The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

At this stage the anarchist leader, Buenaventura Durruti, arrived with more than 3,000 men from the Aragón front. He had been persuaded to go to Madrid by Federica Montseny, who was representing the government in Valencia. At a meeting with García Oliver at Madrid CNT headquarters, Cipriano Mera, the delegate-general of their militia battalions, warned Durruti against attempting a frontal attack on the Casa de Campo, even though the anarchists had become alarmed at the influence the communists were achieving through the International Brigades. Durruti insisted that he had no option but to attack from the University City in the direction of the Casa de Velázquez. The assault took place on the morning of 17 November, but the covering artillery and air support he had been promised failed to materialize. (Whether that was through oversight or intention, anarchist suspicions of communist tactics were greatly increased.) Durruti’s men, who had shown such reckless bravery in the Barcelona fighting, broke back to their start line when they met a concentrated artillery barrage and heavy machine-gun fire, neither of which they had experienced before.

‘Endless air battles have been going on all day,’ wrote Koltsov that evening. ‘At 16.00 a republican fighter aircraft lost its group and attacked a Junkers bravely on its own. Several Heinkel aircraft chased and damaged it. The pilot bailed out with a parachute and landed safely right on a sidewalk on the Paseo de Castellana. The admiring crowd carried the brave man to a car. Five minutes later he was brought to the war ministry. Members of the junta applauded him and hugged the pilot, Pablo Palancar.’²⁴

On 19 November the nationalists attacked with the support of heavy artillery and Asensio’s column found a gap in the republican line. As a result the nationalists were able to cross the Manzanares and establish a bridgehead deep in the University City in the Faculty of Architecture. The legionnaires and regulares held on despite furious counter-attacks from XI International Brigade and other units in that sector, which was to become the most bitterly contested stretch of territory in the whole front. In a foretaste of Stalingrad, the legionnaires of the 4th Bandera and the Edgar André Battalion of XI International Brigade fought a savage battle in the buildings there. ‘Once at the University Campus,’ wrote Karl Anger, ‘we started a ruthless fight for every path, every house, every floor, and every threshold. Here, the front line sometimes goes through the most valuable laboratories and libraries. Sometimes breastworks are constructed from huge volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Here the fascists have come the closest to Madrid: it is only between three and five hundred metres from the Casa Velázquez to the nearest café in town.’²⁵

Durruti was mortally wounded during the fighting that day. He died the next morning in the improvised hospital set up in the Ritz, at the same time as José Antonio Primo de Rivera was executed in Alicante.²⁶ A rumour soon started that Durruti had been shot by one of his own men who objected to his severe discipline. The anarchists, for reasons of morale and propaganda, claimed that he had been killed by a sniper’s bullet when in fact his death had really been an accident. The cocking handle of a companion’s ‘naranjero’ machine pistol caught on a car door, firing a bullet into his chest. Durruti was without doubt the most popular anarchist leader. He had been an unrelenting rebel throughout his life and had earned the reputation of a revolutionary Robin Hood. His funeral in Barcelona was the greatest scene of mass mourning that Spain had witnessed, with half a million people in the procession alone. His reputation was so great, not just among anarchists, that attempts were made after his death to claim his allegiance. The Falange said that, like his two brothers, he was a Falangist sympathizer at heart, while the communists felt certain that he was on the way to joining them.

The nationalists’ failure to break through on 19 November made Franco change his strategy. He could not risk any more of his best troops in fruitless assaults now that a quick victory looked much more difficult. So, for the first time in history, a capital city came under intense air as well as artillery bombardment. All residential areas except the fashionable Salamanca district were bombed in an attempt to break the morale of the civilian population. The Italian Aviazione Legionaria and the Luftwaffe conducted a methodical experiment in psychological warfare with their Savoia 81s and Junkers 52s. The bombing did not, however, break morale as intended; on the contrary, it increased the defiance of the population. In London, Prince Otto von Bismarck, the German chargé d’affaires, derided British fear of air attacks ‘since you see what little harm they have done in Madrid’.