The dispute over the Estremadura offensive produced the first reaction of regular officers against communist control of the republican army. A number of them, who had at first welcomed communist ideas on discipline, now began to suspect the communists might be more interested in increasing their power than in winning the war. They were alarmed that military affairs could be manipulated for purely propagandistic reasons, and they were horrified by the Party’s infiltration of the command structure and its vitriolic campaigns against any officer who resisted.
The fall of Largo Caballero in May, and the appointment of Negrín as head of government, intensified the situation. Prieto, as minister of defence in charge of all three services, was prepared to collaborate closely with the communists and follow their advice on military operations. Yet he was to become one of their fiercest opponents later.
The situation in the north was critical, with the nationalists threatening Bilbao. Republican leaders decided on two operations, one in May and one in June, to take nationalist pressure off the Basques. The first, which was launched on 30 May, took place in the Sierra de Guadarrama. It consisted of an attack on La Granja de San Ildefonso ‘to seize Segovia by surprise in an energetic attack’, according to Prieto’s instructions. This offensive was later used by Hemingway as the background for his novel
My brother was a pilot,
He received a card one day,
He packed his belongings in a box
And southward took his way.
My brother is a conqueror,
Our people are short of space
And to gain more territory is
An ancient dream of the race.
The space that my brother conquered
Lies in the Guadarrama massif,
Its length is six feet, two inches,
Its depth four feet and a half.3
Taking part in the republican operation were the 34th Division, under the command of José María Galán, the 35th Division under General Walter and Durán’s 69th Division, supported by artillery and Pavlov’s tank brigade. All these forces were under the command of Colonel Domingo Moriones, the head of I Corps.
At dawn on 30 May the attack began after a heavy bombardment of nationalist positions around the Cabeza Grande, Matabueyes and la Cruz de la Gallega. The infantry of the 69th Division launched its assault lacking air cover. The republican air force did not arrive until eleven in the morning, and then bombed republican positions.4 Nevertheless, the 69th Division managed to occupy Cruz de la Gallega and continued its advance towards Cabeza Grande, from where it would be able to deploy direct fire on the Segovia road. Walter ordered XIV International Brigade to launch a frontal attack, which left the pinewood hillside scattered with corpses. Walter’s cynicism was revealed in a report back to Moscow in which he wrote, ‘the XIV, which heroically, but passively, allowed itself to be slaughtered over the course of five days’.5
On 1 June Varela’s forces, with one division from Avila and the reinforcements which Barrón had brought from the Madrid front, counterattacked with strong support from bombers and fighters. They forced the republicans back from Cabeza Grande and threatened the whole advance on La Granja. The next day Walter was relieved from operational command of the offensive and on 6 June Colonel Moriones ordered his troops to withdraw to their start lines. According to Moriones, the attack cost 3,000 men, of whom 1,000 were from XIV International Brigade. And as for the original purpose of the operation, the nationalist assault on Bilbao was delayed by no more than two weeks at the most.
The operation failed partly because the nationalists appeared to have got wind of what was being prepared, but mainly because the republican command had greatly underestimated the speed of the nationalists’ reactions and the effectiveness of their air power. The nationalist Fiat fighter force, led by García Morato, even managed to machine-gun Moriones’s headquarters.6 The Soviet pilots of the republican aircraft, on the other hand, demonstrated a distinct lack of aggressive action. Colonel Moriones in his report wrote, ‘Our own aircraft carried out bombing attacks from a great height and carelessly…our fighters kept at a respectable distance and rarely came down to machine-gun the enemy…enemy aircraft were highly active and extraordinarily effective.’7
This action in the Guadarrama produced the first example of unrest in the ranks of the International Brigades as a result of being sacrificed for little benefit. And the brutality of their commanders when some of their men broke in the face of strafing by nationalist fighters was extreme. Captain Duchesne, who commanded the punishment company of XIV International Brigade, ‘designated five men at random and shot them, one after another, in the back of the head with his pistol in Soviet style’.8
