Spain at War

Society, Culture and Mobilization, 1936-44

James Matthews

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350192652
• eBook ISBN: 9781350030114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

Spain's principal and most devastating war during the 20th century was, unusually for most of Europe, an internal conflict. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 two competing armies – the insurgent and counterrevolutionary Nationalist Army and the Republican Popular Army – engaged in a conflict to impose their version of Spanish identity and the right to shape the country's future. In its aftermath, Francoist Spain remained on a war footing for the duration of the Second World War. In spite of the unabated flood of books on the Spanish Civil War and its consequences, historians of Spain in the 20th century have focused relatively little on the interaction of society and culture, and their roles in wartime mobilization. Spain at War addresses this omission through an examination of individual experiences of conflict and the mobilization of society. This edited volume acknowledges the agency of low-ranking individuals and the impact of their choices upon the historical processes that shaped the conflict and its aftermath. In doing so, this new military history provides a more complex and nuanced understanding of Spain's most intense period of wartime cultural mobilization between the years 1936 to 1944 and challenges traditional political accounts of the period.

Chapter 1

The Wartime Mobilization of Spanish Society, 1936–44: An Introduction

James Matthews

On the first day of 1937 we challenged the enemy to a football match. We arranged a time, emerged from the trenches and built goalposts from branches that we jammed into the ground: the match began. We beat them six goals to two. When we were on our way back and about to reach our trenches, they opened fire; I don’t think they did so because we were Reds and they were Nationalists, but because we had scored six goals against them. That’s what pissed them off.

Memoirs of Miguel Gila¹
Humourist and Spanish Civil War veteran.

A ‘New’ Military History

In spite of the unabated flood of books on the Spanish armed forces and their battles, historians of Spain in the twentieth century have focused relatively little on the interaction of society, culture, and the armed forces, even in the period that has overwhelmingly attracted most attention: the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9.

Existing military histories of Spain have tended instead to analyse the organizational and political aspects of the country’s different armies,² as well as the precise details of their wide-ranging military campaigns³ and the biographies of their leaders.⁴ The literature based on these analytical frameworks has produced outstanding results and has substantially improved our knowledge of Spanish armies at war. But it is only in the last few decades that historians have examined and prioritized the study of the experience and motivations of low-ranking individuals in their work on Spanish societies at war.⁵ As such, the divisions between social and cultural historians and traditional military ones have remained relatively impermeable.

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, so-called new military history is by no means new any longer. Writing in the early 1990s, Peter Paret identified the label of ‘new’ military history from at least as far back as the late 1960s and defined it as a

partial turning away from the great captains, and from weapons, tactics, and operations as the main concerns of the historical study of war. Instead we are asked to pay greater attention to the interaction of war with society, economics, politics, and culture.⁶

The argument that a social and cultural approach to warfare and violence enriches our understanding of causality, experience, and consequences is widely accepted.⁷ It has also helped highlight the ‘variety and change that have typified military institutions, thought, and practice over the ages’.⁸ A broader definition of military history and a move away from a battlefield perspective has provided opportunities to ask new questions about societies and people at war, particularly when it also employs comparative and transnational analysis. More recent methodological approaches to warfare have focused on the phenomenology and logic of violence,⁹ which are largely absent from traditional military history, and novel re-evaluations have most notably transformed the study of the First World War. In this case, the dialogue between military history and social and cultural history has been effective in challenging traditional political and nation-centric interpretations of that conflict, and even its spatial and temporal boundaries.¹⁰ In doing so, it has enabled a more complex and nuanced understanding of the First World War by incorporating a history of wartime experience and representations, and just as importantly, their legacies in the post-war world. These approaches have not yet been applied as extensively to the Second World War, although recent studies have also produced remarkable new insights into participants’ preoccupations and motivations.¹¹

This volume aims to develop similar dialogue between military history and social and cultural history in the Spanish case, and has two principal objectives. The first is to advance recent groundbreaking research on the relationship between the Spanish armed forces and society and culture. The principal thread that runs through this book is the impact of wartime mobilization on individuals’ lives and the ambition to reintroduce this non-elite group experience into the structural history of the period. Low-ranking participants in both the armed forces and the rearguard are treated as people with a degree of agency, rather than as pawns within rigid organizational systems in which only those in positions of command take decisions and influence outcomes.¹² The underlying notion is that the daily exercise of choice by subalterns, even within narrow limits, can significantly affect the course and our understanding of historical processes. This analytical focus also sheds important light on the particularities of the Spanish wartime experience and which include the way the conflict was framed by the two sides’ embellished narratives, as well as the mechanisms for mobilizing populations en masse.¹³ The second objective is to make available a cross section of leading Spanish-language historiography on this theme that is not otherwise available in English.

The chapters complement – and, at times, challenge – traditional, political historiography via an emphasis on the grassroots perspective of the experience of war and mobilization between 1936 and 1944. The dates have been chosen to incorporate the period in which Spanish society underwent the most intense period of wartime ‘cultural mobilization’ during the twentieth century.¹⁴ This happened not only during the civil war itself, but also during the Second World War, when General Francisco Franco’s regime asserted itself through continued mobilization against its Republican enemies in peacetime and remained on a continued war footing because of the raging global conflict.¹⁵ This edition focuses significantly on the Spanish Civil War for the double reason that it was the period during which most Spaniards, soldiers and civilians alike, were directly affected by war and that has subsequently attracted most attention from historians working on its social and cultural dimensions. It has also concentrated on the army, rather than the navy or air force, as the largest, most influential of the three branches in which Spaniards served or with which they had contact. The air war, however, is considered through the profound effect that sustained bombing campaigns had on the civilian experience of conflict. Finally, it has also engaged with the human and experiential aspects of ‘new’ military history and attempted to cover a broad cross section of Spanish (and colonial) society. However, it leaves out excellent work on, for example, the financing of Spanish war efforts and international fighters’ participation, as well as war and memory.¹⁶

Politics and the Military

For most of the twentieth century, Spanish politics and the military were significantly intertwined, even though an increasingly impoverished Spain had ceased to be a major European military power by the start of the nineteenth century and obsolete equipment, low pay, and inadequate training frequently beset its forces. Despite having been associated with liberal reform and progress in the nineteenth century, during the majority of the twentieth century the armed forces became, with a few prominent exceptions,¹⁷ largely synonymous with conservatism and reactionary politics.

On the eve of the twentieth century, the Spanish military reeled from the loss of the remnants of the country’s overseas empire, principally Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, in 1898. Its biggest challenges were maintaining its relevance and dignity following catastrophic defeats at the hands of the United States. As a result, over the next decades the armed forces channelled their colonial ambitions into a series of interconnected wars in Morocco with small-scale and expansionistic ‘pacification’ campaigns in between. The Melilla War of 1909–10 and the Rif War of the early to mid-1920s extended Spain’s control in North Africa, but not without bloody and humiliating setbacks, including the 1909 defeat at the so-called Barranco del Lobo, or Wolf’s Ravine, and the rout of Annual in 1921 in which Rif Berbers killed about 10,000 mainly conscript Spaniards.

These events had direct effects on mainland politics. In 1909 Catalan reservists due to be embarked for Morocco revolted and sparked the ‘Tragic Week’ strikes and a wave of anticlerical church burnings; the Annual ‘disaster’, as it was termed in Spain, led to the collapse of the government of the day under Manuel Allendesalazar and encouraged General Miguel Primo de Rivera’s takeover in 1923, in part to avoid the military facing a full enquiry and assuming responsibility for the defeat. It has also been argued convincingly that officers’ experience of conflict in Morocco resulted in the use of colonial methods against the labour movement in metropolitan Spain. This was particularly the case during the Asturian miners’ revolution of October 1934 and later during the Spanish Civil War.¹⁸

During the immediate post-1898 period the armed forces also refined their self-perceived role as the safeguard of the traditional Spanish nation and its existing social and economic hierarchies. This manifested itself as the prerogative to identify and repress ‘internal enemies’ such as Catalan and Basque separatists and working-class political organizations, including socialists, anarchists, and communists, as well as their trade unions, that aimed to push mass political suffrage and land reform.¹⁹ The praetorian proclivity, marked by officers’ pronunciamientos, or takeovers, was particularly notable during the 1923 to 1930 Primo dictatorship, as well as during the July 1936 uprising that directly triggered the Spanish Civil War, and during the long years of the Franco dictatorship. Officers who served in Morocco (africanistas, as opposed to peninsulares, who served on the mainland) especially identified with the call to defend traditional Spain and they were prominent among the initial civil war insurgents. There were, however, also widespread calls for a military takeover in 1919 during the height of widespread strikes that provoked an anti-Bolshevik ‘Red Scare’, as well as a failed military coup in 1932 led by General José Sanjurjo against the Republican-Socialist government during the Second Republic. This tendency was encouraged by the blurred lines between the military and forces of public order, which often included the secondment of officers between the two. Indeed, the armed forces were instrumental in quashing potentially revolutionary uprisings both during the 1917 socialist- and anarchist-organized industrial action and the 1934 Asturian miners’ strike. Moreover, between 1906 and 1931 the armed forces retained judicial jurisdiction over Spanish civilians that offended the ‘honour’ of the military or the Patria, the fatherland.²⁰

Neither 1914 nor 1945 were the major turning points for Spanish political or military history, unlike for the majority of the European continent. In both world wars, Spain remained officially neutral even though the conflicts generated internal political divisions. In the First World War, tensions between those who supported the Entente – generally Liberals and socialists – and those who backed the Central Powers – conservatives, the army, and the aristocracy – have been described as a bitter ‘civil war of words’.²¹ During the early to mid-stages of the Second World War, hard-line Falangists urged Franco to join the Axis powers and fulfil their expansionistic ambitions for Spain, including into Portugal and French North Africa. While Spain did not formally enter the war, in part because its military was critically underfunded and underequipped despite being hypertrophied from the civil war, it sent units of volunteers, known as the Blue Division (army) and Blue Squadron (air force), to participate in Germany’s war against the Soviet Union and communism in the East.

Mobilizing for Civil War and World War

Spanish military history follows a significantly different timeframe from Europe’s major powers. The country’s principal and most devastating war during the twentieth century was, unusually for most of the continent, an internecine conflict in which two sides fought to impose their version of Spanish identity and the right to shape the country’s future. And while the Spanish armed forces were frequently engaged in combat during the period covered by this book, they did not at any point take part in full-blown international war. Although this collection is primarily concerned with individuals, it would be impossible to write a history of Spain and Spaniards at war without outlining the course of the military campaigns fought during the period and how the chapters in this volume fit into that timeline.

The Civil War of 17 July 1936 was triggered when factions of the army in the Moroccan Protectorate rose up against the Republican government and brought to a head a number of different and superimposed conflicts – between centrists and regionalists, traditionalists and reformers, religious believers and secularizers, cosmopolitan urbanites and rural traditionalists, and different classes and political ideologies – which had wracked Spain and led to social conflict and often violence. The plotters were motivated by their common fear of the Spanish left, which they believed to be gaining ground and which they associated with separatism, social revolution, secularization, and the breakdown of public order. The Spanish Second Republic, particularly under the Popular Front government elected in February 1936, was perceived to embody this assault on traditional Spain and was seen as the force behind escalating street violence and strikes. While t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Chapter 1 The Wartime Mobilization of Spanish Society, 1936–44: An Introduction
• Part One Initial Mobilization
• Part Two Mobilizing for Total War
• Part Three Rearguard Areas and Actors
• Part Four Legacies of the Spanish Civil War, 1939–44
• Index
• Copyright