* * *
Who has the greater possibility of victory in war? Whoever has the greater means at their disposal. That is evident … Well, all Spain’s gold, all the monetary resources valid abroad, are in the government’s hands …
War nowadays is principally a war of industry. Well, all Spain’s industrial might, everything that can effectively contribute to maintaining the struggle, is, without exaggeration, in our hands.
With the nation’s financial and industrial resources in the government’s power … those who have impetuously launched themselves into armed struggle against the republic … will inevitably, inexorably, fatally be conquered.
Indalecio Prieto, socialist leader
(Broadcast over Madrid radio, 8 August 1936)
* * *
The movement we have launched has been fervently supported by honest working people to free our country from the anarchy and chaos which has been under detailed preparation since the Popular Front came to power …
Only a monster, and a monster of the complicated psychological constitution of Azaña, could have encouraged such a catastrophe. A monster who appears more like the absurd experiment of a new and fantastic Frankenstein than the fruit of a woman’s love. When we triumph, it will be unjust to demand his disappearance. Azaña must be shut up, so that phrenologists can study his case, perhaps the most interesting case of mental degeneration known since Krostand, the primitive man of our time …
General Emilio Mola
(Broadcast over Burgos radio, 15 August 1936)
* * *
We know exactly what the fatherland must recover in these moments – nothing less than itself … We were no more than the humiliated depository, the dregs of crass, failed ideologies, a colony of Russia, that’s to say, a colony of organized barbarity …
The Falange’s profound preoccupation is to redeem the proletariat … Spain is virtually divided; one half, made up of the vast army of those who earn their daily bread by manual labour, who do not love Spain, who receive no pleasure from belonging to this illustrious nation … We must assure the workers of the spiritual patrimony which they have lost, winning for them, above all, the satisfaction and certainty of their daily bread.
Spain must be proletarianized. It must become a people of workers … The capitalists, the rich will be traitors to the fatherland, unworthy members of the state if … they continue as they have done up to now with their incorrigible egoism, their refusal to look about them at the trail of hunger, scarcity and pain they leave in their wake.
Bread for all, justice for all – these are our slogans and will shortly be put into practice. ¡España, Una! ¡España, Grande! ¡España, Libre! ¡Arriba España!
Onésimo Redondo, Falange leader
(Broadcast over Valladolid radio, 19 July 1936)
* * *
1. Seville, Córdoba, Granada and Cádiz. The other three were Salamanca, Cáceres and, briefly, Albacete. The republicans’ recapture of the latter was balanced by the rapid loss of Huelva in Andalusia.
2. Other factors on both sides certainly contributed to victory or defeat. The failure to manoeuvre offensively, the retreat to isolated ‘strongholds’ or barrios, divisions in the working-class organizations, lack of decisiveness in the military, were among these. But where the offensive fusion was lacking the military triumphed. The assault guards might remain temporarily loyal as in Seville and Córdoba but on the defensive and separate from the people; or go over immediately to the military as in Saragossa and Oviedo. The end result was the same. Unarmed, isolated, disorganized, the masses were in no position to do more than stage a desperate resistance. The military, their task made easier by being able to bring out cannon to force the surrender of official buildings, took the offensive. It should be noted, moreover, that the totality of the Barcelona and Madrid garrisons did not rise.
3. Without the twenty Junkers 52 transport planes provided by Hitler and the nine Savoia 81s which reached. Morocco from Italy, it would have taken nine months to airlift the Army of Africa to the mainland. As it was, just under 14,000 troops, eleven field batteries and 500 tons of war material were ferried from Morocco in two months (see Col. J. M. Martínez Bande, La campaña de Andalucía, Madrid, 1969). Britain played its part in refusing to allow republican ships to refuel in Gibraltar and ensuring that the International Commission which governed Tangier forced the navy to stop using the harbour. From 5 August, the republican naval blockade had been broken by the insurgents, although complete freedom of passage was not achieved until the end of September when the republican government ordered the fleet to the north.
4. Founded at the end of 1931, the magazine crystallized a new-style monarchist reaction to the republic. It was, in its editor’s words, ‘anti-democratic’, believing not in the virtues of universal suffrage but rather in the principle of heredity. In its pages, he propounded the right to rise against ‘an illegitimate power’. Other contributors preached the need for an all-embracing, hierarchical corporative state as the surest guarantee against proletarian revolution (see P. Preston, ‘Alfonsist Monarchism and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 7, 1972).
5. Sáinz Rodríguez was never able to find the notes concerning the plebiscite’s proclamation; and Vegas Latapie frankly doubted that they existed. Sanjurjo, who had won his military reputation in the Moroccan wars, led an abortive monarchist-military revolt against the republic in 1932.
6. See Escofet, Al servei de Catalunya i de la república, p. 403.
July to September 1936
GUADARRAMA
ON BOTH SIDES, militiamen and troops rushed to the strategic passes of the Guadarrama mountains which held the key to the advance on Madrid from Old Castile.
Riding in one of Madrid’s red, double-decker buses, which had been taken over, Pedro SUAREZ, young communist MAOC member, was heading for the Alto del León, the pass through which the main Madrid-Valladolid road ran. From the latter city, a young falangist, Francisco GUTIERREZ DEL CASTILLO, who had just been released from prison, was making in the same direction.
SUAREZ’s wife was with him in the bus; she had insisted on going to the front. When they reached a point just below the pass and got out of the bus, he told her to join the militia to the right, while he went with the one to the left.
—So she joined El Campesino’s forces, while I was with Col. Mangada’s column. I didn’t want us to be in the same lot together. Then we advanced up the pass …
By the time GUTIERREZ reached the pass from the other side, it had already been taken once by his side and lost.
—We reconquered it in a tremendous battle, with artillery firing at point-blank range. A Jesuit priest advanced in front of us, carrying the cross, and urging us on. Like madmen we followed him. What bravery he displayed – without touching a rifle! I’m convinced that it was his example that gave us our victory …
Arriving from Salamanca, Juan CRESPO, monarchist student, reached the pass at the height of the battle. He had been doing guard duty in his home town when he bumped into his army cousin who shouted at him to jump into the lorry. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘To have a cup of coffee in Madrid. We’ll be there for the feast day of St James.’ Spain’s patron saint’s feast day was two days away, 25 July. He got into the lorry. When he reached the bottom of the pass, Col. Serrador, the military commander, was being brought down wounded: a stray bullet killed the new commander before they reached the top.
—Imagine how we raw militiamen felt! The Valladolid artillery was firing point-blank. There were no trenches, only rocks. I was terrified. The noise of my rifle firing produced an acute sense of physical discomfort. I couldn’t see the enemy. Instinctively, my head shrank into my shoulders …
His side was lucky, thought GUTIERREZ, some of the republican army units deserted and crossed to their lines. ‘Very few of our soldiers did the same.’
—So we took the pass and held it, recalled CRESPO. But after three or four days, I g
ot fed up. Most of us militiamen attached to the infantry battalion felt the same. The outing was over. We had fleas. We were cold. We missed our evening beer. A supply lorry arrived from Salamanca. We got on it and rode home. My mother was very happy to see me. ‘So you’ve got over all that business, have you?’ she said …
Early every morning the Madrid militiamen, organized by parties, trade unions and local groups, left the capital and returned late in the evening from their day spent in the Guadarrama mountains. A fourteen-year-old boy in the working-class barrio of Lavapies had the daily scene engraved on his memory.
—In the morning there’d be shouts. ‘Pablo! Pedro! Manolo!’ and the men came out of their houses with their rifles in their hands. Under the other arm they had the lunches their wives had prepared. They set off for the sierra as though they were going on a Sunday outing, to shoot rabbits. Often they were accompanied by women, some of them political, but more often not. Whores, that particular type of Madrid prostitute of the time with enormous breasts and buttocks, Alvaro DELGADO remembered. How amazing it seemed when in the evening they all came to spend the night at home. The next morning the scene was repeated …
Once again, it was the fusion of police and popular forces on the offensive which, if not always victorious, held the enemy at bay. With great rapidity they had taken the initiative in rushing out from the capital to conquer and hold not only the passes but the neighbouring provinces: Guadalajara, Cuenca, Toledo, Ciudad Real.
—In the actual fighting it was the assault guards who again took the brunt, so much so that I can truthfully say that virtually not one Madrid assault guard or officer remained alive after six months, recollected Juan ANDRADE of the POUM. Militarily speaking, the militia were chaotic at the beginning …
Heterogeneous, untrained, often disorganized, the militia none the less served the immediate purpose of reinforcing the fighting units. On the opposing side a somewhat similar fusion of army units with falangist and requeté civilians was also operating, although here the army units were properly organized and led by their regular officers. The matter changed when the professional Army of Africa entered the scene.
The Madrid garrison, moreover, had not been completely dismembered in the wake of the uprising. Due to summer leaves, deliberately encouraged by the government, it had not been at full strength on 20 July; and the government’s subsequent decree demobilizing soldiers meant that many conscripts simply vanished. None the less, several thousand soldiers and NCOs were sent out to fight. Francisco ABAD, communist soldier-organizer of the clandestine soldiers’ and corporals’ organization in the only infantry regiment not to rise in Madrid, helped to send the remnants of the other regiments to the front under officers from his regiment or otherwise known loyal officers.
—However, there weren’t many trusted officers available for the 6,000 men we sent out. In my own regiment, the majority were arrested after the fall of the Montaña, which was a mistake. A great number of the junior officers could have served the republic. Suspicion and distrust combined to make us lose a potentially useful force. Career officers weren’t treated justly nor used properly in those first months …
Major Jaime SOLERA, a staff officer at the war ministry, was one of these. A self-styled liberal democrat without political affiliation, he believed that an army officer’s duty was to serve the legally constituted government. At the same time, he knew that his brother, a serving officer, was in the insurgent zone.
The majority of officers in Madrid, he thought, shared his view. But the people, fearing that their loyalty was merely a trick, were suspicious of all officers.
—It was natural enough. Those were days of terrible confusion and no one could be blamed; but many officers were not only in danger of their lives, they were killed. Living in fear, they tried to escape … 1
While Major SOLERA waited in vain in the war ministry for orders that never came – ‘no planning was undertaken to deal with the uprising on a national level; the general staff couldn’t make any plans because it had no executive arm – the army itself’ – other officers went to the sierra as military advisers to the hastily formed columns. An infantry colonel, who had arrested disloyal officers in his regiment, was among them. Standing with his own men, he saw their faces turn pale. A shot rang out. The colonel turned round. ‘Shoot me from the front, not like a coward from the back,’ he said.
NO-MAN’S-LAND
In a spa hotel on the banks of the river Ebro where it flows along the borders of Burgos and Alava provinces, a twenty-year-old Madrid philosophy student, Paulino AGUIRRE, was holidaying with his parents. His father, a liberal politician under the monarchy, had refused to believe war was inevitable; this was another pronunciamiento – the typical nineteenth-century bloodless Spanish military coup – which would be over in a matter of days or weeks at the most.
Marooned in the hotel, not knowing what was happening, Paulino AGUIRRE came to realize that it was essential to take a stand.
—Little did I realize the role geography was to play, how the chance of where one happened to be was going to define one’s position for one. I saw people leaving the hotel to join relatives in near-by towns. I didn’t know that, in effect, they were crossing from one zone to another – and that it cost some of them their lives …
The zones lacked definite frontiers, front lines; everything was fluid, ambiguous; and yet – who could imagine it? – it was going to be years before the frontiers which were being invisibly created could again be crossed. The isolation was heightened by the radio news from both sides, so evidently propagandist as to be unbelievable.
One day, bodies were floating in the river. They were weighted with stones and floated below the surface, but as the water was clear they were plainly visible. They came from Miranda del Ebro, the near-by railway centre, where the socialists had had considerable strength, and which the insurgents were purging.
—The horror of war was now evident; but life in the hotel continued with a sort of unnatural lack of tension. Everybody seemed determined to prevent tension rising, camouflaging their real feelings. We listened with fascination to Queipo de Llano’s broadcasts from Seville; in their brutality, coarseness and violence, they expressed better than any the true nature of war.
Only when we heard a town had changed hands, when one side or the other advanced and took territory they had not initially held, did we feel psychologically caught in one of the two zones. Only when the front line moved – as it soon did when the Navarrese requetés began invading Guipúzcoa – were we aware that there was a line, that we were definitely in the insurgent zone …
BARCELONA
Coming down the Passeig de Gràcia, Josep CERCOS, libertarian youth metalworker, saw lorries and men assembling, accompanied by a few military. It was the Durruti column about to set off to capture Saragossa.
He had known nothing about it, hadn’t dreamt of going to the front that day. The lorries were already full. On the spot he decided to go to the station, certain there would be another column leaving by train. He had the rifle he’d got from the Sant Andreu artillery depot, and twenty-five or thirty rounds left. Within a short time, as he’d imagined, a train pulled in and everyone piled aboard, without being formed into groups or anything. Antonio Ortiz, of the Nosotros group, was the commander, it appeared, with an army major and a couple of captains as advisers, CERCOS made friends with an Asturian who had no firearm and only got one when a companion was killed in Aragon.
—We were all workers. There was a tremendous fever to reach Saragossa, to take it – the CNT had always been strong there, and so too had the military …
In improvised transport, thousands of men headed westwards from Barcelona. Men who as often as not had never handled a rifle in their lives and who, with or without arms, were setting out to ‘liberate’ Saragossa, Huesca and Teruel, the three Aragonese provincial capitals which had fallen to the military. ‘We didn’t have any maps, and I’m not talking of military maps, I mean we didn
’t have even a Michelin road map with us,’ Jordi ARQUER, one of the POUM column leaders, recalled.
—The people’s revolutionary instinct was amazing, thought Wilebaldo SOLANO, another POUM member. They knew they had to inflict one defeat after another, move ahead every minute. There wasn’t a moment to lose. The cry went up – ‘To Saragossa’. I remember Sgt Manzana, who later became famous alongside Durruti in the latter’s column, saying to me: ‘To Saragossa? But we’re still surrounded by fascists here. We’ve got to consolidate first –’ He was right, of course; but the people were even more right. They realized that Barcelona now wasn’t the over-riding concern in this life-and-death struggle. Saragossa had to be taken. The movement to set off – and which was such madness in military eyes – came from the streets, from the revolutionary turmoil, no one knew from whom or how. No one even knew what the situation was in the towns en route. The cry became general: ‘To Saragossa!’ …
The columns drove into Aragon in search of the enemy. The right had taken over in most villages and the left had fled into the countryside. But under the weight of the advance, the insurgents began, in the main, to retreat towards the cities. The closer the columns advanced, the stiffer became the resistance they encountered. Saragossa was the pivot of the defence, prime target of the offensive. Militarily, its capture would poise the predominantly Catalan attackers on the roads to Madrid and the Basque country, threatening Mola’s flank in Navarre and linking up the two major industrial areas of the Popular Front zone. Politically, victory over Saragossa would confirm the overwhelming strength of the CNT (deeply concerned at the loss of one of its strongholds) and poise the libertarians on the road to carrying their revolution triumphantly beyond the confines of Catalonia and Aragon.
Josep CERCOS emerged from the station at Caspe, in lower Aragon. The train had reached there without meeting resistance. In the station square CERCOS saw, to his great surprise, a company of civil guards. Each guard wore a red neckerchief.
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