Law of Political Responsibilities (Burgos, February 1939)
* * *
MADRID
The sudden collapse of Catalonia dismayed the rest of the republican zone, a not inconsiderable area – about one-third of the country – stretching from Madrid to Valencia and south to Almería, and defended by four undefeated armies of about half a million men.
Negrín and some cabinet ministers, accompanied by communist political and military leaders, returned from France to the centre-south zone; but the president of the republic, many government members, the executives of political parties and trade unions, and some of the republic’s top military remained in France.
On 12 February, two days after his return, the prime minister met Col. Casado, commander of the army of the centre, in Madrid. The latter said continued resistance was impossible: his army lacked aircraft, artillery and automatic weapons, the troops winter clothing; while the population of Madrid was close to starving. Recognizing the seriousness of the situation, Negrín replied that Soviet arms were in France, that peace negotiations had failed, and that food supplies for Madrid would be forthcoming. Casado asked him to call a meeting of the chiefs of the armed forces to discuss the situation; it was held four days later. The army commanders, all regular officers, were – with one exception – of like mind: the war could not continue. Admiral Buiza reported that the fleet’s crews had decided to leave Spanish waters if peace negotiations were not begun. Only General Miaja, the ‘hero of Madrid’ and now supreme commander, argued for continued resistance. Negrín maintained that there was no other course;5 for almost a year he had been attempting to secure peace by negotiation – without success. However, he made no concrete proposals about further resistance.
There now began a fortnight of complicated and obscure manoeuvring which was to end in tragedy.
It was abundantly clear to all that the republic could no longer hope to win the war alone; but there were different ways of bringing the war to an end. Knowing Franco’s intransigence, Negrín no doubt believed that only resistance could win concessions; the imminence of world war might yet change the situation and, while resistance continued, the maximum number of people could be evacuated. Col. Casado, who became his leading antagonist, believed that Negrín’s intransigence and his support by the communists were the major stumbling blocks to winning concessions from the enemy. Both men were determined to save what they could from the war; neither acted resolutely. Negrín never made clear what might be won by continued, if limited, resistance; Casado, who believed he alone could save the situation, offered the republican zone, as well as the enemy, more than he could realistically deliver and thereby allowed the chimera of an ‘honourable peace’ to transcend momentary ideas of resistance.
The drama was heightened by the population’s war-weariness and the increasing anti-communist sentiment.6 The absence of political mobilization in the rear, essential to a revolutionary war, had begun to tell. The communist party’s dominance in the army, the police, the political commissariat, led many non-communists to fear for the future. The bitter struggles of the past were not forgotten in defeat.
While concentrating their efforts on the front, the communists continued implacably to call on a half-starving civilian population for all-out resistance in the rear. ‘United we began the struggle, united we must continue until the end,’ wrote Mundo Obrero, the Madrid communist party organ. ‘Prepare for victorious resistance.’ ‘While an invader remains on Spanish soil, the people will be on a war-footing.’
Despite the hunger and cold, the will to resist was not totally dead. In the ‘tunnel’, where armaments production continued, Pedro GOMEZ, UGT turner, reflected on the situation. They were weary of the war and wanted it to end.
—But not in surrender – even less unconditional surrender. There were rumours of arms stocks in Valencia which would solve everything. We didn’t believe we could lose the war completely …
Resistance, however, could not be summoned up, as in 1936, by exhortation. There must be a purpose. ‘What is the meaning of resistance?’ asked Mundo Obrero. ‘To ensure Spain’s peace and independence,’ it answered itself. The explanation to many seemed inadequate. Would not peace come sooner without fighting to the bitter end?
—I no longer believed in the communists. Their language, everyday familiar language, was completely stereotyped; they reminded me too much of priests, the same slogans day after day, recalled Alvaro DELGADO …
In the past year he had discovered an aptitude for drawing, and, leaving his job as delivery boy in his father’s clothes shop, became a student at the school of Fine Arts, one of the few schools to remain open in the capital throughout the war. There, he was offered a scholarship to study in the USSR; his distaste for what he had seen of communism led him to turn it down.
—The ideal of a new Spain in which social justice would reign supreme – that ideal that had moved us at the beginning of the war – no longer seemed clear. After three years, everything had become muddled for moderate left-wingers like us. We were tired of the war and beginning to hope that a right-wing victory would be what the nationalists claimed – not in fact what it turned out to be …
Disaffection in the rear was translated into a growing fifth column. ‘What is to be in the future has great strength in the present,’ thought David JATO, one of the main clandestine Falange militia leaders. As soon as they saw that the repression was no longer serious, people willing to serve the fifth column turned up in the most unexpected places.
—I wouldn’t say we had people inside Casado’s general staff; I’d say the majority of the staff was willing to help us. So many doctors joined that Madrid’s health services were virtually in our hands. The recruiting centres were infiltrated by our men. Even some communist organizations like Socorro Rojo ended up in fifth column hands …
The clandestine Falange had one important piece of sabotage to its credit: the blowing up of a long section of metro tunnel which was being used as part of the underground munitions factory. But its main task was essentially defensive: the seizure of strategic objectives in the last stages of the war, the undermining of republican morale.
Every day, in soldier’s uniforms, three clandestine falangists with forged vouchers were sent by another leader to a barracks to collect bread. ‘To raise the morale of our militia we had to provide them with the one thing most of the population was lacking: food.’ The youths got the bread and made off, feeling they had accomplished a dangerous mission.
—What they didn’t know was that the corporal who handed them the bread was a member of our militias; that the captain in whose office the voucher was made out – amongst other, genuine vouchers – was working with us; that the colonel commanding the barracks was on our side. I had been to see him myself …
The Medical and Supply Corps were so full of fifth columnists that they were popularly known in Madrid as the Italian and German embassies.
The capital, reported the Quaker International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees, could not support life for more than another two or three months at the existing levels of food supplies.7 There was no heat, hot water, medicines or surgical dressings. As though to underline the differences, the nationalists bombed the capital with bread.
—It came down in sacks with propaganda wrapped round it saying: ‘This bread is being sent you by your nationalist brothers,’ recalled Alvaro DELGADO. It was beautiful, fine white bread. Some came through a broken skylight at the Fine Arts school, and when no one was around I and other students ate so much we felt sick …
His action was not imitated in the streets, where people trampled the bread with rage.
—I did so myself; we were almost dying of hunger, and yet people were shouting at each other: ‘Don’t pick it up.’ We weren’t demoralized, this was proof that our enthusiasm, our support for the cause remained alive, remembered Pablo MOYA, a UGT turner.
*
From before Negrín’s return,
Col. Casado had had contacts with nationalist agents in Madrid. On 20 February, four days after the army commanders’ meeting with the prime minister, an officer under his command appeared as a nationalist agent to give him a statement by Franco offering certain concessions to republican army men who voluntarily laid down their arms. If they had committed no crimes they would be ‘generously’ treated – all the more so if in the last moments of the war they served The Cause of Spain.8
Shortly afterwards, Col. Casado called on Régulo MARTINEZ, left republican leader in Madrid, to travel to Paris to ask Azaña to solicit French government intervention to end the war. MARTINEZ agreed. Casado was a personal friend, an authentic democrat and republican who had sworn loyalty to the republic as an army officer and abided by his oath.
—He had had several confrontations with the communists already, because of their habit of calling black white one day and white black the next, because of their servile discipline to party orders. We knew the war was lost; but we republicans feared there would be an armed confrontation between the communists and anarchists before anything was resolved. The former were obsessed with the idea of continuing the war until the future European conflict began. Thanks to Soviet aid, they had been able to infiltrate so many of their members into important army posts that we feared them capable of blowing up Madrid rather than surrendering …
Casado wanted to prevent the fight between those who knew the war was lost – anarchists, socialists and republicans – and the communists, MARTINEZ thought. He agreed; it was useless to sacrifice more lives in a struggle so patently lost. The people were war-weary, and while there was willingness up to a point, the material means of continuing the struggle were missing.
He set off for Paris with another party member. By the time he got there, at the end of February, France and Britain had recognized the Franco regime, and Azaña had resigned as president of the republic. They were unable to see him. They talked instead to Martínez Barrio who, as speaker of the Cortes, had succeeded him; he said nothing could be done, and he would inform Casado of this.9
The recognition and resignation were further blows to the sinking republic. As far as regular army officers were concerned, what affected them most was, it appeared, the refusal of General Vicente Rojo, architect of the defence of Madrid, the capture of Teruel, the battle of the Ebro, to return to the republican zone. His prestige among regular officers was so great, thought Col. Jaime SOLERA, chief-of-staff of one of the four armies, that they would all have obeyed him.
—Knowing Casado, I was convinced that had Rojo been there he would not have risen. Rojo should have returned. In his absence, Casado felt free to act …
Col. Solera believed that surrender was the only solution. His army commander had returned from the meeting with Negrín fully persuaded that peace negotiations were about to begin, and that preparations for surrendering the army must be undertaken.
In this atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion, a curious inertia affected all organizations. Tagüeña, the brilliant young communist corps commander who had returned from France, drew up plans to seize strategic objectives in Madrid and arrest Casado. Cipriano Mera, the anarchist corps commander on the Madrid front, had earlier proposed kidnapping Negrín and forcing him to open peace negotiations. Both plans were quashed by their respective organizations. The libertarians, under instructions from their leaders in France, were preparing to end the war and save as many of their militants as possible. The communists, possibly underestimating Casado’s threat – three of the four army corps in his command were led by communist officers and could be expected to quell any coup – prepared no pre-emptive move. Popular Front unity must be made to prevail. Communist militants believed the war could and must be continued; the Comintern meanwhile was preparing to liquidate it.10
Looking out over the war-torn city from a balcony of the JSU headquarters, Ricardo SALER feared for the first time that the war might be lost. A pre-war communist youth member, now on the JSU executive, he had just received the assignment of going to Valencia to organize student resistance if Madrid fell to the threatening Franquista offensive. Beside him stood his comrade, Azcárate.
—He turned to me and said, very emphatically: ‘There’s no problem if we lose, it will be for only a very short time.’ And then he went on to talk of the need to resist for as long as possible because a world war was inevitably going to break out soon; the longer we held out the more chance there was of linking our cause to the world war. I think at that moment we reflected the thinking of the communist party leadership, and perhaps even of Negrín …
Those who ‘didn’t believe in miracles’, like Sócrates GOMEZ, former socialist youth member of the JSU, were convinced that Negrín lacked any policy whatsoever. Symptomatic of this, in GOMEZ’S view, was that government ministers in the capital could not locate the prime minister when they needed him. He had come to Madrid, called for resistance, and left immediately for Alicante. When they were able to see him, it was usually hurriedly and without prior planning.
—All this added to the confusion. Moreover, while calling for resistance, Negrín had given instructions for the delivery of passports to be speeded up for anyone who wanted to leave, recalled GOMEZ, whose father was civil governor of Madrid …
Negrín promoted Casado to general, and informed him he was to become chief of the central general staff, which would have removed him from Madrid. Two days later, on 3 March, the ministry of defence Official Gazette published the promotions of a series of communist officers to the commands, amongst others, of Alicante and Cartagena, ports which would be vital in any evacuation. Negrín’s plans to resist were made manifest by his reliance on his only possible allies, even if both he and they were in fact uncertain about the possible extent of resistance. It was rumoured that even more sweeping changes were imminent.
In Madrid, as Eduardo de GUZMAN, libertarian journalist, recalled, the other parties and organizations reacted out of fear of what might happen next.
—Especially after what had happened in May 1937, in Barcelona. If the communists succeeded in monopolizing power, it could only be at the expense of all other organizations. It was impossible to know whether the communists were manipulating Negrín or whether Negrín was manipulating them. Our reaction was designed as a purely defensive movement against a communist take-over …
—With absolutely no intention of seeking revenge against them, assured Sócrates GOMEZ. But if the communist party succeeded in taking over all key commands, the results would be incalculable. Negrín’s appointments speeded up our next move …
For two and a half years, the over-riding aim of winning the war had, in the last resort, prevented the break-up of the republican camp. Now, with only defeat ahead, political hostilities broke into a final, confused, bloody conflict. It began in Cartagena where, on the night of 4 March, units of the important republican naval base revolted against the appointment of the new communist commandant; soon the fifth column also rose. Threatened by a shore battery (commanded by an officer who turned out to be a nationalist) and attacked by enemy bombers, the fleet the next morning put out to sea and internment by the French in Bizerta. At one blow, the republic lost the means of evacuating significant numbers of people.
That evening (5 March) in Madrid, Casado formed a national defence council in which socialists, anarchists and republicans were represented. Its leading figure was Julián Besteiro, leader of the socialist right-wing, who had become increasingly anti-communist during the war, which he had spent in the capital as a municipal councillor. The radio broadcast a manifesto. ‘As revolutionaries, as proletarians, as Spaniards, as anti-fascists, we cannot any longer endure the imprudence and lack of planning of Dr Negrín’s government … We cannot tolerate a situation in which bitter resistance is demanded of the population, while preparations for comfortable and profitable flight continue … We who oppose the policy of resistance give our assurance that not one of those who ought to remain in Spain shall leave
until all who wish to leave have done so.’
—Our aim was to take over from a government which, to all intents and purposes, was inoperative, in order to save the lives of combatants and political militants in a situation where the war was lost and there was very little chance of negotiations succeeding, explained Sócrates GOMEZ, who became a junior member of the new council …
In Elda, near Alicante, where Negrín had established his headquarters since his return three weeks earlier, the cabinet was discussing the text of a radio speech the prime minister was to make to the republican zone the following day. Telephone calls from Negrín and other ministers to Casado produced no results. The following dawn, the government decided to leave Spain; but while waiting for his plane, Negrín consulted communist leaders. A communist staff officer, Ricardo RODRIGUEZ, was present.
—There was a great deal of confusion; we all more or less attended the meetings. Togliatti (the Comintern’s main representative in Spain) advised Negrín to send a message to Casado’s defence council saying that, while the government deplored the disastrous situation, it could and should be discussed in order to avoid a bloody conflict, and to reach a settlement with the common enemy …
Negrín drew up a message to this effect, and RODRIGUEZ was sent to find a telex to transmit it to Madrid. He was ordered to wait only a certain time for an answer. Thereafter, he was to return with the copy. No reply came. ‘I went back and handed over the telex carbon to Alvarez del Vayo, the foreign minister.’11
Fearing that the Casado forces might arrest them, the government flew off to France and North Africa; the newly appointed communist commandant of Alicante, only 40 km away, had already been detained. That evening, the communist party’s central committee held its last meeting in Spain for thirty-eight years. Togliatti said that responsibility for ending the war would have to be left to the Casado council which was the only real authority. To wage an armed struggle against it would be to start a civil war within the civil war. The communists, champions of unity, could not engage in such a struggle, he asserted. Was he unaware that since 6 a.m. that day, communist-led forces in Madrid had been successfully attacking Casado? He made no mention of it.12 That evening and the next day, the communist leaders flew out of the country. Togliatti, Checa, Hernández and Claudín remained behind to organize the evacuation of as many communist militants as possible.
Blood of Spain Page 75