As internal disagreements mounted in the coalition, a radicalisation of the situation in the country was under way. Strikes were frequent, violence between communists and fascists was rife, and there were attacks on clergy and churches. After a series of governmental crises, the elections of February 16, 1936 brought to power a Popular Front government supported by the parties of the left and centre and opposed by those of the right. The new government was unstable, and on April 7, 1936, President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, a moderate, was deposed by the new Parliament, which named Prime Minister Manuel Azaña as the new President.
During this period of rising tensions, according to official sources, 330 people were assassinated and 1,511 were wounded in politically-related violence; records show 213 failed assassination attempts, 113 general strikes, and the destruction of 160 religious buildings;[2] the actual numbers may be higher. On 12 July 1936, José Castillo, a lieutenant in the Assault Guards and member of the Socialist Party, was murdered by a 'far right' group in Madrid. The following day a group of Assault Guards officers took revenge by murdering José Calvo Sotelo, a leading opposition politician who had been finance minister during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. This assassination precipitated the following events.
On July 17, 1936, the conservative rebellion long feared by the leftist Popular Front government of Prime-Minister Santiago Casares Quiroga began. Casares Quiroga, who had succeeded Azaña in the office, had in the previous weeks exiled the military officers suspected of conspiracy, including General Manuel Goded y Llopis and General Francisco Franco, sent to the Balearic Islands and to the , respectively. The rebellion was not only a military coup, but it also had a substantial civilian component. The rebels had hoped to gain immediate control of the capital, Madrid, and all the other important cities of Spain. Seville, Pamplona, Cádiz, Jerez de la Frontera, Córdoba, Zaragoza and Oviedo all fell under control of the Nationalists, but they failed to capture Barcelona and Madrid. As a result, a protracted civil war ensued.
The active participants in the war covered the entire gamut of the political positions and ideologies of the time. The Nationalist side included the fascists of the Falange, Carlist and Legitimist monarchists; Spanish nationalists; and most conservatives. On the Republican side were most liberals, Basque and Catalan nationalists, socialists, Stalinist and Trotskyist communists, and anarchists of varying ideologies.
To view the political alignments from another perspective, the Nationalists included the majority of the Catholic clergy and of practicing Catholics (outside of the Basque region), important elements of the army, the majority of landowners, and many businessmen. The Republicans included most urban workers, peasants, and much of the educated middle class, especially those who were not entrepreneurs.
The leaders of the rebellion were the generals Francisco Franco, Emilio Mola, and José Sanjurjo. Sanjurjo was the unquestioned leader of the uprising, but he was killed in a plane crash on July 20 as he was going to Spain to take control of the rebel side. Franco, the overall commander of the Spanish army since 1933 and already a noted pro-Fascist, flew from the Canary Islands to the Spanish colonies in Morocco and took command there. For the remaining three years of the war, Franco was the effective commander of all the Nationalists.
One of the Nationalists' principal motives, claimed at the time of their initial uprising, was to confront the anticlericalism of the Republican regime and to defend the Roman Catholic Church, which was censured for its support for the monarchy and which many on the Republican side blamed for the ills of the country. In the opening days of the war, churches, convents, and other religious buildings were burnt without action on the part of the Republican authorities to prevent it. Articles 24 and 26 of the Constitution of the Republic banned the Jesuits, which deeply offended many of the Nationalists. Notwithstanding these religious matters, the Basque nationalists, who nearly all sided with the Republic, were, for the most part, practicing Catholics. Pope John Paul II later canonised several of these martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, murdered for being priests or nuns.
Foreign involvement
The rebellion was opposed by the government (with the troops that remained loyal to the Republic), as well as by Socialist, Communist and anarchist groups. The British government was officially neutral but still maintained an arms embargo on Spain and actively discouraged the anti-fascist participation of their citizens. The last president, Juan Negrín, hoped that with the beginning of the Second World War, the European powers (mainly Britain and France) finally would help the Republic, but neither Britain nor France supported the Republic. Both Fascist under Benito Mussolini and Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler violated the embargo and sent troops (Corpo Truppe Volontarie and Legión Cóndor), , and weapons to support Franco. The Italian contribution amounted to over 60,000 troops at the height of the war. In addition, there were a few volunteer troops from other nations who fought with the Nationalists, such as Eoin O'Duffy of Ireland, and including such romantic Catholic intellectuals as the poet Roy Campbell. On July 27, 1936 the first squadron of Italian airplanes sent by Benito Mussolini arrived in Spain.
Thanks to the Franco-British arms embargo, the Government of the Republic could receive aid and purchase arms only from the Soviet Union, which was thousands of miles away and in economic disarray itself. These arms included 1,000 aircraft, 900 tanks, 1,500 artillery pieces, 300 armored cars, hundreds of thousands of small arms, and 30,000 tons of ammunition (some of which was defective). To pay for these armaments the Republicans used US$500 million dollars in gold reserves. At the start of the war Spain had the world's fourth largest reserve of gold, about US$750 million [4], although some assets were frozen by the French government. While some have contended that the Soviet government was motivated by the desire to sell arms and that they charged extortionate prices [5], they also sent more than 2,000 personnel, mainly tank crews and pilots, who actively participated in the war, including in combat, on the Republican side [6]. Later, the "Moscow gold" was an issue during the Spanish transition to democracy. Mexico also aided the Republicans by providing rifles and food. Throughout the war, the efforts of the elected government of the Republic to resist the rebel army were hampered by Franco-British 'non-intervention', long supply lines and intermittent availability of weapons of widely variable quality.
Volunteers from many countries fought in Spain, most of them on the Republican side. 40,000 men and women fought in the International Brigades, organised in close conjunction with the Comintern to aid the Spanish Republicans. Others fought as members of the CNT and POUM militias.
'Spain' became the cause célèbre for the left-leaning intelligentsia across the Western world, and many prominent artists and writers entered the Republic's service (as well a larger number of foreign left-wing working class men, for whom the war offered not only idealistic adventure but also an escape from post-Depression unemployment). Among the more famous foreigners participating on the Republic's side were Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, who went on to write about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell's novel Animal Farm was loosely inspired by his experiences, and those of other Trotskyists, at the hands of Stalinists when the Popular Front began to fight within itself, as were the torture scenes in 1984. Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls was inspired by his experiences in Spain. The third part of Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy ('A Moment of War') is also based on his Civil War experiences, (though the accuracy of some of his recollections has been disputed). Norman Bethune used the opportunity to develop the special skills of battlefield medicine. As a casual visitor, Errol Flynn used a fake report of his death at the battlefront to promote his movies. Despite the predominantly leftist attitude of the artistic community, several prominent writers such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Evelyn Waugh all sided with Franco.
The Nationalists received substantial overt aid in the form of arms and troops from Germany and Italy. The Republicans received no aid from any major world power other than the Soviet Union, from whom they could purchase arms, thanks to their control of the Spanish gold reserves located in Madrid at the beginning of the war. At this time, Britain and France were deeply divided politically and had weak governments, while the United States was isolationist, neutralist, and was little concerned with what it largely saw as an internal matter in a European country. Nevertheless, from the outset the Nationalists received important support from some elements of American business. The American-owned Vacuum Oil Company in Tangier, for example, refused to sell to Republican ships and the Texas Oil Company supplied gasoline on credit to Franco until the war's end. Many in these countries were also shocked by the violence practiced by anarchist and POUM militias - and reported by a relatively free press in the Republican zone - and feared Stalinist influence over the Republican government. Reprisals, assassinations and other atrocities in the rebel zone were, of course, not reported nearly as widely.
Germany and the USSR used the war as a testing ground for faster tanks and aircraft that were just becoming available at the time. The Messerschmitt Me-109 fighter and Junkers Ju 52 transport/bomber were both used in the Spanish Civil War. The Soviets provided Polikarpov I-15 and Polikarpov I-16 fighters. The Spanish Civil War was also an example of total war, where the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the Legión Cóndor, as depicted by Pablo Picasso in Guernica, foreshadowed episodes of World War II such as the bombing campaign on Britain by the Nazis and the bombing of Dresden by the Allies.
The extent of foreign involvement in the conflict has led some commentators (most notably Paul Preston) to view it as part of a wider integrated European Civil War.
The war: 1936
In the early days of the war, over 50,000 people who were caught on the "wrong" side of the lines were assassinated or summarily executed. The numbers were probably comparable on both sides. In these paseos ("promenades"), as the executions were called, the victims were taken from their refuges or jails by armed people to be shot outside of town. Probably the most famous of these was the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. The outbreak of the war provided an excuse for settling accounts and resolving long-standing feuds. Thus, this practice became widespread during the war in areas conquered. In most areas, even within a single given village, both sides committed assassinations.
Any hope of a quick ending to the war was dashed on July 21, the fifth day of the rebellion, when the Nationalists captured the main Spanish naval base at Ferrol in northwestern Spain. This encouraged the Fascist nations of Europe to help Franco, who had already contacted the governments of Germany and Italy the day before. On July 26, Axis Powers cast their lot with the Nationalists. Franco's Nationalist forces won another great victory on September 27 when the city of was captured.
A Nationalist garrison under Colonel Moscardo had held the Alcazar in the center of the city since the beginning of the rebellion, resisting for months against thousands of Republican troops who completely surrounded the isolated building (the inability to take the Alcazar was a serious blow to the prestige of the Republic, as it was considered inexplicable in view of their numerical superiority in the area). Two days later Franco proclaimed himself Generalísimo and Caudillo ("chieftain") while unifying the various Falangist and Royalist elements of the Nationalist cause. In October, the Nationalists launched a major offensive toward Madrid, but increasing resistance by the government and the arrival of volunteers from the International Brigades halted the advance by November 8. In the meantime, the government shifted from Madrid to Valencia, out of the combat zone, on November 6.
On November 18, Germany and Italy officially recognized the Franco regime, and on December 23, Italy sent "volunteers" of its own to fight for the Nationalists.
The war: 1937
On February 21 the League of Nations Non-Intervention Committee ban on foreign national "volunteers" went into effect. The large city of Málaga was taken on February 8, and on April 28, Franco's men entered Guernica, in the Basque Country, two days after the bombing of that city by the German Condor Legion equipped with Heinkel He 51 biplanes (the legion arrived in Spain on May 7). After the fall of Guernica, the government began to fight back with increasing effectiveness.
In July, the government made a move to recapture Segovia, forcing Franco to pull troops away from the Madrid front to halt their advance. Mola, Franco's second-in-command, was killed on June 3, and in early July, despite the fall of Bilbao in June, the government actually launched a strong counter-offensive in the Madrid area, which the Nationalists repulsed with some difficulty. The clash was called "Battle of Brunete" (Brunete is a town in the province of Madrid).
After that, Franco regained the initiative, invading Aragon in August and then taking the city of Santander (now in Cantabria). Two months of bitter fighting followed and, despite determined Asturian resistance, Gijón (in Asturias) fell in late October, which effectively ended the war in the North.
Meanwhile, on August 28, the Vatican recognized Franco (possibly under pressure from Mussolini), and at the end of November, with the Nationalists closing in on Valencia, the government moved again, to Barcelona.
The war: 1938
The battle of Teruel was an important confrontation between Nationalists and Republicans. The city belonged to the Republicans at the beginning of the battle, but the Nationalists conquered it in January. The Republican government launched an offensive and recovered the city, however the Nationalists finally conquered it for good by February 22. On April 14, the Nationalists broke through to the Mediterranean Sea, cutting the government-held portion of Spain in two. The government tried to sue for peace in May, but Franco demanded unconditional surrender, and the war raged on.
The government now launched an all-out campaign to reconnect their territory in the Battle of the Ebro, beginning on July 24 and lasting until November 26. The campaign was militarily successful, but was fatally undermined by the Franco-British appeasement of Hitler in Munich. The concession of Czechoslovakia destroyed the last vestiges of Republican morale by ending all hope of an anti-fascist alliance with the great power. The retreat from the Ebro all but determined the final outcome of the war. Eight days before the new year, Franco struck back by throwing massive forces into an invasion of Catalonia.
