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The Spanish civil war was the first battle of the Second World War.
It is with good reason that the Spanish civil war is consistently called the first battle of the Second World War. Clearly, in terms of time frame, the 1936 start date of the two and a half year long series of battles that would constitute the Spanish civil war sits as a natural historical precursor to the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939.
Likewise, technologically speaking, the Spanish fight represented a priceless opportunity for the Axis powers to test their considerable military might in a practical imitation of the larger battles that awaited them in both Western and Eastern Europe.
Yet it is with ideological reasons in mind that most historians liken the Spanish civil war to the central driving force behind the broader battle of World War Two. With the fight taking place between a rising dictatorial regime and a fledgling, nascent democracy, the war in Spain is rightly seen as the first right wing, fascist challenge that would characterise the Second World War. Its brutal nature was also a trademark of the fighting that would scar World War Two, as Lannon (2002:72) attests. Violence was widespread, ideologically driven and vicious.
Extremists on left and right believed that the world could be reshaped by terror. In this regard, the Spanish civil war was the first in a series of battles waged in the name of freedom, democracy and religious tolerance that continue to take place beyond the boundaries of Europe today.
To best answer the title of the essay we need to take a chronological look at the background to the Spanish civil war: only be tracing its genesis can we gauge its similarity to the fight against Nazism. We also need to examine the war itself to see how the fighting mimicked the battles of World War Two. And, before reaching a conclusion, we must analyse, briefly, the nature of the Second World War to place both encounters in their rightful contexts.
The seeds of the Spanish Civil War were sewn over centuries of struggle pertaining to land and ownership in the country, an unresolved issue ever since the expulsion of the Moors, beginning in the eleventh century. When the Popular Front party won the national election in February 1936 there was a growing sense of unease felt by the landowners and the traditional ruling classes of Spain with regards to land ownership and redistribution. Indeed, the Popular Front came to power on the back of a slogan of land reform, though if this were the only problem facing the aristocrats in 1936 then a civil war would have remained an unlikely outcome. Rather, the loss of the binding influence of the Catholic Church in Spain contributed to a spiritual vacuum of which the civil war was merely a manifestation, at least according to Gerald Brenan (1995:1415).
Spain, since the loss of its Catholic faith has been, above everything else, a country in search of an ideology This was the force behind the Republic, the Socialist and Anarcho-Syndicalist movements - behind even those patriotic and military ideas that paved the way for Fascism.
It was also the hint of further reforms to come that tipped the political scale in favour of a rightist coup. As was the case with the democratic evolution of the National Socialist Party in Germany, the political right in Spain was a conglomeration of different dissatisfied interests who came together in a political marriage of convenience. Aside from the landowners, there was the relatively new concept of the capitalist class, businesses that had a direct interest in the perpetuation of the contemporary status quo, most notably the continuation of the connection between the military and big business, a key feature that had propelled the German economy from the worst casualty of the Wall Street Crash in 1929 to the proud host of the 1936 Berlin Olympics - a fact underscored by Preston (1978:200). The Francoist state remained the instrument of the traditional oligarchy. The veneer of antioligarchic novelty adopted by Hitler and Mussolini was eschewed by Franco.
The military, by the very nature of its relationship to the right, was likewise a key component in the spate of assassinations and disruptions that eventually became a coup on 18 July 1936. Perhaps caught up in the prevalent antagonistic mood of the decade the Spanish military saw in the governments of Portugal, Italy and Germany proof that the army was now a central cog in political affairs throughout Europe. Regardless of the real terms worth of the Spanish military in 1936, the support of Franco and other generals gave considerable impetus to the movement to overthrow the Popular Front.
We can therefore see how the formations of the battle lines pertaining to the Spanish civil war were drawn along familiar ideological and sociological patterns that would be repeated in the Second World War. The power of the Axis Alliance of Mussolini and Hitler rested upon the compliance of big business and the traditional ruling classes to mobilise public opinion for war and to maintain the economies of fascism, to which war was the equivalent of oxygen and Franco's Spain was no exception to the rule.
The Spanish civil war itself was a curious affair that, on paper, appears to have very little in common with the great battles of World War Two. The guerrilla fighting that was witnessed in Guadalajara and other remote regions the length and breadth of Spain was of a very different composition to campaigns such as Operation Barbarossa (1941) or the fight for Normandy (19445). Yet we should not be overly surprised by this truism; we must attempt to remember, throughout our discussion, that the war in Spain was a civil war and thus involved, for the most part, Spaniards killing Spaniards. For this reason alone, the Spanish civil war cannot be held in comparison to the war of attrition that characterised the central ideological fight of World War Two, namely the battle between the Soviets and the Nazis in the East.
But, if we scratch beneath the surface, we can see how Spain acted as a testing ground for the larger scale battles of 193945. The first such clue as to the new chapter that Spain represented came with the manner in which Franco and his troops arrived on the scene of the civil war. At the time of the outbreak of fighting Franco was stationed in Morocco, Africa, unsure how to mobilise his men and to take up arms on behalf of Fascism. Hitler came to the aid of El Generalissimo in the form of an airlift, the first time in history that an entire army had been flown from one continent to another.
Not only was this a tactic repeated time and again during World War Two (most notably during the invasion of the USSR) but the wider symbolism of modernity entering international warfare was the key to the military struggle of the Second World War. For the first time since the end of the Great War, the major European nations were expressing their might on the battlefield, at the same time displaying the advances in technology; the Franco airlift represented the first sign that the coming broader European war would be a wholly different affair to 191418 and would entail a greater degree of technological and military modernity.
The second clue as to the beginnings of a new type of conflict was born out in the unprecedented air assault that was launched against the civilians of the Basque capital of Guernica in April 1937, a trauma revisited by Fraser (1979:401). The effect of Guernica on the soldiers was much worse than if they had been in combat and suffered casualties to know that women and children were killed in the rearguard demoralised them.
The Spanish civil war was therefore the testing ground upon which the concept of declaring war upon civilians was tilled. This altogether novel and barbaric tactic was repeated most famously against the population of London. Closely tied in with the paradigm of bombing nations into submission was the idea of blitzkrieg, or lightning war. Certainly the Spanish civil war acted as a trial run for German tanks and artillery, vital according to many military historians, to the comprehension of the unprecedented assault of the German army in 193940, which saw France defeated in six weeks. Speaking to Von Ribbentrop in 1941 (1977:356), Hitler later explained that he helped Franco in order to distract the attention of the western powers to Spain, and so enable the German rearmament unobserved.
In addition, the Spanish civil war gave the Nazi regime, in particular, the confidence to express itself that it might otherwise have lacked. 1936 saw Germany march into the demilitarised Rhineland and the coming three years would see Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia annexed. It might therefore be pertinent to see the Spanish civil war as the first in a series of illadvised international policies of appeasement on the behalf of the western democracies that only came to a stop with the invasion of Poland.
World War Two was fought for different reasons and on an altogether different scale than history had hitherto known. We have seen how the central ideological battle concerned the twin pillars of freedom and democracy against the combined forces of Fascism yet it is equally true that the chief characteristic of the conflict was the racial and religious issue of intolerance. Though the darkskinned Spaniards cannot logically be bracketed with the Nazi notion of a superior Aryan race and the quest for lebensraum, the presence of racial hatred in Spain during the civil war marks the conflict out as a precursor and relation of World War Two and the Holocaust. In Spain the targets were likewise the Jews and the gypsies; terror was used against Spanish civilians in the same way that it was in Germany, according to Ashford Hodges (2000:146).
As in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, the repression in the Nationalist zone became state directed violence, which required the terrorising and liquidation of any group that could not be reconciled with the Nationalist vision of the Patria.
The true horrors of the Franco regime only came to light after 1969. It is clear, however, that the similarities between Hitler's policies of extermination were mimicked in part in Spain, as authors such as Dr. Robert Whealey (1989:19) testify. The very fact that Franco awarded Himmler a medal in 1939 as a means of expressing empathy with the head of the SS tells us a great deal about the true nature of the Spanish conflict and its deepseated relation World War Two.
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Conclusion
Though the Spanish civil war and World War Two bore many similarities, necessitating the description within the title of our essay, we must remember the outcomes of both conflicts. The Spanish civil war, ultimately, was decided by foreign intervention. It was the superiority of the combined efforts of Germany and Italy against the relatively negligible support of the USSR that tipped the fight in the favour of Franco's forces. Yet, with the fate of his nation at peril, Stalin in 1943, mobilised the full resources of the Russian army to attain victory and herein lays the greatest difference and also the greatest similarity between the two battles.
In the Spanish civil war, the forces of the Centre and the Left drew up treaties and pledged support but did not fight until they were attacked first elsewhere in Europe. The Right, by its nature a nihilistic and offensive creed, started both wars yet succeeded in winning only the former because, ultimately, it was no match for the defenders of democracy across the globe; defenders who displayed a lamentable lack of foresight that the Spanish civil war was indeed the first battle of the Second World War. Perhaps a greater contemporary appreciation of this would have curtailed the longevity of the broader world war which was still to come.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
M. Alpert, A New International History of the Spanish Civil War (Palgrave Macmillan; London, 2002)
G. Ashford Hodges, Franco: a Concise Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson; London, 2000)
G. Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (University of Cambridge; Cambridgde, 1995)
R. Fraser, Blood of Spain: The Experience of Civil War, 193639 (Allen Lane; London, 1979)
H. Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 19361939 (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, 2002)
H. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War: Third Edition (Hamish Hamilton; London, 1977)
F. Lannon, The Spanish Civil War, 193639 (Osprey; Oxford, 2002)
P. Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the Second Republic, 19311936 (Macmillan; London, 1978)
P. Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (Fontana; London, 1996)
R. Whealey, Hitler and Spain: the Nazi Role in the Spanish Civil War, 193639 (University Press of Kentucky; Lexington, 1989)
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