Miguel Cuesta, writer of a information to the stays of the Battle of Jarama, denounces the disappearance of the scenes of the battle Santos Cortés, a veteran of the nice battle, requires these constructions to be maintained in order that nobody forgets the fratricidal conflict Gregorio Salcedo created in Morata de Tajuña and with little assist one of many few museums that exist on the Civil War
Miguel Cuesta is the writer of Routes of the Spanish Civil War (Ed. Anaya Touring). With him we tour the trenches and shelters the place troopers like Santos Cortés fought, whom we visited at his home in Madrid. While one reveals us the scenes of the conflict (he has coated 200 fronts), the 102-year-old veteran tells us how he lived there.
Miguel criticizes that “with few exceptions, the trenches and shelters on the battlefields are in a lamentable state, because it was one of the necessary episodes in our historical past.”
In the Jarama Valley, the identical olive timber that served as a parapet for Spaniards killing one another, or brigade members who got here from many nations world wide: Americans, Italians, Irish, Germans, even Poles, nonetheless stand. Everything appeared like a rehearsal for what would come two years later with World War II.
So that this isn’t forgotten, Gregorio Salcedo created the museum of the Battle of Jarama, in Morata de Tajuña (Madrid). He had issues at first. “They denounced me as soon as as a result of they believed that he had an arsenal -he says-, when what’s saved listed here are, as you possibly can see, from casings to sardine cans that have been used as lamps, all the things for instance how folks lived within the trenches”.
The one who did perceive him was a German brigade member Fritz Eikermeir and his daughter Renate who provided him monetary assist and there have been additionally Germans who fought for the Republic. In the memorial positioned in a big area ceded by the city corridor, we will see all the things, together with letters from the “godmothers”, strangers who wrote to the recruits to carry their spirits, a group of picks used to dig trenches and tunnels like those that lead us Miguel Cuesta.
Santos Cortés, our veteran of the Spanish Civil War, turns 102 in March. His life is a type of issues that begins shortly: on the age of 10, his mom put him to work as an errand boy, “again then there was no cash to go to highschool,” he remembers. At the age of 15 they mobilized him to struggle. The War had begun Civil.
He joined the seventieth Mixed Brigade, IV Machine Gun Battalion. His first mobilization was to defend Madrid within the Jarama Valley, east of Madrid. The insurgent military supposed to encompass Madrid, besieging it and reducing off communications with Valencia, the place the Republican authorities had fled.
Here the primary fashionable battle of the Spanish Army happened and presumably additionally the primary in Europe as a result of they happened in the identical theater of operations: infantry, artillery, armored autos and aviation in a quantity that had by no means occurred earlier than.
And whose traces, little by little, deteriorate till they disappear.