Spanish Civil War

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SPANISH CIVIL WAR

The Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 was the culmination of a prolonged period of national political unrest in a country that was increasingly polarized and unable to ameliorate the poverty in which millions of its citizens lived. In Spain at the time, landless peasants cobbled together a bare subsistence as migrant laborers, following the harvests on vast agricultural estates. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church, identifying with wealthy landowners, was in full control of secondary education; education for women seemed to the Church unnecessary, and universal literacy a danger rather than a goal. 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 as 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 broader reform might begin. Rumors of a military coup led leaders of the Spanish Republic (the elected government) to transfer several high-ranking military officers to remote postings, with the aim of making communication and coordination between them more difficult. But the planning for a military uprising continued.

The military rebellion began on July 18, 1936, 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 such key areas as Madrid and Barcelona. At that point, the character of the struggle changed, for the military realized that it was not going to win by fiat. Military leaders 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.

The 1936 election in Spain had been widely celebrated in progressive publications in Great Britain, France, and the United States. In the midst of the worldwide Depression, the military uprising was thus seen as an assault against the interests of working people everywhere. Moreover, the rapid intervention of German and Italian troops gave what might otherwise have remained a civil war a dramatic international character. Almost from the outset, the Spanish Civil War became a literal and symbolic instance of the growing worldwide struggle between fascism and democracy. Indeed, the Republic perceived the country as being under invasion by foreign troops. By the time the pilots of Hitler's Condor Legion reduced the Basque holy city of Guernica to rubble in April 1937, many in the rest of the world had come to share that opinion.

Yet the Spanish Republic faced the difficult task of defending itself against a substantial portion of its own military. Local militias worked well in inner city skirmishes but were of little use against mechanized battalions in the field. The Republic needed to raise an army, having lost most of its own to the rebel generals. After General Francisco Franco took command of the rebel army, he mounted an assault on the capital city of Madrid, hoping to end the war with one bold stroke. The situation looked desperate enough that the government fled to Valencia. Yet the capital held, with the small Spanish Communist Party playing a key role in the city's defense. Other Western powers signed a pact agreeing to abstain from arming either side, a pact that Hitler immediately violated. Only the Soviet Union was willing to sell quantities of arms to the Republic, a decision that helped gain the Communists increasing influence in the Spanish government. In addition, the Comintern, the international coalition of Communist parties, organized the International Brigades, with forty thousand people from fifty countries volunteering to fight on the side of the Republic. Among the International Brigades was the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, made up of volunteers from the United States.

Yet neither Soviet arms nor the international volunteers ever matched the arms supplied by Hitler and Mussolini. And the Spanish Left was deeply divided, with anarchists and anti-Soviet Marxists seeking a fundamental social revolution, while the Spanish Communist Party urged only moderate reform and cooperation with liberal parties as a way of winning the war. Despite winning occasional battles, the Republic steadily lost territory until it fell to Franco's forces in the spring of 1939.