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For an article about the 1820-1823 civil war in Spain, see: Spanish Civil War, 1820-1823
The Spanish Civil War ( 1936 - 1939) was the result of complex political differences between the Republicans — supporters of the government of the day, the Second Spanish Republic, mostly subscribing to electoral democracy and ranging from centrists to those advocating revolutionary change, with a primarily urban power base — and the Nationalists, who rebelled against that government: these had a primarily rural and more conservative power base.
The war took place between July 1936 and April 1939 (although the political situation had already been violent for several years before) and ended in the defeat of the Republicans, resulting in the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The number of casualties is disputed; estimates generally suggest that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people were killed. Many of these deaths, however, were results not of military fighting, but were the outcome of brutal mass executions perpetrated by both sides. Many Spanish intellectuals and artistAn artist is someone who employs creative talent to produce works of art. The term may be used in connection with any branch of the arts—for example music, literature, and theatre—but more commonly refers to an individual who practises the visual arts ors (including many of the Spanish Generation of 1927) were either killed or forced into exileSee Exile (disambiguation) for other meanings. To be in exile means being away from your home (i. city, state or country) and being either explicitly refused permission to return or being threatened by prison or death upon return. Personal exile Exile has; also thousands of priestA priest or priestess is a holy man or woman who takes an officiating role in worship of any religion, with the distinguishing characteristic of offering sacrifices. Priests have been known since the earliest times and in the simplest societies (see shamas and religious people (including several BishopA bishop is an ordained person who holds a specific position of authority in any of a number of Christian churches. Bishops in the New Testament The bishop's role is typically called the " episcopacy", because the word "bishop" is derived ultimately froms) were killed; the more militaryMilitary (from latin militarius miles "soldier") as an adjective describes anything related to soldiers and warfare. Used as a noun, it is equivalent to Armed force. See also Armed force Martial art Militaria Military history Military rule Military by cou-inclined often found fame and fortune. The Spanish economy needed decades to recover (see Spanish miracle).
The political and emotional repercussions of the war reverberated far beyond the boundaries of Spain and sparked passion among international intellectual and political communities. Republican sympathizers proclaimed it as a struggle between ' tyranny and democracy', or ' fascism and liberty'. Franco's supporters, on the other hand, viewed it as a battle between the 'red hordes' (of communism and anarchism) and ' civilization'. However, these dichotomies were inevitably over-simplifications: both sides had varied, and often conflicting, ideologies within their ranks.
The military tactics of the war foreshadowed many of the actions of World War II.
From 1934 to 1936, the Second Spanish Republic was governed by a center-right coalition that included the conservative Catholic Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA). During this time, there were general strikes in Valencia and Zaragoza, street conflicts in Madrid and Barcelona, and a miners' uprising in Asturias , which was put down forcefully by the troops commanded by General López Ochoa and the Legionnaires commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe, under the direction of Minister of War Diego Hidalgo . During this time, the government expended great efforts to annul the social gains that had been made in the previous years, especially in agrarian reform.
After a series of governmental crises, the elections of February 16, 1936, brought to power a Popular Front government supported by the parties of the left and centre and opposed by those of the right. The new government was unstable, and on April 7, 1936, President Niceto Alcalá Zamora was deposed by the new Parliament, which named Prime Minister Manuel Azaña as the new President.
During this period of rising tensions, according to official sources, 330 people were assassinated and 1,511 were wounded in politically-related violence; records show 213 failed assassination attempts, 113 general strikes, and the destruction of 160 religious buildings; 1 the actual numbers may be even higher. On July 12, 1936, José Castillo, a lieutenant in the Assault Guards and member of the Socialist Party, was murdered by a 'far right' group in Madrid. The following day a group of Assault Guards officers took revenge by murdering José Calvo Sotelo , a Member of Parliament and one of the leaders of the extreme anti-republican opposition, as well as a former finance minister under the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. This assassination precipitated the following events.
On July 17, 1936, the conservative rebellion long feared by the leftist Popular Front government of Prime-Minister Santiago Casares Quiroga, began. Casares Quiroga, who had succeeded Azaña in the office, had in the previous weeks exiled the military officers suspected of conspiracy, including General Manuel Goded y Llopis and General Francisco Franco, sent to the Balearic Islands and to the Canary Islands, respectively. The rebellion was not only a military coup, but it had a substantial civilian component. The rebels had hoped to gain immediate control of the capital, Madrid, and all the other important cities of Spain. Seville, Pamplona, A Coruña, Cádiz, Jerez de la Frontera, Córdoba, Zaragoza and Oviedo all fell under control of the rebels, also known as the Nationalists, but failed in Barcelona and Madrid. Because of this, a protracted civil war ensued.
The active participants in the war covered the entire gamut of the political positions and ideologies of the time. The Nationalist side included the fascists of the Falange, Carlist and Legitimist monarchists, and Spanish nationalists and most conservatives. On the Republican side were most liberals, Basque and Catalan nationalists, socialists, Stalinist and Trotskyist communists, and anarchists of varying ideologies.
To look at the breakdown another way, the Nationalists included the majority of the Catholic clergy and of practicing Catholics (outside of the Basque region), important elements of the army, the majority of landowners and many businessmen. The Republicans included most urban workers, peasants, and much of the educated middle class, especially those who were not entrepreneurs.
The leaders of the rebellion were the generals Francisco Franco, Emilio Mola and José Sanjurjo. Sanjurjo was the unquestioned leader of the uprising, but he was killed in a plane crash on July 20 as he was going to Spain to take control of the rebel side. Franco, the overall commander of the Spanish army since 1933 and already a noted pro-Fascist, flew from the Canary Islands to the Spanish colonies in Morocco and took command there. For the remaining three years of the war, Franco was effective commander of all the Nationalists.
One of the principal motives claimed at the time of the initial Nationalist uprising was to confront the anticlericalism of the Republican regime and to defend the Roman Catholic Church, which was censured for its support for the monarchy and which many on the Republican side blamed for the ills of the country. In the opening days of the war, churches, convents and other religious buildings were burnt without action on the part of the Republican authorities to prevent it. Articles 24 and 26 of the Constitution of the Republic banned the Jesuits, which deeply offended many of the Nationalists. Notwithstanding these religious matters, the Basque nationalists, who nearly all sided with the Republic, were, for the most part, practicing Catholics.
John Paul II has recently canonized several of these martyrs of the Spanish Civil War , murdered for being priests or nuns.The rebellion was opposed by the government (with the troops that remained loyal to the Republic), as well as by Socialist, Communist and anarchist groups. European powers such as Britain and France were officially neutral but still imposed an arms embargo on Spain, and actively discouraged the anti-fascist participation of their citizens. Both fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini and Nazi Germany violated the embargo and sent troops ( Corpo Truppe Volontarie and Legión Cóndor) and weapons to support Franco. In addition, there were a few volunteer troops from other nations who fought with the Nationalists, such as Eoin O'Duffy of Ireland.
The Republicans received aid and purchased arms extensively from the Soviet Union. These arms included 1,000 aircraft, 900 tanks, 1,500 artillery pieces, 300 armored cars, hundreds of thousands of small arms and 30,000 tons of ammunition. To pay for these armaments the Republicans used US$500 million dollars in gold reserves; at the start of the war Spain had the world's fourth largest reserves of gold, about US$750 million [1], [2]. While some have contended that the Soviets were motivated mainly be the desire to sell armaments, and that they charged extortionate prices [3], there is no question that they also sent significant numbers of "advisors" who actively participated in the war, including in combat, on the Republican side. Later, the " Moscow gold " was an issue during the Spanish transition to democracy .
Volunteers from many countries, collectively known as the International Brigades were organized and directed by the Comitern through the NKVD to aid the Spanish Republicans . American volunteers formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and Canadians formed the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion (the "Mac-Paps"). Among the more famous foreigners participating in the efforts against the fascists were Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, who went on to write about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell's novel Animal Farm was loosely inspired by his experiences, and those of other Trotskyists, at the hands of Stalinists when the Popular Front began to fight within itself, as were the torture scenes in 1984. Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls was inspired by his experiences in Spain. Norman Bethune used the opportunity to develop the special skills of battlefield medicine. As a casual visitor Errol Flynn used a fake report of his death at the battlefront to promote his movies.
However, though the Nationalists were receiving overt aid in the form of arms and troops from Germany and Italy, the Republicans received no aid from any major world powers (e.g. Britain or France or the United States) besides the aforementioned Soviet Union contribution. Many of these powers were still practicing a policy of appeasement towards Fascist regimes, or they viewed social revolutionary elements within the anti-fascist forces with distaste, or they believed that the Republicans were Communists.
Germany used the war as a testing ground for faster tanks and aircraft that were just becoming available at the time. The Messerschmitt Me-109 fighter and Junkers Ju 52 transport/bomber were both used in the Spanish Civil War. In addition, the Soviet I-15 fighter and I-16 fighters were used. The Spanish Civil War was also an example of total war, where the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the Legión Cóndor, as depicted by Pablo Picasso in Guernica, foreshadowed episodes of World War II such as the bombing campaign on Britain by the Nazis and the bombing of Dresden by the Allies.
In the early days of the war, over 50,000 people who were caught on the "wrong" side of the lines were assassinated or summarily executed. The numbers were probably comparable on both sides of the lines. In these paseos ("promenades"), as the executions were called, the victims were taken from their refuges or jails and taken by armed people to be shot out of town. Probably the most famous of these was the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. The breaking out of the war provided an excuse for settling accounts and resolving long-standing feuds.
Any hope of a quick ending to the war was dashed on July 21, the fifth day of the rebellion, when the Nationalists captured the main Spanish naval base at El Ferrol in northwestern Spain. This encouraged the Fascist nations of Europe to help Franco, who had already contacted the governments of Germany and Italy the day before. On July 26, Germany and Italy cast their lot with the Nationalists.
The Axis Powers helped Franco from the very beginning. His Nationalist forces won another great victory on September 27, when the city of Toledo was captured. (A Nationalist garrison under Colonel Moscardo had held the Alcazar in the center of the city since the beginning of the rebellion). Two days later, Franco proclaimed himself Generalísimo and Caudillo ("chieftain") while unifying the various Falangist and Royalist elements of the Nationalist cause in one movement. In October, the Nationalists launched a major offensive toward Madrid, but increasing resistance by the government and the arrival of "volunteers" from the Soviet Union halted the advance by November 8. In the meantime, the government shifted from Madrid to Valencia, out of the combat zone, on November 6.
On November 18, Germany and Italy officially recognized the Franco regime, and on December 23, Italy sent "volunteers" of its own to fight for the Nationalists.
With his ranks being swelled by Italian troops and Spanish colonial soldiers from Morocco, Franco made another attempt to capture Madrid in January and February of 1937, but failed again. The large city of Málaga was taken on February 8, and on April 28, Franco's men entered Guernica, in the Basque Country, two days after the bombing of that city by the German Condor Legion equipped with Heinkel He-51 biplanes (the legion arrived in Spain on May 7). After the fall of Guernica, the government began to fight back with increasing effectiveness.
In May, the government made a move to recapture Segovia, forcing Franco to pull troops away from the Madrid front to halt their advance. Mola, Franco's second-in-command, was killed on June 3, and in early July, despite the fall of Bilbao in June, the government actually launched a strong counter-offensive in the Madrid area, which the Nationalists repulsed with some difficulty. The frequent and violent attacks by Republican forces on clergy, laity, and property of the Catholic Church led the Nationalist side to call the Spanish Civil War a modern-day Crusade. This Nationalist poster proclaims: "CRUSADE. Spain, spiritual guide of the world".
After that, Franco regained the initiative, invading Aragon in August and then taking the city of Santander (now in Cantabria). Two months of bitter fighting followed and, despite determined Asturian resistance, Gijón (in Asturias) fell in late October, which effectively ended the war in the North.
Meanwhile, on August 28, the Vatican recognized Franco under pressure from Mussolini, and at the end of November, with the Nationalists closing in on Valencia, the government moved again, to Barcelona.
The two sides clashed over possession of the city of Teruel throughout January and February, with the Nationalists finally holding it for good by February 22. On April 14, the Nationalists broke through to the Mediterranean Sea, cutting the government-held portion of Spain in two. The government tried to sue for peace in May, but Franco demanded unconditional surrender, and the war raged on.
The government now launched an all-out campaign to reconnect their territory in the Battle of the Ebro, beginning on July 24 and lasting until November 26. Their failure all but determined the final outcome of the war. Eight days before the new year, Franco struck back by throwing massive forces into an invasion of Catalonia.
The Nationalists conquered Catalonia in a whirlwind campaign during the first two months of 1939. Tarragona fell on January 14, Barcelona on January 26 and Girona on February 5. Five days after the fall of Girona, the last resistance in Catalonia was broken.
On February 27, the governments of the United Kingdom and France reluctantly recognized the Franco regime.
Only Madrid and a few other strongholds remained for the government forces. On March 28, with the help of pro-Franco forces inside the city (the infamous " fifth column" General Mola had mentioned in propaganda broadcasts in 1936), Madrid fell to the Nationalists. The next day, Valencia, which had held out under the guns of the Nationalists for close to two years, also surrendered. Victory was proclaimed on April 1, when the last of the Republican forces surrendered.
In the anarchist-controlled areas, ( Aragon and Catalonia), in addition to the military success, there was a vast social revolution in which the workers and the peasants collectivised land and industry, and set up councils parallel to the (non-functioning) government. This revolution was opposed by both the Soviet-supported communists and the democratic republicans. The agrarian collectives had considerable success despite the vast opposition and profound lack of resources ( Franco had already captured lands with some of the richest natural resources). This success survives in the minds of libertarian revolutionaries as an example that an anarchist society can flourish, under the right conditions.
As the war progressed, the government and the communists were able to leverage their access to Soviet arms to restore government control over the war effort, both through diplomacy and force. Revolutionary militias (anarchists and the POUM) were integrated with the regular army, albeit with resistance (the POUM was outlawed, falsely denounced as an instrument of the fascists). In the May Days of 1937, many hundreds or thousands of anti-fascist soldiers killed one another for control of strategic points in Barcelona, as George Orwell relates in Homage to Catalonia.
The Popular Front was an electoral alliance formed between various left-wing and centrist parties for elections to the Cortes in 1936, in which the alliance won a majority of seats.
1 The statistics on assassinations, destruction of religious buildings, etc. immediately before the start of the war come from The Last Crusade: Spain: 1936 by Warren Carroll (Christendom Press, 1998). He collected the numbers from what is probably the most famous book on the religious persecution in Spain, Historia de la Persecución Religiosa en España (1936-1939) by Antonio Montero Moreno (Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 3rd edition, 1999).
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