THE BATTLE FOR SPAIN by Antony Beevor Weidenfeld,
To Serrano Suñer, Franco's brother-in-law, the Spanish Civil War was a contest between good and evil; for the poet Cecil Day Lewis it was a battle between 'light and darkness'.
Antony Beevor castigates those who cling to this apocalyptic vision. 'The problem is, ' as he declared in a press interview, 'that people think in absolutely monolithic and Manichaean terms.' Beevor asserts that the professional historian should eschew moral judgments. Tough-minded to the point of arrogance, he seeks to explain, without the distortions of moral judgments, how the republic destroyed itself in the Civil War.
Beevor's book took my mind back to the 1950s and my conversations with General Rojo, chief of staff of the defeated Republican army. I remember his exact words: 'Franco won the war politically and therefore militarily.' The words constantly on Rojo's lips were 'mando único', a single command. Franco achieved this in September 1936 when his fellow-generals, as the commanders of the Roman legions had made emperors, made him chief of state, president of the government and commander of the armed forces. No commander, a French general observed, had enjoyed such powers since Napoleon.
The Nationalists were by no means a political monolith in July 1936 but a loose coalition running from pious, traditional Carlists to radical fascistoid Falangists.
Franco made use of their faction fights to impose what was called 'the Movement';
he detested parties as responsible for the decline of Spain. The Movement under his control was the sole political organisation permitted in his 'New State'. Politics were dead in the Nationalist zone.
While politics languished in Nationalist Spain, they flourished in Republican Spain, as political leaders slandered each other in public. Even before the Civil War, Prieto, whose strength lay in the socialist party, and Largo Caballero, boss of the socialist trade union, were denouncing each other in mass-meetings and the press.
Prieto warned Largo Caballero, who had undergone a process of 'Bolshevisation', that his inflammatory rhetoric about the elimination of the bourgeoisie, which Beevor considers an act of criminal irresponsibility, would lead the bourgeoisie to imagine Spain was on the verge of a social revolution. Inevitably, they would appeal to the army to save society and restore order, its traditional role since the last years of the 19th century.
On 17 July 1936, a group of generals, who had been conspiring since the spring, staged a pronunciamiento against the Republican government. The immediate consequence was the total collapse of the authority of the Republican state. The vacuum was filled by local committees, loyal to the parties that had created them rather than to the state. The journalist Franz Borkenau reported, 'All the villages and towns we passed through, though passionately guarding their own territory, had not sent a single man to the front.' With no regular army at the disposal of the government, the improvised militia columns were likewise loyal to the parties that had formed them. In the general chaos of the summer, the working-class parties, particularly in Catalonia where the anarchists of the CNT, enjoying power and prestige as the heroes of the defeat of the Nationalist rising in the streets and barracks of Barcelona, seized the opportunity to stage the social revolution they had long dreamed of. Factories were 'collectivised';
i. e. , submitted to some form of workers' control. For George Orwell, Barcelona was the first town he had been in 'where the working-class were "in the saddle'' '. This 'Red Spain' and its anti-capitalist revolution made businessmen throughout Europe and America fear for their profits.
They supplied on credit the petrol and trucks for Franco's rapid advance to Madrid.
The task of the Republican politicos was to re-establish the authority of the central government; to organise an army where privates saluted officers, by absorbing the militia into the mixed brigades of the newly formed Popular army; finally, to create an efficient war economy to feed the population and equip the army. This task was, in September 1936, entrusted to Largo Caballero, whose government included bourgeois republicans, socialists and communists. In November it was joined by the anarchists of the CNT. Alas, it was not a government of National Unity.
The president of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, distrusted Largo Caballero and detested the anarchists. To the communists, the anarchists were at best deluded utopians, at worst dangerous bedfellows to be discarded when opportunity arose. The anarchists themselves were divided. To join a bourgeois government as the leaders of the CNT had done in November was, for committed libertarians, to betray the revolutionary tradition of the Movement. The ultra-revolutionaries of the POUM were attacking Stalin in their press. In the eyes of communists they must be eliminated.
Most important of all, Largo Caballero, once hailed as the Spanish Lenin, had become an obstinate old man who resisted the communists' drive to politicise the army. They could count on Prieto, no longer on speaking terms with his old enemy, to help them destroy them.
All these tensions erupted in May of 1937 in what Beevor calls a civil war within a civil war. Anti-collaborationist anarchists and Pournistas were fighting the security forces in the streets of Barcelona. This, at the very moment when Franco was consolidating his power in Burgos. Beevor's detailed description of the May events is gripping stuff. It utilises the researches of his assistant in the Soviet archives. The backdrop to all this were the show trials and great purges in Moscow with their spy mania, inventions of treasonable conspiracies by brazen lies, and confessions extracted by torture. The traitors were the Trotskyites.
This paranoia infected the atmosphere in Spain. Every military setback, Beevor shows, was monotonously attributed to treason. He cites an important document:
'When investigating the rebellion in Catalonia, the organs of state security (i. e. , the Spanish version of the Soviet NKVD) discovered a large organisation committing espionage. In this organisation Trotskyites were working in close co-operation with the fascist Falange Espana.' The Trotskyites in Spain were the POUM.
Trotsky had disowned the POUM, but their leader, Andres Nin, had been his secretary. That was enough. He was tortured and murdered by communist agents, who invented a ludicrous cover-story that he had been assassinated by the Gestapo. The truth leaked out.
In late November 1938, I went to Victoria Station with Philip Toynbee, then a communist albeit an eccentric one, to welcome home returning International Brigaders. I expressed my horror at Nin's murder. He grinned and replied, 'You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.' To cite another piece of communist jargon of the time, the aims of the party were 'objectively correct'. It was their methods, torture included, that sickened George Orwell. He was to expose them later in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four.
With Largo Caballero resisting the liquidation of the POUM, the communists and Prieto moved in for the kill and forced his resignation. His successor was Juan Negrín, son of an affluent family and a distinguished physiologist; the contrast with the self-educated plasterer was striking.
Beevor considers Negrín an authoritarian voluptuary with 'gross tastes in sex and food', whose politics were based on a series of delusions. Accused by his enemies, and they were many, of being a communist poodle, he replied that if the British would send him arms superior to those provided by the Soviet Union, he could escape the communist embrace. This was nonsense. On no account would Chamberlain's Conservative government come to the aid of the embattled Republic.
Negrín believed that to resist to the bitter end might force Franco to accept terms that would avoid postwar reprisals. Two days before the Nationalist troops entered Madrid, Negrín could profess to believe that the Republican army, after its total collapse in Catalonia and of the morale in a starving civilian rearguard, could fight on for six or eight months. This was a fantasy.
To pursue it meant a second civil war within the civil war, as the troops supporting Negrín fought his enemies in the streets of Madrid.
Beevor's signal contribution to the history of the Civil War is his dissection of the military shortcomings of the Republic's war effort. Rojo's strategy was flawed from the start. Enjoying the advantage of interior lines, Rojo planned a series of offences against a weakly held sector of the front.
The battle of Brunete of July 1937 set the pattern. An initial breakthrough stalled as his commanders failed to exploit early gains. Franco brought up reinforcements to plug the gap and turn the tide of battle.
This was the case with the battle of Teruel fought in the sub-zero temperatures of the winter of 1937, and above all in the great battle of the Ebro fought in the high summer heat of 1938. 'A grotesque gamble' from the start, to fight a battle with a great river behind the front was 'beyond military stupidity, it was the mad delusion of propaganda'. Rojo, Beevor considers, should have fought a well-organised defensive war rather than his costly counter-offensives.
He has a point. In the battles around Madrid in the winter of 1937, the nascent Popular army fought heroically and successfully, forcing Franco to abandon his obsession with Madrid.
The internecine feuds of the Republic apart, the reader will accept Beevor's conclusion that Franco won the Civil War as the master of a more disciplined and better equipped army than the Republic's Popular army, remarkable creation as it was. Franco was no strategic genius. His blunders were apparent to his generals, but they carried out his orders. Rojo was to complain bitterly that his orders were 'annulled'. As for equipment, what the Labour party called the 'farce of non-intervention' allowed Hitler to pour arms and Mussolini to send ground troops into Franco's Spain while depriving the legitimate government of all military aid other than that of the Soviet Union. The one innovation of the Civil War was the tactical use of repeated air strikes to break the morale of ground troops. Carefully observed by German military intelligence, this was put into practice as the BEF retreated to Dunkirk. In major battles from 1937 onwards, the Nationalists dominated the air. The squadrons of the German Condor Legion of modern aircraft were duly honoured in Franco's victory parade in May 1939.
Beevor has not written a revisionist history of the war. His conclusions are substantially those of Hugh Thomas in his thousand-page blockbuster published in 1961. It is still essential reading. He has made extensive and intensive use of the Spanish sources available; Beevor's publisher, sensing a bestseller in the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, to lighten his task has 'sifted' for him the necessary Spanish works. Nor, in his remarkably honest introduction, does Beevor claim to have written a definitive history of the war, given that so many aspects are still a matter of debate, from the economic efficiency of the CNT agrarian collectives in Aragón to Stalin's ultimate objectives in Spain.
Beevor's book is notable for the resolute criticism of Francoism, emphasising the massive executions of the postwar years. The destruction of Francoism and all its work is widely regarded, particularly by the recent socialist government and its president Zapatero, as the supreme achievement of Spain's democracy since the death of the Caudillo in 1975. This has made his book a bestseller but earned him the opprobrium of nostalgic Francoists of the extreme Right. It will equally be a bestseller in Britain for those who see the Civil War as the last great cause.
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