Copla, flamenco, and the Tercios of Flanders: The cultural war in Russia of the 'guripa' of the Blue Division

“If our Cervantes had lived through this situation , 'the highest that history has ever seen,' as he would say again, he would have come just as he did to Lepanto , to leave one arm behind, like in the galleys of Don Juan of Austria facing the cursed East, and with the other to wield the pen, like a good captain of culture and sword,” thus wrote Benjamín Alarcón from the eastern front, just two months before the siege of Leningrad began, in which the Spanish Volunteer Division would also participate , and the Wehrmacht’s Operation Northern Light was planned to take the city.

Benjamín Alarcón , who imagined Miguel de Cervantes on the side of the divisionaries in their fight against communism, battling the Soviets until he was one-handed, signed those lines in the section ' Evocando Grandezas ' (Evoking Grandeurs) of the weekly Hoja de Campaña, with the anonymous letter, a Spanish Soldier . A "guripa" in short, which long before it was used as an appellation to refer to the municipal police, was the way in which professional soldiers contemptuously designated the Falangist volunteers of the Russian Front. This was the case of Benjamín himself, Head of the University Students Union of Ciudad Real, enlisted like so many other second- and third-class leaders of the Falange and who lent his pen to Hoja de Campaña: the front newspaper published by the Blue Division and for which even the future Nobel Prize winner for literature Camilo José Cela wrote.

'Guripa,' a term about which the weekly itself explained: "If we're honest, we don't know the exact synonym for the word. For us, specifically, and without going back to the dawn of the language, this word is offered to us in an inconsequential and poor zarzuela: a rascal who collects abandoned children in doorways suddenly sings with bad music and worse orchestration: The song of the guripa, which hasn't filled his stomach in a month."

A "guripa", in short, was the way in which professional soldiers contemptuously designated the Falangist volunteers of the Russian Front.

It was also, in a way, the fate of those young guripas who went to fight on the eastern front with the Spanish Volunteer Division , known almost instantly by its unofficial name of Blue Division , due to the influence of the Falange and its characteristic blue shirt color. A war song against communism that as battles and combatants fell in faraway Russia, lost its music and failed in its orchestration: it would end badly for a few idealists who went into the cold to organize a new world and secretly returned to a Spain in which the Falangist ideal and its influence in the government had lost steam.

The Blue Division, created on June 26, 1941, would become part of the Heer, the German Land Army , as the 250th Infantry Division, first within the 9th Army of Army Group Center and very shortly thereafter, in September 1941, within the 18th Army of Army Group North. By November, they had already entered combat after crossing the Volkhov River to establish a bridgehead as part of the Leningrad encirclement operation. The following Battle of Volkhov was the division's baptism of fire.

They had already entered combat after crossing the Volkhov River to establish a bridgehead as part of the Leningrad siege operation.

It was after that battle, in November 1941, when the first issue of Hoja de Campaña appeared, a weekly magazine that had the dual purpose of indoctrinating young soldiers and serving as a practical guide for war issues, and which ended up becoming “an unbeatable source, even above the diaries and memoirs of the division members themselves, to understand the chronology of the Blue Division and, above all, why it was formed,” as Javier Fernández writes in the recently published The Blue Division from the Campaign Sheet (Arzalia), a magnificent chronicle of the experience of Spanish soldiers in Russia from the perspective of a peculiar weekly magazine that included numerous contributions from the soldiers themselves, as well as those of writers and journalists of importance during the regime such as Álvaro de Laiglesia , future director of the humorous 'La Codorniz'.

The Campaign Sheet arose as a project of his first general, Agustín Muñoz Grandes , and was specifically encouraged by Lieutenant Colonel Ruiz de la Serna, as explained by Xosé M. Nuñez Seixas in Comrade Winter, experience and memory of the Blue Division. It undoubtedly served as a means of indoctrination of the Falange's vision for the approximately 47,000 volunteers who passed through the eastern front, of whom almost a third were already Falangists according to Javier Fernández and where the university group, which in fact would impregnate the Campaign Sheet with texts and articles, was proportionally the largest.

"An unbeatable source, even above the diaries and memoirs of the division members themselves, for understanding the chronology of the Blue Division and, above all, its why."

The large presence of these university students was one of the characteristics of this Campaign Sheet, as Fernández explains: “The Falange and the Blue Division had a strong youth presence. The Sheet cannot be understood without considering the university education of its division members, editors, and readers. Many were students belonging to the active Falangist Spanish University Union (SEU), as well as professors, writers, and journalists who had careers in Franco's Spain. The Sheet was a publication nourished almost exclusively by these Falangists enlisted in the Blue Division, under German supervision, which explains its editorial line and content, sometimes with warlike overtones, which failed to resonate in Madrid.”

In collaboration with the German Propaganda Company, the editorial staff of the Leaflet began its journey from Grigorovo, where the divisional general staff was located. Later, following the German advance, it and its printing press moved to Riga and then Tallinn. Editorials, news items, letters, and various writings from contributors arrived at the editorial office, although one of its main characteristics was the abundant participation of the volunteers themselves, who sent in everything from poems to short stories.

What did the soldiers at the front write? From the most varied to the most dramatic, as Fernández records in his work, "Trains and Love," in issue 25, dated July 25, 1942. Sergeant Paniagua, in an anti-tank unit, satirically depicted the ordeal of traveling by train in 1940s Spain , amidst harsh inspectors and rude passengers. Meanwhile, in issue 37, dated August 12, Divisional Sergeant Lagun, of the FA, wrote his Basque Tale about the adventures of a Basque-speaking carpenter and a fan of Tchakoli. These stories were mixed with harsher ones, such as that of Pedro Herrero, a communications soldier, who wrote a story based on his own war experience, "The Burned Shack."

Stories and experiences that, according to another expert on the Blue Division, Nuñez Seixas, are of great value because often "What many soldiers narrated years and decades later about their war experience, about what they saw and experienced during their stay in Germany, the journey to the front, their time in the trenches and in the forward positions, or in the near and distant rearguard, does not necessarily coincide with what they wrote at the same time," as he points out in his essay.

In the Campaign Sheet, which ran to 108 issues, the first dated November 4, 1941, and the last dated March 18, 1944, there were also humorous sections, cartoons, and culture sections that paid close attention to popular music of the time, such as flamenco and copla , as well as information relating to bullfighting. But if anything stood out in any case in the cultural aspect, it was the constant references to Spain's imperial past and the history of great deeds, such as the exploits of El Cid or Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, – the Great Captain –, which often jumped out of the sections dedicated to them – and there were precisely few – to also occupy editorials and opinion articles. As Fernández explains: “La Hoja published regular sections entitled Historical Memories, Figures of Our Empire, and Spanish Prints, which were dedicated to remembering events and figures from Spanish history. Apart from these sections, essays were also written praising this history from an imperial perspective.”

The constant references to the History of Spain to boost the morale of the divisionaries could even be found in a section entitled Letters to Juan Soldado , written by a chaplain who signed himself as the 'Pater of '44' and which read: "Friends and strangers say it—and the Pater knows it's true—that you, Juan Soldado, are the best in the entire world. The entire history of Spain —from ancient times—in its pages of glory attests to our assertion. You fought against Rome, against Goths and Saracens, against Turks and French, against the whites and blacks. In the war against Russia, the same is happening, for Juan Soldado triumphs over snow and ice. The waters of Lake Ilmen and that treacherous Volchov proclaim that Juan Soldado is an undefeated warrior."

References to the history of Spain to boost the morale of the divisionaries could be found in a section entitled 'Letters to Juan Soldado'

In this context, references to the victorious Flanders Tercios of the 16th and 17th centuries were a constant, almost at the end of its existence, in November 1943, writes Fernández, a front-page editorial emphasized the status of the Spanish divisionary as a combatant skilled in warfare, but also cultured: "In the Spanish Division, a new type of Spanish combatant was created and maintained. The warrior of movement, with the style of a Flanders soldier." The comparison with these victorious Tercios of the Golden Age even generated some debate when Demetrio Castro , one of the most relevant writers of the Hoja de Campaña , criticized in an editorial several Juventud columnists such as Rafael García Serrano, Federico Izquierdo and Camilo José Cela , who had defended precisely that a symbol of decadence in Spain was to idolize the Flanders Tercios.

Although the participation of the divisionaries on the Eastern Front has often been remembered for their outstanding and courageous military actions such as those on the Volkhov Front, the Siege of Leningrad or the Battle of Krasni Bor, the truth is that they did not end up as victorious Tercios of Flanders . Their withdrawal, ordered in October 1943 by a Franco regime that wanted to cut ties with the Third Reich, left a certain bitter taste in the Falangism that had taken over the Blue Division. A small contingent called the Blue Legion would still remain and with them the Campaign Sheet, which closed its last issue in March 1944. Of the 47,000 volunteers who went to the Eastern Front, 42,000 returned, 5,000 lost their lives in combat and about 500 were captured by the Red Army , of these only 226 would return many years later, in 1954 aboard the Greek ship Semiramis.