The siege of Madrid was a two-and-a-half-year siege of the Republican-controlled Spanish capital city of Madrid by the Nationalist armies, under General Francisco Franco, during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The city, besieged from October 1936, fell to the Nationalist armies on 28 March 1939. The Battle of Madrid in November 1936 saw the most intense fighting in and around the city when the Nationalists made their most determined attempt to take the Republican capital.
The highest military awards of the Spanish Republic, the Laureate Plate of Madrid (Spanish: Placa Laureada de Madrid), and the Madrid Distinction (Spanish: Distintivo de Madrid), established by the Republican government to reward courage, were named after the capital of Spain because the city symbolised valour and Republican resistance during the long siege throughout the war.
Uprising: Madrid held for the Republic (July 1936)
The Spanish Civil War began with a coup d'état against the Popular Front Government of the Spanish Republic by Spanish Army officers on 18 July 1936.
In Madrid, the Republican government was unsure what to do. It wanted to put down the coup but did not know if it could trust the armed forces, and it did not want to arm the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) trade unions and potentially accelerate the ongoing Spanish Revolution. On 18 July, the government sent units of the Guardia Civil to Seville to put down the rebellion there. However, on reaching the city, the guardias defected to the insurgents. On 19 July, Santiago Casares Quiroga resigned as prime minister and was succeeded by Diego Martinez Barrio, who tried to arrange a truce with the insurgent General Emilio Mola by telephone, but Mola refused the offer and Martinez Barrio was ousted by José Giral. Giral agreed to arm the trade unionists to defend the Republic and had 60,000 rifles delivered to the CNT and UGT headquarters although only 5,000 were in working order. In a radio broadcast on the 18th, the communist leader Dolores Ibarruri coined the famous slogan ¡No pasarán! ("They shall not pass") to urge resistance against the coup. The slogan was to become synonymous with the defense of Madrid and the Republican cause in general.
General Joaquín Fanjul, the commander of the military garrison based in Montaña barracks in Madrid, was preparing to launch the military rebellion in the city. However, when he tried to march out of the barracks, his 2,500 troops were forced back inside the compound by hostile crowds and armed trade unionists. On the 20th, the barracks was stormed by a mixture of workers and Guardias de Asalto ("assault guards", an urban police force) loyal to the government, as well as five battalions of the communist-led Antifascist Worker and Peasant Militias (MAOC). One of the battalions became the famous "Fifth Regiment" of about 10,000 fighters. The fighting was chaotic, and on several occasions, some soldiers in the barracks indicated their willingness to surrender, only for other troops to keep firing at the attackers, which killed those who had broken cover to take them prisoner.
Eventually, the barracks fell when the Guardias de Asalto brought up a 75 mm field gun to bombard the complex and its gate was opened by a sapper sergeant sympathetic to the Republicans. The sergeant was killed by one of his officers, but his action allowed the Republicans to breach the walls. Many soldiers were massacred by the crowd, which had been enraged by the apparent false surrenders, after the fall of the barracks.
For the remainder of the war, Madrid was held by the Republicans. However, its population contained a significant number of Nationalist sympathisers, over 20,000 of which sought refuge in foreign embassies in the city. The weeks that followed the July uprising saw a number of so-called fascists or fascist sympathisers being killed in Madrid by Republicans. For example, on 23 August, seventy prisoners from the Modelo Prison in the city were massacred in revenge for the Nationalist killing of over 1,500 Republicans after the storming of Badajoz.
Nationalist "Drive on Madrid" (August–October 1936)
The initial strategy of the military plot had been to assume power all over the country in the manner of a pronunciamiento (military coup) of the 19th century. However, resistance to the coup by Republicans meant that Francisco Franco and his allies instead had to conquer the country by military force if they wanted to seize power. Franco himself had landed in Algeciras, in southern Spain, with Moroccan troops from the Spanish Army of Africa. Mola, who commanded the colonial troops as well as the Spanish Foreign Legion and Carlist and Falangist militia, raised troops in the north. Together, they planned a "Drive on Madrid" with Franco advancing from Badajoz, which he took in August and Mola advancing from Burgos. Franco's veteran colonial troops, or regulares, under General Juan Yagüe, along with air cover supplied by Nazi Germany, routed the Republican militias in their path. Yagüe argued for a rapid advance on Madrid, but Franco overruled him to relieve the Nationalist troops besieged in Toledo. That diversion held up the attack on Madrid by up to a month, which gave the Republicans time to prepare its defence.
Meanwhile, in Madrid, the Republican government had reformed under the leadership of socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero, whose government included six socialist party ministers, two communists, two from the Republican Left party, one from the Catalan Left party, one from the Basque Nationalist Party and one from the Republican Union. The communists were a minority in the government, but they gained in influence through their access to arms from the Soviet Union and foreign volunteers in the International Brigades. The Republican military commander in Madrid was nominally a Spanish general, Jose Miaja, but Soviet military personnel were perhaps more important. General Vladimir Gorev was their overall commander, General Yakov Smushkevich controlled the air forces sent from the Soviet Union and General Dmitry Pavlov commanded their armoured forces. About 90% of the Republican defenders of Madrid were militias raised by left-wing political parties or trade unions, which elected their own leaders. The Republican command had relatively little control over the units in the early phase of the Civil War.
On the other side, both Germany and Fascist Italy supplied Franco with air cover and armoured units for his assault on Madrid, and the Luftwaffe units in Spain, the Condor Legion, were commanded independently of Franco's officers. The Nationalists reached Madrid in early November 1936 by approaching it from the north along the Corunna Road and the west by the Extremadura road. On 29 October, a Republican counterattack by the 5th (communist) regiment under Enrique Líster was beaten off at Parla. On 2 November, Brunete fell to the Nationalists, leaving their troops at the western suburb of Madrid. Mola famously remarked to an English journalist that he would take Madrid with his four columns of regular and Moroccan troops from southwest in Spain outside the city and his "Fifth column" of right-wing sympathisers in it. The term "fifth column" became a synonym for spies or traitors for Republicans, and paranoia led to massacre of Nationalist prisoners in Madrid during the ensuing battle. The government, including Caballero, expected Madrid to fall and so made a preplanned move from Madrid on 6 November to Valencia. General Miaja and the political leaders who remained formed the Junta de Defensa de Madrid (Committee for the Defence of Madrid) to organise the republican defenders.
However, the Nationalists' attempt to capture Madrid had some serious tactical drawbacks. Their troops were outnumbered by over two to one by the defenders although the Nationalists were far better trained and equipped. Another disadvantage was their inability to surround Madrid and to cut it off from outside help.
Battle for Madrid (November 1936)
Preparations
The Republicans had a geographical advantage in defending Madrid: the River Manzanares separated the Nationalists from the city centre and was a formidable physical obstacle. Mola planned his assault on Madrid for 8 November 1936. He planned to attack through the Casa de Campo park on a front of only one kilometre (5⁄8 mile) wide to try to avoid street fighting, as the park was open country and lay just across the river from the city centre. Mola's initial intention was to take the University City, just north of the city centre, to establish a bridgehead across the Manzanares. He also launched a diversionary attack towards the working-class suburb of Carabanchel, to the south-west of the city centre. However, on 7 November, the Republicans had captured plans of the attack on the body of an Italian officer found in a destroyed tank and so could concentrate their troops in the Casa de Campo to meet the main attack.
Its strategic location over the Manzanares River made the Bridge of the French of crucial importance. Colonel Romero commanded Republican forces there and effectively repelled attempts to cross it and to gain access to Madrid's city centre.
Initial attack
Mola attacked on 8 November with 20,000 troops, mostly Moroccan regulares, supported by Italian light armour and German Panzer I tanks under German officer Wilhelm Von Thoma. The German Condor Legion also provided air support, which took a heavy toll on the buildings of the quarter.
The Republicans had deployed 12,000 troops in Carabanchel and 30,000 more to meet the main assault at the Casa de Campo. Despite their superiority in numbers, they were badly equipped since they had mostly only small arms, with reputedly only ten rounds for each rifle. In addition, most of them had never been trained in the use of weapons, let alone experienced combat before. Nevertheless, they held off the Nationalist onslaught at Casa de Campo. Some regulares eventually broke through and made an initial crossing over the Manzanares towards the Modelo Prison, the target of the offensive, but the attack stalled at the western fringe of the city. The Republican General Miaja himself reputedly raced to the ruined buildings to which the Republican troops were starting to flee and, pistol in hand, called upon the retreating troops to rally and die with him, rather than flee as cowards. Throughout the day, the city radio called upon the citizens to mobilise and support the front, with the rallying cry "¡No pasarán!" ('They shall not pass!')
Late on 8 November, the XI International Brigade, numbering 1,900 men, arrived at the front, marching through the Gran Via in the city centre. Although few and with their training unfinished, since they had been hurried to the front as a relief force, their arrival was a major morale boost for the defenders of Madrid. The foreign troops, while actually a mixture of volunteers from Germany, France, Britain and various other nations, including Winston Churchill's nephew, Esmond Romilly, were greeted with cries of vivan los rusos ("long live the Russians") by madrileños since they had been mistaken for Soviet infantry.
Stalling and counterattacks
On 10 November, the Nationalists switched the focus of their offensive to the Carabanchel suburb, but the heavily urban area proved to be a very difficult obstacle. The colonial Moroccan troops were pinned down in house-to-house fighting (in which they had little previous experience since their greatest strength was in open-country warfare) and took heavy casualties at the hands of militiamen who knew the urban terrain very well.
In the evening of 9 November, General Kléber launched an assault of the XI International Brigade on the Nationalist positions in the Casa de Campo, which lasted for the whole night and part of the next morning. At the end of the fight, the Nationalist troops had been forced to retreat and abandoned all hopes of a direct assault on Madrid through the Casa de Campo, while the XIth Brigade had lost a third of its men. Meanwhile, Republican troops counterattacked all along the front in Madrid, on 9, 10 and 17 November, driving the Nationalists back at some places, but taking heavy casualties in the process.