|
|
|
Review this Book
3 reviews (below) |
BATTLE FOR SPAIN
by
BEEVOR, ANTONY
Revisits the Spanish Civil War, drawing on masses of material from the Spanish, Russian and German archives. The author's account narrates the origins of the Civil War and its violent course from the coup d'etat in July 1936 through the savage fighting of the next three years which ended in catastrophic defeat for the Republicans in 1939.
Stock: In Stock, Delivery: Standard 2-3 Days (inc BFPO), £2.65
Format: Hardback
Published: 01/06/2006
Publisher: ORION PUBLISHING CO
ISBN: 0297848321
|
Our Price £16.50
List Price £25.00
Your Saving £8.50 (34%)
|
Click here to view associated books
Return to Previous Page |
|
|
Reviewed By: |
History Today |
|
Date: |
14/11/2006 |
|
Reader Rating: |
|
|
Review:
|
To mark the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, two outstanding and comprehensive accounts of that piteous and pitiless contest have been written by two distinguished British historians. This ‘world war in miniature’, within which was fought out a tangled struggle between extreme revolution and counter-revolution, was a pivotal event of the twentieth century whose relevance to the events of our own time becomes more apparent every day.
For many years historians of the Spanish Civil War had somehow to overcome or get round the near-impossibility of unearthing reliable information. Throughout the war, each side and its supporters all over the world waged a reckless propaganda campaign against the other. Once in power, the Franco dictatorship allowed only its own version of history to be disseminated in Spain itself and this was more or less a continuation of what the Nationalists had disseminated during the war. After all, once Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, their principal supporters, had been defeated and the Cold War had set in, they could hardly now say ‘Sorry, that was all propaganda and lies; you know how it is!’
The Spanish archives stayed closed. So did those of countries whose governments had played roles of varying degrees of shamefulness in the farce of ‘non-intervention’. So too did the archives of the former Soviet Union, whose part in the war has provoked more unanswered questions than that of any other nation involved. Thus, although the bibliography of the Spanish Civil War is nearly as enormous as that of the Second World War, it was not until the partial opening in the 1990s of the military archives in Italy and Russia and the discovery of more original documents relating to the German Condor Legion that historians were at last able to begin to assemble that framework of accurate data – such as the true sizes, strengths and dispositions of the opposing armed forces at different stages of the war or in particular operations and battles, and, most important here, the volume of military aid each side received from abroad – without which no trustworthy history of any war can be compiled. Of course, ever since the death of Franco and the coming of democracy to Spain, the earlier generation of Francoist writers has been fighting a stubborn rearguard action against this liberalization, but during the past three or four years in Spain a new right-wing backlash has been gathering force to stop or, if that is not possible, discredit all historical activities that are putting the old Francoist version of history in doubt; its recent productions have included a number of massive best-selling books and magazines. Hence the importance of these two books.
To take Beevor’s The Battle for Spain first, I do not think it an exaggeration to say that, although it is a general history, as a military history of the war it is the best that has been written so far in English. His descriptions of the main battles are masterly and full of new and revelatory details, for he has the gift that is the most valuable to military historians, the ability to place and move troops, artillery and tanks about in a landscape through the chaos of battle in such a way that non-military readers can follow and understand what was happening and to illuminate the picture by vivid quotes from soldiers and civilians of all ranks and types, who were fighting or for one reason or another caught up in the terrifying din, violence and bloodshed of combat. Remarkable is his chapter ‘The Battle for Madrid’, where one can almost see Franco’s Moors and Foreign Legionaries trying to force their way into the capital of Spain through the Casa de Campo and the ‘University City’ against the desperate tree-by-tree and building-by-building resistance of a hastily mobilized array of barely trained militias, a Communist regiment, an Anarchist column, remnants of the Spanish army still loyal to the Government and the first contingents of the ‘International Brigades’ of volunteers from many different countries that had come to ‘smash Fascism’ in Madrid (which, although Madrid never fell until the last day of the war, they did not manage to do) and the heart-thumping euphoric injection of hope on November 4th, 1936, when the first Russian fighter aircraft appeared in the sky above and drove back a formation of Junkers Ju 52s that had been scattering bombs over the city with impunity for days. This two-months-long battle was watched with bated breath by the whole world and there have been innumerable accounts of it, but I have not read one better.
There are, inevitably in a book containing so much information, a few mistakes of fact, but they are too small to shake one’s confidence in the narrative. I shall cite only one example, for the error is not the author’s. Quoting from a Luftwaffe ‘Situation Report’ based on Condor Legion daily squadron diaries for July 1938 during the first days of the ferocious Battle of the Ebro, he notes that the Germans and Nationalists destroyed 79 Republican aircraft for certain plus nine probables. The Republican squadron diaries from June 30th to August 1st, which were sent to Moscow for assessment and had to be accurate, list 23 shot down and ten lost in accidents. German claims of victories over enemy aircraft, like the claims of every air force in every theatre of war (including those by both sides in the Battle of Britain) were always greatly exaggerated. Had the Republican air force lost 79 or 88 aircraft in July 1938, it would have been effectively out of action for the rest of the war. Regarding the political and international dimensions of the war, Beevor says several things I disagree with, notably his unfavourable assessments of Juan Negrín, the Republican leader, and General Rojo, whom many have regarded as the most intelligent of the Republican senior officers, but these are matters of debatable opinion, not of quantifiable fact.
Like The Battle for Spain, Paul Preston’s The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge is an almost complete rewrite and large expansion of a book published in the 1980s. He needs no introduction as the historian who probably knows more about the Spanish Civil War than anyone else living, about its origins in the Spanish past, about its course, about the dreadful Francoist repression through the 1940s and early 1950s and the eventual transition after Franco’s death from ramshackle dictatorship to democratic constitutional monarchy, and this new version will be essential reading to all who need to study the Spanish Civil War seriously. I am surprised to see a reviewer remark that the prose of this book is not ‘passionate’ enough. For Heaven’s sake, this is not a love aria, it is a work of history! I would say that, on the contrary, Preston’s prose is measured to elucidate the factual evidence of what really happened and, as fact follows fact in relentless sequence, it stirs the emotions powerfully by making the readers aware of the real depth of the human tragedy that was the Spanish Civil War and its still unnumbered victims of the defeat of idealism and rationality by Ambition, Greed, Vanity, Ignorance and Ignorance’s Hydra-headed offspring, Bigotry. The fundamental issue of the two World Wars was a juvenile notion that by conquering Europe and Russia, Germany could dominate the modern world. That issue is dead. The fundamental issue of the Spanish catastrophe, how to reconcile social order with social justice, is still alive and, indeed, when listening to the news each morning, I sometimes feel that the Spanish Civil War is being fought all over again, but this time on a world scale.
· Gerald Howson is the author of Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (John Murray, 1998)
|
|
Reviewed By: |
About the Author |
|
Date: |
12/06/2006 |
|
Reader Rating: |
|
|
Review:
|
Antony Beevor served as a regular officer in the 11th Hussars in Germany. He is the author of Crete - The Battle and the Resistance, which won a Runciman Prize, Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949 (written with his wife Artemis Cooper), Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, Berlin - The Downfall, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees' Award, and The Mystery of Olga Chekhova. Stalingrad and Berlin have been translated into twenty-five languages and sold more than two and a quarter million copies between them. His latest work, A Writer at War - Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945, is an edition, with his Russian researcher, Dr Luba Vinogradova, of Grossman's wartime notebooks. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France, Antony Beevor has also been the chairman of the Society of Authors and is a visiting professor at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. He lives in London and Kent and has a daughter and a son. |
|
Reviewed By: |
Misc Reviews |
|
Date: |
12/06/2006 |
|
Reader Rating: |
|
|
Review:
|
'Fascination lies in the human drama, superbly captured by Beevor... a vivid chronicle of a dreadful time and place.'
Max Hastings
THE SUNDAY TIMES
'he is also very good on the political manoeuvrings of this most intenseley ideological of conflicts.'
Andrew Roberts
THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
'it is an admirably clear-sighted account.... a great achievement.'
Miranda France
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
'the story he tells is grimly familiar but he presents it with a freshness, an eye for detail and a degree of detachment that makes this one of the best accounts to date of the Spanish crisis.'
Richard Overy
THE EVENING STANDARD
'This is an enthralling bok. The narrative is masterly, wonderfully clear as a guide through the labyrinth. It is even-tempered and full of good sense.'
Allan Massie
THE LITERARY REVIEW
|
We found 4 associated Books. Displaying results 1 to 4 of 4
Displaying results 1 to 4 of 4
|
|
