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

A much smaller force of only 400 regulares was to secure southern Andalucia under Colonel Varela, a secret instructor of Carlist requetés before the rising and the officer released from prison in Cádiz by the insurgents on 19 July. Colonial troops from Seville captured Huelva, before retiring to crush any remaining resistance southwards to Cádiz and Algeciras. Then, in the second week of August, Varela’s force moved eastwards to help the beleaguered nationalists in Granada. Once a salient to the city had been established, they prepared to attack Málaga and the coastal strip beyond the mountains: But Córdoba was threatened by a republican force of 3,000 men under General Miaja, so Varela moved rapidly on 20 August to reinforce Colonel Cascajo’s small force there. Once the Córdoba front was stabilized in the first week of September (it was hardly to change for the rest of the war), Varela marched southwards and captured Ronda on 18 September.

General José Miaja, the republican commander of the southern front and later of Madrid during the siege, was one of those senior officers who probably stayed loyal from force of circumstance rather than from conviction.⁶ His force was composed of loyal regular troops, Madrid militiamen and local volunteers. The ineffectiveness of totally untrained men in conventional manoeuvres was to be expected, but the uselessness and sloth of the regular officers was extraordinary. Franz Borkenau visited the headquarters on 5 September, during heavy fighting which was going badly. ‘The staff’, he wrote, ‘were sitting down to a good lunch, chatting, telling dirty stories, and not caring a bit about their duty, not even trying to establish any contact with the fighting lines for many hours.’ Even the wounded were ignored.⁷

Meanwhile, on the northern axis of advance Colonel Yagüe’s force was organized in five self-contained columns of some 1,500 men each, with legionnaires and regulares mounted in requisitioned lorries and accompanied by 75mm artillery. They were supported by Savoia Marchetti 81s, piloted by Italians in Legion uniform, and Junkers 52s flown by Luftwaffe personnel. Yagüe struck due north into Estremadura, maintaining a momentum of advance exceeded only by the armoured punches of 1940. His tactics were simple and effective. The lorry-borne force rushed up the main road at full speed until resistance was encountered at a town or village. (No ambushes were made in the open country because the inhabitants wanted to defend their homes and needed the feeling of security which walls gave.) The nationalists would order surrender over loudhailers provided by the Germans. All doors and windows were to be left open and white flags hung on every house. If there was no reply, or firing, then the troops would dismount and launch a rapid pincer attack.

Concentrations of defenders provided ideal targets for professional troops with artillery backed by bombers. Mobile groups would have inflicted higher casualties and delayed the nationalists’ advance more effectively. Once a village was captured, the ensuing massacre was supposed to be a reprisal for ‘red’ killings., but it was utterly indiscriminate. Queipo de Llano claimed that ‘80 per cent of Andalucian families are in mourning, and we shall not hesitate to have recourse to sterner measures’.

The nationalist attack demonstrated the psychological vulnerability of the worker militias. In street fighting, caught up in collective bravery, they were courageous to a foolhardy degree. But in the open the shelling and bombing were usually too much for them, since they refused to dig trenches (Irún was an outstanding exception). ‘The Spanish are too proud to dig into the ground,’ Largo Caballero later declared to the communist functionary Mije.⁸ Most of the bombs dropped were, in fact, almost useless, but the enemy aircraft were skilfully handled, causing maximum terror to peasants who had little experience of modern technology. Also, having no idea of how to prepare a defensive position, the militiamen had a desperate fear of finding themselves facing the Moors’ knives alone. Outflanking movements which surprised them usually led to a panic-stricken stampede. Chaos was increased when the population of a village clogged the roads with their carts and donkeys as they too fled from the colonial troops. Sometimes they even seized the militias’ lorries for themselves. On the other hand, the nationalist tactic of terror provoked heroism as well as flight. Peasants, having seen their families on their way, would take up shotguns or abandoned rifles and return to die in their pueblo.