Siege of Oviedo
Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)
Gijón - Oviedo - Alcázar of Toledo - Mérida - Badajoz - Guipúzcoa - Mallorca - Sierra Guadalupe - Talavera de la Reina - Madrid - Road to Coruña - Málaga - Jarama - Guadalajara - War in the north ( Durango , Guernica , Santander ) - Brunete - Belchite - Teruel - Cabo de Palos - Aragon - Ebro - Catalonia
The siege of Oviedo took place from July 19, 1936 to October 16, 1936. The city garrison, under the command of Colonel Antonio Aranda Mata , rose against the Second Spanish Republic and withstood the siege of government troops until the arrival of the nationalist troops.
The riot
The nationalists saw in the Asturian provincial capital Oviedo a place where a revolt against the republic could hardly be successful and practically abandoned it. The city was the center of the Asturian uprising in 1934 and was considered the center of left revolutionary activity.
Colonel Antonio Aranda, who was considered a Republican, got on amicably with the local Republican officials, but the Falange distrusted him . Aranda let the rumor spread that he was loyal to the Republic. This convinced the government to withdraw 4,000 miners from Oviedo on June 17, 1936, to deploy them in the emerging conflict in other parts of Asturias and Spain. Aranda had all the forces of the Guardia Civil and the Guardia de Asalto come to Oviedo and, on July 19, declared a revolt against the elected government. The troops of the Falange, Guardia Civil and Guardia de Asalto joined Aranda. He took control of the city. The rest of the province, however, was hostile to him.
Aranda's plan
Aranda was aware from the beginning that there would be a longer siege and had prepared for it. The city, surrounded on all sides by hills, was not easy to defend. Aranda had these heights occupied. After the 1934 uprising, the Madrid government reinforced the garrison of Oviedo and stored a large amount of weapons and ammunition in the city. Aranda therefore had 100 heavy machine guns and over a million rounds of ammunition. The weak point of the plan was that Aranda only had about 3,000 defenders. As a result, he was unable to occupy all the hills around the city. During the relatively quiet month of August, Aranda expanded his position by constantly conducting minor attacks that unsettled the besiegers.
The siege
The besiegers consisted of militia troops of the Frente Popular ( Popular Front ) and allied anarchist. They began the siege on July 20th, but were at the same time forced to siege the city of Gijón in Asturias. The nationalist forces held Gijón until August 21, 1936, so the defenders gained Oviedo's time. After the siege of Gijón ended, the forces of the Popular Front were able to concentrate entirely on Oviedo. Most of the attackers were miners from the mines of Asturias.
Union members Otero , a socialist miner, and Higinio Carrocera , an anarchist steel worker, took over the leadership of the besiegers. At the beginning, the city's water supply was cut off. Until September 3, there was little fighting. On September 4, however, the city came under heavy artillery fire and a bombardment of 1,500 aerial bombs, so that the gas, electricity and telephone supplies were interrupted. Four days later, the attackers tried to use an armored steamroller to take an outpost of the defenders. The defenders used artillery pieces raised on sandbags as anti-aircraft guns and fended off the attack in a 12-hour battle. The heavy artillery fire killed many civilians and many died due to the lack of water and the resulting sanitary problems. In the course of September, typhus broke out in the city . However, the bombardment had the opposite effect, so that several residents joined the defenders.
On October 4th, the Popular Front launched a general attack on the city. This was under pressure to succeed, as the nationalist troops advancing from Galicia were only 25 kilometers away. Aranda lost half of his troops and after a week was forced to give up his remaining positions on the heights and to withdraw the remaining troops into the city. By that time the defenders had used 90% of their ammunition and the fighting was becoming more and more hand-to-hand. There was heavy house-to-house fighting and when the defenders seemed to be running out of ammunition, Francist pilots managed to drop 30,000 rounds of ammunition.
Aranda remained 500 men and he withdrew with them to the center of the booth to deliver one last fight. The militias of the Popular Front had lost around 5,000 men by then and they too ran out of ammunition. Advancing further into the city turned out to be more and more difficult, as every house was defended to the last.
End of the siege
When on October 16, 1936 the situation finally seemed hopeless for the defenders, the nationalist troops from Galicia arrived. The militias of the Popular Front were forced to abandon the siege and retreat to their positions at the beginning of the siege. Until the end of the war in the north, a year later, Franco's troops held a narrow corridor to supply the city of Oviedo.
literature
- Hugh Thomas : The Spanish Civil War. Harper, New York NY 1961.
- Gabriel Jackson: The Spanish Republic and the Civil War. 1931-1939. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1965.
- Ronald Fraser : Blood of Spain. An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War. 1st American edition. Pantheon Books, New York NY 1979, ISBN 0-394-48982-9 .