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

The two unions, the CNT and the UGT, provided the majority of the militia forces, though all the parties had their own. There were units from the republican left, the Catalan Esquerra, the POUM and the communists. A militiaman was paid ten pesetas a day at first by his local organization and later by the government. This was the equivalent of a skilled worker’s wage and it became a heavy burden on the ailing economy.²¹ Their uniforms consisted of blue overalls and either a beret or, more often, a fore-and-aft cap in party colours. The standard of equipment and weapons varied greatly. Some militiamen were still carrying only shotguns after six months of war. The maintenance of weapons was universally bad. A rifle without rust was almost unknown; hardly any were cleaned and oil was seldom issued. The few machine-guns were old and lacked spare parts. There was also such a wide variety of calibres that as many as sixteen different types of ammunition were needed within some units. Mortars and grenades, when available, were usually more dangerous to the operator than the enemy, so that the home-made variety, dynamite packed into tomato cans, was preferred.

The greatest shortcoming of the militia system remained the lack of self-discipline. At the beginning stories abounded of detachments leaving the front line without warning for weekends in Barcelona or Madrid. Anyone who stayed awake on sentry duty was thought a fool. Ammunition was wasted by firing at planes at impossible distances and positions were lost because nobody wanted to dig trenches. It is interesting that indiscipline was most marked among groups like factory workers, who had previously been subject to external constraints and controls. Those used to leading an independent existence like farmers and artisans had not had their self-discipline undermined. Much has been made of the fact that leaders were elected and political groupings maintained in the militias. But this was not so much a difficulty as a source of strength. It inspired mutual confidence among men suspicious of outsiders. The real problem came in the first few chaotic weeks, when the revolutionary atmosphere made militiamen react immediately against anything that could be remotely construed as authoritarianism. ‘Discipline was almost a crime,’ admitted Abad de Santillán.²²

The election of officers and the trial of offenders by rank-and-file courts were regarded by anarchists as fundamental principles. Each section, comprising ten men, elected its own corporal. Each centuria, comprising 100 men, elected its own delegate. A militia column varied greatly in its number of centuria. Durruti’s column had 6,000 men at its peak, while others consisted of only a few hundred. Most columns had a regular officer who acted as ‘adviser’ to the column leader, but unless he was known as a genuine sympathizer, he was usually distrusted. There were a certain number of very radical officers in the army, such as Colonel Romero Bassart, the colonial officer who resisted the rising at Larache and later became military adviser to the CNT. There was also the unconventional Colonel Mangada, who was treated as a hero in the first days of the war after his column advanced towards Avila and repulsed a column from Salamanca led by Major Doval in a very confused and inconclusive skirmish in which the Falangist leader, Onésimo Redondo, was killed. Generally, however, republican militia suspected the loyalty of army officers, because many had at first declared for the government, only to betray it later. Some genuine supporters of the Republic were probably shot in error and certainly in several cases loyal regular officers were made scapegoats for militia reverses.

In Catalonia, where the militia system was the most entrenched, the air force officer Díaz Sandino became the Catalan councillor of war while the secretary-general, the anarchist Juan García Oliver, took over militia organization. His main work was to arrange training programmes in the rear. Even though about a tenth of the militia force in Aragón were ex-soldiers who had joined the workers, the standard of training in the metropolitan army had been so abysmal that they provided little help.