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

Basque Nationalist Action was a much smaller social democrat splinter from the PNV.

Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos (STV)

Solidarity of Basque Workers. The Basque nationalist Catholic trade union.

INITIALS

AC

Acció Catalana

AP

Acción Popular

AR

Acción Republicana

CEDA

Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas

CNT

Confederación Nacional de Trabajo–anarcho-syndicalist trade union

CTV

Corpo Truppe Volontarie–Italian fascist expeditionary corps

DEDIDE

Departamento Especial de Información del Estado

DLR

Derecha Liberal Republicana

FAI

Federación Anarquista Ibérica–anarchist purists

FET

Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las

FRG

Federación Republicana Gallega

GRU

Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleni–(Soviet military intelligence)

JAP

Juventudes de Acción Popular–Popular Action Youth

JONS

Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista

NKVD

Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennich Del–People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Soviet secret police)

ORGA

Organización Republicana Gallega Autónoma

OVRA

Opera Voluntaria de Repressione Antifascista–(Italian Fascist secret police)

PCE

Partido Comunista de España–Spanish Communist Party

PNV

Partido Nacionalista Vasco–Basque Nationalist Party

POUM

Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista–Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification

PRR

Partido Republicano Radical

PRRS

Partido Republicano Radical-Socialista

PSOE

Partido Socialista Obrero Español–Socialist Party

PSUC

Partido Socialista Unificat de Catalunya–Catalan Communist Party

RENFE

Red Nacional de Ferrocarriles Españoles–Spanish rail network

SIEP

Servicio de Información Especial Periférico

SIM

Servcio de Inteligencia Militar–republican counterintelligence

SIPM

Servcio de Información y Policía Militar

UGT

Unión General de Trabajadores

UME

Unión Militar Española

UMRA

Unión Militar Republicana Antifascista

PART ONE Old Spain and the Second Republic

Their Most Catholic Majesties

On an unsurfaced road in Andalucia or Estremadura, one of the first automobiles in Spain has broken down. In the photograph a young man grasps the steering wheel. He is not very good-looking, due to a large nose and enormous ears. His brilliantined hair is parted in two and he has a moustache. The driver of the car is King Alfonso XIII.

On either side, men are pushing hard at the mudguards. Their faces are burned a deep brown by the sun and they are poorly dressed, without collars or ties. They are making a big effort. In the background, three or four figures dressed in suits and hats observe the goings-on. A rider, perhaps a local landowner, has reined in his horse. On the right, a landau drawn by two horses, the reins held by a uniformed coachman, waits ready to rescue the monarch if the car’s engine fails to restart. The caption announces that the king’s greatest wish is to maintain ‘direct contact with his people’. Few images better represented the extremes of the social and economic contrasts of Spain in the early part of the twentieth century. But perhaps the most striking aspect of the photograph is the way the peasants and the king must have seemed like foreigners to each other in their own country.

Spain, with its stern tradition of rule from Madrid, was becoming increasingly turbulent at that time, both in the countryside and in the big cities. So not even the tidy-minded could say later that the Spanish Civil War simply began in July 1936 with the rising of the ‘nationalist’ generals against the republican government. That event signalled the greatest clash in the conflict of forces which had dominated Spanish history. One of those antagonisms was evidently between class interests, but the other two were no less important: authoritarian rule against libertarian instinct and central government against regionalist aspirations.

The genesis of these three strains of conflict lay in the way the Reconquista of Spain from the Moors had shaped the social structure of the country and formed the attitudes of the Castilian conquerors. The intermittent warring against the Moors, begun by Visigoth warlords in the eighth century, finally ended in 1492 with the triumphal entry into Granada of Isabella of Castile and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon. For the Spanish traditionalist that event marked both the culmination of a long crusade and the beginning of the country’s civilization. This idea permeated the nationalist alliance of 1936, which continually invoked the glory of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs, and referred to their own struggle as the second Reconquista, with liberals, ‘reds’ and separatists allotted the role of contemporary heathen.