Spanish Civil War

B

The May Events

Republican setbacks were due not only to Nationalist gains, but also to growing internal conflicts. These reached a breaking point in the key Republican province of Catalonia during May 1937. Political tensions in Catalonia had been building for months, and they reached the boiling point during the so-called May Events. The May Events marked a turning point in Republican politics, signaling the end of the revolutionary period that had begun ten months earlier and the beginning of moderate rule in the Republican camp.

Since July 1936 Catalonia had been ruled by a coalition of Catalan regionalists, revolutionary forces, and middle-class parties. By the spring of 1937, these various groups were openly vying with each other for political and economic control of the region. One of these groups was the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (Partit Socialist Unificat de Catalunya, PSUC), a socialist-Marxist party. The PCE had helped to organize PSUC in an effort to counter the influence of the CNT-FAI and the POUM in Catalonia.

On May 3 government police units under PSUC control attempted to eject the anarcho-syndicalists from Barcelona's main telephone exchange building, Catalonia’s primary communications center. The CNT had occupied the building since initially quelling the military uprising. The CNT responded with machine-gun fire, and for the next few days the Catalan capital of Barcelona and the surrounding areas were the battleground for a mini civil war.

On one side of the conflict were the militant sections of the CNT-FAI and the POUM, which were fighting to keep the power and authority they had gained from the social revolution. Allied against them were an assortment of parties, including the PSUC and the middle-class Catalan left. Although the CNT-FAI were probably powerful enough to overthrow the local Catalan government, they had refused to do so. By May 7 the resistance of the revolutionaries had been broken. The crisis ended with a victory for the moderate, anti-revolutionary Republican parties.

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Approximately 500 people were killed during the May Events, and the political consequences were also serious. The coalition of the PCE and PSUC used the crisis to subdue their rivals and gain power within the Popular Front government. In addition, on May 17 the anti-Communist prime minister, Largo Caballero, who had been sympathetic to the revolutionary left, was forced to resign. Replacing him was Juan Negrín, a moderate socialist and former finance minister who fully supported the Communists' Popular Front agenda.

The new leaders of the Republican government immediately set about establishing their complete control over political and economic life in the Republican zone. One of their first steps in this direction was to sharply reduce the powers of the Catalan government, which to that point had operated with a degree of independence from the central government. Encroachments on Catalan autonomy climaxed in late October, when the central government transferred from Valencia to Barcelona.

Taking full advantage of this shift in authority, the PSUC used its considerable leverage in the government to undermine the revolutionaries’ bases of economic and social power. With the backing of the middle-class Catalan parties, the PSUC wasted no time in launching a campaign of persecution against the POUM and those in the CNT-FAI who refused to obey CNT-FAI officials. The most famous victim of these purges was POUM leader Andreu Nin, who was abducted and tortured to death by Communist agents. In the following months, many members of the POUM were either imprisoned or forced underground. The result was that by October 1938, the POUM was silenced as a critic of the Communists and the Popular Front government.

Unlike the POUM, the anarcho-syndicalists were not harshly persecuted for their role in the May Events, but even so, they too rapidly lost ground. On May 17 Negrín excluded CNT-FAI members from his newly formed cabinet, and even in Catalonia, where the anarcho-syndicalists had dominated the government since July 1936, the local government reorganized without the support of the CNT-FAI. A growing number of CNT-FAI members—especially those who believed that unity in the anti-fascist coalition was necessary to defeat fascism—were willing to endorse Negrín’s policies, even if that meant closing their eyes to the anti-revolutionary measures his government was enforcing throughout the Republican zone. In the end, this cost them dearly. For in the last year of the war, they attempted to win over the dissident factions, but could not do so.

C

Campaigns of 1937

Even during the Republican’s internal struggles, Negrín's Popular Front government was desperately trying to improve the Republicans’ military fortunes. In July 1937 the Republicans attempted to counter Nationalist pressure in the northern zone by mounting a major offensive on the Madrid front. The Battle of Brunete, as this operation came to be known, began on July 6 when Republican troops broke through Nationalist lines around the village of Brunete, west of Madrid. Republican troops continued advancing into Nationalist-held territory until July 18, when the Nationalists launched a counteroffensive that forced the Republicans into a full retreat. By late July, the battle ended without either side winning a decisive victory.

While the Battle of Brunete had demonstrated that the Republicans were capable of waging an active war, the offensive had also proved costly to the their army. They suffered over 25,000 casualties, many of whom were among the army's best-trained soldiers, and they either lost or expended a large amount of their prime supplies and ammunition. The morale of both troops and civilians was falling because the high losses of the Battle of Brunete seemed to have had little effect on the course of the war .

The Republicans then shifted their attention northeast to the Aragón front, which had been relatively quiet. They chose this strategy for two major reasons. First, from a strategic standpoint, it was vital for the Republicans to mount another offensive as soon as possible in order to delay a Nationalist victory in the north. If the Republicans began an attack in Aragón, the Nationalists would have to send troops to respond, lessening their chances of taking the north.

In addition, Negrín's government wanted to destroy the authority of anarcho-syndicalists in Republican-held areas of Aragón. The government moved quickly to dismantle revolutionary organizations such as the Council of Aragón, a provisional ruling body that was dominated by anarchists. On August 11 a government decree officially dissolved the council, and in the following weeks Communist-led government forces ousted anarchist collectives in Aragón that had operated since the beginning of the war. By September 1937 Republican-held Aragón, like Catalonia, was completely under the control of the central government.

In late August, Republican forces launched a series of attacks to capture the Aragonese city of Zaragoza from the Nationalists. The fiercest fighting took place in and around the villages of Belchite and Quinto. In Belchite Republican forces struggled for nearly two weeks to overcome a small contingent of Nationalist troops. Eventually, however, the Republican offensive failed, and Zaragoza remained in the hands of the Nationalists. In the meantime, the Nationalists had captured the city of Santander, in the northern province of Cantabria. Furthermore, despite the determined resistance of Republican troops defending the Asturian cities of Oviedo and Gijón, the Nationalists conquered the remaining Republican-held territory in the north in late October.

V

Civil War, 1938

With the northern zone now under their control, the Nationalists revived their drive to take Madrid. Much to their surprise, however, in mid-December 1937 the Republicans began another offensive. During a bitter winter storm, Republican troops attacked Teruel, a small town south of Zaragoza. The surprise attack forced Franco to suspend his plans for Madrid. Overcoming the harsh weather and Nationalist resistance, the Republicans managed to capture Teruel on January 7, 1938, but Franco’s counteroffensive renewed the struggle. Exhausted and desperately in need of supplies, the Republicans held out for nearly eight weeks, until massive Nationalist attacks forced them to abandon Teruel on February 22.

A

Battle of the Ebro

Their victory at Teruel allowed the Nationalists to continue on to the Mediterranean Sea, as Franco’s offensive took advantage of the Republicans’ exhaustion and low morale. Within six weeks, the Nationalists reached the sea, cutting the Republican zone in two. The Republican army grew desperate to stop the Nationalists’ drive to take the remaining two sectors of the Republican zone, which included the areas around Valencia and Barcelona in the northeastern corner of the country and parts of central and southern Spain. The Republican general staff laid plans for a major offensive and decided to mount a surprise operation on the Catalan front. While Franco and his troops began advancing on Valencia, the Republicans gathered along the Ebro River for the last great military contest of the war. By mid-July about 80,000 Republican troops and most of the army's aircraft and artillery outfits were preparing for the Battle of the Ebro.

In the middle of the night on July 24, Republican commandos crossed the river, catching the Nationalists completely off guard. Within a few days they had established a bridgehead across the river, which they used to drive deeper into Nationalist territory. However, the momentum of their drive was short-lived. Not quite a week after the battle began, the Nationalists recovered from their initial setbacks and managed to halt the enemy. The battle grew more intense in the searing summer heat, and the enemies continued fighting until mid-November 1938. Exhausted and critically short of supplies, the Republicans finally collapsed under the Nationalists’ superior firepower.

The defeat was a terrible blow for the Republicans. Apart from approximately 100,000 casualties—soldiers killed, wounded, or taken prisoner—the Battle of the Ebro had depleted the army's supplies, much of which had been left behind by retreating soldiers. Just as devastating was the toll it had taken on Republican morale. The Battle of the Ebro signaled that the Republican army was close to collapsing.

B

Fading Hope

Following their defeat at the Ebro, Negrín's government renewed their appeals for assistance from the international community. But other events had turned Europe’s interest away from Spain's civil war. In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria, and by September had secured territory in Czechoslovakia when Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany signed the Munich Pact. As large-scale conflict in Europe grew closer, Spain’s importance to those nations diminished. Even the USSR, the Republicans’ only secure ally to that point, began greatly reducing its material support. Soviet leader Stalin had nearly abandoned hope of a Republican victory and decided to improve relations with Germany, its archrival.

The Republicans' defeat at the Ebro paved the way for the Nationalists' final offensive. Near the end of December, about 300,000 of Franco's troops attacked the Catalonia front. By January 3 the Nationalists were well on their way to victory.

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