Paths to Glory in the Civil War: The Story of the 84th Mixed Brigade

From the beginning of the Civil War until the winter of 1937, the Aragon front was a stable front, with skirmishes here and there, but little else. On the republican side, it was guarded by columns of different political signs: communists, anarcho-syndicalists, socialists, etc.

George Orwell lived it firsthand. As he explained in Homage to Catalonia (1938), there were no differences between the officers and the troops there, neither in pay, nor in clothing, nor in treatment, and things were decided by assembly. And yet, Orwell emphasized, they kept the insurgents at bay for months. They were there not because they would be shot if they left, but because they wanted to be.

That libertarian utopia – in some towns land collectivizations were made – lasted until the government of Largo Caballero ordered the integration of the columns into the Popular Army. The war was going to be a long one, and it could only be won with a regular and disciplined army.

This is how the 84th Mixed Brigade was born, in March 1937. It went down in history for its dramatic end. However, no one had wondered what its members did in the previous weeks. His exploits had been misplaced in the complexity of battalions, brigades, divisions and army corps that fought in the hell that was the Battle of Teruel.

The one who put an end to this historiographic vacuum was the historian Pedro Corral, who located the survivors and relatives and tracked down the archival information. His story is almost a diary, which follows them hour by hour, as if it were there. And it turned out that the history of the Brigade is incredible, so much so that it makes what happened on January 20, 1938 even more appalling and incomprehensible.

Some of the protagonists of If you want to write to me (2004, with an updated reissue now in bookstores) are Amador Lacueva, Ramiro Cavero, Bernardo Aguilar, Blas Alquézar and Avelino Codes, all of them members of the 84th Brigade. As they had gone to the front voluntarily, when a year later they were caught by militarization they had to get used to talking about you to the officers, to forming up and marching to the beat of the drum.

The unit was created in time for the great offensive planned by General Vicente Rojo, chief of the Republican General Staff, for December 1937. With the North fallen, at that time Franco was concentrating the bulk of his troops in Soria with the intention of carrying out a definitive assault on Madrid.

To force him to turn aside, Rojo launched a plan to take Teruel, which at that time was a salient of the rebels on the Aragonese front. Since it wouldn’t work if Franco didn’t feel threatened, he summoned a huge force. There were about 100,000 men, 400 artillery pieces, a hundred Soviet T-26 and BT-5 tanks and around 120 planes arranged in Catalan and Valencian airfields.

The ground forces were divided into three army corps, each with two divisions. The 84th Brigade was attached to the 40th Division of the XX Army Corps. The head of the division was Andrés Nieto Carmona, a PSOE politician who had been mayor of Mérida. He was an upstart in the military, but he had risen fast in the early stages of the war.

On December 12, the 84th were already in position. It was their turn to take the Port of Escandón, a promontory of 1,242 meters of altitude occupied by the nationals. There they were, waiting in front of the assigned objective – like the rest of the units – when an unexpected guest fell on them.

An unusual cold air mass had been brewing on the Siberian plains, which was pushed towards the peninsula by atmospheric currents. As the scientific popularizer Vicente Aupí explains in El General Invierno y la Batalla de Teruel (Dobleuve Comunicación, 2016), this would cause temperatures of between 20 and 25 degrees below zero in the following days.

The arrival of the storm coincided with the start of the battle. Still miles from the city, the soldiers spent the first nights in the open. In groups of two – there were no blankets for everyone – they covered themselves with what they could, trying to avoid a blizzard that would freeze any exposed part of the body within minutes.

Some developed what became known as “Teruel feet”, a dry gangrene that turned the feet blackish. Since the meter of accumulated snow made evacuation by road impossible, they often had to be amputated in situ.

During the night of December 17, Enrique Líster’s division, which was advancing from the north, lost 87 of its men to the cold. They died in their sleep, in silence. It is the same day that the 84th Brigade scaled the Escandón Pass in force with no more help than the Mauser rifles, since the promised tanks were occupied elsewhere.

It took them a couple of days to take it, and then they continued advancing up the Mansueto hill, liquidating trench after trench in the direction of Teruel. They arrived on the 21st, closing the siege on the city.

“Teruel, for the Republic!” La Vanguardia published the following morning. The Republican press was euphoric about what seemed to be the first reconquest of a provincial capital. Those first moments of joy, along with the cold, made many units take the opportunity to plunder the houses they were entering, stripping the civilians that remained of what they so badly needed.

Not the 84th, which, as a document from the Levante Army Commissariat shows and as Corral was able to confirm with the veterans, had a much more humane behavior.

The looting occurred as the 11,000 defenders, who were under the orders of Colonels Francisco Barba and Domingo Rey d’Harcourt, the latter the military governor of the square, retreated.

They were few, but the conquest of the urban fabric would not be easy. The tanks found it difficult to manoeuvre, and the men had to go not from house to house, but from room to room. It was a day to day capable of breaking anyone’s nerves, advancing one floor knowing that the enemy could be behind the next partition. Shots were coming from all sides, and grenades were flying in through doors, windows, and stairwells.

And in the middle of it all, the civilians. Blas Alquézar remembered that when he opened a trunk he found a woman with his daughter. Crouched there they shouted: “Don’t do anything to us, don’t do anything to us!” Or that young man from Castelserás (Teruel) who carried two small children on his shoulders to get them out of the middle of a shooting. When he was crossing the street, he was knocked down with a shot to the temple, leaving the little ones trapped under his body. They couldn’t get them out until Blas Alquézar sprayed the house where the sniper was with his machine gun.

Around Christmas Day, the defenders were forced to withdraw into two redoubts. Colonel Francisco Barba and his men fortified themselves in the Seminary, which was the most robust building in Teruel. A few hundred meters away, Rey d’Harcourt did the same in the Command, which is how the group of civil buildings that surrounded the Plaza de San Juan was known.

Built with large blocks of stone, the Bank of Spain was the one that promised to resist artillery the best. That’s why they installed the radio there, specifically in the safe in the basement.

It was up to Nieto Carmona’s 40th Division to evacuate those buildings as soon as possible, since Franco had picked up the gauntlet and the bulk of the Army of the North was already heading there to free them. The 84th was going to besiege the Command and the 87th, the Seminary.

They fired with everything, artillery fire, tanks, machine guns… In the Plaza de San Juan they even threw gasoline bottles on the roof of the Bank of Spain. But the defenders put out the fires and after each shot they returned to position themselves on the ruined façade.

On December 29, they continued to resist when the bulk of the rebel army finally arrived. Under the command of General Fidel Dávila, eight divisions split into two attack zones, north and south of the Republican defensive ring. The idea was to surround the besiegers.

They panicked. They were tired, traumatized by what they had experienced, and they were cold, very cold. When another storm arrived on New Year’s Eve, which covered them up to the knees, their spirits finally broke.

Sitting at his command post on the Valencia highway, Nieto Carmona saw how columns of deserters began to appear, more and more. Fearing that he would lose control of his army, he ended up ordering the evacuation of the city himself. It is an inexplicable order, which can only be understood by the pusillanimity of a leader overwhelmed by the situation.

There were two units that did not comply, for not wanting to give away what had cost them so much to retain. It is another novelty in Corral’s book, discovering that the 84th and 87th did not withdraw beyond the old town. It was heroic behavior; according to this author, the only thing that prevented Nieto from being relieved and prosecuted by a military court.

Although Rojo wanted to do it, in the end he only revoked the order and gave instructions for everyone to return to their positions, under threat of firing squad. For a few hours, therefore, the besieged had had an opportunity to meet with their rescuers. If they didn’t, it was because they feared it was a trap.

A regrettable mistake, since on January 3 the 84th definitively launched itself for the Civil Government, whose façade was already a mountain of rubble. Combining the testimonies of the veterans with what was told by the photographer Robert Capa, who was there, we know the episode in detail.

After the explosion of a mine that they had placed in the foundations, they climbed up the rubble with fixed bayonets. What followed was a hand-to-hand fight. Between grenade explosions and short-arm shots, the screams of horror from civilians, who had been living in the bowels of the building, could be heard in the background for days.

Blas Alquézar saw one of the nationals asking for help, trapped under a beam. When a Republican went to free him, the man took out his revolver and shot him. They had opted for collective suicide, amid cries of “Up Spain!”.

The civilians were found in the basement. Fifty women, children and old men looked up with their cadaverous faces, the sunlight blinding them. They had survived for fifteen days on rations thrown at them by soldiers from above. Next to them, in a separate area, they had been piling up the corpses of those who died.

Five days later the Seminary surrendered, Teruel had fallen. The Republican press was finally able to explain a victory, also attaching a note from Bishop Anselmo Polanco in which he thanked the treatment received by his captors.

It was true, the 84th and 87th Brigades did not commit the killings that did occur elsewhere. For Vicente Rojo it was a moment of pride, brief perhaps, since the war would end up imposing his brutality. A year later, Polanco and Rey d’Harcourt were shot along with 41 other prisoners from Teruel by a Popular Army already in disarray towards France.

Cavero, Aguilar, Alquézar and the others had no strength left to celebrate the triumph. They only thought about the permission they had been offered if they completed the mission. A couple of documents from the 40th Division provided by Corral show that this commitment did exist, in addition to the promise of promotions and extraordinary pay for the entire brigade.

But no, they were still sent to reconquer Cerro de la Muela to try to loosen the national grip around the city. Again, to fight and to sleep in the open. Due to the accumulated ice, this time even breastworks could not be dug into the ground.

Permission did not come until the Requetés had been pushed back somewhat. Finally, on January 16, they were relieved by the 68th Division to spend a few days in the rear. Half of the brigade would rest in the Carmelite convent, in Rubielos de Mora, and the rest in some nearby mines.

Those who took the least time spent a day covering the 56 kilometers on foot, but in the end they reached the small town. Although the explosions could be heard from a distance and the formations of the Republican aviation passed over them, there the war must have seemed something very distant to them.

They did not know it, but as they walked towards Rubielos an artillery rain fell on the north of Teruel. That same day, the nationals – now with 12 divisions – had begun an enveloping maneuver in that sector.

It was the turn of the major of the brigade to enter the convent to tell them that all the permits were cancelled, when they had not even arrived a day. They were sent to reinforce the defensive ring. There are no exact data, but Corral has calculated that at that time the 84th had a total of 600 casualties between killed and wounded, which is equivalent to more than a quarter of the total number of troops.

There were huddles, murmurs, and in the end they decided that they would not return until the leave was over. The eldest disappeared, and they didn’t hear anything again until Nieto showed up at night. He told them okay, that he would not be punished. Those who wished could lay down their weapons and wait in the plaza.

Despite how bad that looked, some did it, ignoring the pleas of their comrades. Blas Alquézar, Bernardo Aguilar and Avelino Codes were among the 130 who released the Mauser. Shortly after, some trucks from the Assault Guard (a police force of the Second Republic) appeared, and the policemen forced them to get on at gunpoint.

They took them to the mines, which had already been evacuated by the rest of the brigade -these did go to the front, although once there they also staged an episode of insubordination-, and there they waited until midnight.

At that time, an officer ordered the trucks they heard saying their names to get back on the trucks. Discounting those who did not appear because they had fled, there were 46. They led them to a pine forest next to the road, three kilometers from Rubielos, and there they made them walk a few meters in the dark. They would not see them because they were blinded by the headlights of the trucks, but in front of them there were machine guns ready to kill them.

Why did Nieto take such a disproportionate measure? It is true that the General Staff had given orders to treat disobedience with the utmost severity, but a decree of the Ministry of Defense forced summary trials in such cases.

In his report – which Corral transcribed in the book – he tried to justify himself by saying that the rebels had created committees and that is why he had started a legal case against them. If he included these two lies it is because he knew that justice was being taken into his own hands.

Probably, as Corral believes, he sacrificed his men just to save his image. After the New Year’s rout, when Teruel almost fell due to his negligence, he wanted to demonstrate to the command that he was a determined leader. The case is more ignominious then, since the 84th Brigade was precisely one of the two that remained at its post that day.

Enrique Líster’s division or Valentín González El Campesino’s are just two of those that at one point or another during the battle abandoned their positions without warning and received no punishment. To protect them, Líster even joined the rebellion of his own, and was later pampered by Vicente Rojo in an attempt to appease him.

On the other hand, the men who had taken the Port of Escandón, who had endured the type before the disaster of New Year, who had surrendered the city and who did everything without incurring sabotage, had no defense. They were decimated by their own command.

Now without the 84th, which was dissolved and its members assigned to other units, the battle continued for a few more weeks, until Teruel returned to rebel hands on February 22.

Blas Alquézar and Avelino Codes were saved because their names were not on the list. Bernardo Aguilar did hear his say, but he began to run down the hill with another companion. Crouched in the bushes, at midnight he heard the crack of machine guns in the distance. According to what he told Corral, while they were being machine-gunned, his comrades cheered the Republic.