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

‘H^istory to the defeated’, wrote W.H. Auden in his poem, ‘Spain 1937’, ‘may say Alas but cannot help or pardon.’ The Spanish Civil War is one of the comparatively few cases when the most widely accepted version of events has been written more persuasively by the losers of the conflict than by the winners. This development was of course decisively influenced by the subsequent defeat of the nationalists’ Axis allies. At the time, however, the Republic may have won many battles for international public opinion, but the nationalists won the key engagement by concentrating on a select and powerful audience in Britain and the United States. They played on the fear of communism in an appeal to conservative and religious feelings, and their audience’s suspicions about the Republic were confirmed by Soviet military aid.

The nationalists argued that they represented the cause of Christianity, order and Western civilization against ‘Asiatic Communism’. To bolster this version of events, they alleged, on the basis of forged documents,¹ that the communists had planned a revolution with 150,000 shock troops and 100,000 reserves in 1936, a coup which the nationalist rising had pre-empted. They declared that the election results of February 1936 were invalid, even though CEDA and monarchist leaders had accepted the results at the time. They concentrated on presenting life in the republican zone as a perpetual massacre of priests, nuns and innocents, accompanied by a frenzied destruction of churches and works of art. And to justify their failure to take Madrid, they claimed that half a million foreign communists were fighting in Spain.²

The republican government’s oversimplified case was that it had been elected legally in February 1936 and was then attacked by reactionary generals aided by the Axis dictatorships. Thus the Republic represented the cause of democracy, freedom and enlightenment against fascism. The Republic’s foreign propaganda emphasized that their government was the only legal and democratic one in Spain. This was of course true, when compared with the illegality and authoritarianism of their opponents, but liberal and left-of-centre politicians had hardly respected their own constitution at times. The rising of October 1934, in which Prieto and Largo Caballero had participated, greatly undermined their case against the rebels.

The passionate supporters of the Republic refused to acknowledge that the left’s threat to extinguish the bourgeoisie and the pre-revolutionary situation which was developing in the spring of 1936 was bound to react to defend itself. The unspeakable horrors of the Russian civil war and the Soviet system of oppression that emerged–the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Largo Caballero had demanded–was a lesson unlikely to be forgotten. And once the war had started, the Republic’s democratic credentials began to look increasingly tattered when the Cortes was reduced to a symbolic body with no control over the government. Then, from the middle of 1937, the administration of Juan Negrín developed marked authoritarian tendencies. Criticism of the prime minister and the Communist Party virtually became an act of treason.

Both sides had a very selective and manipulative view of history. In later years supporters of the Republic held that the Spanish conflict represented the start of the Second World War. The Franquists, on the other hand, said it was simply the prelude to a third world war between Western civilization and communism, and that any Nazi or fascist aid they received was incidental.

The Republic’s need to convince the outside world of the justice of its cause was greatly increased by the effects of British foreign policy. In addition, the already strained political atmosphere of the 1930s and the internationalized aspect of the civil war made foreign opinion seem of paramount importance to the outcome. The Spanish workers and peasants believed, with innocent earnestness, that if the situation were explained abroad, Western governments must come to their aid against the Axis dictatorships. Foreign visitors were asked how it was possible that in a democracy like America, where the majority of the population supported the Republic (over 70 per cent according to opinion polls), the government refused it arms for self-defence. Republican leaders were much more aware of the reasons for the actions of Western governments, but even they were wrong in believing that the British and French governments would eventually be forced to accept that their interests lay in a strong anti-Axis policy before it was too late.