Six days of war in the north of Álava. The Mola offensive begins

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With this suggestive title, the Sancho de Beurko Association collects in the latest issue of its digital magazine Saibigain the most complete study carried out to date on the Mola offensive and the breakup of the Basque front in relation to the first week of fighting that began a Wednesday, March , and took the Basque Army, after a six-day battle, to the line of the ports of Barazar, Dima (Zumeltza) and Urkiola, cutting off the lives of many young people, hundreds of whom are still in mountains like Albertia, Maroto, Jarindo and others who surround Otxandio and Ubidea without their families really knowing what became of them and whom this work attempts to name or, when this has not been possible, establish a hypothesis of what their fate may have been. , sometimes going down to the company and section level. The authors, Josu Aguirregabiria and Guillermo Tabernilla , in the tone of the previous issues of this publication, offer in a free digital format for download (much appreciated), the result of a conscientious work of historiographical research that provides important novelties. Six days of war in the north of Álava.

The Mola offensive begins Gudaris of the Salt Rebellion in Ubidea a couple of months before the Mola offensive. This battalion deployed one company in Oqueta and the other three between Mirugain and San Adrián, being involved in combat until April , , when it was withdrawn from the front (IRARGI). The operations have been described at an unprecedented level of detail, including all B2B Email List battalions involved; a scale that both Martínez Bande and other authors did not reach. To obtain such a result, the authors have relied on sources of all kinds (documentary, bibliographical, periodicals, etc.) and even testimonies, such as the interview with Manuel Gárate, corporal of the Flandes Battalion No. , who was precisely in the Known by Franco's troops as the “Red Triangle” , formed by the Albertia, Maroto and Jarindo mountains. His account of the combat fought in Albertia is illustrative of the struggle in the mountains that would characterize the entire Basque campaign until reaching Bilbao and preludes the harshness of a three-month long battle not yet sufficiently investigated by historiography: They ordered us to group together in “La Cuadra” while the artillery was fired and no one had seen anything like it. Those of us who had been in Villarreal already knew what it was like to be sold under the fire of artillery and aviation.



We began to climb thinking that no one could have been left up there after so much bombing, but when we reached a clearing a machine gun began to buzz at us just as we showed our nose and almost without seeing the first parapets, because there was still a lot of smoke, and only The first gust took at least half a dozen of us, we were stuck, but for a short time; Immediately a section overtook them on the right supported by the mortars and with everything we had to secure them, and we were able to cross the clearing and pull up. Mola's offensive on Vizcaya The context in which the operations took place takes us to the spring of After the failure of the great offensive of the Republican Northern Army towards Vitoria-Miranda de Ebro in November-December (an operation framed in the first great offensive of the Republican Army of the North, which sought to alleviate the grip that was hanging over Madrid ), the Asturian, Santander and Basque fronts stabilized during the winter and both sides prepared to fortify their respective lines, especially the government one. At the same time, the rebel operations on the Madrid and Guadalajara fronts had suffered an identical stagnation, so General Franco 's General Staff decided to take the initiative again, planning a major operation on a single front, concentrating all the forces.