Bitter battles – the Jarama, Guadalajara, Brunete – remained to be fought around Madrid as the nationalists sought to encircle the capital, and the republicans to cut off the besieging army; but for the next twenty-eight months the front line would remain almost exactly where it had been drawn in the November fighting.
* * *
Episodes 3
Repression
As though the assault on the capital heralded the enemy’s total extinction, November witnessed an intensification of the repression in some areas of the nationalist zone. It was 7 November, the first day of the nationalist offensive, that Francisca de LEON arrived outside the Jesuit convent of Jesús del Gran Poder in Seville to be turned away by the guards.
—‘Go away, daughter, go away, your mother doesn’t need coffee and food now,’ they said. I knew what that meant …
Her mother, sister of José Díaz, secretary-general of the Spanish communist party, had been shot. She turned and left, still carrying the food basket. ‘I don’t know how I managed to reach home.’
As soon as the uprising occurred in Seville they had tried to flee. She, her four brothers and sisters, her mother, an aunt and the latter’s two children. With so many young, they had not been able to get far, hardly beyond the gates of the city, where they were given shelter by a woman. The police came looking for them, threatening to shoot a youth on the spot unless their whereabouts were revealed. When her mother saw what was happening, she cried out, ‘There’s no need to kill anyone, I am Pepe Díaz’s sister.’
Arrested, she, her mother and aunt were taken to the Jáuregui cinema which had been turned into a prison. It was packed; more than 2,000 people, she believed, were crammed into the place from which all the seats had been removed but where there was still no room to lie down to sleep. Throughout one night, eighteen-year-old Francisca was interrogated in an attempt to get her to give the names and whereabouts of party members. She saw many of her companions being taken out, tied together, to be shot. One group she remembered was of girls who worked in an olive factory.
—When the man came in at night with the list and started calling out names, panic spread like wildfire. But the women always answered when their names were called. Hope remained until the last moment …
The day after her interrogation, she was released and went to look for her brothers and sisters who had remained in the stranger’s house beyond the city walls. When she returned with them and her two cousins, she found her house had been turned upside down and much of it smashed.
—In the first days they shaved women’s heads, forced castor oil down them and led them in their underclothes through the streets to sow terror in the working-class districts. In the mornings you could see mothers crying for sons or husbands who had been shot. Bodies were left lying in the streets without burial. The working class was completely terrorized by the repression …
She returned to work in the glass factory, where she was employed at 2.50 pesetas a day painting designs on glass which others had drawn, to support her brothers, sisters and cousins while her mother and aunt continued in gaol. Her mother, who was forty-three, had never been a member of the communist party. With five children to bring up after her husband died in an accident, she had had to work very hard.
—She earned her living selling bread house-to-house. She was a very good woman, but she had no political beliefs. All she used to say was that communists must be good because her brother was good and he was a communist …
Every day Francisca took the two women their food. Until 7 November.
The next day she returned to see what had happened to her aunt; she had been moved to another gaol. Francisca was able to get in and talk to her for a minute. She explained the tragedy. The guards had come to take them both, but her aunt’s nine-month-old baby, whom she was still breast-feeding, woke up and started to cry.
—‘We’ll leave that one and take only the other,’ the guards said. Then a discussion started between my mother and aunt, her sister. My aunt wanted to be the one to be taken. ‘Let them shoot me because you have got more children than me.’ My mother replied: ‘No, I will be the one because your children are still so young – ’ And she stepped forward and they took her. They wanted to blindfold her before she was shot, but she refused: she would die with her head held high because her brother, José Díaz, merited that of her. ‘Shoot me, but shoot me quickly,’ she said …
Her aunt was kept in prison for another eighteen months; her young brothers were thrown out of school and her aunt’s two children, who hadn’t been christened, were forcibly baptized. A godmother and godfather were chosen and the children were given new Christian names.
Early in 1938, she, her siblings and her aunt and her children were exchanged for two of General Queipo de Llano’s sisters who had been in the Popular Front zone – one of the few exchanges to take place during the war. Francisca joined her uncle in Valencia.
* * *
Social equality is nonsense. Look at nature, at the work of God, and you will see that no two things are equal. Equality among men is impossible.
Queipo de Llano (Speech on inaugurating a cheap workers’ housing site, March 1937)
* * *
The land is the permanent seedbed of Spain. Many have lived on its wealth without ever having a drop of sweat on their brows. Others have been constantly stooped over the land to find themselves forced to sell their products at low prices …
Azul, falangist (Córdoba, August 1937)
* * *
WORKERS
It is you who are triumphant now … All that is asked of you is that you give a day’s work for a day’s wage. In return you are being given real independence and an implacable defence against your eternal enemy: the political bosses of left and right. You don’t believe it yet, but time will convince you.
Guión (Córdoba, January 1937)
34. Although it would have been well able to do so. Before the republic it bought out the bankrupt San Vicente mine and ran it profitably, and later took over three or four other mines in the mountains. It financed the great Oviedo socialist newspaper Avance, created casas del pueblo in all the major mining villages, a theatre in Sama, a miners’ orphanage, etc.
35. See F. Jellinek, The Civil War in Spain (London, 1938), p. 413.
36. Later, when power was concentrated in the Council of Asturias (see below), the communist agriculture councillor expropriated some large insurgent landowners, whose lands were let out in small plots (as tended to be the custom), and the renters were given the usufruct of the land. Sharecropping was abolished and some former communal grazing lands restored. ‘Our long-held claim that the land should be for him who worked it was now met,’ recalled a socialist youth peasant’s son who no longer had to pay rent to a local landowner who lived in Madrid. ‘A lot of the farmers no doubt continued to pay the rent secretly to insure themselves against the future; but we didn’t.’
37. ‘The trade unions can and must control production to ensure that this runs as efficiently and economically as possible. But when it comes to the distributive trades, the trade union cannot play this role,’ thundered Amador Fernández, socialist trade councillor. ‘We are determined that interference (in this sector) must end. As long as the concept of private property has not been abolished, we have to respect the rights of all … Let it be clear: the trade unions are trade unions, control is control, the government is the government, and the owner of a business is the owner, subject only to the limitations and controls that the legitimate organs of government dispose.’ (Cited in J. A. Cabezas, Asturias: catorce meses de guerra civil, Madrid, 1975, pp. 53–4.) However, the boot was sometimes on the other foot. The UGT chemists’ assistants took over the Gijón chemist shops because their owners were ‘fascists’; the libertarian youth councillor of health, Ramón Fernández, ordered them returned to their owners. (I am indebted to A. Masip for this information.)
38. Despite the communist party’s rapid growth and influence, es
pecially in the army, it did not come to excise the same political weight in Asturias as in other regions. On the two occasions of major crises in the Council, socialists, libertarians and republicans joined in taking issue against the communists. In April 1937, the communist party failed to get its slate elected to the UGT leadership and lost the shared leadership it had held with the socialists since the previous September. The JSU, which almost everywhere else followed the PCE line, in Asturias did not do so to the same extent, and showed a tendency to unite with the libertarian youth (see A. Masip, ‘Apunte para un estudio sobre la guerra civil en Asturias’, in Sociedad, política y cultura en la España de los siglos XIX–XX, Madrid, 1973). A solid ‘centrist’ socialist leadership, a UGT unwilling to threaten its alliance with the CNT, isolation from the main area of the Popular Front zone, and the absence of Soviet aid and advisers on anything like the scale of the central zone were some of the contributing factors to the PCE’s failure to assert its control to the same extent as elsewhere.
39. These had their own share of ‘amateurism’, according to an Asturian falangist youth who was able to escape from his home town and join the Galician column after walking four or five days across the mountains: ‘It was pretty much of a walk-over until we reached Grado, about 25 km from Oviedo.’ Given a rifle, a pair of army trousers and a beret he tagged along in the column which was composed mainly of soldiers, under the command of a bearded, retired Lt Colonel wearing a Moroccan campaign uniform and nicknamed the ‘Lion of the Rif’ by his men. ‘For us volunteers there wasn’t much discipline. After we took my home town, I used to leave the column and go home for the night when I felt like it.’ (Faustino SANCHEZ.) No doubt, the military elements were not allowed similar liberties; and the Galician peasantry was to become renowned in the course of the war for its fighting ability on the nationalist side.
40. The extraordinary difficulties of the war in the north, cut off from the rest of the Popular Front zone, without control of the sea or – later – air, and with shortages of every sort must be remembered. So, too, must the subsequent Asturian contribution to the defence of the Basque country and Santander, and the Asturians’ own resistance, especially in the battle of El Mazuco, in the autumn of 1937.
41. See J. Girón, ‘Un estudio de sociología electoral: la ciudad de Oviedo y su contorno en las elecciones generales de 1933’, in Sociedad, política y cultura en la España de los siglos XIX–XX.
42. Some months earlier, when planning of the uprising was still in its preliminary stages, José María MOUTAS, CEDA parliamentary deputy for Oviedo, had sounded Aranda out. ‘I can still hear his words. “Look, Moutas, I am always ready to take part in anything serious, but not in childish ventures.” He knew that I had been implicated in the 1932 Sanjurjo rising. He was an extremely cool, objective man, who had been careful not to express any opinions openly on his arrival, other than a personal disapproval of the Falange.’
43. The measure, natural in defence of this sort, caused an uproar only two months earlier when Popular Front forces used it in their last-ditch defence of Irún in the Basque country. Not the least of the critics were the Basque nationalists.
44. The best day-to-day account of the fighting from the defenders’ side is Gen. Aranda’s own Informe Técnico, of which a résumé is contained in A. Cores Fernández de Cañete, El sitio de Oviedo (Madrid, 1975), pp. 103–12. See also O. Pérez Solis, Sitio y defensa de Oviedo (Valladolid, 1938).
45. Aranda had been promoted in the course of the siege, his general’s insignia being dropped by parachute.
46. Only four months after the October offensive, the Popular Front launched a second all-out attack on the city. With the militia now militarized and greater weaponry available, the February offensive was even more costly in men and arms. It failed in its three objectives: to cut the narrow nationalist corridor, to seize Oviedo and to take pressure oft Madrid, then in the closing stages of the Jarama battle.
The Galician relief column in October brought the rigours of the nationalist repression to Oviedo. The day before the second Popular Front offensive, Leopoldo Alas, rector of Oviedo university, the republican son of the famous novelist ‘Clarín’, was executed. The grocer’s lad, José ALVAREZ, witnessed the execution, lifted on the shoulders of fellow prisoners. Arrested shortly before, beaten up so badly that he was unable to get up from his prison mattress for a week, ALVAREZ was soon condemned to death on charges of not having joined the army (although his age group had not been called up), of being a socialist youth member (which was untrue), and of having crossed the lines (which was true, although no evidence was produced). He owed his life to an elderly guardia civil lieutenant who defended him at the trial and secured commutation of the death sentence. Of the twenty-five prisoners who had been court-martialled with him, all but three were shot.
47. See Points of Rupture, A.
48. The 5th Regiment, which stemmed from one of the five volunteer battalions created in Madrid after the uprising, became a regimental training depot for twenty-eight steel companies, which were created to set an example of discipline, and other units sent to the front. The Regiment grew from 600 to 6,000 men in under ten days; the four other volunteer battalions originally created remained on paper. ‘I don’t think the communist party at the beginning knew its initiative would be so successful; it was something that was simply improvised,’ explained Fernando TAFALLA, architectural student and communist sympathizer who joined the Regiment in its first days and helped organize its infrastructure. ‘All those who joined were not communists, but the latter were in the majority.’ The Regiment’s inspiration derived largely from Vittorio Vidali (‘Carlos Contreras’), the Comintern’s delegate in Spain, who became its political commissar – an appointment the Regiment was the first to initiate on a general scale. Compared to the ordinary militia columns, the 5th Regiment units displayed a higher degree of organization and military discipline, but did not reach the level of the International Brigades. On its incorporation into the newly formed Popular Army in December 1936, the Regiment claimed a membership of 60,000.
49. For the communist party’s analysis, see pp. 323–7 and, for its pre-war origins, Points of Rupture, E.
50. A member of the Non-Intervention Committee, the Soviet Union denounced Italian violations of non-intervention and, in October, began to send war matériel to Spain. This included about 100 tanks and the same number of fighter planes; both tanks and planes were superior to their German and Italian equivalents. As this aid arrived, the Popular Front government opened a base at Albacete for the many thousands of foreign volunteers being recruited, under Comintern auspices, to fight in Spain, and who were now formed into International Brigades. Simultaneously, a start was made in the creation of the Popular Army. At the end of October, the Popular Front government sent a large proportion of its gold reserves to the Soviet Union to finance arms purchascs.
51. See p. 189.
52. 2 May 1808, when the Madrid populace rose against Napoleon’s forces – an episode commemorated in Goya’s famous painting.
53. Plans to exchange him, as attempts to rescue him from Alicante prison, where he was being held at the outbreak of war, had failed. At his trial, he defended himself by reading out editorials from the Falange organ Arriba to show that his views were different to those of the insurgent military. He was sentenced to death on 17 November. For the effects of his execution in the nationalist zone, see p. 316.
54. See M. Koltsov, Diario de la guerra de España (Paris, 1963), p. 193.
Winter 1936
Episodes 4
Return
Public prosecutor of the High Court of Madrid, Francisco PARTALOA crossed from Gibraltar to La Linea and the nationalist zone, his arrival motivated by a sense of patriotism. At the frontier there had been no problems; the nationalist officer in charge of the local security forces had come to welcome him. Now, only a day later, the same officer was telling him he was under arrest. ‘You are a very dangerous person, I underst
and –’
This was not what he had been led to believe by General Franco, who had replied to his letter from Paris by saying that he was the very sort of person the nationalists needed. The latter had even published a propaganda pamphlet which used his case to illustrate the illegalities being committed in the ‘red’ zone: his dismissal from office, his forced flight to France from Madrid where, on his return from his Almeria holiday at the outbreak of the war, he had been shocked to find that people were being assassinated at will, checas functioning, an ‘uncontrolled rampage’ taking place. Very shortly he had come into conflict with a communist trade union leader who was attempting to expropriate a marquesa’s jewellery which was deposited in a Madrid bank.
—‘Do you realize what your attitude can mean?’ the communist said to me. ‘Yes, it can cost me my life; but it is my duty as public prosecutor in this case to oppose you.’ I didn’t believe there was any justification for depriving the marquesa of her rights; but that night I didn’t go home to sleep which was just as well because they came to get me …
From that moment he knew he had to escape. Informed of his case, the republican minister of justice regretted that he was unable to guarantee his safety. None other than the director general of the security forces took him into his office and hid him until he managed to get a plane ticket out of Madrid – on a German plane bound for Paris. ‘Not only did he get me the ticket but he gave me three pounds of gold which I put in my shoes.’ His last night in Madrid he spent in the Model prison – a voluntary prisoner because he thought it was the safest place to be. The next day the assault of the prison took place;1 several of those slaughtered were friends of his.
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