Despite their setbacks in the North, the Republicans are not and do not want to be defeated. On the threshold of the winter of 1937-1938, they pulled themselves together. The government, now chaired by Juan Negrin in place of Largo Caballero, moved to Barcelona, in order to push war production in Catalonia and to regain control of the working masses, watched by anarchy. Indalecio Prieto is Minister of War. He reorganized the army and tried, against the will of the Communists, to depoliticize it. The battle that will engage him in Teruel will allow him to prove himself.
On the eve of Teruel, what are the numbers present? The nationalists have 650 infantry battalions, a cavalry division, 290 artillery batteries and 400 aircraft, making a total of 600,000 men. The Republicans have an army of 450,000 men divided into two masses, that of the Center, commanded by Miaja, and that of the East, under the orders of Hernandez Sarabia. A third army, that of the Levant, is being organized in Valencia. The Republican government also had 350 planes and two artillery batteries.
It was the Army of the East which took the offensive towards Teruel, an important position, because it constitutes the south-eastern salient of the nationalist lines. The first phase of the battle is to the advantage of the Republicans, who seize Teruel, thus preventing the Nationalists from isolating Catalonia and cutting off Madrid from the sea. But Franco will not remain on this failure. On December 31, 1937, the Nationalists took up position opposite Teruel, in a landscape of desolation. It is so cold and the snow is so thick that the two opposing armies, cut off from their supply bases and literally blocked by the ice, are unable to fight.
It is not that in February 1938, after a vigorous counter-offensive, led by Franco's best generals — including Varela, Yagüe and Dâvila — and seventy days of fierce engagements, the Republicans abandoned Teruel, not without blowing it up part with dynamite. Nationalist victory dearly acquired and of which the cold will have been one of the agents.
Germany had prepared its aggression carefully and long in advance. It is clear from Hitlers many statements and from his book Mein Kampf that the Führer regarded the Soviet Union as his main enemy and the essential obstacle to his domination of Europe and, subsequently, of the world. The circumstanc