Spanish militiawoman during the Civil War, with a Mauser rifle and what appears to be an early Star pistol (model 1919 possibly?)
Vintage Saturday: Militiawoman
Handgun
Spanish Eibar/Ruby Pistols
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Flintlock
Spanish Miquelet Flintlock at RIA
The miquelet lock is generally considered the first true, mature flintlock action in the progression of firearms technology. It combined the pan cover and frizzen (the plate against which the flint strikes) into a single […]
Semiauto pistol
The Astra 903 – Nothing New in Advertising
Maybe it’s just me, but I always get a kick out of really over-the-top vintage advertising. I think that we can agree that the Astra 900 series is (and always has been) a nifty family […]
This is one of those photographic portraits that seems to capture the very essence of a moment in time, to be forever frozen for posterity. This is a certain evocative quality that can only be expressed in black-and-white.
There is a weary acquiescence in that care-worn face, and eyes that have seen perhaps too much. Her smile touches her eyes, but underneath it is a sad smile borne of an understanding of life learned through the bitter lessons of war.
I think she looks positively jubilant! Genuinely happy to have some one take her picture, which was a big deal back then. I do not know whether it was because she was still alive, or for some other reason, but she is actually happy!
Stewart, I think you have a good point there — there is a real, if fleeting, happiness of the moment. One of the small but incredibly meaningful joys of life in the midst of so much adversity. However, the more I look at this photograph, the more I sense a deeper undercurrent of sadness as well. I guess we will probably never know the details.
@ Earl Liew :
I honestly hope she survived that terrible episode in human history.
You said it, Earl.
The photograph is probably staged by a professional photographer. The person is probably real but whether she actually fought or wielded the weapons in the photographs is an open question.
The Soviets deployed a large (several hundred strong) propaganda team to Spain during the war. Their Stalinist morality allowed them fabricate and lie freely so they churned out lots of staged photos. Most of the highly evocative photos from the Spanish civil war are their work.
Unfortunately, the Soviets also deployed a large team of secret police, assassins and torture experts to Spain as well with the goal of hijacking the Republican cause. Their actions destroyed the Republican cause from within giving the “fascist” the victory. In hindsight, Franco was probably the best outcome being really just a run of the mill military dictator with no particular ideology or attachment to an external power. The blood bath that would have occurred if the Stalinist had dominated is hard to imagine. Plus, Spain would have been drawn directly into WWII.
The woman in the photo is probably a Spanish Stalinist. In that era, none but the most radical of women would wear men’s clothing even in the middle of firefight. The Stalinist developed an entire mythology about their supposed support for female equality so they heavily publicized real heroines and if they didn’t enough real ones, they just invented them.
The positioning of the pistol suggest that it was placed there for dramatic effect. I don’t think anyone actually in combat would carry a pistol right across the hinge of their pelvis. If you have to run, crouch or hit the dirt, things could get uncomfortable.
You don’t know the political affiliation of the woman pictured. She could be in the PCE/Communist “MAOC” Milicias antifascistas de obreros y campesinos, or she could be in the UGT Socialist militia, or, for that matter, the anarchosyndicalist CNT-FAI. If Madrid, probably the former. If Barcelona before the May 1937 repression of the CNT and Marxist POUM by the PSUC/ Socialist-Communist coalition, then the latter. You are correct that the centralist/authoritarian communists and the decentralist/anti-authoritarian left fought a civil war internal to the overarching Right vs. Left civil war with disastrous results.
There were very many images of women milicianas, and these were not simply the work of Stalinist photographers. By the time the Communists dominated the Ejército Popular de la RE, women were no longer permitted to bear arms and served in commissary, transport and motor-drivers and as nurses and medical orderlies.
As for the outcome of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s victory, see Paul Preston, _The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain_ (NY: Norton, 2012).
Franco’s secret police and security organs were vindictive in the extreme.
Ah, here it is. Abel Paz, who was with the Durruti column as a teenager, and later was part of the resistance to the Franco dictatorship and thus spent over a decade in prison captions that photograph as “Militiawoman, Madrid 1936.”
So she might be either a PCE/MAOC (origins of the Quinto Regimiento), anarcho-syndicalist or anarchist, or a PSOE/UGT socialist given the time frame of the photo.
Incidentally, for a great history of the Soviets swindling the 2nd Spanish Republic on arms transfers, see Gerald Howson, _Arms for Spain_.
The first Soviet arms arrived in November 1936–about the time the Thälmann KPD German communists went into action in Madrid.
They included Gras, Kropotchek, Lebel, Vetterli, Mannlicher, and other obsolete rifles given to the Czar during WWI. The first 7.62x54r caliber rifles were the Winchester 1895s. The first Mosin-Nagant rifles arrived in early 1937. Very, very many DP lmgs were sent, and were used by Franco’s Spanish State along with other captured Soviet weapons like the Polikarpov “chato” fighter plane and the T-26 tank.
David, you have a very comprehensive and critical grasp of history. Your deductive reasoning and level of due diligence are outstanding, as befits a site like FW.
Thanks very much for sharing your insights.
Thanks, David!
I am also joining with others: all respect my to you sir!
Didn’t mean to upset anyone but I think it’s important to be reminded that a vast number of the “evocative” photos of history have in recent years been proven to have been staged or significantly altered e.g. The Falling Soldier the iconic photo of the Spanish Civil War and one of the most widely published war photos ever, is almost certainly a staged shot.
In that case, the photographer Robert Capa was a serial con artist who created an entire fictional identity for himself out of personal ambition. He was a member of POUM which was notionally Trotskyist but like all Trotskyist groups shot through with Soviet agents. On historian of Communism (name escapes me at the moment) quipped that there were probably more Stalinist in Trotskyist parties than Trotskyites.
The anti-individualistic, collectivist ideologies like Fascism and Communism were particularly bad about faking photos and other stories owing to their belief in the power of propaganda to actively create a social reality out of thin air. For a Communist and most far Marxist, objective reality is irrelevant, only the future Communist utopia matters. Lying to get their is not only acceptable but required.
But the problem isn’t limited to extremist. The famous photo of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination was heavily retouched in dark room from the original shifting the shadows and emphasis. Back in 2008, both Reuters and the API both circulated a widely published image of a open carry advocate at a Tea Party rally with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. The man was wearing a long sleeve white shirt and image published cut off right at the cuff and the collar. The original photo showed the man’s hands and neck… he was African-American. Yet, the clipping of the photo was and is still used to sell the idea that the Tea Party is a bunch of racist, white “gun nuts.”
The Rodney King riots resulted from the media collectively choosing to show only the heavily edited video in which the police struck King. Later research showed that individuals, regardless of race or political orientation, who saw the unedited video were highly (IIRC, %75) likely to believe that the police had acted within bounds. Those shown only the edited tape came to the opposite conclusion.
The rise of the internet and which broke the monopoly of analog publishes on images, the analyzing power of modern personal computers and the peer-to-peer information sharing on the internet, have allowed researchers both professional and amateur to examine the reality of many historical photos and videos and in more cases than not the emotions evoked in the viewer by the famous image is not sustained by hindsight analysis.
All single-source photos should be treated as something more akin to a painting than an objective record of events. Photographers and editors can frame real events as they choose, letting us see only what they wish us to see and telling us the story they wish to tell. Ironically, even though digital media is vastly easier to fake, because it stands to produce a vast number of images of the same event, the combination of images is harder to fake, shade, clip or otherwise alter and frame.
I have become perhaps over sensitive to this issue but such photos create emotionally shading on greater issues. The mythology of the Spanish Civil war in which the Communist were the good guys, contributed to soft peddling of Communism up to the present day.
Robert Capa, a Hungarian Jew, may have staged the “Falling Soldier” photo, which has been variously argued as depicting a Marxist POUM militiaman or an anarchist FIJL-Libertarian youth militiaman or a Republican soldier either at the moment of being shot or merely losing his footing during a military exercise. Certainly Capa claimed the shot was authentic.
I am not sure if Capa was a “member” of the POUM. Eric Blair/George Orwell fought with a POUM militia on the Aragón front, came to dislike the sectarian political arguing, and sought to go to Alicante to sign on with the British International Brigade so he might get to Madrid, scene of the heaviest fighting. While making the arrangements, he witnessed first hand the tragic “May Days” of 1937 where the combined PSOE-socialist and PCE-communist [PSUC in Catalonia] repressed the POUM and CNT-FAI. As you note, many NKVD agents and so on participated and lots of antifascist militants were murdered, including the Italian anarchist antifascist exile Camilo Berneri. Seeing this episode turned George Orwell into a “premature anti-Stalinist” and he never forgot the implications of totalitarian movements.
As for the original photo of the Militia woman in Madrid, November 1936, it is housed in the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis in Amsterdam, the Netherlands along with very many other photographs from the Spanish Civil War and much of the CNT-FAI’s archives as well as other materials.
I think it is one of an entire series of pictures taken by a famous, Pulitzer Prize winning photographer for life, IIRC. I wish I could have remembered his name, or the title of the book he published because I am almost certain this was in that book. Maybe? Alfred Eisenstaedt or maybe Robert Capa, I do not know, but I doubt that it was posed.
“This machine kills fascists.”
http://www.sbhac.net/Republica/Fuerzas/Armas/Infanteria/Fusiles/Fusiles.htm
For a list of munitions used in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, see the link at municion.org
“This machine kills fascists.” Woody’s granddaughter with the granddaughter of one of Britain’s great poets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaMThR57Qik
Ummmm, having studied the Spanish Civil War a wee bit, I think the lady is a POUMista. Nothing like, after a few centuries of oppression, like a spell of well-armed resistance to bring a smile to your face!
She could be in the PCE/Communist “MAOC” Milicias antifascistas de obreros y campesinos, or she could be in the UGT Socialist militia, or, for that matter, the anarchosyndicalist CNT-FAI. If Madrid, probably the former. If Barcelona before the May 1937 repression of the CNT and Marxist POUM by the PSUC/ Socialist-Communist coalition, then the latter.
That’s the trouble with the Spanish Civil War. You can’t tell the bad guys from the bad guys. 🙂
Great photo, though. In SCW photos, the commies always seem to be having such a good time. Reminds me of Lehrer:
Remember the war against Franco?
That’s the kind where each of us belongs.
Though he may have won all the battles,
We had all the good songs.
Why do I suspect that there is an Australian Internationalist version where every line rhymes with “beer”?
I agree that this picture is, at least up to a point, is staged.
From reading a preview of Paul Preston’s book, I see that he does address that the Republicans killed 10,000s of non-combatant Christians. I might get a copy of this book to read. It’s one of modern civil wars that is very interesting to me.
Yes. Which is why there were international volunteers on Franco’s side:
http://irelandscw.com/top-Contents-OD.htm
Thanks for the very interesting link. I do like to read and hear the 1st hand accounts of those that were at the place when the events happened.
I think the pistol might be a Sharpshooter, the predecessor to the JoLoAr that did not have the palanca.
Possible, although I don’t see any sign of a heel mag release.
To me is a Star mod. 1919, aka “Sindicalista”, 9 shot -if .32acp- version with longer grip & barrel (possibly a 1920 or 1921 variant of the standard compact model). The front sight and the position of the grip screws are different from a Sharpshooter´s.