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The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 | 
 enlarge | Author: Antony Beevor
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $17.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  43 reviews
Sales Rank: 70786
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 560
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 014303765X
Dewey Decimal Number: 946.081
EAN: 9780143037651
ASIN: 014303765X
Publication Date: June 1, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Slight wear on corners of the cover. Less than 5 pages with underlining. Otherwise good condition.
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Product Description
A fresh and acclaimed account of the Spanish Civil War by the bestselling author of Stalingrad and The Fall Of Berlin 1945
To mark the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil Wars outbreak, Antony Beevor has written a completely updated and revised account of one of the most bitter and hard-fought wars of the twentieth century. With new material gleaned from the Russian archives and numerous other sources, this brisk and accessible book (Spains #1 bestseller for twelve weeks), provides a balanced and penetrating perspective, explaining the tensions that led to this terrible overture to World War II and affording new insights into the warits causes, course, and consequences.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
 Beevors least... July 24, 2008
How Franco seized power. As always, Beevor tells a compelling story, but this is his least attractively written book. It will open for many readers a story they are not familiair with.
If you want to know the cause of many tensions in Spanish society until now, read this. And please, do have a strong stomach. There is more to war than moving flags on a map and Beevor will show you. Especially in the Spanish Civil War.
 The Battle for Continuity April 19, 2008
Lest I repeat what others have already written so well (and so many times), I will just affirm that this book is mainly up to Beevor's usual standard. Beevor has done us a great service in writing it as well, because the Spanish Civil War is probably one of the more poorly understood wars of the last century. I for one am grateful to have this resource.
My only gripe is that it seems that he inserted a lot of the information recently gleaned from Soviet archives, in a rather piecemeal fashion. There were a number of paragraphs or, more often, sentences, that seemed out of place to me. I cannot be certain that these were not part of the original, but regardless, the flow that I enjoyed in _Paris after the War_ and _Stalingrad_ did seem to be choppier in _The Battle for Spain_.
Because of that, if I were going to buy a Beevor book for narrative enjoyment, rather than to learn about history, I would buy his book on Olga Chekhova. I would not skip this one- I would just save it for a long winter, rather than the beach.
 Francisco Franco is still dead.... March 16, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
le for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 by Antony Beevor is a much better book than the first full length book that I read on the Spanish Civil War--The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931-1939 by Gabriel Jackson. Beevor is much more clear in his explanations and much more thorough in his description of the actual war. In defense of Jackson, he spent much of his book examining the pre-war history of the Second Spanish Republic as his title implies.
Beevor starts by setting the stage for the drama to follow. He gives a good thumbnail sketch of the important factions--including the Carlists--followers of a century-old "lost cause" of dynastic struggle for the Spanish throne. Beevor then discusses how bitter partisan battles between the Left and the Right kept spiraling out of control. Most of the parties of the Left--socialist, anarchist, and communist--banded together as The Popular Front to win control of the Cortes (legislature).
The various parties of "the Right" feared that a full blown Marxist revolution was about to occur, a fear that rhetoric from some in the Popular Front didn't calm. The result was a plot by leading generals, along with the Carlists and the Spanish Falange, to mount a coup d'etat. Beevor includes an anecdote about how the Falange ("Phalanx") was formed in a musical comedy theater. Beevor actually contests the idea that the Falange was a fascist party in the same sense as Italian Fascists or Nazis. The German and Italian fascists were populist revolutionaries, but much of the Falange was quite reactionary (in its purest sense). Yet the Falange certainly evolved into something close to its German and Italian counterparts.
In fact, Beevor illustrates how both the Republic and the Nationalists had to manage a coalition of different factions. I don't remember a discussion in Jackson's book about just how Franco managed to outmaneuver other rebel leaders and become the supreme leader for the Nationalist forces and factions. Meanwhile, the anarchists running Catalonia almost started their own civil war with the Republic over the autonomy of Catalonia.
Beevor pulls no punches about the brutality of both sides in the war. He makes the point that the "losers" sort of wrote the story of the Spanish Civil War because Franco's benefactors lost the Second World War. Although the Nationalists certainly engaged in more widespread repression, Beevor does not make any apologies for the Republic--whose secret police were run by the Soviet NKVD. Even more interesting is the fact that the communists maintained their own secret prisons where people freed by the actual courts of the Republic were incarcerated.
So while we're on the subject of the communists, it seems clear to me that, the Republic would have been overthrown by a communist coup had it managed to win the war. Beevor never says it plainly, but the picture he paints leaves no doubts for me. The communists were at the forefront of insisting that the Republic would need a "regular" army rather than just party militias to defend it once the rebellion started. The communists dominated this new "People's Army," especially since they controlled the flow of aid to it. The one Great Power supporting the Republic fully was the Soviet Union. There were numerous anecdotes of unit commanders being forced to join the Communist Party in order to get arms, supplies, and even medical support for their units. And I already mentioned how the NKVD ran the Republic's secret police once the war started.
And this gets us to the subject of foreign aid to the Nationalists. From the start, Italy and Germany were on the side of the Nationalists. The most crucial early aid was in the use of German transport planes to transport the Army of Africa from Morocco into metropolitan Spain. Beevor also brings out facts I never knew before. I have long been fascinated by the Condor Legion, the German military contingent primarily consisted of Luftwaffe personnel. (On both sides of the war, the foreigners ran the air arms.) But who knew that the Germans used their pocket battleships to shell Republican-held coastal towns? And the Italians not only sent three divisions of Fascist Party militia, but they also sent a regular army division.
Speaking of the Army of Africa, it disappears from Jackson's book once the initial drive on Madrid fails to capture the city. So I sort of assumed that it was consumed by the effort, with the survivors going to other units. Wrong. The Army of Africa was reorganized into the Morocco Corps within the elite Army of Maneuver. The Nationalist Army of Maneuver was deployed wherever a major offensive was to be conducted. Jackson's book left out such military details--like why the Madrid offensive failed in 1936. Beevor also discusses the other major decisive battles of the war. He also critiques the generalship of both sides. Although the Nationalists get faint praise, Beevor excoriates the Republican leadership.
One of the amusing and ironic features is how the ultra-Catholic Carlists would fight side by side with the Moorish regulares of the Army of Africa. The regulares were allowed to loot, rape, and pillage on many occasions.
But let us return to the subject of foreign aid. While the Soviet Union supported the Republic, France vacillated. Part of this vacillation was because of British pressure. In Britain and America, the Republic enjoyed popular sympathy. But in the ruling elites, there was suspicion about the far-left nature of the Popular Front government. Franco was also astute enough to "mortgage" Spanish mineral rights and industrial output to secure aid from business interests overseas. Apparently, Franco's logistics were greatly aided by thousands of Ford trucks imported from the U.S.
In a lesson still resonating today, Beevor details some of the tragic farce that was the Non-Intervention Committee. Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union sat upon it. Officially, there was supposed to be no foreign intervention in Spain. Yet even the parading of Italian POW's didn't sway Britain and France from enforcing the arms embargo. But Britain and France were increasingly more concerned with events in Central Europe as Hitler made his moves against the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, etc. In other words, no matter how perfidious the acts of the Axis Powers, the weak and indecisive democracies averted their eyes and refused to act.
Beevor's book finishes with not only a discussion of the ridiculous machinations within the dying Republic, but also how the survivors faired after the collapse of the Republic. Tens of thousands were interned in France. Some key leaders were arrested by the Vichy French Milice or the German Gestapo after the Fall of France--and then turned over to Franco. Some key communists went to the Soviet Union and served there. Apparently, there was a Spanish company in the 2nd Free French Armored Division that led the way in liberating Paris. Beevor also discusses the careful neutrality of Franco in the Second World War. Beevor tries to make the case that Franco wanted to join the Axis, but that his asking price was too high--new Spanish possessions at the expense of the ambitions of Mussolini and vast quantities of military equipment and economic aid. This contradicts other historians who believe that Franco never really wanted to join the Axis but that he coyly strung Hitler along.
All in all, this is a superb work to introduce someone to the Spanish Civil War. It is also excellent for those of us who knew some things, but wanted to learn more. The only real gripe that I have is that all of the maps are up front and not interleaved at the relevant points in the narrative. Otherwise, call this one a 4.5 out of 5 stars in my book.
A good "how", a somewhat weak "why". March 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you are looking for a book telling you _how_ the Spanish Civil was faought on both sides - mostly as estatic warfare, on the WWI model, in which a marginal technological advantage was decisive, a military advantage the Francoist side happened to posess - this is _the_ book to purchase. If, on the contrary, you're looking for a History of the Spanish Civil War explaining the "whys" of the conflict - the ideological outlook of the contending sides and how it shaped their decisions, specially the decision of the Communist Left to fight a conventional war it would eventually lose - this book suffers from a lack of understanding that will leave the reader to offer an interpretation by her/himself. Nevertheless, a superb piece of military history that is never dull, something which is an outstanding achievement in itself.
Excellent, Objective, January 4, 2008
He achieves an oeverall balanced account, letting us know exactly how it was that in the end the most noble people of all were the ones that really lost everything, on both sides. A story to understand how the Soviet Union came to wield so much world power at one point, and how it came to change (as it almost did for Spain) their destiniy forever.
You won't repent.
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