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

On the republicans’ right flank, Mera’s division had almost managed to surround Brihuega when the enemy became seized by panic and fled. The CTV was saved from an even greater disaster by the fall of darkness, the more orderly retreat of the Littorio division and the number of Italian trucks available for their escape. Even so, their offensive had cost the Italians 5,000 casualties and the loss of a considerable quantity of weapons and vehicles. Captured Italian documents stated that many of their supposedly wounded soldiers were found to have nothing wrong with them under their bandages.

For the republicans, the end of the battle brought a moment of respite. Food was brought up on mules and wine was issued. Some of the men cooked paella in their trenches. Commissars issued three cigarettes to each man and trucks brought up new alpargatas to replace those shoes which had rotted in the mud and snow.²⁷ Italian morale, on the other hand, was devastated and Mussolini was furious. Since Moscardó’s troops had suffered very few casualties, Franco’s officers refused to see the engagement as a nationalist defeat. They were scathing about their allies’ performance and composed a song to the tune of ‘Faccetta nera’ which went: ‘Guadalajara is not Abyssinia; here the reds are chucking bombs which explode.’ It ended: ‘The retreat was a dreadful thing; one Italian even arrived in Badajoz.’

As the only publicized republican victory of the war, the battle became a propaganda trophy. The communists claimed that the town of Brihuega was captured by El Campesino’s brigade and even added several anecdotal touches. In fact, El Campesino arrived alone at dusk on a motorcycle and was fired at by outlying pickets from the 14th Division. He raced back to report that the town was still in enemy hands. Considering that Líster’s division was supposed to be advancing up the Saragossa road, El Campesino had no official reason for being anywhere near Brihuega. The communist version of events was dropped in later years after he was disgraced during his Soviet exile and sent to a labour camp.

In that dangerous year of 1937, Soviet officers were to disappear into camps much sooner than El Campesino. Stalinist spy mania was reaching a peak. Suspicions in Spain and suspicions back in the Soviet Union fed upon each other. Regimental Commissar A. Agaltsov reported to Moscow in 1937 that the ‘fascist intervention in Spain and Trotskyist–Bukharin gangs that are operating in our country are links of the same chain’.²⁸ And some of the Soviet military advisers who returned from special mission in Spain accelerated the ‘mincing machine’ of the purges. G. Kulik, the commander of III Rifle Corps, wrote on 29 April 1937 to Voroshilov: ‘One cannot help asking oneself, how could this happen that the enemies of the people, traitors to my motherland, for whose interests I have fought at the front in Spain, could have managed to receive leading positions?…As a bolshevik, I don’t want the blood of our people to be shed unnecessarily because of the career makers, hidden traitors and mediocre leaders of troops, whom I have seen in the Spanish army. I consider it necessary that a careful review is conducted of all our commanders, in the first place, high-ranking ones, both in the army and in headquarters.’²⁹ Stalin’s purge of the Red Army was under way.

The failure of the Guadalajara offensive was excellent for morale, but it was not the turning point which the Republic and its supporters abroad tried to portray. Herbert Matthews of the New York Times even wrote that ‘Guadalajara is for fascism what Bailén was for Napoleon’.³⁰ From a political point of view, however, some argued that ‘Guadalajara aroused the enthusiasm of all anti-fascists…and represented a hard blow for the prestige of fascism and Mussolini’.³¹ Yet, paradoxically, Mussolini’s desire for vengeance to wipe out the humiliation only tied him closer to Franco’s cause.³² As the Wilhelmstrasse put it, ‘The defeat was of no great military importance, to be sure, but on the other hand it had unfavourable psychological and political reactions which needed to be stamped out by a military victory.’³³ Mussolini replaced Roatta with General Ettore Bastico and devoted even more money and armaments to the war at a terrible cost for Italy.

The only certain consequence for the nationalists was that Franco had to abandon his obsession with entering Madrid quickly and to adopt a longer-term strategy. After the casualties suffered at the Jarama, German advisers were able to argue more strongly for a programme of reducing vulnerable republican territories first. For a number of reasons the most attractive target was undoubtedly the northern republican zone along the Bay of Biscay.

The War in the North