The Spanish Civil War (66 page)

At dawn on 10 March, Brihuega fell to the advancing Italian Black Flames and Black Arrows under Colonel Enrico Francisci. Bergonzoli’s Littorio Division of regular troops followed as a reserve. At the same time, Moscardó, advancing down the banks of the Henares, had reached Jadraque. Roatta was exuberant. At noon, the Garibaldi Battalion—accompanied by the formidable trio of Vidali (Carlos Contreras) as inspector-general of the whole front, Luigi Longo (Gallo), holding the same position for the International Brigades, and Nenni, who commanded a company in the battalion—advanced along the road from Torija towards Brihuega. They had no idea that Coppi and Nuvoloni had already taken that town. Reaching the so-called ‘Palace of Don Luis’, they advanced on foot, accompanied by a motor-cyclist patrol. Three miles short of Brihuega, this patrol encountered a motor-cyclist from Coppi’s Black Flames who, hearing the Italian voices of the Garibaldi Battalion, asked if he were right in supposing that he was on the road to Torija. The Garibaldi motor-cyclists said that he was. Both groups returned to their headquarters. Coppi assumed that the Garibaldi Battalion’s scouts were part of Nuvoloni’s division. He continued to advance. Ilio Barontini, the commissar and acting commander of the Garibaldi Battalion, a Livornese communist, continued also.
¹
He established his men in the vineyards on the left of the road, where they made contact with the similarly far advanced 11th International Brigade. Coppi’s tanks now appeared. They were
attacked by the machine-guns of the Garibaldi Battalion. The Black Flame infantry was sent in to attack. Two patrols of the opposing Italian forces met. The Black Flame commander asked why the other Italians had fired on him.
Noi siamo italiani di Garibaldi
came the answer. The Black Flame patrol then surrendered. But, for the rest of the day, the Italians fought a civil war of their own around a country house known as the Ibarra Palace. Vidali, Longo, and Nenni, meantime, arranged a propaganda campaign. Loudspeakers called out through the woods: ‘Brothers, why have you come to a foreign land to murder workers?’ Republican aircraft dropped pamphlets promising safe-conduct to all Italian deserters from the nationalists, with a reward of 50 pesetas. One hundred pesetas were pledged if they came with arms. Meantime in Rome, Count Ciano was assuring the German ambassador, von Hassell, that Guadalajara was going well. ‘Our opponents,’ he added, ‘are principally Russian.’
¹

20. The battle of Guadalajara, March 1937

The next day, the 11th, the battle began again. Mussolini’s commanders were favoured by an Order of the Day from Roatta instructing them to keep their men in the greatest exaltation. ‘This is an easy matter,’ went on Roatta, ‘if they are frequently spoken to with political allusions, and are always reminded of the Duce, who has willed this conflict.’
¹
The Black Arrows broke the front of Lister’s 11th Division, capturing Trijueque, and began to drive fast in their armoured cars along the road to Torija. The Thaelmann Brigade received heavy casualties and might have suffered a serious blow to morale had it not been for the presence of mind of Ludwig Renn, their chief of staff. Rallying, they held the road to Torija from Trijueque. That to Trijueque from Brihuega was also held all day by the Garibaldi Battalion. Roatta ordered a day’s rest. On the 12th, a storm permitted the republican bombers, rising from permanent runways, to pound away unmolested at the stationary Italian columns. The Black Shirts were machine-gunned from the air and bombed. Lister then ordered his division to counter-attack, a Russian officer, Captain ‘Pablito’, the future Marshal Rodimstev, being particularly active at Lister’s headquarters.
²
General Pavlov’s Russian tanks attacked first, both T-26 and TB5 models—the latter, weighing 20 tons each, far more formidable than the 3-ton Italian Ansaldos. Trijueque was recaptured at bayonet-point by the Thaelmann and El Campesino Brigades. Many Italians surrendered. The republican attack continued along the road to Brihuega. The Garibaldi Battalion stormed their compatriots in the Ibarra Palace and captured it at nightfall. The following day, 13 March, the republican government telegraphed the League of Nations that documents and statements by Italian prisoners proved ‘the presence of regular military units of the Italian army in Spain’ in defiance of Article 10 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.
³
General Roatta dispatched into the battle his other
two divisions, Rossi’s Black Shirts and the Littorio Division, under Bergonzoli. These had been held in reserve to follow the initial breakthrough. Their use now meant that the original plan of Guadalajara had failed. Both attacks were beaten off. On the 14th, Pavlov’s tanks drove up the road beyond Trijueque and captured much material. There was a pause in the battle for three days, on 15, 16 and 17 March. Roatta issued orders of the day, but made few preparations, preferring to complain of the continued inactivity of Orgaz on the Jarama.
¹

On 18 March, the republicans on the Guadalajara front were put onto the offensive. The main thrust was led by Pavlov, who had sought to avoid the assignment, which had been insisted upon by Miaja.
²
It was a bad moment for the Italians: Roatta had that morning gone to Salamanca to ask Franco to permit him to call off the Guadalajara attack. Franco refused and insisted that now the attack had begun, it should be continued. The plans that he suggested to Roatta all called for continuation of the offensive. Roatta had just accepted one such plan, when his headquarters telephoned to say that the republic was counter-attacking. At half past one, over a hundred republican aircraft (Chatos, Moscas, Katiuskas, Natashas) fell on Brihuega. Heavy republican artillery-fire followed. At two o’clock, Lister’s and Cipriano Mera’s two divisions, with seventy of Pavlov’s tanks, attacked, one in the west, the other in the east, aiming to encircle the town. They had almost achieved this when the Italians received orders to retreat. They did so, so fast that the action was almost a rout, down the only road still open. The pursuit continued for several miles. Moscardó also was ordered to retreat to Jadraque.
³

In this ill-named ‘battle of Guadalajara’, Mussolini’s Italians reported that they lost only 400 killed, but they were not very truthful,
and the figure was probably higher. They may have lost as many as 3,000 killed, 800 prisoners-of-war, and 4,000 wounded. Moscardó’s losses were insignificant. The republic lost about 2,000 killed, 400 prisoners and 4,000 wounded.
¹
After the battle, apologists for the republic claimed it as a great victory over Mussolini. The novelist Ernest Hemingway, who arrived in Spain on 16 March, wrote, in a dispatch to the North American newspaper alliance: ‘I have been studying the battle for four days, going over the ground with the commanders who directed it, and I can state flatly that Brihuega will take its place in military history with the other decisive battles of the world’.
²
Herbert Matthews, of the
New York Times,
reported that Guadalajara was to fascism what the defeat of Bailén had been to Napoleon.
³
Militarily, it would be more accurate to see the battle as similar to that of Jarama and the Corunna road. A nationalist attempt to complete the encirclement of Madrid was thwarted at the cost of a loss of twelve miles. But the retreat of the Italians, and the proof that organized Italian units were being used by the nationalists, was of considerable propaganda value to the republic. The battle had been intended as an exhibition of how Mussolini’s Italians could carry out modern techniques of war. But, in fact, it was an object lesson of how a mechanized attack should not be launched. Many tanks were left immobilized for hours for lack of fuel. The Italians had not maintained fighting contact with their enemies and had sought to operate without air cover, and without anti-aircraft protection.
⁴
The battalion commanders had no maps while
even Roatta had only a Michelin road map (1 to 400,000 scale), whose lack of detail and topographical information made it inadequate.
¹

The role of the Russian advisers in this battle was considerable. Smushkevich (‘Douglas’) in the air, Pavlov with the tanks, Rodimstev with Lister, as well as Malinovsky, Batov and Meretskov: a galaxy of future ‘heroes’, even marshals, of the Soviet Union.

Guadalajara also had the effect of angering Mussolini so much that he declared that no Italians could return alive from Spain unless they won a victory. To von Hassell, he blamed his Spanish allies who, he said, had ‘hardly fired a shot during the decisive days’.
²
The senior falangist still alive, Fernández Cuesta, remarked to Angel Diaz Baza, a friend of Prieto’s, sent to visit him in prison to talk of a compromise peace, that the Italian defeat at Guadalajara was the ‘sole satisfaction he had experienced during the war’.
³
Nor was the discomfiture of their previously overweening Italian ally unwelcome to Franco and his high command. The gloom of Cantalupo, the Italian ambassador at Salamanca, became so great that he was soon recalled, after a posting of less than six months. There returned with him Generals Rossi, Coppi, and Nuvoloni, as well as the chief of staff, Colonel Faldella. But Roatta, more responsible than the others, remained in Spain, along with Bergonzoli, though General Ettore Bastico, a veteran of the Libyan and Abyssinian wars as well as the Great War, later replaced him as supreme commander in the field, and a well-known fascist leader of the 1920s, Attilio Teruzzi, came to reorganize the ‘volunteers’.

The battle also led the general staffs of Europe (notably the French) to conclude that motorized troops were not as effective as had first been suggested. The Germans were restrained from drawing this conclusion by their contempt for the Italians as soldiers.
⁴

The presence of organized Italian divisions at the battle of Guadalajara was discussed at the Non-Intervention Committee. On 23 March, the atmosphere there had been excited by new reports that Italian troops had left in the
Sardegna
for Cádiz. Grandi said that he was unable to discuss the subject and, carried away by bad temper, added that he hoped that no Italian volunteer would leave Spain till
the end of the war.
¹
This candour caused consternation. The next day, Maisky accused Italy of ‘ever-increasing military intervention’, alleging that there were 60,000 Italians in Spain in mid-February (there were about 40,000), and that a commission should be sent to examine the matter on the spot.
²
Grandi’s speech was discussed, in the meantime, in the chancelleries. German diplomats displayed tact. They appeared to want the control agreement to begin. Cerruti, the Italian ambassador in Paris, assured Delbos that Italy had no intention of breaking up non-intervention. By the start of April, the committee had been preserved, though it was not yet being used.

21. The battles around Madrid, November 1936–March 1937

Guadalajara ended the conflicts around Madrid. Apart from intermittent bombardment, the front was quiet for months. The international shadows over the civil war, however, grew daily longer, with more and more individuals and interests becoming implicated in the emotions of a country of which, in truth, they knew little. Thus the distinguished biologist J. B. S. Haldane arrived in Madrid to give advice on handling Mills grenades and gas attacks.
¹

The International Brigades now had their first rest from action. The volunteers had discovered in battle that ‘a war of ideas’ is much like any other conflict. In Spain, as elsewhere, there was confusion of orders, jamming of rifles at the critical moment, uncertainty about the whereabouts of the enemy and of headquarters, desire for cigarettes (or sweet-tasting things), fatigue, and occasional hysteria. One unknown member of the British Battalion had written:

Eyes of men running, falling, screaming,

Eyes of men shouting, sweating, bleeding,

The eyes of the fearful, those of the sad,

The eyes of exhaustion, and those of the mad.

Eyes of men thinking, hoping, waiting,

Eyes of men loving, cursing, hating,

The eyes of the wounded, sodden in red,

The eyes of the dying and those of the dead.