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

In the Soviet Union some 700 Spanish republicans served in the Red Army and an equal number as partisans. Many others attempted to enlist but were told that they had fought in their own war and would serve the Soviet Union better by working in factories.³ Altogether 46 pilots, most of whom had been training in the Soviet Union at the end of the civil war, were sent to aviation regiments after appealing to La Pasionaria and other communist leaders of ‘the Moscow emigration’ to intercede on their behalf.⁴ More surprisingly, considering the Stalinist suspicion of foreign communists, 119 Spanish men and six women served in the OMSBON (the Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade of Special Designation of the NKVD of the USSR), which was the key praetorian unit in Moscow to defend the Kremlin. Six of them were officers and one became a company commander.⁵

Others served in the 1st Special Air Brigade of NKVD Frontier Guards, stationed at Bykovo twenty kilometres south of Moscow, ready to defend the Soviet capital. Another 700 joined partisan units in the German rear, many of them parachuted in. They included a group of Catalans led by José Fusimaña, while another detachment of eighteen fought with Medvedev, one of the most renowned of all the Soviet partisan leaders.⁶ A number of republican soldiers who spoke good Russian served in the front-line Red Army as if they were Soviet citizens. La Pasionaria’s son, Rubén Ruiz Ibárruri, was made a Hero of the Soviet Union and died in the fighting before Stalingrad, while two others were awarded the Order of Lenin. It is also said that 150 Spanish orphans took part in the defence of Leningrad.⁷

Many other republican refugees fought in the French resistance and the Forces Francçaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). During the first phase, until November 1942, their networks co-operated with Allied intelligence and helped with the escape routes for shot-down aircrews. Libertarians and poumistas were also active, such as Francisco Ponzán, (‘Francçois Vidal’), a former anarchist member of the Council of Aragón, who took part in the Pat O’Leary group. Captured by the Germans in August 1944, he was shot and his body was burned in a wood. Josep Rovira of the POUM managed to escape.

During 1943 and the first half of 1944 there was a certain unification of Spanish resistance groups under Spanish communist direction in the south-west of France. In the last phase of the resistance in France, republican groups formed an important element during what became a virtual civil war against the Vichy Milice. As soon as the fighting in France was over they began looking at the Spanish frontier, expecting the imminent collapse of the Franquist regime.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and following Comintern orders, the Spanish Communist Party had made urgent calls from Independent Spanish Radio and from Radio Toulouse to establish an anti-fascist front of all Spanish republican forces, including the CNT. The communists called this the Unión Nacional Española and it became the political arm of XIV Guerrilla Corps. From the start of 1944, XIV Corps controlled almost all Spanish units in 31 départements in the southern half of France. In May 1944 its name was changed to the Group of Spanish Guerrillas, and over the following months it took over all Spanish state property, consuls and trade councils in the region, hoisting the republican flag. The UNE called for a general mobilization on both sides of the border ready to ‘reorganize our patriotic army for the reconquest of Spain’.⁸ But Franco’s Spain would never be overthrown.

Those who had taken to the hills, ‘los hombres de la sierra’, having escaped from prison or labour battalions, formed small, scattered groups which could not communicate effectively. Yet the first examples of armed resistance to nationalist conquest had started from the very beginning of the civil war. In Galicia, where so many had escaped the brutal Falangist repression, groups had formed in the hills, especially the Sierra do Eixe. In 1937 there were some 3,000 fugitives around Vigo and Tuy. There were other bands in León, Asturias, Santander, Cáceres, Badajoz, Granada, Ronda and Huelva, but they too were improvised and acted more for reasons of survival than as a co-ordinated resistance force. Most of those in the south were annihilated in 1937, but in the north the struggle continued until the end of the war and beyond. When the Asturias front had collapsed in 1937, over 2,000 soldiers fled to the mountains and the nationalists needed to deploy fifteen tabors of regulares and eight battalions of infantry for many months hunting them down.