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

The nationalists’ greatest military asset was the 40,000 men of the Army of Africa, with its combat experience.¹⁵ They had also secured 50,000 men from the badly trained and poorly equipped metropolitan army. In addition, seventeen generals and 10,000 officers had joined the rising. They had about two-thirds of Queipo’s carabineros, 40 per cent of the Assault Guard and 60 per cent of the Civil Guard. In all, this represented about 30,000 men out of the combined strength of the three paramilitary forces. In total they could count on around 130,000 officers and men. The Republic, at the time of Giral’s decree dissolving the army, counted on 50,000 soldiers, 22 generals and 7,000 officers, in addition to some 33,000 men from the paramilitary security forces. In theory, this represented a total of 90,000 men.¹⁶

For a long war it looked as if the Republic had the advantage: the large cities with their industry and manpower, mining areas, most of the navy and merchant marine, two-thirds of the mainland territory, the gold reserves and the citrus fruit export trade from Valencia, which was the country’s largest foreign-currency earner. However, the nationalists were more than compensated by help from outside Spain and control of the main agricultural areas. Their primary supply of recruits for some time was to be the Riffian tribes. Hitler and Mussolini were to provide military, naval, air, logistical and technical support, while American and British business interests supplied vital credits and oil.

The nationalists at this point were starting to organize a military state, while in the republican zone revolutionary processes were set on foot. The army’s attempt at what they claimed was a pre-emptive counterrevolution had destroyed what little remained of the republican state. Andrés Nin of the POUM described it thus: ‘The government does not exist. We collaborate with them, but they can do no more than sanction whatever is done by the masses.’ The rising of the right had pushed an unplanned revolution into the eager arms of the left.

The Red Terror

The most emotive issue in warfare is that of atrocities. It is nearly always the most visually horrific of them which become fixed in the imagination. Spain witnessed many during its civil war, but it was also one of the very first in which the techniques of mass propaganda played an important role.

The Spanish Civil War was a magnet for foreign correspondents and the enemy atrocities related by press officers provided sensational copy. In the early days little was done, or could be done, by correspondents to check the truth and background of most incidents. Refugees often justified their panic with exaggerated or imagined tales of horror. The gang of Barcelona workers said to be covered in blood from a massacre on 19 July were, in fact, from the abattoirs and had rushed straight out to resist the military rising. Wild estimates of the killing were reported: the nationalists stated at the time that half a million people had been slaughtered in republican territory and claimed the still excessive figure of 55,000 after the war. Perhaps the confusion and speed of events made journalists fall back on clichés, rather than investigate what lay behind the ferocity of the war. Having tended to ignore Spain, Europe did not understand the turbulent cycles of repression and revolt which had now built up to an explosion affecting every corner of the country.

The initial, hasty impressions passed on by journalists with little firsthand evidence seriously affected the Republic’s foreign relations when it needed to buy arms in the crucial months of the war. The violent excesses recounted in many papers justified that distaste for the revolution in the republican zone which ran strongly in British conservative and diplomatic circles. The left-wing administration in France under Léon Blum suppressed its own natural sympathies and, alarmed by Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland that spring, felt obliged to follow the British idea of refusing aid to both sides (a policy which was bound to favour the nationalists). Not until the bombing of Guernica in April of 1937 did the battle for world opinion really change in the Republic’s favour, but by then the republicans were already losing the war.

The Spanish war saw many terrible acts, but it was those of a religious significance that tended to prevail in people’s minds: ‘reds’ killing priests and disinterring the mummies in convent vaults; it was even said that Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, had bitten the jugular of a priest; or Carlist requetés making a republican lie in the form of a cross before hacking off his limbs to the cry of ‘Long live Christ the King!’.