The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (26 page)

The gaunt and erect figure of Moscardó waited in his dust-impregnated uniform. He greeted Varela with the words. ‘
Sin novedad en el Alcázar
(Nothing to report at the Alcázar)’. ‘
Sin novedad’
was also the codeword for the rising which nobody had bothered to ask the passed-over colonel to join. He repeated the same performance for General Franco and the newspapermen the next day, 29 September. Moscardó was compared to the great warrior heroes of medieval Spain.
¹⁸

The nationalists, especially the Army of Africa, had demonstrated their offensive abilities in these first two months of the war, while the republican militias possessed neither the training nor the cohesion to mount effective operations against organized troops. They were also desperately short of arms and ammunition. One of the first Soviet advisers reported back to Moscow that in August and early September 1936 there was only one rifle per three men, and one machine-gun per 150–200 men.
¹⁹

In Oviedo, which had been won for the nationalists by Colonel Aranda’s trick, the siege still continued despite ingenious and brave attacks by Asturian
dinamiteros
. Armoured lorries manned by workers with improvised flame-throwers succeeded in making a breach, only to be forced back. Relief for the besieged in the form of a column under Colonel Martín Alonso was on its way from Galicia.

In the south, near Andújar, x guards and Falangists was holding out in the mountain monastery of Santa María de la Cabeza under Captain Cortés.
²⁰
Nationalist pilots devised an original method of dropping fragile supplies. They attached them to live turkeys which descended flapping their wings, thus serving as parachutes which could also be eaten by the defenders. The besieged were eventually overcome in April of the next year by a mass assault. It was a defence at least as brave as that of Toledo, but it was given comparatively little recognition by the nationalists, perhaps because it risked stealing glory from Franco.

Although the worker militias represented the only possible response to the generals’ rising, since few regular army units remained in formation, the anarchists, the POUM and the left socialists, including Largo Caballero, regarded the militias as a virtue rather than a necessity. There was a powerful belief that morale and motivation must overcome an enemy which depended on the mercenaries of the Army of Africa or brother workers who would desert at the first opportunity. The republican left wing seriously underestimated the Catholic zeal of the conservative smallholders of Galicia, Old Castile and Navarre, who were to become the nationalists’ best troops after the colonial professionals.

The Madrid government, the regular officers, centrist politicians and the communists began to advocate a conventional army as the sole means of resisting the nationalists. The communists’ attitude derived from the knowledge that a centralized command could be infiltrated and seized. Hence their call for ‘Discipline, Hierarchy, Organization’. Such plans for ‘militarization’ were greeted with great suspicion by the left socialists, who described them as ‘counter-revolutionary’ and looked upon them as a tactic in the government’s effort to recover control of the workers’ movement. The anarchists were even more strongly opposed. For them a regular army represented the worst aspects of the state. They called it ‘the organization of collective crime’.

The two unions, the CNT and the UGT, provided the majority of the militia forces, though all the parties had their own. There were units from the republican left, the Catalan Esquerra, the POUM and the communists. A militiaman was paid ten pesetas a day at first by his local organization and later by the government. This was the equivalent of a skilled worker’s wage and it became a heavy burden on the ailing economy.
²¹
Their uniforms consisted of blue overalls and either a beret or, more often, a fore-and-aft cap in party colours. The standard of equipment and weapons varied greatly. Some militiamen were still carrying only shotguns after six months of war. The maintenance of weapons was universally bad. A rifle without rust was almost unknown; hardly any were cleaned and oil was seldom issued. The few machine-guns were old and lacked spare parts. There was also such a wide variety of calibres that as many as sixteen different types of ammunition were needed within some units. Mortars and grenades, when available, were usually more dangerous to the operator than the enemy, so that the home-made variety, dynamite packed into tomato cans, was preferred.

The greatest shortcoming of the militia system remained the lack of self-discipline. At the beginning stories abounded of detachments leaving the front line without warning for weekends in Barcelona or Madrid. Anyone who stayed awake on sentry duty was thought a fool. Ammunition was wasted by firing at planes at impossible distances and positions were lost because nobody wanted to dig trenches. It is interesting that indiscipline was most marked among groups like factory workers, who had previously been subject to external constraints and controls. Those used to leading an independent existence like farmers and artisans had not had their self-discipline undermined. Much has been made of the fact that leaders were elected and political groupings maintained in the militias. But this was not so much a difficulty as a source of strength. It inspired mutual confidence among men suspicious of outsiders. The real problem came in the first few chaotic weeks, when the revolutionary atmosphere made militiamen react immediately against anything that could be remotely construed as authoritarianism. ‘Discipline was almost a crime,’ admitted Abad de Santillán.
²²

The election of officers and the trial of offenders by rank-and-file courts were regarded by anarchists as fundamental principles. Each section, comprising ten men, elected its own corporal. Each
centuria
, comprising 100 men, elected its own delegate. A militia column varied greatly in its number of
centuria
. Durruti’s column had 6,000 men at its peak, while others consisted of only a few hundred. Most columns had a regular officer who acted as ‘adviser’ to the column leader, but unless he was known as a genuine sympathizer, he was usually distrusted. There were a certain number of very radical officers in the army, such as Colonel Romero Bassart, the colonial officer who resisted the rising at Larache and later became military adviser to the CNT. There was also the unconventional Colonel Mangada, who was treated as a hero in the first days of the war after his column advanced towards Avila and repulsed a column from Salamanca led by Major Doval in a very confused and inconclusive skirmish in which the Falangist leader, Onésimo Redondo, was killed. Generally, however, republican militia suspected the loyalty of army officers, because many had at first declared for the government, only to betray it later. Some genuine supporters of the Republic were probably shot in error and certainly in several cases loyal regular officers were made scapegoats for militia reverses.

In Catalonia, where the militia system was the most entrenched, the air force officer Díaz Sandino became the Catalan councillor of war while the secretary-general, the anarchist Juan García Oliver, took over militia organization. His main work was to arrange training programmes in the rear. Even though about a tenth of the militia force in Aragón were ex-soldiers who had joined the workers, the standard of training in the metropolitan army had been so abysmal that they provided little help.

Militia volunteers were kitted out at the former Pedralbes barracks, now the Miguel Bakunin barracks where García Oliver had based the Popular School of War. The same building was used for foreign anarchists who arrived to fight in the International Column. They came from all over Europe and Latin America. There were many Italians including Camillo Berneri, a philosophy professor who was murdered the following year during the events of May in Barcelona, and Carlo Roselli, who organized the Giustizia e Libertà column of liberals and anarchists, but who was assassinated in France the following June by members of the right-wing Cagoule. A group of Americans formed the Sacco and Vanzetti
centuria
and a detachment of Germans made up the Erich Muhsam
centuria
, named after the anarchist poet murdered two years before by the Gestapo. The POUM also used these barracks for their militia columns, which included foreign volunteers of whom the most famous was George Orwell. The communist PSUC, under Joan Comorera, found itself in a difficult position. Communist policy demanded a regular army, not militias, yet they could not antagonize their allies.

The largest operation in the east at this time was the invasion by Catalonian militia of the Balearic Islands. Ibiza was taken easily and on 16 August 8,000 men invaded Majorca under the command of an air force officer, Alberto Bayo, later to be Fidel Castro’s guerrilla trainer. The invaders established a bridgehead unopposed, then paused as if in surprise. For once the militia had artillery, air and even naval support, yet they gave the nationalists time to organize a counter-attack. Modern Italian aircraft arrived and strafed and bombed the invading force virtually unopposed. The withdrawal and re-embarkation, ordered by the new minister of marine, Indalecio Prieto, turned into a rout. The island then became an important naval and air base for the nationalists for the rest of the war.

The Aragón front became a stalemate after the Carlist reinforcements arrived at Saragossa. The only exception was an unsuccessful attack on Huesca organized by Colonel Villalba. The town was defended by 6,000 men against his besieging force of 13,000, but a supply line along the railtrack stayed open, allowing the nationalists to bring up supplies and reinforcements.
²³
Militia detachments held each hill in a rough line along the front, while nationalist troops were installed on the far side of the valley. (The day-to-day existence is best described in George Orwell’s
Homage to Catalonia
.)

PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT I

The famous photograph of the young King Alfonso XIII getting to know his people.

Crowds celebrating in Madrid on 14 April 1931 when Alfonso abdicated and left Spain for ever.

The king with General Miguel Primo de Rivera, who seized power with his approval in 1923.