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

Towards the end of September Varela’s relief force arrived within striking distance. Some of the militia stayed on and faced the colonial troops with great courage, but the majority fled back towards Aranjuez. Varela ignored Moscardó’s promise that militiamen who surrendered would be spared. Blood ran down the steep and narrow streets of the city in reprisal. Many militiamen killed themselves rather than surrender. Pockets of resistance were burned out and in the hospital 200 wounded militiamen left behind in the hospital of San Juan Bautista were killed in their beds with grenades and bayonets.¹⁶ Nationalist troops are also said to have taken twenty pregnant women whom they found in a maternity wing and shot them against the walls of the cemetery.¹⁷

The gaunt and erect figure of Moscardó waited in his dust-impregnated uniform. He greeted Varela with the words. ‘Sin novedad en el Alcázar (Nothing to report at the Alcázar)’. ‘Sin novedad’ was also the codeword for the rising which nobody had bothered to ask the passed-over colonel to join. He repeated the same performance for General Franco and the newspapermen the next day, 29 September. Moscardó was compared to the great warrior heroes of medieval Spain.¹⁸

The nationalists, especially the Army of Africa, had demonstrated their offensive abilities in these first two months of the war, while the republican militias possessed neither the training nor the cohesion to mount effective operations against organized troops. They were also desperately short of arms and ammunition. One of the first Soviet advisers reported back to Moscow that in August and early September 1936 there was only one rifle per three men, and one machine-gun per 150–200 men.¹⁹

In Oviedo, which had been won for the nationalists by Colonel Aranda’s trick, the siege still continued despite ingenious and brave attacks by Asturian dinamiteros. Armoured lorries manned by workers with improvised flame-throwers succeeded in making a breach, only to be forced back. Relief for the besieged in the form of a column under Colonel Martín Alonso was on its way from Galicia.

In the south, near Andújar, x guards and Falangists was holding out in the mountain monastery of Santa María de la Cabeza under Captain Cortés.²⁰ Nationalist pilots devised an original method of dropping fragile supplies. They attached them to live turkeys which descended flapping their wings, thus serving as parachutes which could also be eaten by the defenders. The besieged were eventually overcome in April of the next year by a mass assault. It was a defence at least as brave as that of Toledo, but it was given comparatively little recognition by the nationalists, perhaps because it risked stealing glory from Franco.

Although the worker militias represented the only possible response to the generals’ rising, since few regular army units remained in formation, the anarchists, the POUM and the left socialists, including Largo Caballero, regarded the militias as a virtue rather than a necessity. There was a powerful belief that morale and motivation must overcome an enemy which depended on the mercenaries of the Army of Africa or brother workers who would desert at the first opportunity. The republican left wing seriously underestimated the Catholic zeal of the conservative smallholders of Galicia, Old Castile and Navarre, who were to become the nationalists’ best troops after the colonial professionals.

The Madrid government, the regular officers, centrist politicians and the communists began to advocate a conventional army as the sole means of resisting the nationalists. The communists’ attitude derived from the knowledge that a centralized command could be infiltrated and seized. Hence their call for ‘Discipline, Hierarchy, Organization’. Such plans for ‘militarization’ were greeted with great suspicion by the left socialists, who described them as ‘counter-revolutionary’ and looked upon them as a tactic in the government’s effort to recover control of the workers’ movement. The anarchists were even more strongly opposed. For them a regular army represented the worst aspects of the state. They called it ‘the organization of collective crime’.