Panzer Grenadier: Jarama River 1937
Publisher’s Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2026

The Panzer Grenadier series has never covered the Spanish Civil War in an official, legit manner. I’ve always wanted to take it there, and that’s what we’re doing with Jarama River 1937. It’s a complete game, though not as large as the usual Panzer Grenadier offering: 317 pieces, two new maps, and 24 scenarios.

In February 1937, the Spanish Nationalist División Reforzada de Madrid, an army-sized formation, launched an offensive east of Madrid aimed at cutting off the Spanish capital, then held by the Loyalists, from the provisional capital at Valencia. Fascist leader Francisco Franco wanted to outflank the capital of Madrid, the fascist attempt to seize the city directly having failed in their November 1936 attempt to storm the city directly. The Nationalists committed their best troops to the effort: the Moroccan regulares of the Army of Africa, the Spanish Legion, and the fanatical Nazi mercenaries of the Condor Legion and their Panzer I tankettes. The Irish Brigade showed up late to the battle and never made it to the front lines.

Defending the line of the Jarama River, Gen. José Miaja’s Army of the Center fielded four division-sized groups of brigades including the volunteers of the International Brigades, supported by the T26 tanks of Soviet Gen. Dmitri Pavlov’s tank brigade (Spanish crews with Soviet officers). This would be the toughest battle fought by the International Brigades; Ernest Hemingway would write of the attack on Cerro del Pingarrón that destroyed the XV International Brigade, thanks to the incompetence of their Soviet Hungarian commander Janos Galicz.

Yet despite their stunningly poor upper leadership, the Loyalists (both the Internationals and the Spanish Republican brigades) fought heroically against the best the fascist side could throw at them. Fighting raged through all of February. The bloodiest battle of the Spanish Civil War ended in a Nationalist defeat, with the Madrid-Valencia highway still in the hands of freedom’s defenders. For the moment, the fascist tide had been repelled.

Jarama River 1937 features Pavlov’s tank-supported offensive on 13 and 14 February, and his brigade’s defeat of the Condor Legion’s cute little tankettes. But primarily, it’s an infantry game, the close and brutal, no-quarters fighting between the Internationals and the Moroccans, the now-forgotten valor of the 1st Brigade’s Estremaduran farm boys who finally took the Pingarrón from the Legion after four repeated assaults.

We’ve got 24 scenarios, lined up in the story-arc format we now deploy in all of our games, using the scenarios to tell the story. They’re divided among five chapters:

● Chapter One. The Battle Begins (four scenarios). The Nationalists open their offensive; the Republicans counter-attack at Coberteras.

● Chapter Two. Across the Jarama (four scenarios). The river crossing, the formation of a Nationalist bridgehead, the Republican attempts to seal it off.

● Chapter Three. Suicide Hill (five scenarios). The Nationalists drive toward the Madrid-Valencia Highway, and the International Brigades are flung into battle to stop them.

● Chapter Four. Republican Counter-Offensive (six scenarios). The Republic strikes back, and the battle shifts from its mobile phase to bloody positional warfare.

● Chapter Five. The Struggle for Pingarrón (five scenarios). Pingarrón is a height on the right flank of the Republican line, crucial to maintaining the Jarama position. The American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion died to hold this hill.

Each chapter includes a battle game that links the scenario together, so you can play them competitively. They also help make the stakes of each chapter very clear.

Republican troops atop the Pingarrón, February 1937. Note the view.

While no snapshot of the Spanish Civil War can encompass all of the armed groups that fought one another for the future of Spain, the battles along the Jarama River saw a wide array of colorful units deployed by both sides.

Most of the Francoist forces at the Jarama River came from the National Army, by this point a mixed force consisting of pre-war regulars, volunteers, conscripts, forcibly enrolled Loyalist prisoners, and large numbers of volunteers from the Carlist movement (quixotically hoping to restore a previous branch of Spanish royalty to the throne) and especially Falangists, the Spanish fascist movement. The National Army was noted for corruption and cronyism on a scale that dwarfed that of both royal and Republican Spain, a notable achievement in itself.

The fascists deployed their best troops, the two components of the Army of Africa. Those included the fanatics of the Spanish Legion, the so-called “Bridegrooms of Death.” Formed in 1920 on the model of the French Foreign Legion, most legionaries were actually Spaniards who signed up to fight Spain’s colonial wars. Alongside them fought the long-service Moroccan regulares, mercenaries recruited to fight in the brutal, dirty war in Spanish Morocco. Several regiments of Moroccan cavalry also fought on the Jarama.

Nationalist armor, such as it was, came from the ground component of the German Condor Legion, a relatively small outfit (mostly the Condor Legion provided air and anti-aircraft units) equipped with Panzer I tankettes. These proved no match for the T26 tanks sold to the Republic by their Soviet allies (paid in gold, at a premium price, as not for the last time the West decided that denying assistance would somehow lead to peaceful negotiations).

Franco’s forces also included the Irish Brigade; as the only foreign volunteer unit on the fascist side, it had to be committed to battle, but its commander stayed in his luxury hotel in Salamanca, drinking himself into a stupor, and in their only actual combat the fascist Irishmen managed to open fire on the fascist Spanish Legion, who gleefully returned it. But while the non-Irish fascists were also very bad men, unlike the Irish they were very good fighters. The Irish do not show up in the game.

The fascist horde faced the Popular Republican Army, an agglomeration of various leftist militias (labor unions, Communists, Socialists and Anarchists, all proclaiming themselves Anti-Fascist), pre-war regulars loyal to the Republic, and conscripts called up from Republican-controlled areas. The Anarchists were not present on the Jarama. The Popular Army had just started to impose new higher-level organizations, forming its mixed brigades into divisions, but the Army of the Center still operated under the earlier ad hoc division structure.

The Republic’s forces on the Jarama River also included four of the International Brigades, composed of foreign volunteers and organized by nationality. They varied in quality, with men ranging from idealistic fools seeking adventure to hardened combat veterans of the Great War. And they had “Pablo” - Soviet General Dmitri Pavlov, the 40-year-old former commander of the Soviet 4th Mechanized Brigade, the man held to be the Red Army’s best armor commander (Stalin would change his opinion in 1941). Pablo had a small tank brigade of about 50 operable T26B tanks, and a doctrine of tank-infantry combined arms operations years ahead of its time.

Jarama River 1937 is the story of men who stood against fascism, shedding their blood for freedom at a time when their own governments turned their backs on them and pretended that it would all go away if they just ignored it hard enough. That the fascists weren’t serious about their agenda of murder and horror, that they were just another political movement with slightly conservative policies.

Perhaps 10,000 Anti-Fascist troops died on the Jarama, the bloodiest battle of the Spanish Civil War; there is no solid count of casualties for either side. They halted the fascists here, but would ultimately lose their war amid international indifference.

It’s a privilege to tell their story. Fighting fascism is never in vain.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published an unknowable number of books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children

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