Abstract
Michael Alpert, Franco and the Condor Legion: The Spanish Civil War in the Air, Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2019; 256 pp., 11 b/w illus.; 9781788311182, £20.00 (hbk); 9781786735638, £21.60 (ebook)
José E. Álvarez, The Spanish Foreign Legion in the Spanish Civil War, 1936, University of Missouri Press: Columbia, MO, 2016; 307 pp., 8 illus., 5 maps; 9780826220837, $50.00 (hbk); 9780826273604, $50.00 (ebook)
Max Arthur, The Real Band of Brothers: First-Hand Accounts from the Last British Survivors of the Spanish Civil War, HarperCollins: London, 2009; 304 pp.; 9780007295098, £10.99 (pbk)
Richard Baxell, Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle against Fascism, Aurum Press: London, 2014; 544 pp.; 9781781312339, £15.99 (pbk)
David Boyd-Haycock, I am Spain: The Spanish Civil War and the Men and Women who Went to Fight Fascism, Old Street Publishing: Brecon, 2013; 400 pp.; 9781908699312, £9.99 (pbk)
Alexander Clifford, The People’s Army in the Spanish Civil War: A Military History of the Republic and the International Brigades, 1936–1939, Pen and Sword: Barnsley, 2020; 315 pp., 30 illus.; 9781526760920, £25.00 (hbk)
Peter Darman, Heroic Voices of the Spanish Civil War: Memories from the International Brigades, New Holland Publishers: London, 2009; 256 pp.; 9781847734693, £39.99 (hbk)
G. Davies, ‘You are Legend’: The Welsh Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, Welsh Academic Press: Cardiff, 2018; 224 pp.; 9781840571305, £19.99 (pbk)
Daniel Gray, Homage to Caledonia: Scotland and the Spanish Civil War, Luath Press: Edinburgh, 2008; 256 pp.; 9781906817169, £9.99 (pbk)
Adam Hochschild, Spain in our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, Macmillan: London, 2016; 464 pp.; 9781509810543, £25.00 (hbk)
E. R. Hooton, Spain in Arms: A Military History of the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, Casemate Publishers: Havertown, PA, 2019; 288 pp., 20 b/w photographs, 20 maps; 9781612006376, $32.95 (hbk)
Ben Hughes, They Shall Not Pass! The British Battalion at Jarama – The Spanish Civil War, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, 2011; 288 pp.; 9781849085496, £20.00 (hbk)
David Mathieson, Frontline Madrid: Battlefield Tours of the Spanish Civil War, Signal Books: Oxford, 2014; 208 pp.; 9781909930094, £9.99 (pbk)
The Spanish Civil War is a conflict that has been much written about by historians and therefore one that is well covered in terms of general histories, works that one might think of here including those by Hugh Thomas, Gabriel Jackson, Paul Preston and Anthony Beevor. That said, it is also a conflict whose military history has received little in the way of specific coverage. Thus, all the scholars we have just mentioned, not to mention all the many others who have addressed the subject of the Civil War, offer a more-or-less detailed narrative of the various campaigns and battles, but one which is in every case embedded in a formidable social, economic and political context that has clearly generally been of much greater interest to the authors concerned. Nor is this surprising, none of the scholars concerned being military specialists (the one exception, of course, is Anthony Beevor, but, no Hispanist, he for the most part based his account of the fighting on that offered by his predecessors, and in consequence effected little change in the situation). Whatever the reasons, the result is singularly depressing in that over and over again one sees the more-or-less unthinking repetition of myths which have their origin in the propaganda of the epoch: Madrid, for example, is repeatedly held to have been saved by the heroism of its population, and Franco to have been deluged with modern armaments by a Hitler and Mussolini only too delighted to come to his assistance. In recent months, however, not least due to the publication of not one but three military histories of the conflict, the picture has begun to change. In this review article, then, we will look at this potentially very dramatic change in the historiography, whilst yet recognising that much of such specifically military writing that does exist continues to focus on subjects that are in reality of little importance, a prime example here being the famous International Brigades.
It was this conviction that led the author of this review article to attempt to redress the situation through the publication of his The Spanish Civil War: A Military History (2019), whilst, shortly after it appeared, he was delighted to discover that a very similar work was about to see the light of day. Authored by retired defence correspondent, Edward Hooton, this turns out to be a straightforward account of the campaigns of the war which essentially operates at the level of the corps, division and brigade, it being rare that we get a glimpse of the experiences of individual battalions, let alone those of junior officers and common soldiers. This last omission is, perhaps, rather unfortunate – however careful one must be in their interpretation, the letters, diaries, memoirs and reminiscences of the combatants bring the battles Hooton describes to life in a manner which nothing else can – but far worse is the approach which Hooton takes to his subject. Thus, to write an account of the Civil War that prioritizes matters military over matters political and social is one thing, but to write an account of the war that all but totally ignores the latter is daring in the extreme. As stated in the introduction, the failure of most historians to engage with the military narrative in a critical fashion has been a serious problem, but that does not mean that the politics of Civil-War Spain or the wider background to the conflict can simply be swept aside with comments such as the following: ‘With the loss of its empire at the end of the nineteenth century, Spanish social, political and economic problems grew like boils. In a vain attempt to lance them a military coup … was staged from 17 July 1936’ (1). Hooton’s sole comment on the origins of the war, this gloss is at the very least debatable – to put it mildly, one could just as easily say that the coup of July 1936 was intended to frustrate the only serious attempt that had yet been made to lance Spain’s many boils – whilst to fail to discuss the deep splits in the military establishment that, in effect, produced the Civil War is simply unaccountable. At the same time, how can the reader understand such issues as the growth of Communist power without at least some understanding of the divisions that beset the Spanish Left, the policy of the ‘Popular Front’ and the revolution that gripped the Republican zone in the wake of the uprising? This is most emphatically not to say that these and many other issues have to be explored in all the loving detail lavished on them by Hugh Thomas et al. – far from it, indeed – but Hooton’s work represents a lunge in the direction of the military narrative that has left him mired in a salient that is all too vulnerable to attack. What is even more extraordinary is that, for reasons that are never explained, Hooton dismisses the crucial battles of July–November 1936 in a few sentences, and rather begins his account with a discussion of the actions that raged around the village of Boadilla del Monte in the course of December and January, something else that is rather odd being the failure to say anything about the Italian attack on Málaga, and all the more so as this last precipitated a major upheaval in the Republican command structure. However, let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The fact that there are problems with Hooton’s work cannot be denied, but Spain in Arms is still a useful addition to the literature whose judgements on strictly military issues are perfectly sound (well, mostly: for example, the claim that Guernica was bombed by accident in mistake for a nearby settlement with a similar name is more than somewhat tendentious). Those familiar with the standard reading will therefore find their knowledge of the conflict significantly extended, while it is to be hoped that the work will find its way onto many course bibliographies.
If this is true of Spain in Arms, it is also true in respect of Clifford’s The People’s Army in the Spanish Civil War. What this is, in brief, is a study of the Ejército Popular through the twin lenses afforded by the battles of Brunete, Belchite and Teruel on the one hand and the performance in combat of the International Brigades on the other. A complete history of the Civil War, then, it is not – the issue that faces us therefore being whether the foci selected by the author are sufficient for the objectives which he set himself. In so far as this is concerned, it has to be admitted that the matter is open for debate. Concentrating on the regular army established by the Republic is reasonable enough and this allows Clifford to reduce the scope of his work by, like Hooton, omitting the campaigns of 1936, but what is somewhat less easy to understand is his coverage of the different campaigns. Brunete, Belchite and Teruel are covered in great detail, certainly, but the Battle of Jarama is ignored, the campaign in the North treated with the lightest of touches and the Battle of the Ebro dismissed in a mere four pages. Only after reading Clifford’s conclusions does it become clear why these decisions were taken. In brief, it is apparent that he is anxious to portray the Republican army as a force conceived for the purposes of an offensive war, the reason for the focus on Brunete, Belchite and Teruel being that the three of them were all episodes which saw the Republicans taking the war to the enemy rather than simply waiting to be attacked. Setting aside the failure to say much about the Ebro, this makes sense, but, interesting as Clifford’s take on the history of the Ejército Popular is, he then goes too far – to claim that the three battles brought even a modicum of strategic success is best described as very imaginative. If any such result is to be looked for, is it not rather from the Battle of the Ebro, tying down, as it did, the main striking force of the Nationalist juggernaut for three crucial months that, but for Munich, might have seen Europe plunged into the general war that was the Republic’s last hope? At the same time, credit is not given where credit is due: at the Jarama, in Asturias and, finally, at the Ebro, the Republic’s soldiers often stood their ground with great courage and inflicted severe casualties on the enemy; indeed, for that matter, if Madrid was saved in November 1936, it was in large part thanks to the arrival of the first units of the new army, it being these troops which took the lead in the constant counter-attacks on the Nationalists’ outer flank that did so much to put paid to Franco’s chances of success.
What we have, then, is a somewhat distorted picture of the military capabilities of the Ejército Popular. That said, Clifford’s picture of his subject as an army is as acute as it is to the point. Thus, we learn of the appalling shortage of junior officers; of the cumbersome and wasteful structures that resulted from the decision to make the mixed brigade the organizational basis of the new force; of the swollen bureaucracy that soaked up so much much-needed manpower; of the poor standards of training; of the political differences consequent upon the constant quarrels respecting the future of the revolution that had gripped the Republican zone in the summer of 1936; and, last but not least, of the desperate shortages of matériel of all sorts, and especially artillery ammunition, that so limited the striking power of the Republican forces. Whilst one can accept the general point that Brunete, Belchite and Teruel were offensives that had to be launched, it is therefore all too easy to see why they were doomed to failure from the start. Added to the crown of thorns endured by the Republicans, of course, was the superiority of the foreign aid received by the Nationalists, but here it is difficult not to feel that Clifford’s touch is less assured. Setting aside the question of aircraft – an area where Franco did have a great advantage – whilst Germany sent a limited number of state-of-the-art anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns, most of what the Republic’s opponents received was obsolescent material of First-World-War vintage, if that. Constantly to speak of the Nationalists enjoying overwhelming fire superiority is therefore a little misleading, what mattered being at least as much how they used it as what they had. Of course, to make this point is in part to highlight the considerable technical assistance that was received from Germany and Italy alike, but the fact remains that the usual mantra is more than a little unsatisfactory.
The final point to make concerning Clifford’s book concerns his handling of the International Brigades. In so far as these are concerned, the author is very much inclined to question the emerging consensus that the much vaunted ‘volunteers for liberty’ were of only the most limited military value. Thus, in his eyes, while there were serious issues with some of the units concerned, the XI and XV International Brigades were elite forces that provided the Republic with some of its best shock troops. However, it cannot but be feared that to argue in this fashion is unwise. If the battlefield record of the XV Brigade – the unit which included all the English-speaking volunteers – is subjected to detailed scrutiny, the picture it affords is uniformly dismal, what one sees being an endless procession of tactical blunders and failed attacks, not to mention widespread disillusionment and disaffection. That some of the volunteers fought heroically and maintained their faith in the cause to the end is true enough, but the equivalent of the storm troopers of 1918 they were not and never could be. How, indeed, could things be otherwise? Organized, trained, equipped and led in exactly the same way as the rest of the Ejército Popular – a fact which is precisely what makes them so useful as a window on said army as a whole – the International Brigades had neither the firepower nor the capacity to function in the manner imagined by Clifford and the latter should therefore have been more cautious.
As interesting a read as it is, then, The People’s Army in the Spanish Civil War is unlikely to take over from Michael Alpert’s Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. Meanwhile, as it happens, that self-same author has himself contributed to the debate via his new work Franco and the Condor Legion. As its subtitle clearly states, this is not just a study of Hispano-German relations or German intervention in the Civil War, but rather a complete history of the aerial aspects of the conflict, in which respect it comes as a welcome replacement for Jesús Salas Larrázabal’s venerable Air War over Spain (one suspects, indeed, the heavy hand of an editor here, the decision to highlight the Condor Legion in the title in all probability relating to the hope that it would catch the interest of the enormous popular obsession with the armed forces of Nazi Germany). Alpert being the leading Anglophone specialist on the military aspects of the conflict, Franco and the Condor Legion certainly fulfils its promise. In its pages, then, the reader will find detailed discussions of the aerial battles which raged above Madrid, Bilbao, Brunete, Belchite and all the rest, as well as an assessment of the overall contribution of airpower to the Nationalists’ triumph, or, to put it another way, the Republicans’ defeat. In Alpert’s view, said contribution was very simple: air superiority was the key to victory and from the summer of 1937 onwards was something that was increasingly in the hands of the Nationalists. One cannot but feel that more time could have been spent in thinking through this position, for, except in certain very special cases, of which the chief example is the Basque town of Guernica, the damage inflicted by air-raids appears to have been quite limited, while intervention in ground combat by means of strafing and bombing in most cases had only the most limited effect: like it or not, the planes available to the two sides possessed numerous limitations, the Ju 52 bomber, for example, having only the most rudimentary bombsights. Indeed, according to Alpert, what Guernica speaks to is not so much the power of bombing to inflict havoc on ground targets as its inability to do so in any very precise fashion, the town being reduced to ruins on account of the inability of the Condor Legion to secure the chief objective of the raid – the destruction of the crucial Rentería bridge – by any other means than carpet bombing. In the event, the bridge survived the raid, as did the town’s various small armament factories, a rather embarrassing fact that has often been used to justify the claim that the raid was an experiment in terror tactics. Whether or not this was the case will doubtless always remain a matter of fierce debate, but Alpert himself is clearly not convinced, in effect claiming that the destruction of the town was a particularly severe case of collateral damage. Perhaps, but, then again, perhaps not, all that can be said for certain is that, whatever the reasons were for undertaking the operation, it hit the morale of soldiers and civilians very hard: right down to the end of the war, the aircraft employed by the two sides were dogged by many technical limitations, but that does not mean that they could not be used to devastating effect.
Given the tendency of authors to focus far more on Republican Spain than on its Nationalist counterpart, Franco and the Condor Legion appears as something of a historiographical aberration. Yet it is not alone, for alongside it we have José Álvarez’s The Spanish Foreign Legion in the Spanish Civil War, 1936. The first text in English to look at any of the component parts of the Spanish forces that fought for Franco in any detail, this could have been a major addition to the historiography, but, sadly enough, its impact is unlikely to be anything other than rather limited. In brief, this is for two reasons, of which the first is that the focus of the work really is of a very narrow nature, what we get essentially being a blow-by-blow, indeed, bullet-by-bullet, account of the role played by the notorious novios de la muerte in the first six months of the Spanish conflict. In its way, this is all well and good, for not only is much detail added to what we know of such actions as the storm of Badajoz, the relief of the Alcázar of Toledo and the battle of Madrid, but the paucity of resources available to the rebels prior to the intervention of Hitler and Mussolini is thrown into sharp relief. However, lament though the author of this review might the general failure of English-language authors to tackle the tactical history of the Civil War, this does not feel sufficient. Thus, not only do we not hear enough about either the officers and men of the Legion or the brutal ethic with which that force was imbued, but much more could have been said about the atrocities that strewed its way in the course of its operations. In fairness to Álvarez, he does not hide the fact that terrible deeds occurred and goes so far as to provide a number of examples, but, given that so much of the Legion’s time was spent in activities of a solely punitive nature, more attention should have been paid to the subject, matters not being helped by the fact that, over and over again, one comes across stories of Republican atrocities that have been lifted directly from the propaganda of the Nationalist regime, the effect being to suggest the presence of sufficient moral equivalence to excuse the Legion’s excesses. Also problematic, meanwhile, are the constant references to the supposedly superior firepower of the Republican forces opposed to the Legion: when the Nationalists finally got to Madrid in November, this certainly became a serious problem, but, as witness the minimal casualties suffered by the troops concerned during the advance on the capital, until that point it is difficult to see it as any sort of factor in the situation. In short, one cannot but suspect that The Spanish Foreign Legion in the Spanish Civil War, 1936 is a work that is based on something other than impartiality, the fact that it is dedicated to an officer of the Legion doing nothing whatsoever to help in this respect.
Of course, Álvarez is scarcely the first author to write in a less than objective fashion of the rival forces in the Civil War. On the contrary, his every partiality is mirrored many times over in the historiography pertaining specifically to the Republican side. In recent years, in line with the revisionist tendencies of Michael Seidman’s Republic of Egos, there has been a move away from the heroic traditions of the past, a very good example being constituted by Hooton’s views on the International Brigades. Thus: The brigadistas were portrayed as the republic’s shock troops but … inadequate training and poor leadership meant that their operations became massacres of the innocents … For all their heroism, [they] represented one of the most cynical publicity stunts since the Children’s Crusade, providing cannon-fodder to publicise the Republican cause. As one commentator observed, ‘They cannot be said to have given an example of discipline or military ability to the Spanish troops, nor was their achievement greater than that of the Republican army or, at least, its best fighting units’. (54–5)
It seems, alas, that revisionism has yet a long way to travel, for the abiding sense of disillusionment present in Boyd-Hancock’s work is not one that can be found in most of the other works on the Republican forces considered in this review. In the first instance, we come here to Richard Baxell’s Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle against Fascism, Peter Darman’s Heroic Voices of the Spanish Civil War: Memories from the International Brigades and Max Arthur’s The Real Band of Brothers: First-Hand Accounts from the Last British Survivors of the Spanish Civil War. Of these, however, only the first – by far the most detailed analysis of the British battalion of the International Brigades ever to have seen the light of day – is worthy of extended consideration, not least because it is the only one that draws on a mass of archival material. For all his close association with the deeply hardline International Brigade Memorial Trust, meanwhile, Baxell does not shy away from many issues that contradict the all-too-familiar image of dedication to the struggle: there is, for example, considerable coverage of the serious slump in morale that followed the battle of Brunete, as well as an admission that at least some of the volunteers were of poor quality. All this is very much to the author’s credit, and yet one cannot but feel that his efforts fall a little short. Take, for example, the issue of Communist control of the International Brigades and their status as a ‘Comintern army’ whose chief raison d’être was to draw the teeth of the revolution that broke out in the Republican zone in the immediate aftermath of the rising of July 1936. Despite acknowledging the fact that some volunteers consented to act as agents for the Servicio de Información Militar, the de facto branch of the NKVD that was set up in Spain to crush anyone with the temerity to challenge the Party line, not to mention accepting that the majority stemmed from the ranks of the Communist movement, Baxell claims that recruitment was motivated by nothing more than the twin desires to defend democracy and fight fascism. Well perhaps, but the evidence that there was widespread approval of the suppression of, first, the ‘Trotskyite’ POUM and, second, the Anarchist-controlled Council of Aragón cannot but suggest that, whatever their thoughts had been at the hour of enlistment, the men of the British Battalion would have been unthinking in their obedience to orders designed to use them against so-called wreckers and fascist spies.
In thinking about such issues, an important source is obviously the letters and memories of the volunteers themselves. These have been drawn upon for various general anthologies in the past, while in 1986 Ian MacDougall published an extensive collection of hitherto unpublished Scottish accounts entitled Voices from the Spanish Civil War. There is, then, nothing particularly new about Peter Darman’s Heroic Voices of the Spanish Civil War, and certainly nothing new about the distinctly uncritical spirit in which the collection of oral accounts which makes up the work has been put together. As the author writes, Though they had failed to prevent a fascist take-over in Spain, the men and women [sic] of the International Brigades could feel justifiably proud of what they had achieved. With hindsight their efforts are all the more remarkable when one considers that in the 1930s it was no small decision to travel to a foreign country to fight for a … cause. In an age when the majority of the population did not undertake foreign travel, one must marvel at the courage of individuals who took the decision to go to Spain.
A variant on the theme of overall studies of the British volunteers can be found in regional studies which seek to examine the way in which the Spanish Civil War impacted particular areas of the British Isles or sectors of the working classes. Some twenty-five years ago, Hywel Francis published Miners Against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War (1984), and in 2008 this was joined by the cleverly named Homage to Caledonia: Scotland and the Spanish Civil War. The work of Daniel Gray, a scholar with, at the very least, a strong interest in Marxism, this combines deep sympathy for the cause of the Spanish Republic with what appears to be an even deeper pride in the claim that Scotland is a unique part of the United Kingdom characterized by a long tradition of radicalism, communitarianism and social inclusion. Indeed, on the strength of the fact that some twenty per cent of the British volunteers who came to Spain were of Scottish origin, it is claimed that Scotland was the region of the British Isles that threw itself into the fight against Francisco Franco with most verve and determination. As such, the book is clearly intended to be as much a contribution to current Scottish politics as it is to the historiography of the Spanish Civil War, and, if so, this is just as well, the fact being that, so far as the latter is concerned, Homage to Caledonia is gravely deficient. Take, for example, the claim that the British battalion ‘displayed courage and aptitude of the very highest order at Jarama’ (its first action). To put it mildly, this is little more than romantic nonsense: whilst some of the volunteers had indeed shown great courage, others had fled and in some cases not just taken shelter in the immediate vicinity of the front line but deserted altogether; as for the aptitude supposedly shown by the battalion, this was in reality entirely lacking. Nor is Gray any more correct in claiming that the British volunteers ‘achieved a stalemate’: bogged down though the Nationalist offensive was, it was halted by Republican forces holding the line many miles to the north of where the British encountered the enemy. Elsewhere, meanwhile, it is not just a question of interpretation, but rather of simple fact, a good example being the manner in which the attack on Fuentes de Ebro is placed before the battalion’s participation in the fighting at Belchite rather than some six weeks later. In fairness, Gray does have interesting things to say about such issues as morale, discipline and the extent of Communist control of the International Brigades, but in general he is inclined to take a rosy view, the Scottish volunteers in his view in the main staying firmly committed to the struggle and willing to give their lives to the very last: not for him, then, is there the slightest need to inquire into such episodes as the much vaunted assault on the Cerro de Purburrel on 25 August 1937, in which, all too clearly, the battalion went to ground at the first shots of the defenders and proved completely impossible to get moving thereafter.
More recent still than Homage to Caledonia is Graham Davies’ ‘You are Legend’. In one sense, this could be seen as a new edition of Miners against Fascism for it covers much the same ground whilst at the same time drawing on a mass of fresh information garnered in the Moscow archives. That said, whilst it shares the same uncritical approach, it is much less focused, in large part emerging as a history of the British battalion of the International Brigades, the experiences of this unit being recorded in loving detail in tandem with notes on many of the approximately 200 Welsh volunteers who went to Spain, all too frequently on the occasion of their deaths. Throughout the tone is admiring – time and again Davies describes the fallen, in particular, by reference to the formulaic phrases encountered in Communist-Party documents, while he has no hesitation in repeating stock claims to the effect that the British (and, still more so, Welsh) volunteers were in the vast majority steadfast fighters who, like their Scottish counterparts, had been radicalized by such episodes as the General Strike, the Hunger Marches and the struggle against the British Union of Fascists, and had gone to Spain out of a genuine sense of idealism. Nor, meanwhile, is there much hesitation with regard to the retelling of such distinctly dubious anecdotes as the heroic rally that supposedly turned the tide at the Battle of Jarama or the incident in the Battle of Brunete in which the garrison of the beleaguered village of Villanueva de la Cañada made use of human-shield tactics in a bid to break the Republican encirclement.
One component of the International Brigades that has received extensive coverage over the years is the 2800 men who travelled to Spain from the United States. Organized into two battalions, of which the second suffered such heavy losses in its first action that it had to be amalgamated with its fellow, despite frequent references in the literature to an ‘Abraham Lincoln Brigade’, the men concerned were never organized into such a force, but rather served beside the British battalion and three other units – one Franco-Belge, one Slavic and one notionally Latin-America, but in practice largely Spanish – in the XV International Brigade, and it is therefore extremely irritating to find that the latest work on the subject – Adam Hochschild’s Spain in our Hearts – perpetuating this old act of aggrandisement. Setting this aside, however, Hochschild has produced a fascinating work which is at its best when he is writing about the numerous American journalists who flocked to Madrid such as Louis Fischer, Martha Gellhorn, Herbert Matthews and Bill Carney, not to mention the larger-than-life figure of Ernest Hemingway. Also very good, meanwhile, are the lengthy passages concerning the numerous medical personnel who served in the Republic’s field hospitals. Where he is less sure-footed is on the question of the Americans who saw action in the trenches rather than simply writing about the war or soaking up the experience from behind the lines. Even here there is much of interest – for example, the emphasis on the very high percentage of Jews (about fifty per cent of the whole) – but in the end one cannot but be disappointed. As the author rightly observes, the death-rate of over twenty-five per cent was far higher than that endured by any American unit in either of the World Wars, while, as with the British, there is no reason to doubt the courage and commitment of the bulk of the volunteers. At the same time, as he quite rightly points out, the XV Brigade saw so much combat that its men suffered a casualty rate at least three times greater than that of the Republican army as a whole. Yet, willing though he is to highlight many of the problems that dogged the two American battalions – indiscipline; poor armament; especially at the beginning, lack of training; officers who were at best inexperienced and, at worst, downright incompetent; and, towards the end, ever increasing numbers of Spaniards drafted into the International Brigades to make up for the ever desperate shortage of foreign recruits – a desire to praise them to the skies is still apparent. For example, here is Hochschild on the iconic Barcelona parade that drew down the final curtain on the volunteers: The farewell to the International Brigades marked the end of an almost unparalleled moment. Never before had so many men, from so many countries, against the will of their governments, come to a place foreign to them all to fight for what they believed in. (337)
Once again, then, we come back to the purely military history of the war, and in this respect it is a relief to return to treatments of a more analytical bent, albeit this time at the level of the operational study rather than the grand narrative. In this category we can place Hughes’ They Shall Not Pass! The British Battalion at Jarama, the only English-language work on a battle of the Spanish Civil War to have appeared since George Hills’ 1974 Battle for Madrid. In brief, this looks at the events of 12–14 February 1937, three traumatic days that saw the newly formed British Battalion lose almost half its strength in its baptism of fire. An action that is covered exceptionally well in the memoir literature – for a particularly good account, see Jason Gurney’s Crusade in Spain – this saw the 500 men who made up the unit flung into the frontline in a desperate attempt to plug the gaps left by the launch of the battle of Jarama, an attempt on the part of the Nationalists to envelop Madrid from the south in the wake of their failure to take the city head-on the previous autumn. Equipped with Russian Moisin-Nagant rifles that they had scarcely ever fired and three types of machine-gun, of which only one, the unwieldy Russian Maxim M1910, proved serviceable and even then not until the original ammunition it had been issued with had been replaced with bullets of the correct calibre, the volunteers advanced into an area of scrub-covered hills overlooking the valley of the River Jarama, only to be raked with both artillery and machine-gun fire and driven back to a line of knolls where they were even more exposed than before: so bad was the situation, indeed, that one of the latter acquired the nickname ‘Suicide Hill’. By sunset 125 men were dead and many others wounded, while the next two days saw not just many further casualties but also the capture of the entire machine-gun company.
According to International-Brigade legend, the last day of the action concluded with a gallant counter-attack that drove the Nationalists back to the verge of the Jarama valley. However, although Hughes faithfully relates the story, this event is almost certainly completely fictitious: the trenches that mark the line held by the battalion at the end of the battle can still be traced today, and they are nowhere near the knolls which the volunteers had tried to hold on 12 February. Nor is this the only occasion where he is less than critical in his approach to the narrative. Thus, a major feature of the traditional account is that the machine-gun company was captured on account of the cowardice of a company commander called Overton, and this is the version of events followed in They Shall Not Pass! However, it is now widely believed that Overton was scapegoated in an attempt to shield his superiors, and it would therefore have behoved Hughes at the very least to have exercised greater caution. Worst of all, however, he completely fails to read the context of the action and therefore falls into the trap of acquiescing in the idea that the British Battalion turned back the Nationalist offensive and thereby saved Madrid. Such is the proud claim advanced by many letters, memoirs and reminiscences, yet, as intimated above, the axis of the Nationalist advance was not directly through the sector held by the British volunteers, but rather much further to the north. With the British positioned, as they were, at the shoulder of the salient Franco’s troops were driving ever deeper into Republican territory, they had to be subjected to suppressive fire and driven off any ground from which they could harass the Nationalist forces pushing forward across the empty steppes on their right, but it is quite clear that they were never attacked full-on, and, by extension, that, if they were still holding the line on the evening of 14 February, it was because an all-out assault had never come.
In making such judgements, something that is very helpful is a detailed knowledge of the ground over which the battles were fought. To this day much of the terrain remains uncharted territory for all but a handful of specialists, but, with regard to the battles round the capital, relief has come in the shape of David Mathieson’s splendid Front-Line Madrid. Essentially a battlefield guide buttressed by well-written potted history, this offers tours of the city centre, the Alto de León, the Casa de Campo, the Parque del Oeste, the Ciudad Universitaria, the Jarama and Brunete. If the text is a little over-enthusiastic in places – it is, alas, all too evident that Mathieson buys into the myth that Madrid was saved by the heroism of its population – and, on occasion, downright wrong – the partial canalization of the River Manzanares had been carried out well before the Civil War rather than afterwards, for example – the itineraries offered by the book are invaluable, whilst they also offer the ‘city-break’ visitor the chance of a very different excursion into countryside which is often remarkably unspoilt (not the least of the book’s many virtues is the copious detail which it provides in respect of public transport). It is a great pity that some thought was not given to extending the contents so as to include Toledo, the towns and villages south of Madrid which were occupied in the course of the Nationalist advance on the capital in November 1936, the Cerro de los Angeles, and, last but by no means least, the battlefield of Guadalajara, but, for all that, Front-Line Madrid is something that any student of the Civil War should hasten to acquire.
To conclude, then, it is clear that there has been some advance in the military historiography in that for the first time we are seeing the publication of accounts of the war that concentrate on the fighting alone and, more than that, place it centre-stage. That said, there is remains a long way to go, there still being a strong temptation to tell the story of the Republican war effort by reference to the record of the International Brigades. Done in the proper spirit – in other words, one which is duly critical – this is not inappropriate, the fact being that the International Brigades were little different from the Mixed Brigades that made up the bulk of the People’s Army in terms of their experience and performance. However, as witness this review, the fact is that all too often the spirit in which they are written about is anything but critical. For things to improve, this situation needs to be put right, whilst it would also help if scholars would turn aside from the glamorous and easily accessible in favour of the mundane and difficult to research. As an example of the sort of work that is needed to move the historiography forward, we have Matthews’ excellent Reluctant Warriors: Republican Popular Army and Nationalist Army Conscripts in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, but, whether we are talking about military narrative or institutional or social analysis, much more needs to be done. As a good example, one might mention a work paralleling that of Michael Alpert on the Republican army on the evolution of Franco’s armed forces and, in particular, the manner in which the political militias were militarized, thereby throwing open the gates to the elevation of the generalísimo to that of head of state, whilst something just as interesting would be an analysis of the Italians who fought with Franco. In short, there is much unfinished business with respect to the study of Civil-War Spain, unfinished business, moreover, that is unlikely to be filled by the current vogue for cultural studies, and it is therefore greatly to be hoped that scholars more versed in the subject than the current author will step up to the mark.