Famous Faces of the Spanish Civil War: Writers and Artists in the Conflict, 1936–1939 by Steve Hurst
Famous Faces of the Spanish Civil War is a fascinating and enlightening in-depth look at the people involved in the Spanish Civil War.
Spain was invaded by Franco, and his fascist followers. The dictatorship he installed was the last of that era that endured after WWII. He finally died in office of old age. The brutal blood spilled by his insanely and dementedly-driven organization was among the most barbarous of that war.
EXCERPTS:
International Brigades disbanded and leave Spain. Aid from the USSR diminishes to a trickle. The Republican army confounds pessimists by its courage and endurance, but it cannot survive faced with overwhelming quantities of war machinery supplied by the fascist dictatorships.
The Frente Popular was largely controlled by the Communist International, but few of the Cairo society were communists. Most of my mother’s friends were liberals or socialists, but my auntie Mimi and auntie Margaret were staunch members of the Conservative Party who, like Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill, had the good sense to see that Franco and his allies, Mussolini and Hitler, were the enemies of British interests in the Mediterranean.
Orwell’s assertion that Spain would end up a fascist state whichever side won, (meaning either Franco style fascism or Stalinist fascism) was both unproven and unlikely.
Franz Borkenau describes, from his own experience, the initial enthusiasm for the Republic of the peasants and citizens of small towns in Aragon, enthusiasm that was turned to bitter hatred by the senseless destruction, the burning of churches and the torture, or murder of anyone that Durutti or his subordinates suspected of being a ‘fascist’. It was Gustav Regler, seasoned fighter and dedicated Commissar, who remarked that men like the poet Aragon and his extremist followers disgraced the Republic and provided ready-made propaganda for the newspapers of the far Right.
The Germans wanted to try out and perfect the Blitzkrieg technique that would later prove so successful in Poland and in France. Mola preceded his advance on the Basque provinces with a chilling warning broadcast to his enemies and dropped from the air in leaflets. He told them that he was about to terminate the war in the north. He concluded that he would ‘Raze Vizcaya to the ground’. Unable to reinforce the Northern army, the only thing the Republican High Command could do was to launch diversionary attacks. These succeeded, at least to some extent, near Segovia, at Brunete, at Huesca and in the Guadarama mountains north of Madrid.
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