How can the Republicans win?

samcster94

Banned
The Spanish Civil War was a three year conflict that the Nationalists had a huge advantage in given their side was better funded and had Hitler and Mussolini as allies. It also helped they had a reactionary monarchist rather than a full fascist as their leader, which allowed the regime to last into the 1970's. What can be done for the Republicans to win??? Spain does not need to be a democracy under Republican rule, but it cannot become a copy of Stalin's USSR as it'd likely have been a more relatively mild regime. Bonus points if the POD is late.
 
Well the obvious one is that at least some of the democracies recognise the Republicans as a legitimate government fighting an illegal coup, and allow them access to arms and supplies rather than just tossing them under the bus. However that’s also quite a major departure from normal behaviour.
 
The Spanish Civil War was a three year conflict that the Nationalists had a huge advantage in given their side was better funded and had Hitler and Mussolini as allies. It also helped they had a reactionary monarchist rather than a full fascist as their leader, which allowed the regime to last into the 1970's. What can be done for the Republicans to win??? Spain does not need to be a democracy under Republican rule, but it cannot become a copy of Stalin's USSR as it'd likely have been a more relatively mild regime. Bonus points if the POD is late.

It is not like the Republicans were entirely without help either. I remember reading the Republicans had help from the Sovjets while the Nationalists had help from the fascists. I don't know if it is true, but a long time ago my history teacher even claimed that one of the reasons Hitler had so much confident in defeating the USSR is because it had already fought a proxy war with them in Spain by having the side they backed up win.
 
reading the Republicans had help from the Sovjets while the Nationalists had help from the fascists. I don't know if it is true,
Of course this is true but the big issues with soviet ‘help’ are:
  1. The communist taint caused all the western powers to back away from the Republicans even more, they became seen as a communist front organisation
  2. All aid the soviets provided had to go through the “neutrality blockade” which the western powers enforced against both sides while the Axis unaccountably had difficulties intercepting aid but only if it was intended for the Nationalists
  3. Stalin gave not one single shit about the republicans. He wanted the Marxists to win the war and set up a client state for him. If they failed in that then whether it was a nationalist or a democratic socialist regime left standing at the end of the day was irrelevant, so long as it definitely wasn’t Trotskyist. So a lot of stuff happened that seriously harmed the republicans in order to deliver minor advantage to Stalin’s pets
 

RousseauX

Donor
The Spanish Civil War was a three year conflict that the Nationalists had a huge advantage in given their side was better funded and had Hitler and Mussolini as allies. It also helped they had a reactionary monarchist rather than a full fascist as their leader, which allowed the regime to last into the 1970's. What can be done for the Republicans to win??? Spain does not need to be a democracy under Republican rule, but it cannot become a copy of Stalin's USSR as it'd likely have been a more relatively mild regime. Bonus points if the POD is late.
The Francoist coup is crushed right off the bat in 1936 is the easiest one

most important place is serville, where the nationalists ended up getting a lot of aid shipped in, the city had a large "red" labor presence which were ready for fight a fascist take over but wasn't able to get arms to defend themselves because the rifles and their bolts were stored in two different arsenals to prevent a left-wing uprising seizing the weapons. This allowed a relatively small (a few hundred iirc) nationalist soldiers to take over the city with millions of socialist/anarchist workers.

Let's say the city's governor was a little bit more careless, the unions in serville arm themselves and fights off the coup, let's say this repeats itself in a few other key places: the nationalist coup collapses because it doesn't hold enough of the country, and without holding a major port they can't get aid from the Germans/Italians. The spanish republic survives and the civil war is more or less averted entirely. Without a drawn out civil war Soviet aid isn't needed and the Spanish Communist party remains a minor faction in Spanish politics dominated by anarchists and center-left parties
 
Hmm how about some local fascist is bit of an idiot and leads to fighting on the french border/Gibraltar and leads to international incident and gets Allies directly involved in Spain.
 

Ramontxo

Donor
The Francoist coup is crushed right off the bat in 1936 is the easiest one

most important place is serville, where the nationalists ended up getting a lot of aid shipped in, the city had a large "red" labor presence which were ready for fight a fascist take over but wasn't able to get arms to defend themselves because the rifles and their bolts were stored in two different arsenals to prevent a left-wing uprising seizing the weapons. This allowed a relatively small (a few hundred iirc) nationalist soldiers to take over the city with millions of socialist/anarchist workers.

Let's say the city's governor was a little bit more careless, the unions in serville arm themselves and fights off the coup, let's say this repeats itself in a few other key places: the nationalist coup collapses because it doesn't hold enough of the country, and without holding a major port they can't get aid from the Germans/Italians. The spanish republic survives and the civil war is more or less averted entirely. Without a drawn out civil war Soviet aid isn't needed and the Spanish Communist party remains a minor faction in Spanish politics dominated by anarchists and center-left parties

Very much so I remenber reading in Hugh Thomas Book that if the moderate (but left wing) Republican goverment had ordered the local authoritys to open the arsenales to local (anarquist and sindical) militias the rising would have been crushed
 

RousseauX

Donor
Very much so I remenber reading in Hugh Thomas Book that if the moderate (but left wing) Republican goverment had ordered the local authoritys to open the arsenales to local (anarquist and sindical) militias the rising would have been crushed
The risk of that is of course, you might have had a socialist or anarchist uprising against the republic afterwards, just as there had being in (IIRC) 1934

the Democratic Republican government had to walk a tightrope between the facists on the right and the revolutionaries on the left
 
If the Republic can somehow survive, by which I mean still hold Madrid and a port, until past September 1939 things could get interesting assuming the IOTL Nazi-Soviet Pact and World War 2 aren't butteflied away completely, and I don't think that would be the case.
 
Contrary to a widespread belief, the arms embargo by the western democracies (including the US) did hurt the Spanish Republic: "Arms could not 'always be obtained for gold or hard currency': on the contrary, the Republicans rarely obtained more than a fraction of what they needed and even then only after long delays and at a terrible cost...they were faced by a wall of blackmail wherever they turned: by ministers of government, chiefs-of-staff and other officers and officials in more than thirty countries who demanded bribes of between £5,000 ($25,000) and £45,000 ($275,000) a time, in 1937 money, for their signatures on dubious export licenses. Below them were officials down to harbour- and station-masters who not only demanded bribes but found pretexts to delay transportation in order to charge accumulating 'storage fees,' of which one, it may be remembered, rose to as much as £10,000 ($50,000). How often, too, the ministers and officials changed their minds, found ways to withhold delivery of the material and to refuse to return the money! And below them again were the arms dealers, brokers and other go-betweens. Yet such behaviour appears trivial beside that of the Soviets, whose defrauding of the Spanish government of millions of dollars, by secretly manipulating the exchange rates when setting the prices for the goods they were supplying, belied everything they professed to stand for..." Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War, pp. 250-251. See my discussion of the US arms embargo in particular at https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/wi-us-lifts-arms-embargo-on-spanish-republic.425958/
 

samcster94

Banned
If the Republic can somehow survive, by which I mean still hold Madrid and a port, until past September 1939 things could get interesting assuming the IOTL Nazi-Soviet Pact and World War 2 aren't butteflied away completely, and I don't think that would be the case.
or have that war start early
 

iVC

Donor
1. Coup could be easily strangled at the very beginning if Republican govt. decided to spread the small arms to the people and people&workers militia. At the first hours during the coup many leaders of the worker's militia in spanish towns demanded for the armaments, but were denied by republican government due to fears of escalation.

If militia had been armed in the first hours past the outbreak, then Nationalist forces in the Spanish mainland would be utterly outnumbered and crushed with no hope of Sevilla capture and no beachhead establishment for the reinforcements from Morocco.

2. I'm curious about National Front govt. in the 1936's France. Could it take more agressive position towards the Nationalist coup?
 
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