Brigades of Navarre
military unit
The Brigades of Navarre (Spanish: Brigadas de Navarra), also known as Navarrese Brigades, were six brigades composed mainly of Navarrese requeté that participated in the Spanish Civil War. They constituted the main nucleus of the Nationalist Army that carried out the Biscay Campaign, including the decisive battle of Bilbao. Once the brigades won the War in the North, they became divisions.
The brigades have been defined as a shock troop equivalent, in terms of value and performance, to the Army of Africa. Each brigade had a strength ranging from 4,000 to 6,000.
Origins and training
After the triumph of the uprising of July 18, 1936 in Navarre, mainly thanks to the Carlist component, the raised requeté regiments (tercio) were made part of the army's structure. While the siege of Madrid was being fought and the northern front was inactive after the Campaign of Gipuzkoa, the nationalist forces were reorganized and trained.
On December 6, 1936, General Emilio Mola ordered that the nationalist Army's 6th Division be divided into two Groups: the first would cover the entire Basque front from Ondarroa to Orduña and the second from this point to the limits of the provinces of León and Palencia. The forces of the 1st Group, under the command of General José Solchaga, would be transformed into the Brigades of Navarre. The requeté regiments of Montejurra, Roncesvalles and Zumalacárregui constituted the 1st Brigade.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brigades of Navarre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.