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

After the statement that the Salamanca district would be spared, the whole area was packed to overflowing and the streets became virtually impassable. Meanwhile, in a remarkably effective operation, the UGT reorganized the transfer of Madrid’s most essential industries to unused Metro tunnels. The artist Josep Renau, the director general of the Bellas Artes, organized the evacuation of paintings from the Museo del Prado to Valencia. The air raids destroyed hundreds of buildings in Madrid, from slum dwellings to the Palacio de Liria belonging to the Duke of Alba. Alba, in his bitter charges accusing the Republic of responsibility for the damage, did not seem to find it incongruous that the nationalist crusade was destroying its own capital with foreign bombers, but then Franco had already declared to the correspondent of The Times: ‘I will destroy Madrid rather than leave it to the Marxists.’

That week saw the air war escalate. On 13 November the largest dogfight so far took place, with 14 Fiats and 13 Chatos locked in combat over the Paseo de Rosales.²⁷ The next day Miaja issued an order against shooting at pilots baling out. On 16 November nationalist allies bombed the Prado, the Museo Antropológico, the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the Biblioteca Nacional, the Museo de Arte Moderno, the Museo Arqueológico and the Archivo Histórico Nacional, as well as various hospitals: the Clinic of San Carlos, the Hospital Provincial and the Hospital de la Cruz Roja. These attacks were described by Malraux in his novel L’Espoir.²⁸ One bomb hit a school and photographs of the rows of dead children strengthened the determination of madrileños to prevent a nationalist victory.

Estimates of the bombs dropped on Madrid vary a great deal, but we know from Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen’s personal war diary that on 4 December alone, his Junkers 52s dropped 36 tons on the city.²⁹ In comparison to Second World War bomb loads, when a single British Lancaster could drop ten tons, this was not intensive, but as the first concerted bombing campaign against a capital city, the psychological effect was considerable. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who lost his house, ‘the one of the flowers’, experienced a sense of outrage which had nothing to do with his own material loss:

Come and see the blood in the streets

Come and see

The blood in the streets

Come and see the blood

In the streets.³⁰

The fierce fighting on the western edge of Madrid continued. ‘The morning had been hard,’ wrote a French volunteer called André Cayatte. ‘The battalion was relieved for a few hours’ rest. To the west, the noise of shelling rolled on. In all the European languages, people talked and sang with so much friendship that one worked out what one could not understand.’ They went back into action at Palacete de la Moncloa on 20 November. ‘Major Rivie`re, a smile on his lips, died with elegance, as he had lived. Rivière with 115 volunteers, was defending a weekend house surrounded by enemy tanks. Three times the survivors attempted a sortie. Finally, the Moors set the house on fire. Rivière lit a last cigarette from the flames. “Nobody will ever know”, he said, “everything that we have done.” A moment later he was dead.’³¹

The reversion to local committees was proving of great value. Despite an evacuation programme, refugees still crammed the city (its million inhabitants had been increased by half); only such a system could have helped both them and those made homeless by the bombing. The committees supervised the construction of shelters, commandeered empty apartments and organized essential supplies and canteens. In contrast to these efforts a black market boomed and inevitably damaged morale.

The Soviet advisers, commissars, senior officers and important Party cadres had their luxurious and well-stocked base in Gaylord’s Hotel. The large number of visitors, fact-finding missions and committed supporters from abroad were also well looked after. Foreign journalists (‘conspicuous as actresses’ in Auden’s phrase) suffered little. But for the majority of the population the daily allowance was meagre. A horse or mule killed by the bombing or shellfire would be stripped to its skeleton by housewives, while starving dogs hovered around. One International Brigader recorded that a militiaman, having shot a stray which was lapping at the brains of a dead man, shrugged apologetically and explained that dogs were acquiring a taste for human flesh. Cats and rats were also used as food, if only to improve the thin lentil soup. The killing of one bird in the Madrid zoo was not provoked by hunger, however, but by the way the wretched creature learned to imitate the whistle of incoming shells.