The Last Days of the Spanish Republic. Paul Preston
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href="#litres_trial_promo">22 Now, as Prime Minister, Negrín put his faith in the brilliant strategist Colonel Vicente Rojo, who tried to halt the rebels’ inexorable process by a series of diversionary offensives. At the village of Brunete, west of Madrid, on 6 July, 50,000 troops smashed through enemy lines, but the rebels had enough reinforcements to plug the gap. For ten days, in one of the bloodiest encounters of the war, the Republicans were pounded by air and artillery attacks. At enormous cost, the Republic slightly delayed the eventual collapse of the north. Brunete was razed to the ground. Then, in August, Rojo launched a bold pincer movement against Zaragoza. At the small town of Belchite in mid-September, the offensive ground to a halt. As at Brunete, the Republicans gained an initial advantage, but lacked sufficient force for the killer blow. In December, Rojo launched a further pre-emptive attack against Teruel, in the hope of diverting Franco’s latest assault on Madrid. The plan worked. In the most intense cold, the Republicans captured Teruel on 8 January 1938 – the only time that they managed to capture a provincial capital that had been in rebel hands. However, the triumph was short-lived. The Republican forces were dislodged after six weeks of heavy battering by artillery and bombers. After another costly defence of a small advance, the Republicans had to retreat on 21 February, when Teruel was on the point of being encircled. The casualties on both sides had been alarmingly high.
The Republicans were exhausted, short of guns and ammunition and demoralized after the defeat at Teruel. Franco now seized the initiative with a well-resourced offensive through Aragon and Castellon towards the sea. A total of 100,000 troops, 200 tanks and nearly 1,000 German and Italian aircraft began their advance on 7 March 1938. By early April, the rebels had reached Lérida and then moved down the Ebro valley, cutting off Catalonia from the rest of the Republic. By 15 April, they had reached the Mediterranean. In consequence, there was no shortage of senior figures on the Republican side who considered that the war could not now be won. Among them could be found both the chief of staff, Colonel Rojo, the head of the air force, Colonel Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, and that eternal pessimist Indalecio Prieto. Negrín, however, refused to acknowledge the possibility because he was aware of the dangers of defeatism.23 He remained confident in continued Russian logistical support. However, Russian deliveries were few after June 1938. Already, by the late summer of 1937, attacks on neutral shipping by rebel warships and Italian submarines had closed the Mediterranean as a supply route for the Republic. Russian supplies now came from Murmansk or the Baltic ports and were unloaded in Le Havre or Cherbourg and then transported to the French–Spanish border.24 To get them across France, Negrín had to spend valuable foreign currency bribing local officials. As the the Minister of Agriculture, the senior Communist Vicente Uribe, later commented: ‘To get the necessary mechanisms working in France, it was necessary to grease them copiously, according to Negrín, with the funds of the Republic.’25 In June 1938, the frontier was closed by the French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier and remained closed until late January 1939. The situation was most desperate in Catalonia, where the difficulties of supply of weaponry and food grew ever more acute. Daladier opened the frontier reluctantly only after Negrín told the recently appointed French Ambassador Jules Henry that Republican defeat in Catalonia and the arrival of German and Italian forces at the Pyrenees would constitute a threat to the security of France.26
That being the case, Franco could have been tempted to adopt a more attacking strategy. However, he was more interested in the total destruction of the Republican forces than in a quick victory, and he ignored the opportunity to turn against a poorly defended Barcelona. Instead, in July 1938, he launched a major attack on Valencia. The Republicans’ determination in defence ensured that progress was slow and exhausting but, by 23 July, Valencia was under direct threat, with the rebels less than 40 kilometres away. In response, Vicente Rojo now launched another spectacular diversion in the form of a daring push across the River Ebro to restore contact between Catalonia and the central zone, separated since the Francoists had reached the Mediterranean in April. In the most hard-fought battle of the entire war, the Republican army of 80,000 men crossed the river and broke through the rebel lines, although at great cost to the International Brigades.
For some time, Negrín had pinned his hopes on an escalation of European tension that would alert the Western democracies to the dangers facing them from the Axis. The outbreak of a general European war would, he hoped, see the Republic aligned with France, Britain and Russia against Germany and Italy. Any such hopes were dashed when the Republic was virtually sentenced to death by the British reaction to the Czechoslovakian crisis. British foreign policy had long been orientated in favour of a Francoist victory. Rather than risk war with Hitler, Chamberlain effectively surrendered Czechoslovakia to the Nazis when he signed the Munich Agreement of 29 September 1938. It was a devastating blow to the Spanish Republic which, since July, had been engaged in its last great battle, at the Ebro. Even before the betrayal by the Western powers, Stalin had ordered the withdrawal of the International Brigades from Spain.27
The more immediate military objective for which the huge Army of the Ebro was created had been to divert the rebel attack on Valencia. Given the Republic’s lack of armaments, it was an immensely risky venture. By 1 August, the Republicans had reached Gandesa 40 kilometres from their starting point, but there they were bogged down when Franco ordered massive reinforcements, including the Condor Legion, to be rushed in to check the advance. With inadequate artillery and air cover, the Republicans were subjected to three months of fierce artillery bombardment and sweltering heat.28 Despite its strategic irrelevance, Franco was determined to recover the lost ground irrespective of the cost and relished the opportunity to catch the Republicans in a trap, encircle and destroy them. He could simply have contained the Republican advance and driven forward against a near-helpless Barcelona. Instead, he preferred, irrespective of the human cost, to turn Gandesa into the graveyard of the Republican army. With nearly 900,000 men now under arms, he could afford to be careless of their lives. At stake in this desperate and ultimately meaningless battle was the international credibility of the Republic. Munich had undermined the already dwindling faith in the possibility of victory among both the civilian population and the officer corps. Overwhelming logistical superiority in terms of air cover, artillery and troop numbers would see Franco score a decisive victory. In a sense, the Ebro operation, initially a tactical success, was a strategic disaster for the Republic since it used up vast quantities of equipment and left the way open for the rebel conquest of Catalonia.29
Ten days before the signing of the Munich Agreement, Vicente Rojo had drawn up a detailed report on the Republic’s military situation in the context of the Czechoslovak crisis. It was his hope that the democracies would resist Hitler’s demands and provoke a general war in which the Spanish Republic would be allied with Britain and France.30 Neverthless, he also analysed the likely consequences should the democracies give in to Hitler. Rojo’s conclusion was that such a capitulation would give Italy and Germany an even freer hand to help Franco than hitherto: ‘our war would enter, in such a case, a period of acute crisis because of the greater difficulties that we would have to overcome in order to sustain the struggle against an ever more powerful enemy’. Nevertheless, Rojo was still optimistic that ‘a favourable resolution of our conflict’ could be achieved. For this to happen, supplies of food and war matériel would have to be secured and the army’s morale kept high and its organization improved. These two conditions he described as ‘doable. They are problems for the Government.’ To this end, he called for an effort to obtain greater foreign help and for a centrally controlled war effort such as that enjoyed by Franco – more efficient rationing, measures to be taken against those who evaded conscription, a single command for all the armed forces, central control of transport facilities and of industry, and an end to the proliferation of political parties and of competing newspapers.31
What Rojo was suggesting was as necessary as it was impossible. To achieve the fully centralized war effort to which Negrín and the Communist Party had aspired since the beginning of the conflict