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

A large column of militiamen drove south in a convoy of lorries, taxis and confiscated automobiles across the Castilian plain towards Toledo, where Colonel Moscardó was organizing the nationalists’ defence of the military academy in the Alcázar fortress. Only a handful of the cadets assembled, as it was the summer vacation, but a strong force of civil guards had been brought in from the surrounding countryside. A mixed bag of officers and a large number of Falangists brought the total of active defenders to around 1,100. Inside the fortress were also more than 500 women and children and 100 left-wing hostages. Moscardó, who had not been involved in the conspiracy, was acting on his own initiative. He had managed to stall the war ministry’s orders to despatch the contents of the Toledo arms factory to Madrid, and his men had withdrawn into their fortress with most of its contents just as the militia column reached the edge of the town. The siege of the Alcázar had begun. It was to be exceptionally rich in emotive symbolism for the nationalists.

In Barcelona the greatest concern of the anarchists was the fall of Saragossa to the army and the resulting slaughter of their comrades. Flying columns of armed workers assembled in great haste and rushed forth into the Aragón countryside. Villages and small towns which had been secured for the rising by the local Civil Guard detachment and right-wing sympathizers were seized on the way. The militia usually shot all those whom they felt represented a threat before moving on. However, the columns were primarily made up of urban workers. Their fighting effectiveness lay in the streets, not in the countryside where they had no sense of terrain. ‘We didn’t have maps,’ recounted Jordi Arquer, a POUM leader, ‘and I am not talking about proper military maps, but a simple Michelin road map.’¹³

During their advance, the anarcho-syndicalist columns, armed with the 30,000 rifles from the Sant Andreu barracks, seized towns and villages which had fallen into rebel hands, and shooting suspected supporters of the rising. Of the advancing columns only Durruti’s did not fall to the temptation of securing rural areas, which was shown to be a dangerous distraction when the principal town was in enemy hands. The regular commander of the republican forces, Colonel Villalba, even ordered Durruti not to rush on so tempestuously towards Saragossa. A strong detachment of Carlists, sent by General Mola in Pamplona, arrived to reinforce the Saragossa garrison and Durruti’s force was unsupported. The militia columns from Barcelona, amounting to about 20,000 men, would have been far more effective if they had been concentrated on fewer objectives. But such a spontaneously mobilized body could not act like troops controlled by a general staff.

The fighting was chaotic. Improvisations on both sides ranged from the inspired to the impractical. Field guns were fixed on to the rear of lorries, forming an early version of self-propelled artillery; armoured cars were built round trucks, sometimes effectively, although often the weight of steel plate was far too heavy for the engine. Every form of grenade, or petardo, was tried out (the so-called Molotov cocktail was in fact invented a little later by the Foreign Legion when attacked by Russian tanks outside Madrid that autumn). But with the originality came a contempt for more prosaic military customs, such as digging trenches. To fight from the ground was utterly contrary to the Spanish concept of war. There was a subconscious moral certainty that bravery must lead to victory.

It was not until the early days of August that the respective zones became clear and fronts recognizable. The insurgents had a broad horizontal strip of territory from Galicia and León in the west to Navarre and north Aragon in the east. This surrounded the coastal regions of Asturias, Santander and the Basque country, which had defeated the rising. In the south and west the rebels had seized no more than a small part of Andalucia.¹⁴

Only at this stage did the realization that Spain faced civil war, rather than a violently contested coup, penetrate people’s minds. The republican failure to win outright in the early days, when dash and instinct outweighed weaponry and military science, meant that they were to become involved in a totally different type of fighting, one in which very different qualities were needed to win.