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

The only two successes the Republic enjoyed were Guadalajara, a victory which resulted basically from a collapse in Italian morale, and the defence of the XYZ line in the summer of 1938. The latter proved to be the most cost-effective battle of the whole war for the republicans, inflicting four times as many casualties as they received. It has presumably received so little attention because none of the star communist formations was involved and little propaganda effort was attached to a battle that did not conform to ‘the active war policy of the Negrín government’.

All this suggests that a far more effective conduct of the war would have been to combine a strong defensive strategy with short, sharp probing attacks at different points to confuse the nationalists. The People’s Army’s tank forces should have been held back in an armoured reserve ready to counter-attack any nationalist breakthrough. The Republic could not simply have abandoned orthodox warfare for unorthodox, as some militia idealists dreamed. The conditions for a universal guerrilla war simply did not exist. The best-suited regions, with the right terrain, were insufficient to have stretched nationalist forces beyond capacity. But on thinly held fronts, many more nationalist troops could have been held down by commando actions. This would have hampered General Franco’s brutally unsubtle strategy far more effectively. Franco did not so much win the war: the republican commanders, with the odds already stacked heavily against them, squandered the courage and sacrifice of their troops and lost it.

The British-inspired policy of non-intervention has, not surprisingly, generated a great deal of passion and moral outrage. For republicans, it seemed unthinkable that the legitimately elected government of a country should not be allowed to buy arms to defend itself. There can also be little doubt about the hypocrisy of maintaining a policy which was manifestly failing to work, while the committee in London, including the three main interventionist powers, Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, pretended otherwise. The main anger is understandably reserved for the British government which, even if it did not officially propose the non-intervention plan, was certainly the main force behind it. The motives of the two prime ministers, Baldwin and Chamberlain, and the two foreign secretaries, Eden and Halifax, are frequently ascribed to a conservative plot to support Franco. Although extremely plausible, considering their personal friendships and tastes, this is probably a distortion of the truth.

None of them had any sympathy for the left-wing, if not revolutionary, nature of republican Spain, and certainly in the early days, they would have preferred a rapid nationalist success rather than what they saw as a slide towards the horrors of bolshevism. But their principal concerns lay elsewhere. They no more wanted Spain to be controlled by Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, Britain’s chief rival in the Mediterranean, than for the country to fall under Soviet influence. Above all, they were deeply concerned that the Spanish conflagration would prove to be another Sarajevo, creating a widening ripple of involvement which would turn into the next European war. The British Foreign Office was nevertheless totally wrong to assume the lofty role of international policeman when it was secretly prepared to sacrifice the Spanish people, just as it sacrificed the Czechs in 1938.

One must also look at the effective results of the non-intervention policy, which prevented the Republic from purchasing arms openly. The republicans’ greatest needs were for aircraft, tanks and automatic weapons. French equipment was generally of poor quality and the British aircraft available at that date were obsolete. Probably the only country capable of satisfying their needs, apart from the Soviet Union, was the United States. Roosevelt and Cordell Hull may have been influenced by the non-intervention agreement, but it was the Catholic lobby that led Congress to block arms supplies to the Republic. Thus, apart from a few aircraft purchases, Mexican rifles and ammunition, and Czechoslovakian machine-guns bought privately, it might appear that, even without the Non-Intervention Committee the Republic had no alternative to the Soviet monopoly of arms supplies. Nevertheless, the decision to send Stalin the Republic’s gold reserves was one of the most critical of the war.