Spanish Civil War

Spanish Civil War
Clockwise from top left: a Republican tank at the Battle of Belchite; Granollers after being bombed by the Nazi air force in 1938; a bomb in the Sahara; troops during the siege of the Alcázar of Toledo; and the Lincoln Battalion.
Date July 17, 1936 – April 1, 1939 (2 years, 8 months and 15 days) Location Spain Result Victory of the rebel faction and establishment of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco See Consequences
Belligerents
Republican faction Supported by: Soviet Union Mexico	Rebel faction Supported by: Nazi Germany Italy Portugal
Strength
People's Army 850,000 men 1,500 artillery pieces 800 tanks and armored vehicles Law-enforcement forces 16,400 civil guards 7,900 carabineros 12,000 assault guards Republican air force 1,300 aircraft Republican navy 13,000 personnel 1 battleship 3 cruisers 16 destroyers 12 submarines Basque Auxiliary Navy 3,000 personnel 7 bous 24 minesweepers 2 destroyers International Brigades 60,000 volunteers Soviet Union 3,015 technicians 772 combat pilots	Rebel army 800,000 men 2,000 artillery pieces 300 tanks and armored vehicles Law-enforcement forces 15,800 civil guards 6,500 carabineros 5,000 assault guards Rebel air force 1,500 aircraft Rebel navy 7,000 personnel 1 battleship 4 cruisers 5 destroyers 2 submarines Army of Africa 75,000 personnel Condor Legion 19,000 volunteers 100 aircraft Corpo Truppe Volontarie 80,000 volunteers 120 aircraft Viriatos 8,000 volunteers
Casualties and losses
175,000 dead	110,000 dead
~500,000 ~120,000 in the rear

The Spanish Civil War or War of Spain, also known among Spaniards as the Civil War par excellence, or simply the War, was a conflict of an armed nature —which would later also give rise to an economic crisis— that broke out in Spain after the partial failure of the coup d'état of July 17 and 18, 1936 carried out by part of the armed forces against the Government of the Second Republic. After the blockade of the Strait and the subsequent airlift which, thanks to the swift collaboration of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, transferred the rebel troops to Peninsular Spain in the last weeks of July, a civil war began that would end on April 1, 1939, with the last war report signed by Francisco Franco, declaring his victory and establishing a dictatorship that would last until his death on November 20, 1975.

The war had multiple facets, as it included class struggle, war of religion, a clash of opposing nationalisms, and a struggle between military dictatorship and republican democracy, between revolution and counterrevolution, and between fascism and communism.

The parties to the conflict are usually called the Republican faction and the rebel faction:

• The Republican faction was constituted around the Government, formed by the Popular Front, which in turn was made up of a coalition of republican parties —Republican Left and Republican Union— with the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, which had been joined by the Marxist-Leninists of the Communist Party of Spain and the POUM, the Syndicalist Party of anarchist origin and, in Catalonia, the left-wing nationalists led by Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya. It was supported by the labor movement and the UGT and CNT trade unions, which also sought to carry out the social revolution. The Basque Nationalist Party had also sided with the Republican faction, at a time when the Republican Cortes were about to approve the Statute of Autonomy for the Basque Country.
• The rebel faction, which called itself the «Nationalist faction», was organized around part of the high military command, initially institutionalized in the National Defense Junta, which was replaced after the appointment of Francisco Franco as Generalísimo and Head of the Government of the State. Politically, it was made up of the fascist Falange Española, the Carlists, the Alfonsine monarchists of Renovación Española and a large part of the voters of the CEDA, the Regionalist League and other conservative groups. Socially it was supported by those classes who felt that their position was endangered by the Popular Front's victory at the polls; by the Catholic Church, beset by the religious persecution unleashed by the left as soon as the conflict broke out; and by small landowners fearful of a «revolution of the proletariat». In the less industrialized or primarily agricultural regions, the rebels were also supported by numerous peasants and workers of firm religious convictions.

Both factions committed, and mutually accused each other of committing, serious crimes at the front and in the rear, such as sacas of prisoners, paseos, disappearances of people or extrajudicial tribunals. The Franco dictatorship investigated and severely punished the criminal acts committed in the Republican zone, even going so far as to open a Causa General, all with scant procedural guarantees. For their part, the crimes of the victors were never investigated or prosecuted during Francoism, even though some historians and jurists maintain that there was a genocide in which, in addition to subverting the institutional order, an attempt was made to exterminate the political opposition.

The consequences of the Civil War have largely shaped the subsequent history of Spain, being exceptionally dramatic and long-lasting: the demographic ones —mortality and a fall in the birth rate that marked the population pyramid for generations— as well as the material ones —destruction of cities, of the economic structure and of the artistic heritage—, the intellectual ones —the end of the so-called Silver Age of letters and sciences— and the political ones —the repression in the rear of both zones, maintained by the victors with greater or lesser intensity throughout Francoism, and the Republican exile—, which persisted well beyond the prolonged postwar period, including the geopolitical exceptionality of the survival of the Franco regime until 1975.

Background

Cover of the Constitution of 1931

Main article: Second Spanish Republic

In January 1930 General Miguel Primo de Rivera acknowledged the failure of the Dictatorship he had established in September 1923 with the support of the King, and resigned. Alfonso XIII then appointed General Dámaso Berenguer as President of the government, but he failed to return the monarchy to «constitutional normality» (this period was known as the «Dictablanda») and was replaced in February 1931 by Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar, who called municipal elections for Sunday, April 12. The elections were won in the cities by the republican-socialist candidacies that had emerged from the Pact of San Sebastián of August 1930, and on Tuesday, April 14, King Alfonso XIII, faced with the hesitation of the Civil Guard and the Army to use force to halt the massive pro-republican demonstrations flooding the main cities, left the country. In Madrid the republican-socialist «revolutionary committee» proclaimed the Republic and assumed power as the Provisional Government presided over by Niceto Alcalá-Zamora.

During the first biennium of the Second Spanish Republic the new republican Constitution was approved, and the coalition government of left-wing republicans and socialists presided over by Manuel Azaña —formed on December 15, 1931, after the Radical Republican Party refused to take part in it because it disagreed with the socialists remaining in government— deepened the reforms begun by the Provisional Government, whose purpose was to modernize Spain's economic, social, political and cultural reality. The new government was formed after the election of Niceto Alcalá Zamora as President of the Republic, who confirmed Manuel Azaña as President of the Government.

Nevertheless, the broad range of reforms undertaken by the «social-Azañist» government met with great resistance among the social and corporate groups that it was trying to «unseat» from their acquired positions: the landowners, the big businessmen, financiers and employers, the Catholic Church, the religious orders, Catholic opinion, monarchist opinion and «Africanist» militarism. The latter organized a failed coup d'état in August 1932 headed by General Sanjurjo. But there was also resistance to republican reformism from the opposite direction: that of out-and-out revolutionism, led by the anarchist organizations (the CNT and the FAI). For them, the Republic represented the «bourgeois order» (without much difference from the previous political regimes, the Dictatorship and the Monarchy) that had to be destroyed in order to achieve «libertarian communism». Thus a series of anarchist uprisings took place (in January and December 1933), which were harshly repressed.

The coalition headed by Azaña broke up and elections were called for November 1933, in which women voted for the first time; they were won by the Catholic right of the CEDA and by the republican center-right of the Radical Republican Party of Alejandro Lerroux. The latter formed a government with the aim of «rectifying» the reforms of the first biennium, not annulling them, in order to bring into the Republic the «accidentalist» right (which did not openly proclaim itself monarchist, although its sympathies lay with the Monarchy, nor republican either) represented by the CEDA and the Agrarian Party, which gave it their parliamentary support. When the CEDA entered the government in October 1934, a failed socialist insurrection broke out which only took hold in Asturias for a couple of weeks (the only place where the CNT also took part), although it too was finally put down by the intervention of the Army, which brought the colonial troops of the Regulares and legionnaires from the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco; once it was over, a harsh repression followed. The same happened with the proclamation by the President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Lluís Companys, of the «Catalan State» within the «Spanish Federal Republic» on October 6.

The Revolution of October 1934 heightened fears within the Radical-CEDA government that a future attempt at a «Bolshevik revolution» might end up succeeding. This increased the pressure on the Radical Party to pursue a more decidedly legislative or counterrevolutionary policy. Ultimately, the events of October 1934 convinced the CEDA that it was necessary to attain the presidency of the government in order to carry out the «authoritarian turn» that, in their view, the regime needed. The leader of the CEDA, José María Gil Robles, found his opportunity when the Straperlo scandal and the Nombela affair broke, sinking Lerroux and the Radical Republican Party, from which it would never recover. But the President of the Republic, Alcalá Zamora, refused to hand power to an «accidentalist» force that had not proclaimed its loyalty to the Republic and entrusted the formation of a government to an independent he trusted, Manuel Portela Valladares, who on December 15 formed a republican center-right cabinet that held executive power until Alcalá Zamora called elections for February 16, 1936.

The result of the February 1936 elections was a very even distribution of votes, with a slight advantage for the left (47.1%) over the right (45.6%), while the center was limited to 5.3%. But since the electoral system favored the winners, this translated into a comfortable majority for the Popular Front coalition.

The Popular Front Government (February–July 1936)

On Wednesday, February 19, Manuel Azaña, the leader of the Popular Front, formed a government which, in accordance with what had been agreed with the socialists, was made up solely of left-wing republican ministers (nine from Republican Left and three from Republican Union). One of its first decisions was to move the most anti-republican generals away from the centers of power: General Manuel Goded was posted to the Military Command of the Balearic Islands; General Francisco Franco, to that of the Canary Islands; General Emilio Mola to the military governorship of Pamplona. Other prominent generals such as Luis Orgaz, Rafael Villegas, Joaquín Fanjul and Andrés Saliquet were placed on the unassigned list.

The most urgent measure the new government had to take was the amnesty of those convicted for the events of October 1934, thus «legalizing» the storming of several prisons by crowds, but also fulfilling the main point of the Popular Front's electoral program. Another urgent measure was to restore to their posts the mayors and councilors elected in 1931 and replaced during the conservative biennium. On February 28 the government decreed not only the readmission of all workers dismissed for political and trade-union reasons related to the events of 1934, but, under pressure from the unions, it also ordered companies to compensate these workers for unpaid wages. Likewise, the government of the Generalitat of Catalonia was restored, its members having left prison also as beneficiaries of the amnesty.

The «agrarian question» was another problem the new government had to tackle urgently because of the intense peasant mobilization that was taking place with the determined support of the restored local authorities and that threatened to provoke serious conflicts in the countryside, especially in Extremadura. Thus on April 19 the Minister of Agriculture, Mariano Ruiz Funes, presented several bills, among them one repealing the Law of Reform of the Agrarian Reform of August 1935, which became law on June 11, so that the Agrarian Reform Law of 1932 was once again fully in force. Thanks to several decrees and to this law, some 115,000 peasants were settled between March and July 1936, more than in the previous three years. However, the high level of conflict in the countryside continued, due above all to the attitude of the landowners and to the radicalization of the peasant organizations, all of which resulted in violent incidents. The most serious case occurred in Yeste (Albacete), where at the end of May 1936 «the arrest of some peasants who were trying to cut down trees on a private estate led to a bloody clash between the Civil Guard and the day laborers, in which one guard and 17 peasants died, several of them murdered in cold blood by the agents».

The activity of parliament was paralyzed for almost the whole month of April due to the process of removal of the President of the Republic Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, initiated and approved by the left, and his replacement by Manuel Azaña, who was invested in his new office on May 10, 1936, being replaced at the head of the government by his fellow member of the Republican Left party, Santiago Casares Quiroga, who would in turn take over the War portfolio.

Santiago Casares Quiroga in 1931

The new Casares Quiroga government continued the reformist policy already begun by the Azaña government, which consisted fundamentally of bringing back into force the decrees that had been repealed or modified during the Radical-CEDA biennium, to which some others were added.

One of the problems the government had to face was the wave of strikes, often called and sustained by joint committees of the CNT and the UGT, in many of which there was talk of revolution, but neither the UGT nor the CNT was preparing any insurrectionary movement after the repeated failures of 1932, 1933 and 1934, and the only possibility of one occurring would be in response to an attempted military coup.

Another of the problems of the Casares Quiroga government was the internal division of the PSOE, the most important party of the Popular Front, which pitted the «Prietist» and «Largo Caballerist» sectors against each other, since Francisco Largo Caballero, who dominated the UGT and the PSOE parliamentary group, continued to oppose the socialists entering the government and to advocate an understanding among the «workers' organizations» in order to await the moment when the failure of the «bourgeois republicans» would facilitate the conquest of power by the working class. Another problem was that the sector of the CEDA led by Gil Robles was leaning toward boycotting the republican institutions and supporting the position defended by the monarchist right of the National Bloc of José Calvo Sotelo, which openly advocated the violent rupture of the constitutional order by means of a military coup d'état, in whose preparation they were already collaborating (for their part, the Carlist monarchists accelerated the formation of their requeté militias with a view to the military uprising, with whose leaders they maintained contacts).

Political violence

The Popular Front governments also had to deal with an increase in political violence provoked by the fascist party Falange Española —which at the beginning of 1936 was a marginal political force, but after the triumph of the Popular Front received an avalanche of new members from among young right-wingers ready for violent action— and by the response given to it by the left-wing organizations. The first major attack committed by the Falangists was the one perpetrated on March 12, 1936, against the socialist deputy and «father» of the Constitution of 1931, Luis Jiménez de Asúa, in which he was unharmed but his bodyguard, the policeman Jesús Gisbert, died. The response of the Azaña government was to ban the party and, on March 14, to arrest its top leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, but going underground did not prevent it from continuing to perpetrate attacks and take part in brawls with young socialists and communists. It also continued its work of violence and intimidation against the elements of the institutional order of the Republic. On the night of April 13, two Falangist gunmen murdered in the street Manuel Pedregal, a magistrate of the Supreme Court, in reprisal for having acted as reporting judge in the trial for the attempted murder of Jiménez de Asúa. The judge had already received death threats for this reason beforehand. Several of those involved fled to France in an airplane piloted by the then Falange collaborator Juan Antonio Ansaldo. In fact, the Falange circulated blacklists of judges with the purpose of intimidating them, and its clandestine bulletin No Importa threatened magistrates such as Ursicino Gómez Carbajo or Ramón Enrique Cardónigo, who had taken part in cases with rulings unfavorable to its interests.

The most significant incidents took place on April 14 and 15. On the 14th a military parade was held on the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid to commemorate the Fifth Anniversary of the Republic. A device exploded next to the main stand and several shots followed, killing Anastasio de los Reyes, a Second Lieutenant of the Civil Guard who was there in plain clothes, and wounding several spectators. Right-wingers and left-wingers accused each other of the attack. The next day the funeral of the Second Lieutenant was held, which turned into an anti-republican demonstration attended by the deputies José María Gil Robles, leader of the CEDA, and José Calvo Sotelo, leader of the monarchist right, as well as by army officers and armed Falangists. Shots were fired at the procession from various places and were returned, leaving a toll of six dead and three wounded. One of the dead was the student Andrés Sáenz de Heredia, a Falangist and first cousin of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. A young Traditionalist (Carlist), José Llaguno Acha, was also wounded, and a crowd tried to lynch Lieutenant José del Castillo Sáenz de Tejada, who was accused of shooting him.

Between April and July, the attacks and brawls carried out by Falangists caused more than fifty victims among the organizations of the workers' left, most of them in Madrid. Some forty members of the Falange died in those incidents or in reprisal attacks by the left-wing organizations. Religious buildings were also targets of violence (a hundred churches and convents were attacked and set on fire), although among the victims of political violence from February to July there was no member of the clergy.

The rise in political violence and the growth of paramilitary youth organizations both on the right (Falangist militias, Carlist requetés) and on the left (militias of the socialist, communist and anarchist youth), and among the Basque and Catalan nationalists (militias of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and of the PNV) —although they were not armed and their main activity was marching— gave part of public opinion, especially conservative opinion, the perception that the Popular Front government presided over by Santiago Casares Quiroga was incapable of maintaining public order, which served as a justification for the military «show of force» that was being prepared. This perception was also fed by the Catholic and far-right press, which incited rebellion against the «disorder» it attributed to the «tyrannical Government of the Popular Front», «enemy of God and of the Church», taking advantage of the fact that the confrontation between clericalism and anticlericalism returned to the forefront after the February elections, with constant disputes over symbolic matters such as the ringing of bells or manifestations of worship outside churches, such as processions or Catholic funerals. Likewise, in parliament, the right-wing deputies, notably Calvo Sotelo and Gil Robles, accused the government of having lost control of public order.

José Calvo Sotelo speaking at a rally at the Urumea fronton (San Sebastián), in 1935.

On the night of Sunday, July 12, Lieutenant of the Assault Guard and instructor of the socialist militias José del Castillo Sáenz de Tejada was murdered on Fuencarral Street in Madrid as he was heading to his post at the Pontejos Barracks, probably by far-right gunmen belonging to the Traditionalist Communion (or to Falange Española). Lieutenant Castillo was well known for his left-wing activism, and the phrase «I do not shoot at the people» was attributed to him after he had refused to take part in the repression of the Asturian Revolution, an act of rebellion that would cost him a year in prison.

In reprisal, Lieutenant Castillo's fellow policemen, led by Captain of the Civil Guard Fernando Condés, kidnapped from his own home and murdered in the early hours of the following day José Calvo Sotelo, leader of the «Alfonsine» monarchists (who had nothing to do with the murder of Lieutenant Castillo), and left the body in the morgue of the Almudena cemetery. At Calvo Sotelo's funeral, the monarchist leader Antonio Goicoechea solemnly swore «to devote our life to this threefold task: to imitate your example, to avenge your death and to save Spain». For his part, the leader of the CEDA, José María Gil Robles, told the left-wing deputies in the Cortes that «the blood of Mr. Calvo Sotelo is upon you» and accused the government of bearing «moral responsibility» for the crime for «sponsoring violence».

According to the most comprehensive study carried out on the fatalities resulting from political violence between February and July 1936, before the coup d'état began, there were a total of 189 incidents and 262 deaths, 112 of them caused by the intervention of the forces of public order. Of the 262 victims, 148 were left-wing militants, 50 right-wing, 19 from the forces of public order and 45 unidentified. That study also establishes that the number of fatalities caused by political violence decreased over those five months.

The political violence of the months of peacetime Popular Front government, from February to July 1936, was later used by the victors in the Civil War as a justification for their uprising. Today the debate remains open, although most historians are of the opinion that one cannot in any way speak of a «tragic spring» in which the Popular Front government had lost control of the situation. And the conclusion of most of them is clear: «The real political destabilization in the spring of 1936 in no way explains the military uprising [of July 1936], much less justifies it». «Spanish politics and society showed unmistakable signs of crisis, which does not necessarily mean that the only way out was a civil war».

During the first months of 1936 a polarization of Spanish politics took place, at whose extremes stood the revolutionary left and the fascist right, and in between a moderate left and a republican right, together with an anticlerical center and a right with a strong Catholic and monarchist component (which represented many military men, landowners and the Catholic hierarchy, who saw their privileged position and their concept of the unity of Spain endangered). This was a division that could be traced back to the 19th century, when the difficult process of change began in 1808 to put an end to the absolutism that was holding the country back, maintaining sharp economic differences between the privileged and the unprivileged, and which nineteenth-century moderantism only partially managed to overcome. The result was a rural population divided between anarchist day laborers and small landowners clinging to (and dominated by) the caciques and the Church; conformist bureaucrats and a working class with very low wages and, therefore, with revolutionary tendencies typical of the new century, which made the division very pronounced among the poorer classes as well. Also coming from the 19th century was the tradition that problems were only settled through pronunciamientos. It is not surprising, then, that in a Spain marked by the recent dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and failed attempts such as those of José Sanjurjo, there was once again saber-rattling and a plan to overthrow the newly established Government was feared. Events would prove the pessimists right.

The trigger: the coup d'état of July 1936

Main article: July 1936 coup d'état in Spain

The military conspiracy

Route of the Dragon Rapide, the airplane that took Francisco Franco to Tetouan, where he took command of the rebel troops.

As soon as the Popular Front's victory in the elections became known, there was a first attempt at a «show of force» by the right to try to stop the handover of power to the victors. It was Gil Robles himself who first tried, unsuccessfully, to get the acting President of the government Manuel Portela Valladares to declare a «state of war» and annul the elections. He was followed by General Franco, still Chief of the General Staff of the Army, who went ahead and gave the relevant orders to the military commanders to declare a state of war (which according to the Public Order Law of 1933 meant that power passed to the military authorities), but he was overruled by the still head of government Portela Valladares and by the Minister of War, General Nicolás Molero.

On March 8, 1936, a meeting of several generals took place in Madrid, at the home of a friend of Gil Robles (Emilio Mola, Luis Orgaz Yoldi, Villegas, Joaquín Fanjul, Francisco Franco, Ángel Rodríguez del Barrio, Miguel García de la Herrán, Manuel González Carrasco, Andrés Saliquet and Miguel Ponte, together with Colonel José Enrique Varela and Lieutenant Colonel Valentín Galarza, as the man of the UME), at which they agreed to organize a «military uprising» that would overthrow the newly constituted Popular Front government and «restore order at home and Spain's international prestige». It was also agreed that the government would be exercised by a Military Junta presided over by General Sanjurjo, who at that time was in exile in Portugal.

From the end of April, it was General Mola who took over the leadership of the coup plot (thus shifting the center of the conspiracy from Madrid to Pamplona), adopting the code name «the Director». He continued with the plan to constitute a Military Junta presided over by General Sanjurjo, and began to draft and circulate a series of circulars or «Confidential instructions» in which he gradually outlined the complex plot that would carry out the coup d'état. He issued the first of the five instructions on May 25, and in it the idea already appeared that the coup would have to be accompanied by violent repression.

Mola managed to commit numerous garrisons to the coup, thanks also to the clandestine network of the UME, but he had doubts about the success of the coup in the key place, Madrid, and also about Catalonia, Andalusia and Valencia. Thus, the problem for the military men involved was that, unlike in the coup d'état of 1923, they now did not have the whole of the Army (nor the Civil Guard nor the other security forces) to back it. A second difference with respect to 1923 was that the attitude of the workers' and peasants' organizations would not be one of passivity in the face of the military coup; rather, as they had announced, they would unleash a revolution. For these reasons the date of the military coup was postponed again and again, and for this reason, moreover, General Mola, «the Director», sought the support of the militias of the anti-republican parties (requetés and Falangists) and the financial backing of the right-wing parties. The Casares Quiroga government received news from various sources of what was being plotted, but did not act forcefully against the conspirators.

Maps representing the plans outlined by Mola to carry out the coup d'état that would overthrow the Second Republic.

At the beginning of July 1936 the preparation of the military coup was almost complete, although General Mola acknowledged that «enthusiasm for the cause has not yet reached the necessary degree of exaltation» and accused the Carlists of continuing to raise difficulties by still demanding «inadmissible concessions». General Emilio Mola's plan was a coordinated uprising of all the committed garrisons, which would impose a state of war in their districts, beginning with the Army of Africa, which between July 5 and 12 carried out maneuvers at the Llano Amarillo where the details of the uprising in the Protectorate of Morocco were finalized. Since it was foreseen that in Madrid it would be difficult for the coup to succeed on its own (the uprising in the capital would be under the command of General Fanjul), it was planned that a column led by Mola himself would head from the north toward Madrid to support the uprising of the capital's garrison. And in case all of that failed, it was also planned that General Franco, after raising the Canary Islands in revolt, would travel from there to the Protectorate of Morocco aboard the Dragon Rapide airplane —chartered in London on July 6 by the correspondent of the newspaper ABC Luis Bolín thanks to money provided by the financier Juan March— in order to take command of the colonial troops, cross the Strait of Gibraltar and advance on Madrid. Once the government of the Republic had been deposed, a military dictatorship would be established following the model of the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, at the head of which the exiled General Sanjurjo would be placed. «The rebels carried out their action claiming that they were rising against a revolution that was absolutely non-existent at the time they acted; they invented false documents, composed by Tomás Borrás, which spoke of a Soviet government that was being prepared, and in fact what they represented was the defense of the positions of the old ruling classes, the struggle against the social reforms, more or less far-reaching, that the Popular Front was setting in motion again».

The murder of José Calvo Sotelo in the early hours of July 13 accelerated the commitment of the Carlists and also of the CEDA to the uprising, and finished convincing the military men who still had doubts, among them, according to Paul Preston, General Francisco Franco. In addition, General Mola decided to take advantage of the shock that the double crime had caused in the country, and on the 14th he brought forward the date of the uprising, which was set for July 18 and 19, 1936.

The coup of July 17 to 20

On the morning of July 17 in Melilla, the two colonels and other officers who were aware of the military uprising met in the cartographic department and drew up plans to occupy the public buildings on the 18th, plans which they communicated to the Falangist leaders. One of the local leaders of the Falange informed the local leader of Republican Union, and this information reached General Romerales, Military Commander of Melilla, who in turn informed Casares Quiroga. In the afternoon Romerales sent a patrol of soldiers and assault guards to search the cartographic department. The Colonel in command of it delayed the search and called the Legion barracks, from where a group of legionnaires was sent to him. Faced with them, the patrol surrendered and the rebels proceeded to arrest Romerales (who was shot together with the government delegate and the Mayor of Melilla, who had resisted the rebellion), proclaimed a state of war and began the uprising ahead of time, informing their comrades in the Protectorate of Morocco that they had been discovered. This caused the planned date to be brought forward in Morocco. Over the following three days the coup spread to the garrisons of the peninsula, the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands.

Situation on July 23, 1936, after the partial failure of the coup d'état. In blue, the areas controlled by the rebels.

The rebel military did not manage to achieve their main objective of seizing the nerve center of power, Madrid, nor the large cities such as Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao, Málaga or Murcia (although they did control Seville, Valladolid, Zaragoza and Córdoba), but they dominated nearly half of Spanish territory, since they controlled practically the northern third of the peninsula (Galicia, León, Old Castile, Álava, Navarre, a large part of the Province of Cáceres, including the capital, and the western half of Aragon, including the three provincial capitals), except for the Cantabrian strip formed by Asturias, Santander, Biscay and Gipuzkoa, which was isolated from the rest of the Republican zone, and Catalonia. In addition, they dominated the Andalusian cities of Seville (where General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano seized command of the 2nd Organic Division with unusual determination), Córdoba and Cádiz, connected to each other by a narrow strip (as well as the city of Granada, but isolated from the rest), plus the whole of the Protectorate of Morocco and the two archipelagos, the Canary Islands (except the island of La Palma) and the Balearic Islands (except Menorca). Outside this area they controlled certain isolated places and points of resistance within the Republican zone, such as the city of Oviedo (which withstood a siege by the Republicans for 90 days, until the entry of Francoist troops on October 17), the Simancas barracks in Gijón, the Alcázar of Toledo or the sanctuary of the Virgen de la Cabeza in Andújar. This Spain controlled by the rebels was in general «inland, rural Spain, of more backward social forms, of large and medium-sized agrarian landowners, and with an extensive agrarian proletariat as well».

From the places where the uprising had triumphed, the offensives of the rebel troops set out to carry out what «Nationalist» propaganda called the «Reconquista», to take the cities in the hands of the Republic or to relieve the places in rebel hands besieged by government troops, as in the cases of the siege of Oviedo and of the Alcázar of Toledo.

In the rebel zone, the death in an airplane accident of the man who was to be the leader of the rebellion, General Sanjurjo, led the rebel generals to decide on Thursday, July 23, to create a National Defense Junta, which would be constituted the following day in Burgos, and which would be made up of Generals Miguel Cabanellas —who was appointed President of the Junta as the most senior general among the rebels—, Andrés Saliquet, Miguel Ponte, Emilio Mola and Fidel Dávila, as well as Colonel Federico Montaner and Colonel Moreno Calderón. Decree No. 1 published by the Junta established that it assumed «all the powers of the State» and that it would represent the country before foreign powers, although in the following weeks no country recognized it, and they continued to regard the Madrid government presided over by the left-wing republican José Giral as the legitimate government of Spain. On July 27, 1936, the first squadron of Italian airplanes sent by Benito Mussolini arrived in Spain.

The Republican forces, for their part, managed to put down the uprising in more than half of Spain, including all the industrialized areas, thanks in part to the participation of the newly armed militias of socialists, communists and anarchists, as well as to the loyalty of most of the Assault Guard and, in the case of Barcelona, of the Civil Guard. The military governor of Cartagena, Toribio Martínez Cabrera, was a sympathizer of the Popular Front, and the sailors were also opposed to the military coup, which, together with the popular disturbances of the 19th and 20th, caused the coup movement to fail at the naval base of Cartagena and in the rest of the province of Murcia.

The zone loyal to the Republic occupied, grosso modo, the eastern half of the Peninsula: the eastern part of Aragon (except the three capitals), Catalonia, Valencia, Murcia, Eastern Andalusia (except the city of Granada), Madrid, New Castile and La Mancha. In the west it controlled the provinces of Badajoz and Huelva. Isolated from this zone was the Cantabrian strip formed by Asturias (except Oviedo and Gijón), Santander, Biscay and Gipuzkoa. The loyal territory was larger in extent than the rebel one and consisted, in general, of the areas of Spain that were «socially more advanced, with a significant urban population, more industrialized and with modern organized nuclei of the labor movement».

Thus, the outcome of the uprising was uncertain, since it succeeded in some places and failed in others, so that Spain was divided into two zones: one controlled by the military men who had risen against the Republic (the rebel zone) and another that remained loyal to the government (the Republican zone). Approximately a third of Spanish territory had passed into rebel hands, so neither of the two sides had absolute supremacy over the other. The attempt to overthrow the Republic at a single stroke had failed resoundingly. Both sides prepared for the inevitable: a confrontation that was going to bleed Spain for three long years. The Spanish Civil War had just begun.

Military operations

General map of the course of the war.
Legend
Initial rebel zone – July 1936
Rebel advance up to September 1936
Rebel advance up to October 1937
Rebel advance up to November 1938
Rebel advance up to February 1939
Last zone under Republican control
Main rebel centers
Main Republican centers
Land battles
Naval battles
Bombed cities
Concentration camps
Massacres
Refugee camps

The two armies

Although it is a highly controversial subject, most historians estimate that 70% of the 15,000 commanders and officers on active duty in 1936 fought on the rebel side (1,236 were shot or imprisoned for being disaffected toward the side that prevailed in each place), whereas, by contrast, most of the 100 generals did not rise up. Of the 210,000 enlisted soldiers and non-commissioned officers who theoretically made up the regular army in 1936, some 120,000 remained in the rebel zone, but what was most decisive was that among them were the 47,000 who made up the Army of Africa, which constituted the best troops of the Spanish army. The Civil Guard, for its part, was deeply divided between those loyal to the Republic and those in rebellion against it.

If the evolution over the course of the war is considered, the figures are very favorable to the rebels, for while during that time the roster of commanders and officers on the rebel side kept growing until it reached 14,104 men on April 1, 1939, that of the Republican side kept shrinking until it was reduced to 4,771, mainly because many commanders and officers went over to the opposing side during the war. As the historian Francisco Alía Miranda, of the University of Castilla–La Mancha, has pointed out, it must be kept in mind that most of the 18,000 officers in Spain in July 1936 applauded the coup, since a conservative, corporatist and militarist mentality predominated among them. But there is another factor that explains the decrease in the number of commanders and officers in the Republican zone, namely that more than half of those who remained in that zone after the coup refused to obey the Republican authorities, something that did not happen on the rebel side. Thus, while on the rebel side only 258 military men were shot or expelled from the Army, on the Republican side 4,450 were expelled, of whom 1,729 were shot. And even on this side many officers were not given command of troops because they were distrusted, and they held only bureaucratic posts.

Thus, the rebel side did not have to build its army; rather, from the very first moment it could count on the military units (and public order forces) that had risen up during the coup, already organized and led by their commanders. Foremost among them was the army of the Protectorate of Morocco, the so-called Army of Africa, made up of the Foreign Legion and the Regulares (native Moorish troops commanded by Spanish officers), which constituted the most experienced military force of the entire Spanish army. On the other hand, the Carlist militias (requetés) and the Falangist militias that supported the rebels were integrated into the army, of which they considered themselves allies and not enemies (unlike what happened on the Republican side, where the workers' militias, especially the anarchist confederal militias, always distrusted the military institution, with the exception of the Communist militias).

On the rebel side the army quickly achieved unity of command and completely dominated civilian life in the rebel zone, which they called the national zone. The death in a plane crash in the first days of the coup of General Sanjurjo, the officer chosen by his comrades to lead the uprising, meant that command in the rebel zone was then divided between Generals Emilio Mola and Francisco Franco, but only two months later, on October 1, General Franco assumed sole military and political command (General Mola died in another plane crash the following year, on June 3, 1937).

"The phenomenon of the military centralization of the war effort in the rebel zone meant that nothing resembling political disunity, rancor between political groups or a lack of confidence in the commanders and leaders of the campaign was permitted, all of which manifested itself especially in the Republican rear in the north, in Aragon and in Catalonia, which is where the war was really lost. (...) As the Republic was losing the war, hunger and deprivation increased in the rear, creating a hellish situation, with refugees, bombings, shortages and cold."

As for foreign aid, the rebel side received weapons of every kind and aircraft practically from the first day from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, to which complete military units were soon added (the German Condor Legion and the Italian CTV) in a continuous flow that never stopped throughout the war.

The Republican side, for its part, could count on practically no complete, organized and disciplined military unit with all its commanders and non-commissioned officers, and during the first months the military force that opposed the rebel army, after the decision of the government of José Giral to discharge the troops to prevent the uprising from spreading, consisted of improvised columns made up of scattered units and of the militias of the workers' organizations; when these were commanded by career officers, the latter often aroused suspicions of treason among the combatants. It was after the formation of the government of Largo Caballero on September 5, 1936 that the process of building a true army began, with the militarization of the militias and their integration into the Mixed Brigades, the first step toward the creation of the Popular Army, which was only achieved after overcoming the crisis of the "May Days of 1937" and the subsequent formation of the government of Juan Negrín. But the Republican army always had a structural problem that was difficult to solve: the lack of professional commanders (according to Michael Alpert's calculations, only 14% of the military men listed in the Anuario Militar of 1936 were still serving in the army of the Republic in 1938). This problem was especially pressing in the case of the Navy. The Republican general Vicente Rojo acknowledged as much, writing:

We have created an army in name, with all the nomenclature and command system of a regular army... but we have only climbed the first steps toward reaching the summit.

Furthermore, on the Republican side unity of command was only achieved (and was never complete) in mid-1937, when the Popular Army was fully structured, and, on the other hand, only from that moment did military needs take precedence over those of civilian life (marked by the Social Revolution of 1936). And also, unlike on the rebel side, it was the government that made the decisions, though almost always following the recommendations of the Chief of the General Staff, Colonel and later General Vicente Rojo, and of other loyal officers.

As for foreign aid, because France and Great Britain did not come to its aid and, moreover, promoted the pact that gave birth to the Non-Intervention Committee (whose ban on supplying arms to either of the contending sides was complied with by neither Germany nor Italy, despite their having signed the agreement), the Republic had to acquire war matériel wherever it could, often resorting to arms dealers who sometimes sold it outdated or very poorly maintained matériel at astronomical prices. This made it dependent on the supplies provided by the Soviet Union, after Stalin overcame his doubts about aiding the Spanish Republicans. This war matériel (automatic weapons, tanks and aircraft), accompanied by Soviet instructors and military advisers, together with the International Brigades recruited by the Communist International or Comintern, did not begin to arrive until October 1936, and thereafter the successive deliveries were interrupted on several occasions depending on the European international situation (which determined, for example, whether the French government opened or closed the border) and on the growing blockade imposed by the rebel Navy on Republican ports.

Coins minted by the sides in the conflict.

25 céntimos of 1937 from the rebel side.

5 céntimos of 1937 from the Republican side.

July–October 1936: advance on Madrid and the Gipuzkoa campaign

The front four months after the military rebellion. Legend
Zone controlled by the rebels
Spanish Republic
Main rebel centers
Main centers of the Republic

As soon as it became known on the afternoon of July 17 that the military uprising had triumphed in the Protectorate of Morocco, the Minister of the Navy José Giral (who two days later would end up heading the government of the Republic after the resignation of Santiago Casares Quiroga and the "lightning" government of Diego Martínez Barrio) ordered several warships of the Navy to head for the Strait of Gibraltar to blockade the strongholds of Ceuta, Larache and Melilla and thus prevent the colonial troops from crossing to the peninsula. From the base of Cartagena the destroyers Almirante Valdés, Lepanto and Sánchez Barcáiztegui set out, with orders to sail at full power to the strait. Because the crews of those ships rebelled against their officers, who were committed to the coup, the rebels were initially unable to make use of the Army of Africa, made up of the Foreign Legion and the regulares (troops formed by Moroccans commanded by Spanish officers).

On the same day, July 19, on which the rebellion was put down in Madrid, several columns composed of militiamen and troops from the military units that had been disbanded by order of the government, to prevent them from joining the uprising, left the capital for the Sierra de Guadarrama. There they succeeded in preventing the rebel columns sent by General Mola from Castile and León and from Navarre from crossing the mountain passes of the Madrid sierra and reaching the capital. The northern front of Madrid thus remained stabilized until the end of the war. This first campaign of the Civil War became known as the Battle of Guadarrama.

From Barcelona, likewise once the rebellion had been put down, several columns quickly formed by the workers' organizations and the left-wing parties set out for Aragon. Together with the columns of the POUM and the PSUC (and one from Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya that left from Tarragona), the largest contingent was contributed by the confederal militias of the anarchist organizations (CNT, FAI, Juventudes Libertarias). The first and most numerous was the Durruti Column, so called because it was headed by the FAI leader Buenaventura Durruti, which left Barcelona on the 24th in the direction of Zaragoza. The likewise anarchist Ascaso Column and Los Aguiluchos de la FAI Column set out in the direction of Huesca. But none of them managed to achieve their objectives of liberating the three Aragonese capitals (the Iron Column had set out from Valencia toward Teruel), and the Aragon front became stabilized, although the anarchists carried the revolution to the eastern half of Aragon, where they created the Regional Defence Council of Aragon.

An expedition to the Balearic Islands, of which only Menorca remained Republican, was also organized from the Ciudad Condal. The operation, begun on August 8 under the command of Captain Bayo, had initial success in managing to occupy a strip of the coast of Majorca, but the Majorca landing ended in complete failure. Another failure was the Córdoba Offensive, "where the situation was undecided, which constituted one of the few Republican strategic initiatives." It was organized from Albacete by General Miaja, whose chief of staff was Lieutenant Colonel José Asensio Torrado, but the advance soon stalled (General Miaja set up his headquarters in Montoro) and the Republicans were unable to reconquer western Andalusia, in the hands of the rebels, especially after the arrival of the first units from the Protectorate of Morocco.

The blockade in which the Army of Africa found itself (the main fighting force the rebels had for taking Madrid, once General Mola's columns had been halted in the Sierra de Guadarrama) was overcome thanks to the rapid aid the rebels received from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. On July 26 the first twenty German Junkers transport aircraft, which could easily be converted into bombers, arrived in Morocco, accompanied by fighters, and four days later, on July 30, the first nine Italian fighter-bombers. With these air assets General Franco, chief of the rebel forces in Morocco, was able to organize an airlift to the peninsula to transport the legionnaires and the regulares, and also to achieve air superiority over the strait. Thus, on August 5 he was able to cross it with a small fleet that rebel propaganda called the "Victory Convoy". However, the complete unblocking of the passage of the strait would not come until later, when the Republican government decided to transfer most of its warships to the Cantabrian, which according to the historian Michael Alpert constituted "perhaps the greatest mistake of the Civil War." This decision was motivated, among other reasons, by the refusal of Great Britain, which had the most important naval war fleet in the Mediterranean, to allow the Republican government to stop neutral traffic bound for enemy territory, so that the Republican warships could not prevent German and Italian merchant ships from unloading war matériel in the ports of Ceuta, Melilla, Cádiz, Algeciras or Seville, controlled by the rebels.

Republican militiawomen taking a break from the fighting in the summer of 1936

On August 1 General Franco gave the order for the columns of legionnaires, Moorish regulares and volunteers to advance northward from Seville toward Madrid through Extremadura, with their left flank protected by the border of Portugal, whose Salazarist regime supported the rebels. By following this route to reach the capital, the two zones controlled by the rebels would be joined. Thus began the Extremadura Campaign. The so-called "Column of Death", so named because of the brutal repression it carried out in the Extremaduran towns it occupied, and whose most notable event was the Massacre of Badajoz, advanced rapidly at an average of 24 kilometers per day. On August 10 it took Mérida and on the 15th Badajoz, then establishing contact with the rebel forces of the north. The advance then turned northeast to reach the Tagus Valley, and on September 2 Talavera de la Reina fell, already in the Province of Toledo. The rapid advance of the rebels toward Madrid, together with the news of the imminent fall of Irun (with which the north would be completely isolated from the rest of the Republican zone), led Prime Minister José Giral, feeling lacking in support and authority, to submit his resignation to the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña. On September 5 a new government of "antifascist unity" was formed, headed by the socialist Francisco Largo Caballero, who personally took over the War portfolio, with the priority objective of organizing an army that could halt the rebels' advance and win the war.

The speed with which town after town fell during the advance through Extremadura and the Tagus was due mainly to the fact that the Army of Africa was made up of the best-trained and most battle-hardened troops (legionnaires and regulares), perhaps the only truly professional ones in the first chaotic months of the war. By contrast, the Republican forces were made up mostly of militiamen who lacked military training. "They were undisciplined and tended to flee in panic, abandoning their weapons, which consisted of rifles and odd pieces of artillery, since the disarray caused in the capital by the uprising did not permit adequate military planning. In July and August much military matériel was lost. By contrast, the rebels were increasingly armed with foreign matériel, in addition to what they took from the enemy." Moreover, the militiamen, the vast majority of whom came from the workers' organizations and the left-wing parties, distrusted the professional officers who sought to command them and, for ideological reasons, rejected military discipline and organization, with the exception of the Communists, who advocated the complete militarization of the militias and the creation of a Popular Army following the model of the Fifth Regiment they had organized.

Heinrich Himmler visiting the Alcázar of Toledo with José Moscardó in October 1940, a year and a half after the end of the civil war.

On September 21 the Army of Africa took the town of Maqueda, less than 100 kilometers from Madrid. That same day the rebel generals met on an estate near Salamanca to appoint General Franco as sole and supreme commander of the rebel forces. A week later they would meet again to settle the question of political command. In that interval, General Franco decided to divert the columns advancing on Madrid toward Toledo in order to lift the siege of the Alcázar of Toledo, where civil guards and a few cadets of the Infantry Academy under the command of its director, Colonel José Moscardó, had been resisting Republican attacks for two months. This decision, which according to some historians cost the rebels the chance to take Madrid before its defense was organized, has given rise to debate among historians. For a good number of them it was a decision more political than military, since it strengthened General Franco's prestige among his comrades at a time when the sole political command was already being discussed. "The Alcázar held a treasure of symbolic legitimacy: a military academy, the besieged resisting amid the ruins, with the walls of the mighty building half destroyed, taking refuge in the cellars. With its liberation, Franco received enormous political capital: the Alcázar was the symbol of the salvation of Spain which, like a martyr, rose again from the tomb to which her enemies had led her." It also had enormous propaganda value for the rebel cause. "The Francoists later made a myth of the Alcázar, whose main points—the episode of the conversations between Moscardó and his son in the hands of the besiegers, for example—are today completely discredited." However, some historians maintain that it also had a military motivation. "The usual explanation seems convincing: military comradeship and the propaganda value of rescuing those besieged in the Alcázar required lifting the siege as soon as possible. There may have been political motives, not separate from Franco's ambition to be generalissimo and civil chief, that dictated this heroic gesture. That said, taking Toledo first could be justified militarily: securing this city would make it possible to attack Madrid from the south and east, protecting the flanks along the Tagus and having two first-class highways instead of one." On the same day the siege was lifted, September 28, General Franco was appointed by his fellow rebels not only "generalissimo of the national land, sea and air forces," but also "head of the Government of the Spanish State, for as long as the war lasts."

On October 8, the Army of Africa reached San Martín de Valdeiglesias, some forty kilometers from Madrid, where it made contact with the rebel forces of the north under the command of General Emilio Mola, who had just completed the Gipuzkoa campaign after taking Irun on September 5 and San Sebastián on September 13, leaving the Republican north surrounded by land by the "Nationalists." Thus, at the beginning of October, the rebel forces had deployed in a semicircle around Madrid that started from Toledo in the south and reached the northwest about ten kilometers north of El Escorial, lying between 40 and 55 kilometers from the capital. Although the Republican forces put up greater resistance thanks to the military reorganization undertaken by the Largo Caballero government (with the formation of the Mixed Brigades, mostly commanded by career officers and into which the militias were incorporated, a militarization accompanied by the creation of the figure of the political commissar), the "Nationalist" forces kept tightening the semicircle that gripped the capital (while in the north, on October 17, they broke the siege of Oviedo) and at the beginning of November they reached the southern neighborhoods of Madrid. "The attack on Madrid marked the end of the first period of the war."

November 1936–March 1937: the Battle of Madrid and the capture of Málaga

Puente de los Franceses, over the Manzanares River. A contested bridge during the Battle of Madrid.

At the beginning of November the rebels took the capture of the country's capital for granted. Radio Lisboa went so far as to announce prematurely, early that month, the fall of the city (even narrating Franco's triumphal entry on a white horse). As early as November 5 the judicial column that was to take charge of the repression of the Republicans (eight courts-martial, sixteen investigating courts and an Audit Office of the Army of Occupation), commanded by Colonel Ángel Manzaneque y Feltrer, assembled in Navalcarnero—thirty kilometers from Madrid—to await the imminent victory of the Francoist troops.

On November 6, when it seemed that the rebel army was about to enter Madrid, the Largo Caballero government decided to move to Valencia, entrusting the defense of the city to General Miaja, who was to form a Madrid Defense Junta. "A hasty departure, kept secret, about which no public explanation of any kind was given." "Those who stayed in Madrid could interpret these events only as a shameful flight... above all because the people of Madrid were capable of organizing their own defense." Two days later the Battle of Madrid began.

Since the rebel forces were not superior to the Republican forces defending Madrid (some 23,000 soldiers), the penetration of the capital would have to be rapid and on a very narrow front. One column would cross the Manzanares River north of the Puente de los Franceses and advance through the Ciudad Universitaria of Madrid and then go down the Paseo de la Castellana. Another column would cross the Parque del Oeste and continue along the boulevards to reach the Plaza de Colón. And a third would cross the Rosales neighborhood to reach the Plaza de España and Calle Princesa. To support this advance, it was considered essential to take the hill of Garabitas in the Casa de Campo, where artillery could be placed to shell the city from there. The success of the operation depended on the Republicans believing that the attack would come from the south and concentrating their forces there, but on the night of November 7–8, precisely at the moment the Battle of Madrid was about to begin, Lieutenant Colonel Vicente Rojo, chief of staff of the defense of Madrid, learned of the attackers' plans thanks to papers found on the body of an Italian officer of the rebel army.

Between November 8 and 11 violent fighting took place in the Casa de Campo. On the 13th the rebels occupied the hill of Garabitas, and two days later they managed to cross the Manzanares River, pushing into the Ciudad Universitaria. But they could get no further thanks to the resistance put up by the Republican forces, reinforced by the arrival of the first International Brigades, of units of Soviet T-26 tanks (whose first intervention had taken place at the Battle of Seseña) and of 132 Russian "Moscas" and "Chatos" aircraft, which contested air superiority with the 117 aircraft of the German Condor Legion. On November 23 General Franco gave up continuing the fruitless frontal attack on the capital, and the front was stabilized that day.

Soviet T-26 tank used by the Republican forces

"The resistance of Madrid changed the character of the war. It would no longer be a conflict of rapid enveloping movements, but of large-scale battles, of tactical maneuvers to achieve strategic objectives, in which a few hundred meters of ground would have significance and whose model would be the First World War rather than the colonial campaigns, the only form of war the Spanish knew firsthand."

When the frontal attack failed, the rebels decided to envelop Madrid from the northwest, concentrating their forces to cut the La Coruña road and attempt to penetrate Madrid from there. In the first attempt, which took place at the end of November (first battle of the La Coruña road), they managed to advance only three of the seven kilometers planned, and the attack was halted. The second attempt took place in December (second battle of the La Coruña road) and also proved a failure. The third and last attempt (known as the third battle of the La Coruña road) took place at the beginning of January 1937 and constituted the "first important battle of the Civil War in open country." The rebels organized a substantial army, called the Reinforced Division of Madrid, which had Italian tanks, anti-tank batteries to counter the Soviet T-26s, and heavy artillery. Facing it, the Republicans deployed an army composed of five divisions, each with three brigades, although some were not complete and very few were commanded by career infantry officers (to command the five divisions they had to resort to two officers retired under the Azaña Law of 1931, two officers from the security forces, and a militiaman, the Communist Juan Modesto). Between January 6 and 9 the Reinforced Division attacked northward and then turned east on reaching the La Coruña road, but the Republican forces held out and the "Nationalists" had to abandon their advance.

Having failed in the attempt to envelop Madrid from the northwest, the rebels tried from the southeast, advancing toward the Jarama River to cut the vital Valencia road, along which most of Madrid's supplies arrived. The Battle of Jarama began on February 4 with the attack by units of the Spanish Legion and Moroccan regulares forces, supported by tanks, on the Republican positions. On February 11 they took the bridge of Pindoque, defended by the "André Marty" company of the XII International Brigade, which suffered 86 dead. The rebels continued their advance, but the Republican forces, supported by units of Soviet tanks led by General "Pablo" (General Rodimtsev) and by the air dominance of the Republican air force thanks to the "Chatos", forced them to halt and give up reaching the Arganda–Morata de Tajuña line. However, the Republicans could not recover the lost ground, and the front was stabilized on February 23, 1937. That was the end of the Battle of Jarama.

While the Battle of Jarama was beginning, the capture of Málaga by the rebels took place on February 8, 1937, thanks especially to the intervention of the motorized units of the division of Italian Fascist militias ("legionari" of the CTV, Corpo di Truppe Volontarie), which had begun to arrive in Spain two months earlier, sent by Mussolini, imbued with the idea that the Fascist soldier was far superior to the "Red" combatant. The attack had begun on January 14, 1937, advancing from Ronda in the north, along the coastal road advancing toward Marbella from the west (with the support of the two modern cruisers Baleares and Canarias, which bombarded from the sea and against which the destroyers and the older and more poorly armed Republican cruisers could do little), and from Granada to Alhama in the northeast. Although the Republican militias managed to contain the attack inland, on February 5 several columns converged on Málaga, led by the Italian forces. This forced the militias to withdraw to the capital, but there, lacking commanders, fortifications for defense and the support of the Republican fleet, they had no choice but to flee eastward along the Málaga–Almería coastal road, accompanied by thousands of civilians, while they were machine-gunned and bombed by the Italian air force and the rebel warships. Within a few days the rebels reached Motril, taking numerous prisoners and capturing large quantities of matériel. "For the Republican Government, the defeat demonstrated a profound inefficiency and a lack of moral energy, and it marked the beginning of the Communists' disillusionment with the performance of Largo Caballero as Head of Government and Minister of War. The fallout reached the commanders Largo had appointed, who were prosecuted as a result of the investigations carried out after the disaster."

Italian artillerymen of the rebel side firing a gun at the Battle of Guadalajara.

The third and last attempt to envelop Madrid was an initiative of the Italian Fascist Corpo di Truppe Volontarie (CTV), to which Generalissimo Franco agreed, and which gave rise to the Battle of Guadalajara. The Italian idea for the offensive was to attack Madrid from the northeast, heading for Guadalajara, and, once this city was taken, to cut the Valencia road and enter the capital. For this operation, in which the tactics of what the Italian generals called "lightning war" would be followed (the forecast was that within a week, between March 8 and 15, 1937, Madrid would be conquered), a good part of the 48,000 soldiers the CTV then had (organized into four divisions with 4,000 vehicles, 542 guns and 248 aircraft) was deployed.

Italian soldiers of the Corpo Truppe Volontarie during the Battle of Guadalajara

The attack began on March 8, and on the night of March 9–10 the Italian 3rd Division took Brihuega, and on the 11th Trijueque, meeting strong resistance from the Republican forces, among which were the XI and XII International Brigades (which included the Garibaldi Battalion, made up of anti-fascist Italians), supported by Soviet tank units and by the air force, and helped by the bad weather (the ground, muddy from the rain, hampered the advance of the vehicles and prevented the aircraft from taking off from the waterlogged fields, while the Republican aircraft did have usable airfields). On March 12 the Republican troops launched a counteroffensive that sent the Italian 3rd Division fleeing in demoralization and made it possible over the following days to recover Trijueque and Brihuega, seizing matériel abandoned by the Italians. On March 19 the Republican forces halted their advance and organized lines of defense. On March 23 the Battle of Guadalajara ended, which the liberal and left-wing international press called the "first victory against fascism," highlighting the fact that many "legionari" of the CTV had been captured by the "garibaldini" of the International Brigades.

"With Russian help the Republic had been able to respond to the threat posed by the arrival of armaments from Italy and Germany for the Nationalist side. The Popular Army no longer consisted of loose bands of militiamen with improvised commanders. It had shown that it knew how to withdraw to prepared fortifications, holding out with small rearguards while waiting for reinforcements. Responding to this technique would require capabilities other than those the CTV possessed."

March–November 1937: the War in the North and the battles of Brunete and Belchite

Map of the War in the North

The Battle of Guadalajara was the last attempt by the rebel side to take Madrid, and only a week after it ended the War in the North began: the attack by the rebel forces against the Cantabrian strip that remained loyal to the Republic but was isolated by land from the rest of the Republican zone. The objective of the "Nationalists" was to control its important mining and industrial resources (especially the steelworks and arms factories), in addition to which its conquest would allow the rebel fleet to be transferred to the Mediterranean in an attempt to stop the maritime traffic heading for Republican ports. The offensive of the rebel forces under the command of General Mola (some 28,000 men, including those of the units of the Italian Corpo Truppe Volontarie, supported by 140 Italian aircraft and German aircraft of the Condor Legion) began on March 31, 1937 from the positions reached in October 1936 in the Gipuzkoa campaign, which lay about 35 kilometers west of San Sebastián, against the defenses of Biscay that the Basque government headed by José Antonio Aguirre had organized since October 1936, after the Republican Cortes approved the Statute of Autonomy of the Basque Country. The Basque Army recruited by Aguirre rejected the authority of General Francisco Llano de la Encomienda, who was the chief of the Army of the North, which theoretically grouped all the forces of Biscay, Santander and Asturias, and acted independently (it had no political commissars and few professional commanders).

Bombing of Guernica, on April 26, 1937

In the first offensive of the Biscay Campaign the "Nationalist" forces, although they had naval and air superiority (the bulk of the Republican fleet was in the Mediterranean and there was only a small number of Soviet fighters), advanced relatively little owing to the strong resistance they met and the bad weather. The second offensive, begun on April 20, was more successful, reaching the Guernica–Durango line five days later. On April 26, after having bombed Jaén and Durango on the preceding days, the bombing of Guernica took place by German aircraft of the Condor Legion and Italian aircraft of the CTV, causing many civilian casualties and enormous destruction because, in addition to conventional bombs, they used incendiary bombs. Three days later the "Nationalist" forces occupied the town, and on April 30 they reached Bermeo.

Main article: Battle of Bilbao

Both armies then reorganized (lehendakari Aguirre personally assumed supreme command of the Basque army) in order, respectively, to attack and to defend the set of fortifications around Bilbao, the so-called "Iron Ring," which, however, had lost much of its usefulness because the engineer who had designed it, Alejandro Goicoechea, had defected to the rebel side with its plans. Thanks to them, the "Nationalists" were able to penetrate through its weak points while the City of Bilbao was shelled by heavy artillery and bombed by the air force (on June 17 twenty thousand shells fell). Bilbao finally fell on June 19, without the government in Valencia—headed since May 17 by the socialist Juan Negrín after overcoming the Republican crisis of the "May Days of 1937"—having been able to organize any attack on other fronts that would have hampered the great concentration of land and air assets deployed by the "Nationalists" in the Biscay Campaign.

At last, at the beginning of July, the Republican forces launched an offensive on the Madrid front to relieve the pressure of the "Nationalist" army in the north. Thus, on July 6 the Battle of Brunete began, so called because the struggle for the conquest of that town west of Madrid by the Republicans (who intended to continue afterward southeastward to meet the other government forces that would advance from the south of the capital, which, if successful, would force the "Nationalists" to order a general withdrawal of their forces if they did not want to be encircled) became the central element of the fighting. The attack toward Brunete was launched by the reorganized Republican V Army Corps under the command of militia Major Juan Modesto, supported by units of Soviet T-26 tanks, which occupied the town almost without resistance, but General Franco reacted quickly and sent units of the Legion and the Regulares, plus the Brigades of Navarre and some 150 Italian and German aircraft withdrawn from the northern front, thereby halting the attack toward Santander. This allowed the Nationalist forces to counterattack. "Thus began a battle of attrition under the tremendous summer sun, without shade or water, which ended up producing a toll of 40,000 casualties. The hard battle ended on July 26, out of sheer exhaustion. The Popular Republican Army had retained important sectors of the territory it had conquered... although it lost Brunete. (...) [The battle of] Brunete coincided with the anniversary of the start of the war. From a few rebel columns fighting against improvised militias, two armies had been formed with considerable artillery and air support."

Once the Battle of Brunete was over, the "Nationalist" forces reorganized and resumed the War in the North, attacking Santander from the south through the mountain pass of Reinosa and from the east along the coast. The Battle of Santander began on August 14 with the attack on Reinosa, which was occupied only two days later and whose arms factory was not destroyed by the Republicans in their headlong retreat. Republican resistance on the coast also collapsed quickly before the advance of the units of the Italian CTV, thanks especially to air superiority (the Republicans could not send aircraft to that area because of the distance from their bases), whose continuous bombing shattered and demoralized the Republican forces commanded by General Mariano Gamir Ulibarri, appointed on August 6. On August 24, only ten days after the offensive began, the City of Santander (where food and fuel were scarce because of the naval blockade by the rebel navy) was occupied after the public order forces, once the commanders had been evacuated, raised the white flag. "The history of the Santander campaign is one of continuous advance, with occasional and brief resistance. There were many prisoners and many who 'went over,' which bore witness to the state of demoralization in the Republican ranks."

Map of the area where the Battle of Belchite took place, showing the initial and final situations.

The second Republican offensive to relieve the pressure of the "Nationalists" in the North came too late, since it began on the very day Santander fell. This time it took place on the Aragon front, which had remained practically unchanged since the beginning of the war, when the columns of anarchist confederal militias and of the POUM set out from Catalonia and occupied the eastern half of Aragon (where they created an almost independent entity called the Council of Aragon), although they did not achieve their objective of conquering Zaragoza; after the "May Days of 1937" these columns had been incorporated into the regular units of the Army of the East. On August 24 the Zaragoza Offensive began, whose purpose was to break the front and reach the Aragonese capital, which would force General Franco to suspend his Northern offensive. North of the Ebro fought the anarchist divisions, and to the south the Communist ones led by Enrique Líster and the two international generals Walter and Kleber. After taking the villages of Codo and Quinto, they surrounded Belchite on the 26th, beginning the Battle of Belchite, the most notable military event of the campaign. The "Nationalists" defending the town resisted fiercely until September 3. Four days earlier the "Nationalists" had begun the counteroffensive that, north of the Ebro, pushed back the anarchist divisions, and to the south, at Fuentes de Ebro, a town 26 kilometers from Zaragoza, succeeded in defeating the units of Soviet BT-5 tanks and the XV International Brigade.

Although Belchite remained in Republican hands, neither of the two objectives of the Zaragoza Offensive was achieved: the Aragonese capital was not taken, nor was the "Nationalist" advance on the northern front halted. After the occupation of Santander, the Asturias Offensive began on September 1 along the coast and through the interior to put an end to the last territory of the Republican northern strip. A few days earlier the Sovereign Council of Asturias and León had been formed in Gijón (Oviedo had remained occupied by the "Nationalists" since the beginning of the war), under the presidency of the socialist Belarmino Tomás, one of the former leaders of the Revolution of Asturias of October 1934, which tried to organize the defense, but its situation was as difficult as that of Santander. The Asturians had no naval support (they had only the destroyer Císcar) nor air support (the few aircraft they had were greatly inferior to those of the attackers), and they were subject to the naval blockade of the rebel navy, which had caused civilian and military supply problems aggravated by the presence of some 300,000 refugees from other areas occupied by the "Nationalist" troops. Thus, resistance to the "Nationalist" advance was very difficult to sustain owing to the lack of matériel and food and to the abandonment of the area by air and sea, and the demoralization of the troops led to disorderly retreats out of panic. Nevertheless, it was not until October 21 that Gijón, the last stronghold of Republican Asturias and of the entire north, was taken. Most of the prisoners from the Northern Front were held in the Miranda de Ebro camp.

The consequences of the "Nationalist" victory in the War in the North were very important for the course of the war. "Franco was able to concentrate all his forces in central Spain and on the Mediterranean, and he obtained the benefit of an undestroyed industry. The victory restored the pride of Mussolini [lost through the defeat at the Battle of Guadalajara], who from then on would cooperate willingly with Franco. International opinion judged that, once the north was lost, victory was a matter of time."

In November 1937 the Republican government of Juan Negrín decided to move from Valencia to Barcelona (where the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, had already been since November 1936) in order to "put the war industry into full production" in Catalonia, which in the following months came under the direct authority of the government of the Republic, so that it could make up for the loss of the important arms factories of Biscay, Cantabria and Asturias, and also to "definitively establish the authority of the government in Catalonia," which relegated the government of the Generalitat of Lluís Companys to a secondary role.

December 1937–November 1938: from the Battle of Teruel to the Battle of the Ebro

On December 12, 1937, the Republican 11th Division under the command of the Communist militia leader Enrique Líster cut the lines of communication of the City of Teruel with the "Nationalist" rear. Thus began the Battle of Teruel, whose strategy was designed by the Republican Chief of the General Staff, Colonel Vicente Rojo. The objective was to conquer the salient that Teruel represented in the enemy lines, as well as to prevent the "Nationalist" attack on Madrid planned for December 18, and to achieve a military success such as taking a provincial capital held by the rebels since the beginning of the war, in order to strengthen domestic and foreign confidence in the Republican cause after the defeat in the War in the North, at a time when the arrival of war matériel from the Soviet Union was dwindling because of the difficulties it was encountering in crossing the French border after the fall of the government of the socialist Léon Blum. General Franco reacted immediately to break the encirclement of Teruel, but as he could not achieve it on the first attempt he had to send more forces and suspend the planned attack on Madrid (thereby fulfilling one of the Republican strategic objectives of the offensive on Teruel). Low temperatures and snowfall hampered the actions of both armies and prevented the "Nationalists" from breaking the encirclement, despite enjoying air and artillery superiority, so Colonel Domingo Rey d'Harcourt decided to surrender on January 8, and the Republican forces (the 46th Division under the command of the militiaman Valentín González, "El Campesino") occupied the city. From then on the "Nationalist" forces redoubled their attacks to reconquer Teruel, launching several offensives that gradually undermined the defenses and morale of the Republican forces. On February 7, 1938 they reached the line of the Alfambra River, and on February 21 the city was surrounded. The 46th Division commanded by "El Campesino" escaped or fled, according to the different versions, and the city was reconquered by the "Nationalists." "The courage of raw soldiers, poorly led, armed and clothed, and set against one another by political rancor [anarchists against Communists] could do little against experienced and well-equipped troops and, above all, against the bombing." Colonel Vicente Rojo wrote to the Republic's Minister of Defense, Indalecio Prieto, about the withdrawal of the 46th Division from Teruel:

It will still be a long time before the commanders of our army behave as they should.

Map of Spain in July 1938 after the Aragon Offensive and when the Battle of the Ebro began.
Legend
Zone controlled by the rebels
Spanish Republic
Main Nationalist centers
Main Republican centers

The Battle of Teruel showed the weaknesses of the Republican army, which led Franco to postpone the attack on Madrid definitively and instead launch the Aragon Offensive against Catalonia and Valencia. The attack, which was to extend along the entire Aragon front, began south of the Ebro River on March 9, where the front collapsed under the great concentration of artillery fire and air power. On the 14th the CTV took Alcañiz, and on the 17th the "Nationalists" took Caspe, after having "reconquered" Belchite. The same happened north of the Ebro, where they took Fraga on March 27 and at the beginning of April reached Lérida (where the 101st Mixed Brigade commanded by the militia leader Pedro Mateo Merino prevented them from crossing the Segre River there). North of Lérida they advanced as far as the Noguera Pallaresa and established bridgeheads at Balaguer and Tremp. Once those positions had been reached, Franco ruled out heading toward Barcelona and chose to advance toward the Mediterranean south of the mouth of the Ebro, an objective reached on April 15 when they arrived at Vinaroz, whereby the Republican zone was split in two.

The failure of the Battle of Teruel and the collapse of the Aragon front provoked the crisis of March 1938 on the Republican side, when Prime Minister Juan Negrín tried to get Indalecio Prieto to change ministries and leave Defense, since, like the President of the Republic Manuel Azaña, Prieto considered that what had happened showed that the Republican army could never win the war and that a surrender had to be negotiated with Franco-British support. But when he failed to achieve this, Negrín asked Prieto to leave the government, then reshuffled his cabinet on April 6, with Negrín personally taking over the Ministry of Defense, with the Communist Colonel Antonio Cordón as Undersecretary of War, who proceeded to reorganize the Republican forces into two large army groups, in keeping with the division of the Republican zone caused by the arrival of the "Nationalists" at the Mediterranean: the GERC (Army Group of the Central-Southern Region) and the GERO (Army Group of the Eastern Region). The positions of the new Negrín government with a view to possible peace negotiations were set out in its "Declaration of the 13 Points," made public on the significant date of May 1, 1938.

Republican conscript class assigned to the Teruel front

Once the Mediterranean had been reached, Franco decided to send his troops against Valencia rather than against Barcelona, seat of the Republican government, not because he feared, according to the historian Michael Alpert, that "Catalonia would be a difficult mouthful," but because "the presence of German and Italian forces in Spain meant that a possible approach by Franco to the French border could provoke international tensions." Thus began the Levante Offensive, whose plan consisted of converging on Sagunto (some 20 kilometers north of Valencia), advancing along the coast from Vinaroz and through the interior from Teruel, in order to take Valencia from there. Republican resistance was tough, especially when the "Nationalist" forces, after conquering Castellón de la Plana on June 13, reached the line of fortifications called the XYZ Line, which stretched from Almenara, a few kilometers north of Sagunto, on the coast, to the Turia River in the interior. There the "Nationalist" troops had to halt their advance.

Map of the area where the Battle of the Ebro took place

On July 25, 1938 the Republican Army of the Ebro, one of the two large army corps of which the newly created GERO was composed, crossed the Ebro River by surprise in barges between Mequinenza and Amposta with the objective of attacking from the north the "Nationalist" army that was approaching Valencia. This was the start of the Battle of the Ebro, which became a hard struggle of attrition for both sides. Although the crossing of the Ebro at Amposta on the coast was soon wiped out by the "Nationalist" forces, the bulk of the Republican Army reached the gates of Gandesa in the interior but failed to take this town because of the strong resistance put up by the units of regulares and legionnaires defending it, and above all because, inexplicably, the Republican air force did not protect the advance, and the Condor Legion, sent quickly by General Franco, dominated the skies and constantly bombed and strafed the Republican positions. So by around August 2 or 3 the Republican maneuver had failed, since there was not going to be any breakthrough of Republican units into the territory held by the rebels. From that moment on, operations focused on the pocket of territory gained by the Republicans south of the Ebro, which they defended at all costs while the "Nationalists" tried to dislodge them from it (even though some of General Franco's collaborators advised him to abandon the Ebro front once the Republican advance had been halted and to resume the campaign against Valencia; Franco thought, however, "that with the constant aid he was receiving from Germany and Italy in aircraft and heavy artillery, with his greater logistical flexibility (against an enemy that could not bring reinforcements to its troops because the French border was closed) and with the virtual maritime blockade of the coasts, he could slowly destroy the best of the forces of the Republic"). After three months of hard fighting, which caused more than 60,000 casualties on each side, the Republicans had to withdraw and recross the Ebro in the opposite direction. On November 16 the last units did so, thus ending the Battle of the Ebro, the longest of the war, which meant a new victory for the rebel side.

While the Battle of the Ebro was under way, the crisis over the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia broke out, which could have led to war in Europe. Negrín then decided to withdraw the International Brigades in order to win a favorable attitude toward the Republic from the democratic powers France and Great Britain, and General Franco did the same by reducing the presence of Italian troops (while keeping what really interested him in Italian Fascist aid: the artillery, the aircraft and the tanks) and guaranteeing Great Britain and France that he would remain neutral if war broke out in Europe. However, the resolution of the crisis with the Munich agreements of September 29, 1938, under which Czechoslovakia was to hand over the Sudetenland to Hitler, meant a new defeat for the Republic on the international stage, because the agreement meant that the democratic powers, France and Great Britain, were continuing their policy of "appeasement" toward Nazi Germany, and if they did not intervene to defend Czechoslovakia, they would be even less likely to do so to help the Spanish Republic.

December 1938–March 1939: offensive against Catalonia

Spain in February 1939 after the fall of Catalonia.
Legend
Zone controlled by the rebels
Spanish Republic
Main Nationalist centers
Main Republican centers

Both armies emerged badly battered from the Battle of the Ebro, but the "Nationalists" managed to recover quickly, and by the beginning of December 1938 they were ready to begin the Catalonia Offensive, "which would be the last significant one of the war," at a time when, after the Munich agreements, attacking Catalonia no longer carried the danger of a French reaction ("France and Great Britain had accepted, at least tacitly, the continued Italian presence in Spain, and wished only for the end of the conflict. For his part, Franco had guaranteed his neutrality in the event of a general war").

The attack on Catalonia was delayed because of bad weather and finally began on December 23, advancing from the south and from the west and meeting strong resistance during the first two weeks. By around January 6, the remnants of the Army of the Ebro had been almost completely decimated, while the other army group of the GERO, the Army of the East, was in retreat. The Republican Chief of the General Staff, General Vicente Rojo, planned a diversionary maneuver in the central-southern zone to relieve the pressure on Catalonia, but it failed (the landing at Motril had to be abandoned because of the weakness of the Republican fleet, "undermined by apathy, indiscipline and the lack of clear political-strategic direction"; the offensive on the Extremadura front had little success given the low morale and the lack of matériel and means of transport suffered by the armies of the central-southern zone (GERC) under the command of General Miaja).

Thus, from the first week of January 1939 the advance of the "Nationalist" troops was practically unstoppable (thanks once again to the better training of their mid-level commanders—majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels—, to their artillery and air superiority owing to the permanent presence of the Condor Legion and the Italian air force, and to the fact that the rebel fleet bombarded the ports, preventing the arrival of matériel for the Republican forces). As they advanced, the "Nationalists" took ever greater numbers of prisoners, which "always constitutes a sign of the disintegration of an army." Artesa de Segre was taken on January 4, Tárrega on the 15th, Villafranca del Panadés on the 21st, Igualada on the 22nd, and on the 24th they reached the Llobregat River. The shattered Republican armies withdrew toward the French border, accompanied by an immense crowd of civilians, officials and authorities that jammed the roads. On January 26 the "Nationalists," meeting hardly any resistance, entered Barcelona, abandoned by the government and the military authorities, who crossed the French border on February 5 after holding the last meeting of what remained of the Republican Cortes in the Castle of Figueras. A day earlier, on February 4, the "Nationalists" had occupied Gerona. A year later, from exile, General Vicente Rojo Lluch compared what had happened in Madrid in November 1936 with what had happened in Barcelona in January 1939:

What a different atmosphere! What enthusiasm then! And what dejection now! Barcelona forty-eight hours before the entry of the enemy was a dead city... [It] was lost plainly and simply because there was no will to resist, neither in the civilian population nor in some troops contaminated by the atmosphere.

Between February 5 and 11 the last remnants of the two Republican armies of the GERO crossed the border in orderly fashion, laying down their arms, and were then interned in improvised camps on the French beaches, exposed to the elements.

While the Republican troops were crossing the French border, the occupation of Menorca by the "Nationalists" took place thanks to British intervention, the only one that occurred in the War of Spain. To prevent the strategic island of Menorca, which had remained under Republican sovereignty throughout the war, from falling under Italian or German control, the British government accepted the proposal of the Francoist chief of the Balearic Air Region, Fernando Sartorius, Count of San Luis, that a Royal Navy ship take him to Mahón to negotiate there the surrender of the island in exchange for allowing the Republican civil and military authorities to leave it under British protection. The British government set the operation in motion without informing the Republican ambassador in London, Pablo de Azcárate (who, when he later found out, lodged a formal protest for a British ship having been lent to an "emissary of the Spanish rebel authorities"). Thus, on the morning of February 7 the cruiser Devonshire arrived at the port of Mahón with the Count of San Luis on board, where he met the Republican governor, Captain Luis González de Ubieta, who, after trying unsuccessfully to contact Negrín, accepted the terms of surrender the following day. At 5 in the morning on February 9 the Devonshire left Mahón bound for Marseille with 452 refugees on board. Menorca was immediately occupied by the "Nationalists" without the participation of any Italian or German contingent. The British intervention gave rise to a heated debate in the House of Commons on February 13, during which the Labour opposition accused the Conservative government of Neville Chamberlain of having compromised the United Kingdom in favor of Franco. The following day General Franco's unofficial representative in London, the Duke of Alba, conveyed to the Foreign Secretary of the Foreign Office, Lord Halifax, "the gratitude of the generalissimo and of the national government" for helping to "reconquer Menorca."

On February 9 the Prime Minister, Juan Negrín, crossed the French border, but in Toulouse he took a plane to return to Alicante the next day, accompanied by some ministers, with the intention of reactivating the war in the central-southern zone, the last stronghold of the Republican zone. There a last battle broke out between those who considered it useless to go on fighting and those who still thought that "to resist is to win" (hoping that the tensions in Europe would end up exploding and that Great Britain and France would at last come to the aid of the Spanish Republic, or that at least they would impose on Franco a peace without reprisals), but war-weariness and the hunger and subsistence crisis ravaging the Republican zone were undermining the population's capacity to resist. The problem for Negrín, who set up his headquarters at the El Poblet estate in the Alicante town of Petrel (whose code name was "Yuste Position"), was how to end the war without fighting in any way other than unconditional surrender. His position became practically untenable when, on February 27, France and Great Britain recognized the Franco government in Burgos as the legitimate government of Spain, and the following day the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, who was at the Spanish embassy in Paris, resigned his office.

On February 24, Negrín left Madrid after holding a Council of Ministers and set up his headquarters at the El Poblet estate in the Alicante town of Petrel (the "Yuste Position," which was its code name). Three days later, on February 27, France and Great Britain recognized the Franco government in Burgos as the legitimate government of Spain, and on February 28, in the face of this international recognition, the resignation of Manuel Azaña from the Presidency of the Republic and his provisional replacement by the President of the Cortes, Diego Martínez Barrio, became official (both were in France). After all these events Negrín's position was untenable.

Meanwhile, the military and political conspiracy against the Negrín government, led by the chief of the Army of the Center, Colonel Segismundo Casado, was well advanced. Casado was convinced that "it would be easier to wind up the war through an understanding among military men," and had therefore made contact through the "fifth column" with the Headquarters of "Generalissimo" Franco for a surrender of the Republican army "without reprisals" in the manner of the "Embrace of Vergara" of 1839 that ended the First Carlist War (including the preservation of military ranks and posts). This was something to which General Franco's emissaries never committed themselves. Casado obtained the support of several military chiefs, foremost among them the anarchist Cipriano Mera, chief of the IV Army Corps, and of some important politicians, such as the socialist Julián Besteiro, who had also been in contact with the "fifth columnists" of Madrid. All of them criticized Negrín's strategy of resistance and his "dependence" on the Soviet Union and the PCE, which were by then the only ones who still supported Negrín's policy.

Probably in connection with the Casadist plot, on March 4 the uprising at the Cartagena naval base took place, led by pro-Francoist officers encouraged by the fifth column, which had been intensely active in the base and the city. On the 4th and 5th fighting took place between the insurgents and the Republican resisters. And in the midst of it, Admiral Miguel Buiza ordered the Republican fleet to leave port and took it to the naval base of Bizerta in the French protectorate of Tunisia, even though the uprising in Cartagena had been put down by the Republican forces on March 7.

March 1939: defeat of the Republic

Map of the two Spains in March 1939

Main article: Casado coup

On March 5, the day after the start of the Cartagena uprising, the Casado coup began, with its supporters seizing the key points of Madrid and then announcing the formation of a National Defense Council chaired by General Miaja. The Council issued a radio manifesto addressed to "antifascist Spain" in which the Negrín government was deposed, but which said nothing at all about peace negotiations. The military units controlled by the Communists put up resistance in Madrid and its surroundings but were defeated (there were nearly 2,000 dead), finally signing an agreement for the "handover of command from the Republican Army to the rebel Army". The next day Negrín and his government, together with the main Communist leaders, left Spain by plane to avoid being captured by the "Casadists."

Once the Casado coup had been carried out, General Franco refused to accept a new "Embrace of Vergara," just as Mola had also rejected it on the first day of the 1936 coup, and did not grant Casado "any of the guarantees begged for almost on bended knee by his emissaries [who met only with low-ranking members of the Headquarters], and replied to the British and French, eager to act as intermediaries in the surrender of the Republic so as to contain German and Italian influence over the new regime, that he did not need them and that the spirit of generosity of the victors constituted the best guarantee for the vanquished."

Communiqué issued by the Headquarters of the Generalissimo announcing the end of the war

Franco would accept only an "unconditional surrender," so all that remained was to prepare the evacuation of Casado and the National Defense Council. They embarked with their families on March 29 on the British destroyer that took them to Marseille (the socialist Julián Besteiro decided to stay). A day earlier the "Nationalist" troops had made their entry into Madrid, and in their final offensive the rebels quickly occupied, practically without a fight, the entire central-southern zone that had remained under the authority of the Republic throughout the war (on March 29 Cuenca, Albacete, Ciudad Real, Jaén, Almería and Murcia; on March 30 Valencia and Alicante; and on March 31 the city of Cartagena). In Alicante, from March 29, some 15,000 people—military chiefs, Republican politicians, combatants and civilians who had fled from Madrid and other places—crowded into the port waiting to board some British or French ship, but most did not succeed and were captured by the Italian troops of the Littorio Division under the command of General Gastone Gambara. Many of those captured were executed on the spot.

On April 1, 1939 the radio of the rebel side (Radio Nacional de España) broadcast the last war communiqué of the Spanish Civil War, which read as follows:

On this day, with the red army captive and disarmed, the national troops have reached their last military objectives. The war is over. Burgos, April 1, 1939, year of victory. The Generalissimo. Signed: Francisco Franco Bahamonde.

The naval war

Main article: Spanish Civil War at sea

In the Spanish Civil War, land operations predominated over maritime ones, and the navies of both sides avoided large-scale actions for political and strategic reasons. Thus, after the fighting for control of the Strait of Gibraltar in 1936, the two fleets had no "decisive encounters at sea," and "their strategies moved within very conservative frameworks, aimed above all at preserving their forces." The historian Michael Alpert, in his study titled La guerra civil española en el mar, states that the "two Spanish navies had to rebuild themselves," but that the "government navy failed to rise to the occasion and, despite having most of the units of the fleet, played a defensive role for most of the conflict." In contrast, "the Navy of the rebels made the most of its meager resources and of the aid it received from abroad."

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the primary function of a navy was no longer to destroy enemy ships, but to blockade the enemy's sea routes and ports and to hinder its movements along the coast. This is what the navy of the rebel side did with increasing success, while the navy that remained loyal to the government abandoned that objective after the first weeks and adopted a defensive position whose aim was to protect its own maritime communications, while the "Nationalists" strove to interfere with them.

At the beginning of the Civil War, the Republican navy was far superior to the one left in the hands of the rebels, since it comprised practically the entire Spanish Navy of the time: the battleship Jaime I (launched in 1914); the light cruisers Libertad (launched in 1925), Miguel de Cervantes (launched in 1928) and Méndez Núñez (launched in 1923); sixteen destroyers in service or about to be delivered; seven torpedo boats; twelve submarines (from the submarine Isaac Peral (C-1) to the submarine C-6 and from the submarine B-1 to the submarine B-6); one gunboat; four coast guard vessels and almost the entire Naval Aviation.

Despite having such an important fleet, the problem was that throughout the war it proved impossible to overcome the effects of the repression that took place at the time of the coup d'état of July 1936, when the sailors and petty officers rebelled to prevent the ships from joining the uprising, since the immense majority of the officer corps supported the coup. As late as May 1938, a report submitted to Prime Minister Juan Negrín on the state of the fleet noted the lack of effectiveness and discipline. "In general the offensive morale of the commanders is low and the combat morale of the crews is low." It also pointed to the presence of the Francoist fifth column both in the Fleet and at the naval base of Cartagena ("Defeatist morale. Many fascists with complete freedom of action," it said). Later reports indicated that the situation had not improved.

Unlike the rebel side, which was supported by the Italian and German navies, the Republic received from the USSR only four G-5-class torpedo boats, in addition to a few officers and submarine specialists who, according to a "reserved and confidential" report submitted to Prime Minister Negrín, were "regarded—within the Fleet—as bothersome guests who must be put up with courteously. The same occurs at the naval base of Cartagena." For their part, France and Great Britain only intervened on the odd occasion to prevent the seizure of their own ships by the "Nationalist" fleet.

Thus, beyond the occasional victory, such as the sinking of the Baleares in early March 1938 in the Battle of Cape Palos, "the reality was that the Republican navy had concentrated on the service of protecting merchant traffic, on maintaining a supply channel for war materiel and food." But it did not even perform that escort function with complete success, as was noted in a report of the Republican secret service (SIM) of January 1939 which, after asserting the "notorious inferiority" of the Republican navy with respect to the Navy of the "Nationalists," stated:

The truth is that the factious Navy has grown without any harassment on our part... and that its Merchant Navy sails unhindered across all the seas, while ours, pursued and practically defenseless, is easy prey for the factious.

The Republican submarine C-3

The Republican fleet and the naval base of Cartagena grew in strategic importance for the cause of the Republican side as the difficulties of supply from abroad by land increased, as a consequence of the frequent closures of the French border, so that maintaining the maritime "umbilical cord" with the Soviet Union was vital for the Republicans. They also became increasingly important as Republican defeats piled up and the territory of the Republican zone shrank because, especially after the fall of Catalonia in early February 1939, "for the Republican combatants the Base and the Fleet were a kind of safeguard in the event of an organized or last-minute evacuation."

At the beginning of the Civil War, the navy of the rebel side was far inferior to the government navy, since it had only the battleship España (launched in 1913 and in dry dock in July 1936); the light cruisers República, renamed Navarra (launched in 1920 but under repair, and which did not enter service until very late in the war, in August 1938), and Almirante Cervera (launched in 1928); the destroyer Velasco (launched in 1923); five torpedo boats; three gunboats and five coast guard vessels. But this inferiority was very soon offset thanks to the rebels' control of the navy's main shipyard at Ferrol, where the heavy cruiser Canarias was practically finished—it entered service in September 1936—and another, the Baleares, was about to be delivered (it entered service in December 1936), together with Spain's only two minesweepers (the minesweeper Júpiter, which entered service in early 1937, and the minesweeper Vulcano, which entered service at the end of that same year).

The rebels' initial inferiority was also offset by the support they received practically from the beginning of the war from the Italian Navy, which took part with auxiliary cruisers and submarines in the blockade of arms shipments from the Soviet Union, and from the German navy. The scandal caused when an Italian submarine mistakenly torpedoed a British destroyer led Fascist Italy to stop participating directly in naval warfare, handing over four "legionary submarines" to the "Nationalists" and selling them four destroyers and two submarines.

For its part, Nazi Germany sent two submarines to the Mediterranean in the so-called Operation Ursula, with the German U 34 sinking the Republican submarine C3 off Málaga. The Germans contributed cruisers, but these did not intervene, except in the bombardment of Almería by the Admiral Scheer on May 31, 1937, carried out in retaliation for the air attack suffered on May 28, 1937 by the pocket battleship Deutschland at Ibiza. This so-called Deutschland incident was probably carried out by Russian crews, without the knowledge of the Republican command. But the international scandal it provoked led the Republic to say that it was a mistake and that the planes were Republican aircraft that believed they were attacking the heavy cruiser Canarias. The bombardment of Almería, which had been carried out openly (flying the German ensign), came to be considered a possible reason for the Republic to declare war on Germany (a position defended by Colonel Rojo and Indalecio Prieto, who sought to extend the conflict to all of Europe), but in the end the opposing position of Negrín and Azaña prevailed.

A report of the Republican secret service (SIM) of January 1939 noted the disadvantage of the Republican navy compared with the "factious navy," which had "a total of nearly 100 units—counting among them a large number of perfectly armed auxiliary cruisers."

The air war and the bombing of towns

Main article: Bombings in the Spanish Civil War

Bombing of the Estación del Norte in Valencia by Italian aircraft in 1937

The main novelty in the field of air warfare in the Spanish conflict of 1936 to 1939 was that "for the first time in history aviation was used intensively in bombing missions over the rearguard." Thus "from the Spanish Civil War onward, the victims could be hundreds of kilometers from the places of armed confrontation and simply be defenseless civilian population." Since Spanish military aviation in July 1936 was obsolete, this was only possible because both sides received aid from foreign powers that supplied their modern bombers: the rebel side received the Savoia-Marchetti S.M.81 and Savoia-Marchetti S.M.79 of the Legionary Air Force of Fascist Italy and the Junkers Ju 52 and Heinkel He 111 of the Condor Legion of Nazi Germany; the Republican side received the Katiuskas of the Soviet Union.

The rebel side repeatedly used "terror bombing," as Solé i Sabaté and Villarroya call it, whose sole target was the civilian population, in order to demoralize it and push it toward surrender. It began this strategy in Madrid when the frontal assault on the city failed in November 1936, and continued it with the bombing of Durango, the bombing of Guernica, the bombing of Lérida, the bombings of Barcelona in January 1938, the bombings of Barcelona in March 1938, the bombing of the Alicante central market, the bombing of Granollers and the bombings of various Catalan towns in the final months of the war, especially those of Figueras, whose main victims were women and children at a time when the Republican army no longer existed in Catalonia. The only possible case of "terror bombing" by the Republican side was that of Cabra in November 1938, but everything seems to indicate that it was a terrible mistake committed by the pilots, who confused the town's market with a tent encampment of an Italian unit that, according to the orders they had received, they were to find and destroy.

Thus, as for the cities most devastated by the bombings, the list is headed by the three main Republican cities, Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia, followed by Tarragona, Reus, Lérida, Badalona, Granollers, Gerona, San Feliu de Guíxols, Palamós, Figueras, Colera, Portbou and Perelló in Catalonia; Alicante, Sagunto, Gandía, Denia and Cartagena on the coast of Valencia and Murcia; and in Biscay Durango and Guernica, the latter becoming the symbol of the atrocities of the bombings by the rebel side, and which had an enormous international impact. As for the number of victims, there is also an enormous difference between those caused by Republican bombings, some 1,100, and those caused by the bombings of the Francoist side, around 9,000 (Barcelona, 2,500 dead; Madrid, 2,000; Valencia, nearly 1,000; Alicante, nearly 500; Durango, Guernica, Lérida, Tarragona, Granollers, Figueras and Cartagena, more than two hundred dead each; Bilbao, Reus, Badalona and Alcañiz, nearly 200; Játiva, more than 100 dead; and small towns whose dead were fewer than this number).

That is how "aviation became a decisive weapon and the action of the Italian and German aviation was decisive in the victory of the Francoist army."

Other milestones of the air war during the Spanish Civil War are that the first airlift in history was probably carried out during it; that in fighter aircraft ceiling and speed began to take priority, which meant the end of biplanes, and their importance for air supremacy and thus for preventing enemy bombing (even at night) was demonstrated; that air attacks were carried out on naval units, in port and at sea; that dive bombers were used to drop provisions and messages of encouragement to besieged positions, such as the Alcázar of Toledo or the Sanctuary of Santa María de la Cabeza, and for "ideological bombings," by dropping leaflets and harangues over cities in the rearguard, such as the "bread bombing" over Alicante.

Evolution of the rebel zone

Main article: Rebel zone

Banknote issued by the rebel side on October 12, 1937 with the greater coat of arms of the Spanish Monarchy.

After the somewhat provisional stage represented by the National Defense Junta, formed after the death in a plane crash of General Sanjurjo, who was to head the military Directory that would govern the country after overthrowing the Popular Front government, the rebel generals and commanders decided to appoint a single military and political command. From October 1, 1936, General Franco was the Generalísimo of the rebel forces and the head of the Government of the State. After the failure to take Madrid (between November 1936 and March 1937) and with the prospect that the war would be long, Generalísimo Franco, with the help of his brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Suñer, began to shape the political organization of the "New State." The first step was the Decree of Unification of April 1937, by which all the political forces that supported the "national uprising," and particularly the Falangists and the Carlists, who were the ones whose militias had contributed most to the war, were integrated into a single party, named Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS. The next step was the organization of the "New State," the task entrusted by the Generalísimo to his first government, appointed on January 30, 1938 (which replaced the Technical Junta of the State).

The construction of the "New State" was accompanied by the destruction of everything that had to do with the Republic. Thus in the rebel zone, contrary to what was happening in the other zone (where the Revolution had broken out), a "counter-revolution" was undertaken, carrying out "a systematic repression of the persons, organizations and institutions that in some way, real or even imaginary, could be understood as linked to that revolutionary Republic, or one in the hands of revolutionaries, which they claimed to be fighting."

The National Defense Junta

Mola alongside General Franco at an appearance in Burgos on August 27, 1936, reported by the German newspaper Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. Mola is the one standing out on the right.

The death on July 20 of General Sanjurjo, exiled in Estoril, as a result of the accident that occurred just after takeoff of the plane in which he was to fly from Lisbon to Pamplona to take command of the uprising, left the rebel generals without the leader who was to head the rising. To partly make up for the lack of a single command, the rebel generals and commanders set up in Burgos on July 24 a National Defense Junta chaired by the highest-ranking and most senior general, Miguel Cabanellas. Its Decree number 1 established that it assumed "all the powers of the State" and in successive decrees it extended the state of war that the rebels had proclaimed in each place to all of Spain (which served as the basis for subjecting to summary courts-martial all those who opposed the military rebellion), outlawed the parties and trade unions of the Popular Front and prohibited all political and trade-union activity by workers and employers "for as long as the present circumstances last" (Decree of September 25).

But the most urgent matter was to achieve unity of military command. Thus on September 21, 1936, the first meeting was held on an estate near Salamanca, attended by the generals of the National Defense Junta, with the addition of generals Orgaz, Gil Yuste and Kindelán. There those assembled discussed the need for a single command of the rebel forces and appointed General Franco to the post, since he commanded the army that was about to enter Madrid (the Army of Africa was near Maqueda, only 100 kilometers from the capital) and he was the one who had obtained the aid of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and who had been dealing with them. But once the single command in the military sphere had been decided, the political command remained to be settled.

General Franco then made a "masterstroke": he ordered the columns advancing on Madrid to divert toward Toledo to relieve the Alcázar and thus lift the two-month siege endured by a thousand Civil Guards and Falangists, along with some cadets of the Infantry Academy under the command of its director, Colonel Moscardó, who were holding "as hostages women and children of well-known left-wing militants." "The taking of the Alcázar enlarged the legend of General Franco. Moscardó's famous phrase nothing to report at the Alcázar, repeated before Franco and numerous journalists two days after its relief, was suitably propagated. Franco was the savior of the besieged heroes, the symbol of an army willing to win the war at any price."

On September 28, 1936, the same day the Alcázar of Toledo was relieved, the second meeting of the generals was held in Salamanca to decide who would hold the political command. The one chosen was General Franco, whom his fellow rebels appointed not only "Generalísimo of the national land, sea and air forces," but also "Head of the Government of the Spanish State, for as long as the war lasts." But when decree no. 138 of the National Defense Junta with his appointment was published the following day, an important change had been introduced into the text: the tag "for as long as the war lasts" had been deleted, and to the appointment of General Franco as "Head of the Government of the Spanish State" was added "who shall assume all the powers of the new State." This decree of September 29, 1936 would be the foundation of the legitimacy of the power of the "Generalísimo" for the following 39 years.

General Franco, "Generalísimo" and "Caudillo"

Façade of the Palace of the Captaincy General (Burgos)

On October 1, 1936, in the throne room of the Captaincy General of Burgos, Francisco Franco took possession of his new office, as Generalísimo of the rebel army and Head of the Government of the State.

A day earlier the Bishop of Salamanca Enrique Pla y Deniel had made public a pastoral letter in which he presented the war as "a crusade for religion, the fatherland and civilization," giving a new legitimacy to the cause of the rebels: the religious one. Thus the Generalísimo was not only the "leader and savior of the Fatherland," but also the "Caudillo" of a new "crusade" in defense of the Catholic faith and social order.

Casa del Cordón, in Burgos, seat of the Technical Junta of the State.

The first law promulgated by Generalísimo Franco was the one creating the Technical Junta of the State (replacing the National Defense Junta), chaired by General Dávila (who in the summer of 1937 would be replaced by the monarchist general Francisco Gómez-Jordana, much more efficient than his predecessor) and which had a General Secretariat of the Head of State, a post held by Nicolás Franco, the Generalísimo's elder brother. Its task was "to rectify all Republican legislation, returning things to their former state."

The seat of the Technical Junta of the State was established in Burgos, although the political capital of Nationalist Spain was Salamanca, where military power resided, since Franco's General Headquarters was located there.

The Decree of Unification of April 1937

Main article: Decree of Unification

Flag of Falange Española

The next step in consolidating the power of the new "Caudillo" came when, after the failure to take Madrid (between November 1936 and March 1937), the need arose to create a "single party," following the model of the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, based on the merger of the Carlists and Falangists.

From the Generalísimo's General Headquarters, Franco's new adviser Ramón Serrano Suñer (the "Caudillo's" brother-in-law and a former CEDA deputy who had reached Salamanca after escaping from the "red zone") fostered a rapprochement between the Traditionalist Communion and Falange Española y de las JONS with a view to their merger, but the ideological and political differences separating them were almost insurmountable (since they were those separating traditionalism from fascism), and there was also another obstacle that was non-negotiable: that General Franco himself would stand at the head of the "single party." That is, both parties had to accept that the new political formation would be subordinated to the personal power of the "Generalísimo," the apex of military and political power. To support this idea, the slogan One fatherland, one State, one Caudillo was disseminated from the General Headquarters in Salamanca, a copy of the Nazi slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer ('one people, one State, one leader').

There were contacts between Falangists and Carlists, but they bore no fruit, and the whole process did not fail to create tensions within both parties, which in the case of the Falangists resulted in the "Salamanca events" of April 1937, during which several Falangists died in the clashes between the supporters of the merger and of subordination to military power (led by Sancho Dávila and Agustín Aznar) and those opposed to it (led by Manuel Hedilla).

Finally, Franco's General Headquarters decided to act, and on the same day that the Falangists opposed to the merger held a National Council in which they elected Manuel Hedilla as "national leader," Sunday, April 18, General Franco himself announced that a Decree of Unification of the Falange and the Traditionalist Communion would be promulgated the next day, which would now come under his direct leadership as its "national leader."

A week later, Franco had Manuel Hedilla arrested (along with other dissident Falangists) when he refused to join the Political Junta of the new party as a mere member and, moreover, told his provincial leaders to obey only his own orders. "So that no doubt would remain about where power lay in what was already beginning to be called the New State, Hedilla was tried and sentenced to death for his manifest conduct of indiscipline and subversion against the sole and unquestionable Command and Power of Nationalist Spain. It had to be clear to all that unity of military command would in the future be unity of political command." But Franco followed the advice of the sister of the "Absent One," Pilar Primo de Rivera (leader of the "pure" sector of the Falange), of Serrano Suñer and of the German ambassador, and pardoned Hedilla, although the latter spent four years in prison and, when he came out, remained sidelined from political life.

The statutes of the "single party," published on August 4, established that the "Caudillo" would be "responsible only before God and before History," and before no one else.

Two months earlier, on June 3, in the midst of the Northern Campaign, General Mola, the "director" of the military conspiracy that had staged the coup d'état of July 1936 with which the Civil War began, died when the plane in which he was traveling crashed into a hill near the village of Alcocero, near Burgos. Mola frequently used the airplane for his travels and there is no evidence of sabotage, although his death clearly favored Franco by eliminating the "director" as a rival. The German ambassador wrote shortly afterward: "No doubt Franco feels relieved by the death of General Mola."

In October 1937 the 50 members of the National Council of FET y de las JONS were appointed by "Generalísimo" Franco, but it never went beyond being a merely consultative body. The same could be said of FET y de las JONS, whose only activity was reduced in practice to carrying out propaganda. Nevertheless, the leaders of the Falange occupied many of the most important posts in the administration of the "New State" and in the party.

The birth of the "New State"

Coat of arms of the "New State."

In January 1938, while the Battle of Teruel was taking place, the first step was taken toward the definitive configuration of the "New State" with the promulgation by the "Generalísimo" of the Law of the Central Administration of the State, which created an administrative structure that adopted the ministerial form, and with the appointment on January 30 of his first government, in which Franco himself assumed the Presidency, while Francisco Gómez-Jordana (until then President of the Technical Junta of the State) was Vice President and Minister of Foreign Affairs. However, the most prominent figure in the cabinet was Ramón Serrano Suñer, Minister of the Interior and Franco's cuñadísimo ("super brother-in-law"). This government already prefigured the ideological amalgam that Francoism would always be in the future: "its traditional conservatism, and its reactionary rightism."

It would be this government that began the process of institutionalizing the "New State," with the promulgation of the "Labor Charter," based on the Carta del Lavoro of Italian fascism, which constituted the first of the seven Fundamental Laws of the Francoist Dictatorship that functioned as a kind of "constitution" of the new regime; the repeal of the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia of 1932 and the promulgation of a series of orders and decrees prohibiting the use of Catalan in public documents and in private conversation; the Press Law, which subjected newspapers to prior censorship and gave the government the power to appoint newspaper editors; the reintroduction of the death penalty, which the Republic had abolished; and the approval of a Secondary Education Law that guaranteed the Catholic Church absolute autonomy in secondary education.

According to Julián Casanova, fascism and Catholicism were the two ideologies on whose amalgam the "New State" was built. The process of fascistization was evident in the exaltation of the leader, the "Caudillo," like the Führer or the Duce; the raised-arm salute established as the "national salute"; the Falangist uniforms and symbolism; etc. And at the same time Catholic religious rites and demonstrations proliferated, such as processions, field masses or politico-religious ceremonies that imitated supposed medieval forms.

On April 19, 1939, nineteen days after the "last war bulletin" in which Franco declared "the war is over," the Victory parade was held in Madrid, presided over by the "Caudillo." Before the military parade began, General Varela bestowed on Franco, "in the name of the Fatherland," the Grand Laureate Cross of Saint Ferdinand, "which he had so coveted since his African campaigns and which he ended up having to award to himself" in a decree signed by himself and read by General the Count of Jordana at the start of the ceremony. The following day the Madrid newspaper ABC headlined its report: "Spain, in the great military parade before the Caudillo, shows the world the might of the arms that forged the new State." A month later General Franco offered his sword as victorious Caudillo to God in a ceremony held on May 20 in the Madrid church of Santa Bárbara and presided over by the Cardinal Primate of Toledo, Isidro Gomá.

Evolution of the Republican zone

Main article: Second Spanish Republic at war

The government's reaction to the military uprising

Diego Martínez Barrio

On the afternoon of Friday, July 17, it became known in Madrid that a military uprising had begun in the Protectorate of Morocco. The next day the uprising spread to the peninsula and the workers' organizations (CNT and UGT) demanded "arms for the people" to put an end to it, which the government of Santiago Casares Quiroga refused.

On the night of that Saturday, July 18, Casares Quiroga submitted his resignation to the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, and the latter entrusted Diego Martínez Barrio, President of the Cortes and leader of Republican Union, with forming a government that would manage to "stop the rebellion" without resorting to the armed support of the workers' organizations. Martínez Barrio included in his cabinet moderate politicians willing to reach some kind of agreement with the rebel military and in the early hours between Saturday the 18th and Sunday, July 19, he spoke by telephone with General Emilio Mola, "the Director" of the uprising, but the latter flatly refused any kind of compromise. Thus Martínez Barrio's "government of conciliation" resigned and on that same Sunday, July 19, Azaña appointed as new Prime Minister a man from his own party, José Giral, who formed a government made up solely of left-wing republicans, although with the explicit support of the socialists, and which took the decision to hand out arms to the workers' organizations, something that Martínez Barrio had also refused because, like Casares Quiroga, he considered that such a step crossed the threshold of the constitutional and "legal" defense of the Republic.

Because of this decision to "hand out arms to the people," the Republican State lost the monopoly of coercion, and therefore could not prevent the outbreak of a social revolution, since the workers' organizations did not take to the streets "exactly to defend the Republic... but to make the revolution. (...) A counter-revolutionary coup d'état, which sought to halt the revolution, ended up unleashing it."

The social revolution of 1936 and the government of José Giral (July–September 1936)

Coat of arms of the Regional Defence Council of Aragon, a body created during the Spanish Revolution of 1936.

The handing out of arms to the workers' parties and organizations led them to rapidly form "armed militias to confront the rebellion on the military front and to carry out a profound social revolution (disregarding the Republican authorities, whom they did not overthrow): they seized and collectivized agricultural holdings and industrial and commercial enterprises to ensure the continuity of the production and distribution of goods, and they took charge of maintaining the main functions within the competence of the State. Production, supply to the population, surveillance, repression, communications and transport, health care, were left in the hands of trade-union committees, which in quite a few localities abolished money and replaced it with vouchers. Faced with the collapse of the mechanisms of public power ["a government that hands out arms is a government that has been left without the instruments to guarantee public order and impose its authority"], there emerged in the summer of 1936 a new workers' power, which was at once military, political, social and economic." "In the Basque Country, however, where the PNV had rejected a coalition with the CEDA in the elections of February 1936 and had supported the left in processing the Statute of Autonomy, finally approved on October 1, 1936, there was no social revolution, and a Catholic and nationalist party remained until June 1937 at the head of an autonomous government with power over little more than the territory of Biscay."

The committees that sprang up everywhere were autonomous and recognized no limits to their actions, but the paradox was that at the same time the revolution did not do away with the Republican State, but simply ignored it and reduced it to ineffectiveness. In Catalonia the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias was formed, but the government of the Generalitat was not removed and remained in place. In Valencia the Popular Executive Committee appeared. In Málaga and Lérida Committees of Public Safety arose. In Cantabria, Gijón and Jaén, provincial committees of the Popular Front (War Committee of Gijón, Popular Committee of Sama de Langreo, etc.). In Biscay, a Defense Junta. In Madrid a National Committee of the Popular Front was formed, which organized militias and the life of the city, but alongside it there continued to exist the government of José Giral, made up only of left-wing republicans.

But the Giral government, despite the fact that real power was not in its hands, did not cease to act, especially on the international stage. It was this government that requested the sale of arms from the Popular Front government of France and, when it did not obtain them, then from the Soviet Union, for which it drew on the gold reserves of the Bank of Spain. Domestically it dismissed officials suspected of supporting the uprising and issued the first measures to try to control the indiscriminate, arbitrary and extrajudicial "executions" of "fascists" carried out by dozens of "revolutionary tribunals," also known as "checas," set up by the workers' organizations and parties that had imposed the "red terror" in Madrid and elsewhere. Thus the Giral government created special tribunals "to try the crimes of rebellion and sedition and those committed against the security of the State." However, these "popular tribunals" did not put an end to the activities of the "checas," which continued murdering "fascists" through "paseos" (illegal detentions that ended with the murder of the detainee, whose body was thrown into a ditch or beside a cemetery wall) or "sacas" (releases of prisoners who were supposedly to be set free but who in reality were taken to the execution wall).

When on September 3, 1936 the rebel Army of Africa took Talavera de la Reina (already in the province of Toledo, after having occupied Extremadura), and Irún also fell into the hands of the rebels (whereby the north was cut off from the rest of the Republican zone), José Giral submitted his resignation to the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña.

The government of Largo Caballero (September 1936–May 1937)

Francisco Largo Caballero

After Giral's resignation, the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, entrusted the formation of a "coalition government" to Francisco Largo Caballero, the socialist leader of the UGT, one of the two trade-union confederations leading the revolution. Largo Caballero, who in addition to the premiership took on the key Ministry of War, conceived of this government as a great "antifascist alliance," and so admitted into the cabinet as many representatives as possible of the parties and unions fighting against the "fascist" rebellion (as the workers' organizations called the military uprising of July). But the government was not really completed until two months later, when on November 4 (by which time the rebel troops were already on the outskirts of Madrid) four ministers of the CNT joined it, among them the first woman to be a minister in Spain, Federica Montseny.

The new government of Largo Caballero, self-proclaimed the "government of victory," immediately concluded that priority had to be given to the war, hence the political program it put into effect at once, whose main measure was the creation of a new army and the unification of the direction of the war (which included the incorporation of the militias into the Mixed Brigades and the creation of the corps of commissars). Thus the trade-union leaders of the UGT and CNT, by accepting and promoting this program, "agreed that the establishment of libertarian communism, to which the CNT aspired, or of socialist society, which the UGT sought, must wait for military triumph."

But all these measures failed to halt the advance of the Army of Africa toward Madrid, and by November 6 it was on the verge of entering the capital. That day the government decided to leave Madrid and move to Valencia, entrusting the defense of the city to General Miaja, who was to form a Defense Junta of Madrid. "A hasty departure, kept secret, about which no public explanation whatsoever was given." "Those who stayed in Madrid could interpret these events only as a shameful flight... above all because the people of Madrid were able to organize their defense. Madrid withstood the first onslaught and repelled the subsequent ones, thus halting the advance of the rebel army."

The second major objective of the Largo Caballero government was to restore the authority of the government and of the powers of the State. But the tensions with the governments of the "autonomous regions" of Catalonia and the Basque Country, and with the regional councils that had arisen elsewhere, were not resolved. In Catalonia, the government of the Generalitat, which on September 26 incorporated several councilors from the CNT and the POUM, whereupon the Committee of Antifascist Militias was dissolved, organized its own army and on October 24 approved the collectivization decree, both matters exceeding the scope of its powers. As for the Basque Country, on October 1 the Cortes approved the Statute of Autonomy of Euskadi and the Basque nationalist José Antonio Aguirre was invested "lehendakari" of the Basque government, among whose members he included no representative of the CNT (in the Basque Country there had been no social revolution and hardly any anticlerical violence, and the churches remained open). Aguirre built a "quasi-sovereign" State over the Basque territory not yet occupied by the rebel side, which was practically reduced to Biscay. In addition to a Basque police force, the Ertzaina, he created his own army and did not accept the command of the general sent by the Madrid government to head the Army of the North. As for the Council of Aragon, dominated by the anarchists, the Largo Caballero government had no choice but to legalize it.

In the spring of 1937, after Franco's decision to give up for the time being on taking Madrid following the Republican victory at the Battle of Guadalajara, the prospect of a long war opened up, and a crisis soon broke out among the political forces that supported the Republic. The fundamental conflict was the one that pitted the anarchists of the CNT, who defended the compatibility of revolution with the war, against the communists of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and of the PSUC in Catalonia, who understood that the best way to halt the military uprising was to restore the Republican State and bring together all the forces of the political left, including the parties of the petty and middle bourgeoisie, for which reason the social revolution had to be halted and priority given to the war. However, Santos Juliá asserts, contrary to the opinion of other historians, that in the spring of 1937, among the forces that supported the Largo Caballero government, "the dividing line ran not between war and revolution but between parties and unions," because the priority given to the war had already been decided on September 4, when the Largo Caballero government was formed, which the four anarchist ministers joined two months later.

The crisis broke out because of the clashes that began in Barcelona on Monday, May 3, 1937, when a detachment of the Assault Guard, on the orders of the Generalitat, tried to regain control of the Telefónica building in the Plaza de Cataluña, held by the CNT since the "glorious" days of July 1936. Several anarchist groups responded with arms and the POUM joined the fight. On the other side, the Generalitat and the communists and socialists unified in Catalonia in a single party (the PSUC) confronted the rebellion, which they themselves had provoked, and the fighting lasted several days. On Friday, May 7, the situation was brought under control by the public order forces sent by the Largo Caballero government from Valencia, aided by PSUC militants, although the Generalitat paid the price of having its powers over public order withdrawn. The fighting in the streets of Barcelona was recounted by the Briton George Orwell in his Homage to Catalonia.

The events of May 1937 in Barcelona had an immediate impact on the Largo Caballero government. The crisis was provoked on May 13 by the two communist ministers, who threatened to resign if Largo Caballero did not leave the Ministry of War (the PCE, especially since the fall of Málaga on February 8, held him responsible for the continuous Republican defeats) and did not dissolve the POUM. In this attack on Largo Caballero they had the support of the socialist faction of Indalecio Prieto, which controlled the leadership of the PSOE and which, like the communists, wanted to remove the trade-union organizations, UGT and CNT, from the government and rebuild the Popular Front. Largo Caballero refused to accept the communists' two conditions and, unable to find sufficient support for his government, resigned on May 17. President Manuel Azaña, who also disagreed with the presence of the two trade-union confederations in the government, appointed a "Prietista" socialist, Juan Negrín, as the new head of government. The following day the CNT organ Solidaridad Obrera declared in its editorial: "A counter-revolutionary government has been formed."

The government of Juan Negrín (May 1937–March 1939)

The new government formed by the socialist Juan Negrín in May 1937 followed the model of the Popular Front coalitions: three socialist ministers occupying the key positions (Negrín himself, who kept the Finance portfolio he had already held in the Largo Caballero government; Indalecio Prieto, on whom fell all responsibility for the conduct of the war, as he was appointed head of the new Ministry of Defense; and Julián Zugazagoitia at the Interior), two left-wing republicans, two communists, one from the PNV and another from Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya. According to Santos Juliá, behind this government was Manuel Azaña, who sought "a government capable of defending itself at home and of not losing the war abroad. (...) With Prieto in charge of a unified Ministry of Defense, it would be possible to defend ourselves; with Negrín in the premiership, one could harbor hopes of not losing the war abroad."

The policy of the new government had five fundamental axes, some already begun by Largo Caballero: the completion of the formation of the Popular Army and the development of the war industry (which led the government to move from Valencia to Barcelona in November 1937 in order, among other reasons, "to bring the war industry to full output" in Catalonia); the continued recovery of all powers by the central government, on the grounds that the direction of the war so required (the Council of Aragon, the last bastion of the CNT, was dissolved; the move of the government from Valencia to Barcelona to "definitively establish the authority of the government in Catalonia" relegated the Generalitat government of Lluís Companys to a secondary role); the maintenance of public order and legal certainty (with Zugazagoitia at the Interior and Irujo at Justice, "extrajudicial" executions and the activities of the "checas" were reduced, but in the "disappearance" of the leader of the POUM the government let the communists and the Soviet agents of the NKVD have their way); guarantees were given to small and medium property; an attempt was made to change the "non-intervention" policy of Great Britain and France into one of mediation in the conflict, so that they would pressure Germany and Italy to cease their support for the rebels, with the ultimate aim of achieving a "negotiated peace," but nothing was achieved. The great loser of this political line was trade unionism, both that of the UGT and that of the CNT. On the other hand, those who emerged most strengthened were the communists, hence the accusation leveled against Negrín of being a "crypto-communist."

Map of the Spanish Civil War in July 1938

The Republic's defeats at the Battle of Teruel and in the Aragon Offensive provoked the crisis of March 1938. Azaña and Prieto considered that what had happened showed that the Republican army could never win the war and that a surrender had to be negotiated with Franco-British support. Against them, Negrín and the communists were firm supporters of continuing to resist. The crisis opened when Negrín tried to get Prieto to change ministries (having declared his conviction that the war was lost, Prieto was the worst possible Minister of Defense), but Azaña backed Prieto, as did the rest of the left-wing republicans and the nationalists of Esquerra and the PNV. However, they failed to put together any alternative to Negrín, and he ended up emerging strengthened from the crisis, with the consequent departure of Prieto from the government.

Negrín reshuffled the government on April 6, personally took over the Ministry of Defense and brought the two unions, UGT and CNT, into the cabinet. In addition, José Giral was replaced at the Ministry of State by the socialist Julio Álvarez del Vayo. The positions of the new government with a view to possible peace negotiations were set out in its Declaration of the 13 Points, made public on the significant date of May 1. In it, "the government announced that its war aims consisted of ensuring the independence of Spain and establishing a democratic Republic whose legal and social structure would be approved by referendum; it affirmed its respect for legitimately acquired property, the need for an agrarian reform and advanced social legislation, and announced a broad amnesty for all Spaniards who wish to cooperate in the immense work of reconstruction and aggrandizement of Spain. In his attempt to appear before the foreign powers with the internal situation under control, Negrín began fruitless approaches to the Vatican to restore diplomatic relations and open the churches for worship."

Negrín was aware that the survival of the Republic depended not only on strengthening the Popular Army and on maintaining the will to resist of the civilian population in the rearguard, but also on France and Great Britain putting an end to the policy of "non-intervention," or at least pressuring the fascist powers so that these in turn would convince "Generalísimo" Franco to accept a negotiated end. Negrín thought that his policy was the only one possible. As he said in private, "nothing else can be done." Thus his idea was to resist in order to negotiate an armistice that would avoid the "reign of terror and bloody vengeance" (the reprisals and executions by the victors upon the vanquished) that Negrín knew Franco was going to impose, as indeed ended up happening.

Moreover, Negrín, General Vicente Rojo Lluch, chief of the General Staff, and the communists believed that the Republican army was still capable of one last offensive, which began on July 24, 1938, thus starting the Battle of the Ebro, the longest and most decisive of the Civil War. But after three months of hard fighting, there came a new defeat of the Republican army, which had to return to its initial positions, "with tens of thousands of casualties and a considerable loss of war materiel that could no longer be used to defend Catalonia against the decisive Francoist offensive."

Shortly before the end of the Battle of the Ebro, another event occurred that was also decisive for the defeat of the Republic, this time coming from abroad. On September 29, 1938 the Munich Agreement was signed between Great Britain and France, on one side, and Germany and Italy, on the other, which closed off any possibility of intervention by the democratic powers in favor of the Republic. Just as that agreement meant handing over Czechoslovakia to Hitler, it also meant abandoning the Spanish Republic to the allies of the Nazis and fascists. It was of no use that, in a last desperate attempt to obtain foreign mediation, Negrín announced before the League of Nations on September 21, a week before the Munich Agreement was signed, the unilateral withdrawal of the foreign combatants fighting in Republican Spain, accepting (without waiting for the "Nationalists" to do the same) the resolution of the Non-Intervention Committee that proposed a Plan for the withdrawal of foreign volunteers from the War in Spain. On November 15, 1938, the day before the end of the Battle of the Ebro, the International Brigades paraded in farewell along the Avenida Diagonal in Barcelona. In the rebel camp, for their part, in October 1938, already sure of their military superiority and that victory was near, they decided to reduce the Italian forces by a quarter.

The last military operation of the war was the Catalonia campaign, which ended in a new disaster for the Republic. On January 26, 1939, Franco's troops entered Barcelona practically without a fight. On February 5 they occupied Girona. Four days earlier, "on February 1, 1939, in the sessions held by what remained of the Congress at the castle of Figueras, [Negrín] reduced the 13 points to the three guarantees that his government presented to the democratic powers as conditions for peace: the independence of Spain, that the Spanish people should determine what its regime and its destiny would be, and that all persecution and reprisal should cease in the name of a patriotic work of reconciliation. A few days later, he let the French and British ambassadors know that he was prepared to order an immediate cessation of hostilities if his government obtained guarantees that there would be no reprisals. But he did not receive them."

On February 6, the main Republican authorities, headed by President Azaña, crossed the border, followed by an immense exodus of Republican civilians and soldiers going into exile. On February 9 the Prime Minister, Juan Negrín, did the same, after the last soldier had left Catalonia, but in Toulouse he took a plane to return to Alicante on February 10, accompanied by some ministers, with the intention of reactivating the war in the central-southern zone. The only support Negrín still had, besides a part of his own party (the PSOE was divided between "Negrinists" and "anti-Negrinists"), was the communists.

The international dimension of the conflict and foreign intervention

Main article: Foreign intervention in the Spanish Civil War

Soldiers of the International Brigades

The "war of Spain" (as the international press called it) had an immediate impact on the complicated international relations of the second half of the 1930s. In Europe there was a three-way political, diplomatic, ideological, and strategic struggle among the democratic powers, Great Britain and France; the fascist powers, Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy; and Stalin's Soviet Union. Each European State approached the "Spanish question" from the standpoint of its own particular interests.

The European fascist regimes (Germany and Italy) and Salazarist Portugal supported the rebel military from the outset. The Republic, after France and Great Britain refused it aid and opted for the policy of Non-Intervention, obtained the support of the USSR and, from October 1936, of the International Brigades, most of whose members were French citizens. This "international support for both sides was vital for fighting and continuing the war in the first months. Italo-German aid allowed the rebel military to transfer the Army of Africa to the Peninsula at the end of July 1936, and Soviet aid contributed decisively to the Republican defense of Madrid in November 1936."

There is a humanitarian aspect of the international dimension of the Civil War that should not be forgotten: most of the foreign embassies and legations in Madrid and some consulates in provincial capitals granted political asylum to thousands of Spaniards from both sides whose lives were in danger.

The "non-intervention" policy of Great Britain and France

Great Britain and France saw that the "war of Spain" could further complicate the difficult strategic game being played out on a European scale. For this reason, the first aim of these powers' diplomacy was to seek the isolation of the Spanish conflict. This strategy gave rise to the policy of "Non-Intervention," which 27 European countries joined and which led to the creation of the Non-Intervention Committee, headquartered in London. The United States, for its part, considered the possibility of circumventing the pact and lifting the embargo imposed on the Spanish Republic, motivated by the concern with which the Roosevelt Administration viewed the rise of Nazism; but the opposition shown on both sides of the Atlantic by the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy, eager for a Francoist victory, frustrated that initiative.

"Non-intervention" was determined by the British policy of "appeasement" (appeasement policy) toward Nazi Germany, into which the Popular Front government of France was dragged, since it could count only on the British in the event of a possible German aggression. Moreover, the sympathies of the British Conservative government gradually tilted toward the rebel faction, out of fear that Spain would fall "into the chaos of some form of Bolshevism" (in the words of the British consul in Barcelona) if the Republican faction won the war.

The idea came from the French government, which was aware that, since it could not help the Republic (because doing so would open a major internal conflict within French society and would also cloud relations with its "vital" ally, Great Britain), it could at least prevent aid from reaching the rebels. The British government immediately joined the project, even though it "placed a legal Government and a group of rebel military officers on the same footing." The French Prime Minister, the socialist Léon Blum, after refusing Largo Caballero's negotiators passage through French territory for the weapons acquired by the Spanish Republic, went so far as to exclaim: "It is a crime that we are all committing against Spain!"

But in practice the "non-intervention" policy became a "farce," as some contemporaries described it, because Germany, Italy, and Portugal did not in the least suspend their shipments of arms and ammunition to the rebels. The Republic, which began receiving Soviet aid in October 1936, denounced before the League of Nations the intervention of the fascist powers in favor of the rebels, although these powers were never reprimanded.

Foreign intervention in favor of the rebels

Faced with the failure of the coup d'état of July 1936 (in terms of the immediate seizure of power), the rebel military quickly obtained aid from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Aid in manpower to the rebel faction took the form of the German Condor Legion (some 6,000 men) and the Italian Corpo di Truppe Volontarie (a maximum of 40,000), plus a contingent of Portuguese combatants known as the Viriatos. So that there would be no doubt about their commitment to the cause of the rebel faction, on November 18, 1936 (in the midst of the Battle of Madrid), Italy and Germany officially recognized "Generalísimo" Franco and his Technical State Junta as the legitimate government of Spain. As for weaponry, according to Julio Aróstegui, the rebels received from Italy and Germany 1,359 aircraft, 260 tanks, 1,730 artillery pieces, rifles, and ammunition for all of these.

The German, Italian, and Portuguese combatants were regular soldiers who were paid in their country of origin, although rebel propaganda always presented them as "volunteers." The genuine volunteers numbered some one thousand to fifteen hundred men, notable among whom were the Irish Brigade of General Eoin O'Duffy, made up of some 500–900 men who had come to fight in Spain "to wage the battle of Christendom against communism" (although they took part only in the Battle of Jarama and a few months later returned to Ireland), and 300–500 Frenchmen from the far-right organization Croix-de-Feu (later turned into the French Social Party) who formed the Jeanne d'Arc battalion. There were also volunteers from the Romanian Iron Guard, who came for the "battle against the scarlet beast of the Apocalypse." To a lesser extent, some White Russians fought among the rebels, as did far-right activists, Catholics, and antisemites from all over Europe. Also to be counted among the foreigners who took part on the rebel faction are the thousands of Moroccans from the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco who were intensively enlisted in the Regulares troops of the Army of Africa in exchange for pay.

The main reason for Nazi Germany's aid to Franco was that Hitler considered that in the "inevitable" European war that was going to break out in the coming years, it would be better to have in Spain a favorable government headed by anticommunist military men than a republican one that would strengthen its ties with France (and with its ally Great Britain) and with the Soviet Union. Two other factors also played a part in Hitler's decision: an ideological one (according to Nazi propaganda, the war in Spain was a confrontation between "fascists" and "Marxists," and the Soviet Union and "international communism" were held responsible for having caused it) and a military one (testing new weapons and new tactics, which took concrete form in the deployment in the rebel zone of a complete air unit, supported by tanks and anti-aircraft guns, called the "Condor Legion"). The Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters and Junkers Ju 87 A/B aircraft and the Junkers Ju 52 and Heinkel He 111 bombers were tested. Germany likewise premiered in Spain its tactics of bombing cities. Although it was not the only one, the most famous was the bombing of Guernica, depicted by Picasso in his painting Guernica, exhibited in the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 Paris International Exposition.

Advance of Italian tankettes of the CTV during the Battle of Guadalajara.

The main reason for Fascist Italy's aid was to gain an ally for Mussolini's project of building an empire in the Mediterranean, and in that way to weaken the military position of France and Great Britain. Like the Nazis, it also used anticommunism in its propaganda to justify intervention in the Spanish Civil War.

Although less publicized, the aid given to the rebels by the dictatorship of Oliveira Salazar in Portugal was also important, especially in the first months of the war, because it allowed the rebel military to use its roads, railways, and ports to link the northern zone with Andalusia, and it also returned to the rebel zone the Republicans who were fleeing repression. Afterwards Portugal served as a base of operations for the purchase of arms and was also a firm ally of the rebels in the "farce" of "non-intervention," always defending them before the Non-Intervention Committee and in the League of Nations.

Foreign intervention in favor of the Republic

Soviet T-26B tank during the Battle of Belchite, September 1937.

Stalin responded positively to the request for aid made by the Republican government, not immediately but once he became convinced that if the Spanish Republic were defeated, the power of the fascist powers in Europe would increase, which would pose a threat to the Soviet Union (as it would to France, a possible ally). Thus it was that in September 1936 Stalin decided to send war matériel to the Spanish Republic and also ordered the Comintern to organize the sending of volunteers, who would form the International Brigades. A total of approximately 40,000 men passed through the Brigades, and the Soviet war matériel received by the Republic, whose first shipments arrived at the port of Cartagena in early October 1936, amounted to 1,100 aircraft, 300 tanks, and 1,500 artillery pieces (to which should be added some small French consignments of artillery and aircraft, and Mexican rifles and ammunition). Other authors give more precise figures and state that the USSR sent 680 aircraft (Chato and Mosca fighters and "Katiuska" bombers), 331 tanks, 1,699 pieces of artillery, 60 armored cars, 450,000 Mosin–Nagant rifles, 20,486 machine guns and DP light machine guns, and 30,000 tons of ammunition. This war matériel was accompanied by some 2,000 technicians, pilots, and military advisers (and also agents of the NKVD, the Stalinist secret police, under the command of Alexander Orlov). The Soviet Union likewise sent fuel, clothing, and food, part of it paid for by popular donations. The Soviets, like the Germans and the Italians, tested weapons and combat tactics.

Flag of the International Brigades

The recruitment and organizational aspects of the International Brigades were handled by leaders of the French Communist Party, headed by André Marty, and the recruitment center was set up in Paris. The vast majority of those who enlisted were truly "volunteers for freedom" (as Republican propaganda put it), coming from countries ruled by dictatorships and by fascism, such as Germany, Italy, or Poland, but also from democratic countries such as France (which contributed the largest number of brigaders, some 9,000), Great Britain, and the United States (with the famous Lincoln Battalion). Therefore the International Brigades were not the "Army of the Comintern," an instrument of Stalin's policy, as the propaganda of the rebel faction claimed. The training center in Spain was located in Albacete, and there the five brigades numbered XI through XV were organized; they entered combat in the Battle of Madrid.

Mexico supported the Republican cause militarily, diplomatically, and morally: providing the loyalist forces with 20,000 rifles, ammunition (an approximate figure of 28 million cartridges is cited), 8 batteries, some aircraft, and food, as well as creating refuges for nearly 25,000 Spanish Republicans, giving protection, shelter, and food to thousands of intellectuals, families, and children who arrived at the port of Veracruz and other ports on the Gulf of Mexico. Argentina cooperated in the evacuation of asylum seekers to France with two ships of the Argentine Navy, the ARA 25 de Mayo and the ARA Tucumán.

Given its proximity, France collaborated by taking in the exiles coming from Catalonia across the Pyrenees and also those arriving by ship. It also collaborated with the citizen mobilization for joining the International Brigades. Later, Republican exiles would be the ones who enlisted in the foreign battalions of the French army for the defense of the nation against the German conquest in 1940 and for the defense of Free France in the territories of North Africa until the arrival of American and British troops; they would also take part in the third Battle of Narvik and the liberation of Paris.

The financing of the war and "the Moscow gold"

The Republic financed the war with the gold reserves of the Bank of Spain, which it sent to the Soviet Union (what Francoist propaganda called the "Moscow gold"), except for a quarter that was sold to France. The "Moscow gold" was earmarked "for payment for the weaponry acquired from Russia and other countries, which always had to be paid for, whereas the German and Italian deliveries [to the rebels] were free or paid for on deferred terms in goods. The gold that left [for Moscow] is estimated at 510 tons, with a value of 530 million dollars at the time. Today we know that there is no other 'Moscow gold' than that, which was invested in its entirety in the purchase of arms."

The timeliness and wisdom of the decision of the Largo Caballero government to deposit in Moscow most of the gold reserves of the Bank of Spain (which arrived there in early November 1936) has been a subject of controversy among historians. Some state, following mainly the research of Ángel Viñas, that the Republican government had no other option, owing to the hostility that the banks of Great Britain and France had shown toward the Republic, so that the Soviet Union was the only one that guaranteed weaponry and food in exchange for gold. By contrast, Pablo Martín-Aceña, a researcher specializing in the financing of the Civil War, believes that the government of the Republic decided hastily before having explored other options, such as France and even the United States.

Francoist propaganda said that the gold of the Bank of Spain (which it called the "Moscow gold") had been stolen by the Republic and handed over to Stalin without anything in return, but the research of Ángel Viñas has shown that the "Moscow gold" was spent in its entirety on purchases of war matériel. For its part, the Bank of France acquired 174 tons of gold, a quarter of the total reserves, for which it paid the Republican Treasury 195 million dollars. In total, between the "Moscow gold" (three quarters of the reserves of the Bank of Spain) and the "Paris gold" (one quarter, which Francoist propaganda never mentioned), the Republican authorities obtained 714 million dollars, which was the financial cost of the Civil War for the Republic. Nothing of the Spanish gold remained in Russia, and the reserves were practically exhausted by the summer of 1938. The problem was that, because of the "non-intervention" policy, the Republic's emissaries were on many occasions swindled by arms dealers who sold them obsolete equipment at prices far higher than the real cost. The Republican governments were also swindled by the Soviet Union itself, as Gerald Howson has pointed out, or by Poland and other countries that took advantage of the precarious Republican situation to sell them "war scrap."

The rebel faction, for its part, since it had no gold, paid for most of the cost of the war (some 700 million dollars, an amount similar to that spent by the Republic) by means of credits obtained from Italy and Germany. Nazi Germany collected payment for part of the war matériel it supplied "in kind" (a system devised by Hermann Goering) with Spanish foodstuffs, raw materials, and minerals that reached Germany through two companies created for that purpose (HISMA and ROWAK). Something similar happened with Italy, so that the two fascist powers replaced France and Great Britain as Spain's leading trading customers. The rebels also obtained economic and financial aid from companies and businessmen in Great Britain, France, and the United States, especially from those who most sympathized with the "national cause" (for example, the American and British companies Texaco and Shell sold them oil on credit throughout the war). The rebel faction also received financial aid from wealthy Spaniards such as Juan March, who contributed 15 million pounds sterling, or from the former King Alfonso XIII, who donated 10 million dollars.

The Church and the Spanish Civil War

Main article: Catholic Church and the Spanish Civil War

The Catholic Church in the rebel zone

Although religious motivation does not appear in any of the pronunciamiento proclamations of the July 1936 coup d'état in Spain, the transformation of the coup d'état into a "crusade" or "holy war" in defense of religion came about quickly, which proved very convenient for legitimizing the military coup. This sacralization of the war was accentuated above all when the first news began to reach the rebel zone of the savage religious persecution that had been unleashed in the Republican zone, where the military uprising had failed. José María Pemán, one of the main ideologues of the rebel faction, wrote: "the smoke of incense and the smoke of the cannon, which rises to the feet of God, are one and the same vertical will to affirm a faith and, upon it, to save a world and restore a civilization."

Pope Pius XI

Most of the Spanish bishops waited for the Vatican to pronounce itself before making public their view of the war, but this did not happen until September 14, 1936, when Pope Pius XI delivered the address La vostra presenza at his summer residence of Castel Gandolfo in a public audience to a group of some 500 Spanish Catholics who had managed to flee the Republican zone, many of them thanks to the help of the Republican authorities, especially the Generalitat of Catalonia. But in the address the Pope did not use the term "crusade" to refer to the armed conflict in Spain, but rather "civil war" "between the children of the same people, of the same mother country," and made a final exhortation to love one's enemies. In fact, in the rebel zone only those paragraphs of the address that seemed to ratify the civil war's character as a crusade were published, and the entire second part, in which the faithful were exhorted to love their enemies, was suppressed. The Spanish bishops, who at first knew Pius XI's address only in this propagandistic version, immediately made public fiery pastoral letters in favor of the rebels, most notable among them that of the Bishop of Salamanca Enrique Pla y Deniel, published on September 30, 1936, just one day before General Franco was proclaimed Generalísimo and Head of the Government of the State, under the title The Two Cities, in which he declared the war a "crusade for religion, the fatherland, and civilization" (when Pla y Deniel learned of the complete version he did not in the least retract his pastoral letter, nor did the rest of the bishops). In this way "Franco counted on the support and blessing of the Catholic Church." In the same vein spoke Cardinal Isidro Gomá, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain:

Is the war in Spain a civil war? No; it is a struggle of the godless [...] against the true Spain, against the Catholic religion.

— La Guerra de España, 1936–1939, page 261.

Lehendakari Aguirre in exile in France (April 1939)

A serious problem arose for the idea of a "crusade" defended by the rebel faction when the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), a Catholic party, remained loyal to the Republic (as a result, in the Republican Basque Country, which comprised Biscay and Gipuzkoa, there was no religious persecution, no church was burned or closed, and Catholic worship proceeded normally), which undermined the conception of the Civil War as a "crusade." For this reason, on August 6, 1936, just three weeks after the July coup, the Bishop of Vitoria (whose diocese then also covered Biscay and Gipuzkoa, in addition to Álava), Mateo Múgica, and the Bishop of Pamplona, Marcelino Olaechea, jointly published a "Pastoral Instruction" (which had in fact been written by the Cardinal Primate of Toledo, Isidro Gomá) in which they urged the Basque nationalists to end their collaboration with the Republic. The "pastoral instruction," and other later writings by Cardinal Gomá on the "Basque question," refer to the priests murdered in the first weeks of the war by the "Nationals," not by the "Reds," and whose death he in a certain way justifies on the grounds that they were "separatists." The murder of these priests prompted protests from the Bishop of Vitoria, Mateo Múgica Urrestarazu, to which the National Defense Junta responded by demanding that the Vatican remove him from his bishopric and that he leave Spain, despite his having supported the "uprising" (on October 14, 1936, Bishop Múgica set out for exile). This "Basque question" reappeared when the Republican Basque Country was occupied by the "Nationals" in June 1937, because the repression also included numerous "separatist" Basque priests who were imprisoned for the crime of "rebellion."

Two months later the Collective Letter of the Spanish Bishops on the War in Spain was made public. It was drafted by the Cardinal Primate of Toledo, Isidro Gomá, at the request of "Generalísimo" Francisco Franco, who on May 10, 1937, asked him, given that the Spanish episcopate supported him, to publish "a document which, addressed to the episcopate of the whole world, with the request that it endeavor to have it reproduced in the Catholic press, may succeed in setting the truth straight." The "truth" that General Franco sought to have disseminated in this document was intended to counter the condemnation by broad sectors of the more progressive European and American Catholicism of the murders committed by the "Nationals" of fourteen priests in the Basque Country and of thousands of workers and peasants throughout the rebel zone, as well as their refusal to consider the Spanish Civil War a crusade or holy war.

The aim Franco pursued with the collective letter, that of winning over world Catholic opinion to the cause of the rebel faction, was fully achieved, because from then on practically all the bishops of the world adopted the view of the Spanish Civil War expressed in the collective letter, above all because of the description it gave of the religious persecution that had been unleashed in the Republican zone. However, five bishops did not sign it. Among them was the exiled Bishop of Vitoria, Mateo Múgica Urrestarazu, who "could not sign a document in which, in response to the accusation that there was also harsh repression in the Francoist zone, the principles of justice of the military tribunals and the way they applied them were praised." Nor was it signed by Cardinal Vidal y Barraquer, who was without doubt the most significant case of the five, because he was perhaps the most prominent figure of the Catholic Church in Spain at that time. His refusal to sign the letter was based on his "belief that in that fratricidal war the Church should not identify itself with either of the two sides, but should rather work for pacification."

Consecration of Pope Pius XII, March 1939.

The Vatican announced that it would fully recognize the rebel faction, in the midst of the collapse of the Aragon front in the spring of 1938, when it communicated that it would appoint a nuncio to replace the "papal delegate" Ildebrando Antoniutti, who since July 1937 had held the pontifical representation before Generalísimo Franco. The person designated by Pope Pius XI was Monsignor Gaetano Cicognani. He presented his credentials to Franco on May 24, and a month later, on June 30, the ambassador of "Nationalist Spain" to the Vatican, José Yanguas Messía, did the same "in solemn audience" before Pius XI.

When the triumph of the "Nationals" in the war came, the "Spanish Church, which had massively adhered to the uprising, threw itself enthusiastically into the celebrations of victory over the other half. And the Holy See itself, which for most of the conflict had shown itself so reticent, in the end also joined the celebrations." On April 1, 1939, the same day on which Franco issued the famous "last war bulletin" proclaiming "the war is over," Pope Pius XII (Cardinal Pacelli, who on March 2 had been made Pope after the death of Pius XI) congratulated Franco by telegram on his "Catholic victory": Two weeks later, on April 16, 1939, Vatican Radio broadcast a message read by Pope Pius XII himself which said:

With immense joy we address you, most beloved children of Catholic Spain, to express to you our paternal congratulations for the gift of peace and victory, with which God has deigned to crown the Christian heroism of your faith and charity, proven in so many and such generous sufferings.

On May 20, 1939, a month after the Victory Parade presided over by Franco in Madrid, there took place in the Church of Santa Bárbara in Madrid a political-religious ceremony, "medievalizing in character, which sought to represent in the form of a sacred drama the ideology of the holy war that had just ended," in which General Franco, in the uniform of a Captain General, with a blue shirt (of the Falange) and red beret (of the Requetés), accompanied by his wife, entered the church under a canopy (while the organ played the national anthem), where he offered the sword of victory to God. Then Cardinal Gomá, who presided over the ceremony accompanied by nineteen bishops (and in the presence of the Vatican Nuncio, Monsignor Cicognani), blessed the "Caudillo," who knelt before him:

May the Lord be always with you. May He, from whom all Right and all Power proceed and under whose dominion all things are, bless you and with loving providence continue to protect you, as well as the people whose governance has been entrusted to you. Let the blessing I give you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit be the pledge of this.

Days later, on June 11, 1939, it was Pope Pius XII himself who received in solemn ceremony at the Vatican three thousand three hundred legionaries as part of a victory celebration tour through Germany and Italy (the day before they had paraded before Mussolini), a delegation headed by the minister Ramón Serrano Suñer. The pontiff blessed the troops and declared that they had been "the defenders of the faith and of civilization."

The Catholic Church in the Republican zone

Militiamen dressed in liturgical vestments after the looting of a church. Madrid, 1936.

Above all during the first months of the war, a savage religious persecution was unleashed in the Republican zone, with murders, burnings, and looting whose perpetrators were "the extremists, the uncontrolled elements, and the common criminals released from the prisons who joined them," all of it immersed in the wave of violence unleashed against the people and institutions that represented the "bourgeois order" that the Spanish social revolution of 1936, which took place in the zone where the military uprising failed, sought to destroy. "For several months it was enough for someone to be identified as a priest, a religious, or simply a militant Christian, a member of some apostolic or pious organization, to be executed without trial."

As for the number of victims, a Francoist propaganda pamphlet published in Paris in 1937 put the number at 16,750 priests and 80% of the members of the religious orders. These figures remained the official ones during the first two decades of the Francoist dictatorship until, in 1961, the priest Antonio Montero Moreno (who would later become Bishop of Badajoz) published the only systematic and serious study carried out to date, citing the victims by name. According to that study, titled Historia de la persecución religiosa en España 1936-1939, 12 bishops, 4,184 secular priests, 2,365 male religious, and 263 nuns were murdered in the Republican zone. It remains to be determined how many Catholic laypeople were murdered, not for anything they had supposedly done individually but for belonging to a Catholic confessional association or merely for being practicing Catholics.

What research subsequent to that of Montero Moreno has clarified is that the largest number of murders took place between July and September 1936, when members of the clergy were seized and executed without any kind of trial. From the latter date, the people's courts began to operate under the impetus of the new Largo Caballero government; they gave minimal legal guarantees to detainees, and the sentences usually ended in prison terms rather than death. After the events of May 1937 and the formation of the government of Juan Negrín, in which the Ministry of Justice was held by the PNV Catholic Manuel de Irujo, the murders ceased completely and most of the priests who were in prison were released. However, the prohibition of public Catholic worship continued, as did other revolutionary measures. Only at the end of the war, with the disorderly flight of the Republican army toward the French border, were there new victims among the members of the clergy, notable among them the Bishop of Teruel, Anselmo Polanco Fontecha. Thus, according to the historian and Benedictine monk Hilari Raguer, "the tragic reality of the massacres of the summer of '36 cannot be denied, but it is misleading to claim that the terror lasted until the end of the war."

The Republican authorities (especially the autonomous governments of Catalonia and the Basque Country) tried to prevent the murders of priests and religious, and in general of right-wing people and military men. In the Basque Country the government of José Antonio Aguirre managed to control the situation, and there was no religious persecution there. In Catalonia, although effective power was held by the hundreds of revolutionary committees, mainly anarchist, that had arisen after the defeat of the uprising of July 19, the Generalitat presided over by Lluís Companys managed to bring to safety thousands of threatened right-wing people, among them numerous priests (beginning with the head of the Church in Catalonia, the Archbishop of Tarragona, Cardinal Vidal y Barraquer, who had been detained by a group of militiamen) and religious (among them 2,142 nuns), granting them passports and chartering French and Italian ships so that they could flee abroad, although it could not prevent hundreds of them from being executed for being Catholics.

José Antonio Aguirre during a speech at the Aberri Eguna of 1933 held in San Sebastián.

However, despite all these initiatives, the Church and Catholic worship in the Republican zone, except in the Basque Country, had disappeared. In an internal report presented to the Council of Ministers on January 7, 1937, the Catholic PNV minister without portfolio Manuel Irujo denounced that in the "loyal territory" "all churches have been closed to worship, which has been totally and absolutely suspended." Likewise, Irujo stated, "all convents have been vacated and religious life in them suspended," and "their buildings, objects of worship, and property of all kinds were burned, looted, occupied, or demolished." "Priests and religious have been detained, imprisoned, and shot without trial by the thousands, acts which, although diminished, still continue." Having finished his report, Irujo asked the other members of the Largo Caballero government to approve the restoration of freedom of conscience and freedom of worship recognized in the Constitution of 1931 then in force, but his proposal was unanimously rejected on the grounds that public opinion would disapprove of it owing to the alignment of the Catholic Church with the rebel faction, in addition to the old (and false) but very widespread argument that shots had been fired from churches at the loyalist forces and at "the people."

The exception was the Republican Basque Country, for there was no religious persecution there and Catholic worship proceeded normally. The reason was that the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), a Catholic party, remained loyal to the Republic.

In the government formed by the socialist Juan Negrín after the events of May 1937, the Catholic and Basque nationalist Manuel Irujo held the Ministry of Justice, which was the department that traditionally dealt with religious affairs in Spain. The task Irujo received from Negrín was to try to normalize religious life in the Republican zone. The first fruit of the new policy was the toleration of private worship, so that Masses celebrated in private homes were no longer persecuted nor, with a few exceptions, did they give rise to arrests, even though on occasion they turned into gatherings favorable to the rebels.

As for the restoration of public worship, the government ran into the flat opposition of the anarchists, on the one hand, and, on the other, that of some Republican Catholics and of the ecclesiastical authorities, who thought that the churches could not simply be reopened, forgetting the murders and burnings of the first months of the war, besides the fact that all of it could become an instrument of Republican propaganda. The government even secretly sent a churchman to Rome to inform the Vatican of its intention to normalize ecclesiastical life and to reconcile with the Church. But the Vatican's response was evasive, without committing itself to anything.

A new gesture of reconciliation with the Church took place on October 17, 1938, when four government ministers presided over the Catholic funeral of the Basque officer Captain Vicente Eguía Sagarduy, killed in combat, which was given great publicity in the press and had a great international impact. The next step was the creation on December 8, 1938, of the Commissariat of Worship of the Republic, charged with protecting religious freedom and freedom of worship, at the head of which Negrín appointed a Catholic colleague and friend of his, Jesús María Bellido Golferichs, who accepted the post "fulfilling a duty as a Catholic." But there was no time for public worship to be restored because of the Catalonia Offensive launched by "Generalísimo Franco" on December 23, 1938, which in just a month and a half occupied all of Catalonia. Thus, the reopening of Catholic churches in Catalonia was not the work of the Republic but was brought about by Franco's troops (when preparations had already been made to reopen one of the chapels of Tarragona Cathedral for worship, the "Nationals" entered the city on January 15).

Repression behind the lines

Main articles: Red Terror (Spain), White Terror (Spain), and Victims of the Spanish Civil War

During the first days, some 50,000 people who found themselves trapped on the opposing side were executed by means of the so-called paseos ("rides"). These were carried out by armed groups who went to fetch people from their homes or from the prisons where they were being held and, under the euphemism of we're going for a ride, took them to some road or to the cemetery walls and executed them.

Possibly the best known of such executions among those carried out by the rebel faction, owing to the prominence of the victim, is that of the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca in the ravine of Víznar in Granada. Also of great prominence was the Badajoz massacre, perpetrated by the rebel troops after the capture of the city.

On the Republican side, the largest series of mass murders were the Paracuellos massacres between November 7 and December 4, 1936: removals of prisoners from the Madrid prisons (among whom was the playwright Pedro Muñoz Seca, along with other people, intellectuals, religious, politicians, and military men), most of whom were murdered in the town of Paracuellos de Jarama.

In the context of the war, many took advantage of the situation to carry out such macabre acts, sometimes out of revenge unrelated to the conflict itself, and when an area fell into the hands of one side or the other, the paseos were not long in coming. Especially cruel for the population was the case of the towns that were intermittently occupied by both sides, with the consequent repeated executions and acts of revenge.

In the zone under the control of the Republic, clashes between opposing militias and factions also served as a pretext for episodes of bloody repression, as in the case of the May Days of 1937 in Barcelona, narrated by the English writer George Orwell in his work Homage to Catalonia, based on his firsthand experience.

The military officer Ramón Salas Larrazábal studied the figures for the victims who may have died behind these lines. He considered, according to his studies, that all the victims were entered in the Civil Registries, and made an approximate calculation of the deaths of the War. A summary of his conclusions can be seen in Mortality in the Spanish Civil War, by court registration. However, in later studies, for example in Navarre, which he considered a control location, it has been shown that the victims of the repression were far more numerous than the figures he had calculated.

Investigation of the crimes

After the war ended, the Republican faction was accused by the rebel faction of committing crimes from the first days of the war. The main accusations concern the religious persecution against Catholics, the creation of semi-clandestine detention centers (checas) where those suspected of sympathizing with the opposing side were tortured and murdered, and the commission of mass murders such as the massacres at the Cárcel Modelo in Madrid and at Paracuellos. The Francoist regime promoted an extensive investigation into these events known as the Causa General, which, although carried out with partiality and without sufficient procedural guarantees, relied on abundant documentary and testimonial evidence.

The crimes of the victors, for their part, were never investigated or prosecuted. Numerous voices in the legal field, such as Baltasar Garzón (former Spanish judge of the Audiencia Nacional), Carlos Jiménez Villarejo (founder of the association Justicia Democrática), Raúl Zaffaroni (criminal law scholar and justice of the Supreme Court of Argentina), as well as various associations of victims of Francoism and others, maintain that the rebel faction committed acts of genocide and crimes against humanity, since the documentation now available, such as the military archives of the period, would show that its plans included the extermination and systematic persecution of the political opposition, the rape of the women of the Republican zone, the imposition of physical and psychological tests on prisoners to link their ideology with mental illness, or the systematic theft of children from Republican parents to eliminate ideological "contamination," children whose true identity is still concealed from them.

Considering that these acts, by their nature as crimes against humanity, cannot be subject to a statute of limitations or be pardoned, the judge Baltasar Garzón opened proceedings to investigate the events, basing himself on those he had already unsuccessfully pursued against the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and stating that the aim was not "to carry out a judicial review of the Civil War." Among other considerations, he argued the charge of genocide under Spanish law, citing order 211/2008 of Central Investigating Court No. 2 (the SS-Totenkopf or Nazi Genocide case), by which the crimes committed against Spaniards held in the Nazi concentration camps for political or ideological reasons were considered crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity. The Audiencia Nacional decided by a majority vote, and without making any assessment of the criminal nature of the acts reported, that Central Investigating Court No. 5, headed by Garzón, lacked subject-matter jurisdiction to investigate them, considering that the possible criminal liability of those investigated had been extinguished by their deaths. The dissenting judges considered that the court did have jurisdiction, since the acts investigated were "crimes against humanity and genocide," constituting a "systematic and massive elimination of political adversaries" after the conflict.

In addition, proceedings are open before the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights to examine the "red money" seized during the conflict, estimated at 40 million euros in today's terms.

Consequences

Economic

The cost of the war for both sides was very high. The Republican government's use of the gold reserves to buy weaponry exhausted the monetary reserves of the Republican zone. The rebel faction had to pay a great deal of money after the end of the conflict, largely by allowing Germany to exploit the mineral reserves of the Peninsula and of what was then Spanish Africa, so that until the outbreak of the Second World War they had almost no possibility of obtaining revenue. Spain had been left devastated in some areas, with towns completely razed. The Spanish economy would take decades to recover.

Victims of the Civil War

Main article: Victims of the Spanish Civil War

Mass grave in Estépar, Province of Burgos, with 26 victims from the Republican faction. The excavation took place in July 2014.

The number of civilian victims is still debated. Some state that the figure would lie between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people. Many of these deaths were not due to combat but to repression in the form of summary executions and paseos. On the rebel side this was carried out systematically and on the orders of superiors, whereas on the Republican side it took place in an uncontrolled manner at times when the government lost control of the armed masses. The abuses were directed at all those suspected of sympathizing with the opposing side. On the rebel side, trade unionists and Republican politicians (both of the left and of the right) were mainly persecuted, while on the Republican faction this repression was directed at sympathizers of reaction or those suspected of being so and at priests of the Catholic Church, going so far as to burn convents and churches and to murder bishops, priests, and male and female religious. The loss to the historical and artistic heritage of the Catholic Church is incalculable, since some 20,000 buildings were destroyed—among them several cathedrals—including their ornamentation (altarpieces and images) and archives.

The number of dead in the Spanish Civil War can only be estimated approximately. The rebel faction established a figure of 500,000, including, in addition to those killed in combat, the victims of bombings, executions, and murders. Recent estimates give that same figure of 500,000 dead or somewhat fewer, not including those who died of malnutrition, hunger, and diseases caused by the war. The figure of one million dead, sometimes cited, comes from a novel by Gironella, who justifies it as the 500,000 acknowledged dead plus as many again whose lives were irreparably shattered. However, Gerald Brenan was already writing in the prologue to The Spanish Labyrinth (1943): "In addition to the one or two million dead, the health of the people has been undermined by its aftermath of hunger and disease. Hundreds of thousands are still in prison. Both physically and morally, Spain is a ruin."

Francoist postwar repression and the Republican exile

Main articles: Francoist repression and Republican exile

File:El exilio español en la CD de México (4).JPG

Republican refugees working as farmers in Pachuca de Soto (Mexico). Spaniards who sympathized with the Second Spanish Republic fled to other places in the face of the victory of the rebel faction.

After the war, the Francoist repression launched a repressive process against the losing side, beginning a purge of what was called "Red Spain" and of any element connected with the Republic, which led many into exile or to death, and which included the theft of babies from Republican parents, who in many cases still do not know their identity today. During that time, speaking of democracy, republic, or Marxism was illegal and subject to prosecution.

The forced exile of many victims of reprisals before, during, and after the war is difficult to quantify. Depending on their geographical situation and their political preferences, people chose between leaving by sea, crossing the ocean to go mostly to Hispanic American countries, or, for the better-off, to go to the United Kingdom; or by land, crossing the Pyrenees to the French side, a country many chose because of its proximity to Spain and their belief that they would be well received, a belief shown to be mistaken by facts such as the concentration camps of Bram.

The Republican exile took place in three phases. The first was the Northern campaign (March to November 1937). The second, the fall of Catalonia (January to February 1939), during which some 400,000 people crossed into France (a number so large that it overwhelmed the French authorities, who had to improvise various concentration camps, even on the beaches, where those held endured harsh living conditions; although almost half of them would end up returning to Spain). The third and last wave came at the end of the war, in the last days of March 1939, when thousands of Republicans headed for the ports of the Levante to get a ship that would take them into exile, but very few succeeded. It is estimated that in March 1939 only between 7,000 and 7,500 people managed to leave Spain, including the sailors of the crews of the Fleet that fled to Bizerte.

Among the exiles was a significant part of the Spanish intellectual elites, who sought refuge in other countries, especially in Mexico, which meant an enormous loss of human capital for Spain. For example, "in February 1942 the consulate general of Mexico in Vichy registered 13,400 Spaniards with higher education who wished to leave occupied France; among them 1,743 physicians, 1,224 lawyers, 431 engineers, and 163 professors of the 430 that Spain had in 1936."

International relations

The political and emotional repercussions of the war went beyond those of a national conflict, since, for many other countries, the Spanish Civil War was seen as part of an international conflict being waged between religion and atheism, revolution and reaction. For the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the Kingdom of Italy, Spain was a testing ground for new methods of air and tank warfare. For the United Kingdom and France, the conflict represented a new threat to the international balance they were struggling to preserve, which collapsed in 1939 (a few months after the end of the Spanish war) with the Second World War. The pact between Germany and the Soviet Union meant the end of the latter's interest in maintaining its revolutionary pressure in southern Europe.

As for foreign policy, the Civil War led to Spain's isolation and the withdrawal of ambassadors from almost the entire world. Only a few countries maintained diplomatic relations with Spain from the end of the Second World War until the beginning of the Cold War. From the 1950s onward, Spain's international relations, with the support of the U.S., became almost normal, except with the countries of the Soviet bloc.

The devastated regions

During the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, many towns and cities were totally or partially destroyed. Once the war was over, the Directorate General of Devastated Regions was established, which took on the task of rebuilding them.

Among the many devastated towns were the following:

• Asturias: La Foz, Oviedo, Pendones, Tarna, and Villamanín.
• Cantabria: Las Rozas de Valdearroyo.
• Castellón: Benafer and Chilches.
• Extremadura: Mérida.
• Guadalajara: Gajanejos, Hita, Masegoso de Tajuña.
• Gipuzkoa: Eibar.
• Huesca: Banariés, Banastás, Huerrios, Igriés, and Lascascas.
• Madrid: Brunete, La Hiruela, Prádena del Rincón, Villanueva de la Cañada, and Villanueva del Pardillo.
• Jaén: Lopera, Higuera de Calatrava, and Santiago de Calatrava.
• Teruel: Teruel and Híjar.
• Biscay: Guernica y Luno, Durango, and, to a lesser extent, Baracaldo.
• Zaragoza: Belchite.

Historical memory

Main article: Historical Memory Law

Map of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War. Geographic location of the graves or burial sites in Spanish territory for which information is available, represented with symbols of different colors according to the action taken on each of them. Source: Ministry of Justice

In 2007 the Government of Spain approved the Historical Memory Law, which seeks to restore the memory and dignity of the victims of reprisals. It includes the renaming of public streets bearing Francoist names, the removal of Falangist symbols from monuments, maps of mass graves, and the exhumation of bodies, among other measures.

Likewise, other economic administrations have acted along the same lines, and the UN has even spoken out in favor.

In 2020 the Government of Spain approved the Democratic Memory Law, thus expanding Zapatero's Historical Memory Law with measures such as the creation of a DNA bank and a census of victims, the resignification of the Valley of the Fallen, and the banning of the Francisco Franco National Foundation.

The Civil War in the arts

The Civil War is the subject with the largest literary output in all of Spanish historiography, as well as the most controversial and the one that generates the most social and political debate (see historical memory). Although there is almost unanimous agreement on the dates, the so-called revisionists close to Francoism propose the Revolution of 1934 as the beginning of the war. The declaration of a state of war itself differed between the two sides: the Republican Government did not declare a state of war until almost the end (in order to maintain civilian control of all institutions), while Franco's Government did not lift the declaration until several years after the war ended (in order to guarantee its military control).

Film

See Category:Films about the Spanish Civil War

Films made during the war itself, although there were also fiction films (the Republican Aurora de esperanza —Antonio Sau, Barcelona, 1937—, Barrios bajos —Pedro Puche, Barcelona, 1937— and Nuestro culpable —Fernando Mignoni, 1938— and five Nationalist films by Benito Perojo and Florián Rey shot in the German studios of UFA, of the folkloric genre —an atmosphere recreated in La niña de tus ojos, Fernando Trueba, 1998—), were fundamentally of the documentary genre:

Republican side:

• España 1936 (Luis Buñuel)
• Sierra de Teruel (La esperanza or L'Espoir, by André Malraux, who also wrote a novel with the same title).
• Tierra de España (Joris Ivens), an American production.

Rebel side:

• Noticiario Español, 32 documentaries (precursors of NO-DO)
• ¡Vivan los hombres libres! (Edgar Neville, 1939)
• Romancero marroquí (1938-39), about the intervention of Moroccan troops
• They were much less numerous, owing to the smaller number of production companies (eight as against more than fifty Republican ones); although there are Portuguese (O caminho de Madrid), Italian (Arriba Spagna. Scene della guerra civile in Spagna) and German (In Kampf Gegen den Weltfeind or Legión Cóndor) documentaries.
• Defensores de la Fe (Russell Palmer, 1938)

During Francoism (until 1975):

• Frente de Madrid (Edgar Neville, 1939), an adaptation of the novel of the same name by the same author
• Sin novedad en el Alcázar (Augusto Genina, 1940), Italian-Spanish
• Raza (José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, 1941), with a screenplay by Franco himself
• Rojo y negro (Carlos Arévalo, 1942), censored for its harshness, despite its Falangist orientation
• El santuario no se rinde (Arturo Ruiz Castillo, 1949)

Since 1975: Fiction:

• Las largas vacaciones del 36 (Jaime Camino, 1975); by the same director:
  • Dragon Rapide, which takes as its title the name of the airplane in which Franco left the Canary Islands
  • El largo invierno
  • Los niños de Rusia
• Una vita venduta (Aldo Florio, 1976)
• Las bicicletas son para el verano (Jaime Chávarri, 1984), an adaptation of the play by Fernando Fernán Gómez
• La vaquilla (Luis García Berlanga, 1985)
• Réquiem por un campesino español (Francesc Betriu, 1985), an adaptation of Sender's novel
• ¡Ay, Carmela! (Carlos Saura, 1990)
• Tierra y libertad (Ken Loach, 1995)
• Libertarias (Vicente Aranda, 1996)
• La hora de los valientes (Antonio Mercero, 1998)
• La lengua de las mariposas (José Luis Cuerda, 1999)
• El espinazo del diablo (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)
• Soldados de Salamina (David Trueba, 2003)
• La buena nueva (Helena Taberna, 2008)
• La mujer del anarquista (Marie Noelle and Peter Sehr, 2009)
• Mientras dure la guerra (Alejandro Amenábar, 2019)

Documentary:

• Morir en Madrid (Frederic Rossif, 1963)
• La vieja memoria (Jaime Camino, 1976)
• Retablo de la guerra civil española (Basilio Martín Patino, 1980); the same director had previously dealt with the postwar period in Canciones para después de una guerra (1971) and with the figure of Franco in Caudillo (1974).
• La guerra civil española (Granada Television, 1983)
• El honor de las injurias (Carlos García Alix, 2007)
• El perro negro (historias de la guerra civil española) (Péter Forgács, 2005)
• Los niños de Morelia (Juan Pablo Villaseñor, 2004, Mexico)

Novel

• The Spanish Civil War in the novel

• For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway); a film adaptation was made.
• Frente de Madrid (Edgar Neville)
• La forja de un rebelde (Arturo Barea)
• Réquiem por un campesino español (Ramón J. Sender)
• Contraataque (Ramón J. Sender)
• La fiel infantería (Rafael García Serrano)
• Plaza del Castillo (Rafael García Serrano)
• Cumbres de Extremadura (José Herrera Petere)
• Niebla de cuernos (José Herrera Petere)
• Cuerpo a tierra (Ricardo Fernández de la Reguera)
• La retaguardia (Concha Espina)
• Alas invencibles (Concha Espina)
• Madrid, de corte a checa (Agustín de Foxá)
• Los cipreses creen en Dios (José María Gironella)
• Un millón de muertos (José María Gironella)
• Ha estallado la paz (José María Gironella)
• El corazón helado (Almudena Grandes)
• El laberinto mágico (Max Aub), a series of five novels:
  • Campo cerrado,
  • Campo de sangre,
  • Campo abierto,
  • Campo del moro,
  • Campo francés and
  • Campo de los almendros.
• Las últimas banderas (Ángel María de Lera)
• Los que perdimos (Ángel María de Lera)
• El mono azul (Aquilino Duque)
• Tanguy (Michel del Castillo)
• Duelo en el Paraíso (Juan Goytisolo)
• La novela número 13 (Wenceslao Fernández Flórez)
• Sanco Panco (Salvador de Madariaga)
• Volverás a Región (Juan Benet)
• Herrumbrosas lanzas (Juan Benet)
• Las hermanas coloradas (Francisco García Pavón)
• El otro árbol de Guernica (Luis de Castresana)
• Los años únicos (Carmen Díaz Garrido)
• San Camilo, 1936 (Camilo José Cela)
• Mazurca para dos muertos (Camilo José Cela)
• Soldados de Salamina (Javier Cercas)
• Tiempo de memoria (Carlos Fonseca)
• La Capitana (Elsa Osorio)
• El muro (Jean Paul Sartre)
• El lápiz del carpintero (Manuel Rivas)
• Cuentos de Madrid (César Arconada)
• Capital de la gloria (Juan Eduardo Zúñiga)
• El agente confidencial (Graham Green)
• 377A, madera de héroe (Miguel Delibes)
• Inquietud en el Paraíso (Óscar Esquivias)
• La mula (Juan Eslava Galán)
• An example of counterfactual narrative is the novel En el día de hoy by Jesús Torbado.
• Autobiographical accounts of great literary and historical value are:
  • Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell)
  • L'Espoir or La esperanza (André Malraux, who also directed the film of the same name)
  • Los grandes cementerios bajo la luna (Georges Bernanos)
  • La voz dormida (Dulce Chacón), on which La voz dormida, a film adaptation, was based
  • (in French) Pas pleurer (Lydie Salvayre)
  • Mil días de fuego (José María Gárate Córdoba)

Short story and tale

Many of the short stories based on the Spanish Civil War are, according to Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, «stories conceived from an explicit commitment to one side or the other»... the authors of some of those stories collaborated very actively in propaganda work: Arturo Barea and María Teresa León for Republican Spain; Edgar Neville, José María Pemán or Agustín de Foxá for Nationalist Spain. Undoubtedly, in the heat of the conflict many writers adapted to the emergency situation and altered their system of priorities: contributing to military victory, even with something as modest as a story or a poem, would always be above any other consideration».

Children's and young adult literature

Despite the sensitive nature of the subject, it is treated in children's and young adult literature.

Theater

Rebel side:

• Cruz y espada, romance patriótico en cinco retablos (José Gómez Sánchez-Reina, Granada, 1938)
• A Madrid: 682, escenas de guerra y amor (presented as a screenplay for a film, Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena)
• De ellos es el mundo (José María Pemán, Seville and Zaragoza, 1938)

Some plays were broadcast on the radio, such as Miaja defiende la Villa y rinde culto a Zorrilla (Joaquín Pérez Madrigal, on Radio Nacional from Salamanca).

The Arabic-language play 'Yusuf Melik Ispaniya' يوسف ملك إسبانيا (Yusuf King of Spain) (by Ali Al Tuma علي عدنان آل طعمة - Sharjah/United Arab Emirates, 2015) deals with the adventures of a Regular during the Spanish conflict. Deceived by his brothers, Yusuf sets out to escape from the army and from Spain. He is wounded during a battle, becomes involved in a forbidden relationship with a Spanish woman, is imprisoned, is rehabilitated, and becomes a sergeant in the military police and avenges the injustice to which his brothers subjected him. The play deals with themes of religion, war propaganda, the colonial order and intercultural relations. It won the 'Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity' in 2015.

Republican side:

• Velada en Benicarló (Manuel Azaña, not staged until 1980)
• Noche de guerra en el Museo del Prado (Rafael Alberti, 1956), recreating the transfer of works from the Museo del Prado in 1936
• Radio Sevilla (by the same author, a short satirical piece performed during the war itself)

After 1975:

• Las bicicletas son para el verano (Fernando Fernán Gómez)

Poetry

Rebel side

• Poema de la Bestia y el Ángel (José María Pemán, the minstrel of the Crusade)

Republican side

• Canciones de guerra (Antonio Machado)
• Viento del pueblo. Poesía en la guerra (Miguel Hernández)
• España, aparta de mí este cáliz (César Vallejo)
• España en el corazón: himno a las glorias del pueblo en la guerra (Pablo Neruda)
• No Pasarán (Octavio Paz)

Music

Republican side

• Verdades escondidas (Lucía Sócam, 2010 CD)
• Republicana (Lucía Sócam, 2011 CD)
• If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next (Manic Street Preachers, 1998)
• 1936 un pueblo en Armas - Sin Dios (Guerra a la guerra, 1997)
• A las barricadas
• La Internacional
• Bandera Roja
• Spanish Bombs by The Clash
• For Whom The Bell Tolls by Metallica

Satirical magazines

Rebel side

• La ametralladora (by those who would later work on La Codorniz)

Republican side

• Be negre, Papitu (both Catalan); cartoonists: Tísner, Kalders (in Diari de Barcelona), Puyol (in Frente Rojo).
• La Traca (Valencian); cartoonists: Bluff (executed by firing squad after the war), Carnicero, Méndez Álvarez, Palmer
  • More than 500 titles came to circulate in the trenches

Comics

Rebel side

• Flechas
• Pelayos (cartoonist: Valentín Castany)
• Flechas y Pelayos (product of the merger of both, parallel to the merger of the different parties into FET y de las JONS)
• Chicos (Jesús Blasco, Emilio Freixas, Alcaide, Tomás)

Republican side

• Pionero Rojo

Under democracy

• Eloy or Río Manzanares by Antonio Hernández Palacios
• 36-39 Malos tiempos (2007-2008) by Carlos Giménez
• Las serpientes ciegas (2008) by Felipe Hernández Cava and Seguí
• El arte de volar (2009) by Antonio Altarriba/Kim
• El ángel de la retirada (2010) by Serguei Dounovetz/Paco Roca
• Nuevas Hazañas Bélicas (2011) by Hernán Migoya with various artists
• Un médico novato (2013) by Sento
• Los surcos del azar (2013) by Paco Roca

Painting and sculpture

The 1937 Paris International Exposition housed a Spanish Pavilion run by the government of the Republic in which, among other testimonies of the war, were presented Guernica by Pablo Picasso, the Mercury Fountain by Alexander Calder, La Montserrat by Julio González, El campesino catalán en rebeldía by Joan Miró, Descubierta and Fusilados by Modesto Ciruelos, Aviones Negros by Horacio Ferrer, and El pueblo español tiene un destino que conduce a una estrella by Alberto Sánchez Pérez.

Graphic arts, posters and magazines

Rebel side:

• Vértice (magazine)
• Jerarquía (magazine)
• Illustrators: Teodoro and Álvaro Delgado, José Caballero, J.J. Acha, J. Olasagasti and Carlos Sáenz de Tejada.

Republican side

• Hora de España
• Mono Azul
• Photomontage artist: Josep Renau.
• Poster artist: Carles Fontseré.
• The international aid stamp Aidez l'Espagne, by Joan Miró, had wide circulation.

Photography

• Robert Capa, author, among many others, of the controversial snapshot Muerte del miliciano (identified as Federico Borrell, but who could be another of those killed at Cerro Muriano on September 5, 1936), which became an icon of the 20th century.
• Agustí Centelles
• Pelayo Más, compiler of the series of 169 photos Martirio del arte y la destrucción de la Iglesia en la España roja (80 of them of Toledo).
• Guglielmo Sandri, a lieutenant in the Italian army, took 4,000 photographs, recovered in 1992.

Video games

Some video games cover battles of the Spanish Civil War:

• 1936, España en llamas, a mod of the World War II game Call of Duty 2.
• The full game Sombras de guerra.
• The game Hearts of Iron IV.

See also

• Symbolism of Francoism
• Republican nostalgia
• Operation Ursula
• Pavilion of the Spanish Republic
• Appointment of Francisco Franco as Generalissimo
• Prostitution in the Spanish Civil War
• List of aircraft of the Spanish Civil War
• List of ships used in the Spanish Civil War
• List of small arms used during the Spanish Civil War
• List of tanks in the Spanish Civil War
• 1936 Guerra Civil

Bibliography

• Alpert, Michael (1987). La guerra civil española en el mar (in español). Madrid: Siglo XXI. ISBN 84-323-0609-6.
• —— (1996). "La historia militar". In Stanley Payne and Javier Tusell (ed.). La guerra civil. Una nueva visión del conflicto que dividió España (in español). Madrid: Temas de Hoy. ISBN 84-7880-652-0.
• Alía Miranda, Francisco (2018). Historia del Ejército español y de su intervención política (in español). Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata. ISBN 978-84-9097-459-9.
• Aróstegui, Julio (1997). La Guerra Civil. La ruptura democrática (in español). Madrid: Historia 16. ISBN 84-7679-320-0.
• —— (2006). Por qué el 18 de julio… Y después (in español). Barcelona: Flor del Viento Ediciones. ISBN 84-96495-13-2.
• Bahamonde, Ángel; Cervera Gil, Javier (1999). Así terminó la Guerra de España (in español). Madrid: Marcial Pons. ISBN 84-95379-00-7.
• Casanova, Julián (2007). República y Guerra Civil. Vol. 8 de la Historia de España, dirigida por Josep Fontana y Ramón Villares (in español). Barcelona: Crítica/Marcial Pons. ISBN 978-84-8432-878-0.
• Bolloten, Burnett (1989). "La Guerra Civil Española: Revolución y Contrarrevolución" (in español). Madrid: Alianza Editorial. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
• Espinosa Maestre, Francisco (2003). La columna de la muerte. El avance del ejército franquista de Sevilla a Badajoz (in español). Barcelona: Crítica. ISBN 84-8432-431-1.
• García Nieto, Mª Carmen. Guerra civil española, 1936–1939. Salvat Editores, Barcelona, 1982. ISBN 84-345-7996-0
• Fuertes Palasí, Juan Francisco; Mallench Sanz, Carlos (2013). La Batalla Olvidada (in español). Castellón: Divalentis. ISBN 978-84-939522-9-7.
• Gil Pecharromán, Julio (1997). La Segunda República. Esperanzas y frustraciones (in español). Madrid: Historia 16. ISBN 84-7679-319-7.
• Jorge, David (2016). Inseguridad colectiva. La Sociedad de Naciones, la Guerra de España y el fin de la paz mundial (in español). Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch. ISBN 978-84-165564-7-2.
• Juliá, Santos (1999). Un siglo de España. Política y sociedad (in español). Madrid: Marcial Pons. ISBN 84-9537903-1.
• Maldonado Moya, José Mª. El Frente de Aragón. La Guerra Civil en Aragón (1936-1938). Mira Editores. ISBN 978-84-8465-237-3
• Malefakis, Edward (2006). "Perspectivas históricas y teóricas de la guerra". In Edward Malefakis (ed.). La Guerra Civil española (in español) (2nd ed.). Madrid: Taurus. ISBN 84-306-0614-9.
• Martínez Bande, José Manuel. La batalla de Teruel (in español). Madrid: Ed. San Martín. ISBN 84-7140-088-X.
• Montero Moreno, Antonio (1999) [1961]. Historia de la persecución religiosa en España. 1936-1939 (in español) (2nd ed.). Madrid (Spain): BAC. p. 762. ISBN 84-7914-383-5.
• Moradiellos, Enrique (1996). La perfidia de Albión. El Gobierno británico y la guerra civil española (in español). Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores. ISBN 9788432309168.
• Payne, Stanley G. (2005) [2005]. El Colapso de la República (in español) (2nd ed.). Madrid (Spain): Planeta. p. 616. ISBN 84-6742-227-0.
• Payne, Stanley G. (2016) [2016]. El Camino al 18 de julio. La erosión de la democracia en España (in español) (1st ed.). Madrid (Spain): Espasa Calpe. p. 424. ISBN 84-6704-682-1.
• Preston, Paul (2006) [1978]. La Guerra Civil española. Reacción, revolución y venganza (in español). Barcelona: Penguin Random House. ISBN 978-84-9908-282-0.
• Ruiz, Julius (2013) [2013]. El Terror Rojo (in español) (1st ed.). Madrid (Spain): Booklet. p. 464. ISBN 84-6702-537-9.
• Raguer, Hilari (2001). La pólvora y el incienso. La Iglesia y la Guerra Civil española (1936-1939) (in español). Barcelona: Península. ISBN 84-8307-848-8. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: checksum (help)
• Romero, Luis (2019). Tres días de julio (in español). León: Piélago del Moro. ISBN 978-84-947827-6-3.
• Solé i Sabaté, Josep María; Villarroya, Joan (2003). España en llamas. La guerra civil desde el aire (in español). Madrid: Temas de Hoy. ISBN 84-8460-302-4.
• Thomas, Hugh (1976). La Guerra Civil española (in español) (Ed. Debolsillo (2011) ed.). Barcelona: Grijalbo. ISBN 978-84-9908-087-1.
• Tuñón de Lara, Manuel (1986). La batalla de Teruel (in español). Zaragoza: Instituto de Estudios Turolenses. ISBN 84-505-5073-4.
• Viñas, Ángel; Hernández Sánchez, Fernando (2009). El desplome de la República (in español) (Ed. rústica (2010) ed.). Barcelona. ISBN 978-84-9892-108-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

External links

• Documentos de la Guerra Civil española — documents on the Spanish Civil War at Spanish Wikisource
• Document: Comunicado de Alfonso XIII. 14 de abril de 1931.
• Document: Declaración colectiva del Episcopado ante la constitución de la República. 20 de diciembre de 1931
• Document: Solicitud de conformación de una cooperativa agrícola para explotación colectiva. Madrid. 1935
• Document: POUM: ¡Queremos ganar la guerra! 15 de febrero de 1937
• Guerra Civil Española — quotations about the Spanish Civil War at Spanish Wikiquote
• Moscú revela documentos inéditos de Stalin sobre la guerra civil española
• Texto de la Constitución de la República Española
• La Guerra Civil, 70 años después — Elmundo.es
• Historia de España — La Guerra Civil Española (1931–1936) at Historiasiglo20.org
• Memoria republicana: «Objetividad y neutralidad en el estudio de la Guerra Civil Española»
• La intervención alemana en la guerra civil española, by Walther L. Bernecker
• Material on the subject can be found on the website of The European Library Harvest
• La República en la paz como en la guerra by Paul Preston. Letras Libres, May 2003
• Liberados del Olvido Memorial sobre la guerra civil en Aragón.
• Ebre 38: revista internacional de la Guerra Civil 1936–1939, full text.
• Juan Pablo Fusi, «En el fuego del combate», El País, April 15, 2012.