Steadied by the buffs
Raymond Carr
AIRCRAFT OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 1936-1939 by Gerald Howson Putnam, £35, pp.310 This book has opened up a new world to me: that of the buffs — scholars of total dedication and unremitting industry. There are railway buffs who spend hours in the Public Record Office poring over the plans of long forgotten junctions. Mr Howson is an aircraft buff who has given years of painstaking research to identifying the aircraft that flew in the Spanish Civil War.
This book, though intended for his fellow buffs — and they must be a rich fraternity — has important lessons for the general historian because the Spanish Civil War was the first contest where aerial warfare played an important and occa- sionally decisive role. It covered the transi- tion from the weapons and tactics of the first world war to those of the second world war, coming during a decade of rapid technical development that saw the pro- duction of the Messerschmitt 109s and the Spitfire, stars of the Battle of Britain. Yet there is no satisfactory history of the air war and estimates of the number and provenance of planes are bedevilled by myths and ludicrous discrepancies. Did Blum and the Popular Front government send 50 or 400 planes to the Republicans in the first months of the war? Mr Howson settles for 26 to 30. But they arrived without arms, ammunition or gun mount- ings, shortcomings not compensated for by the presence of Andre Malraux whose gifts of self-promotion and utility as a propagan- dist for Stalin were not matched by his experience in air combat. During the same crucial months Franco was provided by his German and Italian friends with 41 well- equipped planes manned by skilled air crew. This gave him air supremacy until the arrival of Soviet planes for the Repub- lic which went into action in October over Madrid ending the daylight bombardment of the city.
To the buffs the fascination lies less in the number of planes, some 3,500 in all, than that they included 205 different types — each photographed — from all over the world. Some had seen service in the first world war; others were to fly during and after 1939. To the historian the main mysteries are the Republican procurement of aircraft in the international market for hard cash and their devices to elude the efforts of the Non Intervention Committee to prevent the import of arms to Spain. Sanction busting was brought to a fine art and the only lesson is that it was inordinately expensive. Republican agents competed with each other and were diddled by unscrupulous arms dealers. Detective work reveals a maze of forged papers, and bogus contracts and bizarre connections. A Fokker FVII, first bought by Professor Gilbert Murray for the League of Nations Unions, fetched up flying gold to Paris for Republican arms purchases, indulging in the drug traffic on the side. A Beechcraft 17, once involved in an obscure plot to kidnap the Emperor Haile Selassie, ended its career flying the President of the Republican Basque Gov- ernment into exile. The Republican purch- ase of Grumman GE23s, a plane beloved by buffs, financed the construction in Canada of the factory that was to build Hawker Hurricanes.
Germany and Italy supplied planes direct to France from the beginning. Dur- ing a Wagner performance at Bayreuth Hitler agreed to send the JU52 transports which flew Franco's Moroccan army to mainland Spain: this air lift of 13,000 troops and their equipment added a new dimension to mobility in war. The war had revealed the deficiencies of Heinkel HE51s and the Germans tried out in Spain their new Messerschmitt 109s — low single-wing planes with retractable undercarriages and miserably cramped closed cockpits. At the battle of Brunete in July 1937 they met the fast Soviet 1.16s ('Moscas9). Air combat was altered out of all recognition: the close quarter dog fights of 1914-18 became bat- tles of 200 planes over large spaces with the new 'four finger' tactics. Yet observers drew the wrong lessons. The Fiat CR32s were biplanes with open cockpits; man- eouverable and reliable, they were much loved by Franco's pilots. The British Air Attaché in Paris repeated the praises of the pilots concluding that sturdiness and man- oeuverability were more important than speed. The Battle of Britain was to prove how wrong he was.
'As you can see, it still has its original fireplace.'
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