Picasso’s painting Guernica … For nearly fifty years it has echoed in the conscience of the world. Spain in the 1930s was in many ways still struggling out of the nineteenth century, but it found itself the arena and battlefield of ideologies of the twentieth. The Spanish Civil War III: Battleground for Idealists
Franco had appealed to the Fuhrer for help. ibid.
As France closed its borders, the Spanish republic felt let down. ibid.
For two generations the Spanish Civil War has been remembered for the international brigades. ibid.
In Catalonia some anarchists feared their revolution was being taken over by communists. ibid.
‘A cause of poets and of writers, a cause of freedom.’ ibid. British writer
General Franco called the uprising against the Republican government a Crusade, a fight for Christian civilisation; others called it fascism. It was for nearly three years the world’s moral arena. The Spanish Civil War IV: Franco and the Nationalists
By the age of thirty-three he [Franco] was a general. He had commanded the Spanish foreign legion for four years. ibid.
The social upheavals of the Republic had led to a progressive breakdown of law and order. ibid.
Francisco Franco emerged as the undisputed leader and called himself head of state. ibid.
Many different groups had supported their rising: first the conservatives … the monarchists … the Carlists … Falange – the fascist party outlawed by the Republic. ibid.
Franco had never claimed to be a politician but he was of the intuitive right, an instinctive defender of capitalism … His programme: no working-class trade unions, help for peasants but land for landowners, concord with the church, above all no democracy. ibid.
These aims of the Spanish right could only be secured by oppression. ibid.
Rome’s approval was a great reinforcement to the devout. ibid.
The people of Barcelona celebrated. Within days of the army rising, revolution had burst out spontaneously in most of Republican Spain. The Spanish Civil War V: Inside the Revolution
In these first weeks of the civil war the militias were the only real defence of the Republic. ibid.
Catalonia was the anarchists’ stronghold. ibid.
For them, the campaign was not just against the army rebels but against capitalism itself. ibid
Everyone now worked only for the community. ibid.
As the anarchists weakened, the communists became stronger. ibid.
Two years which had transformed Republican hopes into memories of failure. The Spanish Civil War VI: Victory and Defeat
The popular army had attempted to match the enemy in regular combat and failed. ibid.
There was a huge increase in German military aid to the Nationalists. ibid.
Catalonia had fallen: for these people the war was over. ibid.
In a longer historical perspective the Spanish Civil War amounts to the opening battle of World War II, perhaps the only time in living memory when the world confronted – in fascism and Nazism – something like unqualified evil. The men and women who understood this early on and who chose of their own free will to stand against fascism have thus earned a special status in history. Viewed internally, on the other hand, the Spanish Civil War was the culmination of a prolonged period of national political unrest – unrest in a country that was increasingly polarized and repeatedly unable to ameliorate the conditions of terrible poverty in which millions of its citizens lived. Spain was a country in which landless peasants cobbled together a bare subsistence living by following the harvests on vast, wealthy agricultural estates. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church, identifying more with wealthy landowners than with the Spanish people, was in full control of secondary education; education for women seemed to them unnecessary and universal literacy a danger rather than a goal. Divorce was illegal. The military, meanwhile, had come to see itself, rather melodramatically, as the only bulwark against civil disorder and as the ultimate guarantor of the core values of Spanish society.
When a progressive Popular Front government was elected in February 1936, with the promise of realistic land reform one of its key planks, conservative forces immediately gathered to plan resistance. The Spanish Left, meanwhile, celebrated the elections in a way that made conservative capitalists, military officers, and churchmen worried that much broader reform might begin. Rumors of plotting for a military coup led leaders of the Republic to transfer several high-ranking military officers to remote postings, the aim being to make communication and coordination between them more difficult. But it was not enough. The planning for a military rising continued.
The military rebellion took place on July 18, with the officers who organized it expecting a quick victory and a rapid takeover of the entire country. What the military did not anticipate was the determination of the Spanish people, who broke into barracks, took up arms, and crushed the rebellion in key areas like the cities of Madrid and Barcelona. It was at that point that the character of the struggle changed, for the military realized they were not going to win by fiat. Instead they faced a prolonged struggle against their own people and an uncertain outcome. They appealed to fascist dictatorships in Italy, Germany, and Portugal for assistance, and they soon began receiving both men and supplies from Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Antonio Salazar …
For many, however, the suffering was not over. It was not to be a civil war ending in reconciliation, for Franco began a reign of terror aimed at the physical liquidation of all his potential enemies. Concentration camps were set up. Tens of thousands were shot. Mass executions would continue until 1944. Meanwhile, World War II was under way, and many of the volunteers took up arms against fascism again. Cary Nelson, The Spanish Civil War: An Overview
In July 1936 General Francisco Franco led a revolt backed by the army, a revolt that soon blossomed into full-scale civil war. Foreign intervention in this confrontation seems to have begun right away. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia **** audiobook 8.05.29, foreword
The nationalists’ international brigade of left-wing partizans made up of volunteers from many countries including England, France and the United States came to Spain to join the loyalists. ibid.
The red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns further up the line, the muddy ice-cold trenches of the mountains: this was in late December 1936. ibid. ch1
It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. ibid.
Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. ibid.
Complete social equality between all ranks. ibid.
Every militia column had at least one dog attached to it as a mascot. ibid.
Above all it meant mud, lice, hunger and cold. ibid.
A ragged barricade of sandbags, a red flag fluttering, the smoke of dugout fires … a deep festering bed of bread crusts, excrement and rusty tins. ibid.
In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last. ibid.
The essential point of the system was social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding of the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and N.C.O.S. but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society. Of course there was no perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would have thought conceivable in time of war. ibid.
For days together clothes, boots, blankets and rifles were more of less coated with mud. ibid.
Firewood was the one thing that really mattered. ibid.
‘It is a comic opera with an occasional death.’ ibid. visiting big-wig
Of course they [guns] were far too precious to be fired. ibid.
It was pneumonia that we were fighting against. ibid.