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

Marty told the volunteers that ‘when the first International Brigade goes into action, they will be properly trained men with good rifles, a well-equipped corps’. This was all part of the Party’s myth of the professional, when in fact sheer courage, bolstered by the belief that the world depended on them, had to make up for appalling deficiencies in the Brigaders’ basic training. Men who were to be sent against the Army of Africa had to project the aura of experts to impress the militias, but they could do little except form ranks, march and turn. Many of them had never even handled a rifle until they were on the way to the front, and the few Great War veterans had to show them how to load their obsolete weapons of varied calibres. From a box of assorted ammunition, inexperienced soldiers had to find the right bullets to fit their rifles. The number of jammed weapons through wedged and separated casings was predictably high.

The militias had suffered from similar disadvantages, but they had no pretensions to being an elite force arriving in the nick of time to save the situation. Nevertheless, the foreign innocents, who felt a ‘moment of awe’ on being handed a rifle, had several advantages over the Spanish militiamen on first going into battle. They had a slightly greater knowledge and understanding of modern military technology, they understood the value of trenches and, most important of all, they had men in their ranks who ‘had been through it before’. Spain’s neutrality in the Great War made the first shock of battle much more traumatic to the militia.

The Soviet authorities did everything they could to camouflage the number of Red Army personnel in Spain, even making some of them enlist as volunteers in the International Brigades. The most obvious examples were the commanders, Kléber, Gal, Copic and Walter, while in the Polish Dombrowski Battalion there was a significant nucleus of Red Army officers. Altogether thirty Soviet officers were sent to Spain as commanders in the International Brigades.¹⁴ The Palafox Battalion appears to have had an even larger Soviet contingent than most. It was commanded by a Major Tkachev (‘Palafox’), most of the four companies were commanded by Red Army lieutenants and many of the men, it would appear, were Soviet citizens. ‘There was all sorts of nationalities in it,’ wrote one member in the official account, ‘such as Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, etc.’¹⁵ In addition, a training centre for International Brigade officers was set up in Tiflis with a capacity for 60 infantry officers and 200 pilots.¹⁶ The Soviet military advisers were ordered to keep out of range of artillery fire (podalshe ot artillereiskogo ognia), so that captured officers could not be paraded in front of the Non-Intervention Committee.

Although it is hard to establish exactly the number of Soviet personnel who served in the Spanish Civil War, it is clear from documents that there were never more than 800 present at any one time. The total appears to have been a maximum of 2,150, of whom 600 were noncombatant, including interpreters. There were, in addition, between 20 and 40 members of the NKVD and between 20 and 25 diplomats. Altogether, 189 were reported killed or missing: 129 officers, 43 NCOs and 17 soldiers.¹⁷

On 16 October, in a coded telegram, Voroshilov, the People’s Commissar for Defence, ordered Gorev to ‘send advisers to work in divisions and brigades’.¹⁸ The vain Voroshilov, who adopted the codename of ‘The Master’ for Operation X, was eager to impress Stalin. He hoped, while sitting in his office in Moscow with a map of Spain, to control events on the ground thousands of kilometres away.¹⁹ Advisers, exasperated by his interference, started to refer to him ironically as ‘the great strategist’. Voroshilov started sending messages to Madrid telling the chief military adviser to ‘use his brains and display some will-power, so that the situation would start looking different’.²⁰ He also threatened the most senior advisers that ‘if the aforementioned instruction is not implemented [on the concentration of forces to attack on the Madrid front], strict disciplinary measures will be taken against all of you.’²¹

The trouble was that many of the advisers were so junior that they had as little experience of command as the Spanish officers they were supposed to advise. Colonel [later Marshal] R. Malinovsky (‘Malino’) wrote that advisers to some divisional commanders were ‘very good lieutenants, wonderful commanders of companies or squadrons, but, of course, were not ready to command a division–and how could one offer advice on something that one has no idea about?’²² Some advisers were extremely undiplomatic in the way they worked with republican officers and ‘rudely interfered in the operational orders given by the commanders’.²³