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

16 BA-MA RL 35/38.

17 Herbert Matthews, The Education of a Correspondent, New York, 1946.

18 Bernardo Aguilar, quoted by Pedro Corral, Si me quieres escribir, Barcelona, 2004.

19 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes…p. 358.

20 Corral, Si me quieres escribir, p. 160.

21 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes…, p. 354.

22 Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales…, pp. 298–9.

23 Salas, La guerra…, p. 292.

24 BA-MA RL35/39.

25 Ibid.

26 Salas, La guerra…, p. 294.

27 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes…, p. 354.

28 RGVA 33987/3/1149, pp. 211–26, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 484.

29 BA-MA RL35/39.

30 Crónica de la guerra de España, vol. iv, p. 442.

31 R. de la Cierva, Francisco Franco, un siglo de España, p. 56. Rey d’Harcourt was treated very badly by Franco. The republican government gave orders that the colonel should be taken to the rear with the local bishop, Anselmo Polanco, and his chaplain, Felipe Ripoll. The three men were executed on 7 February 1939 by republicans during the final collapse of Catalonia.

32 RGVA 35082/1/95, pp. 33–58, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 447.

33 Corral, Si me quieres escribir, p. 213.

34 BA-MA RL35/39.

35 Seidman, A ras de suelo, p. 243.

36 BA-MA RL35/39.

37 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes…, p. 354.

38 Palmiro Togliatti, Escritos sobre la guerra de España, Barcelona, 1980, p. 189.

39 Stepánov, Las causas de la derrota, p. 108.

40 ‘Count Rossi’ was a fascist whose real name was Aldobrando Bonaccorsi. Ciano put him in charge of the Balearic Islands, especially Mallorca. His crimes and reign of terror became infamous. Mussolini and Ciano wanted him to bring the local Falange under Italian fascist influence. See Ranzato, L’eclissi della democrazia, pp. 554ff.

41 Delperrié du Bayac, Les Brigades Internationales, Paris, 1985, p. 331. Von Thoma had four tank battalions, each of three companies with fourteen tanks. See Blanco Escolá, Falacias de la guerra civil, p. 241.

42 RGVA 33987/3/1149, pp. 211–226, quoted in Radosh and Habeck, p. 485.

43 RGVA 33987/3/1149, p. 230.

44 BA-MA RL 35/40.

45 Stepánov, p. 109.

46 Skoutelsky, Les Brigades Internationales, p. 99.

47 José M. Maldonado, Alcañiz 1938. El bombardeo olvidado, Saragossa, 2003.

48 Tagüeña, Testimonio de do guerras, p. 107.

49 ABC of Seville, 16 April 1938.

CHAPTER 29: Hopes of Peace Destroyed

1 On 30 June 1936, Spanish banknotes in circulation amounted to 5,399 million pesetas. In April 1938 they reached 9,212 million in just the republican zone (Joan Sardà, Banco de España, p. 432). Exacerbated by military disasters and the export of the gold reserves, the republican peseta had fallen catastrophically. At the end of 1936 it had depreciated by 19.3 per cent of its value and one year later by 75 per cent. By the end of 1938 it had lost 97.6 per cent of its original value. In December 1936 the exchange rate was 42 pesetas to the pound sterling. A year later, just before the Battle of Teruel, the exchange rate was 226 to the pound sterling, but after the nationalist campaign in Aragón it fell to between 530 and 650 to the pound. See also, A. Carreras and X. Tafunell, Historia económica de la España contemporánea, Crítica, Barcelona, 2004, pp. 270–1; ángel Viñas et al., Política comercial exterior en España(1931–1975), Banco Exterior de España, Madrid, 1979.

2 The main arms-buying teams were headed by Dr Alejandro Otero Fernández (replaced later by Antonio Lara), Jose´ Calviño Ozores and Martí Esteve in Paris; Antonio Bolaños, Daniel Ovalle and Francisco Martínez Dorrién in Belgium; Carlos Pastor Krauel in Britain; A ´n Ordás, with Fernando de los Ríos, in Mexico and the US. They had to do business with traffickers such as Josef Veltjens, Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades, John Ball, Jack A. Billmeir, Stefan Czarnecki, Kazimierz Ziembinski, Stefan Katelbach and others of their type. See Howson, Armas para España.

3 The work by Professors Morten Heiberg and Mogens Pelt for their book, Los negocios de la guerra, has finally confirmed the details of an outrageous paradox which had previously just been suspected: Hermann Göring was selling weapons to republican Spain, while his own Luftwaffe fought for Franco.