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

The anarchists, who knew very well what awaited them if the army seized the city, decided not to leave their fate in the hands of politicians. During that night the CNT local defence committees went ahead with full preparations for war. Isolated armouries were seized (a couple with the active assistance of sympathetic NCOs) and weapons were taken from four ships in the harbour. Even the rusting hulk of the prison ship Uruguay was stormed, so as to take the warders’ weapons. The UGT dockers’ union knew of a shipment of dynamite in the port, and once that was seized, home-made grenades were manufactured all through the night. Every gun shop in the city was stripped bare. Cars and lorries were requisitioned and metal workers fixed crude armour plating while sandbags were piled behind truck cabs. Vehicles were given clear identification with large white letters daubed on the roof and sides. The vast majority were the anarchist initials, CNT-FAI, but POUM and PSUC were also in evidence. Some bore the letters UHP (United Proletarian Brothers), the joint cry of the workers’ alliance in the Asturian revolt.

The atmosphere of that hot night was highly charged. The Popular Olympiad (organized as a boycott of the Olympics in Nazi Germany) was due to open the next morning. The event was forgotten in the threatening crisis, and the foreign athletes waited uneasily in their hotels and dormitories. (Many of them joined the fighting the next day alongside the workers and around 200 later joined militia columns.) Companys, realizing he was superfluous for the moment, went for a walk on the Ramblas, a felt hat pulled down over his eyes to avoid being recognized. The streets were crowded and noisy, with loudspeakers attached to the trees playing music interrupted by announcements. In the favourite anarchist meeting place, the Café La Tranquilidad, CNT members were dashing in and out to hear the latest news and report on the arming of the workers. The members of the regional committee, such as Buenaventura Durruti, Juan García Oliver and Diego Abad de Santillán, maintained a close liaison with the Generalitat despite Companys’s decision. In fact a few assault guards ignored the Generalitat’s instructions and handed out rifles to the CNT from their own armoury.

Just before dawn on 19 July, the soldiers in the Pedralbes barracks were given rum rations by their officers, then told that orders had been received from Madrid to crush an anarchist rising. Falangists and other supporters wearing odd bits of uniform joined the column as it set off up the Diagonal, one of the major thoroughfares of Barcelona.²⁶ Almost immediately factory sirens all over the city sounded the alarm. Also at about five in the morning, the Montesa cavalry regiment moved out of its barracks in the calle Tarragona, the Santiago regiment of dragoons left the Travessera de Gràcia barracks and a battery of the 7th Light Artillery Regiment marched forth from the Sant Andreu barracks, where more than 30,000 rifles were held.

The deployment of troops into the streets was badly co-ordinated. The infantry regiment from the Parque barracks was vigorously attacked and forced to make a fighting retreat back behind its own walls, while the Santiago cavalry regiment was scattered at the Cinc d’Oros. Some units never even broke out into the streets. Those that did manage to march out, advanced to seize strategic buildings near the Plaza de España and the Plaza de Cataluña. They barricaded themselves in the Hotel Colón, the Ritz and the central telephone exchange. Detachments attacked en route made barricades to defend themselves, but these were charged by heavy lorries driven in suicidal assaults. The soldiers were also attacked with home-made bombs lobbed from rooftops and by snipers. Barricades to bar their way to the centre were constructed by almost everyone who could not take part in the fighting. Those made with paving stones could withstand light artillery if properly laid, as the workers knew from the street fighting during the Semana Trágica in 1909.