The Spanish Civil War

This still gets referred to as the standard single-volume history of the Spanish civil war, and it thus seemed the obvious one to go for when I made my mind up to find out some more about the background to a period that has cropped up in a great many novels, poems and memoirs I've read over the years.

Obviously, when you've only read one history of the war, you can't say anything about how it stands up to the competition - and there clearly are a lot more books about the war around now than there were fifty years ago when Thomas first came out - but I suspect that it holds its own rather well. Thomas seems to have updated it progressively as more sources became available to him, so it's quite lengthy now, but it never feels excessively show more detailed. It does have a bit of an old-fashioned atmosphere, but in a generally good way: it sticks to talking about politics, economics, diplomacy and the conduct of the actual war, and doesn't let itself get distracted into projecting the author’s personality, expounding grand theories, or trying to explain to us what it's like to experience the horrors of war. Thomas in 1962 was writing for readers most of whom would have first-hand knowledge of modern warfare: he can simply let the facts speak for themselves, without needing to manipulate our emotions. They are certainly grizzly: if you had any illusions about the character of either side in the conflict, they will be dispelled quickly enough when you read about all the arbitrary executions, torture and imprisonment that went on behind the lines and after the battles.

Thomas doesn't seem to be in the business of defending either side in the conflict: he clearly finds the republicans more interesting than the nationalists and devotes a greater proportion of time to them, but it looks as though that's simply because there was so much more going on on the republican side. Franco seems to have had his allies so well under the thumb that there was never much scope for dissension in the nationalist camp, whilst the Republic expended far too much of its energies in internal squabbles.

It is rather easy to pick up the false idea from other accounts that the Spanish Civil War was fought by armies consisting principally of left-wing British and American poets and novelists on one side and German and Italian professional soldiers on the other, with a few Spaniards here and there on the sidelines. Thomas does his best to correct this, putting the foreign intervention into proportion, and reminding us that most of the volunteers in the International Brigades were working-class trade unionists, predominantly from France.

The only thing that really struck me as something missing from his account that a more modern history would have made more of is the cultural impact of the civil war. Thomas often mentions the writers and poets who served in the war or were its victims, but beyond quoting a couple of Auden’s poems, he doesn't really look at what they wrote or what effect it had, and he doesn't go into other cultural aspects - cinema, music, posters... But there are plenty of other books about such things. show less

This is a remarkably good, detailed but highly readable account of the Spanish Civil War that still stands up decades after its first publication (but make sure that you get the 1977 Edition or later since Thomas was perfectly happy to revise his views with new research).

It is, as they say, 'magisterial' which implies breadth and depth - over 1,000 pages covering the run up to the war, wisely not trying to giving us the later history of Spain under Franco while helpfully telling us something of what happened to the combatants.

The notes are excellent and lie on the pages themselves as they should do, so informative, in fact, that the bulk of them were read with pleasure because they added important detail and anecdote to an otherwise show more fluid narrative. This is narrative history at its best.

There are decent maps although it might be useful to have a map of Spain by your side as you read the book. Wars need to be understood geographically even if this is not only a military but a political and social history with coverage of economic and cultural matters.

There has been much work done since this book, notably by Paul Preston. Some facts and interpretations will now be superceded but it nevertheless gives a grounding for later study. Personally I read it not so much for definitiveness but as good narrative history in its own right.

And what of the subject matter? A quarter of the book is devoted to the origins of the war but, once the rebellion of the generals (not just Franco) has taken place, it becomes a history of Spain over just three years from 1936 to 1939.

Thomas is, above all, fair-minded, humane and allows us to make our own moral judgements - some of which are easy to make amidst the vileness of civil war. There is a necessary abandonment of partisanship to let the facts speak for rhemselves. I hope the same can be done for Syria one day.

The overwhelming sense here is of despair at the horror of it all as civilisation crumbles in the hands of largely inept liberal politicians and callous generals but I am afraid it is not quite the simple tale of good and evil that either side might like us to think it is.

On the Republican side, bitter working class rage at conditions and hatred of clericalism resulted in an anarchism that had become a millennial tradition. It performed atrocities that were easily equal to the deliberate use of terror by the generals, especially by Franco.

Why was Franco so brutal to his own people? Part of the answer lies in the importation of methods used in imperial warfare in Morocco (Moroccan troops were central to the revolt against the Republic) in which the Spanish working class and Left intellectuals were to be deemed 'savages'.

This re-importation of imperial policing into the homeland is not unique to Spain. It is an extreme example of similar tendencies elsewhere. It is an expression of an elite fearful of its own people and seeing them as the enemy within. Any methods become tolerable to survive.

British policing of ethnic communities would later rely on methods and habits derived from its Empire. Colonial counter-terrorism methods were to be applied to Ireland but no other country saw such imperial methods introduced under full national civil war conditions.

In fact, the Falange (the fascist movement) comes across as surprisingly decent and moderate at its leadership level, possibly more so than a vengeful Catholic Church or the Carlists although the rapidly growing Falangist rank-and-file were more than happy to engage in brutalities.

The fascism of Antonio Primo de Rivera, untested in office, strikes this reader as more thoughtful and less brutal than that of Mussolini or the Spanish Generals but we will never know whether he would have been a restraining influence or the opposite.

The Falange was simply appropriated after APdR's murder in the Republican zone. merged with the Carlists and turned into a different sort of fascist movement. Was Franco a fascist? He certainly cannot simply be written off as a catholic authoritarian any more. He was a moral monster.

He was easily as brutal as Mussolini (who had his own blood lust to satiate in Spain) and, if not atheist and corporatist in the same way, he was methodologically no less fascistic than his interwar peers and certainly introduced a cultural totalitarianism under a manufactured one party state.

Were the Republicans any better? Terror was not a instrument of top-down policy except amongst the Communists whereas Nationalist terror was deliberate and encouraged, horribly under what purported to be a Christian polity (as usual, few clerics spoke out and some participated).

But terror took place regardless in the Republican zone. Anarchist atrocities were early in the game and they did not have the excuse of barbarism in response to barbarism. It was also an instrument of policy for the Communists especially against their Trotskyist rivals in the POUM.

Not that the POUM were saints - I think we should be in no doubt that, if POUM had been stronger, it would have behaved in an equally barbarous way. Clerics and middle class nationalists in one zone, workers and republicans in the other - both were slaughtered just for being who they were.

Thomas gives a good account of the conduct of the war itself and of the international interventions (Fascist and Nazi on one side and Soviet on the other) as well as the rather repulsive and weak non-interventionist manouevrings of the democratic countries.

If you are a military history nerd and want precise numbers and makes of aircraft in particular battles or the formations engaged and how the battle front moved, you will get that alongside the problems of arms supply and the details of arms trading.

Sometimes you sense that many of the Republican officers who opposed the Nationalist rebellion did not always have their heart in it. A few were traitors, most did their best but the Republic was not inspiring when many of its proponents were as interested in revolution.

The naval history is almost an allegory of the larger war - not involved in the original plot (the air force was largely Republican and progressive as is often the case in this era), the naval forces split and the Republican side played minimal role while the Nationalists controlled the seas.

If Franco's Moroccans had not been able to cross the Straits in force (and he required German help to get the first of them across by air) and if nationalist exports and imports, especially arms, could have been blockaded, it is probable that a better organised Republic could have won.

As it was, the opposite happened - ships (including British ships) intended for Republican ports were sunk and the French border was only intermittently open for arms trades. Without the Soviets, 'democracy' would have crumbled much more quickly.

Incidentally, the lack of action by the British naval and political authorities in response to attacks on British shipping gives us some sense of just how weak the British Empire had become by the late 1930s compared to its Edwardian heyday. This was an empire ripe for falling.

Thomas is good on the detail of Western non-interventionism even if these are the only sections where one feels one is watching paint dry as possibly intentionally naive liberal bureaucrats are cynically played by diplomats like Neurath, Ciano and Maisky.

In fact, it is hard to see what Western democrats could have done without triggering a general European War (which the Republicans wanted to ensure more aid). They were not prepared for this eventuality. Allying with the Soviet Union for Republicanism was a bridge too far in the late 1930s.

While Italy was happy to go grandstanding around the Meditterranean for effect (before Spain it was Ethiopia and after Spain it was Albania), none of the other players actually wanted war either because it was too early (Germany) or because it was too terrifying in and of itself (everyone else).

Three sets of players, Germany, the Liberal Democracies (a weak Britain and a weaker France with the US nervous of domestic voters) and the Soviets (where Stalin was working every trick in the book to deter invasion), were dancing around each other, aware of the possibility of the 'big one'

The interventionists were certainly cynical, happy to prolong the war and not particularly interested in the victory of the side they backed. The Germans wanted mining rights, the Italians military glory and the Soviets a bargaining tool in trying to build rapprochement with the West.

Stalin sent over vast amounts of equipment and advisers, to be sure, but it was all covered by the Spanish gold reserves held in Moscow which Spain was never going to see again. The Communists were there not for revolution but to build a 'popular front' mentality against fascism.

Both sets of interventionists treated Spain like a military testing ground. Guernica now looks like an unintended blunder from soldiers learning their trade more than the deliberate act of terror that it was interpreted to be but the general attitude was one of blindness to human life.

Franco was just cleverer than the Republicans at managing his allies - tantalising and frustrating the Germans over their access to minerals, ensuring as much control as possible over allied military forces (not always successfuly) but eventually able to kick them out when it was all over.

Communist dominance in the Republic simply arose from their superior competence, especially compared to anarchists who were ill-suited to the discipline of modern warfare. It is intriguing that so many Republican military officers and administrators joined the Party just for that reason.

It turns out that the Spanish Communist Party quickly ceased to be a revolutionary workers' party and soon became a party of middle class technocrats and officers whose sole concern (whatever Stalin thought) was to defend the Republic. The officers tended to scuttle when the Party failed.

The war (so similar in complexity to the current Syrian situation) was the more complicated in having two opposing sets of monarchists as well as radical fascists on one side, two major regional separatisms and two warring Left ideologies as well as the split within Bolshevism on the other.

Liberal and moderates scarcely stood a chance even if they had not between so consistently inept and, when not inept, negative and pessimistic. Liberal moaning will have undermined morale. A rump of the Cortes remained but was no more useful than Parliament in the English Civil War.

Given the cards he was dealt, the final Prime Minister of the Republic, the Socialist Negrin, was capable of decisiveness and tough political decision-making but it was all too late in the game after the Government was forced to scuttle from Madrid, almost but not actually encircled.

There is a lot of classical heroism as well by ordinary officers and men on both sides and moral courage by a few. Nationalists holding out under fearful odds in redoubts, the battle for Madrid, the resistance in the Asturias, the International Brigades and the battles on the Aragon Front.

There is so much to ponder in this story about class conflict, petty nationalism, the burden of history, imperialism, the vulture-like behaviour of some countries and the weak self interest of others as well as the intrinsic weakness of middle class liberalism when things get existential.

Franco, though, must be accepted as a political genius who got everyone else to do his fighting for him, out-manouevred his generals and the various nationalist factions, knocked their heads together to create a 'regime' and died in office, the last fascist to survive, decades later.

He played every card well in a poker game where his own life was at stake against much weaker opponents, using his allies instead of being used by them.

The Spanish Civil War thus remains historically important not just to Spain but in wider European history as a practice run for the Second World War and as a test bed for various ideologies and military operations but also of how civil wars start, are maintained and end.

A civil war is the sign of a failure of a polity even if it wins (which it did not on this occasion), it requires the merging of social forces to the point where there is nothing but killing or being killed and, eventually, one will win and seek to wipe out all traces of the defeated.

There is no instinct for reconciliation and management of the peace as there is after one nation has defeated another in national wars, a lesson slowly learned in stages between 1870 and 1945, just the determination to re-mould the nation in the image of the victors.

The Nationalists continued their terror past victory and there is no reason to believe that Republican revolutionary terror would not have followed its own victory although with more chances for international public opinion to moderate behaviour.

The War destroyed the pretensions of romantic idealism whether anarchist, internationalist or falangist, showed that Machiavelli had it right about power and demonstrated the brutal cynicism of fascism and communism and why liberal democracies are their own worst enemies.

Civil War is an exceptionally bad thing. Here, responsibility lies as much as with the maladministration and naivete of socialists and liberals in the run-up to the rebellion as it does with the fascist brutes, anarchist millenarians and communist torturers enabled by failure.

As a guide to the war and its complexity and as a baseline for the facts required to allow sensible moral judgements, Thomas' book is invaluable - not the last word perhaps but still a book worth reading. show less

An in-depth study of the lead-in to WWII by a competent British Writer. First published in 1961, but up-dated at least three times, the 1977 edition being the one I read. Franco had been dead three years by the time this edition had been brought out. I think it's the best account in English, and though long in a single volume, being actually hard to manipulate (1093 pps.) while reading. The Spanish probably killed 500,000 of each other directly, and crippled their economy for thirty years by the huge blood-letting. The best hint for military historians "Don't allow whole military divisions manned by Anarchists, they won't attack, but can defend."
The difficult part is understanding how the relatively democratic countries were still show more ambivalent to back a relative democracy when it had to fight fascist rebels. France and Britain and the USA were so afraid of the Communist menace, they let the Spanish Republic die by inattention. By 1939 they were very sorry they had. show less

Klassík. Þessi saga er víðtæk og gerir bæði pólitísku og hernaðarlegu landslagi Spánarstríðsins góð skil. Blóðugar hreinsanir á báða bóga og hve ólíka afstöðu stórveldin tóku til aðstoðar við andstæðar fylkingar. Franco var peningalaus en fékk gríðarlega aðstoð gegn lánum en lýðveldið var vellauðugt en var neitað um minnstu hernaðarkaup nema frá Sovétríkjunum sem nýttu sér neyð þeirra út í ystu æsar. Heilsteypt umfjöllun sem staðist hefur tímans tönn.

I admit, this is the first history of the Spanish Civil War that I have read, and while being unfamiliar with the subject, I found it to be scholarly and detailed, if a bit above the level of someone wishing to” get their feet wet’. Still, I think you couldn’t go wrong wit this volume as an opinion. In history, as in in current life you can never depend on just one opinion.

My goodness, that was hard going! Doesn't help that I am not in the least bit interested in politicis, so kept having trouble remembering which side was fascist, which was comunist and where the anarchists fitted in; who was a nationalist or a republician and what on earth the difference was between them.



It was interesting and, if you're interested in the subject, probably a very good read, but I'm afraid I struggled through it.

Exhaustive but dry. Lots of moving parts/factions keep things sort of opaque.