As well as the basic problems of staff failures and republican inferiority in the air, communications between headquarters were disastrously bad. Field telephone lines were continually cut by shelling and runners could not be expected to get through when there was no cover. But these natural hazards of warfare without radios were compounded by the lack of initiative shown by republican commanders. Nationalist field commanders, on the other hand, reacted instinctively and rapidly to the situation as it developed and did not wait for orders from above. Nor did they blindly follow instructions that were out of date when circumstances on the ground had changed dramatically.
Matters were not helped on the republican side by the failure of the staff to provide maps. The International Brigades found that they had to draw them for themselves.31 The problems of command and control were also made far worse by the way commanders under pressure would claim to have reached a particular point when they were nowhere near it. (This emerged as a common failing in the Red Army later during the Second World War.) Some republican commanders, out of vanity, lied to their superiors deliberately. For example, El Campesino shamelessly exaggerated nationalist casualties in Quijorna, when it finally fell, to justify his initial lack of success. Líster, in his report, quadrupled the number of enemy defending Brunete and even claimed at one point that his troops had reached Navalcarnero, when in fact they were twelve kilometres short of it. When Mera’s 14th Division moved towards Brunete to replace the 11th Division, Líster claimed not to know that the village had been retaken by the enemy. Miaja’s chief of staff, Colonel Matallana, thought that Líster’s men were still occupying some small hills beyond it.
Prieto, who was at Miaja’s headquarters when Mera complained that his orders did not correspond to the reality on the ground, became even more furious at the commander-in-chief’s protests that he had been misled. General Walter, in his usual scathing terms, reported that the reason why the 11th Division’s commanders ‘were so touchingly ill informed about the dispositions of their own battalions’ was because Líster had far too many officers on his staff.32 Yet Modesto, the commander of V Corps, may have been trying to save the reputation of the most famous communist formation from responsibility for the loss of Brunete. After the battle, Líster was ordered to ‘withdraw his division for retraining and reinforcements’, which was perhaps necessary after the 400 executions. Rodimtsev, his military adviser, was summoned to a suburb of Madrid to see ‘Comrade Malino[vsky] who wanted to know how things were’.33
Nevertheless, the major factor in the disaster, as in the Segovia offensive, lay in the air superiority of the nationalists. Prieto rightly stated that the Achilles heel of the People’s Army consisted of ‘the commanders and the air force’.34 The whole of the Republic’s Brunete offensive managed to achieve an advance of only 50 square kilometres at the cost of 25,000 casualties, the loss of 80 per cent of its armoured force and a third of the fighter aircraft assigned to the front.35 The loss of equipment was particularly serious at a time when the blockade of republican ports was becoming much more effective. The nationalists suffered 17,000 casualties, but a much lower proportion were killed, and their losses in equipment and aircraft were far lighter.
The first great offensive of the Republic, which had taken little pressure off the northern zone, perhaps a respite of five weeks, signified a major setback. The blow to morale, with the loss of many of their best troops, was exacerbated by the knowledge that the nationalists were soon to achieve parity in ground forces. Franco declared that the battle was over on 25 July, the day of Santiago, the patron saint of the Spanish army, and claimed that Saint James had given them victory. If at that moment he was tempted to exploit republican weakness around Madrid and attack again towards the capital, General Vigón took on the task of persuading him that it was essential to liquidate the northern zone first.36
