The Spanish Civil War was a crucible in which those competing convictions finally collided in such a brutal way that even now, 70 years on, many people refuse to talk about it. For a long time, Spaniards left the history of their war to foreigners, especially the British. Antony Beevor, Hugh Thomas and Paul Preston are read avidly in Spain. For many young Spaniards, it was Ken Loach's film Land and Freedom (1995) that first prompted them to confront this painful chapter in their history.

A revelatory account of the Spanish civil war
(Filed: 11/06/2006)

Andrew Roberts reviews The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor.

The 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 is causing much reflection in Spain at the moment, and perhaps it ought to prompt some here, too. The common perception of that devastating three-year struggle is of a crusade against Fascism in which idealistic young writers and workers from all over the world joined International Brigades in a brave but ultimately doomed struggle to save democracy. Their defeat presaged a world war.

Antony Beevor - the bestselling author of Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall as well as an earlier book on the Spanish Civil War - believes it is time radically to reinterpret the conflict. There have been several hundred learned treatises written about every aspect of the struggle, which Beevor synthesises here to alter substantially our view of what happened. There are also huge numbers of new documents available, such as the diary of the ruthless Luftwaffe commander in Spain, Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, who wrote on April 28, 1937: 'Guernica must be totally destroyed.' Above all, there has been Russian glasnost.

The collapse of Soviet Communism has led to the release of archival material that proves conclusively just how Stalinist many of the key decision-makers of the Spanish Republic had become, and what they were planning to do if they won. From these reports back to Moscow, it is clear that victory over Franco would have led to the same gulags, mass executions and iron-gripped totalitarianism as existed in the USSR at the time. Instead, Beevor estimates, Franco placed up to half a million Republicans in 190 concentration camps at the end of the war, to slave away in labour battalions for decades. He puts the long-disputed figure of those executed after the surrender at around 50,000 to 70,000. The Caudillo would choose who lived and who died - and how they died - as he drank post-prandial coffee with his priest, José María Bulart. For those needing to be made an example of, he wrote 'garrote y prensa' (garrotting and press coverage) on the death warrant.

Far from being admired by the rest of the Republican army, the International Brigades were resented as foreigners and frequently used as cannon fodder to protect the lives of Spaniards. Some battalions were left on the front line for 150 days consecutively. Most soldiers did not know the extent of Stalinist penetration of their upper ranks, let alone the detailed plans to liquidate their anarchist, Trotskyist, socialist and liberal comrades-in-arms the moment that victory was won. The International Brigades even had their own concentration camp, Camp Lukacs, which held 4,000 inmates. It's all a very far cry from the wide-eyed idealism of Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie. How George Orwell would have loved to have been able to read the reports to Moscow of the Comintern representative André Marty, which bear out the suspicions he enunciated in Homage to Catalonia. 'After victory we will get even with them,' Marty wrote of the Stalinists' Popular Front allies, 'all the more so since at that point we will have a strong army.'

Beevor tells the familiar but still terrible tales of the assault on Madrid, the Aragón offensive and the final battle of the Ebro with characteristic verve - helped by 11 excellent maps - but he is also very good on the political manoeuvrings of this most intensely ideological of conflicts. For the Left bears much of the responsibility for the ultimate destruction of the Republic it claimed to revere.

The Asturias Rising of October 1934, in which up to 30,000 miners attacked the Civil Guard and public buildings and assaulted a military garrison of 1,000 soldiers, was nothing less than an attempted provincial revolution. 'It was full-scale civil war, although limited to one region', concludes Beevor of the bitter street-fighting and the miners' execution of 40 priests and landowners. At one point the radical Left leader Largo Caballero said: 'I want a Republic without class war, but for that one class has to disappear.' The actual civil war did not break out for another 21 months, but it cannot be entirely blamed on the Nationalists when it did. (The slaughter of more than 3,000 priests led Pope Pius XII to proclaim to Franco on the fall of Madrid in March 1939: 'Lifting our hearts to God, we give sincere thanks with Your Excellency for the victory of Catholic Spain.')

Beevor shows how many bad generals there were on both sides, including Franco himself. The war was won by the Nationalists because they tended to make fewer egregious strategic errors. The Republicans took absurd risks - such as the Brunete, Teruel and Ebro offensives, the last comprising 80,000 men but only 150 artillery pieces - when a better strategy would have been to bide their time and to hope that the coming European war would force the withdrawal of the German and Italian contingents.

In the light of Beevor's discoveries in Moscow, it is worthwhile considering what would have happened if a Stalinist Spain, a satellite of the USSR, had emerged, as it easily might have done. By June 1941 it would have made more sense for Hitler to have invaded Spain than Russia, leading to the loss to the Allies of Gibraltar and the strategically vital western Mediterranean, which in real life Franco's neutrality effectively protected. Overall, however, Beevor's book leaves one feeling rather as Henry Kissinger did about the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s: 'A pity they both couldn't lose.'

The TLS n.º 5383  May 31, 2006

In times of deceit

Uniforms and disguises of the fighters in Spain’s Civil War

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Antony Beevor
LA GUERRA CIVIL ESPAÑOLA
902pp. Crítica. 9.90euros.
84 84326 65 9

THE BATTLE FOR SPAIN
The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939
526pp. Orion. £25.
0 297 84832 1
 
At the end of another Spanish Civil War – the one usually called the War of the Spanish Succession, from 1701 to 1716 – Francesco Conti wrote an opera to console his master, the Emperor Charles VI, for the loss of the Spanish Crown. Don Quixote in Sierra Morena represents Spain as the kind of country a ruler could do without: a troublesome place full of fanatics and dimwits. At the close of the work – in the version I have seen – the hero is alone on stage, inside the iron bars of a cage, railing at the rest of the world and denouncing its insanity. It could be a metaphor for the next two-and-a-half centuries of Spanish history, when, according to the standard account, Spain was confined in paranoid isolation, puzzled, like so many stage madmen, at other peoples’ madness. The “Tibet of the West” excluded the Enlightenment, resisted the influence of the French Revolution, revived the Inquisition, spurned industrialization, postponed aggiornamento, practised mañanismo, perpetuated the siesta, maintained the mantilla, clung to clericalism, sniffed at science. Painters, poets and novelists spread a fantastic image of Spain, where swart Gypsies and heavily moustachioed bandidos inhabited Moorish ruins. The country became the only Western victim of Orientalism, as though historical accident had washed Spain up on the wrong shore of the Mediterranean. Africa, alternatively, “began at the Pyrenees”.

There was never really any truth in this picture. Spain has a typical Western European past, as far as such a thing exists, and continued to be a representative part of Western Europe in the nineteenth century, experiencing much the same conflicts and changes as everywhere else, with differences of rhythm, intensity and distribution. But the conviction that Spain’s was an extreme case of exceptionalism became a commonplace. I can still recall vividly the first lesson in Spanish history I ever had as an undergraduate in England. The year was 1969 and Hugh Trevor-Roper was the lecturer. “Just as Europe”, he began, “has never learned anything from Spain, so no significant intellectual movement of European origin has ever taken root in Spain.” I knew this sonorous aphorism was overstated, but the prevailing orthodoxy made the exceptions seem proof of the rule.

The Spanish Civil War was the biggest, most widely acknowledged exception. It never seemed merely Spanish – especially not to the British, for whom, if they were on the left wing of politics, it became a mythic part of their own story. No other event in the modern history of Spain became canonical in accounts of global or even of European history, because Spain’s apparent self-exclusion from the mainstream meant that everything else in Spanish experience could be classified as peculiarly Spanish. Even, for instance, in sensitive, wide-ranging, comparative studies about European imperial management overseas in the nineteenth century, there is never anything about Cuba – not even in Henk Wesseling’s wonderful recent volume The European Empires: The Continental powers and the overseas world 1815–1919. Despite brilliant work by David Ringrose, Leandro de los Prados Escosura and others, Spain still hardly gets a mention in most books on early industrialization.

“Liberal” is a word other languages borrowed from Spanish, yet even the most educated readers outside Spain still know virtually nothing about the Spanish contribution to the origins of liberalism. Spain was one of the first countries in the world to have a genuinely democratic franchise but you would never learn that from most general studies of the subject. Little reference is made to Spain even in connection with areas of nineteenth-century European experience in which Spain’s share is well known – such as Romanticism, urbanization, reforms in public health and criminal law, the rise of socialism and anarchism, and the conflicts of absolutists against constitutionalists or of centralizers against particularists. Yet with the Civil War, Spain re-entered European and global history, as the curtain-raiser to an era of global ideological conflict and the mise en scène of the most savage and conspicuous of Europe’s ideologically inspired conflicts. That, at least, was what the propaganda of both sides said and what many participants believed. The war made young poets abandon their bicycles in English lanes and “explode like bombs”. It inspired agenda-laden art that appealed across cultural and national boundaries to patrons’ political commitment. Contributions came from some of Russia’s best movie-makers, some of the most avant-garde studios of Paris, and an American Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Technically, the Spanish war anticipated the Second World War. Politically, it seemed to reflect global divisions, as rival forms of authoritarianism clawed at each other on the streets and in the field, like the crude monsters of the horror films popular at the time. Spain became, in the eyes of beholders, a laboratory of struggle between Fascism and Communism, totalitarianism and democracy. In retrospect, the significance of the war seems to have grown even wider since those days; no longer just a representative and prophetic place of its time, the Spain of 1936–9 has become a cockpit in which universal truths were tried. At the highest level of generalization, the war generates reflections on human values and boundless problems of morals and memories. Antony Beevor illustrates this fact in the last words of his new history:

The Spanish Civil War is, however, best remembered in entirely human terms: the clash of beliefs, the ferocity, the generosity and selfishness, the hypocrisy of diplomats and ministers, the betrayal of ideals and political manoeuvres and, above all, bravery and self-sacrifice of those who fought on both sides. But history, which is never tidy, must always end with questions. Conclusions are much too convenient.

Of course, all wars, like all human dramas, can be made to illustrate universal themes. But an intriguing paradox underlies Beevor’s insights. Almost all the supposed peculiarities of Spanish history turn out, in the light of recent research, not to have been unusual at all.
Yet the Civil War, the one episode deemed widely or even universally representative seems – the more we learn about it – to have had little or nothing to do with broader movements in Europe and the world, or with other divisions and conflicts of its day. Rather, it looks increasingly like a uniquely Spanish event, rooted in quarrels peculiar to Spain, and unintelligible except in a strictly Spanish context. Foreigners who, at the time, saw it as their war, were deluded by propaganda – whether they were German or Italian “volunteers” against Bolshevism, or Catholic “crusaders” against atheism and secularism, or freedom-loving fighters against Fascism, or anti-Communist capitalists or anarchists, or anti-Stalinist Troskyists, or anti-Trotskyist Stalinists.

Ad hoc coalitions fought the war, drawn together by a mixture of accident and advantage, with little ideological consistency. Those on the side commonly called “national” included huge numbers of German and Italian “volunteers” and Moroccan recruits, attracted, like their modern counterparts – the Gastarbeiters and “illegals” who now swarm across the Strait – by rates of pay unattainable in Africa. So while the Nationalists proclaimed a “crusade” and reconquista, implicitly invoking bygone holy wars, the Republicans sang, with perhaps greater justification, their anthem, “We Are Fighting against Moors”. The money that paid for the “national” effort came, meanwhile, in large part, from US and other foreign investors. Meanwhile, if the Nationalists were not genuinely national, not all Republicans fought on the side called “Republican”. General Queipo de Llana, the loud-mouthed boss of wartime Seville, was actually a freemason – a member of an organization Franco loathed and clericalists decried – and ended his incendiary broadcasts with the cry, “Long live the Republic!”. My uncle Ramón was a Republican through and through, but fought on the same side as Franco because, he said, he “could not bear to rape a nun, burn a church or kill a priest”. No simple Left–Right cleavage divided the sides. Until the war stimulated recruitment, fortified identities, and demonized foes, there were virtually no Fascists and few Communists in Spain.

The Falange was a tiny organization and, though it aped Fascist rites, it had its own programme, more concerned with imposing family values and enforcing social uniformity than with enhancing the power of the State or celebrating the right of might. Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, the historian who became President of the Republic in exile, was viscerally conservative, whereas some radical revolutionaries joined the Falange.

The Basque nationalists who fought for the Republic were mostly clericalist conservatives: their left-wing and secularist allies in other provinces virtually abandoned them to defeat out of distaste for their politics. Many liberals sided with Franco, because in Spain the liberal tradition has always been centralizing, whereas devolutionist agendas span Right and Left. The unwieldy nature of the movement Franco had to meld into effectiveness glared in the absurdly sesquipedal name he gave it in an attempt to cover up the gaps: “National and Traditionalist Movement and of the Juntas of National-Syndicalist Organisations”. The leftist “front” of socialists, anarchists, strict Marxists and Stalinists who defended the Republic was so various that its own quarrels rent it and doomed it to disaster. The nearest thing to a clear-cut division between the sides coincided with the cleft between centralists, who fought for Franco, and devolutionists, who supported the Republic; but even this fact was complicated by differences between Basque, Galician and Catalan nationalisms and Navarrese particularism, which allied with the centralizers for reasons peculiar to Navarrese tradition. Some on the Left were as centralist as Franco. Beevor quotes the cry of the beleaguered Republican leader, Dr Negrín, “Spain is the only nation in Spain!”. Nor could the war be explained by the division of military against militias: almost half the armed services sided with the Republic. Both sides betrayed most of their own supporters. The socialists refused to fire “a bullet for Málaga” because they hated its anarchist defenders. Stalinists ended up running a bunker-Republic after proscribing and purging the Marxists and anarchists. “Aren’t we all socialists?”, asked Orwell during the Left’s internecine battles in Barcelona. It was like asking, “Aren’t we all Christians?” at the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

Franco ditched the traditionalists without whom he could not have won the war, and deceived the monarchists. I find it amazing that there are still liberal aristocrats of sentimentally monarchist persuasion in Spain, who – after sacrificing family members in the war and suffering horribly under the regime – still think Franco was on their side. The dictator mocked the “hispanic values” he claimed to defend by selling Spain out to trash capitalism and consumerism. I have never believed in the sincerity of his own conversion to Catholicism. “L’Espagne”, he seems to have thought, “vaut bien une messe.” Ultimately, of course, the war was unideological because most Spaniards were ideologically uncommitted: they were caught up in the bloodshed unawares, conscripted unwillingly, tempted into activism by opportunism, or terrorized into compliance with whichever side happened to control their home localities.

It was, however, the supposed international significance of the Spanish Civil War that first drew Antony Beevor to the subject. His first account appeared twenty-five years ago: essentially a military narrative, written with the lessons for the Second World War in mind. The updated version, which marks the seventieth anniversary of Franco’s so-called national uprising, is much more than an update. Except in the fluency of the writing, which is a constant joy of Beevor’s output, the magisterial handling of copious material, and the expertise the author displays in military history, the new book is so different that it could almost be mistaken for the work of a different writer. The Spanish version is the more complete, but the abridgement for an anglophone readership still contains much that is new.

Beevor seems to have read just about everything that has appeared in the period between the publications and to have taken almost all of it into account, though perhaps without doing justice to the many personal memoirs that have appeared, especially on the Nationalist side. Above all, he has used previously inaccessible documents from Russian archives in which he has done much pioneering work.

His account remains strongest as a narrative of military events. No other book on the same scale does such a good job in this connection. Here his argument is unchanged: the Republican command was incompetent from the moment when Franco was left to transfer his legions from Morocco, virtually unopposed, in support of the coup attempt of July 18, 1936. Political inhibitions made Republican military management even more ineffective. Russian “advisers” did not know how to work their own tanks. The Republic’s propaganda wing was a disastrous failure. Beevor shows that the Nationalists “concentrated their efforts on a select audience in Britain and the USA”. They were far better than their opponents at fabricating and placing atrocity stories. This ensured that the democracies stayed out of the war and that the flow of capital and informal aid to the Nationalists continued. So it was not so much that Franco won the war as that the Republic lost it. The top brass on the Nationalist side were not much superior to their opponents in generalship. Beevor takes careful account of the revisionism of Blanco Escolí, the great anatomizer of the myth of Franco as a great commander, and broadly accepts that the Generalísimo was feeble in the role, though he perhaps underestimates the extent to which the torturous pace of Franco’s conquests was politically prolonged: the victors needed time to “cleanse” conquered territory of their enemies as they went. The difference between the sides was not, according to Beevor, the superior professionalism or equipment of the Nationalists – the battles the Republican militias won proves that – but the inexorable logic of the international situation, which left the Republic effectively friendless, and ultimately starved of supplies. The foreign loan-troops and war matériel, which made up for the Nationalist forces’ deficiencies, “did not”, according to Beevor, “win the war”, but did prevent a Republican victory. The longer the fighting lasted, the more certain Nationalist victory became: Franco piled up weapons and loans, while the gold and silver of the Bank of Spain vanished, the Republican tanks ran out of fuel, and the rations for the defenders of Barcelona dwindled to about four ounces of pulses a day. In one respect, Beevor recognizes that foreigners miscast themselves as part of a war in which they were really intruders. For this was not a crisis of democracy. As Beevor points out, the Left started the war with shaky democratic credentials and rapidly forfeited even those. In a counter-factual passage Beevor imagines what might have happened had a democracy emerged. But there was no chance of such an outcome. A Republican victory after a long war would have turned Spain into a Stalinist satellite, perhaps prolonging dictatorship until the collapse of the Soviet empire. A quick Republican victory would have provoked another civil war: not against the Right, which would have been proscribed, emasculated and pacified – as Franco did with his old enemies – but between the warring sects and cults among which the Left was divided. The only point at which Beevor’s critical judgement seems less than perfect is in his discussion of the purges each side inflicted on the other: he tends to see the Left as more rationally selective in persecution than the Right. “Rarely”, he claims, “was an honest grocer molested or a priest who buried rich and poor alike.” That, I fear, is a romanticization.

The proof that the war was a peculiarly Spanish affair is that it baffled every foreigner who arrived, expecting to fight on a local front of an internationally familiar conflict. Stalin – we now know – sold weapons to both sides. Goering was implicated in clandestine and exploitative arms deals with Republicans. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini had much fellow-feeling for Franco, whom they supported partly to give their armies and aircraft an airing. By locating the war in its European and global context, Beevor misses an opportunity to stress the introspective Spanishness of the conflict. But he does a good job of exploding one of the traditional myths of Spanish exceptionalism.

There was no peculiarly Spanish way of making war. It was not quixotism that made militiamen scorn trenches: they had no tools to dig them. The violence and cruelties of the conflict were not the result of Spanish passions but of the universal demon of the battlefield: “fear in disguise”. People killed not out of a fatalistic Spanish indifference to death, but because of the hateful old wisdom: the dead do not fight back.

Ultimately wars become whatever myth makes them out to be: what people believe generates consequences and becomes a kind of truth. Thousands of foreign volunteers poured into Spain thinking that they were taking part in the defence of the international working class, “uniting the human race”. About 17,000 died. At least 5,000 Spaniards died as volunteers for Hitler in Russia, thinking they were continuing an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Though the experiences on both sides were disillusioning, many participants and onlookers forged new sympathies and realized that the real global struggle would not be of Left against Right, but of democracy versus the rest. The Spanish Civil War was not genuinely a prelude or part of either struggle, but erroneous interpretations had briefly fused it with both by confusing it with them. When the Second World War ended, it hardly seemed worth the Allies’ while to take on Franco. As the Cold War iced over the world, Spain was increasingly irrelevant. Briefly, until the 1960s, when the normal pattern of Spanish history resumed, and the country began to resemble the rest of Europe more closely, Spain really was as “different” as the the tourism-promotion posters said. So it gradually became possible to escape from the hindsight of the World War era and to see the Civil War as a peculiarly Spanish tragedy. Now we are in a new phase of the historiography of the conflict, dominated by a new kind of literature in Spain, in which the children and grandchildren of the victims of the war undertake journeys through memory in search of the dead. In this post-ideological world, Antony Beevor wisely deflects reflection away from the contexts both of Spanish exceptionalism and global Götterdämmerung, to draw human lessons. By applying the technique of the Annals of Confucius – recounting horrors in an unimpassioned tone – he has produced a moving masterpiece of the indictment of war.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

The TLS n.º 5385,    June 16, 2006

Looking back on the Spanish Civil War

Sir, – Many of my age (b 1924) who came to awareness in the late 1930s saw the Spanish Civil War as the great defining conflict of our time, with all the evil on Franco’s side and all the good on the other. No such iconizing vision can stand up to the increasingly dispassionate historical study brought by the passage of time, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s careful review of Antony Beevor’s book on the war (June 2) makes it clear that the old simplicities cannot survive. And yet one clings to them – In his “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943) George Orwell wrote that “In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth”. This leaves out a good deal, including the monstrosity of German totalitarianism, but I persist in resonating to its basic truth. Or in other words, political judgements and historical verdicts do not inhabit the same universe; as we become ever more knowledgeable, the world we know becomes ever more bleak.
 
HOWARD KAMINSKY
301 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, Florida 33139.
 
 

Sir, – Having just finished a book (with Oleg Gordievsky) on Soviet intelligence operations during the Spanish Civil War, I would like to make a few comments on the recent review by Felipe Fernández-Armesto of Antony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain.

The Spanish Civil War, writes Professor Fernández-Armesto, “never seemed merely Spanish – especially not to the British”. Perhaps to some it didn’t seem so, but it was first of all Spanish, and only then international. The Western democracies, with Britain in the lead, abandoned Spain very early on in the conflict, having signed a non-intervention pact and thus forced the Republic into Stalin’s clutches. The British presence – on both sides – in Spain was very small in comparison with that of other countries (especially the German/Austrian and French presence in the Republican camp and the German and Italian presence on the Franco side). In fact, after the war only two prominent British figures emerged: George Orwell, who fought with the far-left Marxist POUM militia, and Kim Philby, a Soviet agent sent to Spain to assassinate General Franco. (After being wounded, quite by chance, young Kim was decorated by the Caudillo for bravery, which helped him to secure a career in the Secret Intelligence Service.) A number of other British volunteers who fought in Spain (one of them is still alive) returned home and became Soviet spies operating against the interests of their own country.

According to your reviewer, the Spanish Civil War “seemed to reflect global divisions, as rival forms of authoritarianism clawed at each other”, and was seen as “a laboratory of struggle between Fascism and Communism”. Really? Fernández-Armesto likes the verb “to seem”, but does he have any reason to imply that the Republican governments of Largo Caballero and then Juan Negrín were Communist? Does Antony Beevor hint at this in his book?

The reviewer writes that Mr Beevor “has used previously inaccessible documents from Russian archives in which he has done much pioneering work”. Perhaps, but it would be interesting if Professor Fernández-Armesto could give us an example of even one important but hitherto unknown fact that comes from any document found by the author of The Battle for Spain in the Russian archives.

I fully agree with the reviewer’s conclusion that the Spanish conflict helped people “to realize that the real global struggle would not be of Left against Right, but of democracy versus the rest”. Mr Beevor’s book has been well received in Spain, and I am sure that it is an important contribution to our general knowledge of events which took place seventy years ago, but it can hardly be called a revelation or be used by specialists as a fundamental source.
 
BORIS B. VOLODARSKY
Liechtensteinstrasse 12, A-1090 Vienna.

Antony Beevor: On the joys of history

The Left isn't going to like Antony Beevor's book on the Spanish Civil War, but he's used to controversy - his account of the fall of Berlin elicited heated protests from the Russian ambassador. Danuta Kean talks to him about the joys of digging in the archives, his despair about history students today and his brush with Jackie Onassis

Published: 21 May 2006

Antony Beevor is horrified, but, for once, it is not accounts of rape, torture or political betrayal uncovered in the archives of Berlin and Moscow that exercise the author of Stalingrad. What angers him is the state of British education, especially the teaching of history. "Britain is the only country in Europe, with the exception of Albania and Iceland, where history is no longer compulsory after the age of 14." His words are rapid as machine gunfire. "There is an extraordinary conviction, which has come partly from teacher training colleges, that history is elitist and reactionary and not worthy."

"I finished the last chapter, took it in to see Artemis and she said it doesn't work, but she couldn't see exactly why. Well, of course I threw my teddy into the corner, even though I knew she was right." Nobody else could work out what needed changing either. "We sent it to Jackie, and this was three weeks before she died, so she was very ill indeed, and she put her finger on it straight away. She was so professional, so elegant..." his voice trails away. It is a fond memory for a man who spends most of his hours among the horrors of other people's recollections.

'The Battle For Spain' is published by Weidenfeld at £25.

Allan Massie

Antony Beevor began the first version of this book thirty years ago. It was published in 1982 under the title The Spanish Civil War. Since then a vast quantity of new material has become available, as a result of research and publications by Spanish historians, and the opening of Soviet files. The revision has been on such a scale that this may properly be regarded as a new book.

This is an enthralling book. The narrative is masterly, wonderfully clear as a guide through the labyrinth. It is even-tempered and full of good sense. One might ask for a little more characterisation of some of the huge cast, and it is mildly irritating to find in the notes that books written in English appear with the title and publication date of their first Spanish edition. But as a guide to the terrible battle for Spain, it is admirable.

History

Failure of the brave new Spain

review by Paul Preston

THE BATTLE FOR SPAIN The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
by Antony Beevor
Weidenfeld, £25; 568pp

FOR MANY YEARS, THE defence of the Spanish Republic was “the last great cause”. This was not just because it involved the selfless struggle of Spaniards and international volunteers against fascism but also because the Republic was an attempt to drag Spain into the 20th century.

In a Europe disillusioned with capitalism, Republican Spain seemed an exciting experiment, the first step towards an egalitarian world.

The anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti told a reporter: “We are not afraid of ruins, we are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.”

In recent years, a Cold War historiography, emanating from the US and using Soviet documents, has endeavoured to portray the Republic in sinister terms. Antony Beevor is altogether more balanced, but also sets out to take some of the shine off the idealisation of the Republic. In this updating of his 1982 work The Spanish Civil War, his two big contributions are to rethink the military conflict and his judicious use of the Russian material. As might be expected of any book by Beevor, the job is done in clear prose, peppered with fresh perceptions, especially where strategy, tactics, and soldiers are concerned.

Given the complexity of the subject, however, occasional judgements are questionable. There can be no doubt that Beevor is right that the Republic tried to do too much too quickly. Given the situation in 1931, however, it is harsh to blame the Socialist Party and its urban middle-class allies for trying.

The Republican-Socialist coalition wanted to create a modern Spain, destroying the influence of the Church, eradicating militarism and helping millions of starving labourers through agrarian reform. This inevitably raised the expectations of the urban and rural proletariats while provoking the bitter enmity of clerics, soldiers and the landowning and industrial oligarchies. Within hours of the Republic being declared, monarchist plotters had begun planning a military coup, which took place on July 18, 1936.

The plotters were unhindered in the spring of 1936 largely because, as Beevor points out, the Prime Minister, Santíago Casares Quiroga, viewed General Emilio Mola, the leading conspirator, as Chamberlain did Hitler. This is typical of the insights that glitter throughout.

The coup provoked the collapse of the state infrastructure, since functionaries — from diplomats to policemen — tended to favour the rebels. The vacuum was occupied by unions and leftist organisations. Essential services were organised with astonishing speed although difficulties of food distribution were provoked by the fact that the militias had commandeered all available transport.

But Beevor suggests that the disappearance of bourgeois attire that so pleased George Orwell had as much to do with hot weather as with the hunting down of the middle classes for wearing hats.

Beevor is most thought-provoking on military detail. The problems of ordinary soldiers are brought vividly alive: anarchists regarded comrades who stayed awake on sentry duty as fools; International Brigaders had to sort through boxes of cartridges to find something that might fit their rifles; Russian “advisers” were often as inexperienced as those that they were supposed to advise. Senior Soviet offices were apoplectic about the anarchic behaviour of the Spaniards but their dispatches were often as redolent of impotence as of iron control. They had no prior experience of people who disagreed. Beevor describes one commissar nonplussed to find that not only were those he dealt with not Communists but in a variety of parties.

Most original are the criticisms of Vicente Rojo, seen by most commentators as the outstanding strategist of the war.

Beevor sees him as rigidly adhering to French First World War notions and overly influenced by Stalinist advisers. There are devastating critiques of his diversionary attacks at Brunete, Belchite, Teruel and the Ebro, as “prestige operations” imposed by the Russians. Teruel is seen as a damagingly futile attack on a strategically useless area.

Certainly all of these operations assisted Franco’s ambition of annihilating the Republic’s forces. In contrast, the defence of Valencia is described as the Republic’s greatest victory.

The involvement of Hitler and Mussolini meant that, from July 27, 1936, the war was a battle of a wider European civil war. Stalin decided to assist the Republic and foreign help rendered the politics of both zones horrendously complex. This was particularly true in the Republican zone, where bewildering political rivalries were bedevilled by the interference of Soviet advisers.

It is here that the Russian documents produce both fascinating and distorting insights. To fight Franco, Hitler and Mussolini while various leftwing factions wanted a revolution was daunting. Communist calls for discipline were music to the ears of liberal Republicans and moderate Socialists. The role of the Russians has to be seen in terms of the time, not with hindsight about the horrors of Stalinism.

Beevor produces much disturbing material on the vicious discipline imposed on the International Brigades by the Frenchman André Marty, something rarely mentioned in memoirs by volunteers.

Marty was a murderous thug but it is not true that he admitted shooting 500 brigaders. He was alleged to have said this to the central committee of the French Communist Party on October 15, 1937. He actually said, totally untruthfully: “During all the time that I participated in the work there, checking everything personally, I can say that there were only two cases of executions.”

However, a Francoist propaganda pamphlet changed this to: “The executions that I ordered did not amount to more than 500.” There can be no doubt that Marty was violent, paranoid and abusive but he was guilty only of between 10 and 20 deaths.

Beevor may not believe that fighting for the Spanish Republic constituted the last great cause, but anyone who reads this intriguing book will understand Albert Camus’s words: “It was in Spain that men learnt that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward. It is this, without doubt, which explains why so many men throughout the world regard the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.”

The Beevorised version

Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain, a revamped discussion of the Spanish civil war, succeeds brilliantly, says Piers Brendon

Saturday June 24, 2006
The Guardian

The Battle for Spain
by Antony Beevor
526pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25

Like the bitter conflict in Iraq today, the Spanish civil war was pathologically vicious. Religious fanaticism, political separatism and foreign intervention inflamed the violence in both cases. But it was aggravated in Spain by other factors, notably virulent class hatred. Half the nation went to bed hungry each night and anarchists said that "the sins of the old corrupt system can only be washed away in blood". The affluent were no less ferocious. One Salamanca landowner boasted that on the opening day of the civil war he lined up all his labourers and shot six of them "pour encourager les autres".

The "Red Terror", which creamed the scum off the top (to paraphrase Stalin's ambassador), reminded some of barbarian massacres. Among the victims were 6,500 clergy and 280 nuns. And such was the hatred felt for the church, a medieval institution with an auto-da-fé mentality, that some priests were buried alive after being made to dig their own graves. Meanwhile Franco proved to be, as HG Wells said, every inch "a murderous little Christian gentleman". He approved a process of limpieza (cleansing) and altogether slaughtered some 200,000 people, four times as many as the Republicans. Nationalists cried "Long live death". The psychopathic General Queipo de Llano, who also encouraged rape, promised to hunt down Republicans without mercy and "if they're already dead, I shall kill them again".

So Antony Beevor's revised history of the civil war, which vividly anatomises a state and a society in the process of disintegration, is a tract for our times. It is also an odd volume. First published in 1982, it was regarded as a competent but not especially original account of the war. It told a chronological, nuts-and-bolts story that held the reader's attention. It was well illustrated - indeed, the first edition had more and better photographs than the present book. And it contained some telling anecdotes - manhunts conducted by Falangist aristocrats were known as reforma agraria because they finally gave the landless peasant a piece of ground for himself.

However, the first edition was overshadowed by Hugh Thomas's masterpiece, which had itself been recently revised and enlarged. Other works also eclipsed Beevor. There were classic novels by Hemingway, Malraux and Barea. There were brilliant documentaries by Orwell and Koestler. There were unbeatable first-hand records, ranging from Gerald Brenan's Spanish Labyrinth to Ronald Fraser's Blood of Spain. There were ground-breaking academic works by Paul Preston, Raymond Carr and others. In fact, the Spanish civil war, widely regarded at the time as the dress rehearsal for the second world war, had produced a vast palimpsest of historical writing. Unusually, too, as Beevor remarks, the losers have had the last word - which must trouble the shade of Franco, who professed himself (rather like Blair) "responsible only to God and to history".

Far from being intimidated by all this competition, Beevor has refashioned his book, more than two decades later, to take advantage of it. But he has not only stood on the shoulders of giants, he has conducted research in German and Russian archives to throw fresh light on the story. So although the present work replicates the structure and often echoes the language of its predecessor, it is more an improved recipe than a reheated dish. There are important additions. New characters appear, such as the Soviet General Smushkevich, who secretly commanded the entire Republican air force. Silent corrections are made, not least over statistics. Whereas Beevor first said that Queipo de Llano captured Seville with 300 men, he now says 4,000. Whereas he first said that 1,654 people were killed at Guernica, he now says between 200 and 300.

Above all, he has Beevorised the book, given it the richness of detail and the narrative drive that made Stalingrad such a success. By its very nature, though, this is not a battle book. Its author cannot consistently display his greatest strength, the depiction of exciting military set-pieces. Instead he has to spend inordinate amounts of time explaining the fiendish complexities of Spanish politics, typified by the alphabet soup of initials identifying the various factions, and setting the struggle in its international context. In fact he does this well, pointing out that American trucks, petrol and credit were as vital to Franco as Hitler's aircraft and Mussolini's tanks. He also shows how Britain's non-intervention policy assisted the fascist cause. This was a farrago of hypocrisy masterminded by Anthony Eden, who held exquisitely aloof from what the left regarded as a crusade for democracy and what he called "the war of the Spanish obsession".

Beevor is alert to the key role that propaganda played in the conflict. It operated at every level, from grotesque atrocity stories - La Pasionaria allegedly killed a monk with her teeth - to the organised mendacity whereby nationalists blamed the bombing of Guernica on Asturian dinamiteros. Posters, described as "soldiers of paper and ink", were ubiquitous - though when German International Brigaders put up the slogan "We Exalt Discipline" French recruits posted precautions against venereal disease. Truth was a fatal casualty. In order to sustain false claims made as fighting commenced, battles were often continued long after they were lost. Furthermore, the communists invariably blamed defeats on treachery instead of incompetence, let alone on Russian weapons so antique that one consignment was named "the battery of Catherine the Great".

The spread of Stalinist paranoia to Spain resulted in a hideous purge within the Republican ranks. Communists treated political allies, such as anarchists and "Trotskyites", as ideological foes, to be tortured, murdered or locked up in lunatic asylums. This internal convulsion did more to ensure Franco's victory than his own unimaginative generalship. But some suspected that he advanced so slowly in order to crush opposition as in an "olive oil press". Certainly one of his aides said that they had "to kill, to kill, and to kill" all reds, "to exterminate a third of the masculine population". Beevor aptly quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "A civil war is not a war but a sickness."

Piers Brendon's books include The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s

La guerra inacabada  

Publicado por Antony Beevor en 1982, este libro sobre la Guerra Civil española, inédito hasta ahora en castellano, ha sido ampliado y revisado. Se trata de una obra de síntesis, clave para

entender el conflicto.

SANTOS JULIÁ

BABELIA - 10-09-2005

Al final, habremos salido ganando. Ya era raro que una estimable historia de la Guerra Civil española, muy crítica del estalinismo, muy comprensiva hacia el anarquismo, escrita por un británico y publicada en 1982, no hubiera encontrado en España quien la tradujera y editara. Saturación, tal vez; o quizá sospecha de que las historias generales habían agotado sus posibilidades o, como afirmaba Stanley Payne, que la Guerra Civil ya no atraía a primeras figuras de la historiografía mundial, o por la razón que fuera, lo cierto es que The spanish civil war, de Antony Beevor, pasó inadvertida para los editores españoles.

Pero como no hay mal que por bien no venga, La Guerra Civil española que ahora se ofrece -por cierto, en una excelente traducción- es una versión sustancialmente mejorada de la que apareció en inglés hace más de veinte años. Beevor ha incorporado a su anterior trabajo nueva documentación, procedente sobre todo de archivos rusos y alemanes, ha seguido con encomiable atención lo que él mismo califica de inmenso trabajo de historiadores españoles en archivos locales y ha escrito así, manteniendo su estructura y matizando y enriqueciendo sus análisis políticos, un libro nuevo, basado en un amplísimo manejo de fuentes y vacunado por completo de las patrañas del sedicente "revisionismo" que tanta mentira ha acumulado en años recientes.

Un libro que se lee, y esto no sorprenderá a quienes conozcan sus tan celebrados Stalingrado y Berlín, la caída, extraordinariamente bien, tanto por nuevos lectores como por los ya familiarizados con la inmensa bibliografía sobre la Guerra Civil. Así es porque, desde el primer momento, Beevor recrea el clima político de la época como si fuera un presente que a todos interpela, en el que se debaten problemas y se juegan destinos que a todos nos afectan y nos importan. La estructura del libro, el ritmo de la acción, los apuntes sobre los personajes, el terror blanco y el terror rojo, la revolución, las pugnas entre partidos, la intervención extranjera: todo, aunque pertenezca a "otro país", vuelve a hacernos presente la guerra como si aún subieran llamas de los incendios de aquellos años.

Pero es en el relato y en el análisis de las acciones militares donde brilla el mejor Beevor, el que sigue día a día, hora a hora, el desarrollo de la acción y el que elabora el balance definitivo sobre la estrategia de los militares profesionales republicanos, apoyados, hasta la ruptura final, por el partido comunista. La República, como ya aconsejó su presidente al nuevo Gobierno nombrado en mayo de 1937, no tenía más alternativa que fortalecer su defensa en el interior para no perder la guerra en el exterior y forzar así una paz negociada. El Estado Mayor, y muy particularmente el general Vicente Rojo, con la aprobación y el impulso de Juan Negrín y -hasta su salida del Gobierno- de Indalecio Prieto, intentaron una y otra vez la ofensiva que rompiera por el centro el frente enemigo para aliviar la presión sobre otras zonas en peligro. Fue un error catastrófico. Primero, Teruel, después el Ebro, dan la razón a Beevor cuando afirma que para dirigir la guerra de modo eficaz la República tenía que haber combinado una estrategia defensiva con ataques cortos, rápidos, de tanteo, en puntos distintos, que hubieran sembrado la confusión en el enemigo.

No fue así: los dirigentes políticos y militares de la República prefirieron lanzar ofensivas en campo abierto, para romper el frente y aprovechar la ventaja de la sorpresa, sin tener en cuenta su evidente inferioridad aérea y su escaso equipamiento de artillería. De esta forma, cuando el avance llegaba al punto máximo y quedaba paralizado, grandes contingentes de soldados se ofrecían como fácil blanco a los aviones italianos y alemanes y a la superior artillería del enemigo. Porque, y éste es otro de los convincentes análisis de Beevor, Franco tampoco sabía hacer más guerra que la del carnero, la de acometida frontal: al cabo, todos dependían de la doctrina militar francesa. La lentitud de su avance, la exasperante -para sus aliados: Hitler, Mussolini- capacidad para desaprovechar ocasiones favorables, habría podido servir a los intereses de la República si un ejército reconstruido por el Gobierno de Negrín hubiera forzado, gracias a una defensa inexpugnable, una salida negociada a la guerra.

Que la estrategia militar republicana no fue la mejor de las posibles queda claro en su quiebra final y en la terrorífica construcción de "la España nueva". Beevor acierta de nuevo al no cerrar su historia con el desfile de la victoria de los insurgentes y al dedicar los últimos capítulos al "gulag de Franco", a las cárceles, la represión y el exilio, a eso que el autor llama "guerra inacabada". La guerra, en efecto, no terminó el 1 de abril de 1939, que fue sólo el día de la victoria de los generales insurrectos. Como Dionisio Ridruejo escribirá en Le Monde a propósito del "delito continuado" que sirvió de pretexto para llevar a Julián Grimau en 1963 ante un pelotón de fusilamiento, España sufrió durante años sin fin un "état de guerre continu", un estado de guerra continuado: quien quiera saber por qué no perderá el tiempo leyendo este libro, llamado a ocupar un lugar de primera línea entre las historias generales de la Guerra Civil.

EL PAIS

17-9-2005

Vuelve el 36

Antonio Elorza:

Cada diez años vuelve a visitarnos el espectro de la Guerra Civil. En 1996 fue especialmente cordial y tuvo como momento estelar la visita y homenaje a los veteranos de las Brigadas Internacionales. No se les hizo demasiada propaganda, el programa a que se vieron sometidos fue de rigidez cominterniana y, sin embargo, la acogida popular fue muy emotiva. Recuerdo la inmensa ovación que ofrecieron los estudiantes de mi facultad a un pequeño grupo al que invité para que relatasen sus experiencias en la guerra y la ulterior del estalinismo. Lo encabezaba Lise, la viuda de Arthur London. La concesión de la nacionalidad española a los brigadistas pareció una señal de que la reconciliación se había alcanzado.

Es de esperar que los historiadores intenten escapar de esa tela de araña. No se polemiza con un panfletario. El magnífico libro de Anthony Beevor sobre la Guerra Civil, utilizando esta vez de verdad los archivos de Moscú y la reciente bibliografía sobre el conflicto, es un ejemplo de cómo explicar la lógica de la guerra, no limitarse a contar batallas, y también de cómo entender que si hubo muchas más víctimas en el sector republicano, por la represión de la guerra y de la posguerra, ello no es fruto de la casualidad, sino de una vocación de exterminio que impulsaba ya antes del 18 de julio a los militares sublevados: la "operación quirúrgica" de que habla Franco en noviembre de 1935. Otra cosa es que libros como éste logren contrarrestar el efecto sobre la opinión pública de la cascada de panfletos.

More reviews, here               

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