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

Co-operation was withheld from even the most senior non-communist officers. Colonel Casado, when in command of the Army of Andalucia, was not allowed to know the location of airfields or the availability of aircraft on his front. Commissars given recruitment targets to fulfil by the Party hierarchy went to any lengths to achieve them. Prieto later stated that socialists in communist units who refused to join the Party were frequently shot on false charges such as cowardice or desertion. After the battle of Brunete, 250 men from El Campesino’s division sought protection in the ranks of Mera’s 14th Division because of the treatment they had suffered for not becoming communists. Mera refused to return them when El Campesino arrived in a fury at his headquarters. General Miaja, though officially a communist, backed him against a Party member.

Perhaps the most dramatic deterioration in morale after mid 1937 occurred in the ranks of the International Brigades, who in October had lost 2,000 men through a typhus epidemic.²¹ There had always been non-communists in their ranks who refused to swallow the Party line, but now even committed communists were questioning their position. At the beginning of 1937 the Irish had nearly mutinied after the Lopera débaˆcle, when they were prevented at the last moment from forming their own company. The American mutiny at the Jarama in the early spring had been successful, though that was seen as an aberration which had been put right. Some Italians from the Garibaldi Battalion deserted to join the liberal and anarchist Giustizia e Libertá column. During the Segovia offensive XIV International Brigade had refused to continue useless frontal attacks on La Granja and foreigners in a penal battalion mutinied when ordered to shoot deserters.

The anger at futile slaughter was accompanied by a growing unease at the existence of ‘re-education’ camps, run by Soviet officers and guarded by Spanish communists armed with the latest automatic rifles. At these camps labour was organized on a Stakhanovite basis, with food distribution linked to achieving or exceeding work norms. The prisoners were mostly those who wanted to return home for various reasons and had been refused. (It was not known until later that several Brigaders in this category were locked up in mental hospitals, a typically Soviet measure.) One of the most sordid camps was at Júcar, some 40 kilometres from Albacete, where disillusioned British, American and Scandinavian volunteers were held. Some British members were saved from execution by the intervention of the Foreign Office, but those from other nationalities were locked up in the prisons of Albacete, Murcia, Valencia and Barcelona.²²

The persistent trouble in the International Brigades also stemmed from the fact that volunteers, to whom no length of service had ever been mentioned, assumed that they were free to leave after a certain time. Their passports had been taken away on enlistment and many of them were sent to Moscow by diplomatic bag for use by NKVD agents abroad. Brigade leaders who became so alarmed by the stories of unrest filtering home imposed increasingly stringent measures of discipline. Letters were censored and anyone who criticized the competence of the Party leadership faced prison camps, or even firing squads. Leave was often cancelled and some volunteers who, without authorization, took a few of the days owing to them were shot for desertion when they returned to their unit. The feeling of being trapped by an organization with which they had lost sympathy made a few volunteers even cross the lines to the nationalists. Others tried such unoriginal devices as putting a bullet through their own foot when cleaning a rifle.

Comintern organizers were becoming disturbed, for accounts of conditions had started to stem the flow of volunteers from abroad. Fresh volunteers were shocked by the cynicism of the veterans, who laughed at the idealism of newcomers while remembering their own with bitterness. Some of the new arrivals at Albacete were literally shanghaied. Foreign specialists, or mechanics who had agreed to come for a specific purpose only, found themselves pressganged and threatened with the penalty for desertion if they refused.²³ Even sailors on shore leave from foreign merchantmen in republican ports were seized as ‘deserters’ from the brigades and sent to Albacete under guard. On 23 September 1937, Prieto issued a decree incorporating the International Brigades into the Spanish Foreign Legion, which brought them under the Spanish Code of Military Justice. He also established a regulation that International Brigade officers in any one unit should not exceed Spanish officers by more than 50 per cent.²⁴