THE FUTURE IN SPAIN

By GEORGE L. STEER

WHEN I went to Bilbao at the beginning of April I assessed the Spanish war in simple terms. If Franco gets Bilbao, he has won the war : if he does not get Bilbao, he has lost it. At the bottom of this elementary calculus lay suppositions in shoals. One of them was that the fate of Bilbao, like the fate of Malaga, would be decided in a month. And it was not.

Bilbao took two and a half months to fall, and Mola's army, fitted with every modern appliance to startle militiamen, took two and a half months to cover thirty-five miles. Eight hundred yards a day against troops without aeroplanes and with a dumb artillery. I have abandoned my judgement a priori. Experience seems a better guide to the future.

Set down in figures, the war in Vizcaya was something like this. On one side a militia, much of which was extra- ordinarily good infantry material, unified only by a General Staff who never visited the front and whose sole idea of warfare was to draw red defensive lines along mountain crests. Until the last days there were over zo battalions out of 79 who had no machine guns. An indigenous war industry, however, tuned up by the continuous effort of Aguirre and his Basque Nationalist Party, produced many infantry needs. Trench mortars of '81 firing ordinary and thermite projectiles : hand grenades en masse of a most destructive type : small arms ammunition, all these things were turned out daily near Bilbao.

The Basque artillery, though in no sense equal to that of the enemy, was not meagre. But it did not have the ceaseless supply that Mola's army drew from Germany and Italy. Above all, it was silenced for many hours out of the twenty- four by the vertical menace of the Germano-Italian aviation. Many a time I have sat in holes beside the guns, wondering when on earth these privileged spies would, literally, buzz off.

And—well, there were no planes. But that is a painful question for the Basques. It meant the difference between stalemate and defeat. If Vizcaya had had 40 fighting planes, I cannot conceive a capture of Bilbao at any time.

The other side, in their turn. -In Bilbao, from foreign prisoners, radio intercepts, espionage in Guipuzcoa and on the Frontier, and from the deserters who passed over even in the darkest days, it was possible to place them fairly welL They were based on a mixed infantry force without drive or bite in it, numbering 35,00o (rather less than the Basques at their highest) and consisting of ro,000 to 15,000 Italians, about 3,000 young Moors, three brigades of Requetes, and the rest conscripts mostly from Galicia and Logrollo. Except for the Requetes they were lazy and unwilling in the field, and shunned infantry engagements, even after a heavy barrage of bombs and shells. They preferred to wait for the Basques to decamp before they went up to a position, and between ourselves, after those bonibardments the Basques quite often preferred to decamp too.

Their artillery, for such a little army, was enormous. In the big battles at the end they massed 45 batteries, and they spent more artillery ammunition than did the Italians in the whole of the Italo-Ethiopian war. It was, besides, the most up-to-date material of Italy and Germany. But not so modern as their aircraft. • These, towards the middle of the offensive, were about no strong, half of which were fighters and half bombers. The most that I ever saw in the sky in a single sector were 55, but at the battle of Ochardiano 57 were counted together.

The staff of this mixed army was naturally mixed— Spanish, German and Italian. But the foreign, and par- ticularly the German idea dominated. The careful approach to Bilbao followed by the final and devastating use of force was German, not Spanish strategy. And since the insurgents' service of Transmissions, so closely linked with G.H.Q., was entirely in German hands, it is not unreasonable to believe that German counsels in Mola's Staff predominated over others.

Against this powerful combination the Basques, fighting without allies, either Spanish or foreign, resisted two and a half months. The Basques were the weakest-armed of all the Government forces. For discipline and staff work, too, Putz told me, they could not compare with the troops of the Army of the Centre, where he had served before. But they wrote their warlike virtues large on the face of the enemy. Twenty thousand casualties, according to his own radio intercepts, was the total of Mola's losses some time before the finish : he had lost his own plane and sixteen others on the Bilbao front : his fighters were worn out : he had expended an enormous amount of aerial and artillery ammuni- tion, out of proportion to the value of Bilbao in the general scheme of the war : and his successor marched into a town whose harbour was blocked, shipping exported, war industries largely dismantled and mining population largely fled to Santander. In short, it will take some time for the insurgents to pay off the victory. From there I can pass to the larger subject of the Civil War.

It was generally assumed in Spain and abroad that Mola's offensive against Bilbao was planned in order to draw off troops, who till then had been holding his northern front, for use in the centre. A -secondary object was to pay his foreign supporters in the raw material, iron, which they need : and this view has been supported not only by state- ments in the Diario Vasco of San Sebastian but also by phrases in Herr Hithr's latest speech.

There can be no doubt—in the mind of an observer at least—that the insurgents have failed in their first objective. Their casualties have actually exceeded in number the forces which before Mola's offensive garrisoned the Vizcayan frontier. And although Basque casualties have been propor- tionately as heavy, the large Basque force which remains intact now protects a far narrower stretch of country than before. Its front has shrunk from a space of well over too miles to something more like 3c.. ; and though it will undoubtedly be driven back much further it will in the end present the same military problem to the invader as it did before the offensive began.

On the whole, therefore, Bilbao has for Franco a value not to be calculated in the crude figures of war. It represents, rather, what Malaga represented : an interim success, valuable for the maintenance of civilian optimism in his own territory and for his credit among supporters in diplomacy and politics abroad. Franco is, very literally, an insurgent : he must keep on insurging. If he cannot score successes, he is losing ground. Bilbao in point of armament represented the easiest possible success of the moment, while he was preparing for perhaps a final offensive against Madrid. Yet even so, he found in Bilbao the hardest victory of the war.

I think that this estimate of the operations in Vizcaya is important, because it shows how near equality were the best armed insurgent forces and the worst-armed militia now at the service of the Government. A very little help would have turned the scales towards the Basques. And when one looks at the rest of Government Spain, the lesson seems clear as day.

During the period in which Bilbao and the villages of Vizcaya suffered, Madrid and Barcelona have been steadily piling up arms. In spite of the occasional shelling of the Valencia coast by the Baleares and the Canarias and the errant torpedoes of unknown submarines, the Government fleet based on Cartagena controls the arms route through the Western Mediterranean more vigilantly than ever before, and the import of arms from the Black Sea has recently been steady and safe. Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona are not, like Bilbao, stripped of aerial defence. The military machines at their command probably exceed the total sold or lent to Franco : their artillery is at least equal to his, and their mobilised man power larger. Where they are sadly lacking is in officers. But Franco, too, is beginning to look round for them. Just as his old Moors are dying off, to be replaced by ineffective darkies of 15 and 16 years, he is turning now to young officers without experience of war. These youngsters have been coached in the mystery of tactics in the Military Academies organised by Franco since the insurrection began.

Valencia, in order to aid the Basques, ordered three offen- fives on the Central and Eastern Fronts. All three broke down in face of an ordinary modern defence supported by sufficient artillery and aviation. It is not generally realised that when Franco at last sets in movement an offensive against the eastern block of Government Spain he kill have to face conditions of exactly the same kind. Though he will have more time than Valencia had to plan his attack his progress should be slower than that against the Basques, and his casualties heavier. One comes up finally to the great question with Franco : Can he afford it ? He has already raised ten year classes for the colours in the territory that he occupies ; and though he occupies a superficies of Spain rather larger than that held by the Government, the comparative population figures given for the area by his supporters are at most dishonest and at least misleading. In nearly all the territory that he has conquered —New Castile, Malaga, Guipuzcoa and Vizcaya—there is not a single mobilisable young man left, bar prisoners. The rest have fled : or they remain in such small numbers that to mobilise them would be to destroy the normality of Franco's rearguard, and normality is the masterword of his civilian organisation, as every little M.P. knows.

With armaments fairly equal, these are conditions which mean stalemate. And stalemate I think there will be between the Government's and Franco's Spain unless Franco's foreign supporters give him overwhelming support in new munitions and new men. Stalemate is a condition in which his movement cannot live. He can take Santander : by a great effort and at great cost he can take Gijon and pacify the Asturias, though my own impression of insurgent plans is that they do not think that it is worth the risk. But without more outside aid I do not think that he can impress himself upon Eastern Spain, and with more aid from outside the Spanish War becomes not an internal but a European matter (if I may be permitted to speak above a whisper).