Today, we have been travelling down the Ebro River... the site of some of the heaviest fighting in the Spanish Civil war... also an important trade route for all the civilisations claiming Aragon as their home.
Our surprise was the number of casualties from battles in the civil war fought around Gandesa... a small country town... undeserving of the cruel fate handed to it by the civil war... its biggest error was to pick the wrong side in this bitter struggle.
Catalonia and Aragon supported the 'Republic' forces. Franco thought the Republic forces had to go because their government was flirting with communism... and he wasn't being cut a reasonable share of the graft and corruption endemic at that time. He (with a number of 'breakaway' generals from the Republican armed forces)... went to Algeria and trained a core of elite troops.. negotiated support from the Nazi regime in Germany and even made a pitch to Mussolini that was successful.
The age of ideology was at its peak... misfits and do-gooders from all over the world came to Spain to support one side or the other. With bigger conflict appearing inevitable on the larger stage of Europe, many powers were keen to test their new age armaments... in particular Hitler wanted real experience of 'blitzkrieg' attack. He gave Franco saturated bombing cover during the War and heavy artillery that proved decisive in the big battles.
Why did Gandesa, Catalonia and Aragon support a corrupt regime? These areas were just starting to benefit from international trade. They had commenced development later than the rest of Spain... they were far enough from Madrid to get a close look at corruption. Along came Franco who wanted to revert to the dark ages... stop trading internationally... give much more authority to the church... make businesses more wealthy... keep women subjugated to men's authority (goodness me, the Republicans were even allowing women to own property... what next??? the vote?) Gandesa et al saw downside in Franco's political manifesto and preferred the devil they knew.
The museum we visited was constructed by families in the village... people who have suffered terribly in the war at the hands of Franco's troops... so, the record of atrocities may not have been balanced. Because Franco turned out to be a 'bad apple', the theme of the museum seemed to be "I told you so '. In the battle for Gandesa, 20,000 lives were lost. The town was abandoned... and what wasn't blown up was looted. The battles showed the locals putting up a good effort... perhaps even winning... until Hitler's airforce arrived and carpet bombed the locals.
After the battles, the locals made a living collecting the metals left behind from the battles... there was loss of life from exploding munitions... but in the years of WWII, scrap metal kept the widows fed... barely... but alive.
Across the whole front of the Ebro River, the number of deaths has been reported to be as high as 100,000 on each side... remarkably high numbers. Like all war reporting, the reliability of numbers needs to be questioned. The total number of deaths for the whole war is recorded as 500,000 with 450,000 being reported as fleeing Spain. It would seem that one fifth of casualties could have occurred in battles in the Ebro area.
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