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

The conduct of the war on the Aragón front, particularly the lack of action, soon became a major cause of tension between the anarchists and the communists. It is true that once the possibility of recapturing the key towns of Saragossa, Teruel and Huesca had diminished, lethargy seemed to descend on the Catalonian militias. Nevertheless, the communist charges (such as the football matches with the enemy, which Hemingway accepted as gospel) were often inaccurate and misleading. The Communists made sure that none of the new equipment went to the Aragón front, certainly no aircraft or tanks, which were reserved for their own troops and were, therefore, concentrated around Madrid. Some of the best Catalonian troops were helping on the Madrid front, and many of those left behind were armed only with shotguns. Under such conditions it was unrealistic to expect conventional offensives to be mounted, particularly since XIII International Brigade failed in seven attacks on Teruel.

Even so, anarchist inactivity in a region which they had promised to turn into ‘the Spanish Ukraine’ was remarkable. Nothing was done by the CNT-FAI leadership to organize guerrilla groups and prosecute a Makhnovista-style campaign, which would have avoided the military conventions which they detested. It is surprising that a man such as García Oliver, who was energetic and imaginative, did not realize that extending enemy forces over wide areas through a vigorous guerrilla campaign would be far less costly in human lives than the slaughter into which they were being inexorably drawn. The nationalists did not have the troops to fight both an anti-guerrilla campaign in their rear areas and a conventional war at the front. There were, it is true, many guerrilla groups behind nationalist lines. But, as will be seen later, a considerable proportion of them were simply refugees from the nationalist execution squads trying to survive. Nevertheless, there was active resistance in Galicia, León, Estremadura and Andalucia, where an irregular brigade under the Granadine cabinetmaker Maroto operated.

The GRU and especially the NKVD carried out ‘active work’ in Spain. This meant that apart from purely intelligence missions, they conducted sabotage work in the rear areas of the nationalists. ‘Orlov’, the NKVD chief in Spain, was in overall charge, but Kh. U. Mamsourov, under the name of Colonel Xanthé, worked in Spain from August 1936 to October 1937 guiding all partisan activities there. He set up aktivki, small sabotage groups who crossed the lines for a mission. Mamsourov, who was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, later claimed when a colonel-general, that he was the person on whom Hemingway based his hero, Robert Jordan, in For Whom the Bell Tolls.²⁴ Mamsourov was replaced by Naum Eitingon, still one of the great heroes of Soviet foreign intelligence who had been an expert in ‘wet operations’: it was he who organized the assassination of Trotsky. In his letter to Largo Caballero in December 1936 Stalin also advocated the formation of detachments behind enemy lines.

Later on, Orlov claimed to have trained 1,600 guerrillas in his schools and put 14,000 ‘regulars’ in the field, but the latter figure is probably a gross exaggeration.

The conversion of militia forces into the People’s Army was known as ‘militarization’ and it was not a smooth process. Those anarchists, poumistas and left socialists, who defended the militia system on the basis of principle, obstinately refused to see that it could not answer the needs of the situation. They also drew false parallels with the French and Russian revolutions.²⁵ A ‘military machine’ can be defeated only by a better machine or by the sabotage tactics of irregular warfare. The militia fell between the two roles. Their improvisation had been a revolutionary necessity, not a military virtue, and as a force to resist a relatively sophisticated enemy they were utterly obsolete.

The theory used to justify the militia system depended almost entirely on morale, which is only one part in the military mix, and the most vulnerable of all. There were too many anarchists who allowed morale to serve as a substitute for practicality, who did not replace the discipline they rejected with self-discipline and who sometimes let their beliefs degenerate into an ideological justification of inefficiency. But there were others, like Cipriano Mera, who realized that they were now committed to a course of action, which they had to pursue even if it conflicted with their ideals. More and more anarchists came to accept this during the autumn and winter of 1936. They were alarmed by the increase in communist power, but they knew that the war against the nationalists was a war of survival.