The ban on volunteers for Spain

At midnight on 20–21 February 1937 a ban on sending volunteers to war-torn Spain came into force. It had been agreed on 16 February by the states represented on the Non-Intervention Committee in London, among them the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union and Portugal. Each undertook not to let its citizens go to the war in Spain and to prohibit recruitment on its territory. The decision is sometimes attributed to a committee of the League of Nations, but this is inaccurate. The Non-Intervention Committee was not a League body but a conference of ambassadors meeting in London outside its structures, and on Spain the League of Nations confined itself to resolutions. In any case the ban came too late to change the character of the war in Spain: Italy, Germany and the USSR had already sent thousands of soldiers, airmen and advisers to Spain, and well over ten thousand volunteers had joined the International Brigades.

Non-intervention

When civil war broke out in Spain in July 1936, the government of the Republic asked France for arms. The prime minister, Léon Blum, leader of the French Popular Front, wanted to help, but he feared a split in his own country, opposition from the right and the Radicals, and the loss of the support of Britain, without which France did not feel safe against Germany. At the beginning of August, therefore, Paris proposed a general ban on arms deliveries to Spain. London backed the plan at once. The government of Stanley Baldwin feared that the war in Spain would turn into a European war, and many British Conservatives looked with distaste on the revolution in the Republican zone.

By the end of August the non-intervention agreement had been accepted by 27 European states, including Germany, Italy, Portugal and the Soviet Union. It was not a treaty but a series of parallel government declarations. To supervise their implementation a committee was set up, made up of ambassadors accredited in London. Its first meeting took place on 9 September 1936 at the British Foreign Office. It was chaired by British politicians, and from the autumn by the Conservative Lord Plymouth. Germany was represented by its ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Italy by Dino Grandi and the USSR by Ivan Maisky.

From the start it was a charade. Germany and Italy, which had been supplying the Nationalists with aircraft and arms since July, assured the committee that they were sending nothing, and their representatives were able to delay every decision for weeks. From October the Soviet Union too openly broke the ban, selling arms to the Republic and sending it advisers. The embargo hit above all the Republic, the lawful government, which under international law was entitled to buy arms abroad. The Republic’s foreign minister, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, protested about this in Geneva. In December 1936 the Council of the League of Nations called on its members to respect non-intervention and endorsed attempts at mediation, and then left the whole matter to the London committee.

The question of volunteers

In the autumn of 1936 foreigners began to pour into Spain. The Comintern organised the International Brigades, which attracted Communists and anti-fascists from all over Europe and the Americas, among them many Poles. In November the German Condor Legion went into action, and in December the first soldiers of the Italian corps, officially also “volunteers”, landed at Cádiz. The August agreement said nothing about men, only about arms. At the end of 1936, therefore, Britain and France proposed extending it to include a ban on volunteers leaving for Spain.

The replies came slowly and with conditions. The USSR agreed on 27 December, Portugal on 5 January 1937, and Germany and Italy on 7 January, stipulating that the ban must cover everyone and be supervised. In Britain the government announced at the beginning of January that taking part in the war in Spain fell under the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870; the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, explained in the House of Commons that the measure was aimed above all at recruiters who had been promising airmen high pay. Other states introduced similar rules. The Congress of the United States, which did not belong to the committee, had already passed an arms embargo on Spain on 6 January. Ireland, from which several hundred volunteers of General Eoin O’Duffy had gone to fight on Franco’s side, passed a law prohibiting service in Spain on 24 February.

Germany and Italy agreed to the ban only once they had moved to Spain as many forces as they considered necessary. By mid-February there were about fifty thousand Italians and several thousand Germans in Spain. On 16 February 1937 the committee adopted a resolution imposing the ban from midnight on 20–21 February. At the same time a control plan was being prepared to give the bans teeth. It was adopted on 8 March but came into force only on the night of 19–20 April.

Control that did not control

The control plan provided for observers on the Franco-Spanish border and in ports, and for naval patrols around Spain. The coast was divided into zones. Britain and France patrolled the northern, southern and Atlantic coasts, while Germany and Italy patrolled the Republican Mediterranean coast – precisely the one through which aid to their opponents flowed. The warships had no right to stop vessels; they could only check whether a committee observer was on board. Ships under the Spanish flag or the flags of states outside the agreement were not subject to control at all, and German freighters off the Spanish coast switched to the Panamanian flag. Portugal refused to allow observers on its border, agreeing only to British officials attached to the embassy in Lisbon. Nor did the control cover the air route.

The ban on volunteers remained in practice a dead letter. The Italians sent reinforcements and new units throughout 1937 and 1938. The Germans rotated the personnel of the Condor Legion every few months so that as many airmen as possible would gain combat experience. Volunteers for the International Brigades crossed the Pyrenees at night with the help of French Communists. The governments knew all this, but none wanted to risk a conflict.

The naval patrol lasted only a few weeks. On 29 May 1937 Republican aircraft bombed the German pocket battleship Deutschland, launched in 1931, in the roadstead off Ibiza, killing 31 sailors. In retaliation Hitler ordered Almería to be shelled from the sea. Germany and Italy withdrew from the patrols, returned, and withdrew again after an attack in June on the cruiser Leipzig, which the Germans blamed on the Republicans, although the latter denied it. In the summer of 1937 Italian submarines began sinking ships bound for the Republic in the Mediterranean. They were stopped only by the Nyon Conference in September, convened without the committee, after which the British and French fleets began patrolling the shipping lanes.

On the road to war

For the next year and a half the committee argued over the withdrawal of volunteers. A plan of July 1938, which provided for international commissions to count the foreigners on both sides, was never carried out. The Republic unilaterally disbanded the International Brigades in the autumn of 1938. The Italians then withdrew about ten thousand soldiers from Spain, a condition for the entry into force of their agreement with Britain, and the rest left only after Franco’s victory. On 27 February 1939 London and Paris recognised Franco’s government. The United States ambassador to Spain, Claude Bowers, later called the whole of non-intervention a shameless fiction.

The ban of February 1937 shows clearly what the policy of concessions to the dictators amounted to even before Munich. Britain and France preferred to pretend that agreements were being kept rather than risk war with Germany and Italy. Hitler and Mussolini learned that they could break their commitments with no consequences at all, and that the democratic governments would themselves supply them with pretexts for delay. The Soviet Union, which on the Non-Intervention Committee watched the submissiveness of London and Paris, came to believe less and less in collective security, and in August 1939 this pushed Stalin towards an agreement with Hitler.