Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Since we have captured large quantities of secret German and Italian documents and have not captured any Soviet documents, it is not possible to fix the date or the degree of Soviet intervention in Spain, but it is conclusively established that it was much later in date and immensely less in quantity than that of either Italy or Germany. On October 7, 1936, the Soviet representative informed the Nonintervention Committee that it could not be bound by the nonintervention agreement to a greater extent than the other participants. Soviet intervention appears to have begun at this time, three and a half years after Italian intervention and almost three months after both Italian and German units were fighting with the rebels. Russian military equipment went into action before Madrid in the period October 29-November 11, 1936.

As late as September 28, 1936, the German charge d’affaires in the Soviet Union reported that he could find no reliable proof of violation of the arms embargo by the Soviet government, and on November 16th he reported no evidence of the transport of troops from Odessa. Food shipments were being sent by September 19th, and extensive shipments of military supplies began to be reported a month later. Earlier, but unsubstantiated, reports had arrived from German agents in Spain itself. The amount of Soviet aid to Madrid is not known. Estimates of the number of technical advisers and assistants vary from 700 to 5,000, and were probably not over 2,000; no infantry forces were sent. In addition, the Third International recruited volunteers throughout the world to fight in Spain. These went into action early in November 1936 before Madrid, and were disbanded in October 1938.

This Soviet intervention in support of the Madrid government at a time when it could find support almost nowhere else served to increase Communist influence in the government very greatly, although the number of Communists in Spain itself were few and they had elected only 14 of 473 deputies in February 1936. Communists came into the Cabinet for the first time September 4, 1936. In general, they acted to maintain the Popular Front, to concentrate on winning the war, and to prevent all efforts toward social revolution by the extreme Left. For this reason, they overthrew Largo Caballero’s government in May 1937, and set up Juan Negrin, a more conservative Socialist, as premier in a Cabinet which continued on the same general lines until after the war ended.

The small number of Russian or other “volunteers” on the Loyalist side, in spite of the extravagant statement of Franco’s supporters at the time and since, is evident from the inability of the rebel forces to capture any important numbers of “foreign Reds” in spite of their great desire to do so. After the Battle of Teruel, at which such “foreign Reds” were supposed to be very active, Franco had to report to Germany that he had found “very few” among the 14,500 captives taken; this fact had to be kept “strictly confidential,” he said (December 1937).

As a matter of fact, intervention in Spain by the Soviet Union was not only limited in quantity; it was also of brief duration, chiefly between October 1936 and January 1937. The road to Spain was, for the Soviet Union, a difficult one, as the Italian submarine fleet was waiting for Russian shipping in the Mediterranean, and did not hesitate to sink it. This was done in the last few months of 1936. Moreover, the Anti-Comintern Pact of November 1936 and the Japanese attack on North China in 1937 made it seem that all Russian supplies were needed at home. Furthermore, the Soviet Union was more concerned with reopening supplies to Loyalist Spain from France, Britain, or elsewhere, because, in a competition of supplies and troops in Spain, the Soviet Union could not match Italy alone and certainly not Italy, Germany, and Portugal together. Finally, the German government in 1936 gave the Czechoslovak leader Edward Benes documents indicating that various Soviet Army officers were in contact with German Army officers. When Benes sent these documents on to Stalin, they gave rise to a series of purges and treason trials in the Soviet Union, which largely eclipsed the Spanish Civil War and served to put a stop to the major part of the Soviet contribution to the Loyalist government. Efforts to compensate for this decrease in Soviet support by an increase in support by the Third International were not effective, since the latter organization could get men to go to Spain but could not obtain military supplies, which were what the Loyalist government needed for their own manpower.

Although the evidence for Axis intervention in Spain was overwhelming and was admitted by the Powers themselves early in 1937, the British refused to admit it and refused to modify the nonintervention policy, although France did relax its restrictions on its frontier sometimes, notably in April-June 1938. Britain’s attitude was so devious that it can hardly be untangled, although the results are clear enough. The chief result was that in Spain a Left government friendly to France was replaced by a Right government unfriendly to France and deeply obligated to Italy and Germany. The evidence is clear that the real sympathies of the London government favored the rebels, although it had to conceal the fact from public opinion in Britain (since this opinion favored the Loyalists over Franco by 57 percent to 7 percent, according to a public-opinion poll of March 1938). It held this view in spite of the fact that such a change could not fail to be adverse to British interests, for it meant that Gibraltar at one end of the middle passage to India could be neutralized by Italy just as Aden at the other end had been neutralized by the conquest of Ethiopia. That fear of war was a powerful motive is clear, but such fear was more prevalent outside the government than inside. On December 18, 1936, Eden admitted that the government had exaggerated the danger of war four months earlier to get the nonintervention agreement accepted, and when Britain wanted to use force to achieve its aims, as it did against the piracy of Italian submarines in the Mediterranean in the autumn of 1937, it did so without risk of war. The nonintervention agreement, as practiced, was neither an aid to peace nor an example of neutrality, but was clearly enforced in such a way as to give aid to the rebels and place all possible obstacles in the way of the Loyalist government suppressing the rebellion.

This attitude of the British government could not be admitted publicly, and every effort was made to picture the actions of the Nonintervention Committee as one of evenhanded neutrality. In fact, the activities of this committee were used to throw dust in the eyes of the world, and especially in the eyes of the British public. On September 9, 1936, Count Bismarck, the German member of the committee, notified his government that France and Britain’s aim in establishing the committee was “not so much a question of taking actual steps immediately as of pacifying the aroused feelings of the Leftist parties in both countries by the very establishment of such a committee—[and] to ease the domestic political situation of the French Premier. ...”

For months the meaningless debates of this committee were reported in detail to the world, and charges, countercharges, proposals, counterproposals, investigations, and inconclusive conclusions were offered to a confused world, thus successfully increasing its confusion. In February 1937, an agreement was made to prohibit the enlistment or dispatch of volunteers to fight on either side in Spain, and on April 30th patrols were established on the Portuguese and French borders of Spain as well as on the seacoasts of Spain. At the end of a month, Portugal ended the supervision on her land frontier, while Italy and Germany abandoned the sea patrol.