So lively and productive is the field constituted by the study of the Spanish Republic and Civil War that students and nonspecialists are going to need regular updates for some time to come on the flood of new material that continues to appear, Spain at War being one such work. Although they make no pretense of offering an original contribution to the literature, Adrian Shubert and George Esenwein have produced a new synthesis that is lively and well structured but somewhat uneven in quality.
A specialist in the Asturian rising of October 1934, Shubert provides the section on the five years of republican rule that preceded the outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936. He gives a brief outline of events, followed by chapters on such questions as the church, the region, and the military. Although necessarily brief—all this is covered in barely 90 pages —the section succeeds admirably, Shubert’s main conclusion being that the rising was occasioned not by the Republic’s failure but by “the possibility that it would succeed” (p. 34).
Rather less satisfactory is Esenwein’s offering on the Civil War, although it is just as comprehensive and accessible. Setting aside the author’s irritatingly indiscriminate use of the word peasant to describe landless laborer and smallholder alike, he is in his heart committed to the heroic view of the Civil War that has the Spanish people rushing to the barricades to defeat the military rising and launch a revolution, only to be betrayed by the machinations of the Communists and their allies.
Too honest a historian to overlook the many problems inherent in this neo-Orwellianism—he implicitly admits, for example, that the key factor in the success or failure of the uprising in each particular city was the attitude of the army and police—Esenwein is, in consequence, trapped by a number of contradictions. A good example is the battle of Brunete. Thus, after categorically stating that the events of May 1937 “seriously undermined republican military efforts in the principal theatres of war,” Esenwein goes on to conclude that the defeat was caused by a combination of superior Nationalist airpower and the woeful deficiencies of the Ejército Popular (p. 239). So concerned, meanwhile, is Esenwein to put the Orwellian case that he sometimes flies in the face of reality, a good example being his claim that the failure to crush the rebels in the immediate aftermath of the uprising resulted from differing ideological perspectives, when the reality was that the offensive capacity of the militias was nonexistent (p. 109).
Clear and succinct though Esenwein is on the politics of the war, he is therefore misleading in his discussion of Franco’s victory: lamentable though the behavior of the Communists may have been, there is nothing here to suggest that the revolutionary alternative would have obtained any more in the way of success.
