The Spanish Civil War (112 page)

For surgical innovations due to the civil war, see J. Trueta,
Treatment of War Wounds and Fractures
(London, 1939). María Rosa Urraca Pastor’s
Así empezamos
(Bilbao, 1940) gives the memoirs of a leading nationalist nurse (‘
La coronela
’).

The third volume of F. Bravo Morata’s
Historia de Madrid
(Madrid, 1968)
and Vicente Ramos’s
La guerra civil en la provincia de Alicante,
3 volumes (Alicante, 1974), begin what will, no doubt, be a library of local histories. Francisco Moreno Gómez’s
La Guerra Civil en Córdoba
(
1936–1939
) (Madrid, 1985) is a remarkable local history, devastating in its detail. See also António García Hernández,
La Represión en La Rioja durante la guerra civil
(Logroño, 1984), 3 vols.

Ian Gibson’s
The Death of Lorca
(London, 1973) illuminates the atmosphere of Granada in 1936.

For an introduction, see Aldo Garosci’s
Gli intelletuali e la guerra di Spagna
(Turin, 1959); Guttman (see above, section IX [8]); Frederick Benson,
Writers in Arms
(New York, 1967); and Stanley Weintraub’s well-written
The Last Great Cause
(London, 1968). A Reading thesis by Hilary Footit is good on French right-wing reactions (
French Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War,
Reading Ph.D., 1972). Enrique Súñer,
Los intelectuales y la tragedia española
(San Sebastián, 1937) gives a nationalist reaction, on which there is valuable information in the work of Abella (section VII [2] above). Herbert Southworth’s
El mito de la cruzada de Franco
(Paris, 1963) stirs up nationalist standards of scholarship. See
Les Écrivains et la guerre d’Espagne
(Paris, 1975).

See, for an anti-Franco polemical work of scholarship, Juan de Iturralde,
El catolicismo y la cruzada de Franco,
2 volumes (Bayonne, 1955). For the Basque priests, see
El clero vasco frente a la cruzada franquista
(Bayonne, 1966). The ‘anti-crusade’ gets further consideration in the Bishop of Vitoria’s (Dr Mateo Múgica)
Imperativos de mi consiencia
(Buenos Aires, no date) and
Montserrat, glosas a la carta colectiva de los obispos españoles,
written by Fr J. Vilar Costa (Barcelona, 1938). See, for French Catholic support for the republic, Georges Bernanos,
Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune
(Paris, 1938) and Jacques Maritain,
Sobre la guerra santa
(Buenos Aires, 1937).

For the orthodox defence of the church, see Cardinal Gomá’s
Pastorales de la guerra de España
(Madrid, 1955) and many pamphlets such as Fr Ignacio Reigada,
La guerra nacional española ante el moral y el derecho
(Salamanca, 1937). Reasoned defence of the church can be found in Luis Carreras,
The Glory of Martyred Spain
(London, 1939). A full consideration of the persecution of the church under the republic is in Fr Antonio Montero’s book cited above (para. VIII [9]). There is some useful material in Antonio Granados’s
El cardenal Gomá
(Madrid, 1969).

Some of the novels dealing with the Spanish war and its origins are: Georges Conchon,
La corrida de la Victoire
(Paris, 1960); Camilo José Cela,
Visperas, festividad y octava de San Camilo del año 1936 en Madrid
(Madrid, 1969); Pío Baroja,
Aurora roja
(Madrid, 1929); José María Gironella,
Los cipreses creen en Dios
(Barcelona, 1956); Agustín de Foxá,
Madrid, de corte a checa
(San Sebastián, 1938); Ernest Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(New York, 1940); Angel María de Lera,
Las últimas banderas
(Barcelona, 1966); André Malraux,
L’Espoir
(Paris, 1937); Henri de Montherlant,
Le Chaos et la nuit
(Paris, 1963); Gustav Regler,
The Great Crusade
(New York, Toronto, 1940); and Ramón Sender,
Seven Red Sundays
(London, 1936).

Some films are:
Madrid ’36
(1937, made by Buñuel);
L’Espoir
(1939, made by Malraux);
La Guerre est finie
(1964), Semprún’s brilliant reconstruction of exile politics;
Mourir à Madrid
(1962), Rossif’s reconstruction;
The Spanish Earth
(1938), made by Joris Ivens, Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, Dos Passos—unsuccessful;
The Spirit of the Beehive
(1974), beautiful if lowering.

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First published by Eyre & Spottiswode Ltd 1961
Revised edition published in Penguin Books 1965
Reissued in Pelican Books 1968
Third edition, revised and enlarged, published simultansously with Hamish Hamilton 1977
Fourth edition published in the USA by Random House Inc (as Revised Edition 2001)
Penguin edition first published 2003
This anniversary edition published 2012

Copyright © Hugh Thomas, 1961, 1965, 1977, 1986, 2001, 2012

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Acknowledgements are due to the late Mr W. H. Auden and Messers Faber & Faber for permission to quote from his poem ‘Spain’; to Mr Edgell Rickword for permission to quote from his poem ‘To the Wife of a Non-Intervention Statesman’; to Mr A. L. Lloyd for his translation of a poem by Miguel Hernandez; to Librairie Gallimard for permission to quote from Claudel’s
Aux Martyrs espagnols
; to the late Mr C. Day-Lewis and the Bodley Head for permission to quote from his poem ‘Nabarra’.

ISBN: 978-0-7181-9293-8

1
See James’s confession in
The Times
, 30 October 2004. During the war, James worked in the War Office in Whitehall and then in the Chiefs of Staff Committee in Washington. He thought it scandalous that the British were not telling the Russians about their military plans, including the plan for D-Day, and took the law into his own hands by approaching the GRU through the Russian embassy in London. He told them many interesting secrets and was apparently known in that agency of the Soviet state as “Milord”.

2
Douglas Jerrold,
Georgian Adventure
(London, 1938), p. 384.

3
He was the son of an even better bullfighter, and a famous ladies’ man.

1.
The animated central square of Madrid where many revolutions have begun.

1.
The Cortes of the Second Republic had 473 members.

2.
A Spaniard’s full name consists of his christian name (or names), his father’s surname (also his own), and his mother’s surname, placed in that order. Spaniards sometimes call themselves by all these names. They often drop their last name (that of their mother) and refer to themselves by their father’s name—with, of course, their christian names. But wherever their father’s name is commonplace, it is often not used alone, and the mother’s is sometimes used in its place. Thus, for García Lorca, no one would say ‘García’, and today he is referred to as ‘Lorca’. The miners’ leader in Asturias, González Peña, might be referred to as Peña where the context was clear, but never as González. Other Spaniards might use their mother’s name because it seems more mellifluous, or more grand.

3.
Natives of Galicia.

4.
Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (Spanish Confederation of autonomous movements of the Right).

1.
Juventud de Acción Popular (Popular Action youth movement).

2.
Diario de Sesiones de las Cortes Españolas,
16 June 1936. See Gil Robles’s memoirs,
No fue posible la paz
(Barcelona, 1968).

3.
Ian Gibson,
The Death of Lorca
(London, 1973), p. 14.

4.
Casares Quiroga was a member of the Republican Left party, which had absorbed the Galician autonomists.

1.
General Union of Workers. Miguel Maura (
El Sol,
18 June 1936) estimated this union to number 1,447,000 workers, on the basis of the director-general of security’s estimate.

2.
The two ‘pure’ republican parties, the Republican Left and the Republican Union, had been joined by representatives of the autonomy parties of Galicia and Catalonia.

3.
National Confederation of Labour. Miguel Maura (
El Sol,
18 June 1936) gave a figure of 1,577,000 for the CNT. Probably an underestimate.

4.
Iberian Anarchist Federation.

1.
He had gone into an election with the simple programme, ‘
¡Nosotros somos nosotros!
’ (‘We are us!’). Perhaps appropriately, in that statesman’s last years, his opponents used the even simpler slogan, ‘
¡Maura no!
’

2.
The forty-nine provinces of Spain were administered by civil governors established in the provincial ‘capitals’. These were political appointments, under the ministry of the interior. The authority of the civil governor was shared by the commander of the garrison of the city in question, who was styled the military governor, appointed by the minister of war.

3.
The best study of Calvo Sotelo is that contained in Richard Robinson,
The Origins of Franco’s Spain
(Newton Abbot, 1970), p. 215f. See also Aurelio Joaniquet,
Calvo Sotelo, una vida fecunda
(Santander, 1939).

1.
All ministers of the republic were entitled to a pension.

2.
See below, p. 156.

3.
Literally, ‘Lordship’ (
Su Señoria
) was the address used in the Cortes.

1.
‘El Campesino’ (Valentin González),
Communista en España y anti-Stalinista en la URSS
(Mexico, 1952), p. 110.

2.
Dolores Ibarruri,
El único camino
(Paris, 1962), p. 102. She had been a member of the central committee of the party since 1930.

3.
The same report quoted by Maura and mentioned above gave the communists 133,000. For Prieto’s comment, see
De mi vida
(Mexico, 1965), vol. II, p. 146.

4.
For 1909, see below, p. 17.

1.
Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ party of Marxist unity). See below, p. 113.

2.
A local saint from near Burgos.

1.
Previously (and later) the Royal Palace.

1.
At the start of this agitated half-century, the Spanish colonies in central and southern America revolted and, in the name of liberalism, became independent.

1.
It was during this period that all the main actors of the civil war between 1936 and 1939 were born. An old man of seventy in 1936 would have remembered the Carlist Wars of the seventies from his childhood. One of eighty might have taken part.

2.
National Confederation of Labour.

3.
General Union of Workers.

4.
See below, p. 33.

1.
Angel Ossorio y Gallardo,
Julio de 1909, declaración de un testigo
(Madrid, 1910), p. 13. Catalonia is discussed on p. 43. Cf. Joaquín Romero Maura,
La rosa de fuego
(Barcelona, 1974).

2.
See Hugh Thomas,
Cuba, or The Pursuit of Freedom
(New York, 1998), Book III passim.

1.
Joan Ullman,
The Tragic Week
(Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 288f. The ‘aimlessness’ of these riots has been exaggerated and so has the anarchist part: more important were the radicals. Still, no doubt the civil governor, Ossorio y Gallardo, was right when he said, ‘On each street they shouted different things and fought for different purposes’ (
Julio de 1909,
Madrid, 1910, p. 54). Five men were executed after subsequent trials, one of them the coalman.

2.
See below for Ferrer, p. 62.

1.
Carr, p. 495.

1.
For the events of this year and the following crisis, see Gerald Meaker’s
The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914–1923
(Stanford, 1974), p. 153f.

1.
See below, p. 75.

1.
David Woolman,
Rebels in the Rif
(London, 1969), p. 96. For a description of the panic, see Arturo Barea,
The Forging of a Rebel
(New York, 1946), p. 304f.

2.
The ‘telegram’, never found, was believed to have said: ‘Olé, boys! I’m waiting for the 25th!’ Rightly or wrongly, the King was never forgiven. V. S. Pritchett, travelling in Spain in the 1920s, found that, whenever he asked whether the monarchy might survive, people said, ‘He should never have sent that telegram!’

1.
From the document made public by the Conde de Romanones in the Cortes during King Alfonso’s ‘trial’ in December 1931.

1.
Unión Patriótica (UP).

2.
Three anarchists were, however, killed in a skirmish at Vera de Bidasoa on the French frontier on 6–7 November 1924, having been provoked by the civil guard.

3.
Ramón Tamames,
Estructura económica de España
(Madrid, 1969), p. 203.

4.
He died in 1925.

1.
Abd-el-Krim died in Morocco, whither he had just returned, in 1963. An obituary note in
African Revolution
(May 1963) spoke of him as ‘Our Master’ who first showed ‘men of colour that imperialism was not invincible’. (The writer forgot Toussaint.)

1.
Compañia Arrendataria del Monopolio de Petróleo, Sociedad Anónima.

1.
Communiqué printed in Miguel Maura,
Así cayó Alfonso XIII …
(Mexico, 1962), pp. 34–5.

2.
Emilio Mola,
Obras completas
(Valladolid, 1940), p. 231.

3.
El Sol,
15 November 1930.

1.
Populations of other big cities in Spain in 1931 were: Valencia, 320,000; Seville, 229,000; Saragossa, 175,000; Málaga, 190,000; and Bilbao, 160,000.

2.
The final figures were never published and were probably never counted. On the evening of 14 April, 29,953 monarchists had been elected, and 8,855 members of republican parties. Some 40,000 councillors remained to be elected. 29,804 councillors had already been elected on 5 April, in places where these candidates were unopposed. The overwhelming majority were monarchists—8 to 1, according to Ben-Ami, whose account is the best (see S. Ben-Ami,
The Origins of the Second Republic,
Oxford thesis, 1974).