Deep and brutal strife in 1930s Spain was a prelude to the barbarity of World War II. Now with the war in Ukraine, we’re reminded that the veneer of civilization is very thin.
rom 1936 to 1939, the civil war in Spain became a European laboratory of new tactics, strategies, logistics, wartime morality, and weapons. Right-wing nationalists under General Francisco Franco finally defeated loyal supporters of an evolutionary socialist republic—but only after much of the Western world had variously weighed in.
The cost to the Spanish people of such brutal and vicious strife was horrific. Over 500,000 Spaniards would die in a little over two-and-a-half years. The country was left in shambles.
Dictatorships in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and autocratic Portugal poured millions of dollars in military aid and money for Franco’s efforts to seize power. In turn, the Soviet Union often matched that aid with shipments to various communists, socialists, and anarchists of the Popular Front forces.
Whether by design or by accident, Spain became a proving ground for many of the strategies, weapons, and tactics that would follow later in World War II. And it would be a preview of just how impotent democracies and international bodies were to stop aggressive powers.
The relatively new regime of Nazi Germany sent to Spain hundreds of tanks and “volunteer” troops, pilots, dive bombers, and transport planes of the Condor Legion.
But Germany’s intervention was not always quite what it seemed. Behind the scenes, Adolf Hitler provided enough aid to ensure Franco’s likely eventual victory. But he did not send quite enough immediate help either to antagonize his European democratic rivals, or to ensure a quick victory for the Nationalists that might have created a powerful and independent Iberian fascist rival bloc to his own.
The Soviet Union ostensibly countered fascist supply chains. But Joseph Stalin had even more strings attached to his aid. He systematically favored communist recipients and harassed and often eliminated their socialist and anarchist allies in the Popular Front.
Stranger still, even before the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact of 1939, Hitler and Stalin were already secretly aiding each other’s rearmament in their shared hatred of Western European democracies. It would take years of research to fathom all of the subtexts and agendas behind the great powers’ interventions in the Spanish Civil war.
The same labyrinth of plots and twists will likely prove true in the present Ukrainian war. Ostensibly NATO and the EU are staunch Ukrainian allies. But powerful German interests remain worried about their tenuous energy supply lines from Russia and are not so ready to...
