This conference was held at Oxford University's Department of Continuing Education on the 1st-2nd February 1997. Some 60-70 people attended ranging from students and interested parties through to professional historians.

Mary Vincent opened the proceedings with a paper on the second Spanish Republic and the origins of the Civil War. Her paper charted the breakdown of the Second Republic and those aspects of its policies which alienated a large section of the population. In particular, land reform measures which were intended for the large estates of southern Spain were inappropriate when applied to the smaller land holdings of Castile. The Republic's policies on religious practice even extended to the banning of church bell ringing without the permission of the local authority, since their clamour was deemed an infringement on individual religious conscience.

However, civil war did not become inevitable until after the 1936 elections. The failure of the Right to secure power in order to change the constitution and the retum of a Popular Front government, whose intention was to resurrect the aims of the 1931 Republic, demonstrated to the Right that they could not gain power by legal means.

Franco

After tea, Sheelagh Ellwood gave a useful summary of Franco and the Spanish Civil War. The rapid rise of Franco's military career was based on professional merit. His attitude to the Republic though remained ambiguous - the Republic attacked many of the traditional values he held, but he took the oath of loyalty and did not support Sanjurjo's failed coup in 1932.

He was intolerant of failure and entertained no respect for his adversaries, as evidenced by his use of Moorish troops against the Asturian miners in 1934. However, his overriding concern appears to have been self preservation. He did not commit himself to the rising of 1938 until July 13, but once committed, took part with energy and efficiency, assuming a leading role which had perhaps not been anticipated or expected by the other conspirators.

The direction of the war was used by Franco to consolidate his personal position and power, partly through propaganda, but primarily as the one man who could secure aid from Hitler and Mussolini, and through whom that aid was channelled. He was left without a serious rival following the deaths of Sanjurjo and Mola in accidents, but his role in the failure of the plots to rescue Jose Antonio from prison before the latter's execution is at best questionable.

Women's Involvement in War

The afternoon session began with Frances Lannon discussing women's involvement in the war. Utilising a number of slides, she described how images of women were used as a means of propaganda by both sides.

She showed some posters which were issued at the start of the war on the Republican side which pictured armed women fighting alongside men. This contrasted sharply with the majority of later Republican images, whose women were portrayed in a more passive and supportive role. One good example was a poster of the bombing of Guernika, where a distressed woman is holding her baby against a backdrop of devastation.

Nationalist images tended to be far more conservative, with women seen as a supportive auxiliary of the movement, and there were never any doubts among them that a woman's place was in raising a family at home.

Frances Lannon explained that the organisation closest approaching a Feminist viewpoint in Republican Spain (despite the fact that many of its activists and members did not see themselves as Feminists) was the Anarchist "Mujeres Libres" or "Free Women." These women had found that even in the CNT, an organisation committed to bringing about a free and equal society, a concern or desire for sexual equality was a moot point as far as many Anarchist men were concerned.

Republican Mobilization

After a tea break, Helen Graham lectured on the Republican experience of mobilising for total war. She explained that the Nationalist victories in their march from Seville to Madrid proved that the militias were incapable of meeting the Nationalist's forces on anything approaching equal terms. Only the Spanish Communist Party at that time had a clear vision of how an armed force could be organised which could carry out such a task.

This was the Popular Army, an army which was to be organised on traditional lines with an established hierarchy, political commissars, saluting, drill, and unquestioning obedience to authority. There were to be no more discussions once orders had been given, no more elections of leaders, and certainly no more women in the front line.

Helen Graham stressed the point that the revolutionary movement in Republican Spain was no more than "a fringe", and that it was too small to offer any alternative to the PCE's Popular Army. She also disparaged the Mujeres Libres for being a numerically insignificant organisation when compared to the Communist's Organisation of Women Against Fascism.

All in all, Michael Alpert's lecture the next moming proved to be more balanced, as he fully discussed the arguments both for and against the Popular Army.

Irish Volunteers

At 5.30pm Robert Stradling explained the role of Irish volunteers on both sides during the war. It was interesting to hear of how the Blueshirts who joined the Spanish Foreign Legion had some trouble coming to terms with the level of discipline required. He descnbed the occasion when the Irish Bandera, on marching towards the front, was fired on by a friendly Nationalist unit who believed them to be International Brigaders trying to infiltrate behind the lines. In the ensuing firefight, the Irish managed to inflict serious casualties on the Nationalist unit for a very small loss to themselves.

On the Republican side, Robert Stradling showed how the Irish volunteers were never content in the International Brigades, and of how they flitted between the American and British battalions.

All in all, the Irish on both sides did not overly distinguish themselves. A lot of fun was poked at the Blueshirts when they resumed, for not only had they killed far more of their own side than they had of the enemy, but they were also the only armed force in history to come back from war with more men than they had set out with.

Michael Alpert's look at the Republican and Nationalist armies in the civil war began the Sunday session. After reviewing the military forces available to each side at the outset of war, he considered their effectiveness. Both sides initially relied on garrisons for the bulk of their troops. However, Nationalist units retained their command structure and organisation from the outset, and its militias were placed immediately under army control.

In contrast, in the first stages of the rising the government had released soldiers from their oath of obedience to superior officers. Those units which remained loyal either had their command structures disrupted and/or their rank and file desert to join militias. The Republic was therefore forced to rebuild an army from scratch using a core of officers and NCOs most of whom were, rightly or wrongly, regarded with suspicion.

The Republican militias, though incorporating many ex-rank and file soldiers, were not placed under military discipline or orders at the outset, although the value of military "specialists" or "tecnicos" was recognised in their appointment as advisors to militia columns and in the efforts of those militias to set up their own military academies.

Guerrilla warfare was largely ignored by the military of both sides, and with the exception of Republican raids on the Seville railway, both sides intended to fight their war with "conventional' military forces. The militarisation of the militias was made difficult by the fact that the Republic was headed by a civilian government with noncentralised ministries - there was no overall head of the armed forces, and they retained their separate administrations for army, air force and navy. Furthermore, in addition to political considerations the militias had, after all, taken on and defeated the traditional military establishment during the July rising and in the battle for Madrid.

Militarisation was begun in September 1936 by Largo Caballero following the arrival of a Soviet mission to prepare the army to receive new Russian equipment. In the course of the following year the election of officers was abolished, and a military hierarchy was restored. Indeed, one reason why so many regular officers either joined or supported the Communist Party may have been that the Communist style army discipline restored the respect and deference to military authority which many officers felt that they had lost in July 1936.

In tactical and strategic matters the point was made that Republican units did not function well at lower command levels due to a lack of trained junior officers and NCOs. Its logistical support was less effcient than the Nationalists, who were able to react rapidly to the strategic surprise which Republican offensives frequently achieved but were consequently unable to exploit. On the battlefield the Nationalists had the use of the Condor legion, a formation of which there was no equivalent on the Republican side.

Consequences

The weekend concluded after tea with Paul Heywood on the Consequences of the Civil War. No attempt was made by the Franco regime to reconcile its defeated opponents, and a savage repression followed which has been largely overlooked by foreign historians. The number of those executed in the years following the war vary between 50,000 and 200,000. War memorials were set up only for the Nationalist dead, and propaganda images projected Franco's vision of Spain.

Though Franco avoided active participation in the Second World War, his support of Hitler and Mussolini isolated Spain in the years following their defeat. Spain's transition to democracy following Franco's death was all the more remarkable because he appears to have made little preparation for the country's future after his death.

Factors other than Franco's vision of Spain paved the way for democracy. The international situation changed - the USA cultivated Franco as an ally in the cold war, facilitating its reintegration into western diplomatic and economic circles in the 1950s. Under Pope John XXIII, the Roman Catholic church disassociated itself from Franco's regime, whilst in Spain itself, underground unions and strike movements developed with which employers negotiated.

Above all, by the 1970s, many of the leading participants were dead and most people had had no direct experience of the war. A tacit agreement to overlook the past was made following Franco's death, and the first election results were a rejection of parties on both right and left extremes.

Overall

Overall it was a very useful weekend with some interesting insights into the background of the war. If there is a criticism, it would be that very few visual aids were used - speakers constantly had to refer listeners to hand out maps which didn't always have marked the places they were talking about. In a conflict which produced so many striking visual images of the struggle it would have been useful to see more of them used to illustrate the points made. If another conference is held in the future, anyone interested in the civil war would be mad to miss it.