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

In between the two parts of the Corunna road offensive, the republicans had fought an unsuccessful action in the south when Queipo de Llano’s forces advanced to capture the rich olive-growing area of Andújar. It was a singularly inauspicious start for the new XIV International Brigade under General ‘Walter’, a Polish communist, who later commanded the Second Polish Army in the Red Army’s Berlin operation. This brigade included the French Marseillaise Battalion, which had a British company. The main action, around a village called Lopera just after Christmas, became famous for the death of the two English communist poets John Cornford and Ralph Fox, and for a frightening foretaste of International Brigade justice.

The battle began on the morning of 28 December and finished 36 hours later. Walter had been ordered to retake Lopera, but he had no telephone communications with his units and no air or artillery support. The nationalists decimated their ranks with machine-gun fire, mortars and artillery. XIV International Brigade was virtually untrained. Like the militia in similar circumstances, many of its men turned and ran on being surprised by machine-gun fire. Some 800 corpses were left under the olive trees and 500 men deserted the front line.⁸ The commanding officer of the Marseillaise Battalion, Major Gaston Delasalle, was arrested and accused, not only of incompetence and cowardice, but also of being a ‘fascist spy’. He was found guilty by a court martial hastily gathered by André Marty. Ilya Ehrenburg later described Marty as speaking, and occasionally acting, ‘like a mentally sick man’, and Gustav Regler remarked that Marty preferred to shoot anyone on suspicion, rather than waste time with what he called ‘petit bourgeois indecision’.⁹ Some Brigaders, however, admired him greatly. ‘A true revolutionary,’ Sommerfield called him, ‘compounded of patience, granite firmness and absolute unswerving determination.’ Tom Wintringham, who later commanded the British battalion, described the proceedings as ‘a thoroughly fair court martial’. But Nick Gillain, serving in XIV International Brigade, wrote later, ‘The guards dragged the condemned man out of the court room, while he continued to protest his innocence. There was the sound of two or three shots. Then, a man came back into the room and placed on the table a watch and some money…Revolutionary justice had been carried out.’¹⁰

The nationalists and their Axis backers began to adjust themselves to a protracted war. Hitler was not surprised by the turn of events, informed as he was by accurate assessments from Voelckers, the German chargé d’affaires. He was also unperturbed by the long pessimistic reports from his ambassador to Franco, Faupel, and the Condor Legion commander, General Sperrle, because an extended war suited his purposes better. It would distract attention from his expansionist plans in central Europe. Mussolini, on the other hand, was eager to win military glory in Europe, but his mood fluctuated wildly according to the performance of his troops.

The most urgent task facing Franco’s staff was to create a trained army of sufficient size. German assistance in this task was almost as important as their combat contribution. The Falangist militia trained by Condor Legion officers at Cáceres in Estremadura bore little resemblance to the gangs of señoritos involved in the summer fighting. The Carlist requetés, the nationalists’ most effective troops after the Army of Africa, now numbered about 60,000. At least half of them came from Navarre, which led to the Carlist claim that ‘Navarre had saved Spain’. This arrogance, combined with open contempt for the Castilian Church, which they thought corrupt and pharisaical, did not make them popular with their allies. The famed discipline of the requetés derived, not from strong respect for hierarchy, but from the self-discipline of the hill farmer. (Their leader, Fal Conde, exaggerated when he described Carlism as a movement guided from below, but it was a uniquely populist form of royalism.) Their medieval crusading faith made them fearless. Colonel Rada described his requetés as men ‘with faith in victory, with faith in God; one hand holding a grenade, the other a rosary’.

In early December 1936 the Carlist war council decided to establish a ‘Royal Military Academy’ to ensure a supply of trained Carlist officers. Franco, jealous of their strength, declared that such an unauthorized move would be considered an act against the nationalist movement. The war council backed down and Fal Conde went into exile in Portugal. The Caudillo followed up this victory with a decree which subordinated all political militias to the code of military justice and the army chain of command.