The Battle of Santander & Avelina’s Submarine
The Battle of Santander & Avelina’s Submarine
On our recent trip to Santander, we confirmed a story from Alfredo’s family about an old family friend named Avelina during the Spanish Civil War. Below is her story.
The Battle of Santander and the surrender of the Basque battalions left a long and complicated memory in Cantabria. For some, the so-called Pact of Santoña became a symbol of betrayal: the belief that Basque nationalist forces had abandoned the Republican cause in order to negotiate their own surrender through the Italians. This produced not only the more familiar right-wing anti-Basque sentiment seen elsewhere in Spain, but also a left-wing anti-Basque resentment rooted in memories of the Civil War.
The campaign itself began after the fall of Bilbao on June 19, 1937. The Republican zone along the Cantabrian coast — divided among Basque, Santander, and Asturian authorities — was already exhausted and internally fractured. Franco’s northern offensive was temporarily delayed by the Republican attack at Brunete, but resumed on August 14. The main rebel advance came from the south, through the difficult mountain terrain, with Reinosa as a key Republican stronghold. There, arms were being produced in significant quantities for the Republican army. Heavy artillery, aviation, and modern German and Italian equipment softened the Republican positions before the advance.
Italian propaganda described the capture of Santander as a great and bloody victory by Mussolini’s Corps of Volunteer Troops, sent to aid Franco. But the journalist Indro Montanelli famously deflated that version, calling the campaign little more than “a stroll” whose only enemy was the heat. That was an exaggeration. Italian losses alone were reported at 424 dead and around 1,600 wounded, while Spanish casualties were likely higher. Republican casualties are harder to calculate, and must also be considered alongside the executions and mass imprisonment that followed. In Santander city alone, an estimated 18,000 prisoners were taken. The Battle of Santander was not the bloodiest of the war, but neither was it a walkover.
As Francoist forces advanced, the Republican rear collapsed. From August 21, Basque units outside eastern Cantabria began abandoning their positions, weakening the defensive line and hastening the rebel approach to the coast west of Torrelavega. At the same time, the Basque autonomous government was negotiating with Mussolini’s representatives, hoping for terms that would allow Basque troops to avoid continued fighting for a Republican cause in which many Basque nationalist leaders no longer fully believed. To leaders in Santander and Madrid, this looked like disloyalty or outright betrayal.
President Manuel Azaña’s wartime notes reveal the scale of Republican disillusionment. On August 15, he recorded that Santander’s lines had already been broken in two places, while the Republican press concealed the seriousness of the situation. He mocked earlier hopes that the Republic might take the offensive in the north and even reconquer Bilbao. By August 23, after meeting with Prime Minister Negrín, he considered Santander effectively lost. On August 24, he noted reports from Prieto that Basque troops in Santoña had become insubordinate and were trying to board British steamers. Azaña also recorded a warning from Lehendakari Aguirre: if the Basque troops were forbidden to leave, they would turn against the Republic.
On August 26, as Franco’s vanguard units entered Santander’s City Hall square in the sweltering heat, Azaña wrote bitterly that what was happening had been easy to foresee. The attackers had cut communications with Asturias, and the Asturian leaders had responded by declaring themselves a “sovereign government” — which Azaña saw as yet another example of local authorities setting themselves up as bosses in the face of disaster. The Republican north, in his view, had long been a collection of competing taifas— small factional kingdoms — rather than a united front.
These political and military events also intersected with deeply personal memories. Families remembered relatives who had fought in the Iron Belt around Bilbao, men who ended up in prisons such as El Dueso and El Puerto de Santa María, and wounded Republicans who convalesced in hospitals such as Valdecilla. In later decades, especially in the early 1970s, older women quietly recalled the perceived betrayal of the Basque battalions at a time when parts of the Spanish left were becoming fascinated by ETA. Those memories were intimate, whispered, and often never recorded.
One such memory was that of Avelina, who had lived in Paris while her son Mariano was raised in Santander by his aunt Maruja. Only much later did the family story become clearer: Avelina had apparently worked as an assistant to senior Republican commanders in Santander. Her account of leaving by submarine once seemed implausible, especially because she confused her departure from Santander with the evacuation from Gijón two months later. But later evidence made the story credible. The Republican submarine C-2 did leave Santander on August 24 carrying prominent Republican figures — and, apparently, Avelina, who cooked for them and ironed their clothes.
In the final hours before Santander fell, Republicans in the city desperately tried to find space on any vessel bound for France or Asturias. Similar scenes had already occurred in Málaga in February and Bilbao in June, and would happen again in Gijón, Avilés, and later in Mediterranean ports at the end of the war. Contemporary observers described the spectacle as “Dantesque.”
The memory of Santander’s fall did not end in 1937. It echoed into exile, imprisonment, family silence, and political resentment. Seven years later, during the liberation of Paris, one of the half-tracks of “La Nueve” — the Spanish Republican company that entered the city with the Free French — bore the name Santander, alongside names such as Gernika, Teruel, and Brunete. The name carried forward the memory of a defeat that was military, political, and deeply personal.