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

Many requests for military assistance from the republican government were simply ignored by Stalin. When the situation became especially hard in the spring of 1938, appeals to the Soviet Union were ignored. ‘I passed Negrín’s request for help to the respective institution (the Politburo),’ wrote Litvinov on 29 April to Marchenko, the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Spain, ‘but no decision has been made so far.’¹³ Finally, Litvinov wrote on 7 August to Marchenko in Barcelona, ‘So far no decisions have been adopted on the requests from Ispanpra [Spanish government]. I think that the reason for this delay is that the answer is going to be negative.’¹⁴ Some arms shipments continued, but Stalin had lost interest in Spain because of the situation in Europe and in the Far East. It was quite clear that the republican government was going to lose and he had other priorities.

As well as the huge cost of importing arms, the Republic had to buy oil, supplies of all sorts, and now food after the loss of Aragón’s agricultural regions. Chickpeas and lentils bought from Mexico became the staple of the republican zone’s diet. Food shortages were serious everywhere, but Barcelona had to cope with refugees from Aragón, in addition to those who had come earlier in the war from Andalucia, Estremadura and Castile, now a million in total.¹⁵ The scenes of peasants from the Aragónese collectives, herding in livestock and bringing their few belongings on carts as they fled from the nationalists, were even more pathetic than those in Madrid during the autumn of 1936. Food queues were worse than ever and women were killed and maimed during the bombing raids because they would not give up their places. The daily ration of 150 grammes of rice, beans or, more usually, lentils (known as Dr Negrín’s little pills) could not prevent the effects of vitamin and protein deficiency among those unable to afford black market prices. Children, especially the increasing number of war orphans (the Quakers reported that there were 25,000 in Barcelona alone), suffered from rickets. In 1938 the death rate for children and the old doubled.¹⁶

The local population responded to the crisis with its customary ingenuity. Balconies in Barcelona were used for keeping chickens or breeding rabbits and the city woke at dawn to the crowing of the cocks. Pots too were used for growing vegetables, as well as many plots of ground all over the city. Pigeons had disappeared from the streets into casseroles, so had cats, which were served up as ‘rabbit’. Orange peel was sliced and cooked as ersatz fries, lettuce leaves were dried to make tobacco, but this was only tinkering at the edges.¹⁷ Mothers used to get up before dawn and walk up to twenty kilometres out to farms in the surrounding countryside in the hope of bartering something for food.

Politicians and senior officials, however, did not seem to be losing much weight; a banquet organized in Negrín’s honour in Barcelona led to angry demonstrations of protest. On the whole the troops were much better fed than the civilian population, but they were very conscious of the way their families were suffering. Inevitably they became bitter at the scandals involving theft by the staff and supply services of petrol, rations and equipment for resale on the black market.

Barcelona, already suffering such hardship, was also subjected to continual bombing raids by the Italian air force. The city had already been bombarded in February 1937 by the Italian fleet, then from March of that year the Italian bomber squadrons based on Majorca harried the city. The worst raids were on 29 May and 1 October. But in 1938 the attacks became more concentrated. In January they bombed the harbour areas and surrounding neighbourhoods, terrorizing the civilian population. Ciano was thrilled by the account of the destruction, which he found ‘so realistically horrifying’.¹⁸

These raids prompted a retaliation by the republican air force on nationalist cities, causing several dozen deaths.¹⁹ A diplomatic attempt was made to have such actions suspended on both sides. The republicans ceased their raids when Eden promised to help. It was later revealed, however, that the British had made no attempt to do anything. Mussolini halted the bombing in February, out of pique with the nationalists for not allotting the CTV a sufficiently glorious role at Teruel. But during the advance to the sea he decided, without warning Franco, to relaunch the raids on a far more intensive scale.²⁰ Ciano noted, ‘Mussolini believes that these air raids are an admirable way of weakening the morale of the reds.’²¹