Glorious and forgotten: the remembrance of air warfare in the Spanish Civil War
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2021-03-01

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) has become a symbol of the resistance against fascism. The internal conflict quickly involved foreign governments (Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union) while thousands of volunteers across the globe joined the Second Republic and its fight against the far right. The victory of the “Nationalists” was followed by a period of intense repression as general Francisco Franco established a ruthless dictatorship that would continue until his death in 1975. Unlike other places the transition to a democratic government did not entail any new perspective on the war as it promoted a “pact of oblivion” to forget this traumatic past.

Francoism created an official discourse of the war that has not been contested until recent years: the conflict was necessary because the Republican government had succumbed to armed anarchist and communist militias. This narrative did not fit the evidence as the Republican army was comparable to Franco’s forces in terms of equipment and performance; for this reason the fascist regime made an active effort to erase the memory of the Republican army and particularly of its most modern component: the “Glorious” Air Force.

This work describes a long-term initiative aimed at rediscovering the Republican Air Force through archaeological heritage. The project integrated a diversity of research, outreach and memorialisation activities as a means to restore the memory of the people that formed this military corps. We discuss here how heritage-based approaches can provide new narratives to forgotten aspects of a conflicted recent past.

XAVIER RUBIO-CAMPILLO, UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, SCHOOL OF HISTORY, CLASSICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY / MURPHY’S TOAST GAMES