Ukraine’s Uncertain Future Looks a Lot Like Spain’s Bloody Past

The war in Ukraine appears to have become a struggle of attrition, and it is unlikely that Kyiv's long-expected offensive will change this fundamental. US Republicans are stirring new hope in Russian President Vladimir Putin's breast. If either former President Donald Trump or Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida wins the 2024 election, aid to Ukraine is likely to be drastically cut.

Without continued, massive US backing, the war-torn nation's hopes of achieving a breakthrough, perhaps even of sustaining its own polity, will be doomed. Putin has placed a huge bet on Western war weariness eventually enabling him to consolidate his claims on the 20% of Ukraine he currently holds, and to call this victory. It is possible that he will be proved right, though it would be an epochal tragedy for democracy and freedom everywhere.

Ukraine has generated the spilling of blood and complex political responses as no regional conflict on the European continent has since the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. The issues at stake are different, because ideology — communism versus fascism — drove the earlier struggle, while the current one was unleashed by Putin's brutal land grab.

But the manner in which 1930s Spain divided the world's elites, and in which Hitler and Mussolini exploited the war to rehearse for the vastly greater clash that was to come, strikes some bleak echoes in our own time.

How did Spain's tragedy happen? In the early 1930s, following the collapse of the monarchy, the Madrid government fell into the hands of leftists of many hues, some of them committed revolutionaries. They were lawfully elected, but their anti-Roman Catholic, anti-capitalist doctrines appalled not only the Spanish right, but also the "haves" of all Europe, still traumatized by Russia's 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Within Spain, clashes between bosses and workers, landlords and peasants, church-burners and religious zealots, became endemic. The army, with strong support from the Catholic Church, determined to overthrow the government.

General Francisco Franco, 43 years old, was little-known even among his own countrymen, but had established himself as a prominent fascist. Other senior officers and the old ruling class saw in the coldly ruthless soldier a plausible figurehead for a revolt — as did the Republican government, which in 1936 dispatched Franco to a command in the Canary Islands, where he could cause no trouble.

A plot was hatched to bring him back, contrived by Luis Bolin, London correspondent of the Spanish monarchist paper ABC, and two British fascist sympathizers: publisher Douglas Jerrold and adventurer-spook Major Hugh Pollard. They chartered a plane from a London aviation company, allegedly for a tourist trip to the Canaries. On July 11, 1936, the major left Croydon Airport outside London in a twin-engine Dragon Rapide biplane, piloted by Captain Cecil Bebb, and accompanied by two pretty young women to add cover to the holiday narrative — Pollard's 18-year-old daughter, Diana, and a friend.

I knew the family slightly, and as a teenager heard at firsthand their gleeful account of the flight to Tenerife, where they successfully bluffed the local authorities. Bebb took Franco aboard, then flew him to North Africa en route to the mainland. Once there, he assumed command of the rebel forces. The Nationalists, as they called themselves (in opposition to the government-supporting Republicans), launched what became an even bloodier struggle than that currently ravaging Ukraine.

Writer and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga, a prominent Republican, wrote later that Spain's fascists "looked to General Franco as the man who would forge a united nation in a crucible of grief." Both sides committed appalling atrocities. The Republicans murdered not only priests and Nationalist sympathizers, but thousands of their own people who adhered to leftist factions that fell out of favor.

The Nationalists likewise killed countless prisoners. One of Franco's press attaches, Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera, told American journalist John Whitaker that it was necessary to "kill, to kill, to kill" all Reds, "to exterminate the proletariat." Nationalist General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano promised a Republican: "On my word of honor as a gentleman, for every person that you kill, we will kill at least 10."

Within days of the outbreak of civil war, both sides were competing for critical foreign support. The French were initially willing to sell arms to the Republicans, but were quickly dissuaded by British appeasers, including the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. France then joined with Britain on a policy of nonintervention.

America's 1935 Neutrality Act banned the shipment of weapons to either side, but business backers of the fascists dispatched huge quantities of much else. The president of Texaco diverted five tankers en route to the Spanish government to the Nationalist-held port of Tenerife. US companies eventually provided Franco with 3.5 million tons of oil on credit. US carmakers likewise sent him 12,000 trucks, and Dupont supplied 40,000 bombs, shipped via Germany to evade the Neutrality Act.

A powerful US Catholic lobby supporting Franco included Joseph Kennedy, ambassador to Britain as of early 1938. It was spearheaded at home by a young Irishwoman named Aileen O’Brien, who reportedly "spoke on the telephone to every Catholic bishop in the United States and begged them to request their parish priests to ask all members of their congregations to telegraph in protest to President Roosevelt" against any arms shipments to the Republicans. More than a million telegrams reached the White House.

But Franco's most important foreign backers were Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini and Germany's Adolf Hitler. Both were eager to see France acquire a fascist neighbor at its back door. There were eventually 100,000 Italian and German military personnel in Spain. The Nazis’ Condor Legion enthusiastically bombed civilians, most notoriously in April 1937 at Guernica in the Basque country, where an estimated 200 people died.

The most important sponsor of the Republican government in this proxy war was the Soviet Union. Moscow offered safe haven for Madrid's reserves of gold, of which 510 tonnes were duly shipped, never to return. Stalin seized the specie as payment for arms, tanks and planes that he sent to the Republicans, along with thousands of advisers and spies. Madrid paid a further price for Russian support: Many wavering foreign governments decided that any group backed by Stalin's Comintern could be no friend of their own.

Public opinion within the democracies divided deeply and bitterly. Capitalists, especially in Britain, France and the US, sided with Franco. A small number of right-wing enthusiasts even sailed to Spain to fight in his ranks.

British right-wing newspapers such as the Daily Mail and Daily Express backed Franco to the hilt. The general secured literary support from such Catholic writers as Hilaire Belloc and Evelyn Waugh. The American poet Ezra Pound said contemptuously of those who instead backed the Republicans: "Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes."

The West's intellectual left, which had less money than the capitalists but claimed higher principles, embraced the Republicans, as did millions of industrial workers who professed communism. Meetings in support of anti-Franco Spain took place in a thousand communities. In a Welsh mining village, a communist organizer auctioned a Spanish militiaman's hat and a militia girl's scarf. When the outcome was announced, the winning bidder handed over an unopened pay packet. "At great London meetings," wrote the journalist Douglas Hyde, "men and women were throwing onto the platforms their wedding rings."

William Faulkner and John Steinbeck were among prominent American writers supporting the Republic. Thousands of men, a curious mingling of writers and trade unionists among whom Britain's George Orwell was the most famous, served on the front lines.

Spain became hottest media story in the world, the war that every adventurous young reporter and photographer wanted to cover, just as Vietnam was a generation later, and Ukraine is today. Robert Capa shot some of the most famous combat images ever made. Ernest Hemingway went to the Republicans, of course, saying: "I like the communists when they’re soldiers. When they’re priests, I hate them." Hemingway may have been one of America's greatest novelists but much of his journalism from Spain was drivel.

The historian Antony Beevor has written that many previously uncommitted journalists "became resolute, and often uncritical" champions of the Republic after experiencing the lengthy siege of Madrid; the ideal of the anti-fascist cause anesthetized many of them to aspects of the war that proved uncomfortable, notably Republican atrocities.

In 1937, American reporter Virginia Cowles recorded that in Nationalist areas the degree of political self-hypnosis against the Republicans which she encountered "was almost a mental disease," which seems comparable to Russia today. Beevor again: "The Spanish civil war proved [that] the first casualty of war is not truth but its source: the conscience and integrity of the individual."

The Lincoln Brigade, composed of American would-be Republican fighters, reached Spain in mid-February 1937 "fresh in their ‘doughboy’ uniforms." Placed under command of an English buffoon who professed to have been a cavalry officer but who knew nothing of war, in their first attacks they lost 120 men out of 500. This provoked a mutiny, until the Americans were permitted to choose their own commander.

Foreigners received no more mercy from their enemies than the Spanish accorded to each other. Colonel Wolfram von Richtofen of the Condor Legion wrote laconically in his diary of reports from Nationalist officers outside Republican-held Madrid: "Tough fighting. French, Belgian and English prisoners taken. All shot except for the English."

A young German serving with the Nationalists, on discovering that his unit was to execute a compatriot of his own captured while serving on the other side, astonished his Spanish officer by pleading "Let me do it! Please, let me do it."

The Spanish Civil War formally ended in March 1939 with Franco's military victory, after the deaths of an estimated half a million people. W.H. Auden concluded his great poem on Spain:

The stars are dead; the animals will not look

We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and

History to the defeated

May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

The Spanish war had this much in common with Ukraine: Despite the torrent of emotional rhetoric deployed during its course, the outcome was determined by harsh global realities. Western democracies in the 1930s feared Franco's triumph less than they dreaded a widening of the war. They liked Stalin's Spanish Republican friends too little to succor them.

Today, fear of provoking escalation — perhaps a direct clash between Russia and the West — remains a major factor in the limits placed on Western military aid to Ukraine. Moreover, a large part of the world, especially in the Southern hemisphere but headed by China, declines to take sides in what it sees as a regional struggle in which a victory for America's Ukrainian client is deemed no more desirable than a victory for Russia.

It is fascinating to reflect upon how the world has changed since 1936, when the US and the great European powers were the only plausible manufacturers and sellers of arms. Russia is today heavily dependent for weapons and ammunition on North Korea, Iran and maybe also South Africa, with China — eight decades ago a basket case — providing Putin with essential goods and services.

When World War II broke out in September 1939, many leftists nodded knowingly. They said the Western democracies should have heeded their warnings three years earlier that Franco was the harbinger of evils that would now have to be resisted with force; that Britain and France should have armed the Republicans and turned back the tide of fascism on Spanish battlefields, rather than waiting for Hitler to invade Poland. Ironically, Franco proved the great survivor among the fascist dictators, ruling until his death in 1975.

Today, Stalin's successor Vladimir Putin seeks to convince his own people that his war is essential not merely to overwhelm Ukraine's supposed Nazis, but to resist an existential threat to Russia from the Anglosaksy — the Americans, British and their allies. His fantasy commands a substantial audience in a nation that, like 1930s Spain, was once a dominant power but is diminished in everything save pride and a fantasy narrative of grievance.

Whether or not the US, France and Britain were prudent to refuse aid to the Spanish government in 1936, the West is assuredly right to back Ukraine against external aggression today. But we share this much with our forefathers — a passionate hope that this European regional conflict does not escalate into something much larger and more deadly.

More From Max Hastings at Bloomberg Opinion:

• Taking Crimea From Putin Has Become ‘Operation Unthinkable’

• The West Can't Afford Hubris About Russia's War in Ukraine

• What the War in Ukraine Tells Us About Deterring China

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Max Hastings is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard, he is author, most recently, of "The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962."

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