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The 2½ years of fighting that followed constitute one of the grimmest episodes in modern European history. Military campaigns of unparalleled ferocity led to enormous casualties on both sides, usually for little or no strategic gain. Saturation bombing campaigns and continuous artillery bombardments of cities gave the world its first views of "total" war involving civilian populations. The war became a testing ground for the weapons and strategies of World War II. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy used the Spanish war to perfect the Stuka dive bomber and the tactics of incendiary bombing that in one day destroyed the town of Guernica, among many others. The Soviet Union backed the Popular Front government, as did Communists everywhere. But the vastly greater weight of German and Italian arms, coupled with the decision by the Russians and Germans to seek a nonaggression pact, which dried up Soviet support for the Republicans, eventually gave the victory to Franco's forces.
Spain's Civil War was not only a testing ground for arms but also for ideals. Volunteers poured in from around the world—including 3,100 Americans who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and other units—to fight on the Republican side against Franco. They believed that a Republican victory in the Spanish Civil War was the only way to stop the spread of fascism. Nearly half of the American volunteers died in Spain.
A brigade of intellectuals, including Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, had their lives and work shaped irrevocably by their experiences in Spain. "As a militiaman," George Orwell later wrote in Homage to Catalonia, "one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between political theories." Albert Camus observed afterwards: "It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many men, the world over, regard the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy."
The war ended with the capture of Madrid by Franco's forces in early 1939. More than 500,000 Spaniards had been killed in the fighting; nearly 100,000 more were victims of wartime terror and firing squads. There were to be other victims. Franco's victorious forces took a bloody and merciless revenge on their political enemies. Between 1939 and 1942, nearly 2 million people were imprisoned by the Franco regime for supporting the Loyalists, and perhaps 200,000 of them were executed.