Brief summary of the Spanish Civil War
The victory to the elections of 1936 of the Frente popular, had been followed
by a billow of popular nervousness caused by the incapability of the Republic
(declared after king Alfonso XIII's abdication) to face the endemic problems of
Spain. Few industries, many large landed estates and vast ownership of the Church
did in way that the vast masses of the rural proletariat were relegated to low
levels of life. Trying to resolve the problem, the government led off to a country
agriculture reform and to the Jesuits' expulsion with consequent confiscation
of the ecclesiastical good. The big landowners and the middle class that were
firmly supported by the army and the Church, they had to choice between a fruitless
respect to the chosen rulers and a strong opposition. The Generals Sanjuirios
and Franco organized the military revolt on July 18. It succeeded only partially
because of the strong popular opposition of the socialist government, with the
support of the labor unions, the agricultural wage earner and the Basque and Catalan
autonomists.
The insurrection would be surely bankrupt if Franco had not succeeded in transporting
from the North Africa to Spain the Foreign Legion and the Moroccan mercenary troops.
The civil war became well soon international because of the strategic position
of the country and of the meeting of opposite ideologies (Dictatorship and Democracy,
fascism or socialism). In favor of the rebels, the national, the fascist Italian
and German governments were lined up. Mussolini was particularly prodigal of weapons
and voluntaries, while Germany was using the Iberian Peninsula as field of experimentation
for the innovative technologies of war that would have used in the second world
conflict. (It became legendary, the Legion Condor and its aviators.) France, which
also had a popular government, and England, undecided on who to favor between
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, they were anchored on the street of the not
intervention. Intervention in favor of government came from international brigades,
constituted on purpose by tifascist voluntaries to fight against the Phalanx of
Franco.
The military behavior of Franco in addition to the favor of the larger number
of troops, benefits since the beginning the Nationals. After the collapse of the
Countries Basque in 1937, a nationalistic offensive in the Aragon cuts in two
the government zone. Particularly heavy were the clashes happened in Barcelona
in the May 1937: on one side the communists and the Catalan government strengths
that gained the victory; on the other, anarchists, Labor Unions and communist
dissidents. Failed a republican offensive in the July 1938 on the front of the
Ebro, the Franco’s men on January 26th 1939 took Barcelona. Lost the Catalan
redoubt, the Republicans stopped the organized resistance demoting up to the doors
of Madrid that was felt on March 28th 1939. On 1 April of the same year Franco
could announce the conclusion of the conflict that had provoked 636.000 casualties
and 350.000 exiles and the nearly total destruction of all industrial infrastructures,
from which the Spanish nation would have not been raised again if not after ten
years.
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