14 FERNANDO CALVO GONZÁLEZ-REGUERAL
Pretendemos en el presente trabajo hacer una especie de radiografía de
tal maquinaria bélica en el periodo comprendido entre el final de la guerra,
1º de abril de 1939, y el verano de ese mismo año, en que el contexto internacional
aconsejaba reajustar y redesplegar todo ese poderío castrense. Para
ello, resumiremos en la primera parte de este estudio las últimas campañas
de la Guerra Civil como antecedentes mediatos y, en la segunda, incluiremos
cuadros resumen que tratarán de acreditar lo antedicho para finalizar.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Ejército de Tierra, Guerra Civil española 1936-
1939, Segunda Guerra Mundial, campaña de Cataluña, caída de Madrid,
sucesos de Cartagena, “Ofensiva de la Victoria”, Cuerpos de Ejército y Divisiones
del Ejército nacional, Flota nacional, Armada española, fuerzas
aéreas y nacimiento del Ejército del Aire, CTV, Cuartel General Franco,
Estado Mayor Central.
ABSTRACT
It could be affirmed, allowing the correspondent qualitative aspects,
that the Spanish Army that emerged victorious in the Civil War that began
in 1936 was, by the Spring of 1939, one of the most powerful military machines
of the moment and, without any doubt , the most formidable ever
seen in our country. It was so because of the quantity and quality of its
weaponry - both contestants having been provided with the best weapons of
the time, which now joined together to swell the strength of a new Spanish
Armed Forces - but also due to the number of soldiers (in excess of a million
men at arms), for its unique and unequaled experience in a modern fighting
modality that preluded the tactics that would develop in the Second World
conflagration and, above all, for its victory morale, which had increased
battle after battle, in the largest that have ever been fought in the Iberian
Peninsula: Brunete, Belchite and Teruel in 1937, those of Valencia and at the
Ebro in 1938 and the offensive on Catalonia in 1939.
We intend in the present work to make a kind of X-ray of such a war
machine in the period between the end of the War, April 1, 1939, and the
summer of that same year, in which the international context advised to
readjust and redeploy all that military might. To do this, we will summarize
in the first part of this study the last campaigns of the Civil War as mediate
antecedents of these new armed forces and, in the second, to conclude, we
will include summary tables that will try to prove the aforementioned.
Revista de Historia Militar, 129 (2021), pp. 14-52. ISSN: 0482-5748