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

In Catalonia the republican general staff had designated fall-back lines, but they were purely theoretical. ‘Only when Tarragona fell’, wrote Stepánov, ‘did we realize that there was no Maginot Line round Barcelona, as some of our military leaders seemed to think. There was not even a kilometre of trenches.’¹⁶

The republican authorities had called up reserves on 9 January from the classes of 1922 and 1942, and a week later they ordered the general mobilization of all citizens of both sexes between 17 and 55 years old. All industry and transport was also militarized.¹⁷ But these measures came far too late to have any effect. They were just gestures of defiance. The republican forces found themselves outnumbered six to one. Many were out of ammunition or without weapons. A defence of the city was also impossible because the morale and determination of 1936 had completely disappeared. Resistance might have taken place only if the city was surrounded, but an escape route to the French frontier remained open.

Since the fall of Tarragona the nationalist air forces never ceased bombing the city, yet Franco was still nervous about French intervention. On 17 January Richthofen had to reassure him again that it was simply too late for them to send in troops. The nationalists and their allies were now convinced that they could prosecute the campaign to the bitter end without the slightest worry of international reaction.

On the republican side, Negrín called an emergency meeting of the council of ministers on 18 January, to which Companys and Martínez Barrio were also invited. He proclaimed a state of war after two and a half years of fighting, a curiously empty gesture. For Federica Montseny, as for almost everyone else, the war was clearly lost. ‘The Spanish people could do no more,’ she wrote. ‘Any solution aimed at saving lives…seemed to us to be a collective salvation.’¹⁸

On the morning of 22 January General Rojo told Negrín that the front had ceased to exist.¹⁹ The same day Negrín ordered all government departments to abandon Barcelona and make their way to Gerona and Figueras. The divisions of Solchaga and Yagüe were crossing the river Llobregat, the two corps of Muñoz Grandes and of García Valiño were attacking Sabadell and Tarrasa, while Gambara’s Italians were advancing on Badalona. ‘Barcelona, 48 hours before the entrance of the enemy’, wrote Rojo, ‘was a dead city.’²⁰

On the night of 25 January, Lluís Companys rang his friend Josep Andreu i Abelló, president of the Appeal Court of Catalonia, to invite him to dinner. Afterwards the two men drove to the centre of the old town through deserted streets. Leaflets appealing for resistance to the bitter end blew in the wind, along with identity cards that had been thrown away. ‘It was a night which I will never forget,’ recounted Abelló many years later. ‘The silence was total, a terrible silence, of the sort which comes at the culminating point of a tragedy. We went to the Plaza de Sant Jaume and we made our farewell to the Generalitat and the city. It was two in the morning. The vanguard of the nationalist army was already in Tibidabo and close to Montjuich. We never believed that we would return.’²¹

Companys would return, but against his will, when the Gestapo found him in France in the autumn of the following year. He would be handed over to nationalist representatives and brought back over the border. The president of the Generalitat was to be declared guilty of ‘military rebellion’, sentenced to death and executed in the moat of Montjuich on 15 October 1940.

A large part of the population of Barcelona, seized by fear, abandoned the city. So many documents were being burned around the city that many minor fires broke out.²² Shops were looted by people wanting food to take with them on the hard journey ahead. The coast road eastwards was jammed with buses, heavy lorries, vans, motor cars and horse-drawn carts piled with mattresses and domestic utensils, trunks and suitcases as well as exhausted women and children. Some men pushed their family belongings on handcarts, but it was hard to see them having the strength to cross the Pyrenees.

The military convoys full of soldiers cast an even greater shadow over the sadness of departure. Teresa Pàmies, a young militant of the Communist PSUC, described what she saw: ‘Of the flight from Barcelona on 26 January, I will never be able to forget the wounded who crawled out of the Vallcarca hospital. Mutilated and covered in bandages, half-naked despite the cold, they pushed themselves towards the road, yelling pleas that they should not be left behind to fall into the hands of the victors…Those who had lost their legs crawled along the ground, those who had lost an arm raised the other with a clenched fist, the youngest crying in fear, the older ones shouting in rage and cursing those of us who were fleeing and were abandoning them.’²³