The Struggle for Madrid: The Central Epic of the Spanish Conflict 1936-1937

The Struggle for Madrid is a study of the battles that werewaged between the armies of the Spanish Republic andthe armies of General Francisco Franco for the city ofMadrid. It was this struggle, beginning with the collapseof Republican arms at Toledo in September, 1936, andending with the victory of the Madrid armies at Guadalajarain March, 1937, that determined the duration andcharacteristics of the rest of the conflict. It was the centralepisode of the Spanish War.Due to international intervention, the Spanish strugglelost its purely national character and became at once a civilwar of a profoundly Spanish type, a war of independencewaged by a section of the Spanish people against German,Italian, and Moroccan armies, and a clash of supra nationalideologies that aroused the deepest passions of peoples farremoved from the immediate Spanish interests at stake.Although the passions aroused by the war distortcontemporary accounts of the fighting, the totalities ofthese obstacles present no insurmountable barrier to apreliminary investigation of the Madrid battles. Such astudy is best undertaken while many of the principal actorsin the Madrid tragedy still live. If truth has been affrontedthe witnesses may yet speak, and from the debate marginof error will be reduced. Robert Colodny’s groundbreakingcross of military history and political ambitions helpsreduce the gap between fiction and fact.