The Spanish Civil War
Hugh Thomas
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Fourth Edition
Contents
List of Maps
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
Some Groups and Political Parties, with Abbreviations
Preface to the Revised Edition
BOOK ONE: THE ORIGINS OF THE WAR
BOOK TWO: RISING AND REVOLUTION
BOOK THREE: WORLD WAR IN MINIATURE
BOOK FOUR: THE WAR OF TWO COUNTER REVOLUTIONS
CONCLUSION
Author’s Notes
Appendix One: THE SPANISH BOURBONS AND THE CARLIST CLAIM
Appendix Two: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE PESETA ON THE TANGIER EXCHANGE
Appendix Three: AN ESTIMATE OF FOREIGN INTERVENTION IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Appendix Four: GUERNICA
Bibliographical Note
Select Bibliography
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THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War (1962) won the Somerset Maugham prize. He is the author of Cuba: Or the Pursuit of Freedom (1971), An Unfinished History of the World (1979), Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico (1994), The Slave Trade (1997), and Rivers of Gold (2003) and The Golden Age (2010), the first of two volumes of a trilogy about the Spanish Empire. From 1966 to 1975 he was Professor of History at the University of Reading. He was Chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies in London from 1979 to 1991, and he became a life peer as Baron Thomas of Swynnerton in 1981. He has been given the Arts Council Prize for history (1980), the Gabarrón prize (2008), the Calvo Serer prize (2009), the Nonino prize (2009) and the Boccaccio prize (2009), while the All Party Parliamentary Group on Archives and History awarded him in 2011 a prize for a lifetime achievement for services to archives and history. He was made a commandeur of the order of Arts and Letter in France in 2008, he was given the Grand Cross of the order of Isabel the Catholic in Spain in 2001, and the Order of the Aztec Eagle in Mexico, 1994.
Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition
Halfway through 1957, I was approached by a literary agent, James Macgibbon, then in the famous firm of Curtis Brown.1 A mildly left-wing, engaging, gentleman-publisher who had once been the founding chairman of the firm Macgibbon and Kee, James asked me to lunch at the Savile Club but I arrived rather late and we walked along to the Connaught Hotel instead. Here he told me that the conclusion of my novel The World’s Game, where the hero goes out to fight in Israel, had reminded him of other such adventures, such as those of the Spanish Civil War. It so happened that an American publisher whom he knew, Cass Canfield Junior (son of the great publisher Cass Canfield who had re-created Harper Brothers), wanted to commission a book about the Civil War for Coward McCann, the firm for which he worked. Would I be interested in putting in for the commission? If so, I would have to write an outline of the book. I agreed.
By August my outline was ready. Cass Canfield, a man about ten years older than I, liked it and commissioned me for Harper’s, which he had by then joined. The outline also satisfied, if it did not please, my English publisher Douglas Jerrold of Eyre and Spottiswoode, who had published my novel The World’s Game. Jerrold had been an active supporter of Franco in 1936 and indeed it had been he who had hired the Dragon Rapide aeroplane which carried General Franco from the Canary Islands to Morocco, a journey planned at a meeting between Jerrold, Luis Bolín, then correspondent in London of the Spanish newspaper ABC, and Ricardo de la Cierva, the inventor of the helicopter, in Simpson’s restaurant in the Strand. Jerrold made clear where he stood in respect of the Civil War in a passage from his book Georgian Adventure, in which he said, after visiting Franco in 1938, that while he might not be a great man, he was ‘certainly a thousand times more important, a supremely good man, a hero possibly; possibly a saint …’2 James Macgibbon and Douglas Jerrold, what a strange alliance of sponsors to have! Cass on behalf of Harper Brothers offered me an advance of $300, Eyre and Spottiswoode one of £250. I thought that I was made.
I worked on the history of the Spanish war between the summer of 1957 and the spring of 1961, beginning with a consideration of the international side to the affair. I had available the documents of the German foreign office which had been published in the usual series in 1951 but which no one had used. The Italian side could be grasped by reading not only some official papers but the diaries for the late Thirties of Count Ciano, whose widow Edda I had once met in Cambridge. For France, I had some parliamentary papers which included a reflection by the French military attaché in Madrid in 1936, a colonel Morel, who had said to Léon Blum something to the effect of “J’ai seulement une chose à vous dire, je peux vous assurer, un roi de France ferait la guerre” (I have only one thing to say to you: I can assure you that a king of France would have gone to war). The English side and the origins of the famous Non-Intervention Committee were more difficult to tie down, but I did eventually find some Foreign Office documents. The non-intervention papers were still confidential then but I discovered that there was a version freely available in Holland. I did not read the papers of the Western department in the Office, though had I done so I should have found minutes there signed by the spies Donald Maclean and John Cairncross. From a good selection of America’s diplomatic papers I found out exactly what Ambassador Claude Bowers had in the Thirties been telling President Roosevelt. Russia was, of course, far more difficult to know about but numerous ex-Communists and others, even some Russian military commanders, had written about events they had witnessed.
I also met some survivors from the diplomatic arena of the time. My great adventure was dinner in Buenos Aires with Johannes Bernhardt, the German businessman who had visited Hitler in July 1936 and asked him to help Franco. Though he had become a general in the SS, he was quite the opposite from what I had expected; he was a melancholy East Prussian who passed much of his time with me regretting the Russian conquests of the landscapes of his youth. He took a letter from Franco to Hitler, which Bernhardt said was “infantile” in style. Perhaps for that reason it seems never to have been published.
I never found an adequete Italian equivalent to Bernhardt despite visiting Italy often. I did find valuable the testimony of the Spanish ambassador to Paris in 1936, Juan de Cárdenas, a diplomat of the old school who subsequently became Spanish representative and then ambassador in Washington. At the start of the Civil War he made a request on behalf of the Republic to the French government to buy arms. To his surprise, Léon Blum agreed but Cárdenas resigned his post before the transaction could be completed. A most useful collaborator from the Republican side was Pablo de Azcárate, who was ambassador to London throughout the conflict, and was the brother-in-law of Julio Álvarez del Vayo, Republican foreign minister from 1937 to 1939. I met Azcárate (by then retired) in 1958 in Geneva, where I was working for the United Nations Association. During many conversations at his home in rue Hodler, Azcárate reminisced about the Spanish Republican government, and showed me his memoirs (later published by his son). He told me that in 1936 Winston Churchill had expressed his determination to be neutral in the Civil War since both sides had “imbrued their hands in blood”. “Blood, blood, blood,” he had exclaimed when he met Azcárate, whose hand he refused to shake when presented to him by Lord Robert Cecil.
I established good relations with people from all sides of the political spectrum in the Civil War. On the Right, with Don Angel Herrera, editor in the Republic of the Catholic newspaper El Debate, who, by the time of our meeting in 1959, had become a cardinal and bishop of Málaga; with Carlos Martínez Campos, Duque de la Torre, who had commanded the artillery on the nationalist side and became tutor and praeceptor to Don Juan Carlos; with M
anuel Fal Conde, the Carlist leader (debilitated by a stroke by the time I met him in Seville with his son). The generous historian of Carlism, Melchor Ferrer, gave me a mountain of fascinating unpublished material relating to the role of Carlists in the Civil War, and he assured me that the unexploded bomb in his fireplace had been dropped by the “reds” on the Virgin del Pilar in Saragossa. It was actually dropped by the newspaperman Frank Jellinek, so the latter told me. I visited Dionisio Ridruejo, the most cultivated of Falangists who had long since quarrelled with Franco (and who still seemed to favour him in a roundabout way), at his house in Madrid. I was also very friendly with Beltran Domecq, a despatch rider for Franco (in the summer holidays from Downside), who had in September 1936 driven into Oropesa and to his horror found the bodies of ten nuns lying dead and disfigured in the cemetery there.
Thanks to a diplomat at the Spanish embassy in London, I met Ramón Serrano Súñer, General Franco’s disaffected brother-in-law, for which he was nicknamed cuñadisimo (cuñado means brother-in-law) at his lovely summer residence on the beach at Zarauz in the Basque country. I also met Captain Noel Fitzpatrick and Peter Kemp, among the few Englishmen to fight on Franco’s side, and Rowland St Oswald, at that time a journalist, who claimed to have been present when the famous expression “The Fifth Column” was coined. Representing the Daily Telegraph at a press conference in September 1936, he asked General Mola which of the four columns making for Madrid would be the first to relieve the people of the capital. Mola apparently replied, “None of my four military columns will relieve Madrid, that honour will fall to a fifth column of secret supporters who are already inside the city.”
On the Left I also met a representative collection of interesting individuals. I have mentioned Julio Álvarez del Vayo, whom I encountered in Paris for a not very satisfactory conversation. I think that either I mismanaged the interview or he had lost his memory. I also met distinguished Basques such as Jesús María Leizaola (at that time the lendakari), whom I met at the headquarters of the Basque government in exile in Paris. Although it was twenty years since he had left his homeland and would be another fifteen before he or his friends could safely return, the atmosphere in the offices in rue Singer was one of intense activity, with telephones ringing and people coming in and out with messages, as if we had been in Napoleon’s headquarters at Waterloo. Another prominent Basque politician whom I knew was Manuel de Irujo, who lived his years of exile in London.
I also visited the Republican government in exile in the Avenue Foch in Paris. I was in the library but, from the next room, I could hear an excited argument, then all the ministers came out smiling. “The government has fallen,” General Emilio Herrera said to me. “And who is the new prime minister, my general?” I asked. “I have that honour,” replied Herrera, seriously.
The same vitality was true of ex-anarchists such as José García Pradas, who had been a man of violence in his youth before he joined the BBC Spanish service, and the anarchist minister and leader Federica Montseny. I met Julian Gorkin of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista); who told me in no uncertain manner how to judge communists (he had left the party when they told him to murder General Primo de Rivera in the 1920s. He insisted that La Pasionaria was a kind of Trilby, a willing creation in the hands of the comintern super-agent Vittorio Codovilla, who saw himself as a new du Maurier). I talked to Dr Juan Negrín Junior, the son of the Socialist Juan Negrín and for a time his chief of staff, and his wife, Rosita Díaz; and became friends with the always optimistic Salvador de Madariaga. Among others were: Fr Alberto Onandía, who described to me the attack on Guernica which he had himself witnessed; Luis de Ortúzar, a Basque, now the chief of the Basque police in Bilbao; and Manuel Tagüeña, who had begun the Civil War as a student leader and ended it as an army commander, and was now living quietly as a pharmacist in Mexico.
Among the English on the Left I sought out a large number of interesting survivors. There was Kitty Wintringham, the widow of the last commander of the British battalion in the international brigade, and that body’s chief of staff, a melancholy actor, Michael Dunbar, who soon after walked out to sea in Wales to drown himself; Kenneth Sinclair Loutitt, who worked for UNICEF in Paris, a one-time Communist prepared to talk about his old friends in the Party; and Claud Cockburn, the one-time editor of The Week, another Communist survivor of great interest, wit and vitality. I met politicians of the Thirties such as W. S. Morrison, ex-Speaker, who had become Lord Dunrossil, and Philip Noel-Baker; George Aitken, once commissar of the XVth international brigade, and Fred Copeman, for a time its commander, as well as a very Chelsea international brigader, Humphrey Slater, who had changed his name from Hugh to Humphrey because he thought it was more working class. I continued by talking with such Republican enthusiasts as Giles Romilly, Philip Toynbee, Stephen Spender, Miles Tomalin, Humphrey Hare, a friend of Nancy Mitford who had some kind of British intelligence role, though one less important than that of the SIS man in Catalonia Donald Darling, and Margot Heinemann, the excellent novelist who had been the girlfriend of the promising poet John Cornford, whose clever mother Frances I interviewed in Cambridge. The last-named assured me that her son John had not wanted to return to Spain when he did in the autumn of 1936 and was then killed by friendly fire, on purpose she thought. Margot Heinemann was vitriolic in her rejection of this view.
In Geneva, I had many conversations with Frank Jellinek, once correspondent of the Manchester Guardian in Spain, who gave me some priceless cuttings which from the time. Another journalist of the Thirties whom I met in the Fifties was Henry Buckley, an admirable source since he knew the Republican politicians well.
I gathered a great library of books written at the time of the Civil War by participants, members of the international brigade or journalists, in every language imaginable. I worked through them all with zest in the old Reading Room of the old British Museum and in the London Library.
Of course I realized I had to make a prolonged tour of Spain to immerse myself in the life of the country and I did that in the early months of 1958. I started with a month or two in Madrid, then travelled to Toledo, Escorial, Ávila, the sierra and Andalusia. Tom Burns, the editor of The Tablet, wanted me to meet his father-in-law, the famous doctor Gregorio Marañon, in Toledo, so he could explain to me how it was impossible to write a history of the Civil War; a history of the fascists in Valladolid, perhaps yes, but a history of the war itself, out of the question. I decided not to go to lunch in the famous cigarral at Toledo.
On I went to Bilbao and San Sebastian and later to Oviedo. Then on to Barcelona. I remember how excited I was by the lively avenue, the Rambla, with its flower stalls and cafés, and the great statue of Columbus on his column at the end of it, facing the sea, and I recall how a seaside gramophone there played a seaside song, I think it was called ‘Volveré’, to an empty square.
I was still travelling round Spain in the summer of 1959 during the English elections of that year. As I sat in a train in the Tagus valley, someone at my side graphically illustrated what happened in Spain when there were elections. There was shooting, he said, it was always so. England was different.
Many a Talgo journey later, in 1960, I completed my draft of the history of the Spanish war and showed it to Douglas Jerrold at Eyre and Spottiswoode on whose behalf there then worked Maurice Temple-Smith, a brilliant publisher, John Bright-Holmes and a certain James Wright. We secured a beautiful friend of mine, Vanessa Jebb, to compile the index. By that time, I had moved to a flat in Cornwall Gardens belonging to Toby Robertson who, long before, had been the producer of my Cambridge play, Some Talk of Angels. There I held a party to celebrate publication. I remember introducing Douglas Jerrold to Giles Romilly, to show how Right can sometimes shake hands with Left.
I returned to Spain for some last-minute topographical observations. I saw Gerald Brenan in Churriana, near Málaga, then went up to Madrid and stayed, thanks to the good offices of a diplomat at the embassy in London, a Sevillano, at the
Colegio Mayor Cesar Carlos. Here I met many interesting, chiefly left-wing men of my age, but also answered a telephone call from General Martínez Caro, the Duque de la Torre, a well-known monarchist general. My friends could not understand how I could have such friends!
The Spanish Civil War was published in April 1961, to almost universally good reviews. Cyril Connolly wrote well of it in the Sunday Times, a great accolade, and Dick Crossman called it “a near masterpiece” in the New Statesman. Roy Jenkins praised it in The Spectator, as did Michael Howard in The Listener. Claud Cockburn was enthusiastic in the Sunday Telegraph, as was Peter Kemp in the Daily Telegraph. Rowland St Oswald was interesting in the Yorkshire Post, as was Malcolm Muggeridge in Time and Tide. Raymond Carr was friendly in the Observer, even though he had planned a history of the Civil War himself. Desmond Williams was excellent in the Irish Press. The Times Literary Supplement was very supportive (I learned later that the review, in those anonymous days, had been written by Alun Lord Chalfont). The only serious criticism I received was by Arnold Lunn in The Catholic Herald.
In America I also had wonderful reviews in the main newspapers, beginning with the New York Times, where Vincent Sheehan, “Jimmy”, praised it enthusiastically; the New York Times even had a leader devoted to the book. William Stuart Chamberlain wrote in the Wall Street Journal, Salvador de Madariaga in the Sunday Herald Tribune. My reputation seemed made.
In Spain the reaction was interesting. There was a splendid review by General Martínez Campos in ABC. Otherwise there were just notices that the work had been published. The book itself was prohibited. Some years later I found references to General Franco’s reaction in the interesting work of Franco’s cousin and ADC Franco Salgado, Mis conversaciones privadas con Franco (My private conversations with Franco). For example: “El general ha hecho preguntas sobre el libro de Mr Thomas … El general me contesta demintiendo muchas afirmaciones de este escritor inglés” (The general has asked questions about Mr Thomas’s book … The general answers me denying many of the statements of this English writer).