The Struggle for Madrid

The Central Epic of the Spanish Conflict 1936-1937

Robert G. Colodny, Beth Luey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412810623
• eBook ISBN: 9781351473040
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Struggle for Madrid is a study of the battles that were waged between the armies of the Spanish Republic and the armies of General Francisco Franco for the city of Madrid. It was this struggle, beginning with the collapse of Republican arms at Toledo in September, 1936, and ending with the victory of the Madrid armies at Guadalajara in March, 1937, that determined the duration and characteristics of the rest of the conflict. It was the central episode of the Spanish War.

Due to international intervention, the Spanish struggle lost its purely national character and became at once a civil war of a profoundly Spanish type, a war of independence waged by a section of the Spanish people against German, Italian, and Moroccan armies, and a clash of supra national ideologies that aroused the deepest passions of peoples far removed from the immediate Spanish interests at stake.

Although the passions aroused by the war distort contemporary accounts of the fighting, the totalities of these obstacles present no insurmountable barrier to a preliminary investigation of the Madrid battles. Such a study is best undertaken while many of the principal actors in the Madrid tragedy still live. If truth has been affronted the witnesses may yet speak, and from the debate margin of error will be reduced. Robert Colodny's groundbreaking cross of military history and political ambitions helps reduce the gap between fiction and fact.

NOTES

Footnotes To Chapter I

¹ Spione und Verschwoerer in Spanien (Paris, 1936): “With the intervention of Germany, Italy and Portugal, Spain has become an international war arena. No longer do the militia of the government fight only against rebel generals, fascist Falangists, and Carlists. They fight against the Third Reich, Italy and Portugal.”

² Lt. General Karl Warlimont, Hitler’s personal representative to Franco’s headquarters in 1936, submitted a statement to American intelligence officers on September 22, 1945, when under interrogation in Germany, which outlined certain aspects of German intervention during the Spanish conflict. According to this affidavit, Hitler sent thirty JU-52 transports to Africa which flew over France to the Moroccan ports and bases held by the rebels on July 18. Warli-mont’s statement was summarized by the New York Times on November 7, 1945. The same data were incorporated in the Report of the Subcommittee on the Spanish Question which was published by the Security Council of the United Nations (Columbia University Press, 1946). Italian planes destined for the same mission left Italy for Morocco on July 15, 1936. Twenty thousand troops were flown to Spain from Africa by August 15, 1936.

When this operation is considered against the background of the entire conflict, it appears as the decisive strategic victory of the rebel forces.

Cf. W. Beumelburg, Kampf um Spanien (Berlin, 1939), pp. 35-38; P. A. Schulz-Wilmersdorf, Spanien Politiker und Generale (Berlin, 1939), p. 243; F. B. Güell, Preparación y Desarrollo del Alzamiento Nacional (Valladolid, 1939), p. 200; J. M. Iribarren, El General Mola (Madrid, 1945), p. 159.

³ Beumelburg, op. cit., p. 34.

⁴ Cf. G. Cox, The Defence of Madrid (London, 1937) p. 19; J. Alvarez del Vayo, Freedom’s Battle (New York, 1940), p. 33. October 12, the anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America, is known in Spain as the Fiesta de la Raza.

⁵ Iribarren, op. cit., pp. 51-52; Güell, op. cit., p. 117.

⁶ General Várela told foreign correspondents the following story concerning the end of Republican resistance in Toledo: “. . . About forty anarchists committed suicide en masse in a seminary when they were trapped after the capture of Toledo. Shouting ‘Viva la Muerte!” (‘Long live Death!’), the anarchists drank large quantities of anisette and then set fire to the building, burning themselves to death.” General Várela also said that about one hundred anarchists were burned to death in San Juan Hospital. “The hospital was surrounded, but the anarchists resisted capture, and the building was shelled and set on fire.” (Quoted by J. Langdon-Davies, Behind the Spanish Barricades [New York, 1936], pp. 254-55.)

Geoffrey Cox reports that the Moroccans shot the doctor of the San Juan Hospital, and then threw grenades at the beds, killing four hundred of the wounded (ibid., p. 54).

⁷ The rebel order of battle used throughout this work is based on the book of the Spanish staff officer Lt. Colonel López Muñiz, La Batalla de Madrid (Madrid, 1943). This work was compiled with the collaboration of officers of various arms of the Franco army. The author is a professor in the Escuela Superior del Ejército.

The units of the Army of Africa had the following composition:

Tabor of Regulars—225 men; native troops with mixed cadres;

Bandera—a quadrilateral battalion: one company of machine guns; three companies of rifles: six hundred men;

A volunteer battalion—approximately six hundred men.

⁸ Muñiz, op. cit., p. 8. Cf. L. M. de Lojendio, Operaciones Militares de la Guerra de España (Barcelona, 1940), p. 162.

⁹ The immobilization of the armies of Mola in the mountains was one of the important strategic blunders of the rebel command. Lt. General Alfredo Kinde-lán, who served from the beginning of the war as liaison officer between Franco and the German officers in Spain, makes the following critique of the operations :

“Shortly after Badajoz was ours, direct contact between the armies of Mola and Franco was established. Then there was reflected in the maneuvers a phenomenon that has been repeated in many wars: the mutual attraction between the masses of the armies that appears to obey the laws of Newton concerning the gravitational attractions of cosmic bodies.

“Two war machines, embryonic armies, were moving towards Madrid in the first month of the war. One came up from Seville with the Extremadura highway as the axis of march; the other came down from the north, from Burgos and Pamplona towards the passes of the Guadarrama range. As far as Mérida, perhaps as far as Oropesa, the first army, the army of Franco, followed with geometric precision the designated route. But then it began to suffer from the attraction of the army of Mola, and began to swerve to the north, continuing no longer along the Extremadura highway, but rather through Arenas de San Pedro, San Martín de Valdeiglesias and Villaviciosa de Odón.

“Simultaneously, the army of Mola experienced a reciprocal attraction towards the west, and instead of seizing the passes through the Sierra that history had assigned, those followed by the great tactician called Napoleon Bonaparte, Navacerrada and Somosierra, the army of Mola was pulled by the attraction of Franco towards El Escorial and other passes in the Guadarrama, where it was absorbed in tactical battles with no point which were hard and exhausting.” (Alfredo Kindelán, Mis Cuadernos de Guerra [Madrid, 1945], pp. 28-29.)

The plan of operations worked out by Mola prior to the outbreak of the rebellion had called for four columns to attack Madrid simultaneously: the forces of Aragón by way of Guadalajara; Navarra and Logroño through Somosierra; Burgos and Valladolid through Alto de León and Navacerrada; and the forces of Valencia by way of Tarancón (Güell, op. cit., p. 127).

The victories of the Republic in the first days eliminated the strategic bases for this operation. Only Mola’s boast that he had four columns attacking Madrid and the fifth, the one within the city, would take it, remained.

¹⁰ Clemenceau’s remark concerning the Allied victory of 1918—“The Allies floated to victory on a sea of oil”—had a direct application to the Spanish conflict. Thus Robert Sencourt, the eloquent and impartial historian of Franco’s armies, states that “Franco could not have won the war without petrol; that petrol from America, given on credit by Standard Oil” (R. Sencourt, Spain’s Ordeal [New York, 1940], p. 339).

“Not one of the governments behind Non-intervention, nor did the United States, bring up the question of petrol supplies. In spite of Washington’s insistence on neutrality . . . it was generously supplied by Standard Oil” (Sencourt, op. cit., p. 351).

Harold Gardozo, the London Daily Mail correspondent at Franco’s headquarters, reported the following concerning rebel oil:

Twenty-four hours after the outbreak of the rebellion, I saw an immense train climbing the steep gradient which leads from Briviesca to Burgos. It was composed entirely of petrol tanks. The Nationalist Government was amply supplied with petrol on credit. This was due to the fact that intelligent financiers had realized that the Nationalists were going to win, and that the Nationalists would pay, very early in the conflict.” (H. Gardozo, March of a Nation [New York, 1937], p. 18.)

But the history of oil shipments is rarely unambiguous. Thus Herbert Feis, Adviser on International Economic Affairs in the Department of State from 1931 to 1944, has revealed the following in his authoritative work The Spanish Story (New York, 1948), p. 269:

The large exports of oil from the United States to Spain were mainly arranged by the Texas Company. This company contracted in July, 1935 to supply the Spanish government oil monopoly, Campsa.

“When a year later the rebellion against the government began, it had five tankers on the high seas bound for Spain. Rieber [Captain Thorkild Rieber, head of the company] ordered them to deliver their oil to General Franco on credit. Other shipments followed, some on manifests that falsely declared the shipments were destined for France—for which offense the company was fined $22,000 by the American Treasury. Under Rieber’s direction, the Texas Company continued to keep Franco supplied, thus risking some six million dollars on the outcome of the Civil War. After Franco won, the debt was paid off, and the contract renewed . . . Texaco shipments to Spain were as follows:

Dates	Metric Tons
1936	344,000
1937	420,000
1938	478,000
1939	624,000.”

Republican oil came from the Soviet Union, but no figures are available concerning the quantities. The commercial arrangements were completed shortly after the outbreak of the rebellion by Indalecio Prieto. [Cf. J. Zugazagoitia, Historia de la Guerra en España (Buenos Aires, 1940), p. 110].

Another aspect of petroleum diplomacy was revealed in the first week of the conflict when Republican warships, attempting to refuel at Gibraltar, were refused fuel by the British commercial companies of the port. On July 28, Lord Stanhope, Conservative member of the British Cabinet, declared that “although they [the British Government] could not prevent the Spanish Government from negotiating ordinary transactions with private firms, the Government could not press firms to supply oil to the Spanish Government Fleet” (H. Greaves and D. Thomson, The Truth about Spain [London, 1938] p. 58).

¹¹ No accurate time-table can be established for the delivery of war supplies to the rebel armies, particularly in the early phase of the war. A collection of press reports dealing with this aspect of the conflict was published with the help of the Republican Embassy in London by a group of journalists and other friends of the Republic who used the collective pseudonym “Hispanicus.” Entitled Foreign Intervention in Spain (London, 1937), this volume supports the arguments that the supply problem of the rebel armies was solved by Germany, Italy and Portugal. The Report of the Subcommittee on the Spanish Question referred to above contains the salient details of the early German intervention and a recapitulation of the Italian armament deliveries throughout the war. (Cf. Spielhagen, op. cit., pp. 165-76; Schulz-Wilmersdorf, op. cit., pp. 245-47; Beumel-burg, op. cit., pp. 34-38.)

The exact dates of arrival of various types of heavy equipment is of extreme importance in establishing the effective fire power and tactical superiority of the rebel forces, but lacking the files of the German and Italian War Offices, this task must be postponed. It is sufficient to observe the remarks of the British author, Henry Blythe, in his little-known work Spain over Britain (London, 1937, pp. 27-28):

“The Insurgents . . . had no mechanical workers on which to draw. Their circumstances forced them, whether they liked it or not, to entrust the most vital part of their fighting machine to foreign specialists who still belonged to the military forces of Germany and Italy. Quantitatively as well as qualitatively, the Insurgents were far more dependent on outside aid than the Government. . .

“In the early days of the Non-intervention Agreement, when no supplies of foreign matériel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• I. The Road From Toledo
• II. The Storming of Madrid
• III. The Battle of Encirclement
• IV. Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Maps