish Civil War was also fought because of the determination of the extreme right in general and the army in particular to crush Basque, Catalan and Galician nationalisms. Spain did not witness ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the kind seen in the civil war in what was once Yugoslovia. Nevertheless, Franco made a systematic attempt during the war and after to eradicate all vestiges of local nationalisms, political and linguistic. Although ultimately in vain, the cultural genocide thus pursued by Castilian centralist nationalism has provoked comparisons between the Spanish and Bosnian crises.

In Spain itself, the fiftieth anniversary of the war in 1986 was marked by a silence that was almost deafening. There was a television series and some discreet academic conferences, one of which, held under the title ‘Valencia Capital of the Republic’ had its publicity poster, designed by the poet and artist Rafael Alberti on the basis of the Republican flag, unofficially, but effectively, banned. There was no official commemoration of the war. That was an act of political prudence on the part of a Socialist government fully aware of the sensibilities of a military caste brought up in the anti-democratic hatreds of Francoism. More positively it was a contribution to what has been called ‘the pact of forgetfulness’ (el pacto del olvido), the tacit, collective agreement of the great majority of the Spanish people to renounce any settling of accounts after the death of Franco. A rejection of the violence of the civil war and the regime which came out of it overcame any thoughts of revenge.

In fact, in 1986, the year that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, a war which would see Spain suffer nearly forty years of international ostracism, the country was formally admitted into the European Community. Ten years later, the withering away of Francoism and continued consolidation of democracy were demonstrated when the Spanish government, with all-party support granted citizenship to the surviving members of the International Brigades who fought against fascism during the Civil War. It was a welcome but belated gesture of gratitude and reconciliation which serves as a reminder of a violent and bloody Spain which has perhaps gone for ever.

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