The Spanish Civil War: A Trial Run for World War II

Michael Peck

Security, Europe

It was the biggest proxy war of its time.

A Mediterranean nation beset by military coup and civil war. A savage struggle marked by atrocities and fanaticism. Proxy war waged by outside nations pumping in men, weapons and money.

Today’s Syria or Turkey? No, it’s sunny Spain, now a peaceful member of the European Union, but eighty years ago the arena for one of the most vicious conflicts in history. The Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 is remembered today as a sort of Second World War-in-training, a playoff game before the championship match between Team Axis and Team Allies a few years later.

The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 when Francisco Franco led a dissident group of staunchly conservative and Catholic generals, as well as half the Spanish Army, against the liberal, elected Spanish government. What should have been an internal military revolt like the recent attempted coup in Turkey swelled into an international struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, liberalism and conservatism, and communism versus fascism. In the end, fascism won.

In some ways, the Spanish Civil War belongs to a different era. We are accustomed today to slaughter inflicted in the name of God. Back then, the cause was ideology, the disputes over whether the world should be democratic or fascist or communist. Yet in other ways, the conflict seems all too familiar. Like today’s Iraq and Syria, the combatants fought amongst themselves as well as the enemy. The Nationalists were a collection of conservatives, monarchists and fascist Falangists. The Republicans were supported by a bizarre potpourri of socialists, communists, Trotskyites and anarchists, as well as international leftists such as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from America. The “White Terror” of the Nationalists murdered two hundred thousand opponents, grimly dwarfing the fifty thousand or so victims of the Red Terror, conducted by Republican death squads that were led by Soviet NKVD secret police.