by Hugh Thomas
Also on 18 July, General Varela (freed from gaol in which he had languished since April) and General López Pinto raised Cádiz, although, as in Seville, victory was not immediate.2 In Córdoba, Colonel Ciriaco Cascajo, the military governor, battered his civil colleague, Rodríguez de León, a pessimist, into submission by artillery, even though urgent voices on the telephone from the ministry of the interior in Madrid promised relief within hours. Algeciras and Jerez were won for the rebellion without a fight. In Granada, there was a stalemate: General Miguel Campins, the military governor, lectured his officers on the evil of the rising in Morocco. In the streets, supporters of the Popular Front, with the anarchists, carried on daylong demonstrations. The conspirators in the city held their hand, although they listened with enthusiasm to the broadcast of Queipo de Llano. At Jaén, where there was no garrison, the local falangists and requetés waited for a signal, but nothing happened, since the colonel in charge of the civil guard, Pablo Iglesias, remained loyal to the republic. Huelva, near the Portuguese frontier, although isolated from the rest of republican Spain by the rising at Seville, stayed in the hands of the Popular Front. General Pozas, from the ministry of the interior in Madrid, telephoned an order to the commander of the civil guard to send a column against Queipo in Seville. Major Gregorio de Haro, therefore, set off with a small force of civil guards, but, on arrival at that city, he rallied to Queipo’s side.
In Málaga, General Paxtot dithered, and eventually gave up the attempt to declare a state of war when threatened by telephone with bombardment by the fleet. The assault guards remained loyal and fought a company of soldiers which was trying to take the main buildings. The workers attacked from the rear. Many conscript infantrymen deserted and the people obtained arms from the barracks. The company commander was lynched by the crowd.1 But this was the last success of the government during the day. In the evening, the last republican resistance in Africa, at Tetuán, came to an end.2 The fighting in Africa had been bitter and left a mark on the army, as well as on the civilian population. Thus the general in overall charge, Gómez Morato, was in gaol, and the commander in the east, Romerales, shot. (The commander of the western zone, General Capaz, an outstandingly able officer who had conquered Xauen in 1926, disliked the rebellion and so had gone on leave, to Madrid.3) In the Foreign Legion, the inspector, Colonel Luis Molina, was dismissed, along with the commander of the first bandera, Colonel Blanco Novo, while the commander of the second bandera, Yagüe, had taken over general command of the entire corps. Among the five commanders of native troops, three (Colonels Asensio, Barrón and Delgado Serrano) rallied to the rising; the fourth, Colonel Caballero, was shot in Ceuta for refusing to join the rebellion, and the fifth, Colonel Romero Bassart, who had opposed the rising at Larache, fled to French Morocco, and thence to the mainland.4
The government in Madrid discovered its defeats by telephone, as in Morocco; to an instruction, a rebel commander would answer insultingly, crying ‘¡Arriba España!’ in place of the civil, or the military, governor. News travelled in this way also to the unions and political parties, who would telephone to their comrades in other towns, and discover enemies in control, say, of the railway station or the post office. André Malraux vividly described these exchanges in his brilliant novel L’Espoir: ‘Allô Avila?’ said Madrid. ‘Comment ça va chez vous? Ici la gare.’ ‘Va te faire voir, salaud! Vive le Christ-Roi!’ ‘A bientôt. Salud!’1 Throughout the day, Casares continued to act as if he were in command of the country, and as if there were no need for emergency measures. He consulted with generals whom he knew to be loyal to the republic, though they and their juniors, particularly those of the radical officers’ organization, UMRA, were establishing contact with working-class militia leaders. A delegation of taxi-drivers called on the Premier to offer him 3,000 taxis to fight the rebels. The UGT possessed a few rifles, already distributed to the communist-socialist youth, who were now beginning to abandon their jobs, and act as political police in the streets. But those rifles did not seem enough to resist the garrisons of Madrid and their falangist supporters, though as yet there was no sign of any movement in any right-wing quarter. Special editions of Claridad and El Socialista demanded ‘Arms for the People’ in banner headlines.2 ‘Arms, arms, arms’ was cried all day by masses of young socialists and communists in the streets around the casa del pueblo, the ministry of war, and in the Puerta del Sol. But Casares still refused. He dispatched General Núñez de Prado, director of aviation, to Saragossa to attempt to reach a compromise with General Cabanellas, a freemason, in command of the 5th Division there. ‘A forthcoming change of ministry will satisfy all the generals’ demands and obviate the necessity for a rising’, Núñez de Prado told Cabanellas. Nevertheless, he was arrested (and was later shot, together with his ADC).
Back in Madrid, the cabinet sat in peripatetic session in the ministry of war, in the Royal Palace, and, later still, in the ministry of the interior, in the Puerta del Sol. In the evening, Madrid Radio announced that the rising had everywhere been crushed, even at Seville. This was the first official admission that anything untoward was taking place on the mainland of Spain. The news was followed by a series of decrees dismissing Generals Franco, Cabanellas, Queipo de Llano, and González de Lara from their commands. Thereafter, the wirelesses of the capital played strident music, partly to soothe, partly to exhort, the expectant crowds.1 From time to time, the loudspeakers would announce: ‘People of Spain, keep tuned in! Do not turn your radios off. Rumours are being circulated by traitors. Keep tuned in.’2 But Casares, with Azaña supporting him, continued to refuse to hand out arms to the masses. Feared as a revolutionary by the Right, the Prime Minister became hated by the Left as a secret reactionary. His nickname, ‘Civilón’ (civilian), after a famous bull who refused to defend himself, was everywhere repeated scornfully. Liberal Spain was in its death agony. About 5,000 rifles, however, were handed out by Lieutenant-Colonel Rodrigo Gil, chief of the artillery park, a socialist sympathizer, to the UGT.3 As for the conspirators of Madrid, they continued indecisive.
During 18 July, the government had done what it could to reply to the successful revolution in Morocco. They even dispatched bombers to attack Tetuán and Ceuta. But this caused the Sultan and Grand Vizier to accept more easily the change foisted upon them by Colonel Beigbeder. Nor did the aircraft inflict any military damage. Casares Quiroga also sent three destroyers to Melilla from Cartagena on the morning of 18 July. On their way, the officers heard Franco’s broadcast from Las Palmas. They resolved to join the nationalists. On nearing Melilla, they received orders to bombard the town. The captain of the destroyer Sánchez Barcaíztegui described the aims of the rising to his men, and then demanded their support for it. He was greeted by a profound silence, which was interrupted by a single cry: ‘To Cartagena!’ This cry was taken up by the whole ship’s company. The officers were overpowered, and the Sánchez Barcaíztegui raised its anchor to break out of the rebel town into the open sea. They bombarded both Melilla and Ceuta before leaving the North African coast. Similar scenes occurred on the Almirante Valdés. The ships each formed a committee of their crews to act in place of the officers. The position of the Churruca, the third destroyer, remained for a time equivocal.
On nearly all the main ships of the Spanish navy, the officers were busy refusing the orders of the minister of marine, Giral; he dismissed them by telegraph, and gave authority to the chief engineers, giving instructions for the distribution of arms. Hence Giral’s reputation as the assassin of the naval officers; but ‘he was merely following etiquette in a situation without precedent’.1 His action did not, however, make the navy efficient as well as loyal. On the contrary, the revolution in the fleet enfeebled it.
The constitutional means of opposing the rising thus met with failure. It did so inevitably, since so much of the forces of law and order—the army and the civil guard—were with the rebels, who claimed to represent order themselves, if not law. The only power capable of resisting the rebels was tha
t of the trade unions and left-wing parties. Yet for the government to use that would mean that it accepted revolution. It is not surprising that Casares shrank from this step. But at the stage that Spanish affairs had reached on the night of 18 July, such a step was also inevitable. Already in the towns where risings had taken place, in Morocco and Andalusia, the opposition to them had been that of the revolutionary parties of the Left. Indeed, in many small towns the rebellion was anticipated by revolution for when the news of the rising in Morocco and Seville reached places with no military garrisons, the reaction of the Left was certainly not to wait until they were attacked.
So now there was to spread over Spain a cloud of violence, in which the quarrels of several generations would find outlet. With communications difficult or non-existent, each town would find itself on its own, acting out its own drama, apparently in a vacuum. There were soon to be not two Spains, but two thousand. The geographical differences within Spain were a prime factor in the social disintegration of the nation. Regional feeling had sown the wind, and now reaped the whirlwind. Sovereign power ceased to exist and, in its absence, individuals, as well as towns, acted without constraint, as if they were outside society and history. Within a month, thousands of people2 would have perished arbitrarily and without trial. Bishops would be murdered and churches profaned. Educated christians would spend their evenings murdering illiterate peasants and professional men of sensitivity. These events inevitably caused such hatreds that, when order was eventually established, it was geared solely for the rationalization of hatred known as war.
The terrible prospects were plainly seen by Casares Quiroga, as he feverishly paced his office, recently regilded, in the Paseo de la Castellana. His optimism had proved vain. Exhausted, he decided to resign. The President, Azaña, also had only too clear a vision of the disasters which might lie ahead. He therefore called upon Martínez Barrio, the arch-priest of compromise, to form a government to treat with the rebels. The men whom he asked to serve as ministers in the middle of the night of 18–19 July were all moderates. They included the middle-of-the-road barrister, Sánchez Román, leader of the small National Republican party, and two of his friends. Sánchez Román had not signed the Popular Front Pact before the February elections; and he represented the best hope for the political compromise which he himself vigorously supported. Martínez Barrio hoped that his name would persuade the rebels to abandon their plans. Instead, it was greeted merely by the crowds which heard it from Madrid Radio in the streets with cries of ‘Treason’. Another name, that of Justino de Azcárate as foreign minister, a nephew of the great professor of the Free Institute, was more popular. But Azcárate was in León, not Madrid—and was soon to be a prisoner of the rebels. Thousands of workers pushed their way from the casa del pueblo down to the Puerta del Sol. ‘Sol, Sol, Sol’, cried the crowd as they went and then again: ‘Arms, arms, arms’.
The attempt at compromise was made. General Miaja, whom Martínez Barrio had named as his minister of war, and who was known as an easy-going republican officer, telephoned Mola at Pamplona. It must have been difficult to get through, since Mola spent most of the night on the telephone, trying to ensure that his rebel officers were going through with his appointed plan. After an exchange of courtesies, Mola bluntly announced that he was about to rise against the government. Azaña then telephoned to Miguel Maura, then on holiday in La Granja, to ask him to take part in a new coalition. Maura refused and said that it was too late. Largo Caballero anyway would have refused to countenance a government of the centre. He promised that, if such a government were formed, he would ‘unleash the social revolution’.1 A little later, Martínez Barrio himself telephoned Mola to offer him a post in the government. ‘The Popular Front cannot keep order,’ answered Mola. ‘You have your followers and I have mine. If we were to seal a bargain, we should be betraying our ideals and our men. We should both deserve to be lynched.’2 After further argument, Mola said, ‘What you propose is now impossible. Pamplona is full of Carlists. From my balcony, I can only see red berets. Everyone is ready for the battle. If I tell these men now that I have made an arrangement with you, the first head to roll would be mine. The same would happen to you in Madrid. Neither of us can control our masses.’ The telephones were put down and the war began. Mola thus bears responsibility for the course of events. But then, how could he have drawn back at this stage? If he had, would not the Carlists have brushed him aside? Mola, it seems, realized that there would be a civil war if the coup failed; so did General Franco. The vigour with which he spoke was the energy of an intellectual who was now at the eye of a storm which he had himself aroused. A similar telephoned appeal by Martínez Barrio to General Cabanellas at Saragossa also failed.3
So, towards dawn at the end of this nuit blanche of 18–19 July, new consultations were held between Azaña, Martínez Barrio, and the socialist leaders, Prieto and Largo Caballero. The loudspeakers of Union Radio soon announced that a new government was being formed which would accept ‘Fascism’s declaration of war upon the Spanish people’. This administration was, however, not new at all. Save that the minister of marine, Professor José Giral, became Prime Minister, General Pozas, the commander of the civil guard, became minister of the interior, and General Castelló, military governor of Badajoz, became minister of war, the cabinet of 19 July was the same as it had been before 18 July. But the socialists, communists, and even anarchists declared themselves behind the ministers, and formally sank their differences.1 Apparently it was Giral who, while Casares and Martínez Barrio were still reluctant, had realized that the only solution was to hand over arms to the unions.2 The new government anyway took the irrevocable step from which Casares, constitutional to the end, had shrunk. The people would be armed! Miaja, commander of the 1st Brigade (and, so briefly, minister of war), was reluctant to carry out this order, but the government insisted.3 As the sun was rising on 19 July, lorries carrying rifles were driven fast along the streets of Madrid from the ministry of war to the headquarters of the UGT and the CNT, where they were received by the waiting masses (particularly an armed section of the socialist youth with lorries and motor bicycles, known as La Motorizada) with rapturous excitement. But there was a serious problem. 65,000 rifles were handed out, but of these only 5,000 had bolts. The remaining 60,000 bolts were in the Montaña barracks. The ministry of war ordered the colonel in command, Colonel Serra, to hand them over. His refusal to do so marked the beginning of the rising in Madrid.