The Spanish Civil War (90 page)

Hodgson, the British agent in Salamanca, told Stohrer, however, that Britain was intending to mediate in Spain.
³
Stohrer had himself questioned whether compromise might now not be in Franco’s favour, when his troops were being ‘bled white on the Ebro’. But the Generalissimo himself, sitting next to Stohrer at dinner on 1 October, talked only of the Führer’s triumph at Munich. He was silent when the ambassador suggested that the ‘Czech method’ might be the model for the solution of other international questions.
⁴
On 2 October, Negrín (distressed by Munich and the evidence it offered for the weakness of the old democracies)
⁵
broadcast a speech declaring that Spaniards must come to an understanding with each other. He demanded publicly whether the nationalists desired to carry on war until the country was destroyed. The speech made clear to the world for the first time Ne
grín’s aspiration to seek a negotiated peace. But Hodgson’s attempts—aimed at ‘compromise, with the appearance of complete victory’—were as unfruitful as all similar proposals had been. On 4 October, Schwendemann, at the Spanish desk in the Wilhelmstrasse, admitted that Germany’s ‘negative aim’ of preventing a communist Spain could be achieved by compromise. So could their economic interests. But, he added, ‘a strong Spain leaning towards Germany’ could only be secured by Franco’s victory.
¹
On 6 October, Jordana repeated to Stohrer that a compromise would mean that the whole civil war would have been fought in vain. The republic must capitulate.
²
A nationalist pamphlet published in Paris declared that ‘the civil war itself was caused by the attempt at mediation between the rival forces of Spain embodied in the republic’.
³
Far from considering compromise, Franco was demanding from Germany shipments of 50,000 rifles, 1,500 light and 500 heavy machine-guns (one month’s German production of machine-guns), and 100 75-millimetre guns. These, he assured the Germans, would give victory. The Germans were willing, on condition of the formal recognition of all their mining rights. But the matter was not agreed until November.
⁴

After Munich, Stalin had meantime despaired of being able to arrange an alliance with France and Britain against Hitler. From then on, Russia toyed increasingly with the only other solution open to her to avoid being involved in war: friendship with Hitler, at the democracies’ expense. It was a policy which Stalin had probably contemplated as a possibility, even at the most enthusiastic moment of the Popular Front.
⁵
This change had an effect on the Spanish war. Russian spokesmen had suggested that they would be pleased to withdraw from Spain.
⁶
Hence Stalin’s agreement that, before the final understanding
in the Non-Intervention Committee on volunteers, the International Brigades should be withdrawn.
¹

The role of the Brigades was now over. They had ceased to be effective propaganda for the republic, and the seasoned men who had been the early brigaders had mostly been killed, or had left Spain. A majority of those in the Brigades were now Spanish, some volunteers, but some of them men from prison, work camps, and disciplinary battalions. Several even of the officers in command of foreign volunteers were also Spanish. The 15th Brigade, for example, was led by the Spanish Major Valledor.
²
Admittedly, Colonel Hans Kahle, leader of the first International Brigade in Madrid in 1936, was still in action, in command of a division at the front. But his troops, like those of his colleague, the equally experienced General Walter, were Spaniards. Even the Lincoln Battalion comprised a three-to-one majority of Spaniards.
³
Thus Negrín was able, without military risk, to propose at Geneva, during the Munich crisis, the withdrawal of all foreign volunteers in republican Spain. He asked the League to supervise this step. In so doing, he demonstrated his contempt for the Non-Intervention Committee, and gave a fillip to the spirits of the League. The secretary-general of the League, the usually cold anglophile Avenol, was unable to repress his delight. ‘A master-stroke!’ he exclaimed, when meeting Azcárate in the corridors of the Palais des Nations. On 1 October, it was agreed that the League should supervise the withdrawal, through a commission of fifteen officers, headed by a general. Russia now diminished her propaganda appeals on behalf of the republic, but she continued to send military equipment, in diminished quantities. With the French frontier closed once again, it was difficult to make sure that any aid would arrive. The sea route (even that between Marseilles and Barcelona) was impracticable.

The grim battle of the Ebro continued. Franco prepared his main counter-attack. On the republican side, ‘Resist—Resist’ continued to
be cried by the commissars. The battle was still going on when the International Brigades were withdrawn. Their last action was on 22 September, when the 15th Brigade went into battle for the last time. The British Battalion once again suffered heavy casualties. The son of the American writer Ring Lardner, who had been among the last Americans to enlist, was killed in this battle.
¹
At a parade of farewell to the Brigades at Barcelona on 15 November, Negrín and La Pasionaria spoke words of thanks. La Pasionaria’s speech revived for a moment all the ideals of those who had cared so much for the Spanish cause in the heroic days. First, she addressed the women of Barcelona:

Mothers! Women! When the years pass by and the wounds of war are staunched; when the cloudy memory of the sorrowful, bloody days returns in a present of freedom, love, and well-being; when the feelings of rancour are dying away and when pride in a free country is felt equally by all Spaniards—then speak to your children. Tell them of the International Brigades. Tell them how, coming over seas and mountains, crossing frontiers bristling with bayonets, and watched for by ravening dogs thirsty to tear at their flesh, these men reached our country as crusaders for freedom. They gave up everything, their loves, their country, home and fortune—fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, sisters, and children—and they came and told us: ‘We are here, your cause, Spain’s cause is ours. It is the cause of all advanced and progressive mankind.’ Today they are going away. Many of them, thousands of them, are staying here with the Spanish earth for their shroud, and all Spaniards remember them with the deepest feeling.

Then she addressed the assembled members of the Brigades:

Comrades of the International Brigades! Political reasons, reasons of state, the welfare of that same cause for which you offered your blood with boundless generosity, are sending you back, some of you to your own countries and others to forced exile. You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality. We shall not forget you, and, when the olive
tree of peace puts forth its leaves again, mingled with the laurels of the Spanish republic’s victory—come back!
¹

The parade heaved with controlled emotion: it was true, surely, as Pietro Nenni reflected, that, all unknowing, they had ‘lived an
Iliad
’.
²
The crowds cheered beneath large photographs of Negrín, Azaña—and Stalin. Flowers were thrown. Slightly less than half the 10,000 volunteers then in the International Brigade began to leave by boat and rail for France, for home, wherever it might be. The League of Nations Commission, led by the Finnish General Jalander, the British Brigadier Molesworth, and the French Colonel Homo, counted 12,673 foreigners in the republican forces. By mid-January, 4,640 men of 29 nationalities had left Spain. Of these, 2,141 were French, 407 British, 347 Belgian, 285 Poles, 182 Swedes, 194 Italians, 80 Swiss, and 54 Americans. Another 6,000—Germans, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Hungarians—remained, knowing that their homes would not welcome them, to be engulfed in the catastrophe in Catalonia, perhaps to encounter hardships greater than they had known in the war.
³

One other commission was also in Spain during this, for democrats, distressing autumn. In October 1937, the republic had proposed to the British that they should negotiate the exchange of those Spanish civilians who desired to leave nationalist territory, for nationalist prisoners in republican hands. A commission led by Field-Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode, a hero of the First World War, latterly commander-in-chief India, was arranged to visit Spain to effect a general exchange of prisoners, though Chetwode was not allowed to set off till September 1938. The commission was not successful. It secured several small-scale exchanges, such as that of 100 British prisoners in nationalist hands for 100 Italians held by the republic. When Sir Philip returned to London at the end of the war, he claimed that he had persuaded the
republic to stop executing their prisoners and that he had gained the remission of 400 death sentences by General Franco. The latter achievement appears genuine, the former less so, since the republican government had already promulgated a law banning executions.
¹

On 30 October, the nationalist counter-offensive began on the Ebro. The point of attack was the one-mile-wide northern stretch of the Sierra de Caballs just east of Gandesa. For three hours after dawn, the republican positions were subjected to bombardment by 175 nationalist and Italian batteries, as well as over a hundred aircraft. A hundred republican fighters made no impression upon this aerial armada. Then the Army Corps of the Maestrazgo under García Valiño went into the attack. Mohammed el Mizzian, with the Navarrese of the 1st Division, captured republican positions abandoned during the bombardment. The battle on the heights of the Caballs continued all day, but, by night, these mountains were in nationalist hands, including nineteen fortified positions and the republican defence network. The nationalists claimed 1,000 prisoners and 500 dead, as well as 14 aircraft. The loss of the Caballs was a terrible blow to the republic, since the Sierra commanded the whole region.

Worse was to follow. On the night of 1–2 November, Colonel Galera, an officer who had begun the war as a commander of
Regulares,
stormed the Pandols, the only high point remaining to the republic. On 3 November, advancing through the village of Pinell, he reached the Ebro. The right flank of the nationalist army had now achieved its objectives. On 7 November, Mora la Nueva on the riverbank fell. The nationalists launched a massive attack towards the hill known as Mount Picosa. In this sector, the republic had entrenched itself with skill. After the fall of Mount Picosa, the pressure of the nationalist armour convinced the republic that the battle of the Ebro was as good as lost. By 10 November, only six republican batteries remained west of the Ebro. With deliberation, the last republican defence points were abandoned. The hill village of Fatarella fell on 14 November, to Yagüe. The last stages of the conflict were delayed by the first snows of win
ter falling upon a battlefield which had earlier been rendered intolerable by the heat of summer. On 18 November, Yagüe entered Ribaroja, the last republican bridgehead. The intrepid Anglo-Saxon reporters, Hemingway, Buckley, Matthews, and Sheean, were among the last to cross the river, Hemingway rowing hard in a small boat.
¹

Controversy reigns over the number of casualties in this battle. Both sides probably lost about 50,000 to 60,000, with deaths numbering 6,500 among the nationalists, and probably between 10,000 and 15,000 among the republicans. Both lost many aeroplanes, the republic between 130 and 150—which they could not replace.
²

The same day that the last republicans left the right bank of the Ebro, 16 November, the Anglo-Italian Agreement came into being, now that the 10,000 Italians, of whom Mussolini had spoken at Munich, had been withdrawn from Spain. The Italians remaining in Spain would be about 12,000 men of the Littorio Division, consisting of picked men, to be commanded by the temperamental and fascist-minded General Gambara. Berti, who had been a successful commander, and Piazzoni (the ‘Papa of the Black Arrows’) were withdrawn. There remained pilots, the tank corps, and artillerymen, as well as officers and NCOs to command four mixed divisions of Spaniards.
³
Ten thousand returning men were welcomed at Naples on 20 October. King Victor Emmanuel and the populace greeted them without
warmth. But Ciano soon forgot his consequent annoyance when he received from Franco, as a souvenir, a painting by Zuloaga of
The Oldest Requeté,
with a pleasant background of war and flames.
¹
Chamberlain now judged that the long-sought Anglo-Italian Agreement could come into force.

A fortnight later, in the House of Commons, Eden recalled how Lord Perth had said, when the agreement was signed in April, that a settlement of the Spanish question was a ‘prerequisite’ for its entry into force. Now, Eden said, there had been no such settlement, only an arrangement at the expense of Spain. Such a remark was shown to be justified when, in the House of Lords, on 3 November, Halifax announced that Mussolini had ‘made plain that, whether Britain approved or not of his reasons, he would not be prepared to see Franco defeated’. The previous day, the Spanish Civil War had even flared up in the North Sea. Seven miles off Cromer, a nationalist armed merchantman, the
Nadir,
sank the
Cantabria,
a steamer used by the republic for food supplies.
²
Eleven British ships, furthermore, had been attacked in republican ports during the month of November; yet now, on 16 November, here in Rome was Lord Perth ‘moved’, as the master-toady Ciano put it, at this last act in appeasing Italy.
³

At the end of the battle of the Ebro, nationalist morale had naturally again risen. It was sustained by press, radio and literary campaigns, which continued to drench the country in half-fascist, half-monarchist and wholly Catholic propaganda. The paintings of Sáenz de Tejada, for example, or Teodoro Delgado, seemed a right-wing parody of those staunch, clench-fisted, forward-looking workers and fighters seen on republican posters. Radio Nacional de España, directed by the falangist Antonio Tovar, had a different objective, since it was aimed at the secret nationalists or Fifth Column in republican Spain, as much as at the enemy.
¹
Expansively entitled journals such as
La Ametralladora
(The Machine-Gun),
Jerarquia
(
Revist Negra de la Falange
) (Hierarchy), or
Vertice
(The Vertex) published the cartoons, poems, stories, arguments, and drawings of the new régime’s new or rediscovered artists and writers, for a large audience. The purges of civil servants, schoolmasters, university professors and doctors continued, as more and more territory
was captured. ‘The prisons’, wrote the German ambassador, Stohrer, ‘are overflowing as never before. In the prison here [i.e., at Salamanca], which is intended for forty persons, there are supposed to be about 1,800 at the present.’
¹
In September, the nationalists announced that they had taken 210,000 prisoners since the war began, of which 134,000 were at ‘liberty’—usually in the army, or some kind of ‘national service’. The rest were dead or in prison. There were bouts of executions of so-called spies, one running into several hundreds.
²
The Falange and the clergy grumbled at each other, though they did not openly quarrel. The cult of José Antonio, begun on the second anniversary of his death (20 November 1938), had no effect on this. But despite his Jesuit training, Serrano Súñer had not successfully bridged the gap between these two departments of Spanish society. The final text, for instance, of the new Secondary Education Law of 20 September 1938 seemed an uneasy compromise between Falange and church: one hour a week was for ‘the patriotic formation of youth’, while there would be two hours’ religious teaching. Whereas Catholicism was declared ‘the essence of Spanish history’, of the two foreign languages which could be studied, one could be either German or Italian. But in general the Catholics, through their leadership in the ministries of justice and education (the Conde de Rodezno and Sáinz Rodríguez), won where religion was concerned: all secular rights were cancelled, the state was tied to Catholicism, and non-Catholic churches were given few facilities.
³
A nuncio, Monsignor Cicognani, had come to Spain to replace the apostolic delegate, Monsignor Antoniutti, in June 1938, while the nationalist ambassador in Rome was the lawyer José Yanguas Messía, who had been foreign minister under Primo de Rivera. One more man of the old directorate thus found himself being used in the new tyranny.

The economic situation in nationalist Spain was a little less favourable than it had been a year previously. There was food for those who could buy it, but wages had not kept up with prices, despite the price control. Due to difficulties of transport, prices varied wildly from district to district. Inflation had brought prices up from a level of 164 in 1935 (with 100 in 1913) to 212 in 1938. Meat had increased some 80 per cent, vegetables, wine and oil nearly 50 per cent, and textiles about 40 per cent; wages had only risen about 20 per cent in general since 1935. Manufactured goods were almost non-existent, though production in essential industries had increased during 1938. The output of iron ore from Vizcaya, for example, reached 154,000 tons in 1938, in place of 115,000 in the last year of peace—a substantial increase too on what was produced in early 1937 under the Basque republic. Movement in the port of Bilbao increased by 50 per cent over peacetime.

González Bueno, minister of syndical organization, had meantime set up a skeleton of new state unions (
sindicales
) throughout Spain. But ‘syndical’ control of labour and of the economy existed only on paper. The nationalist economy was, in the main, a banker’s one, with continuous governmental intervention, production stimulated by war, wages kept steady by terror. Share prices on the nationalist-held Bilbao stock exchange were rising; while, internationally, the nationalist peseta was quoted at 100 to the pound in late 1938, with the official rate still 42.50 (the republican peseta was then over 500 to the pound).

The nationalist government, needing new war supplies badly, had, meanwhile, agreed to the German conditions for fulfilment of their latest request. German capital would be permitted to participate in Spanish mines to the extent of a basic 40 per cent. But 60 per cent would be permitted in one mine and 75 per cent in four others. These enterprises, grouped in the so-called ‘Montana’ project, of which the artful Bernhardt was still the chairman, concentrated on mines which were not working well at the time; the German interest in 1938 was an insurance against the day when Germany would not be able to make a direct exchange of weapons for ore.
¹
Bernhardt picked his Spanish partners well, so that he knew that they would accept German leadership. In Morocco, where the Spanish mining law
did not apply, German participation was permitted up to 100 per cent. Spain agreed to pay all the expenses in Spain of the Condor Legion and to import 5 million reichsmarks’ worth of mining machinery. That would enable Franco to contemplate a new offensive immediately, and so strike the republic at the moment when they had exhausted their supplies. This aid was the consequence of the German sense that, after Munich, nothing which they did in the Spanish war would cause Britain and France to go to war. Had it not been for it, a compromise peace, or perhaps, a permanent division of Spain (such as divided Germany, Korea and Vietnam after 1945), might have been inevitable. The new aid admittedly did not arrive until the New Year, but the knowledge that it was on the way enabled the nationalists to act swiftly.
¹

The nationalist army had doubled during the year to total over a million. All healthy men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-one were in uniform, and many more besides as volunteers. This host was organized in three grand armies—that of the south, and inactive, under Queipo; that of the Levante, the main inspiration of the next campaign, under Orgaz; and that of the centre, preparing for an attack on Madrid, under Saliquet.
²
The two last generals were ‘Francoists’. Queipo alone was in any way likely to think independently.
³

On the republican side, the successful withdrawal from the right bank of the Ebro masked the destruction caused. After all, the nationalists had taken three months to win back what they had lost in two days. But discontent seethed. The anarchist historian, Peirats (then a second-lieutenant in the army), has described how the police now seemed to control the whole army, SIM agents being everywhere, their methods being characterized by a mixture of sadism and incompetence, some of their chiefs being quite new men: the SIM chief in the 199th Brigade, for example, who had powers of life and death in that
unit, was only nineteen in late 1938.
¹
By this time, a million men had also probably been mobilized in the republic—since July 1936. The class of 1919, men aged forty, would soon be called to the colours (the nationalists had not had to go beyond the class of 1927).

Thus 8 per cent of the Spanish population in late 1938 was either in the army, or a prisoner. If the peacetime history of the republic was the history of the nation’s ‘politicization’, the war was characterized by its ‘militarization’.

On 30 September, the six-monthly session of the Cortes was held, this time at San Cugat del Vallés. Attacks against Negrín were made, by the Catalan (Esquerra) deputy, Miguel Santaló, and the Basque ex-minister, Irujo. The former alleged that at the time of the August crisis, newspapers friendly to Negrín had misrepresented the decree which militarized the tribunals as being a decree affecting the harbour. Both he and Irujo pointed out that the republican government was bound, legally and morally, to consult the Catalans.
²

As for religious freedom, private celebration of mass had been permitted for some time. Two thousand priests were privately active in Barcelona in 1938, bizarrely protected by the SIM against the anarchists.
³
There were, however, no priests active even privately in the central zone. Irujo proposed a corps of almoners for the army and suggested the opening of a church in Barcelona. He and the councillor for justice in Barcelona (Bosch Gimpera) again asked Father José María Torrent, vicar-general of Barcelona, to open at least one church; but Father Torrent refused to allow this. The vicar-general made further difficulties. It was difficult for him to collaborate with a régime which had been denounced as satanic by orthodox Catholics, and which had, at the least, failed to prevent the murder of so many of their brethren. On 17 October, a funeral procession, though, passed through Barcelona in memory of a dead Basque officer. Further unsuccessful efforts were made to try to secure the return of the archbishop of Tarragona, Cardinal Vidal i Baraquer. On 9 December, a commissariat of religion was finally set up, to provide priests for the armies, and Dr Jesús Bellido, professor of medicine in
the University of Barcelona, became the commissar-in-chief. The outbreak of the Catalan campaign prevented this from being put into effect.
¹

Food was very short in the republic. In Madrid, half a million persons lived, during the winter of 1938–9, on a daily issue of two ounces of lentils, beans or rice, with an occasional ration of sugar or salt cod. Lentils, the commonest food, were named Dr Negrín’s ‘little victory pills’. Average rations of republican troops had shrunk: from 1
²
/
₃
pounds of bread a day in 1936 to less than a pound in 1938, just over a pound of meat to a third, and the ration of vegetables was also down.
²
The republic had to buy much of its food from abroad and supplies were irregular, because of the continued bombing of supply ships. Sir Denys Bray, the British civil servant who headed the League’s mission on refugee relief, reported that the population of the republic were living on minimum rations, while even those were not being distributed. In Barcelona, where there were a million refugees in addition to the normal population, the problems were even worse. An International Commission for the assistance of child refugees, founded by the Quakers in December 1937, could help only 40,000 out of 600,000 child refugees, though they were being financed by seventeen governments.
³
The cost of giving a third of these children one meal a day throughout the winter was estimated as nearly £150,000. Many diseases appeared, such as scabies and pellagra; and deaths from malnutrition doubled between 1937 and 1938.
⁴
The Quakers’ mission did help to alleviate the worst tragedies. The nationalists, meantime, sought to point the contrast between the hungry republic and their own territory, by an air-raid of loaves of bread on Barcelona. (The republicans replied with an air-raid of shirts and socks, to demonstrate their alleged superiority in manufactured goods.) The work on the fields in the republic continued, but in many places at greatly reduced momentum: in Cuenca, for instance, only 14 per cent of the land re
served for cereals could be sown, due to shortage of hands.
¹
The wheat harvest reached 130 million bushels.
²
Trifón Gómez, the realistic socialist who was commissary-general in the army, believed it to be less; but even what there plainly was, was quickly dispersed. Since the government was slow to pay, the peasants did not deliver their goods. Disorganization in the largely communist ministry of agriculture, as well as the collectives, who neither paid taxes nor cooperated with rationing, was thus largely to blame for what went wrong with the republic’s food supply.
³

Even in manufactured goods, the republic was in a bad position. The chief cause was the shortage of raw materials due to the blockade. But what about Spanish production, and, in particular, the output of the Catalan war industry over which there had been such argument? Despite all the communists’ efforts, the changeover from textiles and chemicals to armaments was difficult; one type of aircraft only was developed, a copy of the Russian Chato, of which 169 were built in 1938 though never used. Monthly arms production in December 1938 was 1,000 rifles and 10 million bullets; 700,000 grenades and 300,000 artillery shells; 80,000 mortar grenades and 100 mortars.
⁴
Otherwise, all depended on Russia and elsewhere. Overall industrial production in Catalonia was only a third of what it had been in July 1936, and prices had risen 300 per cent since then. Between November 1937 and November 1938, there was an inflation of almost 200 per cent.
⁵
A more telling statistic was the collapse of the use of electricity during 1938, itself a consequence of the loss of the hydro-electric plants. In Sep
tember 1938, the last month for which statistics seem available, the industrial use of electricity was half that for September 1937, while that itself was probably half normal use.
¹
Only in one sphere, indeed, was the republic still able to preserve its optimism. This was education.

I have visited [reported the brilliant French poet and flier Antoine de Saint-Exupéry], on the Madrid front, a school installed 500 metres from the trenches, behind a small wall, on a little hillock. A corporal was teaching botany. He was carefully peeling away the petals of a poppy. Around him were gathered bearded soldiers, their chins sunk in their hands, their brows knitted in the effort of concentration. They did not understand the lesson very well, but they had been told: you are brutes, you have only just left your caves we must save you for humanity. And with heavy feet they were hurrying towards enlightenment.
²