The opening dispositions found the 29th Brigata in the open ground to
the south. That way enemy artillery would be encouraged to waste its attention on
them while the politically sound internationals closed over the rough (hilly) terrain
offering some shelter and somewhat delayed arrival. Shown in photo 2 are the
Serbian tanks with some volunteer infantry (Basque and Trostkyite) in trucks
poised to take advantage of the extreme road moves, while the infantry legs it over
the rough terrain. According to Willoughby (Maneuver In War- The Spanish
Civil War) tanks usually outran the infantry they were supposed to support
and got into trouble on their own. Talk about realism!
SURPRISE! The road had been ranged in, and, as the famous Willie and Joe cartoon puts it, a moving foxhole is too conspicuous. The politically correct erbians and their fellow travelers in the trucks attract A the artillery Fire. Who wants to waste shots on Anarchists when they have real Russian tanks to shoot at~ The rules provide for reduced effects for indirect shellfire on tanks (even the thinly armored vehicles of this period) but packed road columns take triple casualties. Within a turn or two the division commander is already moving up to the top of Stalin's Purge list. The tanks and trucks finally deployed to avoid the incoming hellfire, but trucks don't move well off the roads, so the blitzkrieg come up short.
While the reserve artillery pounded Teruel from the reverse slope, the 29th Brigata, spearheaded by elite dynamite carrying Anarchigts of the CNT advanced behind its home built armored truck supported by motley militia sweeping across the plain.
On the more direct road passing through Santa Cruz, the Ist and 25th Brigatas took advantage of the distraction to advance up to the town and try to seize the bridge. The Republicans were not informed about whether or not the town was occupied. In the HISTORICON 91 scenario they found out by sending the Basques over the bridge in column-which is okay if you don't like Basques. This time, as shown, the commander prudently deployed supporting weapons before throwing his advance elements into Santa Cruz (Photo 4). The 25th went in first the old 5th was too politically reliable to be risked. The buildings on the near side of the river were seized without opposition and an exchange of fire began with the Gardia Civil on the opposite side.
Unfortunately a preoccupation with the (undefended) town proved to be the undoing of these elite troops who showed a rather negative reaction to a charge threat by Nationalist cavalry. It was noted (Between The Bullet And The Lie) that the Teruel region was ideal cavalry country--cavalry moving through the hills could get within a few hundred yards of troops and vehicles on roads without being detected. The subsequent heroic charge (Photo 5) supported by automatic weapons at the edge of the woods in case anyone tries to rally, pretty much ended the Santa Cruz offensive. However, the troops in the town were immune to saber charges. The player in charge wanted to fire into the cavalry pursuit. In most periods this is discouraged by the rules. However, this SCW was a rather savage affair) and I decided to allow them to ignore the Gardia Civil over the river and fire into the mob. When troops are in contact or intermixed in these rules they each take full casualties. This caused the surviving cavalry and fugitives to leave a respectable distance between themselves and the town.
Meanwhile, back to the Anarchists! Sweeping across the plain they make
the mistake of committing the Rube Goldberg armored truck to rough terrain. As for
the heroic garrison. The regulars in Teruel have about had it due to prolonged
shellfire and began to fade back from the town, but fortunately the Nationalists had dashed up some truck borne Requetes. (Photo 6). People tell me I shouldn't use U.S. Army deuce and a halfs. Well as it happens a photo in Carros De Combate shows an Italian truck that looks superficially like an underscale deuce and a half. The vehicles shown are mini-tank models left over from an Ariete Armored
Division for the Western Desert and bear Italian unit markings.
Due to the inordinately meager mobility of home built AFV in hills the 29th begins to sweep past their armored support (Photo 6) and engage the Requetes defending the outskirts of Teruel. Note that my experimental rules treat any infantry halted under fire as prone. No special orders arc required. A case can be made that inexperienced and/or untrained troops would have to use up an order chit to do this unless responding to a morale check with a Pinned result. Prone troops count as being at the next longer range, and since the short and medium ranges for Anarchist militia arc rather short, and that for Requetes not much better, most of the killing is up to the machinegunners and armored truck.
Photo 1 shows the Anarchist high water mark. Both attackers and defenders have been thinned out by casualties and desertion. The Armored Truck people have taken minor casualties and shown themselves cowards (morale role of 1.) Fortunately they had made it to the road so it would not be necessary to abandon the vehicle to retreat in an expeditious manner. This pretty much ended the Teruel Offensive at NOVAG.
While all this had been going on there had been some panic and consternation to the northwest as the cavalry regrouped and prepared to advance on the artillery position. However the division commander (represented by the flag base) had scrounged up some of his trucks and sent them off to retrieve die Assahos, who had been discretely following the offensive in the gap between the Internationals and the Anarchists. A new line of well trained and well armed riot police at least ended the chance for a glorious saber charge down the gun line.
NOTES ON RULES AND GAMING THE SCW OF 1936-39
I mentioned earlier that my own gaming of the period used Arriba Espana by Bob Cordery (Partizan Press) as a point of departure. That rule system describes variations for 6mm, 10mm and 20mm games, in the latter of which 2 figures on a 50mm by 35mm base represent a platoon. In the smaller scales 3 figures are used and the base is a company. I began with the same base size and 3 figures, partly because having acquired the U.S. production rights for the HOTSPUR SCW line from the late Dave Alsopp, I can get the figures cheap. That led to what some described as a Napoleonic Look to some of my early playtests. I compensated by specifying intervals between bases a violation of which will increase fire casualties. I also used the higher level of representation (base equals company or squadron) for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which, as mentioned earlier, was the desire to be able to stage games large enough to have brigades of different political persuasion in the game. Even the Command Decision level of representation (roughly a base per platoon or less) would have required an awful lot of troops to get the mix I was looking for.
Actually I needn't have bothered. Franco apparently went out of his way to mingle battalions of different types in his combat divisions. In the Teruel counterattack, for example, the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Division consisted of the X Battalion of the Zaragoza Infantry, V and IX of the Merida Infantry, IV Tabor Regulates (Moors) of Tetuan, IV Tabor of Regulates of Melilla, and the Galicia Bandera of the Falange Espanole Traditionaliste (FET.), while the 2nd Brigade consisted of the 11 Bandera of the Tercio (Spanish Foreign Legion) I, VI, VII, and IX Battalions of the Zaragoza Infantry, and the )QV of the Zamora Infintry.(Battalla De Terue Servicio Historico Militar) The regular infantry regiments, apparently, showed early signs of sliding into the modem pattern of losing tactical identity. As early as The March on Madrid battalions more often than not acted independently of the regiment. Moreover, they broke down internally to incorporate volunteem
In 1936 one column approaching Sommosierra consisted of a battalion each of the Sicily and America regiments, a section of Zapadores (sappers) and later added 2 batteries of light artillery, two companies of the Arapiles Mountain Infantry Battalion and a group of Falange volunteers. Moreover, the battalions in the first group, unless my poor Spanish has led me astray, incorporated 2 companies of regular infantry with 2 of Requetes and 1 of Falangists (La Marcha Sobre Mahid-Servicio Historico Militar.)
As for the Republicans, they opposed the above column with a force under the command of a Loyalist Colonel named Bernal, who had 277 Security troops (Gardia and Assalto), 458 infantry, 278 cavalry, 80 Air Force troops, 191 artillerymen, 90 sappers, 764 miscellaneous Militia and medical personnel. The latter column had managed to wipe out most of an otherwise unidentified guerilla outpost of about 70 Nationalists who were trying to hold a key position until the main force arrived. (IBID)
The Republicans began with political militias and left over regular units plus the bulk of the ASALTOS and some GARDIA CI`VIL The basic unit was at first notionally a Centuria, or a hundred men usually of the same political persuasion. George Orwell said of his unit, which seems to have been essentially a non-Stalinist Communist element, that it was supposed to have consisted of 100 men but actually included eighty men and several dogs (Orwell Homage To Catalonia.p 18).
Orwell describes the early organization as follows: The workers militias had not been organized on an ordinary basis. The units of command were the section" of about thirty men, the centuria of about a hundred men, and the column which in practice meant any large number of men." (Hommage p.7).
At any rate it should be obvious that there is historical precedent to mix the eclectic types of troops of the Spanish Civil War in scenarios tailored to the CommandDecision level of representation. And while I personally have trouble with the suspension of incredulity needed to play TSATF, and find true skirmish gaming a bit personal for may taste, the diversity can even be stretched to that level without violating the historical patterns.
Equipment issue in the Republic was heavily influenced by political affiliation - regulars and some elite communist units like the 5th Regiment were fairly well equipped with Spanish Army weapons (Mauser rifles, Bergmann SMG, Hotchkiss machineguns.)
The Internationals came to be equipped with predominately Soviet (or pre- Soviet) Russian equipment - although at first it was catch as catch can. Such politically undesirable people as the 29th which was formed from the Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista (POUM-so called Trotskyites) and Confederation National de Trabajadores, (CNT or Anarchists) were lucky to have old Spanish equipment when on duty. Orwell describes an attack which led to defending a trench against a Fascist counterattack, and he lamented that they could have held out forever If we had a submachinegun or 10 clean rifles (Of course they didn't).
By contrast stories of the British Internationals and the later Lincoln Battalion (American) indicate that in addition to a fair supply of Moisin Nagant M95 7.65 rifles they came to have a moderate supply of Degterov LMG and the machinegun company normally had the wheeled Russian Maxim. On really good days an International Battalion might have an anti-tank and a mortar section as well.
One other point: Readers may be concerned about all the profusion of battleflags in this rather late period. For those who asked Were flags carried on the battlefield in 1870? 1 was once able to answer Yes, in moderation. With respect to the Spanish War of 1936-39 the answer is Yes, only more so.Whatever their faults, moderation was not one of them.
Orwell (OP.Cit.) reported: On the opposite hill top ... seven hundred meters away at the very least, the tiny outline of a parapet and a red and yellow flag - the Fascist position.(p.21) Over to our right there was a small outpost, also POUM, and on the spur to our left, at seven o'clock of us, a PSUC position faced a taller spur with several small Fascist posts dotted on its peaks. The so-called line .... would have been quite unintelligible if every position had not shown a flag. The POUM and PSUC flags were red. Those of the Anarchists red and black; the Fascists generally flew the monarchist flag (red-yellow-red), but occasionally they flew the flag of the Republic (p.24-Orwell later doubted the use of the latter flag by Fascists).
Were flags only posted on fixed positions? Apparently not. He later reported that while on patrol near enemy lines I came upon relics of earlier fighting ... and a red flag, obviously one of our own. I took it back to the position where it was unsentimentally torn up for cleaning rags. (p.26. Orwell had introduced his troops to the custom of using drop cloths to clean rifles. It is not clear that they had ever cleaned a rifle before he got there.)
Of course the Traditionalistas were inherently prone to use flags as well as crucifixes on poles (Requetes) as symbols in attack and defense, particularly in cavalry charges (it isn't easy to conceal a cavalry charge anyway.) I doubt, however, that they used their battleflags to clean rifles.
I must admit the red flag of my International Brigade HQ is apocryphal. I based it on the commemorative vexilliurn for the British Internationals which appears in color on the cover of Partizan Press' reprint of JARAMA. It wasn't actually carried in the field, but I found it rather attractive. A Republican (red-yellow-purple) flag with a circle and 3 pointed star was more commonly associated with the Internationals.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES
In addition to the PARTIZAN PRESS series, and such popular general works in English there are naturally many Spanish language books and publications on this war which dominates Spanish history of this century. The handiest source of these is probably BARREIRA MILITARIA Agremiado Nurn. 98.827, Mayor 4 Madrid Spain. These include a series of MONOGRAPHIAS DE LA GUERRA. DE ESPANA 1936-1939 par J. Martinez Bande based on Spanish Army Historical Service data. The principle work on Spanish Civil War Armor is CARROS DE COMBATE DE LA GUERRA CIVIL ESPANOLA by F.C. Albert. However, for those who read no Spanish, much of the material in Albert's book is contained in PARTIZAN PRESS' TANKS AND TRUCKS OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR.
THE FOLLOWING TITLES ARE ALSO RECOMMENDED:
Brome, Vincent William Morran Co. NY 1966, THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES IN
SPAIN 1936-1939
Eby, Cecil Holt Rinehart & Co. NY 1969, BETWEEN THE BULLET AND THE LIE
Larios, Capt Jose, Marquis de Larios, Duke of Lerma MacMillan NY 1966,
COMBAT OVER SPAIN
Proctor, Raymond L. Greenwood Press, Westport CT 1983, HITLER'S
LUFTWAFFE IN SPAIN
Snellgrave, LE. NY, Chicago, San Francisco 1965, FRANCO AND THE SPANISH
CIVIL WAR
Wyden, Peter H. Simon & Schuster, NY 1983, THE PASSIONATE WAR
Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
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