Catalonia Offensive, 1938 to 1939: the fall of Republican Catalonia

The Catalonia Offensive decided the Spanish Civil War. In seven weeks the Republic lost Barcelona and all of Catalonia, its president, prime minister and chief of staff crossed into France, and the only question left was how long the rest of Republican Spain could hold out. For Catalans it is remembered above all for the Retirada, the long retreat on foot to the French border in the depth of winter.²

Who won the Catalonia Offensive and why?

Franco's Nationalists won. They attacked with some 300,000 well-equipped men and about 500 German and Italian aircraft against a Republican army bled white on the Ebro, short of rifles, almost without planes and cut off from Soviet arms by the closed French border. Once the front broke in early January, the Republican defense fell apart.³

Background: after the Ebro

The Battle of the Ebro, the hardest of the war, ended in mid-November 1938 and had used up the men and resources of Catalonia. The region was cut off from the rest of the Republic and crowded with refugees from all over Spain, hungry, bombed and increasingly convinced that the war was lost. The French border was closed, so the arms the Soviet Union had sent could not get through.⁴

The Republican army that came back from the Ebro was a shadow of itself. The Enciclopèdia Catalana describes the Army of the Ebro as short of men and materiel, and Aloy an army with no time to make good its losses, equipped with scarce and outdated weapons while Soviet arms waited at the closed French border.⁵

Franco's troops, by contrast, were well equipped and their morale was high. After a pause of some five weeks, delayed further by bad weather, they were ready to strike at the last Republican region in the north.⁶ › The Aragon Offensive, 1938

The commanders' decisions

Franco set the start of the offensive for 10 December 1938. Bad weather put it back, and the attack opened on 23 December.⁷

The Republican chief of staff, General Vicente Rojo, counted on a system of successive defense lines reaching back toward the French border, on which his troops were to fall back one after another.⁸

Armies and commanders

The attack fell to General Fidel Dávila's Army of the North, among whose corps were Yagüe's Moroccan Corps and the Italian volunteers of the CTV. Both Muy Interesante and the Enciclopèdia Catalana count some 300,000 men, with about 500 German and Italian aircraft.⁹

Against them stood the Republic's two armies in Catalonia, the Army of the East and the Army of the Ebro, grouped under General Juan Hernández Sarabia. Their ranks had been filled with hurriedly called-up recruits, the very young and the old, many of them convinced that defeat was inevitable. Of 90,000 Republican soldiers at the front, only 60,000 had a rifle, and the Republican air force had almost ceased to exist.¹⁰

The battle in phases

The first blow, 23 December. Dávila attacked on two fronts at once. In the north the Army of the East, fresher and protected by mountains, held off much stronger forces. In the south, on the lower Segre, the front of the Army of the Ebro gave way on the first day, and only counterattacks prevented a collapse.¹¹

The grinding advance. Even so, the Nationalists advanced slowly at first. They faced some of the best units left in the Popular Army, bad weather grounded their aircraft for days, and the Ebro and Segre were in flood. The Republicans had dug trenches and bunkers, and the fighting became a battle of attrition.¹²

The air war. The bombers went ahead of the armies. From early December Nationalist aircraft struck roads, airfields and ports behind the front and the towns of the Catalan rear, Barcelona among them, and the bombing of the whole region went on as the armies advanced.¹³

The break, early January. The Republican line broke at the start of January: the Virtual Spanish Civil War dates the breakthrough to 3 January, and Muy Interesante describes the fall of Artesa de Segre on the 4th and of Les Borges Blanques the next day as the turning point. Rojo ordered a withdrawal to a second line, but it was overrun as easily as the first. From 11 January the Nationalists advanced on both fronts.¹⁴

The last levies. The Republic called up the last men it could find, the oldest and the youngest: the Enciclopèdia Catalana and Muy Interesante both describe the mobilization of boys of seventeen and of men well past forty. None of it could restore the front.¹⁵

Turning point: Tarragona and Barcelona

The advance now ran fast up the coast. Yagüe's men entered Tarragona, the southernmost provincial capital of Catalonia, on 15 January by the account of the Enciclopèdia Catalana and Muy Interesante, the 14th by that of the Virtual Spanish Civil War. The French government, alarmed, reopened the border long enough to let some of the Soviet arms through. Rojo tried to organize a defense of Barcelona on the line of the Llobregat, but the city, hungry and worn out after thirty months of war, was no Madrid of 1936.¹⁶

His plan of successive lines failed for the same reason. The Enciclopèdia Catalana judges it inoperative because the Republican army was by now practically disintegrated, and Aloy calls the retreat a rout.¹⁷

On 23 January, while still calling for Barcelona's defense, the Negrín government ordered the evacuation of official bodies to Girona, and that night Companys, the Basque president José Antonio Aguirre and other leaders left the city. An exodus of officials and civilians had been under way since before Christmas. The Nationalists crossed the Llobregat on the 25th, and on the 26th entered Barcelona without resistance, finding it, in the Virtual Spanish Civil War's words, semi-deserted and silent. The sources differ on the hour: the Enciclopèdia Catalana has the troops entering in the afternoon, Muy Interesante at dawn. Both describe Franco's supporters in the city pouring into the streets to cheer them.¹⁸

The new order came at once. Franco created the Occupation Services of Barcelona under General Eliseo Álvarez-Arenas, which declared a state of war and banned Catalan from public life.¹⁹

Aftermath: the Retirada

A flood of soldiers and civilians now headed for the French border along the roads to Le Perthus, Cerbère and the mountain passes, under attack from Nationalist aircraft. France at first refused them entry. On the night of 27 to 28 January it let women and children through, then the wounded, and on the afternoon of 5 February disarmed Republican soldiers began to cross in formation.²⁰

On 1 February the Republican Cortes met for the last time on Spanish soil, in the castle of Figueres. Girona fell on 3 or 4 February. The government was scattered among the villages near the border, Agullana and La Vajol among them. President Manuel Azaña, General Rojo, Companys and Aguirre left Spain on 5 February, the presidents by the track over the Coll de Lli; Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who saw Azaña to the border and turned back, followed a few days later.²¹

On 9 and 10 February the Nationalists reached the French border, and Franco declared the campaign over on 10 February, after some fifty days.²²

Counting the cost

No reliable total of dead and wounded appears in the sources used here. What can be counted is the exodus, the largest in Spanish history. The Virtual Spanish Civil War counts more than 400,000 people across the border by the end of the campaign; Muy Interesante and the Girona historians interviewed by Presència speak of close to half a million.²³

France, overwhelmed, held many of them in improvised camps on the beaches, Argelès among them, where they had no protection against the winter cold.²⁴

The war's violence did not stop at the front. Retreating Republican troops killed some of the prisoners they had held. Among them were Bishop Anselmo Polanco of Teruel and Colonel Domingo Rey d'Harcourt, taken when Teruel fell, who were shot with other prisoners from Teruel a few kilometers from the French border.²⁵

Prisoners were also shot by Republican troops at the sanctuary of Santa Maria del Collell in January 1939. One of the men marked for execution, the Falange founder Rafael Sánchez Mazas, escaped, an episode Javier Cercas later used in his novel Soldiers of Salamis.²⁶

The fall of Catalonia meant that the Republic had essentially lost the war. Negrín and his Communist supporters wanted to fight on; Azaña, convinced that defeat was unavoidable, resigned; and in Madrid officers and politicians began to plan the coup that would seek a negotiated surrender.²⁷

Legacy and memory

For Catalonia the offensive meant the banning of Catalan from public life and the start of a long exile for hundreds of thousands of its people. The Retirada became the founding memory of that exile, and seventy years later historians were still leading walks along the routes the refugees and their leaders took over the mountains.²⁸

Memory now has its places. Where the entrance to the camp at Argelès once stood, in the middle of a seaside resort, a monolith and a plaque recall the Republicans held there, and the Museu Memorial de l'Exili runs a memorial program for the Argelès camp among its projects.²⁹

Visiting today

The routes of the exiles can still be followed. At La Jonquera, on the border crossing used by most of the refugees, the Museu Memorial de l'Exili (MUME), run by a consortium that includes the Generalitat de Catalunya and the University of Girona, tells the story of the Republican exile. It leads walks along the route of the presidents' crossing from Agullana and La Vajol over the Pyrenees to the beach at Argelès, and guided visits to the Mina Canta at La Vajol, the old talc mine where the Republic hid part of its art treasures.³⁰