|
Opening
vignette
Madrid, March 1939 |
| The
war was almost over. In Madrid, a coalition of anticommunist
Republicans broke with the communist-controlled Popular Front
government, itself in flight towards the French border following
the fall of Barcelona in late January. This coalition fought a
mini-civil war against Communist troops in Madrid, established a
Military Council in defiance of the Popular Front, and began
negotiating with Francisco Franco, head of the Nationalist
government and commander-in-chief of the forces which, after
having been stalled at the gates of Madrid since December 1936,
were finally on the move into the capital. |
|
Before these negotiations could result in an armistice,
Nationalist troops were well within city limits. On March 26,
Gen. Juan Yagüe’s Moroccan veterans broke the Republican lines
at Peñarroya. Col. Adolfo Prada Vaquero, commanding the remnants
of the Army of the Center, offered its surrender to Col. Eduardo
Losas Camañas, commanding the 16th Nationalist Division. Losas
asked Prada and his delegation to appear at his command post in
the medical center of the Ciudad Universitaria on the 27th at
one p.m. |
| Late
on the 26th, with the war in Madrid still continuing, the head
of the Military Council, Col. Segismundo Casado, left his
headquarters in the Ministry of Finance to begin his flight to
the sea and abroad, safe from both Nationalist and Communist
reprisals. Before leaving, he ran into the new commander of II
Army Corps, Lt. Col. Joaquín Zulueta. Casado later wrote: “He
presented himself in my office, seeming very perturbed. He told
me that some of his batallions had wandered into no-man’s-land
and were fraternizing with the Nationalists with guitar-playing,
wine, dancing and singing. To get them back to his own trenches,
Lt. Col. Zulueta went under flag of truce to the Nationalist
commander in the Medical Center, Losas, who explained that to
try to do that was useless, because the soldiers had made
peace.” |
| The historian and
memorialist Ricardo de la Cierva calls this “the most incredible
and beautiful moment of the Civil War.” |
|
|
Introduction
Spain, a divided country?
|
Divided by geography: the Iberian peninsula is
unlike any other region of Europe.
Its average elevation is 1000 ft.
Its central portion is a huge plateau with
extremes of climate and divided into regions by
mountain ranges often impassable in winter before
the age of high-speed railroads and freeways.
No other European people has faced comparable
differences between coast and interior, north and
south, east and west, valley and mountain, which
makes Spain’s long history as a unified and stable
state – a history usually forgotten and, if
remembered, vilified – all the more extraordinary.
Divided
by regionalism and nationalism: since the late
1800s, ideologues of separatism in Vascongadas (the
Basque country) and Catalonia, and to a lesser
extent in other regions, have argued that the
Spanish are not a single people, that Basques and
Catalans are not Spaniards, and that these regions
therefore deserve special treatment and
self-government.
In both the Basque country and Catalonia,
separatist politicians sought alliance with the
Socialists to foment civil war in the 1930s.
Needless to say, most Basques and Catalans do
not at all agree that they are not Spaniards or that
their home regions are not parts of Spain.
Divided
by politics: the rise of messianic political
movements from the late 19th century on,
promising redemption on Earth through violent or at
least drastic revolution, took in Spain a particular
form. Only
in Spain did a strong anarchist movement survive
into the 20th century.
Only in Spain, therefore, was the
revolutionary impulse divided into mutually
quarreling factions: anarchists, socialists,
communists, and Catalan nationalists.
Also characteristic of Spanish revolutionary
movements was their ideological naïveté.
Spain never produced a leading revolutionary
thinker; the thoughts and actions of Spanish
revolutionaries were usually guided by primitive
notions.
Despite
these divisions, Spain from the time of the Catholic
monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella to 1808, and again
from 1874-1931, enjoyed a history of stability and
order unrivalled by any other European nation.
Contrary to the “black legend” of Spanish
ignorance and superstition, Spain in 1600 had more
universities relative to its population than any
other country, not to speak of Spanish art and
literature, which flourished not just in the Golden
Age of the 1600s, but also, and strongly, in the
early 20th century.
Note on Spanish nomenclature, usages adopted in the
book, abbreviations, acknowledgments.
The
first four chapters,
essential to understanding the condition of Spain in
the 1930s, provide needed background.
A fault of many histories of the Civil War is
that they largely ignore this back story, reducing
their account of Spain before 1936 to one of
poverty, feudalism, and the bigotry and arrogance of
the mighty, as if the ruling class of an ancient and
proud people would deliberately intend to oppress
and impoverish its fellow-countrymen for no good
reason.
Bigotry and unjust oppression certainly
occurred but were hardly worse than in other
countries.
One is led to conclude from conventional
accounts that the Civil War was a war of the just
– the Left, those who wanted liberation and
progress – against the unjust – the defenders of
privilege, clerical power, and ignorance.
This is a caricature, and it is necessary to
describe the back story in order that the real
story, that of the conflicts leading up to and
expressed in the Civil War, be honest.
The
fifth chapter
tells the story of 1935-36 through the statements
and actions of the leading figures of the various
camps.
It establishes that there was no deep-seated
right-wing or Fascist plot to overthrow the
Republic, but that the Republic was disintegrating
for other reasons, notably the leftist desire to
turn it into something else, either an anarchist
utopia or a Soviet-style totalitarian state.
The military plot that matured during 1936
matured in step with the collapse of order and was
not its cause.
Chapter
1: A Backward Country?
In
1800, Spain had enjoyed 300 years of internal
stability. It
was about half as rich as France, but was not
slipping behind, rather growing at the same rate as
other European nations. The French invasion of
1808-1813 ended this era and led to 60 years of
political and social chaos which retarded growth and
exacerbated the three great burdens of Spanish
society: illiteracy, hunger, and poverty.
The era of chaos culminated in the disastrous
First Republic of 1873-4, the work of excitable
liberal ideologues of a peculiarly Spanish variety.
Chapter
2: The First Restoration 1874-1923
The
restored monarchy put Spain back on the path of
gradual development toward political liberty and
economic progress.
The much-maligned turno
system of political alternation between pre-selected
candidates of liberal or conservative persuasion
actually guaranteed stability for all its relative
corruption. At
the same time, progressive intellectuals and
businessmen established institutions of education
and charity; a brilliant example was the Catalan
textile magnate Eusebí Güell’s workers’ town
near Barcelona.
In the same period, however, the political
polarization that did so much to destroy Spanish
democracy under the Second Republic began to take on
its characteristic shape.
Spanish liberalism split between moderates
and exaltados,
the latter inspired by the Jacobins of the French
Revolution. Workers’
and peasants’ movements split into anarchist and
socialist variants, with Spanish anarchism
demonstrating a capacity for survival and violence
unmatched elsewhere.
Radical nationalisms in the Basque country
and Catalonia won over many intellectuals,
activists, and simple bandits.
The loss of Cuba and the Philippines in the
Spanish-American War of 1898 traumatized the
country, although its effects were more modest than
left-wing historians have admitted.
Gradual progress continued, as measured by
the decline of hunger as a cause of death to almost
nil in 1930.
Chapter
3: Dictatorship and Republic 1923-1934
The
so-called “´98 generation” of politicians,
artists, and intellectuals – including names such
as Pablo Picasso, Pio Baroja, Azorín, Ramón del
Valle-Inclán, Ramiro de Maeztu and the philosophers
Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset --
reached the peak of its influence in the culturally
vital years of the 1910s to early 1930s.
The generation also included politicians such
as Manuel Azaña, Alejandro Lerroux and the
Republic’s first president, Niceto Alcalá-Zamora.
The chapter introduces these and other
characters who were to play leading roles in the
drama that followed.
The dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera
was mild and stabilizing; the Socialist party, PSOE,
collaborated, temporarily calming its own
revolutionary impulses.
In 1930, the king dismissed Primo de Rivera,
encouraging leftists to conspire to overthrow the
government; the conspiracy failed, but the
governments had lost their nerve.
In April 1931, municipal elections returned a
majority of monarchist town councils, yet the
king’s advisors persuaded him to abdicate.
The Second Republic was thus born under a
shadow of illegitimacy and as the child of people
who, like Azaña, held themselves called to rule
whatever the popular will.
Chapter
4: Training for Civil War: October 1934
Socialist
leaders such as Francisco Largo Caballero, known as
“the Spanish Lenin,” and Indalecio Prieto wished
for violent revolution on the Bolshevik model to
speed the social and political transformation they
deemed desirable.
When center-right parties won the elections
of November 1933, Largo and the PSOE began
organizing a revolutionary uprising in alliance with
the Catalan separatists under Luis Companys who
controlled the regional government, the Generalidad,
in Barcelona. They
had the support of Azaña and other left
republicans. In
October 1934, using as pretext that the right-wing
alliance, CEDA, the largest party in the Parliament,
had joined the government, socialists and
separatists launched that revolution, which failed
because “the masses” stayed home, except in
Asturias, where the mini-civil war continued for two
weeks. Despite
their defeat, Largo, Companys and their allies
launched a hugely successful, world-wide propaganda
campaign claiming enormous numbers of dead and
alleging brutality by the government forces
commanded by Francisco Franco, the 41-year old Chief
of Staff of the army.
They conceived the attempt as the first act
of civil war, a war launched openly by the Left, not
the Right. And
the propaganda campaign mobilized leftist
intellectuals across the world in a war of words
that both predated and outlasted the war itself.
Chapter
5: “Fear engenders hate” (Azaña)
In
late 1935, Alcalá-Zamora, the supposedly
conservative president, joined forces with the Left
to unseat the center-right government of Alejandro
Lerroux, exploiting a small-scale corruption scandal
known as the straperlo.
This bizarre episode would have been a
comical footnote to history had it not resulted in
the end of the last government with a chance to hold
the country together.
In the following, dubiously legitimate,
elections the leftist Popular Front claimed victory
and a huge majority in the Cortes (parliament).
Leftist agitators and gunmen took to the
streets, burning churches and libraries and killing
political opponents.
Right-wing groups responded feebly, again
counter to the usual accounts which portray a
non-existent “Fascist” threat.
Spain had few Fascists; even the Falange
movement led by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, which
had no members in the Cortes, was dubiously Fascist;
José Antonio himself was jailed and later executed
by the Popular Front government.
Early on July 12, gunmen associated with
Prieto assassinated a leading monarchist, José
Calvo Sotelo. For
many Catholics and conservatives, this was the last
straw, although some historians such as Stanley
Payne believe that decisive action by the government
could yet have saved the peace.
Such action was not forthcoming, however, and
a few days later, the military conspiracy of Gen.
Emilio Mola recruited a long-standing opponent of
rebellion, Francisco Franco, now commanding the
Spanish forces in the Canary Islands.
On July 17, troops loyal to Franco defied
government forces in Morocco; the Civil War had
begun, or rather resumed.
The Republic, too, was at an end.
The government calling itself Republican for
the duration of the war was in fact a
semi-totalitarian Popular Front regime controlled
increasingly by the Communists.
One of the first acts of this regime in
response to Franco’s uprising was to order the
socialist, Communist, anarchist, and other leftist
militias armed.
Peace, in the words of the conservative
leader José María Gil-Robles, had become
impossible.
|
The
Civil War
Military operations, political intrigues,
social chaos
|
Chapter
6: Francisco Franco
One
of the most striking features of mainstream writing
on the Civil War and the Franco regime is its
ineradicable and extremely emotional hatred of and
contempt for the man.
This is something rationally inexplicable,
inasmuch as Franco as head of state was a vastly
milder dictator than the leftist dictators admired
by many Franco-hating intellectuals.
Another odd feature is that much mainstream
writing, such as that of the British historian Paul
Preston, portrays him as a bloody and simple-minded
opportunist; odd, because that implies that the
Left, by definition wiser and more far-seeing than
others, was defeated by a bumbling fool and an
idiot. The
record shows a more interesting and multifaceted
character, whose earlier life and attitudes this
chapter investigates.
Chapter
7: The Forces in Being
Prieto
was entirely right when he, in a speech in response
to the military uprising, declared its chances to be
virtually nil.
The Popular Front government controlled most
of peninsular Spain and almost all its industry and
wealth. The
armed militias might not be worth much in combat,
but they were numerous, and many military units had
not joined Franco and Mola, nor had the navy.
The so-called Republic’s might was
overwhelming, rather as that of the North in the
American Civil War.
Unlike the U.S. North, however, Popular Front
Spain was torn by debilitating internal conflicts
between Communists, Socialists, anarchists, and
Basque and Catalan nationalists.
Still, Franco’s and Mola’s uprising
seemed a quixotic gesture – appropriate to Spanish
pride, but doomed to fail.
Yet it did not.
The chapter details the military and economic
resources of the two sides at the start of the
conflict and explores the reasons that Prieto’s
prediction failed to come true.
It also introduces the leading figures in the
Nationalist camp.
Chapter
8: Revolutionary Spain
One
of the first and most famous casualties of the war
was the poet Federico García Lorca.
He became a mythical figure of the Left; the
true story of his unhappy end, presented here,
paints a different picture.
He spent his last days in the home of a close
friend, who happened to be a Falangist.
The chapter continues with an account of
events in Popular Front Spain in the first months of
the war. Anarchists,
Communists, Catalan nationalists, and many
Socialists thought the hour of revolution had
struck. Farms
and factories were occupied by workers.
Production collapsed and hunger reappeared.
In September, the government, now led by
Francisco Largo Caballero, known as “the Spanish
Lenin,” gave the gold reserves of the Bank of
Spain to Joseph Stalin in return for military aid.
The chapter tells the true story of this
“vast fraud,” as Prieto called it, and of the
first huge expropriations of private wealth, as well
as of the persecutions and killings of priests,
monks, and nuns.
The most decisive event of the early fall,
however, was the formation of the People’s Army on
the remnants of the old.
Without this army, the Republic would have
lost in 1936 despite its material superiority.
The new army was modelled on the Soviet Red
Army and, like its model, staffed with political
commissars supplied by the Communist Party or its
sympathizers. By
November, the new army had largely replaced the
willing but incompetent militias in combat.
All knew now the war would not be a brief
one.
Chapter
9: The War of the Columns (July-October 1936)
As
neither side possessed forces strong enough to form
continuous fronts, the first months were those of
“the war of the columns”, groups of men moving
forward across the land, seizing towns and
strongpoints. In
this war, Franco’s columns were spectacularly
successful. Few
in number, but strong in morale, they crossed the
Strait of Gibraltar in defiance of massive
Republican superiority at sea and moved 300 miles
north to join forces with Mola.
They then turned toward Madrid, but first had
to relieve Toledo, the ancient capital, where Col.
José Moscardó quixotically (this Hispanic adverb
seems particularly appropriate) had occupied the Alcázar
or citadel, which was in no state of defense, and
which he held heroically against great odds.
The defense of the Alcázar and the proud
final communiqué, “sin novedad en Alcázar”,
“no news from the Alcázar”, created a
Nationalist legend to stand beside the Popular Front
legends of García Lorca, Guernica, or the defense
of Madrid (see below).
Immediately following the relief of Toledo,
the military junta proclaimed Franco head of the
Spanish state, not just for the duration of the war,
but indefinitely.
Chapter
10: Foreign Intervention
A
persistent legend claims that Franco won because he
was supplied with arms and soldiers by Adolf Hitler
and Benito Mussolini.
This is false.
Mussolini had promised aid to the military
uprising, and Hitler sent a few planes in 1936, but
these were not decisive, nor were the Italian ground
troops or German squadrons that later arrived.
Neither were the International Brigades
fighting for the Popular Front or Joseph Stalin’s
support of that regime, except in one instance, the
defense of Madrid in November 1936, where Soviet
tanks helped repel weak Nationalist attacks.
Franco persuaded the Germans and Italians to
sell on credit and rarely permitted their
representatives to interfere either in combat
operations or in his government, again unlike the
Popular Front, where Stalin’s agents gained ever
greater influence.
One type of foreign involvement may well have
been vital in ensuring Franco’s survival: the
Norwegian-born Thorkild Rieber, president of Texaco
and admirer of Franco, sent the Nationalists oil on
credit, which was unheard-of in the business,
throughout the war.
Another type of foreign intervention was that
of the intellectuals, such as Ernest Hemingway or
André Malraux, a self-appointed combat pilot
described by the Communist chief of the Republican
Air Force as a man “with no idea at all of what
flying means”.
Chapter
11: The First Battle of Madrid, November
1936-February 1937
“¡No
pasarán!” “They
shall not pass!” was a slogan that went round the
world. The
reality was different, no matter what Ernest
Hemingway or other foreign sympathizers of the
Popular Front wrote.
The populace of Madrid did not stand shoulder
to shoulder with the regime in determined resistance
to “Fascists”; in fact, Popular Front men
massacred over 6,000 real or alleged Franco
sympathizers in the jails of Madrid in true
Bolshevik fashion.
One of them, the later Communist leader
Santiago Carrillo, continues to lie about his role
in these killings.
The chapter details the operations around
Madrid during these critical months.
The Popular Front government fled to
Valencia, and later to Barcelona, but the fronts
held, and in February the People’s Army inflicted
a massive defeat on the Italian expeditionary force
in the Guadalajara area.
The Italians, emboldened by the easy conquest
of Málaga, launched a midwinter offensive without
securing their flanks and were crushed.
Nationalists and Leftists agreed: Italians
cannot stand up to Spaniards.
Chapter
12: The Other Civil War, Barcelona Winter and Spring
1937
In
Popular Front Spain, the Communists and their front
men increased their hold on the government while
maintaining the fiction that it was a democratic,
Republican regime.
Largo Caballero had in the meantime become a
liability to Stalin and his agents; with Prieto’s
support, which he later regretted, they replaced him
with the minister of finance, a doctor named Juan
Negrín whose policy was one of close collaboration
with the Soviet Union.
The next step was to tame the wild
revolutionaries and, under the instruction of Soviet
agents of the NKVD, to regularize a Soviet-type
regime. The
anarchists, numerous in Catalonia, objected.
Their opposition led to a civil war within
the civil war, the events recorded by George Orwell,
in which the regime bloodily suppressed the
anarchists, assassinating their leading figures,
most famously Andrés Nin.
Azaña, now an increasingly impotent
president, accurately described the disorder and
violence of the “Republic” at war in his book The
Soirée of Benicarló.
He was always better at analyzing, which he
did brilliantly, than at governing.
Chapter
13: Guernica and the Northern Campaign, Spring 1937
Thanks
to Pablo Picasso’s propagandistic painting and to
an orchestrated campaign of disinformation, the
German air raid on the Basque town of Guernica in
April 1937 became the central symbol of senseless
Fascist brutality.
The real story is different and is the
centerpiece of this chapter. In
March, Franco made the decision that won the war
when he voted to break off the attacks in the center
and to move on the Basque country and Asturias with
the important industries and ports of Bilbao and
Santander. In
the following weeks, Franco consolidated his
government with a view to winning the war and to
postwar reconstruction.
The contrast to the vicious infighting and
Soviet influence in Popular Front Spain could not be
starker. As
part of the consolidation, the Falange was
officially designated the centerpiece of the
Nationalist movement; this was in fact purely
ceremonial. Franco
remained averse to overt ideologies of any kind.
Chapter
14: The Popular Front Counterattacks, Summer 1937
When
Bilbao fell on June 30, Prieto realized the war was
lost. Without
the North, the Popular Front no longer controlled
all heavy industry or the chief centers of
population. To
relieve the pressure on the North, Negrín’s
government launched attacks on Brunete and Zaragoza
in the Center and Northeast.
Both failed.
The chapter recounts the operations of the
summer and early fall, ending in the complete
control of the North coast by the Nationalists.
Chapter
15: The War of the Intellectuals
Ernest
Hemingway was only once at the front, participating
in a minor clash at La Granja in summer 1937 which
he romanticized in For
Whom the Bell Tolls.
Hemingway was the archetypal Popular Front
sympathizer; the most famous of a long list of
international intellectuals who turned the civil war
into a battle of ideologies, of Fascists against
democrats. As
the book has shown and will continue to show, this
is a travesty which nevertheless has dominated the
international image of the war ever since.
The chapter discusses some of these figures,
both international, such as Gerald Brenan, Georges
Bernanos, Willy Brandt, and Spanish, such as Ortega
y Gasset or Unamuno, who clashed publicly with the
Falangist militia commander José Millán-Astray at
the University of Salamanca, an event that has been
read as Unamuno’s scornful repudiation of Franco,
whereas in fact Unamuno from the outset gave the
Nationalists his support.
It is another myth of the war that “the
intellectuals,” the thoughtful, humane, artistic,
and literary people, were unanimously against
Franco. This
is not at all the case; among counterexamples are
Ramiro de Maeztu, Gregorio Marañón, Roy Campbell
and Ortega y Gasset.
Chapter
16: A Cold Winter 1938
The
winter of 1938 was the coldest in a century.
The Popular Front, wanting vengeance for the
North, attacked in the Southeast toward Teruel,
which the People’s Army took after weeks of bloody
fighting in below-zero weather, kidnapping and
killing its bishop.
This victory, with Teruel being the only
provincial capital ever taken by the People’s
Army, gave the regime a needed boost.
The chapter recounts this and the other
operations from the fall of the North to March 1938,
including the campaigns of Belite and Lérida and
the naval battle that ended in the sinking of the Baleares,
the Nationalists’ most modern and powerful
cruiser.
Chapter
17: The March to the Sea and the Valencia Campaign,
March-July 1938
In
March, the war became one of movement when
Franco’s forces broke the Republican lines east of
Teruel and in six weeks reached the sea at the
estuary of the Ebro, cutting Popular Front Spain in
two. Franco
then turned south to take Valencia, which his men
failed to do in two further months of fighting.
His numerous critics have seen this decision
as driven by a desire to prolong the war until a
general European war broke out, since he could, they
say, have ended the war by turning north on
Barcelona, capital of “Republican” Spain.
Franco’s explanation, supported by the
world’s leading Civil War historian Stanley G.
Payne, was that he did not want to risk French
intervention by marching toward the French border;
France also had a Popular Front government, although
not Communist-controlled as in Spain, so this may
not have been groundless.
In any case, the character who most
desperately wanted to prolong the war until a
general European war broke out was not Franco, but
the Popular Front leader Juan Negrín.
Chapter
18: The Ebro Campaign, July-November 1938
It
was to be the finest hour of the People’s Army.
In July, it launched its greatest offensive
ever across the lower Ebro, aimed at retaking Teruel,
rejoining the two remaining parts of Popular Front
Spain, and reopening land communications between
Madrid and Barcelona.
Franco decided to stand his ground,
initiating a battle of attrition in the terrible
summer heat and drought that, over five months, bled
the People’s Army’s best units dry and made its
ultimate defeat all but certain.
Toward the end of the campaign, the
International Brigades disbanded under Stalin’s
instructions. The
“Republic” was on its own.
Chapter
19: The Fall of Catalonia, December 1938-March 1939
Negrín’s
last hope now was indeed that a general European war
pitting the Soviet Union against Germany could
somehow save the “Republic”.
What he did not realize was how completely
the Western Allies in Munich had sold out to Adolf
Hitler and that no one, not even Stalin, any longer
cared much about Spain, nor could he of course
foresee that the general war, when it came, would
see Stalin allied to Hitler.
Yet he, or rather his men, fought on,
increasingly outnumbered and out-equipped; the last
in large part because the Nationalists were good at
re-using captured equipment.
At war’s end, more Soviet-made tanks were
serving Franco than the Popular Front.
Having recovered from the Ebro Campaign, the
Nationalists in January finally began the offensive
on Barcelona, which fell without a fight on January
28, “waiting expectantly for Franco,” as an
observer wrote.
The government, taking all the gold, jewels,
and other valuables its members could lay their
hands on, fled north.
It launched a final offensive in far-west
Extremadura to distract the Nationalists; it took
much ground to no purpose.
Chapter
20: Madrid and Alicante, March 1939
The
front lines around Madrid had not shifted in two
years. In
the former capital, anticommunist Socialists
rebelled against the Popular Front regime, hoping to
end the war as recounted in the opening vignette.
Franco insisted on complete surrender, and
before the talks could proceed further, events
supervened. Madrid
fell on March 28 amid scenes of rejoicing.
Three days later, the last People’s Army
units surrendered in Alicante on the Mediterranean
coast, and the next day a fever-ridden Franco could
issue his final communiqué: “Today, the Red Army
being captured and disarmed, the National forces
have achieved their final military objectives.
The war is over.”
Chapter
21: Aftermath
How
many died? Which
side was the most murderous?
What did the war cost?
How did the average Spaniard fare in the two
regions? How
many fled and where?
Many have ready answers: a million died, the
Nationalists were the worst killers, because they
killed for fun, whereas the Popular Front only
killed when necessary.
Life in “Republican” Spain was freer and
better than in Nationalist Spain.
Hundreds of thousands had to flee or they
would have been killed.
All these are distortions if not lies.
The best information on the casualties is
that they were around 600,000, and that the two
sides were about equally responsible for non-combat
killings. However,
contrary to myth, Nationalist forces rarely slew at
random whereas this was entirely typical of the
Popular Front with its competing armed factions.
Another explosive topic is the cost of
postwar reprisals by the Franco regime; about 25,000
were killed, likely fewer than if the other side had
won. Of
those jailed, most were paroled after a few years.
Also contrary to myth, most leading Spanish
intellectuals did not flee the country.
Franco’s Spain remained internationally
isolated until the late 1940s, costing severe
economic hardship, although the number of deaths
from hunger never reached the levels seen in
“Republican” Spain.
Chapter
22: The War about the War
Democratization
after Franco’s death in 1975 was an organized
process. The
regime had faced no serious democratic opposition;
its only consistent and relentless enemies were the
Communists, who were no democrats.
Since the 1980s, the Communists and many
Socialists began to revise history, blackening the
story of the regime and asserting that Spanish
democracy was not safe unless it made a break with
the past and returned to the ideals of the Second
Republic. In
this overheated and excited atmosphere, honest
discussion of and writing on the Civil War became
rare. With
few exceptions, Spanish university historians
adopted a quasi-Communist reading of history,
leaving the true story to vilified outsiders.
The story outside Spain is somewhat but not
totally different.
Stanley Payne sides unequivocally with the
revisionists, stating that “there is no free
speech about the Civil War on Spanish campuses.”
The book closes in the hope that it has
contributed to honest discussion as well as telling
an exciting story.
The
book includes illustrations, a full complement of
maps, both general and of particular operations, a
timeline, bibliography, references, and index and is
linked to a website with more extensive references
and the possibility for readers to comment.
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Illustration fra
borgerkrigsbogen "Estampas de la Revolucion
Espanola, 19 Julio de 1936" af Rey Vila aka Sim.
Sims skitser blev de mest kendte skildringer af Den
Spanske Borgerkrig indtil
Picassos "Guernica", blev afsløret i efteråret
1937. |
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Counterattack before losing Irún to
the Rebels at the Battle of Irún during the Spanish Civil War in
September 1936.
Modangreb før de
tabte
Irún
til oprørerne i slaget ved Irún under Den
Spanske Borgerkrig i september 1936. |
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