I admit, this is the first history of the Spanish Civil War that I have read, and while being unfamiliar with the subject, I found it to be scholarly and detailed, if a bit above the level of someone wishing to” get their feet wet’. Still, I think you couldn’t go wrong wit this volume as an opinion. In history, as in in current life you can never depend on just one opinion. ( )

La guerra civil no fue sólo un episodio crucial en la historia contemporánea de España, marcó un punto de inflexión en la conciencia del mundo occidental, anticipando el enfrentamiento entre el progreso y la reacción, entre el totalitarismo y la democracia. El libro de Hugh Thomas es un estudio clásico en la extensa bibliografía que la guerra española ha suscitado, una de las primeras obras a cuya amplitud y rigor se unen la claridad y la ponderación.

Klassík. Þessi saga er víðtæk og gerir bæði pólitísku og hernaðarlegu landslagi Spánarstríðsins góð skil. Blóðugar hreinsanir á báða bóga og hve ólíka afstöðu stórveldin tóku til aðstoðar við andstæðar fylkingar. Franco var peningalaus en fékk gríðarlega aðstoð gegn lánum en lýðveldið var vellauðugt en var neitað um minnstu hernaðarkaup nema frá Sovétríkjunum sem nýttu sér neyð þeirra út í ystu æsar. Heilsteypt umfjöllun sem staðist hefur tímans tönn. ( )

This still gets referred to as the standard single-volume history of the Spanish civil war, and it thus seemed the obvious one to go for when I made my mind up to find out some more about the background to a period that has cropped up in a great many novels, poems and memoirs I've read over the years.

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. ( )

An in-depth study of the lead-in to WWII by a competent British Writer. First published in 1961, but up-dated at least three times, the 1977 edition being the one I read. Franco had been dead three years by the time this edition had been brought out. I think it's the best account in English, and though long in a single volume, being actually hard to manipulate (1093 pps.) while reading. The Spanish probably killed 500,000 of each other directly, and crippled their economy for thirty years by the huge blood-letting. The best hint for military historians "Don't allow whole military divisions manned by Anarchists, they won't attack, but can defend."
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. ( )