2023-04-27 01:31:24
The maximum of Adolfo Morales Trueba, Marine Corps officer and expert in Naval Special Warfare, is to elevate the fratricidal conflict in the seas to its rightful altar. And not because he has idealized it, nor because it is what he has been studying for decades, but because it was key in the future of the war that broke out in 1936. On the other end of the phone, the doctor and university master’s degree in Peace maintains that it was necessary a work that analyzes the details and the influence of the navies of both sides between 1936 and 1939. And for this reason it has given birth to ‘Naval History of the Civil War’ (La Esfera). Because, according to him, he reveals to this newspaper, it was necessary to review a genre that had not come to the fore since the time of Michael Alpert.
The Spaniard has not failed and has plunged into the subject fully, objectively and fleeing from the old political troubles that have burdened traditional historiography so much. The conversation, however, has given a lot. So we have chosen to divide it into several parts. And there goes the first one, focused on the importance of submarine warfare.
– Was it time to review traditional sources like Alpert?
Alpert treated the international dimension of the war very well because he had access to the British archives, but he lacked a bit of detail on some issues. He had to do a review. In addition, this war has never left anyone indifferent, and that has had a negative part: bias has been abused and any type of study has always been loaded with ideological bias. Now, with the years that have passed, our society deserves that we analyze things with historiographical criteria. And also without hiding anything. If some did something, you have to write it down. It was an obligation to explain which decisions were wrong, which were correct and which brought terrible consequences.
-What influence did the clashes at sea have on the future of the conflict?
He had influences at very specific moments. The first of them, which has not been sufficiently valued, by the way, were the weeks in which the Republic blocked the Strait and prevented the passage of the army from Africa to the peninsula. This meant that the rebels could not move the bulk of the force, the ammunition and all the heavy weapons they had in North Africa. Thanks to this, only light columns could reach Madrid with insufficient combat power to undertake an operation of this magnitude. It was not until the Republican army marched north that the encirclement could be broken. Later, yes, the bulk of the troops positioned themselves on the peninsula.
-He affirms that the Republic began with an overwhelming superiority of ships, but not of commanding officers…
In the first days, when the coup attempt failed, the ships of the Navy were practically entirely under the command of the Republic. The same happened with submarines and naval aviation. The problem is that there were committees that went ahead and assumed that some officers were going to revolt. This caused a repression that, in the long run, caused the government fleet to lack direction because it did not have commanders prepared to take charge of the General Staff of the Navy. The same thing happened with the direction of the ships; to such an extent that officers from the merchant marine had to be used.
-Were officers who were not going to revolt repressed?
That is a good question. It is very difficult to know after the fact. As far as I have been able to study, the Navy was out of the conspiracy. At least the vast majority. It was not involved in the preparation of the uprising, as it was, for example, the Civil Guard or the Army. General Mola planned a territorial coup directed primarily at the capitals, especially at key cities such as Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. My guess is that since he didn’t need it, he left it out for safety. Were there officers involved? Yes, but they were very poorly linked to the leadership of the riot.
-What do the testimonies tell us about the possible participation of the Navy in the coup?
At a time when it was a merit and very positive in the Regime to have participated in the coup, there were many officers, among them Indalecio Nunez, who stated that they did not know. They could have taken advantage and said otherwise, but they didn’t. Salvador Moreno he explains that he went to Valencia in the spring to speak with the heads of the main naval units of the fleet before July 18. He met with key personalities such as the chief of staff of the squadron or the ship captains who commanded the cruisers and battleships to gauge their participation. And, when he returned to Ferrol, he wrote very discouraged about the support of the Navy.
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Author
Adolfo Morales Trueba -
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The sphere -
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460 -
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-So, the Navy was not ready to revolt?
It’s not that she wasn’t willing to rise up; rather she was offline. Most of the officers were oblivious, didn’t know, or if they had heard the news, weren’t sure what to do. In the end, they reacted a bit on the events. The clear example was Ferrol, where there was no uprising synchronized with Melilla. They were a little following waters.
-He affirms that Ferrol was a key piece for the victory of the insurgents…
There the army rose up, and that helped the uprising in the Armada succeed. The importance of Ferrol was enormous, it was the main naval base and the most decisive means of repair were there. If a cruise ship broke down in the Mediterranean, the only way to fix it if it required docking was to get it there. Losing it was one of the Republic’s handicaps. The example is that, when the Italians torpedoed the cervantes cruiseIt took months to repair it. As if that were not enough, he had a key strategic position to keep the north. If Ferrol had not fallen into the hands of the rebels, they would not have had a naval foothold to support from the sea all the operations that were carried out to put an end to the republican Cantabrian Sea. Had it not been so, the war would have changed.
-Why was the Republican submarine warfare so disastrous?
The problem is that it is a very complex weapon, since it has to go under the water, operate and come out again. And not all the officers of the General Corps were prepared to handle this system. When the war broke out, the Republic lost virtually all U-boat commanders; They assumed that they were going to revolt and prosecuted them. In the end, at the tactical level they found themselves with a very big problem to use them. In fact, as the conflict progressed, they incorporated Soviet officers to take charge of them. The lack of direction from the strategic and operational level to give it an adequate role also had an influence. Great things could have been done with them, but they weren’t.
Republican submarine B-4
-Wasn’t there any prominent Republican officer in the submarine weapon?
The Republic kept an extraordinary officer, who was a very good technician and a very dear person: Lieutenant Commander Remigio Verdía. He could have reoriented the submarine strategy, but, since there were no officers on the subs, he was assigned to one. He did not do badly, but perhaps he should have dedicated himself to directing the flotilla from the outside, and not fighting as such. In the end, he died during a bombardment in Malaga, which was a disaster for the Government.
What could the submarines have been used for?
For example, to blockade the Ferrol naval base and prevent ships from leaving. They could also have concentrated in the Straits in a similar way to how Germany would do it at the beginning of World War II. In short, they could have gotten a lot more out of it, but the lack of officers and technicians conditioned them a lot.
-Where were they initially deployed?
They deployed the submarines in the north, with a clear problem: they had no logistical support there. The result was that, when something broke in one of them, the spare parts, the technicians and the shipyards prepared to fix them were in Cartagena. In the end, circumstance repairs were made, and that decreased its operability. In fact, it is possible that these difficulties doomed Lieutenant Commander Lara’s submersible, which disappeared under the water. If you study her journey, you can see that she had an incident where a number of questionable repairs had been made to her. It is likely that it was an accident as a result of the ship’s poor condition, since it had not been properly maintained for months.
-The disappearances were normal among the submarines of the Second Republic, and some, linked to strange theories.
Indeed. The clearest is, precisely, that of the C-5, the one commanded by the lieutenant commander Jose Maria de Lara y Dorda. The possibility that she committed suicide to sink the ship has been considered, but it seems strange. After all, there is a book written by Ramón Cayuelas, one of the sailors under his command, in which he tells how the officer brought the submarine to the surface after it became inoperative at the bottom of the waters. I am not saying that the possibility that he wanted to seize a submersible from the Government does not exist, but no data has led me to think so. What I have found is that this was in very poor condition. It is likely that he had an accident when she was diving.
Arrival at the Basque port of the submarine squadron of the Second Republic in 1932
-Something similar happened to the B-5 submarine…
Yes, it was directed by Carlos Barreda Terry and disappeared in the Alboran Sea. His case is more complex. There are documents that say that he was in bad shape, but that he had to leave the mission. And there is a report from a rebellious seaplane that confirms that he located it, attacked it, and probably hit it because he later saw an oil slick on the water. Still, it’s quite possible that a glitch in the ship doomed her.
-You also include in your book the strange case of C-3.
Yes. For many years it was considered sunk by an internal explosion. But Willard Frank, the person who had best analyzed everything corresponding to the Civil War without ideological bias and with technical criteria, opened the German archives at the end of the eighties and came across an unknown operation carried out under the strictest secrecy. And he revealed that this submersible had been destroyed in it.
-What did this operation consist of?
was the call operation ursula. In it, Adolf Hitler deployed two German submarines, ‘U-Boote’, in the Spanish Levant to destroy several republican merchantmen. The crews were ordered never to reveal their mission and to work under absolute discretion. Passing in front of Malaga, one of them ran into a government submersible on the surface, the C-3, and a torpedo was fired at it. The shell passed through the target and sank it, although it did not explode.
-How is it possible that they thought it had been an accident?
The testimonies of the three survivors, the existing data and the fact that the rebels did not have submersibles at their disposal led the Republicans to conclude that it had been an internal explosion. Thus they closed the investigation, arguing that it could be a problem of theories. But years later Frank came across the statement in which the commander of the ‘U-Boat’ confirmed the attack.
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