The Origins and Causes of the Spanish Civil War, (1936-39)
PART 2
A Brief Summary of the Civil War
While Spaniards waited nervously for events to play out, two pretty young women climbed into a Dragon Rapide in England and were flown to what they thought was a summer holiday on the west coast of Africa. In reality, they were unwitting participants in one of the greatest plots in modern history. As part of General Franco’s punishment for his role in quashing the revolt of 1934, he was banished to the Canary Islands, a remote archipelago off the African coast far from the intrigue of Madrid, and far from his beloved and loyal troops of the Army of Africa, which included the Foreign Legion and Moroccans (the Moors). Franco’s high prestige among these troops meant that a highly disciplined and effective fighting force would be at the service of the Nationalists. The only problem lay in getting Franco from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco secretly. Any indication that Franco was reuniting with the Army of Africa would have jeopardized the success of the revolt and most likely cost Franco his life. To use a military plane was obviously out of the question, and so a private plane was chartered from London to the Canary Islands, complete with young women whose presence would not have raised suspicion. The plan worked, thanks to careful planning and a bit of good luck. Franco arrived in Morocco to the cheers of his troops, who had secured the town of Tetuan. General Franco and his men were now ready to take back Spain.1
Within days of the revolt, the battle lines were drawn in what was to be a protracted, bloody war. The Nationalists held the northern-central and western parts of Spain, while the Republic held Barcelona, Madrid, and other key cities. From the beginning, Madrid, the capital, was the goal of the Nationalists. Franco, who was commanding troops from Morocco, was to take Madrid from the south, while General Mola, stationed in Pamplona, was to take Madrid from the north. Franco’s creativeness as a general was highlighted in the early moments of the war when he led the first mass airlift of troops in world history to southern Spain from Africa after the navy’s sailors took the side of the Republic and murdered their officers. Franco was making good time towards Madrid when he received word that the ancient fortress in Toledo known as the Alcazar, which was defended by roughly 1,000 Nationalist troops and supporters, was besieged by Republican troops. He knew that any detour from Madrid would very likely give the Republic enough time to set up defenses and repel his attack. Still, he could not leave his fellow soldiers to face certain slaughter, and so the decision was made to head to Toledo to save the heroic defenders of the Alcazar. Meanwhile, Mola’s drive towards Madrid went much slower than expected as the Basque country proved more treacherous to traverse than had been anticipated. The Nationalists’ attack on Madrid ultimately failed, as did the prospect for a quick, decisive battle to end the war.
The rest of 1936 and 1937 saw the armies engage in a slow war of attrition. The Republicans claimed several victories in 1936, but by early 1937, the tide began to turn in favor of the more disciplined Nationalist troops. First, the Basque country fell to Franco’s forces, providing him with precious raw materials. Next fell the rest of the north of Spain, which gave the Nationalists control over the Atlantic. Counterattacks by the Republicans failed, and desertions and in-fighting further undermined the Left’s chances. In April 1938 the Nationalists split the remaining Republican territory in two. Despite furious last-ditch counterattacks, the days of the Republic were numbered. The cause for which the Nationalist troops fought prevailed, and on April 1, 1939, General Franco announced to an exhausted Spain that the war was over.
The Catholic Holocaust: “It would make your blood boil”
Once the war began, anyone identified as a Catholic in a town controlled by the Left was essentially handed a death sentence. All civil wars are infused with a degree of savagery that repels the outsider, and the Spanish Civil War is full of examples of cruelty and sadistic murders, especially of priests and religious. Ernest Hemingway, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, describes a real massacre at the beginning of the war.2 The town in question, Ronda, in the south of Spain, fell into Leftist hands. One of the main characters, Pilar, recalls how a mob converged on a small group of prisoners, men whose political and religious beliefs had marked them for death. One by one, the men are led out of their makeshift prison and marched through a line of Leftists, who beat and taunted them until they reached the end of the line, where they were thrown over a cliff to their deaths. The mob saves its most ferocious aggression for the priest, whose poise at the hands of his attackers wins for him Pilar’s (and Hemingway’s) admiration.3
With propaganda and the vilest fabricated charges against the Spanish clergy receiving widespread circulation, churches were torched or appropriated for secular uses. No area was exempt from these detestable attacks. Churches were burned to the ground in Malaga, Cordoba, Murca, Cadiz, Palma del Rio, Granada, Almeria, Badajoz, and Cartagena. Some of these cities had several churches destroyed. In Yecla alone, all 15 Catholic Churches were destroyed, leaving the entire city without a Catholic place of worship.4 Priests and nuns suffered greatly, even to the point of death (many nuns were both raped and murdered), and it is these priests and religious women who are being championed for sainthood by the Vatican today. A Spanish woman reflected on her experience as a young girl in Barcelona during the early stages of the Civil War:
They [the mob] dug up the nuns’ corpses, too, and displayed the skeletons and mummies....In the Passeig de Sant Joan, they were exhibited in the street….We kids would make comments about the different corpses—how this one was well-preserved, and that one decomposed, this one older; we got a lot of amusement out of it all…5
One Irish volunteer for the Nationalists wrote home: “Well, mother, it is terrible to see the way the Reds smashed up the chapels here, it would make your blood boil.”6 Another Nationalist volunteer from Ireland wrote,
You should see the chapels here; their altars torn down and burned and the graves dug up and the skulls of the nuns all about the place. It’s awful. It would make your blood boil.7
International Participation
The extent of international involvement in the Spanish Civil War is difficult to discern in some instances. This is due to a reluctance of both the Nationalists and the Republicans to admit to the presence of foreign fighters in their armies. Both sides accused the other of recruiting and enlisting foreign nationals who were “fighting against the people of Spain.” In addition, two major foreign participants, Germany for Franco and Russia for the Republic, had major enemies throughout the world and both Spanish sides sought to keep their alliances with these countries as hushed as possible so as not to jeopardize foreign aid.
Despite this fog of reporting, historians like Stanley G. Payne and Judith Keene lay out a relatively clear assessment of both the numbers and the influence of these foreign fighters. Payne states that the number of men in the International Brigades fighting for the Republicans was 42,000,8 while Keene cites the number of international volunteers fighting for Franco as “a most likely understated 1248.”9 With these numbers it is tempting to infer that the impact of international volunteers was negligible in a war that took the lives of some half a million people. In reality, these troops served as valuable entities to both sides, though not—as we shall see—in actual battle. Of major significance, particularly to the Spanish government, was the fact that the foreigners were volunteers—unlike the Spanish conscripts whose commitment to the Republican cause oftentimes was suspect or lacking altogether. In Franco’s forces these volunteers, mainly from Catholic countries, demonstrated international Catholic support for the Nationalists, and this was a very important weapon in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Spanish people, as well as in keeping up pressure on foreign governments to remain neutral lest they lose the support of an important constituency.
For the Republicans, especially, the influx of foreign fighters was a boost to morale. The Republican forces, made up as they were of a hodgepodge of militias, anarchists, conscripts, and Communists with different commitment levels, could not match Franco’s troops in discipline and military experience. The most disciplined troops of Franco’s forces—the Moors and the Foreign Legion—consistently struck terror in the hearts of the Republicans, who were new to military culture and combat. In the early phases of the war, the Republicans broke ranks and fled whenever they knew the Legion or the Moors were approaching. Only by the force of officers’ guns could these troops be prevailed upon to stay and fight. The addition of more experienced foreign fighters in the form of the International Brigades brought an immediate change to the discipline and fighting spirit of the Left.10
Generally speaking, the Spanish reaction to the foreigners’ involvement in the civil war was a wary tepidity. It could probably be likened to a marital spat with some neighbors stopping by to get involved. Neither party would really welcome this intrusion, but the party failing to get a particular neighbor’s support would be especially suspicious of outside involvement. Despite all this, however, the Spanish tried their best to assimilate the crusading foreigners into their fighting forces.
Volunteers from Ireland
An examination of the fighters from Ireland illustrates the effectiveness of foreign volunteers. This is possible because the cases of the Irish volunteers in the war mirror almost exactly the experiences of foreign nationals from other countries who came to Spain on one side or the other. Moreover, the Irish provided troops for both the Republicans and the Nationalists, and this provides an insight into both sides’ use of international contingents.
What prompted men to leave the country of their births and fight in another country’s civil war? First and foremost—for Catholics—was the religious consideration. “As a Catholic I would fight for my faith at any time,” declared a young Irishman who spoke for nearly all of the volunteers for the Nationalists.11 The Irish media took up Franco’s insurgency as a crusade against the Communists and were aggressive in broadcasting the news of their role in the murders of nuns and priests throughout Spain. Catholic Ireland reacted predictably to these news reports—accompanied by gruesome pictures in many cases—and the majority swung their support to Franco. Although the Irish government was officially neutral, its opposition to recruiting for the war was feeble, and authorities regularly turned a blind eye to the military and medical support organized for Franco.
The Spanish Republicans also enjoyed fertile recruiting ground in Ireland for much the same reasons as the Nationalists—once again due to effective propaganda efforts. The Republicans significantly played up the charges that Franco was a fascist along the lines of Mussolini and Hitler, both of whom were providing aid in personnel and materiel to him. In this case, guilt by association was enough to convince many in Ireland to side with the Republicans. Though Franco never embraced the ultimate tenets of fascism as did his two allies in the War, he was painted with the same brush as they were in propaganda releases. The Falange (a Spanish version of fascism, with few adherents) was, indeed, fighting on the side of Franco during the war, but he was never completely comfortable with either Fascists or Fascism and never gave them a significant voice in his military or, later, in his government. The efficacy of this particular propaganda onslaught, though, can still be seen to this day in the form of the many scholars who apply a double-standard in alleging that Franco was a fascist. To accept this allegation one must completely ignore the reality of Franco’s actions, not only in forming his insurgency and his government, but also his later conduct during WWII. These scholars, of course, will have a difficult time reconciling the West’s alliance with Soviet Russia during the Second World War. They fall victim to the fallacy that Franco, by turning to Hitler and Mussolini for military help, reflected their values and political beliefs as well.
Once in Spain, the two groups of Irish volunteers performed well for their respective armies, though the time they actually spent in Spain, particularly during battle, was not great. It would appear that their value as a morale boost or propaganda aid exceeded their military accomplishments.
The Irish, by all reports, were good fighters. but they were never widely accepted within the Spanish Nationalist ranks, especially the Foreign Legion. The reasons for this lack of assimilation were many, but we can include the difference in language and their lack of discipline when not in battle. Needless to say, this did little to endear them to General Franco or to the rest of the Nationalists.
On the Republican side, the Irish volunteers—numbering about 1,000—were assigned to fight within the International Brigades and were assigned to the English/Welsh battalions. Initially, this led to some problems when the Irish refused to fight alongside the English, who had only recently been driven out of 26 of the 32 counties in Ireland by many of these same Irish fighters. This was a very similar predicament to the Irish volunteers on the Nationalist side refusing to fight the Basques, and it was handled in the same way—the Irish in the International Brigades were transferred to fight within the Abraham Lincoln Battalion made up of Americans.
It is apparent from this review of the Irish forces involved with both sides of the Spanish Civil War that the Irish volunteer did not have much of an impact on the actual fighting of the War. The differences in cultures, languages, motivations, and climate, as well as the negative perceptions of outsiders’ interference, all combined to place insurmountable barriers in the path of foreign cooperation with one side or the other. To make matters worse, the foreign volunteers tended not to stay long in Spain. For a variety of reasons, short stays in Spain were common. Although most of the foreigners had previous military experience in their own countries’ military units, many were shocked at the brutality shown by both sides in this conflict. Prisoners were routinely shot and, as discussed above, the non-acceptance of foreigners by Spanish troops also did not encourage longevity in the foreign ranks. Though the volunteers on the Republican side came mainly for ideological reasons, the anti-Catholic practices perpetrated by their comrades shocked many of them and likely caused some early departures, as did a lack of medical treatment for illnesses and wounds. It is important to note that these short stays were mostly a factor of the foreign volunteers. Countries that sent their regular forces—Germany, Italy, and Portugal on Franco’s side, and Russia on the government’s side—had a much greater influence on the war and proved to be the only outsiders who mattered much in battle.
The Church Irritating
The Spanish Civil War is one of the most misunderstood historical events of the 20th century. Situations leading up to the conflict and the accompanying reasons for the very premise of the war and the way it was played out were not studied in depth due to other world events taking center stage. We refer, of course, to the early tides of World War II. These tides were a rapid run-up to World War II close on the heels of the Spanish Civil War. The pre-eminent positions occupied by two of the major belligerent allies in the Spanish Civil War—Russia and Germany—in the Second World War, colored the judgments concerning the Spanish fight as perceived by the world.12 The easy description, though most certainly a false one, was that the Spanish Civil War was a dress rehearsal for the Second World War. With that war coming at the world at a dizzying pace, there was little interest in looking deeply at the roots of the Spanish conflict when it could be explained away and bundled up so easily with the Second World War. What can be said with certainty, however, is that if the Spanish Civil War was indeed a dress rehearsal for the Second World War, the war did not follow the script.
One thing that the Spanish Civil War proved to be, as we can now recognize by recounting the world events and movements of the remainder of the 20th century and on into the 21st century, is a dress rehearsal for attacking the Catholic Church. To be sure, the violence against the Church in the Spanish Civil War has not yet been repeated on such a grand scale. The massacre of Catholic priests was the worst since the French Revolution, with more than 7,000 clergy murdered.13 In more recent decades, attacks against the Church have become political and all-encompassing, particularly in the West in what is known as the “free world.” The methods of political attacks against our Catholic Faith have assumed familiar tactics which were first forged in the strategies of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Today, in Western Europe and in the United States and Canada particularly, we see similar methods used to attack the Church. These attacks are subtle but effective, and come in the form of assailing our Catholic values in the media, the stage, the screen, and in teaching institutions, many times with the collusion of those who profess to be faithful Catholics.
The story of how General Franco healed a country from the wounds of civil war, how he steered Spain towards an alliance with what remained of the Christian West, how he was betrayed by the modernist Church of the 1960’s, and the utter collapse of the Spanish Church in the post-Franco era must wait for another day. For now, it is worthwhile to meditate on the fundamental issue over which Spain fought a savage civil war: “There is the one supremely inspiring and irritating institution in the world; and there are its enemies. Its enemies are ready to be for violence or against violence, for liberty or against liberty, for representation or against representation; and even for peace or against peace.”14 The enemies of the Church are perpetually irritated; it remains to be seen whether today’s Church will prove the truth of Chesterton’s words and be correspondingly inspiring.
1 Bolin’s thrilling account of Franco’s return to Morocco is covered in the first five chapters in his Spain: The Vital Years.
2 Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, p.263.
3 Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (Scribner’s, 1940), Ch.10. Some on the Left never forgave Hemingway for his honest depiction of the Left’s crimes.
4 Payne, The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, p.388, n.24; and Bolin, Spain: The Vital Years, p.149.
5 Frasier, Blood of Spain, p.152.
6 Robert A. Stradling, The Irish and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 71.
7 Ibid.
8 Stanley G. Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany and World War II (Yale University Press, 2008), p.7.
9 Judith Keene, Fighting for Franco: International Volunteers During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (Manchester University Press, 1999), p.8. Keene does not provide another estimate.
10 Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931-1939, p.346.
11 Stradling, The Irish and the Spanish Civil War, p.28.
12 Burnett Bolloten was a scholar’s scholar whose painstaking research led him to conclusions that were at odds with the orthodox interpretation of the Civil War among academics that downplayed the Soviet Union’s role in the Civil War. As he reflected in the Preface to his The Spanish Revolution: The Left and the Struggle for Power During the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 1979), p.xvi, he remained indebted to several brave academics who defended his earlier work The Grand Camouflage in 1961, “at a time when the unorthodox conclusions expressed or implied therein were unacceptable or even shocking to a large segment of the academic world.” Bolloten’s career suffered as a result of telling the truth.
13 Michael Seidman, A Republic of Egos: A Social History of the Spanish Civil War (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p.29; and Jose M. Sanchez, The Spanish Civil War as a Religious Tragedy (University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), p.199.
14 Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows, “My Six Conversions,” Part VI, “The Case of Spain,” p.56.
Was Franco a “Fascist”?It is a cliché among historians that history is written by the winning side in a war. While that is often the case, the opposite is true when it comes to the history of the Spanish Civil War. Jacques Maritain, in his preface to Alfred Mendizabal’s The Martyrdom of Spain, predicted that the truth of the Leftist government’s complicity in the murders of “more than three hundred thousand” would be revealed once the history of the war was written.1 Instead, Franco and the Nationalists were from the earliest stages of the war cast as “Fascists” in league with Hitler. Liberal Catholics published in 1936 a pamphlet on the war featuring the opinions of Spanish and British Catholic politicians, professors, and priests. The writers condemned Franco’s rebellion against the “legitimately constituted government” and claimed that “Spanish democracy is fighting Fascism.”2 Almost any book or article written since 1936 that mentions Franco will identify him and his regime as “Fascist.” What is the truth? Was Franco a fascist? Did he and Hitler share the same ideology? In any discussion about Franco simplistic, rigid labels are impossible to pin on him. “Pragmatic” may be the best term to describe the way Franco approached his professional life, but even that is insufficient to describe his political views. Franco’s pragmatism was subordinate to his Catholicism. Hitler, for example, loathed the Church and counted her among his most bitter enemies. He was annoyed that the Communist threat had forced him to intervene on the side of the Nationalists; otherwise, he was certain, the clergy would have been exterminated, and a “curse” in Spain lifted.3 In contrast, it was Franco who offered a public prayer to God during a victory Mass in Madrid in May, 1939: Lord God, in whose hands is right and all power, lend me thy assistance to lead this people to the full glory of empire, for thy glory and that of the Church. Lord: may all men know Jesus, who is Christ son of the Living God.4In terms of ideology, Hitler and Franco were diametrically opposed. Franco never shared Hitler’s racialist ideas and in fact played a key role in saving the lives of thousands of Jewish refugees who were on the run from Hitler.5 Even Hitler would not count Franco as a fellow traveler, declaring, “One must be careful not to put the Franco regime on the same level as National Socialism or Fascism.”6 Franco understood that a sincere Catholic could never promote such a perverse political, social, and economic philosophy as Hitler’s National Socialism. Instead, Franco bestowed on Spain a conservative state linked closely with the Church: [He] did not ask for a rigorously ideological state, but only for a general theory of authoritarianism. His formula was a conservative syndicalism, bounded by all sorts of state economic controls, spiritually tied to Catholicism, ready for any kind of practical compromise, and always backed up by the Army.7The writer Franz Borkenhau, a liberal Austrian who published his eyewitness account of the civil war in 1937, made a perceptive analysis of the budding Franco Regime. After identifying the key features of the German and Italian regimes that characterized them as fascist–a one-party system, an ambitious leader who exalts himself over his rivals, a totalitarian state that involves itself in the minute details of public and private life, and an overemphasis of modernization and efficiency–Borkenhau arrived at a sensible conclusion. He declared that “Hardly any of these features have their counterpart in the Franco regime.”8 He pointed out that Franco’s “party” actually consisted of a fusion of the Falange, a small fascist party founded by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the late dictator’s son, and the Carlists, who sought the restoration of the legitimate monarchy. Neither party was Franco’s party, yet he created a single party of the two opposing camps in order to unite the various groups who were fighting against the enemies of the Church. In terms of political ambition, Franco was remarkably low key: He scorned overtures from senior military conspirators to play a leading role in the revolt and did not even commit to the revolt until less than a month before it occurred.9 Finally, Borkenhau noted that a regime that relied on support from the Church and the Army could be anything but modern. He pointed out that “the first thing genuine fascism would do would be to subdue both army and Church to the Totalitarian party–as it had done in Germany and Italy”10 and that “in order to become genuinely fascist, the Franco regime would first have to destroy itself.”11 By any reasonable definition of the term, Francisco Franco, then, was not a fascist.12 (Endnotes)
1 Mendizabal, The Martyrdom of Spain, Preface by Jacques Maritain, p. 16, n. 1. The liberal Catholic Maritain managed a couple of feeble criticisms of the Leftist government for its actions vis-à-vis the Church, but the rest of his essay represented a text-book example of an “on the other hand” way of thinking. Whatever sins Maritain judged the Left to have committed were offset by those of the Right. Maritain ultimately issued a verdict of moral equivalency between the Catholic Nationalists and the anti-Catholic Leftists.
2 A. Ramos Oliveira, Catholics and the Civil War in Spain: A Collection of Statements by World-Famous Catholic Leaders on the Events in Spain (Three Arrows Press, 1936), p.4, 7.
3 Payne, Franco and Hitler, p.171.
4 Quoted in Payne, Spanish Catholicism, p.179.
5 Payne, Franco and Hitler, pp. 271-272. Jane and Burt Boyar, in Hitler Stopped by Franco: 40,000 Jews Saved by Franco (Marbella House, 2001), is an excellent study of Franco’s admirable charity towards the Jews.
6 Ibid., p.172.
7 Stanley G. Payne, Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism (Stanford University Press, 1961), p.224.
8 Franz Borkenhau, The Spanish Cockpit: An Eyewitness Account of the Spanish Civil War (Faber & Faber, 1937), p.278.
9 Payne, The Franco Regime, pp.92-3.
10 Borkenhau, The Spanish Cockpit, p.280.
11 Ibid., p.281.
12 Arnold Lunn has an interesting perspective on “The Use and Abuse of Labels,” wherein he mocks the tendency of political discussions to focus on epithets (labels), not facts. See his Spanish Rehearsal, pp.99-105.
International Catholic Support for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil WarOne of the enduring myths of the Spanish Civil War is that intellectuals (philosophers, writers, artists) were of one opinion concerning the SCW and supported overwhelmingly the Republican side against Franco. Of course, it is easy to find partisans of a particular stripe if one simply ignores people who could provide a contrary perspective. What is rarely discussed, however, is the support that Franco received from those who condemned the murderous activities of the Republic. Any list of supporters of Franco’s crusade will reveal a wide variety of accomplished men and women whose talents are well-known internationally. Here is a sampling: Evelyn Waugh,1 the great Englishman convert and author of Brideshead Revisited and, later, fierce opponent of the Second Vatican Council; Robert Brasillach,2 French novelist, journalist, literary critic, and propagandist for Franco; Joseph Kennedy,3 United States of America Ambassador to Great Britain; Surrealist artist Salvador Dali;4 South African poet and convert Roy Campbell;5 Anglo-French historian and essayist Hilaire Belloc;6 novelist, poet and journalist G. K. Chesterton;7 Catholic convert and apologist, and inventor of the downhill ski slalom, Arnold Lunn;8 Frs. Ronald Knox, S.J.9 and Martin D’Arcy, S.J.,10 renowned scholars; influential American priest Fr. Charles Coughlin11 (the “Radio Priest”), whose vocal support on behalf of Franco thwarted President Roosevelt’s attempt to formally supply arms to the Republic; Joaquin Turina,12 one of Spain’s greatest composers of the 20th century; Fred Elizalde,13 pioneering Jazz musician from the Philippines who fought in Spain with Franco; Christopher Dawson,14 the great historian and convert to Catholicism; Irish General Eoin O’Duffy,15 who volunteered to crusade on behalf of Franco; and Eleanor Smith, a popular novelist during the 1930’s and 1940’s and early champion of Waugh. She was asked to respond to a survey of writers to the question, “Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?” She replied impishly, “I was delighted to receive your unprejudiced brochure. Naturally, I am a warm adherent of General Franco’s, being, like all of us, a humanitarian.”16 (Endnotes)
1 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2001), p. 334, n. 1. See also Valentine Cunningham, editor, Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 57. For Waugh’s views on Vatican II see Selena Hastings, Evelyn Waugh (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994), pp.616-27.
2 Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (The University of Chicago Press, 2000), p.35.
3 Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain (Penguin Books Ltd., 2006), p.242. Ambassador Kennedy was instrumental in persuading President Roosevelt to impose an arms embargo during the civil war. Roosevelt supported the Left-Communists in Spain but believed he needed the Catholic vote to remain in office.
4 Fleur Cowles, The Case of Salvador Dali (Little, Brown and Company, 1959), p. 145. See also Salvador Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (Dover Publications 1993), pp.351-68 for Dali’s commentary on the Spanish Civil War.
5 See Roy Campbell, Light on a Dark Horse (Henry Regnery Company, 1952), pp. 276-312 for Campbell’s haunting description of life in Toledo, Spain, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. See also Joseph Pearce, Bloomsbury and Beyond: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell (HarperCollins Publishers, 2001), pp.181-201, and 205-11.
6 Pearce, Bloomsbury and Beyond, p.217.
7 Although Chesterton died in June 1936, his sympathies were made clear in an essay published in 1935, in which he, with typical insight, noted that the fundamental divide in Spain was between those who respected the rights and authority of the Church and those who hated the Church. See G. K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows (Ignatius Press, 2006) “My Six Conversions,” Part VI, “The Case of Spain,” pp.52-6.
8 Arnold Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal: An Eyewitness in Spain During the Civil War (1936-1939) (The Devin Adair Company, 1937). Lunn’s brilliant assessment of the war provides a point-by-point refutation of left-wing propaganda.
9 Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts (HarperCollins Publisher, 1999), p.203.
10 H. J. A. Sire, Father Martin D’Arcy: Philosopher of Christian Love (Gracewing, 1997), pp.88-9.
11 Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.135. See also Dominic Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War: Neutrality and Commitment in the Struggle that Divided America (Duke University Press, 2007), pp.63, 92.
12 The Houghton Mifflin Dictionary of Biography (Houghton Mifflin Reference Books, 2003), p.1531.
13 Ivor Brown, British Thought, 1947 (The Gresham Press, 1947), p.300.
14 Pearce, Literary Converts, p.204.
15 Judith Keene, Fighting for Franco: International Volunteers in Nationalist Spain During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39 (Leicester University Press, 201), pp.115-29. Robert A. Stradling’s The Irish and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (Manchester University Press, 1999) covers O’Duffy’s expedition to Spain on behalf of Franco.
16 Cunningham, Spanish Front, p.230.
The Carlists
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