Spanish Civil War

Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), military conflict between left- and right-wing factions in Spain. After the establishment of the Second Republic in Spain in 1931, an alliance of moderate socialists and middle-class liberal Republicans instituted a programme of social, military, and ecclesiastical reform. Right-wing obstruction split the coalition, and the socialists fought the November 1933 elections alone in the hope of establishing an exclusively socialist government. In a system which favoured coalitions, this handed victory to a rightist electoral alliance. Throughout 1934, the reforms of 1931-1933 were overturned. Fearful that the entry of the right-wing Catholic CEDA party into the government in October 1934 heralded the establishment of an authoritarian state, socialists, anarchists, and communists rose up in the mining districts of Asturias. In the first battle of the Civil War, they were bloodily defeated by the army under the supervision of General Francisco Franco. The savagery of the consequent repression impelled the Left to reunite in the Popular Front, which in the February 1936 elections won a narrow victory and immediately began to revive the reforming programme of 1931.

An alarmed Right prepared for war. A military conspiracy was masterminded by General Emilio Mola. Terror squads of the growing fascist party Falange Española provoked a spiral of violence and disorder to justify a military intervention. The left-wing response culminated in the assassination on July 13 of the monarchist leader, José Calvo Sotelo.

The rising on July 18 succeeded in the provincial capitals of rural Léon and Old Castile, towns such as Burgos, Salamanca, and Avila, but was defeated by the workers in Madrid, Barcelona, and most industrial cities of the North. In the South, the countryside fell to the left but, in major towns such as Cádiz, Seville, and Granada, working-class resistance was bloodily crushed. The rebels controlled about a third of Spain in a large block including Galicia, León, Old Castile, Aragón, and part of Extremadura together with a smaller Andalusian triangle from Huelva to Seville to Córdoba.

The rebels confronted unexpected initial problems. With untrained workers' militias facing untried conscripts, the rebels' advantage lay in the mercenary African army, under General Franco, which was blockaded in Morocco by Republican warships whose crews had mutinied against their Rightist officers. Accordingly, the rebels turned abroad for help. Enticed by the possibility of causing difficulties for France, Hitler and Mussolini each decided to provide transport aircraft to make possible a major airlift from Morocco to Seville. Fifteen thousand men crossed in ten days and a failed coup d'état became a long and bloody civil war. The Republic, in contrast, got little help when it turned to the democratic powers. Paralysed by internal opposition and by British fear of provoking a general war, the French premier Léon Blum smothered his early inclination to aid the Republic. The Madrid government was forced to turn to the Soviet Union.

The Nationalist rebels then launched two campaigns which greatly improved their situation. Mola attacked the Basque province of Guipúzcoa to isolate it from France. Meanwhile, Franco's mercenary Army of Africa advanced northwards to Madrid, leaving a trail of slaughter in its wake, including the massacre of 2,000 prisoners at Badajoz. By August 10, the two blocks of Nationalist Spain were joined. They consolidated their position throughout August and September. General José Enrique Varela's troops linked up Seville, Córdoba, Granada, and Cádiz. The Republicans could manage no comparable triumphs. Indeed, Republican militia columns were bogged down besieging both the rebel garrison in the fortress of the Alcázar in Toledo, and the cities of Oviedo and Zaragoza, which had fallen quickly to the rebels.

On September 21, at an airfield near Salamanca, the leading rebel generals chose Franco as commander in chief both for obvious military reasons and to facilitate relations with Hitler and Mussolini. On the same day, he diverted his columns to the south-east of Madrid to relieve the Toledo garrison, losing an excellent chance to attack the capital before its defences were ready. It permitted Franco to clinch his own power with an emotional victory and a great publicity coup. He thereby slowed down the pace of the war so as to carry out a sweeping political purge of captured territory. Confirmed as Caudillo and Head of State on October 1, Franco controlled a tightly centralized zone. In contrast, the Republic was severely hampered by intense divisions between the communists and moderate socialists who made military survival their priority, and the anarchists, Trotskyists and extreme left socialists who were more concerned with social revolution.

On October 7 the army of Africa resumed its march on a capital flooded with refugees and short of food and water. Franco's delay permitted the reorganization of the defence of Madrid, aided by the arrival of arms from the Soviet Union and columns of volunteers known as the International Brigades. Nevertheless, on November 6, the government fled to Valencia, leaving Madrid in the hands of General José Miaja. Supported by the communist-dominated Junta de Defensa, he rallied the population, leaving military planning to his brilliant Chief of Staff, Colonel Vicente Rojo. Despite being able to call on the crack German specialized units known as the Condor Legion, by late November Franco had to accept the failure of his assault. The city would hold out for another 28 months.

Franco responded with a great effort to encircle the capital. The battles of Boadilla (December 1936), Jarama (February 1937), and Guadalajara (March 1937) saw his troops beaten back at bloody cost to the Republic. Despite being defeated at Guadalajara, where many Italian troops were involved, the Nationalists still held the advantage. This was shown by a stream of victories which permitted them to capture northern Spain in the spring and summer of 1937. It began in March, when 40,000 troops under Mola advanced through a Basque Country demoralized by the terror-bombing expertise of the Condor Legion. The annihilation of several small towns, including Guernica on April 26, 1937, undermined the morale of the defenders of the capital, Bilbao, which fell on June 19. Thereafter, the Nationalist army, well supplied with Italian troops and equipment, captured Santander on August 26. Asturias soon followed during September and October. Northern industry and mineral wealth was now in rebel hands—a decisive advantage to add to their growing superiorty in terms of men, tanks, and aeroplanes.

Rojo tried to stem the Nationalists' inexorable progress by a series of offensives. At Brunete, west of Madrid, on July 6, 50,000 troops broke through enemy lines, but the Nationalists had enough reinforcements to stem the flow. For ten days, in one of the costliest battles of the war, the Republicans were pounded by air and artillery attacks. At great cost, they had slightly delayed the collapse of the north. Then, in August 1937, Rojo made a bold offensive against Zaragoza at the town of Belchite, but within three weeks the offensive had ground to a halt. In all these initiatives, the Republicans gained an early breakthrough, but never mustered the force for the killer punch. The same was true in December 1937 when Rojo launched a further pre-emptive attack against Teruel, in the hope of once more diverting Franco from Madrid. In bitterly cold weather, his troops took Teruel on January 8 but were dislodged after six weeks of relentless battering by artillery and bombers. After another costly defence of a small advance, they had to retreat on February 21, 1938. The casualties on both sides had been high.

The Nationalists now exploited Republican exhaustion to launch a great drive through Aragón and Castellón towards the Mediterranean. 100,000 troops, 200 tanks, and nearly 1,000 German and Italian aircraft moved forward on March 7, 1938. The Republicans were short of guns and ammunition and demoralized after the defeat of Teruel. Franco's troops moved down the Ebro Valley cutting off Catalonia from the rest of the Republic and, by April 15, reached the sea.

In July, Franco held back from capturing Barcelona, and instead launched a major attack on Valencia. The Republicans' stubborn entrenched defence made progress slow and exhausting, but it remained inexorable. By July 23, 1938, the Nationalists were less than 40 km (27 mi) from Valencia. In desperation, Rojo launched a great diversionary assault across the River Ebro in an attempt to restore contact with Catalonia. His forces reached Gandesa, nearly 40 km (27 m) away, but there they were bogged down as Nationalist reinforcements arrived. Despite the strategic irrelevance of the territory that had been taken, Franco was determined to destory the Republican army, and engaged in a three-month battle of attrition. By mid-November, at devastating human cost to both sides, the Republicans were expelled from the territory taken in July. Now the Republic was practically defeated. Barcelona fell on January 26, 1939. In Madrid, on March 4, the commander of the Republican Army of the Centre, Colonel Segismundo Casado, rebelled against the Republican government in the hope of stopping increasingly senseless slaughter. His overtures for a negotiated peace were rejected by Franco and, after a minor civil war within the civil war, Republican troops simply began to surrender. The Nationalists entered a stunned capital on March 27. 400,000 Republicans were forced into exile. Franco's victory was institutionalized into 38 years of dictatorship. Over one million spent time in prison or labour camps. In addition to the 400,000 killed in the war, there were at least a further 100,000 executions between 1939 and 1943.