The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  In Barcelona, the entry of the CEDA into the government caused Companys to proclaim ‘the Catalan state’ as part of a ‘federal Spanish republic’. Once again, Companys was stimulated to precipitate language by his counsellor of the interior, Dencás. He was also menaced on the Left by the rabassaires, the Catalan vineyard tenants, who threatened physically to take over the land which they held to be theirs under the now-suspended Ley de Cultivos. The burden of Company’s appeal to Catalonia was an attack on the fascism of the CEDA, despite the fascist colouring of Dencás’s ideas:

  The monarchical and fascist powers which have been for some time attempting to betray the republic have attained their object [announced Companys]. In this solemn hour, in the name of the people and of parliament, the government over which I preside assumes all the functions of power in Catalonia, proclaims the Catalan state in the federal Spanish republic, and, strengthening its relations with those who direct this general protest against fascism, invites them to establish the provisional government of the republic in Catalonia.

  This was at once a proclamation of a new relationship between Catalonia and the rest of Spain and also an encouragement to revolutionaries in Madrid to declare themselves the government, if necessary establishing themselves in Barcelona. A wave of nationalism, and hostility to all things Castilian, had been sweeping through Catalonia that summer, which Companys, who was weak, found impossible to withstand. Dencás, meantime, would probably have liked to have declared outright independence.

  This Catalan rebellion was, however, crushed nearly as quickly as the general strike had been in Madrid. There was some fighting between Dencás’s escamots and the Mozos de Escuadra (the security force established in Catalonia under the monarchy). Forty people were killed. The anarchists held aloof, saying that they would not collaborate with the socialists unless they abandoned their collaboration with the Esquerra. Dencás promptly arrested Durruti and other anarchist leaders. Companys sent for General Batet, commander of the division quartered in Barcelona, and asked him to transfer his allegiance to the new federal régime. Batet, himself a Catalan, however, placed himself at the orders of the central government, and declared a state of war. Acting deliberately slowly in order to save lives, and to allow escapes, he soon arrested Companys and his government—with the exception of Dencás, who fled down a sewer to freedom, and, ultimately, to Rome. All resistance was overcome in the rest of Barcelona, and Companys broadcast a dignified appeal to his followers to lay down their arms. Also held was Azaña, who was in Barcelona for the funeral of his finance minister Jaime Carner.

  The ‘October revolution’ thus failed in Madrid and in Barcelona. There were other outbursts, but, with one exception, these were also crushed. The exception was Asturias.1 Here the rising—for such it undoubtedly was—was directed by the tough, well-paid miners of the region. Their action was politically, rather than economically, inspired. While, elsewhere in Spain, the working-class parties had been divided about the revolution, in Asturias, anarchists, socialists, communists, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Alliance, the UGT, and the Asturian regional CNT committee cooperated under the rallying cry UHP! (¡Uníos, Hermanos Proletarios!).2 The ground for this collaboration had been prepared by a famous article the previous February by a young leader of the CNT, Valeriano Orobón Fernández, in the journal La Tierra. He had argued that the danger of fascism in Spain was such that a new working-class alliance was necessary. Only Asturias followed his advice.3 The previously moderate socialist miners took up the cause of revolutionary violence.

  3. The revolution in Asturias, 1934

  The rising in Asturias was carefully prepared throughout the province, with its headquarters in Oviedo, the capital, and important actions organized in the nearby mining towns of Mieres and Sama. The signal as elsewhere was the entry of the CEDA into the government. But the miners were well organized against this eventuality. They had supplies of arms. They had dynamite. They already possessed joint workers’ committees to direct their activities. Their reaction to the ‘fascist’ conquest of power in Madrid was to launch, so far as was possible, a full-scale working-class revolution.

  ‘Towards half past eight in the morning [of 5 October],’ recorded Manuel Grossi, ‘a crowd of about two thousand persons gathered before the town hall of Mieres, already occupied by the rebel workers [obreros insurrectos]. I proclaimed, from one of the balconies, the socialist republic. The enthusiasm was indescribable. Vivas for the revolution were followed by others for the socialist republic. When I managed to make myself heard again, I gave instructions to continue the action …’1

  This signified attacks on the civil guard posts, churches, convents, town halls, and other buildings in the villages and towns of the province. Asturias had a strong, well-organized and disciplined labour force; the 26,000 miners were among the best-paid workers in Spain, but unemployment had been high since 1931. The accident rate was also high and safety was less assured than elsewhere in Europe. The UGT dominated the mines, but collaborated with the CNT. Many miners were young, and there had been innumerable strikes there since the coming of the republic. The communists were also well established in Asturias (particularly in Mieres) and their leadership competent.

  Within three days of the start of the revolution, the centre of Asturias was in the hands of the miners. Each town or village which had been captured was controlled by a revolutionary committee which made itself responsible for the feeding and the security of the inhabitants. A radio station installed at Turón maintained morale. ‘Comrades,’ announced the revolutionary committee of Grado, ‘we are creating a new society … it is not surprising that the world which we are forging costs blood, grief and tears; everything on earth is fecund, soldiers of the Ideal! Put up your rifles! Women, eat little, only what is necessary! Long live the social revolution!’2 The arms factories at Trubia and La Vega (Oviedo) were taken over by a committee of their workers and put to work night and day. Elsewhere, factories and mines were deserted. Recruitment offices demanded the services of all workers between the ages of eighteen and forty for the ‘Red Army’. Thirty thousand workers had been mobilized for battle within ten days.3 The extent of cooperation between the parties surprised everyone. Even the anarchists recognized ‘the need for temporary dictatorship’, and the limitation of this activity to a group of pueblos prevented questions of state organization from dividing them from the communists. The communists in some pueblos showed themselves keener on establishing their own dictatorship than sending men to ‘the front’. But, as a rule, the cry ¡UHP! was in no way misleading.

  While the miners of Asturias had thus successfully established a revolutionary soviet throughout their province, they were also engaged in fighting. This particularly occurred in Oviedo and in the mining valleys. The 1,500 regular troops based in Asturias and elsewhere on the north coast were too few in number to be able to do more than hold out in their garrison in Oviedo. In the meantime, there was pillage and unprovoked violence on the part of the revolutionaries. The local committees set out to maintain discipline, and there were instances of workers saving the lives of menaced members of the bourgeoisie. There were, however, a number of outrages. Several churches and convents were burned. The bishop’s palace, and much of the university at Oviedo, including the library, were destroyed during the attempts to capture the Pelayo barracks, which were held by the civil guard. A few businessmen and about twelve priests were shot, especially in Turón. At Sama, thirty civil guards and assault guards sustained a siege of a day and a half. When they surrendered, some were shot. These atrocities made matters more difficult for the two hitherto moderate socialist leaders, Ramón González Peña and Belarmino Tomás, who, somewhat to their own surprise, found themselves at the head of this revolution.

  The government was now faced by a civil war. Indeed, the committee in control at Mieres were contemplating a march on Madrid. Though they did not know that, Lerroux and his ministers now took several harsh decisions. First, they sent for Gener
als Goded and Francisco Franco to act as joint chiefs of staff to direct the suppression of the rebellion.1 Secondly, they accepted the advice of these two officers when they recommended the dispatch of elements of the Regulares and of the Foreign Legion to reduce the miners. Goded, as has been seen, had been chief of staff for some months at the beginning of the republic but had been dismissed by Azaña.

  Francisco Franco Bahamonde was forty-two when he reached his new post under Lerroux. Born in 1892 at the naval base at El Ferrol in Galicia, the son of a dissolute naval paymaster and descendant of naval administrators on both sides of his conventional family, he had been intended for the sea. But there was no room in the naval Cadet School. The naval disaster in the Spanish American War of 1898 was responsible. Instead, Franco went, in 1907, to the Infantry Academy at Toledo. He was posted to Morocco in 1912, where he became, in quick succession, the youngest captain, major, colonel and general, gaining the last rank after the victorious end to the war. In 1916, he had been severely wounded in the stomach and returned to Spain for four years’ garrison-duty at Oviedo. He was second-in-command of the Foreign Legion at its inception in 1920, commanded it from 1923 to 1927 and, in particular, led the landing-party at Alhucemas Bay (under Sanjurjo) in 1925 which brought victory. He had criticized Primo de Rivera to his face, when the dictator seemed to be trying to prepare the army to leave Morocco, at a dinner in 1924. Indeed, he and some other africanistas even planned, in that year, to arrest Primo and his staff out of outrage against the idea of abandonment of the territory. Franco was dedicated to his profession—he never drank, never went out with women, and, at that time (as his pious biographers make haste to interject), never seemed religious. His puritanism may be attributed to the indiscretions of his father, the naval paymaster, who separated from his wife in 1907 and lived with a mistress in Madrid thenceforth until his death in 1942, aged eighty-seven; and to the piety of his mother, who died in 1933 on the first step of a pilgrimage to Rome. Franco’s childhood was, no doubt, an unhappy time.

  Franco always was known as a cruel disciplinarian. He had a reputation for bravery and for good luck under fire: he rode white horses in battle. The efficiency of the Foreign Legion owed much to him. He gained his first experience of fighting revolutions during the general strike of 1917, when he was first in Oviedo. He married—after delays due to campaigning—a girl of good Asturian family, Carmen Polo. Franco was short in height and, even in early middle life, had developed a stomach. His voice had also acquired a high-pitched tone which caused him to give to military commands the note of a prayer. To a British politician, he seemed like ‘a doctor with a big family practice and a good bedside manner’, into whose ‘cotton-wool entanglements’ of ‘amazing complacency’ it was impossible to penetrate.1 He had a great reputation as ‘the brilliant young general’, but he refused to declare himself on any side in politics, though he had admired the idea of Maura’s ‘revolution from above’ and in the end liked Primo de Rivera. Even when the republic abolished promotions gained by merit, and so relegated him from near the top of the list of brigadier-generals to the bottom, he had taken the blow without complaint. When, in 1931, it was published in ABC that the new government intended to appoint him high commissioner of Morocco, Franco wrote that he would refuse such a post since to accept would reveal ‘a prejudice in favour of the régime recently installed, and a lukewarm loyalty to those who only yesterday epitomized the nation’.2 He was shy, quiet and patient, but also ruthless, ambitious and determined: ‘a less straightforward man I never met’, said an American journalist who talked to him in 1936.3 When monarchist conspirators were asked, ‘Is Franco with you?’, they were unable to give a clear answer. He had refused to support General Sanjurjo in the pronunciamiento of 1932. But he had promised Sanjurjo not to take action against him and he disliked Azaña’s reforms, particularly the closure of the new Military Academy at Saragossa, of which he had been the first commandant and to whose courses he had devoted much care (on the inspiration of Germany, which he had visited in 1928). Republicans knew, from addresses that he had given when at Saragossa, that he was a friend of authoritarian rule. They knew too that he had, for a long time, been interested in politics. As early as 1926, he had been demanding books on political theory to be sent to his headquarters.4 But the general’s brother, Ramón, a noted pilot who had been the first man to fly the south Atlantic, was a republican, even a revolutionary: it had been he who in 1930 had dropped republican pamphlets over the Royal Palace during the abortive republican rising.

  The government called not only on General Franco, who knew Asturias, to direct the battle against the miners, but also upon the Foreign Legion and Moroccan troops, because they plainly doubted whether other troops would be successful. The minister of war, the radical Diego Hidalgo, later explained that he was appalled at the alternative prospect of seeing the young conscripts from the peninsula dying in Asturias because of their inexperience. They would be fighting against past-masters of dynamiting and of the technique of the ambush. ‘I decided’, he wrote, ‘that it was necessary to call on the units which Spain maintains for its defence, whose métier is to fight and die in the accomplishment of their duty.’1 Within a few hours of General Franco’s arrival at the ministry of war, units of the Legion were indeed dispatched under Colonel Yagüe to assist the regular garrisons in the north. Another column under a liberal general, López Ochoa, who had led the military side to the republican conspiracy in 1930, fought its way to reinforce the beleaguered garrison in the centre of Oviedo.

  The Foreign Legion and the Regulares were successful. Accompanied by aircraft, they swiftly relieved Oviedo though not before the sanctuary of the ‘chaste King’ Alfonso, the beautiful ‘cámara santa’, was nearly destroyed by the miners. Gijón fell on 10 October. In these towns, the conquerors gave themselves over to repression. After fifteen days of war and revolution, only the communists wanted to fight on in the other towns. González Peña resigned his directorship of the revolution. The Legion captured several of the towns house by house. Colonel Yagüe, in command of the Legion, encouraged the exemplary use of brutality in the repression. In the end, the rebels at Sama finally surrendered. Belarmino Tomás, the socialist leader who had been at the centre of all the fighting, spoke in the following terms to a crowd of miners gathered in the main square:

  Comrades, red soldiers! Here before you, certain that we have fulfilled the mandate with which you have entrusted us, we come to speak of the melancholy plight into which our glorious insurrectionary movement has fallen. We have to describe our peace conversations with the general of the enemy army. We have been defeated only for the time being. All that we can say is that, in the rest of the provinces of Spain, the workers did not do their duty and support us. Because of this failure, the government has been able to conquer the insurrection in Asturias. Furthermore, though we have rifles, machine-guns, and cannons, we have no more ammunition. All we can do, therefore, is to arrange peace. But this does not mean that we abandon the class struggle. Our surrender today is simply a halt on the route, where we make good our mistakes, preparing for our next battle which must end in the final victory of the exploited …1

  There followed a severe retribution under the direction of a brutal major of police, Lisardo Doval, known for his ruthlessness. Some 1,500–2,000 persons were believed killed, and nearly 3,000 wounded. Of the dead, about 320 were civil guards, soldiers, assault guards and carabineers. The remainder, it must be presumed, were workers. Certainly many deaths occurred after the end of the fighting, at the time when the Legion were ‘driving home’ their victory.2 Several thousand, perhaps as many as 30,000, political prisoners were also made in Spain during October and November 1934 (though the number may have been half that). Of these, the majority were in Asturias. The casas del pueblo of the region were turned into extra prisons, and those held within were subjected to every kind of indignity, including torture.3 Almost 2,000 people died in this little revolution, among them 200 in the repression,
230–260 in the army or forces of order, and about 33 priests. A journalist, Luis de Sirval, who ventured to point out these terrible things, was himself arrested and murdered in prison by three officers of the Legion. In Madrid, Generals Franco and Goded were regarded as the saviours of the nation, while the right-wing press gave fearful information about the raping of nuns and gouging out of priests’ eyes. Otherwise, censorship on Asturias was complete. In the countryside, landlords celebrated by abandoning any willingness to collaborate with agrarian reform, evictions were carried on apace and those socialists who had avoided imprisonment received short shrift in the pursuit of employment. Further resentments were, therefore, created.

  10

  After the revolution of October 1934 and the manner in which it had been quelled, it would have required a superhuman effort to avoid the culminating disaster of civil war. But no such effort was forthcoming. Most socialist leaders were in prison. They were accompanied there by leaders of the Catalan government, by Azaña, and by several other left-wing politicians. Also in gaol were many anarchists, even though they had played little part in the rising, save in Asturias. The arrest of Azaña, attributable to panic, was followed by his being held in gaol for some months—an indignity for which there was no justification. In these conditions, the rising in Asturias assumed an epic significance in the minds of the Spanish Left. Some, echoing the last words of Belarmino Tomás in the doomed gathering in Sama, prophesied that October 1934 would be to Spain what 1905 had been to Russia. Largo Caballero, who remained in gaol till December 1935, passed his captivity in reading, for the first time, the works of Marx and Lenin. Now approaching seventy, the imagination of this long respected and moderate socialist leader became dominated by revolutionary visions. Many others found their time in gaol ‘a veritable school of revolution’.1 Meantime, in Paris, Romain Rolland announced that the world had seen nothing so beautiful since the Paris Commune. The brutality of the proscription in Asturias caused people to forget that even Azaña would have put down the revolution; and news of the repression came through the reports of a Cortes commission and a British parliamentary delegation. Meantime, Largo’s mixed arbitration boards collapsed in many places, the building and metallurgical workers were driven back to a forty-eight-hour week and many were dismissed for having taken part in political strikes before October 1934. Employers cut wages wherever they could. CEDA deputies complained, but their voices were lost. On the other hand, no lands taken over by the Institute of Agrarian Reform were given back to their owners. Still, from now on a ‘revolutionary mentality of the Right and of the Left’ clearly dominated all parties.1