Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War began on 17 July 1936, when a group of army generals launched a military uprising against Spain's left-leaning Popular Front government, plunging the country into nearly three years of conflict between the Nationalist faction, encompassing the military, monarchists and fascists, and the Republican side defending the elected government, drawn from socialists, anarchists and communists. General Francisco Franco emerged as the Nationalists' supreme commander on 1 October 1936, and his forces received substantial military support from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, which used the conflict to test new weapons and tactics, while the Republicans received more limited aid from the Soviet Union, Mexico and international volunteer brigades. The Nationalists steadily gained ground through 1938 and 1939, and after the fall of Barcelona in early 1939 and the isolation of Madrid, an attempted Republican coup by Colonel Segismundo Casado to seek peace terms failed to change Franco's refusal to negotiate; Franco entered Madrid and declared victory on 1 April 1939, sending hundreds of thousands of Republican refugees fleeing into southern France. The war, which killed more than 200,000 people, is widely regarded as a dress rehearsal and prelude to the Second World War, testing German and Italian weapons and tactics and cementing the Rome-Berlin Axis in the years immediately before that wider conflict began.