Too true, there were far worse British generals than Monty.
Horatio Gates comes to mind. Nothing screams "LEADERSHIP" quite like riding 120+ miles away from your soldiers in the middle of a battle.
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Horatio Gates comes to mind. Nothing screams "LEADERSHIP" quite like riding 120+ miles away from your soldiers in the middle of a battle.
Duritz - There were indeed worse generals on the British side that Monty, most of the Australian ones for starters.
I actually ended up doing a history essay entitled 'Was Haig a good general?' back at school and concluded the answer was in fact 'yes', admittedly caveated with 'by the standards of the time'. Given nobody on the Western Front had a good war I struggle to see what else he was expected to do, it was a war of attrition and they are inevitably bloody. When you have to launch a large scale attack just to save your ally from collapse (and the traitorous buffoon Asquith couldn't even arrange a decent supply of working shells) things are never going to end well.
Nathan Madien - That is quite impressive, though you have to wonder why he joined the Continental Army? If your going to betray your country surely go somewhere you'll be appreciated, had he defected to Paris he could have been a Marshall of France with those skills at running away!
Exciting domestic problems with showers and flooded bathrooms have delayed the update. Soon though, once the house is dry.
I actually ended up doing a history essay entitled 'Was Haig a good general?' back at school and concluded the answer was in fact 'yes', admittedly caveated with 'by the standards of the time'. Given nobody on the Western Front had a good war I struggle to see what else he was expected to do, it was a war of attrition and they are inevitably bloody. When you have to launch a large scale attack just to save your ally from collapse (and the traitorous buffoon Asquith couldn't even arrange a decent supply of working shells) things are never going to end well.
Nathan Madien - That is quite impressive, though you have to wonder why he joined the Continental Army? If your going to betray your country surely go somewhere you'll be appreciated, had he defected to Paris he could have been a Marshall of France with those skills at running away!
Exciting domestic problems with showers and flooded bathrooms have delayed the update. Soon though, once the house is dry.
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OK, two things we're going to have to disagree on. Three if you include the tripe about 'we did it to save the French'! With you on Asquith though...
And just so I don't seem parochial, Major General Gordon Bennett fled more than 120kms when he deserted his troops at Singapore. As I understand it he wanted a medal and promotion for the act and couldn't understand when he was shafted. Then again, if you look at his act and that of MacArthur's flight from the Phillipines you start to get an idea of how two similar acts can be dealt with in different ways!
Dury.
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I need to defend MacArthur on this. There's a difference between the two. MacArthur was ordered out of the Phillipines by FDR against his will to avoid getting captured by the Japanese. MacArthur was hell-bent on returning to the Phillipines, arguing with the Navy who wanted to bypass the place and focus elsewhere. MacArthur ends up sloshing ashore on Luzon, telling people "I have returned."
If MacArthur had his way, he probably would have gone down fighting in the Phillipines instead of fleeing it. That makes him different from Gates and Bennett, who deserted their troops by choice.
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Chapter CVII: Spain ’37 Part I – The Anarchy of Command
Chapter CVII: Spain ’37 Part I – The Anarchy of Command
The most well known parts of the Spanish spring campaigns of 1937 are those that revolve around the tanks. While it is certainly true the tanks deployed by both sides had an impact that was completely disproportionate to their numbers, the bulk of the battles were fought not with tanks but with artillery, rifles and bayonets. It is with one of these ‘traditional’ campaigns that we begin; the Barcelona Offensive.
The Barcelona Offensive was a joint effort between the Catalan militias and the CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, National Confederation of Labour - Federación Anarquista Ibérica, Iberian Anarchist Federation). Lacking the international support the ‘legitimate’ government faction had or the strong industrial base of the Basque the two groups struggled for both supplies and equipment, surviving mainly on what they could ‘divert’ from French shipments into Tarragona and the remains of the pre-war equipment issued to the CNT-FAI militias. Most units were short of basics such as artillery and machine guns, let alone tanks and mechanised transport. The increasing government co-operation with France made French supplies harder to divert (initial French shipments had been delivered to the nearest Spaniard with a uniform, the subtleties of Republican politics being a mystery to most French merchants) and there were no more caches and arms dumps to ‘liberate’, thus Barcelona became a last, desperate, throw of the dice to secure a purely anarchist powerbase.
The situation was not much better for the Monarchist Army of Catalonia, while there was no shortage of British and German equipment flooding into Spain there was no easy way of getting it from the Atlantic ports of La Coruna or Vigo to the north east of Spain. The east-west road routes were poor, the main railways in the region all ran through the Republican held town of Zaragoza and, outside of the more gung-ho Royal Navy attaches, no-one was prepared to contemplate running the gauntlet of the west coast to ship supplies direct to Barcelona. The biggest problem for the Monarchists though was not supply but numbers; the massed anarchist and Catalan militias outnumbered them over two to one. Allowing for the detachments needed for ‘internal security’ and watching the Basque border the Monarchist commander, Rey d'Harcourt, was badly out numbered.
Buenaventura Durruti, ‘Commander’ of the Durruti Column and one of the leading Anarchist commanders during the Barcelona Offensives. Durruti is perhaps best remembered for inventing the term ‘Fifth Column’, a phrase coined during a propaganda broadcast when he boasted the four anarchist columns attacking Barcelona would be aided by a fifth column of supporters within the city. Given how the phrase would be inaccurately applied by dictators and democrats alike in later years, it is fitting that it’s very first use was also incorrect; there was no popular rising in Barcelona. At the time this was attributed to ‘cunning black propaganda’ by the Monarchists in the city, though in truth even a poor propagandist could have whipped up fear in a city being attacked by, amongst other units, several thousand heavily armed thieves and murders (in this case the ‘Iron Column’ of freed prisoners).
Given their importance to how the campaign unfolded, it is perhaps worth briefly discussing the peculiar anarchist command structure. An anarchist column consisted of a number of centuria (Centuries, 100 men units with their own democratic sub-divisions) who elected a delegate to the war committee for that column. The war committee would then select a leader, often (but not always) the figure who first organised the column. While there were undoubted benefits in terms of morale there were also obvious drawbacks, the two greatest being scale and leadership. With one delegate per 100 men the war committees soon reached unwieldy numbers, at its peak the Ascaso Column (named after the ‘martyred’ CNT leader Francisco Ascaso Abadía) numbered over 10,000 men and thus had over 100 delegates on its war committee. This problem was compounded by the second, leadership. An anarchist column leader had no real authority, there was no term of office or security; it was easier to remove a leader than it was to elect them in the first place. While the truly charismatic, such as Durruti, could carry the delegates of their column with them lesser speakers (but perhaps better tacticians) could only follow the will of the group or be removed. Whatever the ideological attractions of such a system the problems of organising large scale operations between several Columns should be obvious.
Despite these disadvantages the initial engagements favoured the anarchists, the offensive was spearheaded by the multi-national Durruti Column and the fearsome ex-prisoners of the Iron Column who swept into Catalonia, taking the outlying towns and establishing a siege of Barcelona. At this point the problems began to arise, for all the assumed sympathy to the anarchist cause, a general uprising had failed to occur and the Monarchist garrison had drawn back into the city in relatively good order. Without the benefit of artillery to ‘soften up’ the defenders any assault would be a bloody affair, certainly compared to the easier picket and garrison roles also required. Thus it was that the most highly motivated (and highly skilled) units who volunteered while the second string formed the picket, a reasonable enough outcome given the circumstances but one with unfortunate consequences.
The Hotchkiss M1914 machine gun. Of a similar vintage to the venerable Vickers machine gun, the Hotchkiss was the main medium machine gun of the French army and, after the sale of a manufacturing licence in the 1920s, had served in the same role in the pre-civil war Spanish Army. An air cooled design its two most distinctive features were the five rings on the barrel and its extreme weight, the former a necessity of the air cooling and the later an object of much cursing from its crews. Along with smaller numbers of hastily imported ex-British Lewis Guns the Hotchkiss remained the main machine gun of the Monarchists until well into 1938, when all Monarchist units finally standardised on 0.303 inch guns and ammunition.
The assault on Barcelona went about as well as could be expected, lacking artillery or even mortars the Hotchkiss M1914s and Lewis Guns of the Monarchists extracted a terrible toll on the attackers, but in the end superior numbers told. Rather than wait to be crushed the Monarchist commander Rey d'Harcourt attempted a breakout, striking north more in hope than expectation. To his surprise he found that the unit assigned to guard the north of Barcelona, the Tierra y Libertad (Liberty and Land Brigade) had decided the battle was as good as won and had begun the revolution. Whatever the benefits of bringing the anarchist revolution to the good people of Catalonia were, they did not include the ability to mount a cohesive defence and the Monarchist managed to break through, rallying in the city of Girona before establishing themselves in the Cadi Mountains near the border with Andorra.
The conventional choice would have been a pursuit, indeed the original campaign plan called for the complete liberation of Catalonia. Here again though the anarchist command structure intervened, as did the consequences of Barcelona. The best units of the CNT-FAI were shattered; the losses in the house to house combat had been horrific and none of the columns who had led the assault were fit for the pursuit. As the remaining columns decided that ‘spreading the revolution’ was more important than charging up mountains, a decision the Catalan militias agreed with, the Monarchists were left to recover in peace. Their position however remained precarious, wedged between the Basque and the Catalan and with France to their back they were in desperate need of a relief column. Whether or not that column would reach them would depend on the outcome of the first armoured clash of the war.
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Notes
A slight diversion into the anarchist command structure, something I admit I found fascinating when I started poking into it. There were, of course, variations from column to column but the 10 man team, 100 man centuries and war committees did appear to be very common. Given the anarchists folded into the Republican Army in late 1936 in OTL no-one knows how they would work on the grand scale and when not in a panic. I resisted the urge to say ‘badly’ and tried to be fair, but I just can’t see it working that well. So the good units kept volunteering and the less keen units were allowed to take the easier route. But in fairness Anarchist Catalonia is now looking a real goer, it may even last longer than OTL if the CNT-FAI can avoid merging into the Republican Army this time.
Columns are all OTL, including the alarming Iron Column of ex-prisoners. Not political prisoners (I don’t think the Spanish Republic had that many to be fair) just normal criminals, everything from petty thieves to murderers. Unsurprisingly they were not popular, but apparently very effective. Durruti died late ’36 in OTL but due to a completely different pattern of fighting survives this time around, his hat was too jaunty not to make it.
Sorry for the lack of tanks, this update suffered from shrinking horizons. I started hoping to do the whole of Spain in one update, I ended up just doing the North East corner where there were no tanks. I hope for better luck next time!
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Well, now let's see if the anarchists can vote what to do next before the Monarchists strike back. It's funny to see that, for once, Rey de Harcourt managed to get out of a encircled city and did not surrender
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Anarchist columns are interesting. Completely impractical military-wise, but cool nevertheless. And now when we´re done with them, it´s time for tanks
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Well, even if not followed up properly, the successful Barcelona offensive is a feather in the anarchists' cap.
Agreed tough to see a 5th column when one of the 1st four is made up of ex-prisoners--I suppose having nothing left to lose does wonders for morale (if not discipline).
Probably best for Spain to keep to keep the tanks & anarchists as far apart as possible.
Agreed tough to see a 5th column when one of the 1st four is made up of ex-prisoners--I suppose having nothing left to lose does wonders for morale (if not discipline).
Probably best for Spain to keep to keep the tanks & anarchists as far apart as possible.
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Bloody anarchists! Where are my tanks!?!
I don't understand why you are making such a big deal about the Iron Column. The British Army relied on criminals to make up the "other ranks" for over 200 years.
Now, give me tank pron or give me death!!!
I don't understand why you are making such a big deal about the Iron Column. The British Army relied on criminals to make up the "other ranks" for over 200 years.
Now, give me tank pron or give me death!!!
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Nice little update there and I like the twist on the "fifth Column" story. I wonder if the Anarchists will be able to organise Barcelonan industry as well as they did OTL. The Council of Catalunya worked quite effectively at organising the city for the war effort, it will be interesting to see if they can do so this time. I guess it might depend on the damage caused by seige and their ability to gain raw materials. I would suggest as in OTL the government will deny them these, one of the reasons they had to give in to the government's demands for a unified command.
All very interesting but...
Yes, give me tank porn or give Davout death!
Dury
All very interesting but...
Yes, give me tank porn or give Davout death!
Dury
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Kurt_Steiner - I've no idea if Rey de Harcourt was a nice bloke or not, but he did get a very rough deal and I thought he deserved a chance this time.
I'd say I'm glad someone noticed, but you've always been good at spotting these little details so I shouldn't be surprised. There's a question for you at the bottom that I'd appreciate your thoughts on.
Karelian - If the rule of cool actually applied in real life the anarchists would have won in Spain before the end of 1936.
DonnieBaseball - An anarchist tank unit does sound terrible. What happens if the gunner and driver of a T-26 try to out-vote the commander mid battle?
Worse the H 35 had a two man crew - Voting deadlock!
Davout - There are criminals and then there are criminals. Serving alongside petty thieves is one thing, but going to sleep each night knowing there are men in your squad who are convicted multiple murderers? Honestly I'd struggle, maybe as an Australian you're more used to living among convicts and so it wouldn't bother you.... ( )
Duritz - The 5th column thing was spotted! Excellent, I do enjoy it when people notice those things. Thanks.
The anarchists are in a good position, but linking up with the Basques would have been better, between them they have pretty much all you need for a full industrial chain, what they don't they can import as they have the ports and the critical mass. The question is would it work? From the outside I'd say Catalan and Basque co-operation looks obvious, there's no overlap of territory and they have similar aims. But logically obvious things so regularly go wrong I must be missing something.
So Kurty, is there anything I'm missing about a deep seated hatred among those bits of Spain that don't like being bits of Spain? Anyone else any thoughts?
I'd say I'm glad someone noticed, but you've always been good at spotting these little details so I shouldn't be surprised.
There's a question for you at the bottom that I'd appreciate your thoughts on.Karelian - If the rule of cool actually applied in real life the anarchists would have won in Spain before the end of 1936.
DonnieBaseball - An anarchist tank unit does sound terrible. What happens if the gunner and driver of a T-26 try to out-vote the commander mid battle?
Worse the H 35 had a two man crew - Voting deadlock!
Davout - There are criminals and then there are criminals. Serving alongside petty thieves is one thing, but going to sleep each night knowing there are men in your squad who are convicted multiple murderers? Honestly I'd struggle, maybe as an Australian you're more used to living among convicts and so it wouldn't bother you.... (
)Duritz - The 5th column thing was spotted! Excellent, I do enjoy it when people notice those things. Thanks.
The anarchists are in a good position, but linking up with the Basques would have been better, between them they have pretty much all you need for a full industrial chain, what they don't they can import as they have the ports and the critical mass. The question is would it work? From the outside I'd say Catalan and Basque co-operation looks obvious, there's no overlap of territory and they have similar aims. But logically obvious things so regularly go wrong I must be missing something.
So Kurty, is there anything I'm missing about a deep seated hatred among those bits of Spain that don't like being bits of Spain? Anyone else any thoughts?
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I'm fairly surprised at the success of the anarchists, their command system seems so ludicrous that I keep expecting a Monty Python sketch to break out. However like in OTL pretty much everyone hates them and would like Catalonia for themselves so I can only see them lasting until someone else manages to put together a proper force to conquer Catalonia. Of course when one considers the current situation that means they could be able to hold out for quite a while.
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OTL they had the Nationalists [spits on ground] between them and the co operation couldn't happen, plus the fact that only Russian ship were calling and they wouldn't give Anarchists the time of day... so nothing to suggest the Catalunyan Council wouldn't work with the Basques. I can't see the system going much beyond economic bartering but then again the Catalunyan Council was rather pragmatic when it needed to be. I think there was a clear understanding that the War had to be won for them to continue and so they were prepared to compromise (after much hand wringing and arguement anyway)... I never got the same feeling from the Basques.
I'm sure others will have differing views though...
But hey, stop stalling... or at least kill Davout.
Dury.
I'm sure others will have differing views though...
But hey, stop stalling... or at least kill Davout.
Dury.
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Since the most damaging weapons available to the anarchists were machine guns, the damage shouldn't be severe. The factories should all be in working condition. As for materials, they're sitting on top of the largest Spanish port on the Mediterranean. The French merchants can now safely send weapons and materials over for the anarchists. It looks like their faction is going to be quite capable of resisting assimilation.
Zhuge Liang said:
Yes indeed. The Republicans ARE struggling together.
In other news, Generallisimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
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just to very briefly unlurk, say how much I enjoy your leisurely pace and the chance to learn something as you meander through 1937 ... & relurk
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Call me strange, but I would have thought that the capacity to kill without remorse would be a desirable quality in a soldier.
My recent experience with anarchism suggests that it works surprisingly well, at least in a crisis. When we were cut off by the floods recently, the locals formed the People's Syndicalist Commune of Southern Paddington & Rosalie. It was like an army of ants swarming over the houses, shops and streets, cleaning up the mess without any co-ordination whatsoever. And the free love, wahay..... Of course, it only lasted 4 days until the roads opened again.
And I am sure you could have worked a Fawlty Towers reference in somewhere with all this talk of Barcelona.
Onwards to tanks, liberty and free love!!!
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You should have declared independence while you had the chance. On second thought, the Anarchy of Paddington sounds like an R-rated, unseen story of Paddington Bear. The things you can do with tea and free love...
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Fifth Column...I just saw a question about it on "Jeopardy". I therefore felt smart going into this.
Interesting how we go from tank porn to teddy porn just like that.
Interesting how we go from tank porn to teddy porn just like that.
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I highly recommend "Secret Diary of a London Call Plushie" by Bear de Jour although the blog and books are better than the TV series (even with Bearie Piper).
Ahem. I think we need some tanks soon to return us to a more wholesome stream of thought. Almost at the end of the page.
Ahem. I think we need some tanks soon to return us to a more wholesome stream of thought. Almost at the end of the page.
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