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History. Military. Nonfiction. HTML: "Mr. Thomas has understood [the Spanish Civil War] incredibly well and has written it superbly. A full, vivid and deeply serious treatment of a great subject.". "Stands without rivals as the most balanced and comprehensive book on the subject.". HTML: A masterpiece of the historian's art, Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War remains the best, most engrossing narrative of one of the most emblematic and misunderstood wars of the twentieth century. Revised and updated with significant new material, including new revelations about atrocities perpetrated against civilians by both sides in this epic conflict, this "definitive work on the subject" (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times) has been given a fresh face forty years after its initial publication in 1961. In brilliant, moving detail, Thomas analyzes a devastating conflict in which the hopes, dreams, and dogmas of a century exploded onto the battlefield. Like no other account, The Spanish Civil War dramatically reassembles the events that led a European nation, in a continent on the brink of world war, to divide against itself, bringing into play the machinations of Franco and Hitler, the bloodshed of Guernica, and the deeply inspiring heroics of those who rallied to the side of democracy. Communists, anarchists, monarchists, fascists, socialists, democrats -- the various forces of the Spanish Civil War composed a fabric of the twentieth century itself, and Thomas masterfully weaves the diffuse and fascinating threads of the war together in a manner that has established the book as a genuine classic of modern history..… (more)
User reviews
Obviously, when you've only read one history of the war, you can't say anything about how it stands up to the competition - and there clearly are a lot more books about the war around now than there were fifty years ago when Thomas first came out - but I suspect that it holds its own rather well. Thomas seems to have updated it progressively as more sources became available to him, so it's quite lengthy now, but it never feels excessively detailed. It does have a bit of an old-fashioned atmosphere, but in a generally good way: it sticks to talking about politics, economics, diplomacy and the conduct of the actual war, and doesn't let itself get distracted into projecting the author’s personality, expounding grand theories, or trying to explain to us what it's like to experience the horrors of war. Thomas in 1962 was writing for readers most of whom would have first-hand knowledge of modern warfare: he can simply let the facts speak for themselves, without needing to manipulate our emotions. They are certainly grizzly: if you had any illusions about the character of either side in the conflict, they will be dispelled quickly enough when you read about all the arbitrary executions, torture and imprisonment that went on behind the lines and after the battles.
Thomas doesn't seem to be in the business of defending either side in the conflict: he clearly finds the republicans more interesting than the nationalists and devotes a greater proportion of time to them, but it looks as though that's simply because there was so much more going on on the republican side. Franco seems to have had his allies so well under the thumb that there was never much scope for dissension in the nationalist camp, whilst the Republic expended far too much of its energies in internal squabbles.
It is rather easy to pick up the false idea from other accounts that the Spanish Civil War was fought by armies consisting principally of left-wing British and American poets and novelists on one side and German and Italian professional soldiers on the other, with a few Spaniards here and there on the sidelines. Thomas does his best to correct this, putting the foreign intervention into proportion, and reminding us that most of the volunteers in the International Brigades were working-class trade unionists, predominantly from France.
The only thing that really struck me as something missing from his account that a more modern history would have made more of is the cultural impact of the civil war. Thomas often mentions the writers and poets who served in the war or were its victims, but beyond quoting a couple of Auden’s poems, he doesn't really look at what they wrote or what effect it had, and he doesn't go into other cultural aspects - cinema, music, posters... But there are plenty of other books about such things.
It was interesting and, if you're interested in the subject, probably a very good read, but I'm afraid I struggled through it.
The difficult part is understanding how the relatively democratic countries were still ambivalent to back a relative democracy when it had to fight fascist rebels. France and Britain and the USA were so afraid of the Communist menace, they let the Spanish Republic die by inattention. By 1939 they were very sorry they had.