Spain at War: Society, Culture and Mobilization, 1936-44 ed. by James Matthews

Abstract

MATTHEWS, James, ed. – Spain at War: Society, Culture and Mobilization, 1936-44. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 263. The Spanish Civil War is a historical paradox. On the one hand, it continues to engage historians in Spain and elsewhere who, year after year, produce a flood of publications about it. On the other, despite this ongoing production, the literature is strangely resistant to new historiographical developments. Rather than strike out in new directions, scholars have preferred to debate, or perhaps fight out, such old, essentially political, questions as who was responsible for the conflict and why it had the outcome it did. This is certainly the case for the military history of the war, as James Matthews observes in his concise introduction to this important new collection. The overall goal of the volume is to apply the approaches of the new military history, which, as Matthews points out, is “by no means new any longer” (p. 2), to the Spanish Civil War. In doing so, Spain at War aims to “advance recent ground-breaking research” that integrates the impact of mobilization on individuals into the history of this total war and to offer the work of Spanish historians to an English readership. The focus on mobilization correctly leads Matthews to expand the collection’s chronological scope beyond the years of the Civil War itself, 1936 to 1939, because the Franco dictatorship continued wartime mobilization against its remaining Republican enemies and because of the ongoing global conflict, in which Spain had a minor military role. The volume’s thirteen substantive chapters, each relatively short at 16 to 18 pages, are arranged in four sections: Initial Mobilization, Mobilization for Total War, Rearguard Areas and Actors, and Legacies of the Spanish Civil War, 1939-1944. They cover topics ranging from volunteer militias to conscript soldiers, spies and informers, political economy, social work, children, diet and cooking, demobilizations, Spaniards on the Eastern Front, and martial masculinity. Overall, the volume presents a Spanish Civil War that is very different from the one with which most non-specialist readers will be familiar, and the effect can be disorienting. Instead of a Manichean conflict pitting dedicated anti-fascists supported by the Soviet Union and the valiant volunteers of the International Brigades against the fascistic Spanish lackeys of Hitler and Mussolini, we read about a war overwhelmingly fought by hastily trained conscripts who had to be taught why they were fighting. By far the largest number of foreign fighters were the 80,000 Moroccans in Franco’s army, and shirking, desertion, and selfmutilation were problems shared by both sides. In this context, Pedro Corral has an interesting discussion of how Republican authorities came to declare that contracting sexually transmitted infections would be considered a form of evasion of duty and punishable by arrest, assignment to a disciplinary company, and, on the third offence, trial for self-inflicted injury. The Republicans also used highly gendered posters featuring diseased women to prevent such infections. Behind the lines, both sides mobilized large numbers of women to engage in social work activities, and did so in similar ways. Meanwhile, Republican civilians grumbled over “wartime stew” as modern nutrition science was used to legitimize reduced meat consumption and the favourable re-evaluation of such foodstuffs as sardines, olives, and walnuts. In the book’s most original and compelling contribution, Veronica Sierra Blas uses a range of innovative sources, such as toys, games, and especially children’s writings, to analyze the war’s impact on the day-to-day lives of children, both those who remained in Spain and those were evacuated to other countries. The two groups had very different experiences. Many of those who remained died, and, like other Spaniards, children in both the Republican and Francoist zones were subject to mobilization efforts. The idea of children playing war-themed snakes and ladders gives new depth to the concept of total war. Starting in early 1937, between 30,000 and 50,000 children were evacuated from the Republican zone to Belgium, Denmark, France, Mexico, Switzerland, and the Soviet Union. Sierra Blas reconstructs their experiences using memoirs, autobiographies, novels, diaries, letters, articles in papers produced in evacuation camps, and even drawings. Even while...