The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Intorduction by Helen Graham

Author:Helen Graham
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

17. The division of Spanish territory, July 1938

subsequent point in the war. Its army was in disarray and the front was broken between Vinaroz and Barcelona. If Franco had gone straight on for Barcelona, then he could not have been stopped.

With Catalonia in his power and the French frontier sealed, the war would have been over more quickly. But Franco, to the astonishment of the Republic’s political leaders, its military high command, and not a few of his own high-ranking officers, diverted troops south instead for a major attack on Valencia. Partly he did this for fear that a head-on assault on Catalonia would frighten France into intervening there militarily in defence of the Republic.

In retrospect, it is unlikely that this would have occurred, but after the French reaction to the Anschluss, Franco was not prepared to risk provoking its government any further. More importantly, however, to have launched an offensive against Catalonia at that point would have left a substantial Republican force in the ra centre-south zone. Turning away from Catalonia in spring 1938

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and towards the centre-south army, thus lengthening the conflict, was about maximizing the destruction and demoralization visited on the Republic’s human resources. It was, then, entirely consistent e Spanish Civi

with Franco’s underlying war aims.

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The survival of the Republic beyond April 1938 depended on the rapid reorganization of its armies and the political galvanization of its home front. Continued military resistance was seen by Negrín as a crucial means of increasing the diplomatic pressure on Britain and France. They feared that the longer the Spanish conflict went on, the more likely it was to explode into a general European conflagration that would draw them in inexorably. These fears, combined with the British government’s distaste for all things Republican, led them successfully to oppose Negrín’s bid to have Non-Intervention lifted at the League of Nations in May. In public Negrín declared his continuing commitment to all-out resistance.

But, in the hope of turning British and French anxieties to the Republic’s advantage, throughout the second half of 1938, Negrín engaged in an intense round of personal diplomacy to try to persuade the great powers to broker international mediation as a 98

way of ending the conflict in Spain. But this would be much harder to achieve now because the division of the Republican zone indicated its weakness not its strength, and Franco would scarcely be inclined to negotiate over what he believed he could take by force.

Maintaining Republican resistance was also dependent on access to an external supply of armaments – however tenuous. But the situation at the French frontier was now precarious in the extreme.

In mid-June the border, opened in the wake of Anschluss, was once again closed. The new French government, of more conservative hue, was less inclined to tolerate a permeable frontier. ‘Relaxed Non-Intervention’ was over. The government also froze Republican financial assets in French banks. This was the price exacted by Franco before he would agree exports to France of the pyrites Th

crucial to its rearmament programme and in which the north of e R

Spain was uniquely rich in Europe.

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