The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (37 page)

Líster’s brigade was transferred to the University district by the bridge across the Manzanares. Rodimtsev in the command post saw Moroccan
regulares
advancing, shouting wildly as they moved in towards the bridge, one group at a time running forward while the others covered them. Miguel, one of Líster’s machine-gunners, was firing at them in short bursts, but then the gun ceased firing. Rodimtsev, a machine-gun instructor, ran over. ‘The belt was jammed. I hit the handle hard with my palm and it fell into place. I started firing at the Moroccans running towards me. The Maxim was working really well. There was a bottleneck on the bridge. The Moroccans at the front turned back and collided with those coming up behind.’ Another machine-gunner, Gómez, later told him that the Soviet Union had sent them bad machine-guns. They could not kill Moroccans. ‘We fire at them but nothing happens. Then the enemy shell us with mortars.’ Rodimtsev told him to camouflage the machine-guns. The Moroccans were using dummies to attract their fire. Then the nationalists shelled the republican machine-gunners when they revealed their positions.
²³

Having been severely checked on the west flank, Varela switched his attack on 9 November towards Carabanchel. Fierce house-to-house fighting ensued in this working-class suburb, where the militias, on familiar ground, not only held back the
regulares
, but inflicted heavy casualties. That evening, two kilometres to the north, XI International Brigade suffered severe losses when forcing the nationalists to retreat a few hundred metres in the central part of the Casa de Campo. The fierce fighting continued in Carabanchel over the next few days, then on 12 November General Miaja (or more probably General Goriev), concerned that the nationalists might thrust through to cut off the Valencia road, sent XII International Brigade and four Spanish brigades to attack the important hill, Cerro de los Angeles, as a diversion. This second International Brigade had received even less training than the first and, despite the Great War veterans in their ranks, the attack collapsed in chaos. Much of this was due to language and communication problems, but the fact remains that the Brigaders were hardly more skilful at mounting attacks than the militias.

At this stage the anarchist leader, Buenaventura Durruti, arrived with more than 3,000 men from the Aragón front. He had been persuaded to go to Madrid by Federica Montseny, who was representing the government in Valencia. At a meeting with García Oliver at Madrid CNT headquarters, Cipriano Mera, the delegate-general of their militia battalions, warned Durruti against attempting a frontal attack on the Casa de Campo, even though the anarchists had become alarmed at the influence the communists were achieving through the International Brigades. Durruti insisted that he had no option but to attack from the University City in the direction of the Casa de Velázquez. The assault took place on the morning of 17 November, but the covering artillery and air support he had been promised failed to materialize. (Whether that was through oversight or intention, anarchist suspicions of communist tactics were greatly increased.) Durruti’s men, who had shown such reckless bravery in the Barcelona fighting, broke back to their start line when they met a concentrated artillery barrage and heavy machine-gun fire, neither of which they had experienced before.

‘Endless air battles have been going on all day,’ wrote Koltsov that evening. ‘At 16.00 a republican fighter aircraft lost its group and attacked a Junkers bravely on its own. Several Heinkel aircraft chased and damaged it. The pilot bailed out with a parachute and landed safely right on a sidewalk on the Paseo de Castellana. The admiring crowd carried the brave man to a car. Five minutes later he was brought to the war ministry. Members of the junta applauded him and hugged the pilot, Pablo Palancar.’
²⁴

On 19 November the nationalists attacked with the support of heavy artillery and Asensio’s column found a gap in the republican line. As a result the nationalists were able to cross the Manzanares and establish a bridgehead deep in the University City in the Faculty of Architecture. The legionnaires and
regulares
held on despite furious counter-attacks from XI International Brigade and other units in that sector, which was to become the most bitterly contested stretch of territory in the whole front. In a foretaste of Stalingrad, the legionnaires of the 4th Bandera and the Edgar André Battalion of XI International Brigade fought a savage battle in the buildings there. ‘Once at the University Campus,’ wrote Karl Anger, ‘we started a ruthless fight for every path, every house, every floor, and every threshold. Here, the front line sometimes goes through the most valuable laboratories and libraries. Sometimes breastworks are constructed from huge volumes of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Here the fascists have come the closest to Madrid: it is only between three and five hundred metres from the Casa Velázquez to the nearest café in town.’
²⁵

Durruti was mortally wounded during the fighting that day. He died the next morning in the improvised hospital set up in the Ritz, at the same time as José Antonio Primo de Rivera was executed in Alicante.
²⁶
A rumour soon started that Durruti had been shot by one of his own men who objected to his severe discipline. The anarchists, for reasons of morale and propaganda, claimed that he had been killed by a sniper’s bullet when in fact his death had really been an accident. The cocking handle of a companion’s ‘
naranjero’
machine pistol caught on a car door, firing a bullet into his chest. Durruti was without doubt the most popular anarchist leader. He had been an unrelenting rebel throughout his life and had earned the reputation of a revolutionary Robin Hood. His funeral in Barcelona was the greatest scene of mass mourning that Spain had witnessed, with half a million people in the procession alone. His reputation was so great, not just among anarchists, that attempts were made after his death to claim his allegiance. The Falange said that, like his two brothers, he was a Falangist sympathizer at heart, while the communists felt certain that he was on the way to joining them.

The nationalists’ failure to break through on 19 November made Franco change his strategy. He could not risk any more of his best troops in fruitless assaults now that a quick victory looked much more difficult. So, for the first time in history, a capital city came under intense air as well as artillery bombardment. All residential areas except the fashionable Salamanca district were bombed in an attempt to break the morale of the civilian population. The Italian Aviazione Legionaria and the Luftwaffe conducted a methodical experiment in psychological warfare with their Savoia 81s and Junkers 52s. The bombing did not, however, break morale as intended; on the contrary, it increased the defiance of the population. In London, Prince Otto von Bismarck, the German chargé d’affaires, derided British fear of air attacks ‘since you see what little harm they have done in Madrid’.

After the statement that the Salamanca district would be spared, the whole area was packed to overflowing and the streets became virtually impassable. Meanwhile, in a remarkably effective operation, the UGT reorganized the transfer of Madrid’s most essential industries to unused Metro tunnels. The artist Josep Renau, the director general of the Bellas Artes, organized the evacuation of paintings from the Museo del Prado to Valencia. The air raids destroyed hundreds of buildings in Madrid, from slum dwellings to the Palacio de Liria belonging to the Duke of Alba. Alba, in his bitter charges accusing the Republic of responsibility for the damage, did not seem to find it incongruous that the nationalist crusade was destroying its own capital with foreign bombers, but then Franco had already declared to the correspondent of
The Times
: ‘I will destroy Madrid rather than leave it to the Marxists.’

That week saw the air war escalate. On 13 November the largest dogfight so far took place, with 14 Fiats and 13 Chatos locked in combat over the Paseo de Rosales.
²⁷
The next day Miaja issued an order against shooting at pilots baling out. On 16 November nationalist allies bombed the Prado, the Museo Antropológico, the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the Biblioteca Nacional, the Museo de Arte Moderno, the Museo Arqueológico and the Archivo Histórico Nacional, as well as various hospitals: the Clinic of San Carlos, the Hospital Provincial and the Hospital de la Cruz Roja. These attacks were described by Malraux in his novel
L’Espoir
.
²⁸
One bomb hit a school and photographs of the rows of dead children strengthened the determination of
madrileños
to prevent a nationalist victory.

Estimates of the bombs dropped on Madrid vary a great deal, but we know from Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen’s personal war diary that on 4 December alone, his Junkers 52s dropped 36 tons on the city.
²⁹
In comparison to Second World War bomb loads, when a single British Lancaster could drop ten tons, this was not intensive, but as the first concerted bombing campaign against a capital city, the psychological effect was considerable. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who lost his house, ‘the one of the flowers’, experienced a sense of outrage which had nothing to do with his own material loss:

Come and see the blood in the streets

Come and see

The blood in the streets

Come and see the blood

In the streets.
³⁰

The fierce fighting on the western edge of Madrid continued. ‘The morning had been hard,’ wrote a French volunteer called André Cayatte. ‘The battalion was relieved for a few hours’ rest. To the west, the noise of shelling rolled on. In all the European languages, people talked and sang with so much friendship that one worked out what one could not understand.’ They went back into action at Palacete de la Moncloa on 20 November. ‘Major Rivie`re, a smile on his lips, died with elegance, as he had lived. Rivière with 115 volunteers, was defending a weekend house surrounded by enemy tanks. Three times the survivors attempted a sortie. Finally, the Moors set the house on fire. Rivière lit a last cigarette from the flames. “Nobody will ever know”, he said, “everything that we have done.” A moment later he was dead.’
³¹

The reversion to local committees was proving of great value. Despite an evacuation programme, refugees still crammed the city (its million inhabitants had been increased by half); only such a system could have helped both them and those made homeless by the bombing. The committees supervised the construction of shelters, commandeered empty apartments and organized essential supplies and canteens. In contrast to these efforts a black market boomed and inevitably damaged morale.

The Soviet advisers, commissars, senior officers and important Party cadres had their luxurious and well-stocked base in Gaylord’s Hotel. The large number of visitors, fact-finding missions and committed supporters from abroad were also well looked after. Foreign journalists (‘conspicuous as actresses’ in Auden’s phrase) suffered little. But for the majority of the population the daily allowance was meagre. A horse or mule killed by the bombing or shellfire would be stripped to its skeleton by housewives, while starving dogs hovered around. One International Brigader recorded that a militiaman, having shot a stray which was lapping at the brains of a dead man, shrugged apologetically and explained that dogs were acquiring a taste for human flesh. Cats and rats were also used as food, if only to improve the thin lentil soup. The killing of one bird in the Madrid zoo was not provoked by hunger, however, but by the way the wretched creature learned to imitate the whistle of incoming shells.

Life in Madrid was full of contradictions. Near the Puerta del Sol two foreign journalists, Sefton Delmer and Virginia Cowles, passed an old woman on the pavement selling black and red anarchist scarves to enter a tailor’s shop which made cavalry and opera capes. Delmer and Cowles were fascinated by the continued existence of such an establishment in the middle of revolutionary Madrid. The proprietor, who clearly lacked customers, welcomed his visitors with enthusiasm. Delmer asked him how business was going. ‘It is very difficult, señor,’ he replied sadly. ‘There are so few gentlemen left in Madrid.’
³²
They left for lunch on the Gran Vía, ‘having to take shelter along the way from the daily preprandial artillery salvoes.’ Cowles was most impressed at the way the streets filled again after the last round had landed, shopkeepers emerged to take down shutters and people strolled along pavements again.

An English International Brigader told her later that what had struck him the most on reaching the country was to see a Spaniard, standing in the road during a bombardment, nonchalantly picking his teeth with a match. Foreigners were intrigued by the Spanish cult of conspicuous fearlessness. A Serbian International Brigader noted: ‘Spaniards are very brave in the fighting. But this courage, too, is of a knightly, poetical sort. It is hard for them to adapt to the volatile, pedantic and prosaic demands of modern war.’
³³

Even with the intense air attacks of 19–23 November life was almost normal. People went to work each day and the trams still ran, even though their tracks had to be repaired continually. The underground was, of course, safer, though people joked that at least the tram had to stop before the front line, whereas on the metro you might come up behind it on the far side. These communication systems meant that reinforcements and supplies could be moved rapidly over the relatively short distances involved. Hot food for the front-line troops was far easier to provide than in normal defensive positions and the troops themselves could be relieved frequently, or even visited at the front.