Stalin & the Spanish Civil War - Kowalsky by Les Weil

Author:Les Weil
Language: eng
Format: epub

The increased bombing of ports, as much as the improved access across the French border, convinced Section X in the fall of 1937 to altogether abandon the southern route.

If Soviet memoirists are to be believed, the ships ferrying arms to Spain were met by sloppy, inept, or even negligent Loyalist dockworkers. In Kuznetsov's account, these workers carelessly handled barrels of gas and tossed around boxes of ammunition with no sense of possible consequences. 82 The naval attaché was dismayed that the unloaded shipments of fighters, tanks, cannons, and rifles often sat exposed on the docks with little or no protection. More than once, Kuznetsov claims to have witnessed anarcho-syndicalist groups absconding with portions of the weaponry. Finally, even once unloaded and placed aboard rail cars, the Soviet hardware was rarely expedited to where it was needed; the Republic did not possess sufficient locomotives to carry the rolling stock to the front. 83

Despite the numerous obstacles and difficulties inherent in the transit stage of Operation X, sixty-four out of the total sixty-six igreks (using Ribalkin's numbers) reached their appointed destinations. 84 In all, the Soviets delivered to Spain something on the order of 600,000 tons of war matériel. 85 According to one Russian researcher, during the whole of Operation X, only two ships carrying Soviet arms encountered problems sufficient to force serious alterations of their routes. One igrek was attacked by enemy aircraft not far from the Spanish coast and only with difficulty managed to reach the shoreline near Valencia and safely unload its cargo. The other ship, unable to break through the blockade of Spanish waters, called instead at Algiers and weapons were unloaded there. 86 40

This safe record of delivery, however, does little to indicate the considerable dangers these vessels faced in Spanish waters during the civil war. Potemkin, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, reported that from October 1936 to April 1937 there were eighty-four cases of Soviet vessels detained by rebel ships: seventy-four in the Gibraltar straits, five off the northwest coast of Spain, and five in the Mediterranean. 87 One Soviet ship, the Smidovich, had its cargo confiscated by the rebels. 88 Three others, the Komsomol, 89 Timiriazev, and Blagoev, 90 were sunk. Soviet authorities at the time insisted that none of these was carrying materials of war at the time of their sinking; that is, none was an igrek. 91 By any reckoning, the Soviets had a significant amount of luck in getting weapons to Spain. Consider the following: between the end of September and November 1936, the Soviets sent seventeen igreks to Spain, ten of these aboard Soviet vessels. 92 During nearly the same period—October to November 1936—the Nationalist navy detained and searched twelve Soviet vessels, yet not a single igrek was among them. All seventeen shipments of arms reached their destinations safely. 93

Non-Soviet craft fared more poorly. From the beginning of the war until the end of 1937, the Nationalists and their naval allies sunk 125 craft, including 48 English, 30 Spanish, and 9 French vessels.

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