Newly-acquired Spanish Civil War books

Yesterday’s post brought two new Spanish Civil War books to add to my collection, WARSHIPS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR and ARMAS Y UNIFORMES DE LA GUERRA CIVIL ESPAÑOLA. The former has just been published, but the latter has been around for a few years.

WARSHIPS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR has six chapters, a short bibliography, and an index, and is particularly well illustrated. The chapters etc., are:

• Introduction
• The pre-war Spanish Navy
• The Navy during the uprising
• Command and manpower
• The naval war
• Specifications
• Battleships
• Cruisers
• Destroyers
• Submarines
• Gunboats
• Smaller warships
• Further reading
• Index

This is a good primer on the naval aspects of the Spanish Civil War, but I feel that other than the excellent illustrations, it does not offer anything more than my own book, LA ULTIMA CRUZADA.

ARMAS Y UNIFORMES DE LA GUERRA CIVIL ESPAÑOLA is a much more substantial book and is chock full of coloured line drawings and photographs. The text is in Spanish, but I suspect that most English-speaking readers will find little difficulty understanding the captions that accompany the lavish illustrations.

The book is divided into several sections, each of which contains a number of chapters:

• Introducción
• Vision global de las armas y uniformes de la Guerra Civil Española
• El Arma de Aviación
• La aviación en la Guerra de España
• La Marina
• La Marina española en 1936
• La evolución de la Flota nacional
• La Marina republcana
• El Ejértico
• Carros de combate y vehiculos blindados en la Guerra Española
• Las armas individuales y colectivas del combatiente
• Las piezas de artilleria: cañones y orbuses

The book also contains an extensive bibliography.

(For the benefit of those of my regular blog readers who do not understand enough Spanish to fully understand the contents listed above, here is a rough English translation:

• Introduction
• Overall view of the weapons and uniforms of the Spanish Civil War
• Air Forces
• Air power during the war in Spain
• The Navies
• The Spanish Navy in 1936
• The development of the Nationalist fleet
• The Republican Navy
• The Army
• Tanks and armoured cars during the war in Spain
• The individual and support weapons used
• Artillery: Cannons and howitzers)

I wish that I had had access to this book when I was writing LA ULTIMA CRUZADA, and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who wants detailed information about the weaponry used during the Spanish Civil War. The reader may well need to acquire a Spanish-English dictionary in order to understand some of the more detailed text, but the illustrations alone are worth the cost of the book.

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WARSHIPS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR was written by Angus Konstam and illustrated by Paul Wright. It was published in 2021 by Osprey Publishing (ISBN 978 1 4728 4866 6).

ARMAS Y UNIFORMES DE LA GUERRA CIVIL ESPAÑOLA was written by Lucas Molina Franco and José María Manrique Garcia and published in 2009 by Susaeta Ediciones S.A. (ISBN 978 84 305 7036 2).