But it did provide invaluable experience to HitlerвЂ™s military, especially the Luftwaffe. The mountainous Spanish terrain precluded the massed tank attacks and deep-penetration mechanized offensives of World War II. Though the Spanish Civil War is viewed as a proving ground for World War II, thatвЂ™s not strictly true.

The вЂњ White TerrorвЂќ of the Nationalists murdered two hundred thousand opponents, grimly dwarfing the fifty thousand or so victims of the Red Terror, conducted by Republican death squads that were led by Soviet NKVD secret police. The Republicans were supported by a bizarre potpourri of socialists, communists, Trotskyites and anarchists, as well as international leftists such as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from America. The Nationalists were a collection of conservatives, monarchists and fascist Falangists. Like todayвЂ™s Iraq and Syria, the combatants fought amongst themselves as well as the enemy. Yet in other ways, the conflict seems all too familiar. Back then, the cause was ideology, the disputes over whether the world should be democratic or fascist or communist. We are accustomed today to slaughter inflicted in the name of God.

In some ways, the Spanish Civil War belongs to a different era. What should have been an internal military revolt like the recent attempted coup in Turkey swelled into an international struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, liberalism and conservatism, and communism versus fascism. The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 when Francisco Franco led a dissident group of staunchly conservative and Catholic generals, as well as half the Spanish Army, against the liberal, elected Spanish government.

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