In the republican exile, where I was born, this was the question of many desktops. Why did Barcelona fall into the hands of the Francoists, without any resistance, on January 26, 1939? The older ones thought about the subject and exchanged accusations according to their affinities. those of Negrin held responsible companies of never having taken the war seriously. Those of the Esquerra Republicana attributed the collapse of the Catalan front to its exclusion from everything related to the war by Negrín and the communists. supporters of azana attributed the shameful entry of Franco’s troops into Barcelona to Stalin he had already sentenced the Spanish Republic. As for the anarchists and the POUM, they attributed it to a mistaken policy that had handcuffed the proletarian revolution. To which the communists replied that things would have gone differently if so much time had not been lost in organizing an army as God intended. The Cainite controversies that had decimated the Republican side continued to wreak havoc among the exiles, who only agreed on one statement: the non-intervention policy of France and England it had been the Achilles’ heel of the Republic.
More than 80 years after the entry into Barcelona of Yagüe’s troops from the south, and of the Navarrese army corps, Italian tankettes and Moroccan regulars through Tibidabo, there are sufficient studies to address the multiple causes that explain the Barcelona fall like a ripe fruit. My father used to intervene in those Byzantine discussions stating that the war had not been won by Franco, but the republicans had lost it. A certainly severe but sincere conclusion, whose emphasis was on the mess that the Republican camp experienced, especially in Catalonia. For him, the Civil War was lost because of the war within the war that confronted the left in May 1937, and because of the struggles that divided the Catalan nationalists with Companys, abandoned by many of his own who accused him, unfairly, of all the disasters in the Catalan rearguard. There is no doubt that this climate of fratricidal division weighed heavily, but we must not forget that, after the defeat of the Ebro River – where thousands of young Catalans from the fifth of the bottle died -, the republican army was in disarray and the morale of the soldiers who had not yet deserted was rock-bottom.
With nearly 2,500 civilian casualties, the German-Italian experiment achieved its goal: to break any moral resistance; this strategy would be used later in World War II
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The day before the entry of the Francoists into Barcelona, ’La Vanguardia’ reached yet another edition of the newspaper (then controlled by Negrín) with a striking headline: ‘El Llobregat could be the Manzanares of Barcelona’. The ‘can’ revealed the skepticism of the linotypists, which was confirmed a few hours later. The Francoist and Italian troops crossed the Llobregat through the bridges that hadn’t even been dynamited by republican artificers. Many of the reasons given by some and others, in the debates in exile, to justify the inability to defend Barcelona, had their reason to be to a greater or lesser degree. However, it is often forgotten, to explain the demoralization of a population that did not dig trenches like those of the Casa de Campo in Madrid, nor did they erect a single barricade, Barcelona had been subjected to systematic bombing for more than two years by the Italian Savoia-Marchetti and the German Junkers. With nearly 2,500 civilian casualties and 1,800 buildings destroyed, the German-Italian experiment achieved its goal: break all moral resistance. Added to the defeat of the Ebro, the internal struggles between republicans and the negative impact caused by the murders of numerous civilians and religious at the beginning of the war, this military strategy – which would be used during the Second World War – doubled any possibility of reaction and it paved the way for the arrival of the Francoists and their reception by a population surrendered by rationing and war. Winston Churchill would recognize the extent of the bombing suffered by the people of Barcelona in June 1940, in a famous speech, when the Nazi bombs began to fall on London. It was late. Franco had already won the war.
*Andreu Claret is the author of the novel ‘1939. The fall of Barcelona‘.