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

There were two main stumbling blocks in the process of militarization. One was the principle of ‘unified command’, which worried the anarchists and the POUM because they feared the communists, even though they came to recognize its necessity in conventional war. The other was the imposition of traditional military discipline. The POUM wanted soldiers’ councils like those formed in the Russian revolution, an idea which horrified the communists, while the anarchists were split among themselves. Mera emphasized on several occasions that the instinct of self-preservation had proved itself too strong to be controlled solely by individual will-power in the unnatural atmosphere of the ‘noise of artillery, the rattle of machine-guns, and the whistle of bombs’.²⁶

The anarchists’ beliefs usually made them extremely reluctant to accept any form of command position, which of course made them vulnerable. (This was not new; in 1917 Trotsky became head of the Petrograd Soviet when Voline refused the post on the grounds of anarchist principle.) The conflicts between the anarchists and the military hierarchy were solved by a series of compromises. Saluting, the formal term of address and officers from outside were rejected by the anarchists, and delegates they had already elected were confirmed with the equivalent rank. (As only regular officers could become colonels, militia column commanders remained majors.) The problem over pay differentials was usually solved by officers contributing everything they earned above a militiaman’s wage to the CNT war fund.

It was not only the militias who were forced to alter their attitudes in the winter of 1936. In less than six months an attempted coup d’état had turned, first into a full-scale civil war and then into a world war by proxy. On 31 December 1936 nationalist artillery opposite Madrid rang in the new year by firing twelve shells into the centre of Madrid on the stroke of midnight. Ten of them hit the Telefónica. The Caudillo was said to have been angered by this unprofessional levity. Nevertheless, even such a career-minded general as Franco could not have liked the words of Captain von Goss of the Condor Legion: ‘No longer in the spring of 1937 could one talk merely of the Spanish war. It had become a real war.’²⁷

The Battles of the Jarama and Guadalajara

After the bloody shock of the Corunna road had ended in a stalemate, Franco began to prepare a new operation against Madrid. He refused to abandon the idea of taking the capital before spring, but although his strategy of a pincer attack to the east of Madrid was sound, he did not follow it through.

During the second half of January 1937, the front ran southwards from Madrid along the line of the road to Aranjuez. The new offensive was planned in the centre of this sector, thrusting north-eastwards across the River Jarama to cut the Valencia road. This was to be accompanied by an attack of the Italian Corpo di Truppe Volontarie under Roatta, which would strike down towards Guadalajara from the northern part of the nationalist zone. The pincers were planned to join round Alcalá de Henares, thus cutting off Madrid completely. But these two assaults did not coincide because the bad weather in January had delayed the redeployment of Italian troops after the Málaga campaign. There was little chance that they could be in position by the first week of February, yet Franco decided to launch the Jarama offensive without waiting for his Italian allies. The weather was indeed a problem. ‘Raining, raining, raining,’ wrote Richthofen in his diary at the end of January. ‘Airfields are completely sodden. Ice and mist!’¹

Franco was slow in appreciating how the war had changed in the last few months and that his best troops could not put the republican forces to flight as they had done in the previous autumn. It was no longer a war of rapid manoeuvre, but of head-on slogging, and as a result the advantage of his troops’ fieldcraft and tactical skill was greatly reduced. Even the increase in air and artillery support was not enough to ensure victory, especially since the Russian Mosca made the Heinkel 51 obsolete. Delivery of the new Messerschmitt 109 to the Condor Legion was accelerated, but the first models did not arrive until March. In any case, the republican forces were already better prepared to survive air or artillery bombardment.