Considering that it is probably THE most politically diverse conflict in recent memory, and that it included anarchists, communists, democrats, fascists, nacional socialists, royalist monarchists and all sorts of shades of gray on presque equal footing (well, equal enough to have a war), it should be of great interest to many here.
I’ve done a lot of research on this throughout my life, so here is a bit of a summary of how it all went down:
Pre-1936 Spain: In 1923, the last monarchy was overthrown by a brutal military regime. After a while of this, political unrest led them to resign on 1930 and give birth, so to speak, to the new and democratic Spanish Republic. Much of the unrest had been due to the left in Spain: communists, socialists, pseudo-anarchists, etc, so it is not surprising that the left-leaning Niceto Alcalá-Zamora was elected first. What followed was a progressively violent back-and-forth of power between economically awkward leftists and militarily heavy-handed rightists. Alliances were formed and populations were polarized until
in 1936, the basically unanimously rightist top echelons of the military wing of the Republic decided that they had lost elections to the leftists for the last time. The top guy died in an airplane crash when moving from wherever he was to wherever he planned to stage the coup from, so the baton fell to the undesciferable (I think colonel at that time, can someone correct me so I can edit the info in?) Francisco Franco, who was stationed with his troops in some northern province in Africa. He phoned up the German Furer who promptly sent over some planes to get them into Spain (lol, the rain in Spain…). Thus the right, including everybody from oldskool monarchists to italian-style fascist falangists, made its choice, and they had the guy to get it done. This uprising was supposed to be a quick coup, but nobody counted on…
The semi-organized leftist forces of the republic! (this, btw, is why the leftists where known as the republicans and the rightists as the nationalists.) First of all, although all the top-top guys where basically fascists, many of the lower-tier officers and privates where loyal to the republic, many of them even being leftists themselves; so the government had it’s own, alas less disciplined, armed forces.
Aside from this, the whole world was at this moment split between leftists and rightists and, even though the fascists had support from the likes of Hitler and Mussolini, the left had support from grass-roots volunteers willing to fight for an ideology (George Orwell among them). In fact, most of the inicial warfare fell in the hands, not of the professional army, but of organized militias with heavy international support ranging from stalinist communists (who recieved aid from the soviets and who Orwell loved criticizing) to purest-of-the-pure anarchists.
And so, what was supposed to be a quick and painless coup turned into the most interesting war ever had from a political perspective, lasting almost three years.
Wikipedia list of Republican factions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_faction_(Spanish_Civil_War)
Wikipedia list of Nationalist factions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Faction_(Spanish_Civil_War)
(In the interest of objectivism, I will admit that the Falange had the coolest flag)
And then what happened? In purely military terms, this: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhsBNeyZDAs[/youtube] Ignore the Spanish, just look at the arrows and colored areas: Republican territory is green, National territory is red and the arrows represent military action. Madrid, at the center, was the main objective and was held by Republicans until the bitter end.
It is easy to tell that the Nationalists basically ploughed through Republican lines, always gaining and never retreating. The nationalist force was led by a single guy, eventually named Generalísimo (literally: Extremely-General or Very-Very-General) Francisco Franco. “Go here and do this, this way” would say Franco, and it would be done. The republicans, well, they were a loose confederation of militias, some of them so anarchist that they didn’t have leaders period. The comparatively shitty organizational capacity of the Republic led the government to eventually outlaw militias, attempting to force anarchists and communists alike to simply join the state army and obey a unified command, achieving instead an internal state of strife that weakened cooperation of forces even more. Anarchists were mostly regionally based anyways, radiating from Barcelona (the capital of a region of Spain that has always been and still is equivalent to Scotland in the UK: they want to be autonomous). When the Nationalists finally squashed the Anarchist resistance in Barcelona, the anarchists where almost out of the picture. Otherwise, they clung to the anarcho-syndicalist CNT militia group.
So, from a military point of view, a long held ILP myth is validated here: Anarchists will never be able to thrive as long as immense, centrilized state armies are willing to squash them.
However, once Franco won and got started, two other myths become validated: All statists are back-stabing sneaky bastards who would drop a life-long alliance at the drop of a hat. Also, that all fascists regimes are systematically opressive, coercive, and homicidal.
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