Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  The coup had fissured the republican regime, not crushed it. In that sense, it had failed. With a couple of notable exceptions, it had captured only what it could hope to capture and left itself the task of taking the rest. That meant war.

  Civilian resistance had played a large part. But – contrary to popular belief – in no major town had the people alone crushed the military revolt. The loyalty of the security forces was essential to victory. Equally, however, the police forces had nowhere fought successfully without strong civilian support. The fusion of the two in attack brought victory in Barcelona, Madrid, Málaga, Gijón and – shortly – Valencia and San Sebastián.2 This was clear to working-class militants in most of the towns, particularly Barcelona.

  —The combination was decisive. For all its combativeness, its revolutionary spirit, the CNT alone could not have fought off the army and the police forces, thought Jacinto BORRAS, a CNT journalist on Solidaridad Obrera. There wouldn’t have been one of us left within a few hours …

  Pere ARDIACA, communist party representative on the Barcelona Popular Front committee and soon to be editor of the newly formed PSUC’s (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya) paper Treball, saw that more than collaboration had been involved. In the action of assault guards and masses a dynamic had developed, which had produced the decisive result.

  —The masses impelled the guards to defend their positions; and the guards gave the masses the organized support that was needed. Within this dialectic however, the attitude of the CNT and its leaders was extraordinary, virtually decisive when fused with that of the police forces …

  Not that, in truth, thought Manuel CRUELLS, the Catalan nationalist student, it was accurate to speak of the ‘masses’. Civilians fought and died heroically; but, from what he saw, it was the militants of the different organizations – the FAI and CNT defence groups especially, the POUM, the few communists, socialists and members of Estat Català like himself, the republican parties – who engaged in the actual fighting. The masses had not appeared until the evening when victory was assured; ‘then the masses seized the victory for themselves’.

  An FAI militant, Felix CARRASQUER, whose defence group had encircled the Pedralbes barracks and forced its surrender, agreed.

  —Where there were 2,000 of us libertarians who rallied to put down a fascist coup – not, let me stress, to make a libertarian revolution – by 8 a.m. the next day there were 100,000 in the streets …

  In Madrid, Juan ANDRADE, soon to be called to Barcelona to serve on the POUM’s executive committee, drew certain revolutionary lessons from the events.

  —The left would never have destroyed army discipline if the masses hadn’t attacked. Only when a regiment was in real danger – as in the Montaña barracks in Madrid or in the streets of Barcelona – were there signs of refusal among the soldiers to fight their own working class. Until that moment, military discipline remained effective. But when soldiers and NCOs found themselves attacked on all sides they became demoralized, discipline collapsed, they would no longer obey their officers. Then the military units became ineffective fighting forces, and it was impossible for the officers to order out new units. For all that, it must be said that the assault guards played an absolutely crucial role, which was almost always overlooked. The guards were the only efficient police corps created by the republic, and in Madrid they were a revolutionary force made up almost exclusively of socialist youth or other left wingers. Their importance in the fighting that was about to come was equally decisive; it was they who, in the first couple of months, virtually saved Madrid …

  *

  Three decisive events took place on 20 July 1936 which were to condition the future course of events. The first was the landing that morning in Seville of two Fokker bombers from Morocco carrying twenty legionaries; in the afternoon, a further twenty-four legionaries and twenty Moroccan troops were ferried across. It was the beginning of the first major ‘air lift’ in history.

  —As soon as the troops arrived, Queipo de Llano had them driven round and round the city to make people think far greater numbers had reached Seville, recalled Rafael MEDINA, falangist businessman. The Moorish troops arrived feeling very air-sick …

  The 25,000-strong Army of Africa, the only professional fighting force in the Spanish army, was blocked in its bases by several warships whose sailors had risen and killed their officers who had been trying to rally to the uprising. Only two tabores of Moroccan troops had been able to cross by sea before the strait of Gibraltar was blockaded. But the rest of this crack army, composed of legionaries and Moroccan regulares, was desperately needed on the mainland to spearhead the march on Madrid. They would be ferried across, thanks largely to German and Italian planes, in the next two months.3

  The following day, Rafael MEDINA, later to become duke of Medinaceli, participated alongside a group of legionaries in the attack on the Seville working-class district of San Julián.

  —I quickly saw their combat spirit. After a couple of cannon rounds from a field piece emplaced by the famous Macarena arch, we advanced. The revolutionaries started firing. We suffered casualties. A legionary was killed. The man behind him jumped over his body shouting, ‘Long Live Death!’ and advanced down the street. We reached our objective, but as night was coming on the order came to withdraw. Shouting their battle cries, the legionaries led our withdrawal to safety. They were magnificent. The next day the red barrio fell …

  It was the end of working-class resistance in Seville.

  BURGOS

  Leading monarchists had gathered at Gamonal aerodrome outside Burgos to welcome General Sanjurjo, the uprising’s national leader, from his exile in Lisbon. Two days before the rising, the monarchists had received warning to leave Madrid for the safety of Burgos and Vitoria. Eugenio VEGAS LATAPIE, editor of the monarchists’ theoretical magazine Acción Española,4 believed that the uprising had taken place without sufficient ideological preparation.

  —It was like being in a house on fire without means of escape. You throw yourself from the window, without knowing whether you’ll fall on your head or your feet …

  The military, he feared, lacked a clear idea of the type of political regime the country needed. Not that this was by any means a purely militarist uprising, but rather a ‘typical national movement’ which transcended any one particular class.

  —The army, the few members of the aristocracy who remained in Spain (most left the country after the republic was proclaimed), and the middle class – those were the components of the movement. The middle class, through its representation in the army and its readiness to leave home and fields to fight for ideological reasons, dominated. Its ideas had been shaped and hardened through five years of republican persecution, especially since the Popular Front elections. Calvo Sotelo’s assassination was the spark that produced the explosion …

  Scanning the sky for the light aeroplane, Pedro SAINZ RODRIGUEZ, monarchist parliamentary deputy, recalled General Sanjurjo’s political plans for the nation. At first, a military junta would rule, its period in office depending on how quickly the rising was successful. Then there would be a plebiscite to determine whether the nation wanted a monarchy or a republic.

  —Sanjurjo had spoken to me of these ideas, and the notes of a proclamation on the plebiscite had been sent to Burgos with a close friend of his. It was hoped, of course, that coming after a successful military coup, the plebiscite would favour the monarchy’s return. A Constituent Cortes would have to decide what form the monarchy should take. As anti-parliamentarianism was in vogue, as we were all much influenced by the examples of Germany and Italy, it might well have taken the form of ‘organic’ democracy, instead of the ‘pure’ democracy which had been discredited by the republic …

  All afternoon they waited in vain. That night, to their consternation, they heard on Madrid radio that the plane had crashed on take-off and Sanjurjo had been killed. It was the second decisive event of the day, and a bitter blow to the monarchists. Whether the S
anjurjo ‘plan’ would have been put into effect or not,5 the monarchists had lost the main hope of a monarchist outcome to the civil war. More importantly, the movement had lost its leader.

  BARCELONA

  The day’s third decisive event took place in Barcelona.

  Jordi ARQUER, POUM executive committee member, went into the Generalitat, seeking news. He had returned to Barcelona only late the previous evening. He encountered a number of Generalitat councillors who asked him for news. He told them he had none. Had he seen Durruti, they asked. No. ‘Well, if you do, tell him we want to have a talk.’ As he went out of the building, he saw Durruti, García Oliver and Ricardo Sanz, three of the anarchists who had led the CNT–FAI defence groups in crushing the rebellion.

  —I went up to Sanz. I knew him best because we had been members of the same union when I was in the CNT. Relations between the POUM and the CNT weren’t over friendly. The FAI had expelled a whole series of people from the CNT and made our lives impossible. Anyway, I told him the councillors were looking for Durruti. ‘If they want to say anything to us, let them come direct,’ he replied haughtily, as though telling me not to meddle in these matters. Then they went into the Generalitat, which is where they had probably been going anyway …

  That morning the last rebel bastion, Atarazanas barracks, had been stormed; in fact taken by an audacious assault over the side walls by a small group of libertarians. The assault had been costly in lives. Francisco Ascaso, one of the best known libertarians, had paid with his life. Ricardo SANZ had lifted his body off the hood of the ice lorry from which he had been firing at the barracks. Before the assault a company of civil guards had marched down the Ramblas, and Durruti had stopped them to ask what their orders were. ‘We thank you,’ he told the captain, ‘but there are enough of us to take Atarazanas. Please inform your commander that Durruti has asked you to return.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid, they’re guardia civil,’ a POUM militant said to Durruti. ‘Let them attack first –’ But the CNT leaders had wanted the honour for themselves.

  A few hours later, carrying their arms and still covered in the dust of battle, the small group of libertarian leaders went into the Generalitat for a meeting with President Companys. The latter had already been informed by Commissioner Escofet that the commanders of the civil and assault guards could no longer rely on their men to restore order in the streets. Even if the attempt were made it would mean fighting the libertarians, and the ensuing battle would be as heavy as, if not heavier than, the one which had just been fought in the streets. The chances of ‘restoring order’ were virtually nil.

  The limits placed on the state’s coercive power were the true measure of the depth of the revolution: the police, even the disciplined guardia civil, had abandoned their masters.

  —When I saw a guardia sitting in a car in the Plaça de Catalunya, his tunic unbuttoned, his tricorn pushed to the back of his head and smoking a cigar, I knew there was no law and order any more, knew that the guardia civil had become infected by the populace, recalled Juana ALIER, a mill-owner’s wife …

  Escofet advised Companys that the only solution was to contain the situation politically. On leaving, the police commissioner reflected that he had never seen Companys look so profoundly concerned, so anxious.6

  When the libertarian leaders were shown into the Generalitat, Companys shook them by the hand. The CNT and FAI had always been harshly treated, he told them, even by those who, in the past, had defended them (as he had frequently done) as a lawyer in the courts. ‘Today you are the masters of the city and of Catalonia … You have conquered and everything is in your power; if you do not need or want me as president of Catalonia, tell me now. If, on the other hand, you believe that in my post, with the men of my party, my name and my prestige, I can be useful in the struggle … you can count on me and on my loyalty as a man and a politician; a man who sincerely desires Catalonia to march at the head of the socially most advanced countries … ’

  —His speech took us by surprise. He saw the situation more clearly than us because he hadn’t been in the thick of the street fighting, recalled Ricardo SANZ. One of us replied: ‘We have come to no decision about this, consequently we cannot give an answer.’ We would have to return and report to the CNT. This was a new turn of events. Then another one of us – I don’t remember who, it could have been any of us three because in the Nosotros group no one tried to piss outside the pot – said that Companys enjoyed the confidence of Catalonia and the CNT, and we hoped he would continue as president of the Generalitat. This was a purely conditional answer; it didn’t for a moment preclude our returning in a couple of hours and telling him we were taking over. That was what the three of us, our group, were in favour of doing. But the organization had to make the decision …

  Outside, in another room, representatives of the Popular Front – to which the libertarian movement did not belong – waited. At Companys’s suggestion, the libertarian leaders met the latter and agreed to set up a militia committee which would not only organize armed forces but be a ‘suitable organization for continuing the revolution until final victory’.

  Meanwhile, the CNT local federation was discussing its position. Anti-authoritarian, anti-state and government, a-political if not anti-political, would the libertarian movement, which had preached and attempted revolution to free the working masses from all forms of coercion, take power? Make the revolution?

  Appointed that day to the FAI peninsular committee – the leading body of that organization – Félix CARRASQUER, anarchist schoolmaster, was attending the discussions. Only the previous Friday, the day the uprising began in Morocco, he was proposing to the Catalan CNT regional committee the need to set up a Popular School or University to train CNT revolutionary cadres. Violence, so long preached in the movement, was no substitute for revolutionary leadership. Where were the trained militants who could sustain the revolution? The movement’s most influential leaders, the most spirited and determined revolutionaries, lacked the training and preparation necessary to run a revolutionary society. And if that was true in Catalonia, vanguard of the movement, and Aragon, what of the less-developed regions? In Catalonia, with its three and a half million inhabitants, he had argued, it would need a thousand trained militants to take over strategic posts in factories, businesses, town halls, the university. These militants would have to have the necessary imagination and capacity to lead, organize and administer; if not, it was impossible to make a successful revolution. And where were those one thousand militants? At best, in his view, there were probably no more than two dozen.

  Now, when García Oliver and the others returned from the Generalitat and informed the meeting of Companys’s remarks, the perspective of revolution opened before them.

  —We realized our strength. We could establish libertarian communism in Catalonia. But Catalonia wasn’t the whole of Spain. García Oliver argued that the movement should take power, should impose libertarian communism as a dictatorship: it was the position he had defended for a long time. He was supported by a companion who had spent many years in the Soviet Union, who had always fought the Bolshevik dictatorship, and now defended the imposition of libertarian communism. What a contradiction! Libertarian communism could not be imposed! Dictatorship was the antithesis of libertarianism! …

  CARRASQUER opposed García Oliver. While they were in a minority in the whole of Spain, a libertarian revolution could not be made. A civil war was certainly beginning. If the libertarian movement did not collaborate at all levels with the other forces opposed to the uprising, it would be crushed ‘as had been the anarchists in Russia – crushed by those fighting on our side’. The movement had to cooperate in the defence of the republic – in the streets, town halls, factories and workplaces, wherever it was necessary: even in politics.

  Abad de Santillán, the influential libertarian writer, argued along similar lines. Dictatorship was the liquidation of libertarian communism which could be achieved only by the liberty
and spontaneity of the masses. To impose it would mean forcibly enrolling the petty bourgeoisie and exercising an implacable authority over it, as well as over the political parties, which would end up attacking the CNT, their bête noire. Nothing could be further from anarchism than to impose its will by force, it would be moral suicide. Moreover, if the rest of the country did not follow the Catalan CNT in making total revolution, Catalonia would be isolated, international capital would apply a pitiless boycott, and unless there were an international revolution, the libertarian movement would be crushed.

  —As a group, recalled Ricardo SANZ, we didn’t press the issue. We knew that the organization was opposed to dictatorship. And that’s what it would have been if our position had been accepted. From the moment the movement took over responsibility for everything, everyone would have had to do what we ordered. What is that if not dictatorship? Certainly, dictatorship wasn’t part of the anarchist programme, but our proposal was dictated by force of circumstance; we saw it as a way out at that moment. But it couldn’t be done. Why not? The CNT was opposed. I believe – it’s a hypothesis only – that they were frightened of us, of the Nosotros group. Frightened that if we imposed a dictatorship they wouldn’t be in a position to take decisions; frightened that sooner or later some of them might be eliminated as traitors to the revolution, that Stalinist methods might be imposed. Stalin was just then beginning to eliminate a whole series of revolutionaries who weren’t traitors, as we all knew. But in any case we didn’t try to force the issue because there were other urgent matters: Companys had suggested that Durruti lead a militia force to take Saragossa which was in enemy hands …

  The collaborationist option won the day. The discussion, if sometimes violent in tone, did not last long. The majority were in favour, no vote had to be taken. There would be no talk of attaining libertarian communism until the war was won.