Nationalist faction (Spanish Civil War)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nationalist faction in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 was not a single party or a unified ideology but a coalition of rivals who agreed on almost nothing except that the Spanish Republic had to fall. Carlists who despised Hitler and Mussolini for their socialist tendencies marched alongside a Falange that openly admired them. Catholic monarchists shared trenches with anticlerical fascists. A Nazi propagandist coined the very name by which the world would come to know them. What bound these groups together, and who emerged from that crucible in command? Those are the questions that run through this story.

• 2. A Name From Berlin

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  On the 24th of July 1936, a clandestine Spanish delegation led by Captain Francisco Arranz arrived in Germany requesting war materiel. It was Joseph Goebbels who settled on the word "Nationalists" to describe the rebel military, a label he chose to give Nazi Germany's support a cloak of legitimacy. The rebel leaders, who had already been called "Crusaders" by Bishop of Salamanca Enrique Pla y Deniel, immediately took a liking to it. Their opponents refused the term entirely, preferring "fascistas" or "facciosos" to describe the same men. The two labels for a single faction reveal how differently each side saw the war they were fighting.

  The phrase Bando nacional carried a deliberate political charge. Historians note it functioned primarily as propaganda, much as the opposing epithet "Reds" did for the Republicans. Paul Preston and Julian Casanova describe the Nationalists as a movement where divergent groups shared the unity of "regiments in the same army," united by a political culture that Preston says was, throughout the Civil War, "indistinguishable from contemporary fascisms." That radicalization was not the starting point. It was what the war made of them.

• 3. The Falange's Ambitions

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  José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the former Spanish leader Miguel Primo de Rivera, founded the Falange Española with Alfonsist monarchist money, yet declared the party officially anticlerical and anti-monarchist on its first day. As a landowner and aristocrat himself, he reassured the upper classes that Spanish fascism would not escape their control the way it had in Germany and Italy. In 1934 the Falange merged with Ramiro Ledesma Ramos's pro-Nazi Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista to form the Falange Española de las JONS.

  In its early years the Falange was a small, underfunded student movement that combined utopian rhetoric with street violence. Its terror squads deliberately cultivated disorder to justify demands for an authoritarian regime, and the right-wing press blamed the resulting lawlessness on the Republic. By September 1936 that gamble had paid off in membership: Falangist volunteers reached 35,000, accounting for 55 percent of all civilian forces fighting for the Nationals.

  After José Antonio Primo de Rivera died, Manuel Hedilla tried to take control of the Falange but Franco outmaneuvered him. In 1937, Franco announced a unification decree folding the Falange and the Carlists into a single movement called the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS, with himself at the head. Both groups were furious. Falangists believed their revolution had been indefinitely postponed and their ideological role handed to the Catholic Church. Franco's public response was to declare that "The Falange does not consider itself fascist; its founder said so personally." By 1937 the practice of calling the Falange "fascists" had disappeared within Nationalist circles, though Franco did not deny that fascists existed within its ranks. Raimundo Fernández-Cuesta, a Falange member, went further, declaring that Falange's national syndicalism was fully compatible with capitalism.

• 4. CEDA and the March on Madrid

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  José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones led the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-wing Groups, known as the CEDA, as a Catholic, anti-Marxist organization that presented politics as a binary choice between Marxism and its opponents. After attending the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Gil-Robles returned committed to building a single anti-Marxist counterrevolutionary front. He declared his intention to give Spain "a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity," and added that if parliament did not submit, "we will eliminate it." The CEDA held fascist-style rallies, addressed Gil-Robles as "Jefe" - the Spanish equivalent of Duce - and threatened a "March on Madrid" to seize power by force.

  From 1931 to 1936 the CEDA failed to win the electoral gains it needed to form a government. Right-wing support drained away toward the more openly aggressive Alfonsist monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo. Facing irrelevance, the CEDA abandoned whatever moderation it had shown and began channeling resources toward violence, including handing its electoral funds to General Emilio Mola, the initial leader of the military coup. The CEDA's youth movement, the Juventudes de Acción Popular, began defecting en masse to the Falange and ceased to exist as an organisation in 1937.

• 5. Monarchists Divided

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  The Carlists held a history of violent opposition to Spanish liberalism stretching back to 1833, when they launched a six-year civil war against the reformist regency of María Cristina de las dos Sicilias. By the time of the Spanish Civil War they sought the throne for Carlist Pretender Francisco Javier de Borbón and were so deeply anti-socialist that they opposed both Hitler and Mussolini on those grounds. Their militia, the Requetés, peaked at 42,000 recruits during the war, though by April 1939 that number had fallen to 23,000. The Carlists contributed some of the Nationalists' most effective shock troops and were, along with the Falange, among the original backers of the coup against the Republic.

  The rival Alfonsists wanted Alfonso XIII restored and had formed the Renovación Española after the monarchy's fall in 1931. Their party held considerable economic influence and close connections inside the Spanish army but never became a mass movement. In 1934 Alfonsist leader Antonio Goicoechea and the Carlists met with Benito Mussolini, who promised money and arms in exchange for an uprising against the Republic. The charismatic Alfonsist spokesperson José Calvo Sotelo spent the years from 1934 to 1936 calling for the "conquest of the state" as the only path to an authoritarian, corporatist Spain. On the 13th of July 1936 he was kidnapped and assassinated by political opponents who had initially set out to abduct Gil-Robles of the CEDA instead. The killing ignited fury on the political right and helped justify the coup that followed days later.

  When war broke out, Infante Juan, son of Alfonso XIII and heir to the Spanish throne, asked Franco's permission to fight by enlisting in the crew of the cruiser Balaeres. He promised to stay out of politics. Franco refused, convinced that Juan would become a rallying point for Alfonsist officers in the military.

• 6. Armies and Foreign Backers

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  The Army of Africa, garrisoned in Spanish Morocco as a legacy of the Rif War, was the most lethal military instrument the Nationalists possessed. Under General Francisco Franco, it comprised the Spanish Foreign Legion and the Regulares, infantry and cavalry units recruited from the Moroccan population with Spanish officers in command. Between July and October 1936, more than 13,000 Moroccan troops were airlifted to peninsular Spain on 20 Junkers Ju 52 planes supplied by Hitler. The calculated cruelty of these forces was not incidental. Francoist military planners used it deliberately to instill terror in Republican defence lines. By May 1939 the Army of Africa was the most decorated unit in the Nationalist victory parade, and it has been estimated that one in five of its members died during the war, a casualty rate twice that of the peninsular forces.

  Approximately 47 percent of the Spanish Republican Civil Guard defected to the rebel side at the start of the war. With the Civil Guard's Inspector General Sebastián Pozas remaining loyal to the Republic, the defecting units were placed under direct Nationalist army command.

  Italy committed an expeditionary force of 35,000 troops, the Corpo Truppe Volontarie, to Spain by January 1937 under General Mario Roatta. The contingent was organized into four divisions: Littorio, Dio lo Vuole, Fiamme Nere, and Penne Nere. The first was made up of regular soldiers; the other three of Blackshirt volunteers. In March 1937 Italy sent Roberto Farinacci to pressure Franco into merging the Nationalist political movements into a single fascist party.

  Germany supplied the Condor Legion, which both airlifted soldiers from Africa to mainland Spain and conducted offensive operations against Republican forces. The Nationalists received tanks including the Panzer I and aircraft including the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Heinkel He 111. Hitler publicly called his strategy "Blumenkrieg" - Flower War - insisting his long-term designs were peaceful. Germany's economic stake was real: it imported large quantities of mineral ore from Spanish Morocco and saw the war as a testing ground for the weapons built during German rearmament. Debt from Nationalist weapons purchases rose quickly, requiring additional German financial assistance to cover shortfalls.

  Portuguese Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar aligned with the Nationalists almost immediately after the war began. Portugal's Estado Novo regime had long strained relations with a Republic that sheltered Portuguese dissidents. Portugal provided ammunition and logistical resources, and allowed an unofficial volunteer force of between 8,000 and 12,000 fighters, known as the Viriatos, to serve with the Nationalists. The Nationalists nicknamed Lisbon "the port of Castile." In 1938, as Franco's victory appeared increasingly certain, Portugal formally recognized his regime, and after the war the two countries signed what became known as the Iberian Pact.

• 7. The Church as Belligerent

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  Bishop Enrique Pla y Deniel of Salamanca had already declared the rebel fighters "Crusaders" before the war was weeks old. The Catholic Church took the rebel side formally, describing Spaniards killed by Republican forces as "martyrs of the faith." Francoist propaganda called the secular Republic "the enemy of God and the Church" and blamed it for closing Catholic schools, desecrating religious buildings, and failing to stop the killing of priests and nuns by mobs.

  The Holy See moved carefully in public but used its diplomatic network to lobby for the rebel side. At an International Art Exhibition in Paris in 1937, both governments were present. Because Franco's regime was not yet officially recognized, the Vatican allowed the Nationalist pavilion to display under the Vatican flag. By 1938 the Holy See had become one of the first states to formally recognize Franco's Spanish State. Portugal actively argued to the United Kingdom that Franco sought to replicate Salazar's Estado Novo and not Mussolini's Fascist Italy.

  Not all Catholics followed the Nationalist line. Republican Catholic general Vicente Rojo Lluch commanded forces for the Republic. The Catholic Basque nationalists also opposed the rebel faction. Manuel Montero, a lecturer at the University of the Basque Country, commented on the 6th of May 2007 that the Church's beatification in later decades of 498 "martyrs" of the Civil War conspicuously excluded priests executed by Franco's Army, who were not counted among them.