International response to the Spanish Civil War

The governments of Italy, Germany and, to a lesser extent, Portugal contributed money, munitions, manpower and support to the Nationalist forces, led by Francisco Franco.

Although individual sympathy for the plight of the Spanish Republic was widespread in the liberal democracies, pacifism and the fear of a second world war prevented them from selling or giving arms.

Such a declaration had already been accepted by the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union and required renouncing all traffic in war matériel, direct or indirect.

[18] It established a subcommittee to be attended by representatives of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, Sweden and the United Kingdom to deal with the day-to-day running of non-intervention.

Accordingly, the British Cabinet adopted a policy of benevolent neutrality towards the military insurgents, a covert aim being to avoid any direct or indirect help to the Republic.

British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden publicly maintained the official policy of non-intervention but privately expressed his preference for a Nationalist victory.

French Prime Minister Léon Blum, the socialist leader of the Popular Front, feared that support for the Republic would lead to a civil war and then to a fascist takeover of France.

[63] The leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, criticised the way it had been agreed by calling it "a gross betrayal ... two and a half years of hypocritical pretense of non-intervention".

[64] When the Spanish Civil War erupted, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull followed American neutrality laws and moved quickly to ban arms sales to both sides.

[10] US President Franklin Roosevelt initially ruled out US interference publicly with these words: "[there should be] no expectation that the United States would ever again send troops or warships or floods of munitions and money to Europe".

[67][nb 4] Those against the bill, including American socialists, communists, and even many liberals, suggested that the export of arms to Germany and Italy should be halted as well under the Neutrality Act of 1935 since foreign intervention was a state of war in Spain.

[77] The New York Times correspondent in Seville, Frank L. Kluckhohn, reported on 18 August that "the presence of the Italian destroyer Antonio da Noli here means that an ally has come to help the insurgents".

[90] Initially, the Vatican refrained from declaring too openly its support of the rebel side in the war, but it had long allowed high ecclesiastical figures in Spain to do so and to define the conflict as a "Crusade".

[91] Forsaken by the Western European powers, the Republicans depended mainly on Soviet military assistance, which played into the hands of the Nationalists, who portrayed the Republic as a "Marxist" and godless state in Francoist propaganda.

[105] Anticlericalism and the murder of 4,000 clergy and many more nuns by the Republicans made many Catholic writers and intellectuals cast their lot with Franco, including Evelyn Waugh, Carl Schmitt, Hilaire Belloc, Roy Campbell, Giovanni Papini, Paul Claudel, J. R. R. Tolkien and those associated with the Action Française.

[citation needed] Many artists with right-wing sympathies, such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle voiced support for the Nationalists.

Mexico had suffered from the 1926–1929 Cristero War in which President Plutarco Elías Calles tried to enforce militant state atheism; it led to the deaths of many people as well as the suppression of popular religious Mexican celebrations.

O'Duffy's Irish Brigade, whose legionnaires considered their primary role in Spain to be fighting against communism and defending Catholicism, quickly became disenchanted with the Nationalist cause, in part due to the brutality of its tactics.

Throughout the war, the efforts of the Republican government to resist the Nationalists, and their foreign supporters were hampered by Franco-British "non-intervention", the long supply lines and the intermittent availability of weapons of widely-variable quality.

[129] Another NKVD-led operation was the shooting down in December 1936 of the French aircraft in which the delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Georges Henny, carried extensive documentation on the Paracuellos massacres to France.

Since Poland was bound by non-intervention obligations, Polish governmental officials and the military disguised sales as commercial transactions mediated by international brokers and targeting customers in various countries, principally in Latin America; 54 shipments from Danzig and Gdynia were identified.

Polish sales amounted to $40 million and constituted some 5-7% of the overall Republican military spendings, but in terms of quantity certain categories of weaponry like machine guns, they might have accounted for 50% of all arms delivered.

The company partially took advantage of the earlier Schacht Plan, a German-Greek credit agreement that enabled Greek purchases from Rheinmetall-Borsig; some German products were later re-exported to Republican Spain.

For the Spaniards the deals were negotiated by Grigori Rosenberg, the son of well-known Soviet diplomat, and Máximo José Kahn Mussabaun, the Spanish representative in the Thessaloniki consulate.

The exact number of shipments is unknown but remained significant since by November 1937, 34 Greek ships were declared to be non-compliant with the non-intervention agreement, and the Nationalist Navy seized 21 vessels in 1938 alone.

[135] Mexico provided only some material assistance, which included rifles, food and a few American-made aircraft, such as the Bellanca CH-300 and the Spartan Zeus, which had served in the Mexican Air Force.

As well, it attracted a large number of foreign left-wing working-class men for whom the war offered not only an idealistic adventure but also an escape from Great Depression unemployment.

[citation needed] A 47-year-old man from Turkey named Mustafa İbrahim would serve in the 14th International Brigade[152] Patriotism was invoked by both sides, which presented the struggle as one of the Spanish people against foreign invaders.

The heroic Spanish people were said to be rising against foreign invaders, who were directed by traitors belonging to the upper classes, the clergy and the army, which were now at the service of the "fascist-imperialist world coalition".

The involvement of Moorish troops in a Catholic crusade was explained by the Nationalists as that of defenders of religion in the face of the godless, anticlerical, anti-Islamic and Jewish supporters of the Republic.