Confederal militias

The origin of the CNT militias in the Spanish Civil War is in the Defense Committees, clandestine military organizations of the CNT that were financed by and subordinate to the unions. The essential functions of the defense committees were twofold: arms and administration. These committees were a reorganization and expansion of different affinity groups, such as Los Solidarios, who fought against the bosses' pistolerismo between 1917 and 1923.[3]

In 1934, other factions began to organize their own clandestine militias. The Communist Party formed the Antifascist Worker and Peasant Militias.[4] The Carlists formed the Frente Nacional de Boinas Rojas,[5][6] in an attempt to create a hierarchical national Requeté structure,[7] detached from local Carlist juntas.[8] The newly founded Falange Española de las JONS also formed their own militia, the Primera Línea.[9]

In October 1934, the CNT Defense Committees abandoned the old affinity group tactic in favor of serious and methodical revolutionary preparation:

There can be no revolution without preparation. We have to put an end to the prejudice in favor of improvisation. This error, involving confidence in the creative instinct of the masses, has caused us to pay a heavy price. We cannot obtain by means of a process of spontaneous generation the indispensable means necessary for waging war on a State that has experience, heavy weaponry, and a greater capacity for offensive and defensive combat.[3]

The basic defense group had to be small in order to facilitate its secrecy. It had to be made up of six militants, with very specific functions:[3]

• Secretary, in charge of contacting other cadres, creating new groups and preparing reports.
• Personal Investigator, in charge of assessing the danger posed by enemies, such as priests, the military, and pistoleros.
• Building Investigator, in charge of drafting up blueprints and the preparation of statistical reports.
• Researcher, in charge of determining strategic points and tactics for street fighting.
• Researcher, in charge of studying public services: electricity, water, gas, sewerage.
• Investigator, in charge of determining where to obtain arms, money and supplies.

To that ideal figure of six, one more member could be added to cover “high-profile” tasks. The clandestinity of the group had to be absolute. They were the basic nucleus of a revolutionary armed force, capable of mobilizing larger secondary groups, and these, in turn, the entire people.[3]

The scope of action of each defense group was a very precise demarcation within each neighborhood, indicated on a map. The neighborhood defense committee coordinated all these defense cadres, and received a monthly report from each of the group secretaries. The defense committees were also organized at the regional and national level, due to the importance of communications and coordination in a revolutionary insurrection.[3]

The Defense Committees were replaced, in August 1936, by the Control Patrols acting under the command of the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia. However, the defense committees were reactivated during the Barcelona May Days, when the Spanish Republic clashed with the CNT-FAI and POUM, in a dispute over the control of Revolutionary Catalonia.[3]

The Aragon front in 1936.

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On July 19, 1936 in Barcelona, the military garrison had about six thousand men, compared to almost two thousand assault guards and two hundred Mossos d'Esquadra. The Civil Guard, who were split between both sides were about three thousand. The CNT-FAI had about twenty thousand militants (among some 200,000 affiliates), organized in neighborhood defense committees. In the CNT's liaison commission with the Government of Catalonia and the loyalist military, they promised to stop the coup plotters with only a thousand armed militants.

There was a double transformation of those defense cadres. That of the popular militias, who defined the Aragon front in the first days, establishing the collectivization of land in the liberated Aragonese towns; and that of the revolutionary committees that brought about a "new revolutionary order", in every neighborhood of Barcelona and in every town in Catalonia. Their common origin in the defense cadres meant that confederal militias and revolutionary committees were always very united and interrelated. Those local committees, in some towns, were the result of the relationship of forces existing in each locality, and sometimes they were merely front-populist organs, without any revolutionary aspiration.

The revolutionary committees carried out important administrative tasks ranging from the issuance of food vouchers, safe conduct passes, wedding celebrations, supply and maintenance of hospitals, to the expropriation of food, furniture and buildings, financing of secular education and schools managed by the Libertarian Youth, payments to militiamen, or to their families, etc.

On July 21, a Plenum of Local and Regional unions of the CNT renounced the very coordination and extension of power that the revolutionary committees already exercised in the streets. It was decided to accept the creation of the Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias of Catalonia (CCMA), an organism in which all anti-fascist organizations participated.

As of this moment, it was the CCMA and not the CNT-FAI who directed the military operations in Catalonia and, from there, the Aragon front. On July 24, the first two anarchist columns departed, under the command of Buenaventura Durruti and Antonio Ortiz Ramírez. In those same days, columns of the PSUC and the POUM were also formed. In two months, the committee managed to organize 20,000 militiamen who were spread out across a 300-kilometer front. The aforementioned defense committees ceased to operate in Barcelona since either their members were in the neighborhood committees organizing the revolution, or they were on the war fronts. They remained inactive until May 1937.

Between July 21 and mid-August 1936 the Control Patrols were established by the CCMA. Approximately half of the 700 patrollers had a CNT card, or were from the FAI; the other half was affiliated with the rest of the component organizations of the CCMA: POUM, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) and PSUC. Only four section delegates, out of the eleven existing, were from the CNT: those from Poblenou, Sants, Harmonia and Clot; four others were from ERC, three from PSUC and none from POUM.

What was happening in Barcelona was of transcendental importance for the CNT in all of Spain since it was in this city where it had the most affiliates, its best militant cadres, and its most powerful and veteran organization. It was then in Barcelona where the decisions made by the CNT were going to affect the future course of the entire CNT in the country.

Regional map of the CNT

Andalusia   Aragon-La Rioja   Asturias-León   Canary Islands   Catalonia-Balearics   Central

Extremadura   Galicia   Levante   Murcia   North

The CNT militias functioned in the form of columns, especially in Catalonia and Valencia. In order to operate better, they were subdivided into Groups or Divisions, which were equivalent to the battalions in Aragon and Valencia respectively. When the militarization of the columns came, they first became Mixed Brigades, and the Catalan ones, which were more numerous, directly became divisions.

Milicianas of the CNT-FAI in Barcelona, July 1936.

Woman with a rifle near a cannon, Barcelona, 1936.

The appearance of the militias was the result of the revolutionary situation in the republican zone during the beginning of the civil war. During the first days the libertarian, socialist and communist organizations called to arms anyone who could, and wanted to, take them up. Among the volunteers were many women. From the first days of the Civil War, the newspaper "Libertarian Front" launched a campaign for the enlistment of women in the workers' militias.

The first fighters who wore the blue jumpsuit, the uniform of the workers' militias, the barracks cap with a red tassel, and a carabiner on the shoulder, or a pistol at the belt, were the libertarian women, soon followed by the Socialists and the Communists, although the latter were not supporters of the incorporation of women into the armed struggle. In a climate of indescribable exaltation, women organized themselves into popular militias and left for the different war fronts. Among them in the Harriers Column, organized by the FAI and by the Libertarian Youth, up to 200 women participated, making it by far the republican column with the most women. The Free Women, an anarcha-feminist organization did not organize any women's unit, although it was clear that it supported the effort of the militias.

Generally it was young workers from factories, workshops, shops and offices, as well as domestic workers and students, who left their jobs to enlist. Most were teenagers, such as Victoria López Práxedes, sixteen years old, who died fighting in the Talavera sector. And Lolita Maiquez, of the same age, immortalized in the "General Chronicle of the Civil War". But old militants also joined, such as Libertad Ródenas, fifty-four years old, incorporated into the Durruti Column that left for the Aragon front. They generally came from a militant revolutionary environment, with other direct family in the militias (parents, brothers, husbands). There were also internationalists like Mary Low, Simone Weil, Clara Thalmann, and other women, who participated in the war as milicianas.

From the popular astonishment caused by women defending their freedom and that of the community, battalions began to name themselves after revolutionary women: Mariana de Pineda, Aida Lafuente, Lina Ódena, Rosa Luxemburg, La Pasionaria, Margarita Nelken ...

But not everyone approved of the mobilization of women on the fronts. Indalecio Prieto even said that women's mission was in "hospitals, kitchens and factories". The role of women in warfare was called into question, with the old recurring and discriminatory old defamatory slogans. Largo Caballero, in the late autumn of 1936, sustained the discrediting campaign by signing military decrees ordering the milicianas to leave the trenches and go to rear-guard work. Women took over the management of factories, hospitals, schools, shelters, children's camps, evacuation abroad, they also drove trams and ambulances and worked in the agricultural collectives of the countryside.

Due to the shortage of combat means and materials, heavy vehicles such as trucks, buses or agricultural machinery were reinforced with steel plates of different thicknesses. They began to be informally known as "tiznaos" for their disparate colored camouflage. The armor of these makeshift armored vehicles was not usually very effective because the steel plates were unevenly attached, or not thick enough, to the extent that on some occasions the "tiznaos" included mattresses as a protection measure. It also happened that sometimes, when wanting to install vehicles with thicker plates to increase protection, the maneuverability and speed of the vehicle were impaired. Due to deficiencies in armor or handling, the more improvised "tiznaos" were quickly put out of action. Those that had been built with more care and with better technical means lasted longer, some of them surviving the three years of the war.[25]

It was common that the "tiznaos" were covered in graffiti, with the name of the column to which they belonged and the initials of some party, union, or labor organization to which the militiamen who used them adhered.

Michael Alpert in his book The People's Army of the Republic, 1936-1939 states that the confederal militia organization in Madrid had nothing to envy in the Fifth Regiment,[21] and much less in warfare. The differences were mostly ideological. Ideology determined politics, and this made the communist forces have a much wider known role - diffused by propaganda - than the anarchist forces. Soon the politics of the Communist Party caused criticism from the republican press against the role that the militias were playing on the war fronts.

And yet, the popular militias (not only those of the CNT) saved the Republic between July and September 1936. They managed to defeat the uprising in numerous peninsular capitals such as Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Bilbao, Gijón. .. and the militias that would liberate Guadalajara, Cuenca, Albacete or Toledo were organized from these cities. They tried unsuccessfully to liberate Córdoba, Granada, Oviedo or Zaragoza, creating, despite their failure, stable fronts. The army, to contrast, had almost completely revolted against the Republic. And that if there were a few troops left on the republican side, on many occasions they did so without conviction, purely by chance or for fear of rebelling. The troops were at the mercy of the will of officers sympathetic to the Nationalists.

The militiamen were workers and peasants who often took up arms for the first time. They lacked military experience of any kind, which they balanced with a high morale, based on their revolutionary convictions. The troops recruited by the Falange in Castile or some troops of Requetés, as well as the militias organized by the Socialists or the Communists, faced similar difficulties. The only thing that made the difference was the quality of their weapons and command. And in these matters the anarchist militias always suffered a chronic hardship and an almost total boycott by those who controlled the arms supplies. On the nationalist side, the inexperience of the volunteers was solved by framing the Falange troops and the civil guard in secondary units, the weight being carried by the legionary or regular troops who were experienced soldiers, commanded by professional, military personnel, experienced in wartime situations. However, the Republic could not count on an experienced army, since it could not even trust its officers. The war experience had to be practically done from scratch.

It took several months for the militiamen to gain enough experience to face the other side. There was an evolution from the beginning of the war, in which several battalions fell back due to aerial bombardments in August 1936 (for example the Alcoy battalion in Córdoba or the internationalist Malatesta battalion on the Huesca front), until the time of the battles around Madrid in the winter of '36, in which the militiamen no longer retreated in the face of enemy attacks.

The militiamen (and the first soldiers, many of whom had been militiamen before) managed to counter and arrest the best-prepared army in the war, the Army of Africa. The Regulars and the Legionnaires had no rival in Spain until they reached Madrid, where they were stopped at the cost of numerous casualties. There are reports that by November 1 the militiamen had suffered no less than 35,000 casualties.[26] In January 1937, the libertarian militiamen Cipriano Mera, converted from bricklayer to commander of the 14th Division, halted the advance of experienced Italian troops in the battle of Guadalajara.

The weakest fronts garrisoned by the militias were those of Andalusia, in which militiamen were frequently frightened by aerial bombardments. Málaga fell without having been able to organize any resistance. Given the anarchist predominance in the city, the central government of Largo Caballero chose to ignore it and marginalize it from the distribution of weapons, which would lead to its fall in February 1937. On the Extremadura front, in the Guadiana and Tajo valleys, militiamen ran away when the nationalists surrounded them, abandoning their rifles, machine guns and even cannons.

Behind the frontlines, a revolution swept through the republican sector. The country's economy was taken control of by the unions, agrarian communities were created and industry was socialized. There was educational reform. Rental prices were regulated or abolished. In many places the currency was even abolished. The appearance of the Free Women, an organization of anarchist women that in practice led to the emergence of women in the political-social sphere of war, also represented what they called "a revolution within the revolution".

Unlike the PCE, PSUC, PSOE and other republican forces, the war and the revolution were seen as inseparable by the CNT, FAI and POUM, as can be found in these words of Buenaventura Durruti:

Have you already organized your community? Wait no more. Occupy the lands! Organize yourself so that there are no bosses or parasites among you. If you do not do that, it is useless for us to continue forward. We have to create a new world, different from the one we are destroying. If not, then youth is not worth dying on the battlefields. Our field of struggle is revolution. "

— Buenaventura Durruti

To this end, the militias helped and promoted the formation of communes in the towns through which they passed. In Aragón 450 agricultural communes made up of 423,000 people, were formed and integrated into the Council of Aragon. These communes were a source of support in the rear for the militias, in addition to probably representing the closest approach to the ideal of anarchist life that had been fought for in Spain since the First Spanish Republic.[27]

When the Aragonese communes were dissolved in August 1937, production collapsed. The morale of resistance that had prevailed in Aragon collapsed in such a way that the republican government itself authorized the reconstruction of the communes some time later. When the Francoists launched their offensive in the Ebro Valley (after the battle of Teruel) in the spring of 1938 the front fell apart and the nationalists reached as far as Lérida and even the Mediterranean.

The militarization of militias was a controversial issue that has been hotly debated, even within the CNT ranks themselves. Among the most authoritative voices raised against militarization and the formation of a traditional army, that of Durruti stood out, who in the summer of 1936 stated the following :

«I think –and everything that is happening around us confirms my thinking– that a worker militia cannot be led according to the classic rules of the Army. I consider, then, that discipline, coordination and the realization of a plan are indispensable things. But all that cannot be interpreted according to the criteria that were in use in the world that we are destroying. We have to build on new foundations. According to me, and according to my colleagues, solidarity between men is the best incentive to awaken individual responsibility that knows how to accept discipline as an act of self-discipline.

"The war is imposed on us, and the fight that must govern it differs from the tactic with which we have conducted the one we have just won, but the purpose of our fight is the triumph of the revolution. This means not only victory over the enemy, but it must be obtained by a radical change in man. For this change to take place, man must learn to live and conduct himself as a free man, learning in which his powers of responsibility and personality develop as the owner of his own acts. The worker at work not only changes the forms of matter, but also, through that task, modifies himself. The combatant is nothing other than a worker using the rifle as an instrument, and his actions must have the same end as the worker. In the fight he cannot behave like the soldier sent to him, but like a conscious man who knows the significance of his act. I know that obtaining this is not easy, but I also know that what is not obtained by reasoning is not obtained by force either. If our military apparatus of the revolution has to be sustained by fear, it will happen that we have not changed anything, except the color of fear. It is only by freeing oneself from fear that society can build itself in freedom ».

— Buenaventura Durruti

Cipriano Mera, on the other hand, ended up assuming an opinion fully favorable to "militarization":

"Everything that happened reaffirmed me in the idea that it was not possible to face the enemy army if we did not have another equally organized army where iron discipline prevailed. It was no longer a matter of street fights, in which enthusiasm could make up for the lack of preparation, nor was it a matter of simple skirmishes, in which everyone could do whatever they wanted. It was a war, a real war, and therefore it was essential to organize properly, with militarized units, with commanders able to plan operations against the enemy with the least possible losses of men and material. And, above all, compliance with discipline was imposed on all of us. There was no other way to win a war that had been imposed on us. "

"I always believed - and I have repeated it several times - that there was no greater force than self-discipline in free men and that the commitment acquired among all those who felt moved by an ideal was superior to any other consideration. What I experienced made me realize, in the midst of war, that convictions, great ideas, can inspire great heroic deeds and acts, guide a whole life with a commendable exemplarity; but that was not enough to obtain the necessary operational cohesion in the battle fronts, to effect a coordination of values and making possible a logical approach to the inexorable laws of war, both in terms of attack and defense. Our improvisation, our free will, we had paid for with too many lives of comrades, and it was necessary, to reduce the bloodshed, to radically change our behavior, not our ideas."

— Cipriano Mera

The assembly organization of the militias had numerous problems, since lack of discipline was frequent, as well as riots and desertions. In the toughest battles, where the nationalist armies proved to possess more and better means, routing was not uncommon. Situations like this forced military leaders to be vigilant of their soldiers, having in many cases to take the lead in the attacks if they wanted to be followed, so many of the most capable characters fell in the front.[28]

From the autumn of 1936, the militarization of the confederal militias was carried out against the will of many of its members -with the government of Largo Caballero and its "Decree of militarization of the Popular Militias", and the approval of the CNT members in the government -, until 1937, a period in which there was no lack of numerous conflicts regarding the matter. Within the anarchist militias, people such as the founder of the Iron Column, José Pellicer Gandía, opposed militarization, but people such as Cipriano Mera, Miguel García Vivancos and the Basque CNT militias, supported a militarization controlled by the CNT-FAI, rather than by the government. But they were in favor of a militarization controlled by the CNT-FAI and not by the government. Successive decrees of the Government obligatorily restored the military discipline characteristic of the old Army, at the same time that they established logistics and supply organizations under militarized and centralist criteria. Finally, after the Battle of Madrid in November 1936, the Government denied the services of administration and ammunition to militias that resisted militarization. Thus, the militias became regiments or divisions of a regular Army - the so-called Republican People's Army -, and the militiamen became soldiers subject to traditional military discipline.

The Friends of Durruti (4th Grouping of the Durruti Column) decided to withdraw from the Aragon front, taking their weapons with them. In addition there were conflicts in the Ascaso Column. However, the tone was that of accepting militarization due to the circumstances in which the war was entering. On the northern fronts, militarization was never questioned, with confederal militias practically militarized from the beginning. On the Central front and those of Andalusia and Extremadura, militarization was imposed without great problems, except in the Maroto Column, which was dissolved by Negrinists.

According to a report of the "Peninsular Committee of the FAI" of September 30, 1938 - quoted by José Peirats - the percentage of anarchists and confederalists in the Republican Army was 33% (about 150,000 soldiers of about 450,000 soldiers republicans). The 5th, 16th, 20th, 24th, 25th, 26th, 28th, 54th, 63rd, 70th, 71st and 77th divisions had anarchist commanders. Anarchists also had command of 2 army corps. Despite appearing to be important figures, in reality there was a clear under-representation of anarchists in the republican army.[29]

• The "Uncontrollable" Iron Column, March 1937, bilingual Spanish / French edition, editions Champ Libre, Paris, 1979. La Columna de Hierro y la Revolución
• Miquel Amorós, José Pellicer Gandía, the upright anarchist. Life and work of the founder of the Heroic Iron Column , Editorial virus, Barcelona, 2009. ISBN 978-84-92559-02-2
• Miquel Amorós, The revolution betrayed. The true story of Balius and Los Amigos de Durruti , Editorial virus, Barcelona, 2003. ISBN 84-96044-15-7
• Burnett Bolloten, "The Great Deception: The Left and its struggle for power in the Republican zone."
• Abel Paz, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution , AK Press, 2006. ISBN 978-1-904859-50-5. Translated by Chuck W. Morse.[32][33][34][35]
• Abel Paz, The Story of the Iron Column: Militant Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War. AK Press and Kate Sharpley Library, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84935-064-8. Translated by Paul Sharkey.[36]
• Carlos Semprún Maura (1978). Revolution and counterrevolution in Catalonia. Barcelona: Tusquets.
• Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The short summer of anarchy. Durruti's life and death , Barcelona, Anagrama, 1998.
• Antoine Giménez and the Gymnologists, "Of love, war and revolution" followed by "In search of the children of the night", Logroño, Pumpkin seeds, 2009.
• Agustín Guillamón, The CNT Defense Committees (1933-1938) , Barcelona, Aldarull Edicions, 2011. ISBN 978-84-938538-4-6
• José Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution , Toulouse, 1952.

• Militias and military unit confederations, in the Virtual Athenaeum of To the barricades.
• Interpretive Commentary of the Plenary of Confederate Militia and Columns, by Frank Mintz
• The Spanish Revolution, 1936-39 at Anarchy Now!