Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War [Hardcover]

Sebastian Balfour (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 20, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0199252963 | ISBN-13: 978-0199252961

Combining military, political, cultural, social, and oral history, Sebastian Balfour narrates for the first time the development of a brutalized, interventionist army that played a crucial role in the victory of the Francoists in the Spanish Civil War. Spain's new colonial venture in Morocco in the early twentieth-century turned into a bloody war against the tribes resisting the Spanish invasion of their lands. After suffering a succession of heavy military disasters against some of the most accomplished guerrillas in the world, the Spanish army turned to chemical warfare and dropped massive quantities of mustard gas on civilians. Dr Balfour exposes this previously closely guarded secret using evidence from Spanish military archives and from survivors in Morocco. He also narrates the daily life of soldiers in the war as well as the self-images and tensions among the colonial officers. After looking at the motives that drove Moroccans to resist or cooperate with Spain, the author describes the contradictory pictures among Spaniards of Moroccan collaborators and foes. Finally, he examines the Spanish colonial army's response to the Second Republic of 1931-1936 and its brutal march through Spain in the Civil War.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Deadly Embrace breaks new ground by demonstrating, in meticulously documented detail, the critical connections between the war that Spain waged in Morocco...and the civil war."-- HISTORY: Reviews of New Books

"...impressive and thought-provoking..."--Journal of Modern History

About the Author

Sebastian Balfour is a Reader in Contemporary Spanish Studies at the University of London

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (June 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199252963
• ISBN-13: 978-0199252961
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #892,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #60 in Books > History > Africa > Morocco

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Balfour's Declaration, November 8, 2005

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Hardcover)

Balfour's book advances a strange thesis which he makes compellingly believable by the middle of the text, and from that point afterward, you believe it the way you believe the earth is round. If I oversimplify his argument, it is to state that the Spanish Army of Franco was a rag-tag scatterbrained bunch who might well have lost to the Popular Front during the War of the later 1930s had not they had the chance to hone their martial skills during a horrifying campaign earlier in the century, directly after the First World War, in Northern Africa. As Bob Hope and Bing Crosby sang, "Just like Webster's Dictionary, we're Morocco-bound," and so might have sung the colonial army of 1919-20, when they invaded Morocco with every trick in the book, including mustard gas, itself a pretty new invention.

Africa was a-swarm with colonialization, and much of the continent had already been divided up by competing French and British interests, with a smattering of Dutch privatization and heaping helpings of German outposts. The Spanish may have felt themselves embarrassingly absent from Africa, and the Moroccoan incursion might have been a matter of national pride. However they came bump up against the cunning guerrilla fighters of the Rif, a loose organization of native tribes that, frustratingly for our hermanos, seemed to vanish into air as soon as you attached them, like smoke, only to re-amass under stronger conditions from a higher hill in the sand, the minute you had counted them out for the kill.

I haven't seen much press attention for this intriguing OUP title, which has by the way some very high quality maps that help us to visualize the scene of the crime with the precision of Patricia Cornwell. Maybe some critics have ignored DEADLY EMBRACE due to its pulp title, which might have been by Cornell Woolrich or James Hadley Chase rather than a serious work of history. Specialization is so prevalent in today's history that I expect Balfour has been ignored largely because his focus is on Africa, and confounding the specialists in the Spanish Civil War who have just about myopically concentrated their gaze on Europe, with perhaps a glance at related developments in the USA and Canada.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important book but hardly mentioned., July 17, 2008

By 

Beppo (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Hardcover)

I encounter this book in a local library by chance. It is a highly enlightening read. The author merticulously depicts and explicates the cause and subsequent outcome of Spain's phatasmagoric expedition to the North Africa and blood common soldiers had to shed for this political fiasco. Also, how it shaped the mentality of Africanos whose military contribution was crucial for Franco. In addition to that , the author deals with Spanish foreign legion and its disturbing psyche that shaped through years of battle and hardship.

we can roughly paradigmatize the way a small amount of elite troops ,who shares disctictive culture and mores through years of hard fought battle,could topple the goverment and turn the tide of revolution. It happened in Germany by Freikorps and as did in Spain approximately 20 years later.
Was Franco capable to win the war without Africanos? Very doubtful.