Today's British Army are convinced of the military value of Battlefield touring. As our current experience consist largely of peace support and counter-terrorism operations we see properly organised battlefield tours as a valuable way to learn lessons about High Intensity warfare. Every year dozens of British Army Battlefield tours visit Normandy, Arnhem, the Ardennes, Cassino, Ypres, the Somme, Cambrai and other sites of interest, mainly from the two World Wars. Information gleaned from these tours is collated at the Army's Tactical Doctrine Retrieval Cell in Upavon, Wiltshire so officers organising the tours do not have to "re-invent the wheel" each time they are planning one.

Until this year none of these many tours had featured the Spanish Civil War. The reason for this is that detailed accounts of actions involving the British Army are available in profusion in Unit War Diaries held in the Public Record Office in Kew, Regimental Histories, the Imperial War Museum and many Army libraries including the Prince Consort's in Aldershot and the excellent Sandhurst library. No such sources are easily available, to the non-Spanish speaker, for the Spanish Civil War. The many lessons that war holds for today's Army have therefore remained unlearnt. As I arrived recently at the British Army's Combined Arms Training Centre at Warminster in Wiltshire, and Spain was really the birthplace of Combined Arms Warfare (Infantry-tank co-operation, effective anti-tank defence and,most importantly, close air support to ground forces), I decided it was time for the British Army to look at the Spanish Civil War. Classroom study is boring, for all but the most enthusiastic Military Historians, so a battlefield tour was the answer.

Preliminary reading identified three alternative areas that could be visited, to avoid excessive travelling, in a short (4 day) tour. The choice lay between the Northern Area (Bilbao, Santander and the Basque Country), the Eastern Area (Barcelona, Teruel and the Ebro) and the Madrid Front. As only one area could be visited, the sheer variety of the siege of the Alcazar, the British Battalion's baptism of fire on the Jarama, the Italian Civil War within the civil war at Guadalajara and, most of all, the street fighting in the University City, all combined to make the Madrid Front my chosen destination.

To bring battlefields to life what are required, above all, are detailed accounts of engagements down at battalion or better still company level, enlivened by personal anecdotes and accompanied, if possible by large scale maps or at least sketch maps. Whilst many books are available on the Spanish Civil War, few (at least in English) go into this kind of detail. Assisted by various Book Search engines onthe word wide web the following books were assembled. I list them in order of usefulness to me, beginning with the most useful. Some are well known and some less so.

1. "The Spanish Civil War" by Hugh Thomas
2. "The Battle for Madrid" by George Hills
3. "The Siege of the Alcazar" by Cecil Eby
4. "The Spanish Civil War" by Patrick Turnbull
5. "Miracle of November" by Dan Kurzman
6. "The Spanish Civil War" by Anthony Beevor
7. "They Shall Not Pass" by Richard Kisch
8. "International Brigades in Spain" by Ken Bradley
9. "The Shallow Grave" by Walter Gregory
10. "The Struggle for Madrid" by Robert Colodny
11. "The Irish and the Spanish Civil War" by Robert Stradling
12. "Phoenix Triumphant......... The Rise of the Luffwaffe" by E R Hooton
13. "Boadilla" by Esmond Romilly
14. "Franco" by Paul Preston
15. "The Spanish Foreign Legion" by John Scorr
16. "Blood of Spain" by Ronald Fraser
17. "Disciplina Camarades" by Christopher Hall
18. "Revolutionary Warfare: Spain 1936-37" by Christopher Hall

I was unable to obtain the following titles, much to my regret, as I felt they would have been particularly useful in my research:

1. "Battle of Jarama" by Frank Graham
2. "Book of XV Brigade" by Frank Graham
3. "English Captain" by Tom Winteringham
4. "British Volunteers for Liberty" by Bill Alexander
5. "I was a FrancO Soldier" by Seamus McKee
6. "Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion" by Victor Hear
7. "Mine was of Trouble" by Peter Kemp
8. "March of a Nation" by Harold Cardoza

Having obtained as many books as I could the next stage was acquiring large scale mapping. Again the Internet came to my aid. Themapshop@btinternet.com can supply 1:50,000 scale military mapping for the whole of Spain at £ 3 per sheet. About 12 sheets are needed to cover all the battles that we visited on the Madrid Front.

The details of the battles gleaned from the various books were compared (it will come as no surprise to Spanish Civil War aficionados that they vary wildly) and the results were then plotted on plastic overlays placed on the relevant maps. A close study of the resultant red and blue arrows, the terrain beneath them and finally a reconnaissance of all the battlefrelds enabled me to build up a narrative for each battle and identify suitable viewpoints from which to deliver these narratives. The reconnaissance phase took 2 1/2 days and the tour itself (for which I was joined by a 15 strong party from the Land Warfare Training Centre consisting of two Lieutenant Colonels, five Majors, three Captains, one Warrant Officer, three Colour Sergeants and one Corporal Major) 4 days. Throughout that period our base was the ideally located Hotel Mercator on the Calle-Atocha. This offered twinrooms for ;£ 26 per person per night and, vitally for Madrid, its own car park. Return flights from Luton to Madrid were £ 115 each with Easyjet and two "people carriers" were hired from Europcar at Madrid airport.

As to the tour itself, as my research progressed I realised it was going to be interesting. Any conflict including combatants as varied as the Tiradores of Ifni, the Irish Blueshirts, and Condor Legion and the Anarchist Militias could not fail to be so. A 'dramatis personnae' including Durrutti, Lister, El Campesino, von Richtofen, George Nathan, Varela, Kleber, Moscardo to name but a handful has more variety than can be found in a 50 mile radius in any other war I can think of. As my reconnaissance took place I realised that it was not going to be just interesting, it was going to be fascinating, because many of the battlefields were unaltered and others were very easy to visualise. We tried to arrange the tour in chronological order from July 1936 until the Madrid front effectively stalemated in July 1937. These are the battles we visited and what we found there.

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