The Eight Years of War: Spanish Memories

The Observer, 16 July 1944

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The Spanish Civil War, curtain-raiser of the present struggle and one of the most tragic as well as one of the most sordid events that modern Europe has seen, began eight years ago next Friday.

The issue of the Spanish war was decided outside Spain, and by the time that it was a year old realistic observers were able to see that the elected government could not win unless there were some radical change in the European situation. In the first period of the war, which lasted just under a year, the struggle was essentially between Franco’s professional soldiers and Moors on the one side and the hurriedly-raised militias of peasants and factory workers on the other.

In this period honours were about even, and no objective of first-rate importance changed hands.

Franco, however, was being reinforced on a massive scale by the Axis Powers, while the Spanish Government was receiving only sporadic doles of arms from Soviet Russia and the help of a few thousand foreign volunteers, mostly refugee Germans. In June, 1937, the resistance of the Basques collapsed and the balance of forces tipped heavily against the Government.

In the meantime, however, the Government had quelled the revolutionary disorder of early days, smoothed out the struggles between factions, and trained its raw forces. Early in 1938 it had a formidable army, able to fight on for the year or so that food supplies would last out.

Dr. Negrin and the other rulers of Government Spain probably realised that they could not win by their own efforts, but they were justified in fighting on, since the political outlook in Europe still might change. The obviously approaching world war might break out during 1938; the British Government might abandon its policy of non-intervention.

Neither event happened, and towards the end of 1938 the Russians withdrew their help. Government Spain had long been hungry, and was now definitely starving.

As the Fascist forces drove across Catalonia, hordes of refugees streamed into France, machine-gunned by Italian aeroplanes and interned behind barbed-wire as soon as they arrived.

Early in 1939 Franco entered Madrid, and used his victory with the utmost ruthlessness. All political parties of the Left were suppressed, and countless people executed or imprisoned. If recent reports are true, half a million people, or 2 per cent. of the population of Spain, are still in concentration camps.

The story is a disgusting one, because of the sordid behaviour of the Great Powers and the indifference of the world at large. The Germans and Italians intervened in order to crush Spanish democracy, to seize a strategic keypoint for the coming war, and, incidentally, to try out their bombing planes on helpless populations.

The Russians doled out a small quantity of weapons and extorted the maximum of political control in return. The British and French simply looked the other way while their enemies triumphed and their friends were destroyed. The British attitude is the hardest to forgive, because it was foolish as well as dishonourable.

It had been obvious from the start that any foreign country which supplied arms to the Spanish Government could control or at least influence that Government’s policy. Instead, the British preferred to make sure that Franco and Hitler should win, and at the same time that the affection and gratitude of the Spanish people should be earned by Russia and not by Britain.

For a year or more the Spanish Government was effectively under Russian control, mainly because Russia was the only country to come to the rescue. The growth of the Spanish Communist Party from a few thousands to a quarter of a million was directly the work of the British Tories.

There has been a strong tendency to push these facts out of sight and even to claim Franco’s hostile “non-belligerency” as a triumph for British diplomacy. Rather should the true history of the Spanish war be kept always in mind as an object-lesson in the folly and meanness of Power Politics. Nothing, indeed, redeems its story except the courage of the fighting-men on both sides, and the toughness of the civilian population of Loyalist Spain, who for years endured hunger and hardship unknown to us at the worst moments of war.