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

The Generalitat in Catalonia followed the policy of the central government, but at the same time it tried to establish the eastern forces as an independent Catalan army. This was an ambitious policy, intensely disliked by the central government. The communists refrained from criticizing the Generalitat, since their policy was to aid Companys, the Catalan president, to assert state power at the expense of the anarchists. Once that was close to being achieved, they would use their Catalan PSUC to help bring the Generalitat under central government control. On 6 December, the Diari Oficial de la Generalitat published the decree creating the Exe`rcit Nacional de Catalunya, an army composed of three divisions instead of mixed brigades. But in February 1937, when the Generalitat called up the classes of 1934 and 1935, it also had to place its army under the control of the central general staff.²¹

In Euzkadi, meanwhile, Aguirre’s Basque government organized its own independent army, the Eusko Gudarostea, with 25,000 men, nominally forming part of the Army of the North. War industries were militarized and work started on constructing the ‘iron ring’ of Bilbao, a defence line to defend their capital.²²

The only offensive in the north was General Llano de la Encomienda’s push southwards in the mountains towards Villareal in early December. The Basques and their ill-assorted allies had virtually no air support and only a few field guns hauled by oxen. But morale was high. Pierre Bocheau, a French communist volunteer with the Larrañaga Battalion, recorded his impressions. His unit, an international detachment, was named after Jesús Larrañaga, the Basque communist deputy and chief commissar of the army. ‘Friday, a grey, rainy morning, we have assembled in the courtyard of the barracks and we are filling our ammunition pouches, checking our machine-guns, revolvers and rifles. Suddenly one of us, almost a boy, starts singing a song…We cross Bilbao. At the railway station are the sisters, fiancées and mothers of our Spanish comrades. Some of them are crying. And we Italians, French and Bulgarians from the international detachment are thinking about our mothers, fiancées and sisters who are not here. Spanish women surround me. They offer me bread and oranges. They say with much tenderness in their voices: “Muchacho! Your family is not here to kiss you goodbye.”

‘In the train, one of my comrades–Piero, I think–spoke of death with much indifference. “To die is nothing. The main thing is to win.”…We begin to sing the ‘Carmagnole’. Then, we sang in Spanish ‘The Young Guards’. It seemed to me for a minute that we are immortal. That not one of us is going to die, even if a bullet strikes the head or the heart.

‘Elorrio. The train stops. Night. We call to each other while lining up in companies. It’s pouring with rain. Our battalion of workers and peasants is marching forward between the black, silent fences of the village.

‘Tuesday. “Comrades! Get up!” It is two in the morning and the night is dark. The company is ready to fight in two minutes. In fact, all we had to do was to put on our boots. Dudul said suddenly, “And actually when you are going into battle, your heart really does beat fast.”

‘Bullets are hitting the branches of the trees. Bullets are flying past our ears. Bullets hit the ground round our feet. A whisper is heard. “Comrades, we’re going to advance now.” Then, a loud cry: ‘Adelante!’ We move forward, knee deep in mud. We move forward through a curtain of bullets. My body is shaking and I am not a coward. It is flapping around like a pennant in the wind. I have to take my own body by the shoulders and push it forward…

‘It is so heavy to carry a wounded man. The wounded men seem so heavy when you have been on your feet from dawn till dusk. At times, we stumbled into shell holes, tripped and dropped the man we were carrying. Every moan broke our hearts. I collapsed when we reached the wood where the French battalion was fighting. That’s all I remember.’²³