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Buy itA masterpiece of the historian’s art, Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War remains the best, most engrossing narrative of one of the most emblematic and misunderstood wars of the twentieth century. Revised and updated with significant new material, including new revelations about atrocities perpetrated against civilians by both sides in this epic conflict, this "definitive work on the subject" (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times) has been given a fresh face forty years after its initial publication in 1961. In brilliant, moving detail, Thomas analyzes a devastating conflict in which the hopes, dreams, and dogmas of a century exploded onto the battlefield. Like no other account, The Spanish Civil War dramatically reassembles the events that led a European nation, in a continent on the brink of world war, to divide against itself, bringing into play the machinations of Franco and Hitler, the bloodshed of Guernica, and the deeply inspiring heroics of those who rallied to the side of democracy. Communists, anarchists, monarchists, fascists, socialists, democrats -- the various forces of the Spanish Civil War composed a fabric of the twentieth century itself, and Thomas masterfully weaves the diffuse and fascinating threads of the war together in a manner that has established the book as a genuine classic of modern history.
| Publisher | Modern Library |
| ISBN | 0375755152 |
| Format | Paperback |
| Author | Hugh Thomas |
| EAN | 9780375755156 |
| Label | Modern Library |
| Edition | Rev Upd |
| Dewey Decimal Number | 946.081 |
| Studio | Modern Library |
| Number Of Pages | 1120 |
| Title | The Spanish Civil War: Revised Edition (Modern Library Paperbacks) |
| Release Date | 2001-12-04 |
| Publication Date | 2001-12-04 |
| Manufacturer | Modern Library |
Review by Robert J. Crawford, 2010-07-13
This is one of those massive, serious books you mean to read (to impress yourself as much as learn what's in it). I have had it for years on my list, but never had the courage to crack it until recently. Happily, once I started it, I simply could not put it down, even though it took me months to read.
The situation in Spain in 1936, when the civil war began, was dauntingly complex. On the right, there were the traditionalists, including monarchists, staunch catholics, industrialists, militarists seeking glory for Spain in Morocco, and various fascists and authoritarians opposed to the idea of a republic. They were divided into a multitude of parties, factions, charismatic leaders, and simple brutes. On the other side was a collection even more fractious of anarchists, communists, socialists, marxists, liberal democrats, atheists, and left-leaning regional liberation movements. Caught somewhere in the middle were separatists in the Basque regions and Catalonia - the only industrialized regions of Spain - and the emerging middle classes. This added up (perhaps) to more political parties than existed in Weimar Germany, along with Italy its coeval in poorly united nations that were seeking a clear identity in the 1920s.
At this time, many of the old certainties were in precipitous decline due to local historical factors. First, after the Inquisition and in spite of the many flowerings that sprung from the counter-Reformations (e.g. the Jesuits), the Catholic church had grown rigid and in many quarters was murderously despised. It could offer no leadership and little comfort in the face of the upheavals that the republic was experiencing. Second, the monarchy was decadent and incompetent, a shell that had been in decline since the apogee of the 17th C. It too offered nothing to address the increasing chaos. Third, the military was involved in a terribly costly colonial war, for some ill-defined glory of Spain, and was corrupted by bizarre notions of duty and privilege, embittered by lack of opportunity, and ignorant of the evolving society by its isolation. The enlightenment, it seems, had never taken root in Spain, nor had the popular revolution as in France.
The political configuration was similar to Weimar, a Parliamentary democracy that was unable to impose order or forge consensus, yet the country was for the most part appallingly poor and underdeveloped. As the world fell into economic crisis - Spain was prosperous during WWI as a supplier not fighting - the tensions of both class and generational conflict were added to the ideological crisis, provoking the left (mostly anarchists at the time) into mob violence that reached unimaginable excesses: churches were burned down, bourgeois were thrown off of cliffs, clerics murdered and raped, dignitaries and nuns were disinterred and mutilated, etc. This rightly evoked horror among the traditionalists as society appeared to be completely breaking down; they found champions in the military, including Franco, who was a hero general in Morocco, and quickly moved into a leadership position. Nonetheless, a dazzling array of social experiments were undertaken - money was abolished in some regions, collectives established that eliminated ruling elites and even managers, marriage was abolished in favor of free love and association, etc. It is a reminder that the narrow social-political spectrum that exists today - capitalist democracy - is only one way that societies might have chosen to organize themselves, an entirely different trajectory on which to evolve; this alone is worth the price of admission.
In 1936 in the name of order and traditional values, the military staged a country-wide coup, taking over about 2/5 of the country. The opposition republicans occupied the N and E of the country, with all of the industry and most of the international legitimacy. This is when Spain became a crucible testing ground for the battle of ideologies that culminated in WW II as well as military technology. The fascist powers backed the military and Franco, providing aid and, crucially, highly trained personnel. Not only did they test military strategies, refining among many techniques the Blitzkrieg (piercing lines with concentrations of tanks rather than using them as supporting supplements to infantry), but their men were "blooded", i.e. trained in killing in ways that would be applied on an industrial scale from 1939. The USSR did the same, but also required the republicans to pay with Spanish gold. As a result, both the fascists and the communists became unifying centers of power within their respective spheres, muscling out other factions and applying brutal force against erstwhile allies. Meanwhile, Britain and France attempted to stay neutral and keep the other powers from interfering in a "domestic" matter. Finally, to complicate matters, everyone was sending volunteers to fight for their causes, often arriving without clear contractual limits and hence becoming virtual slaves to their respective military establishments. The IRA, for example, sent volunteers to both the fascists and anarcho-communists!
The republic, in spite of its superior resources, was at a fatal disadvantage in their anarchic disarray before the unified command structures of the rightist military. As Thomas says, it cut like a knife through butter, with steady losses of territory before a final collapse in 1939. The brutal violence, arbitrary executions, ideological proscriptions, and simple murder are as frightening as they are unbelievable to those of us used to orderly lives based on rights and law. It is a reminder of the savagery that existed in places that we see today as orderly extensions of our cultures. Social experiments accelerated, on the left of course but also as patriarchal dictatorship on the right. Many participants acted like the war was just a day job: one combatant (a pilot and machine gunner) used to eat breakfast with his family, fight until lunch, take a siesta, fight again a bit in the afternoon, then retire the the cafes for late night conversation and drinking with his companions.
I had read another of Thomas' books first, Rivers of Gold, which was a great disappointment, getting lost in detail with little narrative thread and seemingly meaningless asides. This book is so much better in narrative, focus, and evocation that there is absolutely no comparison. That being said, the book is encyclopaediac and simply too long, with so many references to obscure politicians that it is hard to follow and the names just fly out of the book. Indeed, the index (mostly proper names) is 100 pages! This makes it a slog, particularly at the beginning. But there is no doubt that this is the definitive masterpiece against which all subsequent histories will be judged. The principal failing of the book, in my reading, is that Thomas does not sum up and interpret the outcome of the war, which he leaves to the reader to find elsewhere. I expected more judgment or at least perspective.
Recommended as one of the most serious explorations into the 20C. This conflict, along with that in the USSR and Hitler's Germany, is absolutely necessary to study if one wants to understand the world today. The greatest thing I take away from this is that our experimentation with politico-social systems is probably far from over, even if we Americans like to flatter ourselves that we have achieved the right combination of stability and dynamism that others should emulate.
Review by Benjamin R. Grandy, 2010-07-05
i HAVE READ THIS BOOK ABOUT 6 TIMES OVER THE LAST 40 YEARS. I RECEIVED MY FIRST COPY AS A GIFT FROM AN ENGLISH FRIEND WHEN I WAS STATIONED WITH THE U.S. NAVY AT SUBMARINE BASE ROTA IN THE PROVINCE OF CADIZ IN THE SOUTH OF SPAIN IN THE 1960'S.USING THIS BOOK AS A GUIDE I VISITED MANY PLACES, AND MET MANY MEN WHO WERE INVOLVED IN THIS PRECURSOR TO WORLD WAR 2.I MET OLD NATIONALISTS, REPUBLICANS, SPANISH LEGIONARES, AND ONE MEMBER OF THE LINCOLN BRIGADE. THOMAS IS RATHER PRO REPUBLICAN, BUT HAS HIS HISTORICAL FACTS STRAIGHT.I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK HIGHLY.
Review by G. Stelzenmuller, 2009-09-07
This book also details the most history on the topic, concentrated in one place. Although sometimes billed as a "heroic" tale of many various people rising to their occasions, a better description might be a very long TV drama about what the many important personages said to each other, how they treated each other, and when. Such a story with this level of detail clearly took massive research to complete. In fact, the amount of detail could be said to come close to that of Will Durant's typical history works.
The Spanish Civil War, among other things was a terribly tangled affair, especially to a Spaniard living in a disputed area at that time. Most of the time Thomas clarifies who was for/against whom. His short glossary of organizations and acronyms at the beginning of the book is particularly helpful. Sometimes, though, he tangles the relationships more. One could attribute this to the book's historical approach. Thomas tells the history as it unfolds contemporaneously, often day by day. To those who have suffered through high school texts which take a historical thread at the expense of events happening at the same time in other places (this reviewer included!), the author was scrupulous about not skipping around in time. This is a fair approach, even if it can be confusing in itself. The reader will have to keep the "larger historical picture" in mind as the pages pass.
Some maps, and some pictures would have been helpful to the book.
Review by John P. Jones III, 2009-08-31
Salvador Dali's painting, oddly titled, and appropriately sub-titled, graphically depicted the agony that would be the Spanish Civil War. It not a painting that would find a home over a mantelpiece; it is painful to study, and conveys the horrors of war even more than the works of his fellow Spaniard, Goya. Hugh Thomas has written the definitive history of this gut-wrenching war, perhaps without the required "distance," since Franco was still very much in power in 1961. But it is difficult to imagine that it will be superseded. As for capturing what Dali foresaw, his prose is more dispassionate, but he has done an admirable job: "Within a month nearly a hundred thousand people perished arbitrarily and without trial. Bishops would be torn to pieces and churches profaned. Educated Christians would spend their evenings murdering illiterate peasants and professional men of sensitivity. The majority of these crimes were the work, on both sides, of men convinced that what they were doing was not only right, but noble. Nevertheless these events inevitably caused such hatreds that, when some order was eventually established, it was an order geared solely for the rationalizations of hatred known as war. And it would be quite wrong to think that there was much repugnance at this development. Spaniards of all parties leapt into the war like the cheering, bellicose crowds in the capitals of the rest of Europe in 1914 at the start of that war of which, perhaps subconsciously even in 1936, the people of Spain felt they should have been a party."
Thomas has written a rich, dense, detailed account. He has clearly mastered his material, and his account is not for the casual reader. The first fifth of the book addresses the social and political causes of the war; Spain was a deeply divided society, with the power of the Church and the rich upper classes threatened by the rise of the labor and the anti-clerical forces. Throughout the book he balances the accounts of military action with the shifting political forces of the numerous factions involved. The maps included in the book are excellent references which detail the advance, and ultimate triumph of the nationalist forces.
As we know now, Spain was a "dress-rehearsal," for World War II. The Western Powers, mainly France, Britain and the United States adopted a policy of non-intervention. This was not matched by the Axis Powers, Italy and Germany, who used Spain as a training ground for its men, and a testing ground for their tactics and weapons. The Soviet Union was the chief supporter, in terms of aid, of the Republican forces. Leftists in the Western democracies volunteered, forming the International Brigades, with Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Membership in the later would be grounds for suspicion, or worse, during the McCarthy era. As Thomas notes, some observers say that the sole reason for a Nationalist victory was the support from Germany and Italy, but he gives a more judicious and balanced answer, identifying five critical periods, and concluding that it was mainly the timing of outside assistance. He also indicates that much of the reason for the outcome was the relative unity of those on the Nationalist side, and the disunity and conflict of those on the Republican side.
A few reviewers criticize Thomas for not being "balanced"; specifically they feel he was too "pro-Republican." It is a difficult charge to weigh, like saying various World War II histories were not balanced because they portrayed Hitler as evil. Franco very much had fascist tendencies, but did manage to keep Spain out of WW II. Thomas's "tribute" to him was to call him "the Octavius of Spain," a reference to the Roman emperor who managed to survive the civil wars of Rome, when virtually all others did not.
Today Spain is at peace. In terms of numbers, the impact of the civil war was more catastrophic than the American Civil War. Thomas estimates that 600,000 died, out of a population of 25,000,000, whereas the numbers in America were also roughly 600,000, out of a larger 32,000,000. The higher percentage dead and the greater proximity of time may be one of the reasons that 90% of the Spanish population opposed their country's participation in the Iraq war.
The civil war reverberates in numerous other ways as well. Just in terms of language, the nationalist General, Mola, gave us the term, "a fifth column," meaning a subversive group, when he talked about how he would seize Madrid - it was from those within. Only last week the NYT ran yet another article which seemed to confirm that Capa's famous picture, of a Republican soldier at the instant of death, was faked.
I started the review with a painting, and will end with another, Pablo Picasso's "Guernica." He painted it in honor of the civilians who died there, in the first deliberate aerial attack on a civilian population, with no military motive. It was a careful, controlled "experiment" by the Luftwaffe. The painting is at the United Nations, and when Colin Powell gave his speech advocating the invasion of Iraq, with the inevitable aerial bombardments, the painting was covered up, a not very subtle tactic to erase the lessons of Guernica from our memory.
Hugh Thomas carefully describes the attack at Guernica, as well as the rest of the war, so the lessons cannot be covered up. His book is a wonderful historical account, and deserves 5 plus stars.
Review by Luis R. Florez, 2009-02-15
Very well written and comprehensive. Full of details not given in other books of this theme
I find it a somewhat bias against General Franco and in favor of the more extreme parties on the republican side like the Anarquists
Probably the best book on the Spanish Civil War
Luis R Florez MD
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