Spain's vulnerability as a colonial power was most starkly clear in the military ‘disasters’ of the colonial campaigns, the battles of Barranco del Lobo (1909) and Annual (1921). In both cases, the Spanish army's attempt to respond to Moroccan resistance to colonial penetration resulted in a spectacular military failure and tremendous loss of life. The Battle of Barranco del Lobo took place when the government deployed troops in late July 1909 to defend Spanish railway workers outside Melilla who had been attacked by a coalition of local tribes opposing the foreign rush for mining resources in the area, and the conflict escalated into a costly campaign that resulted in the death of more than a thousand Spanish troops in only four days. The Spanish were unable to recover the bodies of their fallen until two months after the battle. The battle of Annual took place when Abdel Krim's forces attacked various outposts in the area west of Melilla in July 1921, forcing Spanish troops to retreat to the outpost of Monte Arruit. Besieged by Riffian fighters, the three thousand men defending the fort waited for a counter-attack from Melilla that never came. Trapped for weeks, many died of thirst or gangrene, and many more committed suicide. Finally on 9 August, believing terms of surrender had been agreed, the Spanish troops tried to march out of the garrison. Abdel Krim's troops attacked them immediately, killing the majority of unarmed men and officers on the spot. The territory lost in the area was not recaptured until September, when the army returned to find thousands of unburied bodies.

As the first Spanish war to be documented through photojournalism, images of the tragic aftermath of these events were mass-produced and disseminated throughout the nation for the first time, serving as truth-telling narratives to audiences far from the battlefront. Barranco del Lobo and Annual are also central to Carmen de Burgos and Arturo Barea's literary narratives of the war, which fictionalise and dramatize the disasters even as they ground them in their personal testimonies (Barea as a soldier who survived Annual, Burgos as a reporter on Barranco del Lobo behind the front lines).