Abraham Guillén, 'The Military Error of "the Left"'
Abraham Guillén, 'The Military Error of "the Left"'
What follows is the first fruit of preparation for a forthcoming ABC Bitesize episode about Abraham Guillén’s book, El error militar de las ‘izquierdas’. Estrategia de la Guerra revolucionaria. Guillén fought in the Spanish Civil War and later became a theorist of the urban guerrilla. His book, which in English is titled ‘The military error of the left. A strategy of military war’, was published in Spain by Editorial Hacer in 1980. It is a military history of the Spanish Civil War that offers a critique of Republican military strategy and simultaneously outlines a hypothetical alternative approach to waging the war.
Written in the aftermath of successful guerrilla struggles waged in Cuba, Vietnam, and so on, Guillén applies the ‘lessons’ of these conflicts to the Spanish Civil War. However, in suggesting alternative military tactics the Republic might have pursued, Guillén affirms the truth of counterfactual statements without going into detail about the political and practical obstacles that his proposals may have encountered. Furthermore, the book is repetitive and most of Guillén’s assertions are not backed up by references. But to judge it only as a work of history is to miss the point that Guillén was aiming to impress upon his readership certain understandings of armed conflict that he thought might be useful in the future. In any case, several of the book’s arguments are worth taking seriously from a historical perspective despite these considerations.
The following section is translated from pp. 14-16 and gives a good introduction to the book’s main talking points and hypotheses.
At the outset of the Civil War of 1936-1939, there was no one amongst the leaders of the Spanish left who had read up on the use of small and large military units, on the tactical value of different weaponry, on geostrategic questions applied to the Spanish territory, or even Clausewitz’s On War.
We are presented with the paradox that the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939, which could only triumph as a revolutionary war rather than as a war of regular fronts, was transformed into a conventional war, subject to the laws of traditional tactics.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the aristocratic general Clausewitz had a clear understanding of the political content of warfare: ‘We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means. War in general, and the commander in any specific instance, is entitled to require that the trend and designs of policy shall not be inconsistent with these means. That, of course, is no small demand; but however much it may affect political aims in a given case, it will never do more than modify them. The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.’[1]
The leaders of the Spanish left in 1936 were unaware that war is a continuation of politics by other means. Perhaps this was because the war of 1936 was not initiated by the left but by the right: by the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the clergy and the armed forces, who sought a political outcome through military methods. Previously, the right had lost control of the government peacefully, through parliamentary elections. Thus, the Spanish Revolution of 1936 was imposed by an ‘uprising’ of the right, surprising a left that, except for the anarcho-syndicalists, was complacent and gullible, making speeches in parliament or at rallies.
Once the war began, no left-wing political grouping had a strategic, political and historical understanding of what the right had unleashed. And so, without a political, economic, diplomatic, tactical and strategic plan, the Spanish Civil War began with the left practically defeated from the get-go. The ineffectiveness of the left gave the rebel generals time to bring over the Army of Africa and unite their divided Southern and Centre-North-Northeastern borders. All because the revolution was not unleashed by the popular masses but by the policy of the bourgeoisie, using war to defend its interests and privileges.
The Popular Front won a majority in the elections of February 1936 in Andalucía, Extremadura, Madrid, Toledo, Cataluña, the Basque Country, Zaragoza, Asturias, Galicia, Levante; but had lost in the Meseta Central, Navarre, León and Huesca, and it was in these latter places that the mutinous generals had initially succeeded in their coup against the Republican government. The left, with the mass of the population in its favour, did not win the war in Andalucía, despite retaining most of the territory in the days that immediately followed 18 July. Nor did the left entirely control Asturias, where Oviedo remained in the hands of the military rebels – perhaps because the miners had sent some of their number to join the forces trying to liberate León.
It is inexplicable that Yagüe’s rebel army in the South won continuous victories: crossing the Guadiana River and advancing twenty to thirty kilometres every day in the Tajo valley despite the opposition of the specialists of Huelva and Extremadura and the anarchists of Andalucía. If the anarcho-syndicalists and socialists had worked together in a united front in Yagüe’s rear, the army of the South would not have advanced in a military procession through the Tajo valley but would have had to disperse in operations to counter the guerrilla, preventing its advance towards Madrid.
If the leaders of the Spanish left had understood that war is a continuation of politics, it would have armed and mobilised the Spanish people, moving them out of the cities and into the countryside in lightning strikes before the rebel generals had had time to recover from their initial defeats. The most serious mistake the republicans made was to try and defeat the enemy at the front alone, in pitched battles, with inferior firepower. The greatest and most decisive battle the republicans could wage against the generals had to be in the rearguard of ‘the national zone’, infiltrating political and union agitators and squads of guerrilla to win over and mobilise the antifascist population. The most important thing is not to win territory but to win over the population that lives there. Only in this way can a small army defeat a large one and its foreign allies. The art of revolutionary war resides in only doing what is in the interest of the population; in acting where the enemy least expects it; in surprise attacks, moving the area of combat to the weakest points of its rearguard; turning the population against the enemy, and obliging it to disperse its forces.
[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, 1984), p. 87.