Customer Reviews

Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War

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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.

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.