In addition to the nine viewpoints on five battlefield listed above the party also visited the Spanish Army Museum in Madrid, the Spanish Army Tank Museum in El Goloso Barracks 10 miles North of the city and the Valley of the Fallen 20 miles to the north west.

The first of these is quite fascinating with one room devoted to the SCW, which features a model of the key terrain in the University City fighting but also several galleries packed with exhibits from other eras. These include everything from the Conquistadors in the Americas, to the colonial campaigns in Morocco by way of the Napoleonic, Carlist and Spanish-American wars in Cuba and the Philippines. Particularly striking are some marvellous scale models of Vauban fortifications made by Spanish Army Engineers as training exercises and a large collection of primitive artillery of all shapes and sizes.

The tank museum at El Goloso is only open at evenings and weekends as it is really only several grassed areas adjacent to the tank park in the barracks of an Armoured Infantry Brigade. Showing our passports and being issued with security passes we saw a small collection of Armoured vehicles from the SCW to the present day. It is worth visiting as it allows one to appreciate the tiny size of the Italian L33 tankettes and German Panzer I tanks and how they were dwarfed by the Russian T26, itself diminutive by the standards of later WWII tanks. These facts cannot truly be appreciated from photographs.

Finally the Valley of the Fallen provided a fitting viewpoint from which to sum up our tour of the SCW on the Madrid Front. Here the giant underground basilica, below the largest stone cross in the world says more about Franco than the history books do. It provides a good backdrop against which to review the eventual end of the war, its cost to Spain in blood, how its aftermath became woven into WWII and how Spain started to shake off its legacy as the last Republican resistance was extinguished in 1960.

The tour was greatly enjoyed by all participants as Spain is a very benign area in which to battlefield tour and a lot can be seen on the Madrid Front without too much travelling about. Now that my report has been submitted to the Army's Tactical Doctrine Retrieval Cell it is thought that other Army units may also begin to tour the SCW battlefields. I certainly plan to return to further my explorations and am already planning my next trips which will probably be long weekends in Autumn this year and Spring next year.

A Battlefield Tour of the Madrid Front

Introduction
Siege of Alcazar
Battle for Madrid
Battle of Jarama 1937
Battle of Guadalajara 1937
Battle of Brunete 1937
Other Places of Interest