Of all the wars of the 20th century, the Spanish Civil War has to have been one of the most confusing to outsiders at the time and virtually unreadable to moderns who didn’t live through that tumultuous era. I’ve read and enjoyed Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, but it’s not a history of the whole war: Orwell was an enlisted volunteer who served on a “quiet” sector until he was seriously wounded by a Nationalist sniper. He discusses the situations he encountered personally and avoids, for the most part, editorializing the larger strategic conflict (the TimeGhost team did a pretty helpful video on how the war was triggered that may be informative). As a result of the lack of clarity and the confused narratives, the Spanish Civil War hasn’t been covered in wargames to any great degree, but Jonathan Kay found a scenario for Advanced Squad Leader on part of the conflict that he clearly found intriguing:
The Spanish Civil War was, in human terms, an epic clash of arms: Almost 300,000 combatants are thought to have been killed, as well as more than 150,000 civilians. The conflict also looms large in the history of the 20th century, having been memorably described by U.S. ambassador to Spain Claude Bowers as the “dress rehearsal” for World War II.
Among the idealistic combatants who travelled to Spain to join the fight against fascism were Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, whose war experiences served to inform, respectively, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Homage to Catalonia. The war also inspired Pablo Picasso’s unsettling surrealist masterpiece Guernica, which depicted the bombing of the Basque town of the same name on April 26, 1937.
Picasso’s Guernica in mural form in the town of Guernica.
Photo by Papamanila via Wikimedia Commons.
All in all, something like 50,000 foreigners assisted the Republican side through the International Brigades — whose Brigada Abraham Lincoln included a Washington Battalion made up of Americans, and a Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion made up of Canadians. At least a quarter of these international volunteers died in combat, but most of the rest went home with frightening stories to tell. Even before the Nazis invaded Poland, the world’s understanding of fascism’s existential threat to humanity was shaped by General Francisco Franco’s successful campaign to topple the Second Spanish Republic.
And yet one thing that the Spanish Civil War has not yielded is a wide array of popular boardgames. This may be partly due to the fact that the conflict was so greatly overshadowed in scale and importance by World War II. But it may also be due to the fact that neither side emerged as sympathetic. As Orwell described in Homage to Catalonia (and as Adam Hochschild described, from a U.S. perspective, in his 2016 book, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939), the Republican war effort turned out to be incompetent, fractured, and cynical, with the dominant pro-Stalinist faction eventually turning murderously upon its Trotskyist and anarchist allies. And as late as early March, 1939, just weeks before Franco conquered Madrid and ended the war, Republican forces inside the capital city were engaged in a deadly power struggle within their own ranks. All in all, the many regional and political subplots make the war difficult to model in any kind of conventional wargame (though, of course, this hasn’t stopped numerous game designers from trying).
However, The Beleaguered Capital, HazMo scenario 11, presents a reminder that when Republican and Nationalist forces fought each other in pitched battles, the mode of combat really did offer a preview of World War II, including the use of air power and tanks. (While the only tanks that existed in Spain when the war broke out were a handful of tiny, World War I-era Renault FTs, the Russians sent T-26s to the Republicans while Germany dispatched Pz Is to the Nationalists. In both cases, these vehicles arrived in Spain during the Fall of 1936, just a few months before the December 16 dateline on The Beleaguered Capital.)
