Revolutionary Catalonia - Revolutionary Militias and The Regular Army

Revolutionary Militias and The Regular Army

After the military rebellion, the Republic was left with a decimated officer corps and a severely weakened army in the regions it still controlled. Since the army was unable to resist the rebellion, the fighting mainly fell to the militia units organized by the various labor unions. While army officers joined these columns, they were under the control of whichever organization had formed them. The militias suffered from a wide variety of problems. They were inexperienced and lacked discipline and unity of action. Rivalry between the various organizations exacerbated the lack of any centralized command and general staff. The appointed professional officers were not always respected. They also lacked heavy weapons. Militiamen would often leave the front whenever they wished. Republican officer Major Aberri said of the militiamen he encountered at the Aragon front: "...It was the most natural thing in the world for them to leave the front when it was quiet. They knew nothing of discipline, and it was clear that nobody had bothered to instruct them on the subject. After a forty-hour week at the front they got bored and left it...." In the initial months the ministry of war had little authority over transport and was forced to rely on the National Committee of Road Transport controlled by the CNT and UGT. The committees, unions and parties widely disregarded demands from the ministry of war and retained equipment and vehicles for themselves and their own militia forces. In the CNT militias especially, there was no hierarchy, no saluting, no titles, uniforms or distinction in pay and quartering. They were organized into centuries with democratically elected leaders that had no permanent authority.

While the militias had their defects, they were instrumental in holding the line at the front and their discipline slowly improved over time, George Orwell who served in the POUM explains:

Later it became the fashion to decry the militias, and therefore to pretend that the faults which were due to lack of training and weapons were the result of the equalitarian system. Actually, a newly raised draft 'of militia was an undisciplined mob not because the officers called the private 'Comrade' but because raw troops are always an undisciplined mob. In practice the democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers' army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never 'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up to the mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish. We had all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest difficulty in getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for a dangerous job. 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness--on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square. The journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to the strength of 'revolutionary' discipline that the militias stayed in the field-at all.

— George Orwell, 'Homage to Catalonia, ch. 3'

The most effective Anarchist unit in Catalonia was the Durruti Column, led by the militant Buenaventura Durruti, it fought mainly in the Aragon front. It was the only anarchist unit which managed to gain respect from otherwise fiercely hostile political opponents. In a section of her memoirs which otherwise lambasts the anarchists, Communist militant Dolores Ibarruri states: "The war developed with minimal participation from the anarchists in its fundamental operations. One exception was Durruti...."

The column began with 3,000 troops but at its peak, was made up of about 8,000 people. They had a difficult time getting arms from a suspicious Republican government, so Durruti and his men compensated by seizing unused arms from government stockpiles. Durruti's death on November 20, 1936, weakened the Column in spirit and tactical ability; they were eventually incorporated, by decree, into the regular army. Over a quarter of the population of Barcelona attended Durruti's funeral. It is still uncertain how Durruti died. Modern historians tend to agree that it was an accident, perhaps a malfunction with his own gun. Widespread rumors at the time claimed treachery by his men. Anarchists tended to claim that he died heroically and was shot by a fascist sniper.

Because of the need to create a centralized military, the Communist party was in favor of establishing a regular army and integrating the militias into this new force. They were the first party to dissolve their militia forces, including the fifth regiment, one of the most effective units in the war, and create 'mixed brigades', forming the core of the new 'Popular Army'. These units were firmly under the oversight of Communist party Commissars and under the command of experienced army officers. The Communist party eventually came to dominate the leadership of the new army through their commissars, who used any means at their disposal, including violence and death threats, to increase party membership. Soviet army advisers and NKVD agents also exercised considerable influence within the new armed forces.

The CNT, POUM and other socialist militias initially resisted the integration. The CNT saw the militias as representing the will of the people while a centralized army was against its anti-authoritarian principles. They also feared the army as an organ of the Communist party, and these fears were backed up by the historical suppression of Russian anarchists by the Bolsheviks during the Russian revolution. However, the CNT were eventually forced to yield to militarization, since the government refused to supply and arm its militias unless they joined the regular army. The experiences of CNT leaders in the front with the badly organized militias and the examples of better structured units such as the International Brigades also made them change their minds and support the creation of a regular army. The CNT conducted its own militarization. Helmut Ruediger of the AIT reported on May 1937: "There is now in the central zone a CNT army of thirty-three thousand men perfectly armed, well-organized, and with membership cards of the CNT from the first to the last man, under the control of officers also belonging to the CNT." Militarization was still resisted by the most radical Anarchists within the CNT-FAI who were extremely passionate about their libertarian ideals. More than any other unit, the famous and notorious Iron Column fiercely resisted militarization. Composed of anarchists from Valencia and freed convicts, the Iron Column was critical of the CNT-FAI for joining the national government and defended the militia system in their periodical Linea de Fuego. The CNT refused to supply them with arms and in March 1937 they were incorporated into the regular army.

After the fall of the government of Largo Caballero and the rise of the Communist party to dominance in the armed forces, the integration of the militias was accelerated and most units were coerced into joining the regular army.