![\"Spanish-Civil-War\"](\"http:\/\/contactprod.com\/invitationauvoyage\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Spanish-Civil-War.jpg\")
<\/a>The war keeps on resonating visually as Picasso\u2019s \u201cGuernica,\u201d painted after the carpet-bombing of that city, is among the most important artworks of our time.<\/p>\n
It was, also, a strangely literary little war. We remember it today through classic accounts like Hemingway\u2019s novel \u201cFor Whom the Bell Tolls\u201d and Orwell\u2019s memoir \u201cHomage to Catalonia.\u201d So many other significant writers and journalists poured into Spain, as observers or participants, it\u2019s hard to keep track of them.<\/p>\n The French novelist Andr\u00e9 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-Exup\u00e9ry reported for a Paris daily. Hemingway\u2019s 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\u2019d 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:<\/p>\n Until well into the twentieth century, Spain\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n A circle of generals, planned a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat. It began on July 17, 1936, in Morocco, home of Spain\u2019s army of Moors and foreign legionnaires.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 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\u2019s defense.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s \u201cSiegfried,\u201d he named the program Operation Magic Fire. Mussolini, too, provided planes, and within weeks more than ten thousand troops were flown across the Mediterranean \u2013 the first major airlift in history.<\/p>\n 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 mat\u00e9riel, of the Messerschmitt Bf 109, the Luftwaffe\u2019s \u201cdeadly, versatile mainstay\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Terror was a conscious instrument of Nationalist policy. Commanders, \u201cspoke of limpieza, <\/em>or cleansing.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The Republicans were not innocent of atrocities themselves. Almost 7,000 Catholic clergy \u2014 the Spanish Church tilted hard to the right \u2014 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 \u201cfifth columnists\u201d (the term originated in a Nationalist boast) were taken off and shot. \u201cCenturies of pent-up social tensions had erupted in a murderous fury.\u201d<\/p>\n Fellow-democracies did not rush to the Republic\u2019s side, however. France\u2019s Prime Minister wanted to, but Britain still hoped to dodge a fight with Hitler, and was alarmed by the Republican government\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The French and British governments, which had complicated interests of their own \u2014 not to mention ample numbers of Franco sympathizers among their officer corps \u2014 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.\u00a0Martha Gellhorn\u2019s 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 \u201ca grave mistake.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s bargain.<\/p>\n In exchange for arms, the Republicans were forced to accept the presence\u00a0of Soviet political and military operatives and the increasing dominance of the\u00a0Communist Party within the ruling coalition. The radical egalitarian experiment in Catalonia and Aragon \u2014 \u201cthere was no boss-class,\u201d Orwell wrote, \u201cno menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no boot-licking, no captouching\u201d \u2014 was suppressed and defamed.<\/p>\n There were moderates in the Republican government who didn\u2019t want a revolution and even for many who did want a revolution, it makes sense to \u201cFirst Win the War!\u201d as one propaganda poster put it. War or revolution struck Orwell as a false choice, however, and in \u201cHomage to Catalonia\u201d he dismissed it as a pretext under cover of which the Communists were gradually consolidating power.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In September, 1936, the government declared that it was dissolving all independent militias and merging them into a single military force.<\/p>\n In 1937, Orwell\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cWhen the fighting broke out,\u201d Orwell wrote, \u201cit is probable that every anti-Fascist in Europe felt a thrill of hope. For here at last, apparently, was democracy standing up to Fascism.\u201d \u201cBecause there at least was something <\/em>to fight for,\u201d James Baldwin would later write about that time of \u201cbewildered and despairing idealism,\u201d \u201cyoung men went off to die in Spain.\u201d<\/p>\n Payback time? Not really.<\/p>\n The Nazis came to see Franco as a charlatan.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\nEPILOGUE\u00a0– VICTOR’S PARADE<\/h5>\n
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