As VAZQUEZ-PRADA, the falangist journalist, retreated from the Loma del Canto to new positions around the church of San Pedro de los Arcos, he saw an assault guard lying beside the church with a head wound. ‘Get me out of this hell,’ he begged. ‘I carried him just a few steps to a first aid post in the main street. We were fighting in the city now, yet I never for a moment thought the reds would take it.’
—‘They’re here, they’re here!’ the two assault guards cried as they ran into my house. They were in rags, without rifles, almost dead with exhaustion. Very shortly, the streets running parallel to the North Station, a couple of hundred metres from my house were being raked by republican fire, recalled José ALVAREZ, the grocer’s lad …
After a week’s heavy fighting, the defenders had been forced to withdraw from all the positions on the perimeter that had served them so well: the water reservoir, the hermitage of Christ Enchained, the cemetery, the lunatic asylum of La Cadallada. There was no second line of defence, no machine-gun ammunition left, only one tenth of the rifle ammunition of a week earlier remaining. From the south-east, through the working-class barrio of San Lázaro, and from the west through La Argañosa, the miners advanced.
—We cut through the walls of houses to get up the Calle Magdalena. The defenders were so close we had to set up mirrors to be able to stand guard without being in the line of fire. Most of the fighting was done with hand-grenades, but their mortar fire was punishing. We suffered heavy casualties … Anselmo PAÑEDA, a socialist youth miner, considered himself lucky to be only slightly wounded. The miners waited under cover of dark listening to the artillery fire before attacking, recalled his companion, Misael MARTINEZ. ‘When thirty shells had exploded, we charged. It needed no training – only knowing how to count’ …
In La Argañosa and in the Calle Marqués de Gastañaga, the defenders set light to blocks of houses to prevent the miners’ advance.43 Jesús-Evaristo CASARIEGO, who was in command of one of the defenders’ assault groups, knew they were fighting for their lives.
—We were like wild animals at bay. We were prepared to burn the city, to create barricades of fire between us and the enemy. We were fighting street by street, house by house, storey by storey, room by room. We weren’t prepared to surrender under any conditions. Win or die, there was no other choice …
His home, in the Calle de la Independencia, fell into enemy hands; his wife and six-month-old daughter fled to the cellar of a house in the centre. The daughter of a socialist, the wife of a nationalist, she said she wanted to die with her husband. His eighty-year-old grandmother, his mother, sisters and two young brothers remained in the hands of the attackers. ‘The reds didn’t maltreat anyone; indeed, one of their officers even gave the children some condensed milk from his kit.’ Hardly any ammunition remained.
—Fifteen rifle rounds each was all we had left. ‘Well, we’ve still got bayonets and balls,’ we said …
Nationalist aviation dropped 30,000 rounds of rifle ammunition. Only 500 men remained, including the lightly wounded and sick, able to bear arms. The attackers were almost in the city centre; preparations were being made to withdraw to previously selected strongholds where resistance would be carried on to the end.
Three days after being wounded in the throat, Salvador GARCIA, the advertising agent who had volunteered as soon as the uprising began, insisted that he be allowed to return to duty. So many wounded were lying in the hospital that no doctor had had time to examine him. A medical assistant, a good friend of his, offered to bring him civilian clothes and to make out a certificate saying he had been wounded by firing in the street. He had lived through the October revolution, was convinced that the miners were going to take the city.
—‘You know what that means –’ His words convinced me that my place was beside my companions who were fighting to the death. The first doctor refused, but the next understood and discharged me. My throat was bandaged, I could hardly speak. But I could handle a rifle, you don’t need to talk to shoot …
His artillery unit ran out of ammunition and became infantrymen. The Fresno electricity generating plant was captured and the city blacked out. Only the fires of burning buildings lit the night sky, and oil lamps the cellars which the civilian population had been unable to leave for nearly a fortnight. Aranda moved his HQ from the arms factory into the Pelayo barracks. Over the radio, powered by a car battery, he sent a message to the defenders exhorting them to fight like Spaniards to the end. A radio message to the Galician column said ammunition was exhausted, but Oviedo would resist to the last man.44
The Popular Front offensive had dragged on, had been costly in men and ammunition too. In the south-eastern sector, in the Calle Campomanes, José MATA was pinned down. Advance into the city was difficult, bloody. He cursed the day they had left for Madrid three months before. If they had been like the CNT in Gijón and remained, things would have been different. Every house had to be destroyed before the defenders were put out of action.
—The guardia civil defenders wouldn’t surrender – they had to be killed. A single machine-gun in a house pinned us down; it took artillery to reduce the house to rubble before we could advance. The numbers of casualties were enormous – 5,000 wounded we had on both fronts …
On the western side, the advance had penetrated deeper; there was fighting in the Plaza de América, and almost at the walls of the hospital. Manuel SANCHEZ’S unit had advanced through the houses, outflanking the Casa del Jabonero, one of the defenders’ strongholds. He was trying to snatch some sleep when he was woken and told that a squad leader and some men had got drunk and had set off for the centre. He went after them. Singing at the top of their voices, they were not far from the Calle Uría, Oviedo’s main street, when he caught up with them. It was evident to him that the Popular Front forces could have virtually walked into the city that night.
The next morning, summoned to a meeting with their communist column leader, Damián Fernández, SANCHEZ and other leaders were told that Oviedo could be taken now but that the Galician column was advancing rapidly to the relief. It was vitally important to protect the artillery factory at Trubia near by which was threatened. ‘To lose it would be a serious defeat, whereas Oviedo could be taken later. Moreover, ammunition was running short –’
In the city, VAZQUEZ-PRADA was posted in the cupola of the Banco Asturiano building with a machine-gun. 17 October had dawned sunny; the offensive was entering its fourteenth day. The front – it was impossible to speak of a line – was almost in the centre. Like every other defender’s, his nerves were worn thin. Only the memory of October 1934 sustained his determination: a sports reporter on the local right-wing paper Región, he had been caught by the revolutionaries, his rib-cage buckled in by their rifle butts, had almost been shot. The rapid intervention of a communist leader who had stopped the men beating him, and of a doctor cousin who had him removed to another ward in the hospital where he had been taken unconscious, saved his life. Seeing that he had disappeared, his persecutors believed he had been shot, and his death was entered on the hospital records. When he recovered, he joined the Falange, rejecting both marxism and capitalism, for he had suffered both, having begun his working life at twelve in a machine shop after his lawyer father had died.
In the cupola beside the machine-gun he could at least enjoy the sun. These were the last moments. There was only one thing to do: die fighting.
—If the reds took the city we would all be assassinated. I drank in the sunshine. On the social security building there was an aircraft observation post. Our planes appeared and began attacking the enemy positions. Suddenly I saw don José Rubio in the observation post gesticulating. His voluminous cape spread open, his head was bare. I heard him shout: ‘¡Moros en la cuesta!’ [Moors on the hill]. It sounded almost like that old warning shout, ‘¡Moros en la costa!’ [Moors on the coast]. I grabbed binoculars, looked up at Mount Naranco; there were Moors on the crest. ‘We’re liberated, freed!’ I shouted. Shortly, there was a tr
emendous explosion on the mountain-side; the reds were blowing up their ammunition dumps. Then we knew for sure they were retreating …
In the evening, fog closed in. The relief column was not due to enter the city until the following day. Fighting was still continuing. Jesús-Evaristo CASARIEGO was in a position close to the Plaza de América when he heard shouts: ‘We are the Galician column. ¡Viva España!’ Next to him a soldier shouted: ‘It’s a lie,’ believing it to be an enemy trick. CASARIEGO went forward with a captain. Aranda, who had been informed, ordered every precaution to be taken. Thanks to the fact that one of the defenders’ officers recognized the commander of the column’s advance party, Capt. Jacobo López, the newcomers’ identity was established.
—The Galicians, mainly volunteers, came in with their bayonets dripping with blood. They had had a bitter fight in the railway depot before breaking through. Aranda received Capt. López by the light of a car’s headlamps in the doorway of the Santa Clara barracks. The captain saluted. ‘At your orders, mi general.45 The advance guard of the relief column of Galicia has arrived. Sin novedad … ’
On the other side of the city, in the Calle Magdalena, the socialist miners saw flares and bengal lights being fired from the centre. They suspected the worst. The next day they heard the news and received orders to withdraw to their original positions.
—I was only an ordinary militiaman, I couldn’t tell the reason for these orders, recalled Anselmo PAÑEDA, socialist youth miner. I thought that if we had continued we could have taken the city. Instead, we withdrew, abandoning all the positions we had captured – a couple of which, a few days later, we were ordered to take again …
Despite great bloodshed and heroism, no revolutionary revanche could be wrested from history for October 1934. The attempt foundered on the lessons learnt by the defenders from two years earlier. The ninety-day siege had been withstood, and the nationalists had won a narrow corridor to the city which remained beleaguered until the war ended in the north a year later.46
* * *
MADRID WILL BE THE TOMB OF FASCISM
¡No pasarán!
Every house a fortress, every street a trench, every neighbourhood a wall of iron and combatants …
Emulate Petrograd! 7 November on the Manzanares must be as glorious as on the Neva!
WIVES –
TOMORROW PREPARE TO TAKE YOUR HUSBANDS’ LUNCH TO THE TRENCHES, NOT TO THE FACTORY
VIVA MADRID
WITHOUT A GOVERNMENT
* * *
Militancies 8
TIMOTEO RUIZ
Communist peasant
Lying wounded in the open lorry – there were no ambulances – he saw men, women and children at work everywhere in the Madrid streets, filling sandbags, building barricades. Loudspeakers were blaring out insistent calls to the people to resist. In hospital that night he fell asleep happy, convinced that the capital would resist.
Seventeen years old, a corporal in the communist-organized 5th Regiment, he had been fighting in retreat from the Army of Africa for the past two months. In the last stretch, between Toledo and Madrid, he was wounded. Under-age, he should not have been at the front.
—When I came from my village in Toledo province with a few other local youths who like me wanted to fight, we met a lad in Madrid from the village who had joined the communist youth. He told us that the best unit was the 5th Regiment which the communists were forming. I needed my parents’ permission because I was too young. One day we were training when I heard my name on the loudspeakers ordering me to report to the commandant’s office where my father was waiting. I ignored the order – I knew they’d never find me …
Almost immediately, he was made an NCO. Each recruit was asked if he had had any military training. In his village of Los Navalmorales de Pusa, an ex-legionary had given the socialist youth some training – without arms – before the war. So he said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Right, you’re a corporal.’
—I had very little idea of what was involved; all I knew was that I wanted to do what I could. In the village I had been one of those who three years before had organized the socialist youth. I didn’t know much about socialism – I was only fourteen – but when I heard what had happened during the Russian revolution and that the large landowners had disappeared and the land was given to the peasants, my imagination was fired. Shortly afterwards, I and some others were arrested for writing ‘Long Live Russia’ on the village walls. We were too young to be taken to court; the mayor and the local guardia civil commander agreed to punish us by shutting us up in the townhall cell every Sunday – the only day of rest and enjoyment – until the day’s festivities were over. The punishment lasted more than four months. That was the sort of feudalism we lived under.
Five large landowners practically owned the village. Apart from some 500 smallholders like my father, the rest of the 4,000 inhabitants were landless day-labourers who every morning waited in the village square to be chosen to work by the foremen of the big estates. There was work for all only at harvest and olive-picking times. The only way the landless labourers could keep themselves and their families alive was by cutting firewood on the communal land in the mountains. But this was forbidden, and the guardia civil confiscated the wood if they caught the men …
His father made ends meet only by going out to work for the large owners; under the agrarian reform he received some land but the soil was so poor that he left it untilled.47 There were four children in the family, and they lived on gazpacho and chick-peas. A chicken at Christmas was a ‘big event’ and meat was an unknown treat.
On 18 July, he was out irrigating his father’s smallholding when, at 2 a.m., his brothers came from the village to tell him the military had risen. He ran back to the socialist youth headquarters.
—‘What are we going to do? We’ve got no arms; we’ve got to defend ourselves and the republic.’ The only thing anyone could think of was to go to the seignorial house in the village belonging to Joaquín Costa’s brother, don Tomás. He had a collection of old armour there. I remember with what pride I received the lance with which I set out to defend the republic. Others went with old swords, bucklers, breastplates. We set off in a small lorry for the neighbouring village to see what was happening. We found they had cut down trees to block the road; the barrels of a couple of old shotguns poked through the branches. It was a scene from another age, a war of long ago …
After a month’s training, his No. 10 Steel company left the 5th Regiment’s barracks in a former convent in Madrid for the Talavera front not far – but on the other side of the Tagus river – from his home village. Meanwhile, he joined the JSU and later would become a member of the communist party. The company was issued with old military uniforms and Mexican rifles; the men had received rifle and hand-grenade training. The company had no machine-guns, but included stretcher-bearers and casualty equipment, which was rare amongst the militia.48
—As we got close to the front, I was surprised to see cars and lorries, many of them bearing the letters CNT–FAI, coming back from the lines. The men said they were returning to Talavera to sleep. Was this possible in wartime? When I got to the front, I saw that the only units which had a certain discipline – self-imposed, by and large – were those of the 5th Regiment …
At the beginning, he found himself facing Moroccan troops and the Foreign Legion. It was enough, in his experience, for someone to shout that the Moroccans were attacking for panic to spread. His unit stood up to them in hand-to-hand fighting in trenches outside Talavera for a couple of days; but after a heavy artillery barrage, the break came. ‘The ease with which they shelled our positions was what made the biggest impact on us. It demonstrated their strength and our weakness, for we seemed to have no cannon to reply. It was demoralizing.’
Remaining bunched on the roads, the militia units were easily cut off or, fearing encirclement, retreated. For two months, the withdrawal continued to the gates of Madrid. The last 70 km from Toledo, however, took a month.
Each time his unit retreated there was great disorder and it was easy to lose contact with the company. This created a serious problem. His company was armed with Mexican rifles; the next Steel company had Russian rifles; the ammunition was different for each. A man who lost his company ran the risk of having no ammunition if he had to join another unit. But the worst was always feeling alone, exposed.
—You could never be sure whether the column to your right or left was still there, or whether you were in danger of being encircled. It couldn’t continue like this. We had to have a single command. I was filled with joy when I heard that the militias were to be militarized. Not because I knew anything about military problems, but because for too long I had known what it meant not to be able to count on the units on either side …
A friend of his, a brave lad, made off on his own each time the company took up a new position. Asked where he was going, he replied: ‘To see where we’re going to retreat to.’
—He was right. Each time we took up a new position we could be sure we’d be retreating again the next day. But when we got to Madrid, I said to him: ‘You won’t have to look behind you any longer. There’s nowhere to retreat to now’ …
* * *
The Madrid militia had had to face two tests unknown to the Catalan militia in Aragon: a professional fighting force in the Army of Africa; and the bitter experience of constant defeat. None of the militia units, including the 5th Regiment, was able to withstand the onslaught of the first. The second was driving home – however slowly – the need for a different concept of war. The revolution was failing on two related scores: no proletarian power had been created, no revolutionary Valmy had been capable of routing, if only temporarily, the main enemy force. The militias were the manifestation of the ‘dual power’ vacuum: each party and organization had its own military headquarters, its own supply services, its own transport which attended to the requirements of its columns with scant regard for the rest. Such central staff as there was was in no way able to formulate a common plan of action and allocate available supplies of men and munitions according to an effective plan. There was rivalry, if not open hostility, between different columns. The failure to create a proletarian power capable of mobilizing the population’s total energies in the revolutionary task of winning the war must lead to the establishment of a different power capable of organizing the war effort. The creation of such a power was the aim pursued by the communist party, for which the socialist revolution, even if underway, was not on the historical agenda.49 With its acute understanding that the Popular Front was facing a large-scale civil war rather than the sequel to a military coup, the party was the only one able to offer a coherent alternative to the power vacuum which seemed inevitably to be leading to defeat. ‘Discipline, Hierarchy and Organization,’ Mundo Obrero, the party organ, thundered only two days after the uprising had been crushed in Madrid. But it would take time. Before the change could be completed, the revolution’s failures were suddenly reversed, its unrealized potential dramatically revealed, in the defence of Madrid.
Blood of Spain Page 37