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

On the nationalist side General Orgaz was put in charge of the central front, where a renewed offensive began on 16 December, after a 48-hour delay due to weather conditions. Varela retained the field command with 17,000 men divided into four columns. The first objective, after a heavy bombardment with 155mm artillery, was the village of Boadilla del Monte, some twenty kilometres west of Madrid. It was captured that night and the general staff in Madrid, realizing that they faced a major offensive rather than a diversion, sent XI and XII International Brigades, backed by the bulk of Pavlov’s T-26 tanks. XI Brigade counter-attacked at Boadilla, only to find themselves virtually cut off in the village. The nationalists withdrew to take advantage of such a clearly defined artillery target and attacked again with their infantry. The International Brigades established defensive positions within the thick walls of country houses belonging to rich madrileños. They resisted desperately and on 19 December the slaughter was enormous on both sides. The next day Orgaz halted the offensive, having gained only a few kilometres. He lacked reserves and the republicans enjoyed numerical superiority.

Karl Anger, one of the Serbs in XI International Brigade, described their arrival in the village of Majadahonda just south of the Corunna highway at the start of the fighting. ‘It was still an untouched little place, far from beautiful, a little dirty because of poverty, but warm, quiet and sweet, like a lamb. We filled it with our troops, services, guns, trucks, armoured vehicles, and all things that an army drags behind it during a campaign. Quiet Majadahonda became crowded, noisy and dirty, as if on a market day. On the first morning after our departure enemy aircraft started dropping bombs on the village. The inhabitants scattered, abandoning all their property. Livestock, pigs, unmade beds and unattended houses. On the first evening and first morning there still was life at Majadahonda. One could see mysterious silhouettes of young Spanish girls behind the poorly lit windows of houses. The next day the windows were already black, gaping–frightening holes in the shells of the houses. Only stray dogs, supply people and stragglers were left in the village, and also a woman who had gone mad. She screamed terribly on a moonlit night in an empty house, and the screams echoed frighteningly in the dead moonlit streets.’⁴

It is also important to understand the chaos which resulted in the driving sleet and the winter darkness. The International Brigades lacked intelligence on the enemy. They had no maps or compasses, and blundered around just managing to avoid attacking each other. A battalion would start digging its trenches, only to find later that they were completely out of line with the neighbouring units. Language problems within the International Brigades did not help. Anger, a Serbian within a German battalion, also indicates in his account the extraordinary mixture of nationalities and of motives within the International Brigades. ‘In Majadahonda we were joined by a young Chinese volunteer, the first Chinese to join us. On the next day, when we had just started thinking how to incorporate him better into our Serbian team, he was brought back with both his legs smashed to bits. We hadn’t even had time to learn his name.’ He went on to add that ‘in all the International Brigades, including the first [i.e. XI International] brigade, there was a number of former Russian White Guardists or sons of White Guardists’. These were the desperately homesick Russian émigrés hoping to earn a safe passage back to the Soviet Union.

When nationalist reinforcements arrived towards the end of December, Orgaz prepared to relaunch his unimaginative offensive along the same axis. During the breathing space the republican general staff had redeployed their units in the Pozuelo-Brunete sector in a very uncoordinated manner and without attending to the supply of ammunition. When the nationalist offensive was relaunched on 3 January 1937 the republican right flank fell back in disorder. At first the republican troops on the left managed to hold Pozuelo, in a battle ‘which was the most complete chaos’. Koltsov said that ‘despite all their heroism, our units suffered from the confusion, stupidity, and perhaps treason in headquarters’.⁵