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

Two weeks later, between 19 and 26 September, the nationalists fought their way from rock to rock to take the heights of the Sierra de Cavalls, held by the exhausted soldiers of Modesto’s army. Rojo was desperate because Menéndez, the commander of the Army of the Levante, and Miaja did nothing to launch an offensive on their side of the corridor to alleviate pressure on the Army of the Ebro. On 2 October, after capturing the heights of Lavall, the nationalists reached La Venta de Camposines. And a couple of weeks later they captured in a night attack Point 666, the key to the Sierra de Pàndols. They totally cleared the defensive position of Cavalls, leaving republican formations exposed, and carried out a pincer movement, with Yagüe attacking towards La Faterella and García Valiña gave the order to blow it up. ‘A dry explosion, a flash, a thundering from fragments of iron falling into the water announced the end of the Battle of the Ebro, 113 days after its beginning.’³¹ General Rojo supported Tagüeño in the direction of Ascó and Flix.

The republicans, after losing huge casualties, were left with only a small strip of territory on the right bank of the Ebro. At 4.30 in the morning of 16 November, taking advantage of a heavy river mist, the last men of the 35th Division recrossed the Ebro by the iron bridge at Flix. Fifteen minutes later Tagüeña’s decision to withdraw.

The mistake was not to have done it at least 100 days earlier. Modesto’s Army of the Ebro had virtually ceased to exist. Its remnants returned to the same positions which they had occupied on 24 July.

The Terra Alta had been a harsh battlefield for a pitiless conflict–a summer counterpart to the winter horrors of Teruel. The nationalists had lost 60,000 casualties, the republicans 75,000, of whom 30,000 died, many of them unburied in the sierras which Modesto’s army had been forced to abandon. Apart from the terrible loss of human life, almost all the weapons needed for the defence of Catalonia had been lost on this grotesque gamble.

Non-communist officers were the most vocal critics of the Ebro campaign and the way it had been handled. General Gámir Ulibarri argued that the fall of Catalonia had taken place on the Ebro. Others, such as Colonel Perea, the commander of the Army of the East, who was furious with Rojo, had harsh words for the lack of military sense in the whole operation. The Comintern agents, on the other hand, tried to blame Rojo and the general staff. Togliatti informed Moscow that the Army of the Ebro had received no support from the central front because of ‘sabotage and the malevolent action of General Miaja and the other commanders of the centre’.³²

Following the distorting pattern of his usual Stalinist paranoia, Stepánov attacked the general staff and Rojo for having prolonged the operation, ‘calculating that by exhausting the Army of the Ebro, they would debilitate and incapacitate it’.³³ The fact that the whole strategy had been agreed between Negrín and the communists, and the army had been commanded by a communist who refused to retreat, were of course ignored. So was the fact that the whole plan had been ill thought-out. To attack a sector so close to the bulk of the nationalist Army of Manoeuvre meant that the enemy could counter-attack rapidly; and to choose to fight with a large river just behind your front line when the enemy had a crushing air superiority to smash your supply lines was idiotic; to refuse to pull back after a week when it was clear that you had no chance of achieving your objective was bound to lead to the useless sacrifice of an army which could not be replaced. It was beyond military stupidity, it was the mad delusion of propaganda.

The Republic in the European Crisis

During the slaughter on the Ebro front, the vastly over-optimistic propaganda bulletins had raised exaggerated hopes in the rear areas. Even the normally pessimistic Azaña had been encouraged by the initial reports. But few people back in Barcelona realized that the offensive had in fact failed by 1 August.