the Socialist Party. To go further, as Rojo now suggested, would generate even greater resentment. In any case, given the scale of the myriad problems faced by Negrín, the enormous reorganization required was simply out of the question. What Negrín did manage to do, along with his secret peace initiatives, was to intensify his efforts to secure military supplies from Russia. He successfully negotiated the supply of aircraft, tanks, artillery and machine guns. While what was agreed was less than he had hoped for, these armaments could have made a huge difference if, after their arrival in France in mid-January, they had been transported to the Catalan border. However, the continuing obstacles placed in the way by the French government ensured that they did not arrive in time.32 Another aspect of Rojo’s report would also have disappointing results. He added an appendix on military plans in which he talked of the relief that could be given to the Republican forces on the Ebro by the launching of offensives in the centre-south zone.33 The four armies that made up what was called the Group of Armies of the Centre (Grupo de Ejércitos Republicanos del Centro) – Extremadura, Andalusia, the Levante and the Centre – were under the overall command of General Miaja, with General Manuel Matallana Gómez as his chief of staff. The Army of the Centre was commanded by Colonel Casado. Since all three were reluctant to continue the fight, Rojo’s orders to this effect were never properly implemented.
The decisive Nationalist counter-offensive on the Ebro was launched on 30 October 1938. Concentrated air and artillery attacks on selected areas followed by infantry attacks gradually smashed the Republican forces.34 By mid-November, at horrendous cost in casualties, the Francoists had pushed the Republicans out of the territory captured in July. The remnants of the Republican army abandoned the right bank of the Ebro at Flix late at night on 15 November. As they retreated back across the river, they left behind them many dead and much precious matériel. It had taken Franco four months to recover the territory gained by the Republic in one week in July. As we have seen, he had in July rejected the more adventurous strategy of holding the Republicans near Gandesa and pushing on to Barcelona from Lérida. By so doing, Franco demonstrated his preference for attrition and for the physical annihilation of the Republican army. He thereby ensured that there would be no armistice, no negotiation of peace conditions.
It was Munich that turned the battle into a resounding defeat, especially for the Communist Party which had invested energy, resources and prestige in the Ebro initiative.35 Before, during and after the battle, this last throw of the dice contributed massively to civilian and military demoralization. After the defeat at Teruel in February and during the great Francoist advance through Aragon to the coast, the Republic had already suffered massive losses. In order to create the Army of the Ebro, the government had been obliged to call up a further nine years’ worth of conscripts (the reemplazos of 1923 to 1929, and of 1940 and 1941). The need to train, and rely on, both older and younger men had a negative impact on the Catalan economy and society at large. Labour was in short supply and families were outraged that, during the battle of the Ebro, many Republican soldiers were seventeen-year-old adolescents. During the battle itself, army requisitioning, effectively the troops scavenging off the land, exacerbated the growing discontent. Further tension was caused by the Republican military intelligence service (Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, or SIM) which was pursuing those who had evaded conscription and those who had deserted.36 Approximately 13,250 Spaniards and foreigners were killed, 6,100 (46 per cent) of them Francoists and 7,150 (54 per cent) Republicans. In roughly similar proportions, about 110,000 suffered wounds or mutilation. The richly fertile Terra Alta became a vast cemetery – tens of thousands of men were buried quickly, many were left where they lay and others drowned in the river. To the dismay of the local peasantry, and to the detriment of the Republican war effort, the fighting ruined the harvest of wheat and barley in July, of almonds in August, of grapes in September and of olives in November.
Negrín was fully aware of the significance of Munich. He knew that Republican victory was impossible. In late September 1938, the deputy secretary of the PSOE executive, Juan-Simeón Vidarte, told him that the committee’s members remained convinced that the unconditional surrender demanded by Franco was out of the question. Commenting that no one forgot what had happened in Andalusia, Extremadura, the Basque Country and Asturias, he remarked: ‘We can’t hand over half of Spain and an army of a million men so that they can exterminate them as they like.’ Negrín replied with resigned realism: ‘Guarantees for an honourable peace is all that I want.’37 To this effect, he consulted the Republic’s legal adviser Felipe Sánchez Román, who drafted the minimal conditions which Negrín accepted as the basis for negotiations with Franco, including a promise not to take reprisals against the supporters of the Republican government and a guarantee to maintain public order.38
Another close friend of Negrín, the cardiologist Dr Rafael Méndez Martínez, at the time Director General of the border guards, the Carabineros, wrote later of how the spirit of victory had been tranformed into the spirit of resistance that would last until such time as it was possible to achieve ‘the second of his aims, a satisfactory peace’. In this regard, he believed that only an effective and well-ordered resistance that prolonged the war might persuade the democracies to help negotiate such a settlement. ‘Once Negrín had accepted that victory was impossible, the nub of his policy was resistance to the end and the mobilization of international support to achieve a peace settlement that would prevent the extermination of thousands and thousands of Republicans.’ His peace initiatives included a secret meeting with the German Ambassador in Paris.39
Over the next two months, their success at the Ebro would see Franco’s forces sweep through Catalonia. Confident that, after Munich, the Republic would not find salvation in a European war, Franco gathered over 30,000 fresh troops. He granted substantial mining concessions to the Third Reich in return for sizeable deliveries of German equipment.40 With the French frontier closed and help from the Soviet Union reduced to a trickle, Franco had every possible advantage for his final push. Months of Italian bombing raids had taken their toll on morale. An immense army was gathered along a line surrounding Catalonia from the Mediterranean in the east to the Ebro in the west and to the Pyrenees to the north. Originally planned for 10 December, the offensive was postponed until the 15th. Further delays were caused by a period of torrential rain and it was eventually launched on 23 December.41 The scale of war-weariness, resentment of the conflict’s human and economic costs and defeatism in the wake of Munich made a successful defence seem the remotest possibility. Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming superiority of the attacking forces in terms of air cover, artillery and sheer numbers, the Republican retreat never turned into a rout. Franco could rotate his troops every forty-eight hours while the Republicans had had no leave for seven weeks.
The forces of Enrique Líster managed to hold up the Nationalist advance for nearly two weeks at Borjas Blancas on the road from Lérida to Tarragona. Nevertheless, the advance was inexorable. On New Year’s Eve, a ferocious Italian bombing raid on Barcelona brought to the city what Negrín, in a broadcast to the United States, called ‘sorrow and mourning’. His Minister of Foreign Affairs, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, commented: ‘Perhaps this is “Happy New Year” in the Italian language.’ Herbert Matthews, who had helped Negrín polish his English for the broadcast, wrote later: ‘I had never seen him so moved.’ On 4 January 1939, the Francoists broke through at Borjas Blancas and the end was nigh for Catalonia. Without adequate armaments and with the troops drained after their superhuman efforts, the road was open to Tarragona and then on to Barcelona. The bespectacled Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Tagüeña, a tall, thin mathematician who had risen through the ranks of the militias to command an army corps, mounted a determined defence but had only a fraction of the necessary weaponry.42
In the wake of the Munich Agreement and the consequent conviction in Moscow that Russia had been betrayed by the democracies,