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

The report also accused Giral, the minister of foreign affairs, of infiltrating Trotskyists into his ministry. Negrín was the only one to support the Communist Party, but he was not strong enough. ‘Our party insisted on the following three points: to carry out a purge of the military apparatus and to help promote to the top ranks the commanders who come from among the people, and to put a stop to the anti-communist campaign; to carry out tirelessly a purge of Trotskyist elements in the rear; once and for all to stop indulging the press, groups and individuals who are carrying out a slanderous campaign against the USSR. If he will not do this, then the Party is strong enough, understands well enough the responsibility that it bears, and will find the necessary means and measures to protect the interests of the people.’ The survey of the political situation concluded with the statement: ‘The popular revolution cannot end successfully if the Communist Party does not take power into its own hands.’¹²

The War in Aragón

After the failure of the Brunete offensive in July, the republican general staff finally admitted that nothing could be achieved by major operations in the central region. But even though another attack on such a massive scale could not be considered after their losses in matériel, a further effort to help Santander and Asturias was demanded. If the republican forces in the north could hold out until the winter snows blocked the passes of the Cordillera Cantábrica, Franco would not be able to bring down his Navarrese, Galician and Italian troops (which would bring him numerical parity) or the major part of his air power before the late spring of 1938.

The Aragón front was chosen for the next republican attack. The reasons for deciding on the east rather than the south-west were primarily political. The communists and their senior supporters in the army could not select Estremadura, because it would be a virtual admission that the Brunete strategy had been wrong and Largo Caballero’s project right. The major reason, however, for switching the emphasis of the war to the east was the intention of Negrín’s government and the communists to establish complete control over Catalonia and Aragón.

In the wake of the May events in Barcelona, the central government had taken over responsibility for public order in Catalonia, dissolved the Generalitat’s Council of Defence, which had been run by the anarchists since its inception, and appointed General Pozas to command the newly designated Army of the East. This represented the first stage in ending the Generalitat’s independence and anarchist power in Catalonia. The next stage in reasserting central government control was to be the crushing of the Council of Aragón by bringing in communist troops and placing the three anarchist divisions under overall communist command. The composition of republican forces in the east was changed radically in the summer of 1937. Before Brunete the only communist formation in the region had been the PSUC’s 27th (Carlos Marx) Division, but during the last days of July and the first part of August all the elite communist formations were transferred from the central front, including Kléber’s 45th Division and Modesto’s V Corps (with Líster’s 11th Division, Walter’s 35th Division and El Campesino’s 46th Division). For the first time the anarchists were threatened in their ‘Spanish Ukraine’.

At the end of July, after the battle of Brunete, the communists launched a propaganda offensive against the Council of Aragón’s president, Joaquín Ascaso, who was a controversial and flamboyant figure. The communists accused him of acting like a Mafia chieftain. His libertarian supporters, on the other hand, defended him vigorously when he was accused of smuggling jewellery out of the country. Ferocious attacks were made on the system of self-managed agricultural collectives in the main Party newspapers Mundo Obrero and Frente Rojo, because it ran counter to the ‘controlled democracy’ which Negrín and the communists advocated.