Abstract
Based on published primary and secondary sources, this volume offers a revised and refreshed military history of the Spanish conflict. The author’s knowledge of how weapons and terrain influenced individual battles – Toledo, Madrid, Euzkadi, Segovia, Brunete, Belchite, Teruel, Aragón, Maestrazgo, Ebro, and Catalonia – is impressive, and his overall analysis of the evolution of the war is revealing. In contrast to much traditional political and diplomatic historiography favourable to the Republic, Esdaile stresses the Republican inability to use effectively its considerable resources, including substantial foreign aid. Its Nationalist enemies may have received somewhat more of the latter, but Nationalist employment of domestic and foreign assets was more efficacious. The author also convincingly rebuts the argument advanced by Paul Preston and others that Nationalist leader Francisco Franco intentionally prolonged the conflict in order to ensure his personal hegemony. Instead, he shows that most of the cautious Caudillo’s major decisions were militarily rational or at least defensible. Franco may have been ‘slow and unimaginative’ (p. 305) as a military leader, but he was sensible. Nationalist organization of both the front and the rear were far superior to Republican logistic incompetence and its faulty system of mixed brigades which seriously underemployed both men and equipment. The author might have added that Nationalist success was due not only to ruthless terror but also to the ability of its rear to incentivize workers and soldiers with sufficient calories and a solid currency.
Esdaile is persuasive in debunking the idea that popular enthusiasm allegedly kept the Republican effort alive. He correctly refuses to identify political militants of any colour with the Spanish people and, given the multiple penuries of means and motivation in the Republican zone, rightly dismisses the possibility of its victory through a strategy of guerrilla warfare. Most of the great powers were directly involved in the conflict, and their armed forces attempted to draw lessons from it. Esdaile shows the difficulties of making appropriate conclusions from a conflict which in many ways resembled the trench warfare of the First World War, not the motorized mobility of the Second World War.
While his military history is usually broadly conceived, the author has a somewhat narrow vision of the civil war’s origins, attributing them to short-term political conflict between left and right. He therefore ignores the long-term economic and social backwardness of Spain that encouraged a revolutionary/counterrevolutionary confrontation similar to those in Russia after the First World War and China after the Second World War. Esdaile correctly argues that the Spanish ‘revolution’ greatly hindered the Republican war effort, but he never clearly defines what this revolution was or precisely how to periodize it. This lack of definition and periodization is also a problem with his less frequent use of ‘revisionist’. Like many historians of the conflict, he affirms that the Communists and their allies halted the revolution. However, this analysis neglects the Communist-Socialist-Anarchist continuation of collectivization, increasing state control of the economy, and use of terror against opponents of both right and left, including supposed fascists, suspected Trotskyists, and authentic anarchists. Indeed, the Republic copied many aspects of the Soviet New Economic Policy (NEP) and prefigured the postwar ‘people’s democracies’ in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, Republican Prime Minister Juan Negrín was not as hostile to the Communists as Esdaile indicates (p. 252). The author’s own confirmation of increasing Communist domination of the Republican military refutes his evaluation of Negrín. Esdaile occasionally wanders dangerously into non-Spanish territory. The governments of the French Popular Front did not ‘savagely’ (p. 279) reduce national military budgets. In fact, they increased them.
These relatively minor errors and omissions do not ultimately negate Esdaile’s outstanding contribution to the literature. Like all good historians, he has destroyed persistent myths and largely resisted creating new ones.