Originally posted by Juan campos
Pat,
While I agree with much you say, I find much more could be added:(I don´t want to give the impression I like Franco, simply that most of his enemies were in many ways worse, specially the Anarchists, socialists and communists).
Preston is in my opinion still very partial to the left.Stanley Payne seems to me a more balanced historian.
It was not only the communists who were antidemocratic, totalitarian and violent in their methods: the core of the dominant-before-the-war Socialist Party also had a revolutionary program and methods with their leader,Largo Caballero, the Spanish Lenin, preaching civil war rhetoric and supporting the 1934 attempt to topple the republican with a violent socialist revolution in Asturias. But the then enormously influential Anarchists also had terrorist methods and indulged in an orgy of specifically anticlerical and antireligious genocide in the first months of the civil war.And similarly their enemies, but equally murderous communists.
My maternal grandfather,Jose Calvo Sotelo, leader of the right wing monarchists, was murdered-before the war started by government police under government approval. The people who actually fired on him were bodyguards of Prieto, the "moderate"(?) socialist leader.
There were very few genuine democrats among the republicans, and no more in number than the democrats in the right.Very hard to regard such government as democratic or legal.
The Franco regime also evolved from tough repression after the war to a relatively mild dictatorship in the sixties and seventies.
Recently a Spanish historian, Pio Moa, exmember of a communist terrorist group, the GRAPO, in the seventies, has written much attacking the mythology of the standard prorepublican vision of the civil war.He queries many myths, like the exact figures of victims in the bombing of Guernica, ludicrously swelled by conventional historians like Preston and others, or the false shocking accounts of killings in Badajoz in the bullring watched over by ladies in "mantilla".Killings there certainly were, but not ladies in the traditional Spanish "mantilla" applauding them in the bullring (!?). He has been attacked personally, though hardly refuted in his many correct factual points. One can disagree with his too positive view of Franco, but still find much relevant in his demolition of the republican side.
Your descriptions of the Spanish left here, and the events running up to the Civil War, are very valuable indeed. Indeed, they needed to be added to fully explain the story.
What has traditionally been very difficult for Americans to understand is that Spain of the pre Civil War period fit in to the category of immature republic. I don't mean that to sound insulting, but Americans often assume, incorrectly, that democratic behavior is an instinct, not a learned habit. Our own history with democracy is so long, to which we can add the inherited history of democractic evolution in the UK, that we often tend to think that all political bodies will be democratic by nature.
However, a nation without a fully developed republic does not tend to behave that way, and it can be very difficult for it to get through the developing period. In Spain's case, the left wing parties, as you've pointed out, were increasingly radical. That left very little room for the middle, and there was simply no way that Spain was going to survive its final election cycle as a democracy.
That forms part of the background as to why the Communist ultimately acted to dominate and control the Republicans in the Civil War. The Communist everywhere were completely intolerant of any other extreme left wing party, which they regarded as rivals for their own power.
You also point out a real difficulty in having open discussion on this type. Acknowledging that the Spanish left was radical, anti-democratic, violent, anti-religious, anti-monarchist, and anti-capitalist is not the same thing as claiming that Franco was a nice guy. However, it's almost impossible to point out how really bad the Spanish left was at the time, without drawing some response that this means that you are sympathizing with Franco. It doesn't mean that, but it was the case that, in a world of bad options, Franco was the least likely to be totally repressive, and the Nationalist were the only force that was actually willing to preserve some liberties and rights. That doesn't mean they were nice. It probably makes them roughly comparable to the Russian Whites in the Russian Civil War, rather than to the Nazis or the Fascists.
Franco held a very difficult balance during World War Two, while inevitably rendering some help to the Germans. However, if he had allowed Hitler´s ambitions to recruit Spain into the war or even allowed his plan to march German divisions over Spanish soil to take over Gibraltar, the fate of the war might have been much worse for the allies.
As for the "División Azul" who fought in Russia, they were on the whole volunteers or adventurers, including a percentage of "reds" who had changed sides or wanted to clean their slate to avoid repression.There were also plenty of "Falange" idealists who were disappointed with the conservative situation of postwar Spain.They certainly were not, on the whole, conscripts of any kind.
Spain's role in World War Two is one of the most difficult aspects of Franco's rule to understand. Indeed, I suspect it isn't fully capable of being understood, as Franco never really explained it to anyone. For that reason, it's hard to know whether Spain was simply really lucky to avoid the war, or if Franco highly crafty in that regards.
Spain certainly played out its hand much better than Mussolini, and by extension, the Allies are lucky that Churchill was crafty enough to not over react to some Spanish actions. What seems somewhat clear seems to be the following.
Germany looked up Spain as an agrarian backwater, and hoped to reduce it, in a new German dominated Europe, to a supplier of foodstuffs and raw materials. Early after the Civil War the Spanish economy was dominated by atarkic thought, which was the same type of thought that dominated Nazi economic thinking. In Spain's case that proved to be a disaster, and ultimately Franco tossed out his economic advisors and opened the economy back up. That took some time, however. For a period of time after the Civil War, the Spanish economy was a disaster.
That, in part, formed part of Franco's argument to not do what Mussolini did. Franco, it should be noted, did not attack France in 1940. And it didn't attack anyone else either. It did have an incentive to attack France in 1940, in that it coveted French Morocco. Had Spain attacked France in April, 1940, Spain would have ended up with French Morocco, and would have been a full scale combatant in WWII. That also would have made the British position in North Africa much worse for a variety of reasons.
Instead, Franco stated that his army was a mess after the war, and that it was weak in all material ways. This same story would be told again and again by Franco throughout the war. There was some truth to it. The Spanish Army of 40-45 was not equivalent to the German or Italian armies. So he was correct that it needed vast quantities of German material to be useful. However, even after getting some of that material, he kept asking for more. Had the Germans listened to Franco, they would have had to equip the Spanish Army in the same fashion that the very best German units were equipped, with no guranty that they'd ever be used. The Germans simply gave up on it.
The Germans did think about invading Spain, or crossing it by force, but gave up that idea too. It was probably a strategically dumb idea, and Franco appears to have been apprised of it by Canaris, and seems to have sometimes been able to encourage the Germans just enough to put them off.
Spain did aid the Germans during the war, however. Early in the Battle of Britain some German planes flew out of Spain. The British turned a blind eye to this, realizing that to strike the bases might bring Spain in to the war at a time in which the UK was weak. Spain also provided some port rights to German submarines, and some long distance naval reconnaissance flights were flown by the Germans out of Spain, all of which the British ignored. A lessor leader than Churchill would have reacted to this, but Churchill assessed that if things went badly for Germany, Spain would walk away from the Germans, which was correct. The reasons for Spanish assistance to Germany have never been fully explained, but again, it's hard not to wonder if Franco was simply hedging his bets a bit.
The Blue Division is a little more difficult to explain, but even its history is enigmatic. I agree with Juan that it was made up of volunteers, not conscripts. However, at least some accounts indicate that the pressure to volunteer in some units was fairly high. However, at the same time, there's been some who suggested that Franco was happy to provide the Blue Division in part because the really aggressive Falangist would volunteer for it, and a a lot them would get killed. That may sound extreme, but Franco's use of Italian troops in the Civil War suggested that he wasn't above purposely wasting human resources on the battlefield, and some battles in the Civil War appear to have been prolonged simply because they were killing a lot of Republicans, thereby saving Franco the trouble of having to deal with them later. If viewed that way (and there's really no way to prove or disprove it) the Blue Division was a win win project for Franco, as it meant that his troops were taking on the Communists in his view, they were getting battlefield experience, it got the Germans off his back, and it might mean that a lot of young fanatics would get killed off. Indeed, the fate of the Blue Division was not a happy one. Churchill did complaint about the Blue Division, and Franco then camouflaged it by allowing it to be turned in to a Waffen SS Division, which the Western Allies then ignored.
FWIW, the Blue Divison is slightly comparable to some similiar, very small formations, that also were sent to the Russian front with the encouragement of Vichy France. I don't want to over do that, however, as very, very few Frenchmen volunteered for such units. Those who did were from the far right, however, like the Falangists, and a few of them were from the French Army, like the Blue Division recruits. Having said that, such units had next to no appeal for the overwhelming majority of Frenchmen, and the history of Spain and France are completely different in this overall context.
Pat