The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 ‐ By Anthony Beevor

Abstract

The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 . By Anthony Beevor . Weidenfeld & Nicolson . 2006 . xxxii + 526 pp. £25.00 . The Battle for Spain is a seven-part study of the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, which sets the conflict within the larger international context. Beevor states in his introduction that Spain's tragedy was greater than other fratricidal struggles because ‘it had become enmeshed in the international civil war, which started in earnest with the Bolshevik revolution’ (p. xxv). Indeed, thousands of volunteers from all over the world went to Spain to fight fascism as embodied by the nationalist insurgents and their Italian and German backers. A smaller number of foreigners volunteered to help the nationalists’ crusade against the Masonic-Bolshevist conspiracy as represented by the Republic and her Soviet allies. The questions of Italian and German assistance to the nationalist insurgents and of the Republic's increasing subservience to Stalin loom large in the book. Beevor brings together valuable findings from a variety of sources, including recently opened files in Russia and Germany, which shed light not only on German and Soviet policy in Spain but also on military details. He shows, for instance, that the Spanish conflict provided Germany with a testing ground for new weaponry and tactics. The Germans learnt important lessons, such as the power of carpet bombing, which helped them greatly over the next few years. On the other side, Anglo-French adoption of a policy of non-intervention threw the Republic into the arms of the only great power willing to help her: the Soviet Union. According to Beevor, the price paid for that aid was very high. Under Comintern orders, the communists established extensive control over the Republic's bureaucracy and military. Soviet advisers and Spanish communists attempted to export the show-trial mentality to Spain, carrying out a witch-hunt of anarchists and suspected Trotskyists. The communist direction of the war effort was destroying the Republican army with prestige operations it could not afford. Hence, as Beevor demonstrates, the battles of Brunete, Techel and Teruel were all disastrous repetitions, motivated exclusively by propaganda considerations. Perhaps the one weakness of the book is Beevor's tendency to speculate. Thus, he claims, without any evidence, that the Republican navy's incompetence meant that Franco's Army of Africa would have been able to cross the Straits of Gibraltar even if Hitler had not sent planes to get it to the mainland (p. 427). Another example of this tendency is the assertion that with a communist government Spain would probably have been left in a similar state to the people's republics of eastern Europe until after 1989 (p. 432). Nevertheless, this is a thoroughly researched, clearly written analysis, which provides much Soviet material for non-Russian readers and adds important insight into the history of the Spanish Civil War.

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