The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (30 page)

Mexico, the other country to support the Republic, refused to join the non-intervention agreement. President Lázaro Cárdenas, despite his country’s limited resources, provided the republicans with 20,000 Mauser rifles, 20 million rounds and food. These rifles from Mexico were used to arm the militias facing the Army of Africa as it advanced on Madrid.
³⁰

The Spanish war was no longer simply an internal struggle. Spain’s strategic importance, and the coincidence of the civil war with the Axis powers’ preparations to test their secretly developed weaponry in Europe, ensured that the war lost its amateur character. The nationalists were inundated with foreign advisers, observers, technical experts and combat personnel. Within a month of the rising Franco had received 48 Italian and 41 German aircraft. The Republic, on the other hand, received no more than thirteen Dewoitine fighters and six Potez 54 bombers. These aircraft were outdated, and lacked weapons and even mountings. The French government could not provide pilots, so the Republic had to resort to very expensive volunteers.

Malraux, the author of
La Condition Humaine
and supposedly a communist sympathizer, set up the air squadron España crewed by mercenaries and paid for by the republican government. This provoked the suspicion and contempt of the Comintern representative, André Marty, who regarded Malraux with a good deal of justification as an ‘adventurer’. When Soviet advisers arrived, they criticized him for ignoring republican commanders, making ‘absurd proposals’ and for knowing ‘little about aerial tactics’. They also berated his group for ‘a complete lack of discipline and lack of participation in battle’. To be fair, their obsolete aircraft stood little chance against Heinkel or Fiat fighters, but this did not stop Malraux from extracting exorbitant rates of pay for very little action, as the Soviet officers reported to Moscow. ‘He had recruited the pilots and technicians himself in France. Most of them have come here in order to make good money. Due to his insistence, the Spanish government was paying 50,000 francs a month to pilots, 30,000 francs to observers, and 15,000 to mechanics. This was during the period when the government had no air force at all and it was easy for Malraux to persuade them to pay whatever he wanted.’
³¹

The Republic, ignorant of the murky world of mercenaries and the armament industry, suffered from numerous confidence tricksters. Malraux stands out, not just because he was a mythomaniac in his claims of martial heroism–both in Spain and later in the French Resistance–but because he cynically exploited the opportunity for intellectual heroism in the legend of the Spanish Republic.

Relations between foreigners and Spanish were seldom smooth on either side. Franco and his officers hated being indebted to their allies, while their often arrogant German advisers might perhaps have agreed with the Duke of Wellington’s comment on the Spanish officers attached to his staff that ‘the national weakness was boasting of Spain’s greatness’. The Republic, however, was to suffer far more from its only powerful ally, the Soviet Union.

Sovereign States

T
he nationalists also needed a formalized state structure to impress foreign governments, but there was no pretence of democracy. The authoritarian values of all its component groups–army, Falange, Carlists and monarchists–demanded a single leader. Franco, who had established his headquarters at Cáceres on 26 August, refrained from any overt manoeuvring until the relief of the Alcázar became certain in late September. As with his military strategy, he did not make any political move until everything possible was in his favour.

His command of the most professional force, the Army of Africa, had made him a contender for the leadership from the start. Then the German proviso of giving military aid only to his forces greatly strengthened his claim. But Franco knew that if his long-term ambitions were to be satisfied, he needed to gain a complete moral, as well as military, ascendancy over his rivals. That he achieved with the relief of Toledo. To challenge the ‘Saviour of the Alcázar’ for the leadership of the nationalist movement would have required rash courage.

The first major step to resolve the leadership issue came when Franco requested a meeting of the Junta de Defensa Nacional at the military aerodrome outside Salamanca on 21 September. General Kindelán, the air force commander, had prepared the ground, assisted in the background by the rest of Franco’s
camarilla
, including his brother Nicolás Franco, Orgaz, Millán Astray, Luis Bolín and the diplomat José Antonio Sangróniz. They had worked painstakingly to place their chief in the most advantageous position. Colonel Walter Warlimont, Hitler’s envoy, had also applied discreet pressure on the question of military assistance.

All the possible candidates for the leadership were present at Salamanca airfield that day: Franco, Mola, Queipo de Llano and Cabanellas, the nominal president of the junta, who chaired the meeting.
¹
The military were to take a decision on behalf of right-wing Spain. With the CEDA leader, Gil Robles, in self-imposed exile in Portugal (many nationalists blamed the civil war on his lack of nerve), José Antonio in Alicante prison, where he was to be executed, and Calvo Sotelo dead since just before the rising, only the wishes of the monarchists and the Carlists had to be considered. Mola, Queipo and Cabanellas were all tainted with republicanism or Freemasonry in varying degrees, so Franco benefited greatly from a lack of obvious defects and his political inscrutability.

In a charade which was accepted with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the the monarchist General Kindelán proposed at the end of the meeting that Franco should be appointed supreme commander of all land, sea and air forces, with the title of Generalissimo. Mola, conscious that his reputation had suffered because his plan for the rising had not succeeded, gave in almost sycophantically. ‘He is younger than me,’ he acknowledged, ‘and of higher professional standing. He is extremely popular and is well-known abroad.’
²
Queipo, with his habitual lack of tact, ran through the possibilities later. ‘So who were we going to nominate? Cabanellas could not take it on. He was a convinced republican and everyone knew that he was a Freemason. We couldn’t possibly nominate Mola either, because we would lose the war…And my reputation was badly damaged.’
³
Only Cabanellas dissented. He demanded a military directory and it cost him dear. Six days later Toledo fell. Kindelán, believing that Franco would restore Alfonso to his throne, helped with the preparations for 28 September, when the ‘Saviour of the Alcázar’ was to return to Salamanca to be accepted as supreme commander by the other generals.

The most active supporter of Franco behind the scenes was his brother Nicolás. He arranged for a mixed guard of Falangists and Carlists to hail his brother as chief when all the generals came together in Salamanca. Then, by omitting or changing key words in the text of the decree, he made Franco ‘Head of the Spanish State’, as opposed to ‘head of the government of the Spanish State’ for ‘the duration of the war’.
⁴
This trick did not endear Franco to his colleagues, who found themselves presented with a fait accompli, one might almost say a
coup d’état
within the coup. Even Mola was deeply irritated that Franco had taken over supreme political power as well as military. It is said that Queipo called Franco a ‘son of a whore’, or according to other sources a ‘swine’. But Kindelán and Dávila somehow persuaded the other generals that Franco had simply been proclaimed head of government for the duration, as the original decree had stated. But there was in any case little that either Mola or Queipo could do once the event had been reported in the newspapers. To protest now could be represented as disloyalty to the nationalist cause.

On 1 October 1936 Franco was invested with his powers in the throne room of the captain-generalcy in Burgos, in front of the diplomatic representatives of Portugal, Germany and Italy. General Cabanellas had been forced to accept total defeat. ‘Señor Chief of the Spanish State,’ he proclaimed. ‘In the name of the Council of National Defence, I hand over to you the absolute powers of the state.’ Franco went out on to the balcony to receive the cheers of the crowds. In his speech to them he promised ‘no home without a hearth, nor a Spaniard without bread’. The anniversary of this day was to be celebrated for almost forty years as ‘The Day of the Caudillo’.
⁵
The military junta, which had been led by Cabanellas, was immediately replaced by a ‘Junta Técnica del Estado’ with General Dávila at its head.
⁶

Once Franco became the Caudillo, he never allowed opposition to develop. His speeches skilfully selected compatible aspects of the rival nationalist ideologies. He affected an intensity of religious feeling to woo the Carlists and the Church. The Falangist slogan, ‘
Una Patria, Un Estado. Un Caudillo
’, was converted to ‘
Una Patria: España. Un Caudillo: Franco
’. But it was not long before the chant of ‘Franco! Franco! Franco!’ was heard.

Historical parallels were drawn by nationalist writers with the first
Reconquista
. This safely inspired the appropriate image in the appropriate mind. For the Falangists, it was the birth of the nation. For Carlist and Alphonsine monarchists it represented the establishment of a royal Catholic dictatorship; for the Church the age of ecclesiastical supremacy, and for landowners the foundation of their wealth and power. Franco was very different from Mussolini and Hitler. He was a cunning opportunist who, despite his rhetoric, did not suffer from overly dangerous visions of destiny.

Franco’s new position was reinforced with good news. The recently completed nationalist cruiser
Canarias
had sailed round the Portuguese coast from El Ferrol, the Caudillo’s birthplace, to attack republican warships off Gibraltar. She managed to sink the destroyer
Almirante Fernández
and force the others to seek shelter in Cartagena harbour. The blockade of the straits was now finished and Moroccan reinforcements could be brought across without diverting aircraft from bombing raids.

In the republican zone, Giral’s government had resigned on 4 September. It had never been able to reflect the reality of the situation, let alone win enough support to influence it. All the political parties recognized that there was only one man able to gain the trust of the revolutionary committees. Largo Caballero was enjoying a great wave of popularity after his visits to the militia positions in the Guadarrama mountains. ‘Largo Caballero’, wrote his fellow socialist Zugazagoitia, ‘retained in the eyes of the masses his mythical qualities and his pathos had started to work the miracle of a difficult rebirth of collective enthusiasm.’
⁷

Even Prieto, the middle-class social democrat, recognized that his great rival, the obstinate, often blinkered proletarian, was the only suitable successor to Giral.
⁸
Both Prieto and the communists tried to maintain the liberal façade as far as possible, but Largo Caballero wanted a coalition which was preponderantly socialist. He felt strongly that he had been exploited by the liberals in the first republican government, undermining his work as minister of labour.

The new government was presented as symbolizing unity against the common enemy since it brought together the liberal centre and the revolutionary left into one administration. This administration called itself ‘the government of Victory’ and was the first in Western Europe to contain communists. It marked also an important move towards the progressive recuperation of power from local committees. Faced with the nationalist successes (Talavera and Irún were about to fall), even the anarchists found it difficult to challenge its development. Nevertheless, the Republic was still far from that middle-class state which communist propaganda attempted to portray to the world outside. La Pasionaria and Jesús Hernández insisted that Spain was experiencing a ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ and that they were ‘motivated exclusively by the desire to defend the democratic Republic established on 14 April 1931’.

In fact, the Spanish communists were far from happy that Largo Caballero, the man they had so recently lauded as ‘the Spanish Lenin’, was now leading the government. They reported to Moscow on 8 September that ‘despite our efforts, we were not able to avoid a Caballero government’. They had also tried, following Comintern orders, to evade being included themselves, but ‘everyone emphatically insisted on the participation of communists in the new government, and it was impossible to avoid this without creating a very dangerous situation. We are taking the necessary measures to organize the work of our ministers.’
⁹

Marty, meanwhile, knew that communist power did not have to reside within the council of ministers. It lay in infiltrating the army and the police, as well as in its propaganda methods. ‘The political influence of the Communist Party has exceeded all expectations…Only our party knows what must be done. The slogans of the party are quickly taken up and reprinted by all the newspapers…Our party supplies cadres for the police…The main strength of the army has been directed towards the creation of what has become the pride of the People’s Army–the 5th Regiment of the militia. The 5th Regiment, enjoying well-deserved military glory, numbers 20,000 warriors. All the commanders of the regiment are communists.’ The aptly named Comrade Checa, the party official responsible for the army and the police, gave ‘directives for conducting the interrogation of those under serious arrest’.
¹⁰

President Azaña, who remained as a figurehead of liberal parliamentarianism, objected to the inclusion of communists in the government, but Azaña was increasingly isolated and Caballero’s will prevailed. The two communist ministers accepted their posts only after instructions to do so from Moscow. Jesús Hernández became minister of education and Vicente Uribe was given the agriculture portfolio; Alvarez del Vayo, whom Largo Caballero did not yet know to be a communist supporter, became foreign minister.