Spanish Civil War
A group of Spanish generals rose against the Republic on 17 July 1936, and the coup that was meant to take days became a war of nearly three years. The Second Republic had been proclaimed in 1931 and had polarised the country. Its reforms — land redistribution, regional autonomy, the separation of church and state, the closing of religious schools — were too fast for the right and too slow for the anarchists and the revolutionary left, and the Popular Front's narrow victory in February 1936 was followed by months of street violence and political murders. The rising succeeded in the conservative north and west and failed in Madrid, Barcelona and the industrial regions, which is what made a civil war rather than a coup. Franco flew from the Canaries to Morocco and airlifted the Army of Africa to the mainland in German and Italian transport aircraft — the first significant military airlift in history. Germany and Italy supplied the Nationalists with aircraft, tanks and troops; the Soviet Union supplied the Republic and took its gold reserve in payment; and Britain and France organised a non-intervention committee that Germany and Italy signed and ignored. Some 35,000 volunteers came from fifty countries in the International Brigades. Guernica was bombed by the Condor Legion in April 1937. The Republic also fought itself, in Barcelona in May 1937, between communists and anarchists. Madrid fell in March 1939. Around 500,000 died, and Franco ruled until 1975. Spain has spent the decades since 2000 arguing about whether to exhume the mass graves, and tens of thousands are still in them.
- Year: 1936 CE
- Category: Military
