Geography, not ideology, determined Spanish Civil War sides

Geography, not ideology, determined Spanish Civil War sides

Asking which side grandparents fought on during the Spanish Civil War often stirs more emotion than any political debate. The answer, when it comes, rarely trinc the textbook: most testimonies suggest people fought where they were assigned, not where they believed. One in two accounts begins with the same phrase: “it was assigned to me there.”

Geography as a recruiter

The pattern repeats insistently: the grandfather who was right-wing but ended up in a Republican zone and fought with the People's Army; the socialist who remained in a Nationalist zone and found himself wearing the uniform of the sublevados (the insurgent forces). There are extreme cases, such as two brothers who ended up on opposite sides and called out to each other at night from their trenches, asking how the other was doing. Both survived, and the family remembers it as a gesture of sanity amidst the madness.

Many did not take up arms out of conviction. Some hid for months in a fake oven; others deserted and walked through the countryside at night to return home. One great-grandfather escaped the quinta (the mandatory military draft) because he was the son of a single mother—and because a ham reached the right person just as they came to fetch him.

Battles that marked generations

The Battle of the Ebro is, by far, the most mentioned. It appears in testimonies from both sides: water-cooled Italian machine guns that betrayed their position with smoke, charges with an anise bottle in hand, a soldier who crossed the Ebro without knowing how to swim to save his life. It also appears in the memories of those who returned having lost 40 kilos, haunted by nightmares forever. Other names emerge: Teruel, Brunete, Badajoz. “In Badajoz, we resisted in a house until the bullets ran out,” says the descendant of a Republican guard.

The Battle of Brunete claimed the life of a UGT (a major socialist trade union) peasant who had volunteered to defend Madrid. His family still does not know if he lies in a mass grave or in the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen).

The postwar era was another front

Winning or losing did not return anyone to civilian life. An Ebro survivor “won” the war, only to be rewarded with another four years of military service. Republican prisoners accumulated years of jail time; the state invented forced labor schemes that deducted five years from a sentence for every year worked, in order to empty the prisons. Another testimony recalls that Felipe González paid one million pesetas in the 1980s to a former political prisoner for his time in the Ocaña penal colony.

Others did not end up in prison but carried the stigma. A widow had to raise her children alone with the label of being “red” because her husband, who had no political affiliation, had been executed in a roadside ditch. And there were those who crossed the border into France only to end up in a prisoner-of-war camp.

Those who chose a side

Not everything was chance. There were plenty of volunteers: the one who lied about his age to “kill reds,” the FAI (an anarchists' federation) militant who was a lieutenant colonel at age 20, the UGET (a communist union) member who enlisted to defend Madrid. There are also those who, after fighting for the Nationalist side, threw away all their decorations and became anti-Francoist, never telling their families, only asking for forgiveness for what they had done. “War is the most da repelús activity a human being can carry out,” summarizes the grandson of an officer who wept while remembering.

What no one wants to remember

Most grandparents did not speak. Some out of antiestéticar, others out of shame, others because the memories were too heavy. “No one wanted to tell anything,” says one descendant. Silence became the inheritance: few families today know where the remains of their dead are located. The war took some 700,000 Spaniards and left a broken country, with the defeated in mass graves and the victors with remorse.

These testimonies do not resolve the historical debate, but they ground it. Choosing a side was not always a choice: sometimes it was a street, a coincidence, or a ham sent to the right person. Eighty years later, the question remains open, as do the graves. That is where the analysis gets stuck: memory does not accept labels as easily as official history does.