Category: SPANISH CHRONICLE

1936 – 1939

For the first time a war was fully documented. Photographed and filmed by artists. Some were the pioneers of modern photography, the first “war photographers”. Master among them was Robert Capa. His combat photographs are milestones.

The war keeps on resonating visually as Picasso’s “Guernica,” painted after the carpet-bombing of that city, is among the most important artworks of our time.

It was, also, a strangely literary little war. We remember it today through classic accounts like Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and Orwell’s memoir “Homage to Catalonia.” So many other significant writers and journalists poured into Spain, as observers or participants, it’s hard to keep track of them.

The French novelist André Malraux organized a squadron of volunteer pilots for the anti-Fascist resistance and made a film while fighting. The aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry reported for a Paris daily. Hemingway’s suite at the Hotel Floridain Madrid was a boozy hangout for a revolving rat pack of wellgroomed foreign correspondents, including Martha Gellhorn, with whom he’d begun an affair (she will become his third wife). Dorothy Parker, Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes and W. H. Auden toured the fighting and told this story:

Until well into the twentieth century, Spain’s economy remained largely agricultural, and its great landowners were accustomed to a near-monopoly on political power, shored up by the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. This started to change quickly with the establishment of the Second Republic, in 1931. Parliament legalized divorce, cut government subsidies to the Church, and laid the groundwork for the redistribution of land.

In February, 1936, after an alliance of centrist and leftist parties won a parliamentary election, peasants seized land, and mobs burned churches and stormed prisons, releasing political prisoners.

A circle of generals, planned a coup d’état. It began on July 17, 1936, in Morocco, home of Spain’s army of Moors and foreign legionnaires.

The coup was welcomed in the Roman Catholic heartland, but it faltered in the larger cities and the northern industrial centers. Trade unions in Madrid were eager to defend the Republican government; the government wary of the unions’ radicalism, hesitated for two days but then gave them guns. In Barcelona, where anarchism had long been a powerful movement, workers simply seized armories and took up the city’s defense.

In the early days of the rebellion, the Spanish Navy remained mostly loyal to the Republican government, isolating the Moors and legionnaires in Africa. Franco, in search of planes, sent emissaries to Hitler. Hitler was willing to sell even more aircraft than Franco was asking for, inspired by Wagner’s “Siegfried,” he named the program Operation Magic Fire. Mussolini, too, provided planes, and within weeks more than ten thousand troops were flown across the Mediterranean – the first major airlift in history.

The German involvement in particular, especially the provision of aircraft and pilots, proved decisive. Hitler not only gained an ally, he tested weapons, honed tactics, and seasoned his personnel for the coming war. The Spanish conflict saw the debut, among other matériel, of the Messerschmitt Bf 109, the Luftwaffe’s “deadly, versatile mainstay” during World War II, and the Stuka Ju-87 dive bomber, terrifying for its accuracy and for the dementing sound made by its wind-driven sirens. Spanish towns, including one called Guernica, were carpet-bombed by way of experiment. German planes came to dominate the sky, and therefore the war.

Terror was a conscious instrument of Nationalist policy. Commanders, “spoke of limpieza, or cleansing.” Politicians and trade unionists were bayoneted or shot. Women were subjected to gang rape. Executions often assumed a paranoid cast: in Huesca, one hundred suspected Freemasons were killed; in Granada alone, the death toll amounted to 5,000. Bodies were left to lie as warnings in plazas and streets. All together, some 150,000 individuals were murdered.

Against the Nationalist offensive, the government could muster only a relatively small number of regular troops. The Republic was saved from rapid capitulation by what was essentially a counter-uprising, this one led by trade unions and left-wing parties, many of which maintained, or hastily assembled, their own militias. The units were poorly trained, poorly equipped, poorly organized, and poorly supplied, but their numbers and morale, along with the general spirit of popular enthusiasm (the anarchists alone soon had 100,000 men and women under arms), were enough to stabilize the front.

The Republicans were not innocent of atrocities themselves. Almost 7,000 Catholic clergy — the Spanish Church tilted hard to the right — were put to death. During the first weeks of the siege of Madrid, which began in November 1936 and lasted for more than two years, up to 2,500 suspected “fifth columnists” (the term originated in a Nationalist boast) were taken off and shot. “Centuries of pent-up social tensions had erupted in a murderous fury.”

Fellow-democracies did not rush to the Republic’s side, however. France’s Prime Minister wanted to, but Britain still hoped to dodge a fight with Hitler, and was alarmed by the Republican government’s support of militant labor unions, given that British companies had extensive mining interests in the country. The British Foreign Secretary urged France not to intervene.

In America, Congress, disconcerted by the spectacle of armed labor leaders taking up politics, outlawed sales of military equipment to either side. It has long been known that Torkild Rieber, the chief executive of Texaco, and Nazi sympathizer, violated this embargo by selling oil to the Nationalists on credit. It has recently been discovered that Rieber also directed Texaco employees around the world to monitor oil being shipped to the Republic by rival companies. Texaco sent the Nationalists more than fifty messages about these shipments, many containing intelligence that could be used for targeting them.

The French and British governments, which had complicated interests of their own — not to mention ample numbers of Franco sympathizers among their officer corps — remained aloof. As for Roosevelt, he temporized throughout the war, imposing an arms embargo on both sides that, in practice, hobbled only the Republic. The Depression was re-intensifying, the Spanish Republicans were seen as dangerously radical, and with his popularity declining, FDR was ever mindful of the Catholic vote. Martha Gellhorn’s efforts to influence him through her mentor, the First Lady, came to nothing. Only after the fall of Barcelona, two months before the end of the war and many months too late, did FDR acknowledge that the embargo had been “a grave mistake.”

As it later would with Cuba and Nicaragua, the United States had succeeded in driving a leftist government into the arms of the Soviet Union. With no alternative, the Republic turned to Stalin for support. It was a devil’s bargain.

In exchange for arms, the Republicans were forced to accept the presence of Soviet political and military operatives and the increasing dominance of the Communist Party within the ruling coalition. The radical egalitarian experiment in Catalonia and Aragon — “there was no boss-class,” Orwell wrote, “no menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no boot-licking, no captouching” — was suppressed and defamed.

There were moderates in the Republican government who didn’t want a revolution and even for many who did want a revolution, it makes sense to “First Win the War!” as one propaganda poster put it. War or revolution struck Orwell as a false choice, however, and in “Homage to Catalonia” he dismissed it as a pretext under cover of which the Communists were gradually consolidating power.

France allowed Soviet arms to be shipped across its border with Spain in the spring of 1938, but only for a few months. Stalin, meanwhile, was losing interest. He began withdrawing Soviet advisers, many of whom he took the precaution of shooting when he got them home, in case they had brought back the wrong ideas.

In September, 1936, the government declared that it was dissolving all independent militias and merging them into a single military force.

In 1937, Orwell’s war ended when he took a bullet in the neck; he stood a towering 6 foot 3, and his head too easily poked over the parapet.

The Spanish Civil War, which began a few months after the remilitarization of the Rhineland, was fought against the backdrop of the annexation of Austria, the Munich Agreement, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It concluded five months to the day before the start of World War II. It was a proxy war not only for Hitler and Stalin but for almost everybody except the Spanish. “When the fighting broke out,” Orwell wrote, “it is probable that every anti-Fascist in Europe felt a thrill of hope. For here at last, apparently, was democracy standing up to Fascism.” “Because there at least was something to fight for,” James Baldwin would later write about that time of “bewildered and despairing idealism,” “young men went off to die in Spain.”

EPILOGUE – VICTOR’S PARADE

Payback time? Not really.

The Nazis came to see Franco as a charlatan.

References:  This post incorporates text from reviews of the book Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, by Adam Hochschild, in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker.