SPANISH CIVIL WAR (1936–1939)

Social and political fissures in Spanish society came to a head in 1934, as the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany and the allure of new European fascist ideologies for the Spanish right led the left to revolt. The resulting Popular Front government proved unstable and unable to maintain social order. That frightened Spain’s propertied classes and traditionalists. The Civil War itself began as a revolt of elements of the colonial army in July 1936, led by Francisco Franco. Within Spain, many of the propertied were relieved at the impending overthrow of the Popular Front. The rebellion was thus supported by Carlists and Falange, conservative Catholics and the church hierarchy, and by “captains of industry” and landowners. On the Republican side, the Popular Front coalition drew upon an eclectic mix of peasants, workers, democrats, socialists, communists, anarchists, and assorted imported romantic and ideological adventurers. While Franco’s forces said they fought for the Catholic Church, tradition, and the Fatherland, the watchword of the anticlericals and social reformers on the side of the Republic was “it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.” That Mexican Revolution slogan of Emilio Zapata was made famous in Spain by a female anarchist revolutionary widely known as “La Passionaria.” While the rebels made headway in rural areas, they initially failed to take control of most cities or industrial areas. That encouraged spontaneous armed resistance by peasants and workers, who later became well-organized. Restoring the status quo antebellum was not enough for the lower classes: as the military rebels moved hard right to pick up support, the Popular Front moved into full revolutionary mode under pressure from peasants, workers, and ideologues within the government. The “red terror” that followed from that shift leftward was especially vicious toward Catholic clergy.

The status quo Western democracies declared neutrality, an act of “passive intervention” for which they have been criticized from the left ever since. Why did they do it? In Britain and France many in the governing elites saw the Republic as a reprise of Alexander Kerensky’s ill-fated 1917 regime in Russia, and worried about national and private assets should “the left” win the war. In addition, democratic opinion in the West was alienated by the revolutionary terror in Spain in the second half of 1936. About 55,000 were killed, including nearly 7,000 Catholic clergy. Although that provoked a rebel or Nationalist (“Nacionales”) terror in response, the massacres helped excuse Western refusal to support the Republic directly. French policy was most complicated as the Spanish war deeply divided France internally. That tendency encouraged Hitler to support the rebels to continue the war and thereby preoccupy the Western powers, not out of ideological affinity for Franco. It was hoped by the Popular Front government of France that neutrality would permit the Republic to crush the rebellion. The French thus settled on a policy called “relaxed nonintervention” in which they provided financial support, allowed transshipment of Soviet military aid, and permitted international volunteers to cross into the Republic. London was far more pragmatic from the start, bluntly pursing a strict policy of Realpolitik. The British professed broad indifference as to the internal character of Spanish government as long as Spain remained independent of the Axis alliance. London most deeply feared being drawn into a repeat of the general war that began in 1914, when a small regional quarrel escalated into all-out war among the Great Powers of Europe.

The great dictatorships were not as reticent as the Western democracies. The latter’s fear grew as the profoundly revisionist states, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, eagerly intervened with arms and numbers of regular troops designated as “volunteers.” Italy and Germany immediately sent key shipments of arms to Franco, and Hitler subsequently dispatched the Kondor Legion. More important was German armor and aircraft. Italy sent tens of thousands of its soldiers to fight in Spain. Finnish public opinion was the most sympathetic to the military rebels among any nonfascist country, as Finns viewed with distaste the dominant Communist influence on the Republican side and tended to see the war as one of Communist aggression. More Finns than any other nationality, proportionate to population, therefore volunteered to fight for Franco and the rebels. The Soviet Union hesitated to engage for two months, then counterintervened in the fall of 1936. Axis escalation was only partly matched by Soviet intervention and arms shipments: although Moscow become the main backer of the Republican side, it only sent a few hundred advisers to support its arms shipments. Even so more modern Soviet tanks and aircraft than were supplied initially by the Axis states to Franco helped halt the rebel advance on Madrid that November. That ensured the war would continue as an attritional conflict for nearly three years. Over that time, some 42,000 leftist volunteers of the international brigades arrived in Spain to fight for the Republic.

Most fighting took place in mountainous terrain, under combat conditions and with weapons more closely resembling those of World War I than of World War II. The widely held view that the Great Powers entered the war to “test” new weapons systems is a myth. The Germans did bring combined arms warfare to the fight, along with terror bombing and some minor tactical adjustments by the Luftwaffe. But German observers and the High Command explicitly concluded that there was little to learn from the war in Spain. The Italians failed to draw clear and important lessons about their essential military weakness and very poor standard weapons, especially inflating the role played by their obsolete aircraft and inadequate tankettes. The Red Army was the most interested in the war from the point of view of revising doctrine, but its Spanish war veterans and some of its best theorists were mostly swept away by the Yezhovshchina blood purge. Nor did any of the neutral Western militaries conclude much from the fight in Spain. As a result, the Spanish Civil War had very little direct impact on World War II.

In all, some 250,000 died during the war, with about 120,000 of those military casualties. About half the dead were prisoners or noncombatants killed in tit-for-tat massacres: the right massacred those it accused of being “Reds” or Republicans, the left killed priests, nuns, and “fascists.” The Italians lost 4,300 men and 12,000 wounded out of 49,000 they committed to the fight at any one time in the Corpo di Truppe Volontarie (CTV). Mussolini also lost one-third of all armaments of the Regio Esercito. German casualties were about 300 dead out of 16,500 who served in the Kondor Legion. The Soviets lost about 200 men of the total of 3,000 pilots and military advisers they sent to Spain. Franco proved to be militarily quite competent. He was also effectively ruthless. He pursued a military-political strategy of securing Nationalist rear areas via sweeps, violent repression, and terror. In those policies he was closely supported by Benito Mussolini following the humiliation of the Italian Corps at Guadalajara in March 1937. That battle became a rallying point for Italian fascist vengeance, much as the humiliation of Adowa had become for Italian nationalists after 1896. Mussolini was always more committed to Spain than was Hitler. The Duce saw victory for Franco in Spain as critical to his dream of an Italian empire in the Mediterranean. Hitler wanted only to continue the war to distract Western Allied attention from what he was planning for Austria and Czechoslovakia. In that policy, he was singularly successful. In that regard, the better criticism of the democracies is that they paid too much attention to Spain, allowing Hitler to distract them from the real issues leading into the great Europewide war of 1939–1945.

The Republicans had genuine popular support, probably significantly more than the Francoists. However, by no means did the Republic command all Spanish loyalty or the rebellion represent only a tiny fraction of the Spanish people. Nor did working class support for the Republic suffice in battle against an enemy that was ultimately better armed and at least as ruthless. Deeply eroding support for the Republic was the strict Communist control established during the last 21 months of the war. At its worst, the Spanish Republic became something of a precursor and forewarning of the nature of Soviet-dominated postwar states of Eastern Europe after 1945, though it never entirely surrendered its pluralist leftism. Republican military forces were already teetering from internal political disunion and too many battlefield failures when the Soviets suddenly cut off all aid to the Republic, completing the collapse. That was part of a “reneversement des alliance” with Nazi Germany that led to the Nazi–Soviet Pact (August 23, 1939). A military revolt overthrew the Communists in March 1939, and the Republic surrendered: Franco announced total victory on April 1. Terrible retribution followed, as perhaps 30,000 Republican prisoners were judicially murdered by Franco and his followers from 1939 to 1941. Within weeks of the collapse of the Spanish republic Britain and France had cause to rue the fact they had not helped a struggling democracy survive takeover by a regime sympathetic to the fascist cause in Europe: Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, and Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. Thus began World War II in Europe, the great and desperate contest against fascist imperialism. Yet, the link should not be overdrawn. In only a limited sense did the war in Spain set a quickening pace of international crises in the late 1930s, and it affected even less the early terms of the great war that followed on its heels.

Suggested Reading: M. Alpert, A New International History of the Spanish Civil War (1997); George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938); Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (1961; 1994).