Flying in the face of reality, the communists declared to the world at large that Brunete had been a victory. In XV International Brigade, commissars told their men that it ‘had totally vindicated the active war policy of the Negrín government following the laissez-faire attitude of Largo Caballero’. The premature and wildly exaggerated claims about the operation’s success in the first two days had forced Miaja and his staff to persist at horrendous cost rather than admit failure. The communists defended the operational plan furiously, but such a concentration of slow-moving forces on a restricted front enabled the nationalists to profit from the vastly superior ground-attack potential of their combined air forces. With both Avila and Talavera airfields less than 30 minutes’ flying time from Brunete, they were able to establish a bombing shuttle and fighter sortie rhythm, which the advocates of the offensive must have seriously underestimated.
The communists’ obsession with propaganda, often at the expense of their men’s lives, contributed to the growing unrest within the International Brigades. The minor mutinies which broke out among the Americans, the British and the Poles of XIII International Brigade were described in reports back to Moscow as ‘unpleasant events’. Members of the Lincoln Battalion were forced back to duty at pistol point, while the British, who were down to 80 men, accused Gal of incompetence and only returned to the front when Walter Tapsell, their commander, was threatened with execution. The Poles, who had been at the front for several months without respite, decided to return to Madrid. The brigade commander, Vincenzo Bianco (‘Krieger’), attempted to crush the revolt by hitting the men and shooting one of them in the head. The International Brigade cavalry detachment, which had done nothing during the battle, was brought in to restore order and prevent anyone leaving the front. Meanwhile, Modesto had resorted to deploying machine-guns behind the line with orders to open fire on anyone who retreated on whatever pretext. The troops were angry about the enormous losses, above all because they suspected that most of them had served no purpose in a senseless butchery.37
Soviet reports emphasize the appalling state in which the International Brigades found themselves after Brunete. They had suffered 4,300 casualties out of a strength of 13,353, and nearly 5,000 men were in hospital.38 International volunteers now formed around only 10 per cent of the strength of the XI Brigade. The rest were Spaniards who naturally resented being commanded by foreign officers who could not speak their language. XIV and XV Brigades were both reduced from four to less than two battalions. Gómez, the head of the International Brigade camp at Albacete, reported to the Red Army’s intelligence directorate in Moscow that the performance of the brigades at Brunete had been affected by ‘the systematic work of the fifth column’.39
The degree of paranoia at this time of Trotskyist witch-hunting is almost incredible. Every blunder, of which there were many, was attributed to deliberate sabotage. General Walter was so convinced that the brigades had been infiltrated that, like Modesto, he set up machine-guns behind the lines to prevent battalions from surrendering to the enemy. ‘On the first night of the operation’, he reported to Moscow, ‘it was necessary to disarm and arrest the entire company of one of the brigade’s battalions. Eighteen men from it, led by a lieutenant and three noncommissioned officers, were shot by sentence of an army tribunal for organizing the company’s defection to the enemy. The divisional commissar and brigade commander (anarchists) were shot by Líster on the second night of the operation for refusal to obey a military order and for persuading the command staff to surrender. Moreover, during the course of 22 days, while the brigade was in the front line, up to twenty enemy agents were exposed and removed from the division. A good half of these were officers. The surrender of Brunete and the flight of many brigades were to a significant extent the result of panic sown by the “fifth column” that the fascists had spread around our forces.’40
Morale in all cases was extremely bad, as General Kléber reported back to Moscow: ‘I have begun to worry a great deal about the state of the International Brigades. There is a lot going on there: the attitude of Spaniards towards them and of their attitude towards Spaniards; the questions about morale; the chauvinism of certain nationalities (especially, the French, Poles and Italians); the desire for repatriation; the presence of enemies in the ranks of the International Brigades. It is crucial that a big man be despatched quickly from the big house especially for the purpose of providing some leadership in this matter.’41
