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

At the beginning of December, two weeks after the last republican units slipped back across the Ebro, the nationalist Army of Manoeuvre redeployed along the two river frontiers of the Republic’s north-eastern zone. The republican general staff, foreseeing this development, prepared the defence of Catalonia and planned attacks in the west and south to divert the enemy’s attention.¹

Negrín also had to pay attention to feelings in the rearguard. Very few parties supported his policy of resistance to the very end. The republican alliance was split between his supporters, chiefly the communists,² and the other factions led by Prieto, Largo Caballero and Besteiro. Besteiro in particular disliked Negrín’s position. On 16 November he had left Madrid for Barcelona to see the president of the Republic. He told Azaña of his conviction that Negrín was completely bound up with the communists. At the executive committee of the Socialist Party he had said to the head of government, ‘I consider you to be an agent of the communists.’³

During a dinner with the new British representative, R. C. Shrine Stevenson, Negrín managed to convince him that his attitude to communism was purely a question of necessity. Stevenson reported to Lord Halifax afterwards how Negrín argued that communism was the wrong ideology for Spaniards. The republican government had only worked with the communists because they were the best organized force in the early days, and because the Soviet Union was the only country which had been able to provide solid support. The communists had been the most enthusiastic and energetic in their support of the government, and for that reason the government needed them, but if the Republic could obtain from France and Britain what it needed, then as soon as that happened, he could crush the Communist Party in a week.⁴ But these sentiments which Negrín expressed are rather hard to reconcile with his own approach on 10 December to the communists about forming a United National Front to have done with party politics.

At the beginning of January Negrín tried again to persuade the French to help the Republic in extremis. On 7 January he travelled in secret to Paris where he met the British and the American ambassadors as well as seeing Georges Bonnet, the foreign minister. He told them that in order to resist, they needed 2,000 machine-guns and 100,000 rifles.⁵ The French authorities not only failed to reply to this desperate and ingenuous request. Bonnet collaborated with Franco’s representative in Paris, Quiñones de León, in partially blocking the last delivery of Soviet arms which reached Bordeaux on 15 January.⁶

Faced with the huge nationalist concentration of forces on the River Segre, the republican general staff put into effect its plan of diversionary attacks, agreed on 6 December. On 8 December republican forces advanced on the Córdoba-Peñarroya front towards Seville, while another effort was to be made on the north side of the Estremaduran front. An amphibious assault in reinforced brigade strength was also planned for the same day against the Andalucian coast near Motril, but it was called off just as the troops were ready to leave. The Estremaduran offensive did not begin for another four weeks, by which time the nationalist onslaught on Catalonia had commenced.

The nationalist offensive in the east was due to begin on 10 December, but torrential rain forced a postponement. Franco did not want to take any risk and insisted that flying conditions should be good enough for their ‘flying artillery’ to operate. The nationalists had deployed 340,000 men, around 300 tanks, more than 500 aircraft and 1,400 guns. Their only concern was the danger of a desperate resistance in Barcelona. The Italians were once again in two minds. ‘Things seem to be going well and the campaign in Catalonia could have a decisive character,’ wrote Ciano in his diary on 6 December. ‘I am a little sceptical. This phrase has been used too many times to be believable.’⁷

Meanwhile, foreign statesmen like Roosevelt, who admitted that the arms embargo ‘had been a grave mistake’,⁸ and Churchill and Eden, who had previously held aloof in disapproval of the Republic, now realized what its extinction signified. The few democracies left on the Continent included France, Switzerland, the Low Countries and Scandinavia; even the pessimists did not imagine that most of these had only eighteen months left. Attempts to mediate in Spain were made by many foreign governments, but Franco rejected all approaches. The attitude of the British government left him feeling secure enough to continue to insist on belligerent rights before volunteers were withdrawn. Italian infantry he could do without, but the Condor Legion was his guarantee of victory.