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

On that day of march pasts through the streets of Burgos, hung with bunting and huge portraits of the Generalissimo, there was a ‘mixture of fascist and medieval elements’.²³ In the ancient captain-generalcy of Burgos, the new captain-general made a speech, referring to the revolution of October 1934, paying homage to the ‘absent one’, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, denouncing the conspiracy of atheist Russia against Catholic Spain, recounting the crimes of the reds and announcing the final victory of his military crusade.²⁴ ‘This imposes on every Spaniard the duty of cultivating remembrance. The harsh lesson must not be lost, and the benevolence of Christian generosity, which has no limits for those who have been led astray, and for the repentant who come in good faith to join us, must nevertheless be controlled by prudence to prevent infiltration by recalcitrant enemies of the Fatherland, whose health, like that of the body, needs to be quarantined from those coming from the camp of pestilence…In their name [those of the Nationalist dead] and that of sacred Spain, I sow today this seed in the deep furrow which our glorious army has ploughed. Spaniards all: ¡Arriba España! Viva España!’²⁵

The Battle of the Ebro

After the collapse in Aragón during the spring, the republican government had set out to reconstitute an army from the formations pushed back into the isolated eastern zone. They had the River Segre to the west and the Ebro to the south as reasonable defence lines behind which they could reorganize. They also had the 18,000 tons of war matériel which came over the French frontier between March and mid June. And they had more time to reorganize than they could have reasonably expected, thanks to Franco’s ill-judged offensive towards Valencia.

During the late spring and early summer the call-up was extended to the classes of 1925–9 and 1940–1. Twelve new divisions were formed. The conscripts ranged from sixteen-year-olds (which veterans called the quinta del biberón, the baby’s bottle call-up) to middle-aged fathers. To these were added nationalist prisoners of war and many skilled technicians, who were now drafted because the loss of the hydroelectric plants in the Pyrenees had cut Catalonian production dramatically. Yet since there were insufficient rifles to go round, the government’s militarization decrees seem to have had more to do with creating an impression of resolute resistance than with military requirements. The new war matériel was of most use to the air force, special arms and machine-gun companies. The small arms did no more than replace those lost by front-line divisions at Teruel or in Aragón.

After the failure of his peace overtures Negrín, supported by the communists, felt that international attention must be aroused by a great heroic action. If it were successful the Republic could negotiate from a position of greater strength. This reasoning, however, contained several basic flaws. European attention was much more preoccupied with events in the east, especially Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakia. There was no prospect of Franco changing his refusal to compromise,¹ nor of Chamberlain coming to the aid of the Republic.

The military justification for the project consisted of a vain plan to recapture the nationalists’ corridor to the sea and link the two republican zones again. But this was wildly optimistic and demonstrated that the government and the communists still refused to learn from their own disastrous mistakes. The pattern was entirely predictable. Even if the republican attackers achieved surprise, the nationalist armies, with their American trucks, would redeploy rapidly to halt the offensive. And once again nationalist air and artillery superiority would crush them in the open. In addition, this attack across a major river, with all the problems of resupply that entailed, represented a far more dangerous risk than even the offensives of Brunete and Teruel. The loss of aircraft and equipment would also be far more catastrophic than before, since there was little chance of any further replacements arriving, now that the French border had closed again. Negrín also refused to see that another battle involving heavy casualties would damage republican morale irretrievably. Altogether it was a monumental gamble against very unfavourable odds and bizarrely incompatible with Negrín’s hope that the Republic would still be resisting strongly when a European war broke out.

An Army of the Ebro was specially formed for this offensive. As at Brunete, it was communist dominated and received nearly all the armour, artillery and aircraft. Modesto was the army commander, with V Corps under Líster, and XV Corps under the 26-year-old communist physicist Manuel Tagüeña. His right flank was covered by XII Corps, which defended the bottom part of the River Segre from Lérida to where it joined the Ebro opposite Mequinenza.²