Spanish Civil War

Based on Wikipedia: Spanish Civil War

A Dress Rehearsal for World War

In the summer of 1936, a group of Spanish generals tried to overthrow their government. They expected the whole thing to be over in a few days. Instead, they ignited a war that would last nearly three years, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and serve as a chilling preview of the horrors that would soon engulf all of Europe.

The Spanish Civil War wasn't just Spain's tragedy. It became a laboratory where Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy tested their weapons and tactics, where the Soviet Union extended its reach into Western Europe, and where thousands of idealistic volunteers from around the world came to fight—and often die—for what they believed was the future of civilization itself.

It was a war that meant different things to different people. To some, it was a class struggle between workers and their oppressors. To others, it was a religious crusade to save Catholic Spain from godless communism. Still others saw it as the first real battle between fascism and democracy, a fight that would determine whether Europe's future belonged to dictators or to the people.

All of them were right. And that's what made it so terrible.

The Collapse of a Kingdom

To understand how Spain tore itself apart, you have to go back decades before the first shots were fired.

Spain had been politically unstable for generations. In 1868, popular uprisings overthrew Queen Isabella II. Her replacement, an Italian prince named Amadeo, lasted only a few years before giving up in frustration and going home. The First Spanish Republic that followed was so chaotic it barely survived a year before the army stepped in and brought back the monarchy, this time under Isabella's son Alfonso XII.

But the underlying problems never went away. Spain remained deeply divided—between monarchists and republicans, between the Catholic Church and secular reformers, between wealthy landowners and desperately poor peasants, between those who wanted Spain to remain a unified nation and those in regions like Catalonia and the Basque Country who wanted independence or at least autonomy.

The early twentieth century only made these tensions worse. Spain stayed neutral during World War One, but that didn't spare it from the turbulence that followed. In 1923, General Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power in a military coup. His dictatorship lasted seven years before collapsing under its own weight. By 1930, the king was running out of generals willing to prop up his throne.

In April 1931, municipal elections became an unexpected referendum on the monarchy itself. When left-wing parties swept the major cities, King Alfonso XIII read the writing on the wall. He fled the country without formally abdicating, and Spain proclaimed its Second Republic.

A Republic Under Siege

The new republic started with broad support. Its first government included liberals, socialists, and moderate republicans, and it quickly set about transforming Spain. The constitution they wrote was radically progressive for its time. It separated church and state, gave women the right to vote, and promised land reform for the peasants who worked the great estates of the south.

But from its very first day, powerful forces were plotting to destroy it.

According to historian José Ángel Sánchez Asiaín, representatives of monarchist circles met on the same day the Republic was proclaimed to discuss how to overthrow it. Within three years, they had secured a promise of support from Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy.

The Church, which had enjoyed enormous power and privilege under the monarchy, saw the Republic as an existential threat. The Republic's aggressive secularization—abolishing Catholic schools, stripping the Church of its property and political influence—turned much of the clergy into implacable enemies. In rural areas, parish priests preached that voting for the left was a mortal sin.

Meanwhile, the Republic's reforms weren't satisfying anyone. Landowners refused to implement land redistribution, using their control of local politics to block reform. Peasants, seeing their hopes for change frustrated, grew increasingly radical. Strikes, workplace sabotage, and violent clashes between workers and police became common.

The anarchists—and Spain had the largest anarchist movement in the world—never trusted the Republic at all. To them, any government was an instrument of oppression. They announced their intention to overthrow the Republic through revolution, and launched several unsuccessful uprisings.

The Black Biennium

In November 1933, right-wing parties won the national elections. For the left, this felt like a catastrophe.

The victory had several causes. Women, voting for the first time, largely supported conservative Catholic parties. The left had splintered while the right unified. And anarchists, disgusted with the Republic's crackdowns on their movement, either voted for moderate parties or stayed home entirely.

What followed became known as the "black biennium"—two black years.

The new government reversed many of the Republic's reforms. It granted amnesty to the generals who had attempted a coup in 1932. The Civil Guard—Spain's militarized police force—adopted what was grimly called "preventive brutality" against workers' movements.

The largest party in the winning coalition was the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-wing Groups, known by its Spanish acronym CEDA. Its leader, José María Gil Robles, made no secret of his admiration for Mussolini and Hitler. He spoke openly of dissolving parliament, crushing workers' movements, and establishing an authoritarian corporate state. Whether CEDA was genuinely fascist or merely using fascist rhetoric is still debated by historians. What's certain is that the left believed it was fascist, and acted accordingly.

In October 1934, when CEDA ministers entered the government, Socialists in the northern mining region of Asturias launched an armed uprising. For two weeks, workers controlled the region, seizing weapons, taking over towns, and declaring a socialist revolution. The government responded by sending in the Spanish Foreign Legion and Moroccan colonial troops under the command of a young general named Francisco Franco. The uprising was crushed with exceptional brutality. Perhaps two thousand people died, many of them executed after surrendering.

The Asturian uprising failed, but it transformed Spanish politics. For the left, the miners became martyrs, proof that the Republic could only be saved through revolutionary action. For the right, the uprising confirmed that the left was a revolutionary threat that had to be destroyed by any means necessary.

The middle ground was disappearing.

The Popular Front

New elections came in February 1936. This time, the left had learned its lesson. Socialists, Communists, liberal Republicans, and even some anarchists formed a coalition called the Popular Front. They campaigned largely on a single issue: amnesty for the thousands of political prisoners from the 1934 uprising.

The Popular Front won by a narrow margin. Almost immediately, the situation began spiraling out of control.

Peasants, tired of waiting for land reform, began seizing estates on their own. Workers launched waves of strikes. Street violence between left and right intensified. Political assassinations became common. The government, a coalition of squabbling factions, seemed incapable of restoring order.

Meanwhile, military officers were finalizing their plans for a coup. They had been plotting for months, maybe years. The conspiracy included generals, monarchists, fascists from the Falange party, and Catholic traditionalists called Carlists. They disagreed about almost everything except one thing: the Republic had to go.

On July 17, 1936, army units in Spanish Morocco rose against the government. The rebellion spread to mainland Spain the following day.

A Coup That Became a War

The plotters expected quick victory. They were wrong.

In some parts of Spain—Navarre, Old Castile, much of Andalusia—the coup succeeded immediately. Local garrisons declared for the rebels, and civilian resistance was quickly crushed. But in Spain's largest cities and most industrialized regions, things went very differently.

In Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and the Basque Country, workers and leftist militias defeated the rebel garrisons, often after fierce street fighting. The government, initially paralyzed, began distributing weapons to workers' organizations. Within days, Spain was split roughly in half, with neither side strong enough to quickly defeat the other.

This was no longer a coup. It was a civil war.

The rebels called themselves Nationalists, claiming to represent the true Spain against foreign ideologies. They controlled the more rural, conservative, and Catholic regions. The Republic held Spain's major cities, its industrial heartland, and its most densely populated areas.

But the Republic faced a crippling problem: most of its professional military officers had joined the rebellion. The regular army was largely gone. In its place stood improvised militias—enthusiastic, ideologically committed, but poorly trained and equipped. The Nationalists, by contrast, had the best units in the Spanish military, including the battle-hardened Army of Africa.

Everything depended on outside help.

The World Chooses Sides

Within weeks of the uprising, the Spanish Civil War became an international crisis.

The Nationalists turned to Europe's fascist powers. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy responded enthusiastically, seeing Spain as an opportunity to test weapons, train troops, and extend fascist influence. German transport planes airlifted Franco's Army of Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar—the first major military airlift in history. Italian troops eventually numbered more than fifty thousand. German pilots formed the Condor Legion, which would achieve infamy for bombing civilian targets.

The Republic looked to the democracies. It found them unwilling to help.

Britain and France, terrified of provoking another world war, organized a Non-Intervention Agreement. The agreement was a farce from the start—Germany and Italy signed it while continuing to pour weapons and soldiers into Spain—but it gave the democracies cover to do nothing while the Republic was strangled.

Only the Soviet Union and Mexico provided significant aid to the Republic. Stalin sent tanks, aircraft, and military advisors. In exchange, the Republic shipped most of Spain's gold reserves to Moscow for safekeeping—gold that would never return.

But Soviet aid came with strings attached. The Communist Party, tiny before the war, grew enormously powerful because it controlled access to Soviet weapons. Communist influence would eventually tear the Republic apart from within.

The International Brigades

If governments wouldn't help, individuals would.

From around the world, tens of thousands of volunteers made their way to Spain to fight for the Republic. They came from France and Britain, from Germany and Italy where they had fled fascist persecution, from the United States and Latin America, from as far away as China. They were organized into International Brigades and sent to the front with minimal training.

Many were Communists, but not all. They included socialists, anarchists, liberal democrats, and people with no particular ideology who simply believed that fascism had to be stopped somewhere. Among them were writers who would later become famous—George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux—and thousands of ordinary people whose names are now largely forgotten.

Perhaps forty thousand volunteers served in the International Brigades. Around fifteen thousand of them died.

They arrived too late, were too few, and were too poorly equipped to change the war's outcome. But their presence gave the Republic an international legitimacy that the Nationalists never achieved, and their sacrifice became a powerful symbol for generations of leftists around the world.

Revolution and Counter-Revolution

In the territory it controlled, each side built a radically different society.

On the Nationalist side, Franco—who emerged as supreme leader by late 1936—imposed a military dictatorship backed by the Church. He merged all the disparate right-wing factions into a single movement under his control. Dissent was not tolerated. Suspected leftists were rounded up and shot, sometimes by the thousands. The Nationalists called this the "cleansing" of Spain.

On the Republican side, something stranger and more complex happened. In many areas, the initial resistance to the coup triggered a genuine social revolution. Workers took over factories and ran them collectively. Peasants seized land and formed agricultural communes. In Barcelona, anarchists effectively controlled the city. Churches were burned and priests killed—a revolutionary terror that would later be used to justify Nationalist atrocities.

But the revolution was uneven and controversial. The Communists, backed by the Soviet Union, argued that winning the war had to come first—that social revolution was a distraction that alienated potential allies and undermined military discipline. The anarchists and independent Marxists of the POUM party disagreed violently. In May 1937, open fighting broke out between Communist-aligned forces and anarchists in Barcelona. The Communists won, and the revolution began to be rolled back.

George Orwell, who served with a POUM militia, wrote about these events in his book "Homage to Catalonia." He arrived believing he was fighting fascism and left having narrowly escaped being purged as a suspected fascist agent—by his own side.

The Agony of Madrid

In November 1936, Franco's forces reached the outskirts of Madrid. The government fled to Valencia. The capital seemed doomed.

It held.

The defense of Madrid became legendary. Workers, militias, and the newly arrived International Brigades threw themselves against the Nationalist assault. "¡No pasarán!"—"They shall not pass!"—became the rallying cry of the Republic. Against all expectations, the city did not fall.

Franco turned to siege warfare. For nearly three years, Madrid endured bombing, shelling, and hunger. But it never surrendered. The Nationalists would not enter the capital until the war was already over.

The Tide Turns

The Republic's survival at Madrid was inspiring, but it couldn't change the fundamental realities of the war.

The Nationalists had better weapons, better-trained troops, and more consistent foreign support. The Republic's Soviet aid was offset by the chaos of its multiple competing factions and the limitations of the Non-Intervention Agreement, which hurt the Republic far more than the Nationalists.

Through 1937 and 1938, the Nationalists steadily advanced. They conquered Spain's northern coast, capturing the industrial regions of the Basque Country and Asturias. The destruction of Guernica—a small Basque town obliterated by German bombers in April 1937, killing hundreds of civilians—became an international symbol of the war's brutality, immortalized in Picasso's famous painting.

In early 1938, the Nationalists split Republican Spain in two, reaching the Mediterranean and cutting off Catalonia from the rest of Republican territory. The Republic launched desperate counteroffensives, including the bloody Battle of the Ebro, but could not change the strategic situation.

By late 1938, it was clear the Republic was losing. The International Brigades were withdrawn, a futile gesture toward non-intervention when the war was already decided. Barcelona fell in January 1939. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled toward the French border.

The End

By early 1939, the Republic held only Madrid, Valencia, and a shrinking pocket of central Spain.

Even then, it could not surrender peacefully. In March 1939, Colonel Segismundo Casado led a coup against the Republican government, hoping to negotiate with Franco. Fighting broke out between Republicans in Madrid—Communists against anti-Communists—even as the Nationalists waited outside.

Franco refused to negotiate. He demanded unconditional surrender.

On April 1, 1939, he got it. The war was over.

The Price

No one knows exactly how many died. Estimates range from three hundred thousand to over half a million. Perhaps two hundred thousand were killed in combat. The rest died from disease, starvation, bombing, and above all, political violence—executions, massacres, and systematic murder carried out by both sides, though the Nationalists' killings were more organized and continued long after the fighting stopped.

Franco's victory began a dictatorship that would last until his death in 1975. He never forgave his enemies. Tens of thousands were executed in the years after the war ended. Hundreds of thousands more were imprisoned, sent to labor camps, or forced into exile. The defeated were systematically humiliated—required to publicly renounce their beliefs, denied jobs and education, their children taken away and given to Nationalist families.

Perhaps half a million Republicans fled Spain, most of them to France, where they were herded into miserable refugee camps. When World War Two began a few months later, many would join the fight against fascism again—some in the French Resistance, others in the Allied armies. Some ended up in Nazi concentration camps. The war they had lost in Spain followed them across Europe.

The Legacy

For decades after Franco's death, Spain maintained what was called the "pact of forgetting"—a tacit agreement not to examine the Civil War too closely, for fear of reopening old wounds. Mass graves remained unmarked. Families never learned what had happened to relatives who simply disappeared.

Only in recent years has Spain begun to seriously confront this history. The process remains painful and politically contentious.

Outside Spain, the Civil War has never been forgotten. It remains one of the most written-about conflicts of the twentieth century, the subject of countless novels, memoirs, histories, and films. For the left, it became a kind of lost cause, a moment when ordinary people tried to stop fascism and the world let them fail. For the right, it was a warning about the dangers of social revolution.

Both sides found what they were looking for. That's the nature of a war that meant everything to everyone.

The volunteers who came to fight for the Republic believed they were fighting for the future. In a sense, they were right. The tactics and weapons tested in Spain—terror bombing of cities, tank warfare, combined arms operations—would soon be used across Europe and the world. The ideological alignments of the Spanish Civil War—fascism against democracy and the left, with the democracies paralyzed and the Soviet Union pursuing its own agenda—prefigured the even larger conflict to come.

Spain was the rehearsal. World War Two was the performance.

And for Spain itself, the Civil War remained an open wound, a trauma passed down through generations, a catastrophe whose consequences are still being felt nearly a century later.