by Hugh Thomas
There was a similar stalemate at Valencia. In mid-morning, all was ready for the rising, with several thousand civilian supporters assured, when bad news came in from Barcelona. General González Carrasco, who had arrived from Madrid to lead the rebels, vacillated, to the fury of Major Barba, the chief organizer of the conspiracy there (he was national chief of the UME). The military governor, General Martínez Monje, who had been trying for some months to play both sides against each other, similarly wavered. The civil governor resigned. The CEDA’s leader in the town, the unstable vice-president of the movement, Luis Lucia, who had eddied from regionalism to insurrectionism, condemned the rising, and thus prevented the mass middle-class rally for the rising which so helped it elsewhere.1 The Valencian workers, led by the anarchist dockers, were massing in the streets. The college of St Thomas of Villanueva and the church of the Two St Johns were pillaged and set on fire. The generals continued to dither, while left-wing officers of the civil guard, led by Captain Manuel Uribarri, began to distribute arms. The matter was thus left unsettled by the time night fell.2 This uncertainty was reflected down the coast at Alicante, Almería and Gandia. But there was no doubt about the Popular Front success farther south and throughout all those parts of Andalusia where there had been no rising on 18 July. By nightfall, this poverty-stricken part of Spain was aflame with revolution.
In the Balearics, while Majorca had been secured by Goded for the rebels, the NCOs and troops of the garrison at Minorca prevented the success of the rising there by General José Bosch.3 By nightfall, that officer had proclaimed a state of war at Port Mahon, but was closely besieged. In Ibiza, the rising triumphed, as in the other small Balearic islands. Discussion of the politics of this archipelago naturally prompts consideration of the whereabouts of the fleet.
On the disastrous dawn of 19 July, the cruisers Libertad and Miguel de Cervantes were sailing south from El Ferrol. They had been dispatched by the government to seek to prevent the Army of Africa from crossing the Straits of Gibraltar. Later, the only seaworthy Spanish battleship, the Jaime I (the España was under repair at El Ferrol), also left Vigo for the south. Upon all these ships, upon the destroyer Churruca which had already landed a cargo of Moors at Cádiz, and upon all the warships at Cartagena, the same revolutionary events occurred as on the three destroyers which had been sent the day before to Melilla: that is, the men, stimulated by radio messages from the admiralty in Madrid addressed to them and not to their commanders, overwhelmed, imprisoned and in many cases shot those officers who seemed disloyal.1 The most violent battles occurred on the Miguel de Cervantes where the officers, in mid-ocean, resisted the ship’s company to the last man. (To the laconic question as to what should be done with the corpses—asked by the committee of the ship’s company which took over command—the admiralty replied: ‘Lower bodies overboard with respectful solemnity’.)2 There was, however, little fighting on board the Jaime I, whose captain remained in command. So, by the evening of 19 July, an extraordinary fleet, run by self-appointed committees of their crews, was gathered in Gibraltarian waters, so obstructing access by General Franco to southern Spain. The gunboat Dato, which remained under the officers’ control, did, however, run a second cargo of Regulares across the Straits in the evening of 19 July, while part of the 5th Bandera of the Legion was flown to Seville by three Breguet aircraft which chanced to be in Morocco.
Confusion continued among the plotters in Madrid. Mola had failed to coordinate there the diverse elements—the army officers around Fanjul, those in the UME, the falangists—who were hostile to the republic. There was doubt whether General Miaja, the Infantry Brigade commander (and very briefly minister of war), was or was not with the rebels. Some said that he was a member of UME, and people remembered that he had been Mola’s first captain, in Morocco. At the last minute, there was even ambiguity as to who would lead the rising in Madrid: the politically active Fanjul, or García de la Herrán, the general in charge of the regiment at Carabanchel.3 Also missing was the ‘nerve’ of the conspiracy, Colonel Galarza, ‘the technician’ and coordinator of the plot, who had been arrested. The nominal leader of the rebellion in Madrid, General Villegas, therefore decided that the assignment was too much for him and so General Fanjul, the deputy who had once been under-secretary for war under Gil Robles, took his place. He arrived at the Montaña barracks in the afternoon. To that large, rambling edifice on the west of Madrid, overlooking the valley of the sluggish river Manzanares, and commanded by Colonel Francisco Serra, there also repaired, during the day, officers from other barracks in Madrid, and a number of falangists. General Fanjul gave a lecture on the political aims of the rising, and on its legality. Then the rebels attempted to sally out into the streets of the capital. But by this time a huge crowd, organized by the UGT and CNT, and the political parties, had assembled outside the gates, many of them armed with the UGT’s rifles or those 5,000 handed out by the government which did have bolts. The density of the crowd rendered it difficult for the rebels to move. They, therefore, resorted to firing with machine-guns. The crowd replied; but nothing else happened until the morning. Meantime, that night Dolores Ibarruri, La Pasionaria, made the first of many violent speeches, on the radio, calling on ‘workers, peasants, anti-fascists, and patriotic Spaniards’ not to permit the victory of ‘the hangmen of Asturias’: no pasarán, they shall not pass, an echo of Verdun, was the watchword, often repeated during the next months.
During the night of 19–20 July, fifty churches in Madrid were set on fire. The working-class parties, led by paramilitary units, of which the MAOC (the communist militia) was the most important, gained effective control of the streets, while loyal republicans consolidated their hold over the ministries, particularly the ministry of war. On 20 July, a crowd even larger than that which had gathered the previous day assembled in the Plaza de España. All shouted ‘Death to fascism’ and ‘All to the aid of the republic’ with exultant monotony. The lance of Don Quixote, whose statue stands in the centre of the square, was enthusiastically interpreted as pointing to the Montaña barracks.1 Five hours of bombardment of that fortress followed. Aircraft and three pieces of artillery (drawn by a beer lorry) were included among the weapons of assault. Loudspeakers encouraged counter-rebellion among the soldiers inside the barracks. Inside, Fanjul, though confident, with 2,000 troops and about 500 monarchists and falangists, had no means of concerting measures with the other garrisons in Madrid. Those could only communicate with each other by signals over the roof-tops. Fanjul nevertheless by this means implored General García de la Herrán, at the suburb of Carabanchel, to send a force to relieve him. But there was no possibility of relief getting through. With hindsight, it seems that it was a fatal error to retire on the Montaña barracks in this manner; Fanjul hoped to await help there, but he only found disaster. At half past ten, Fanjul and Colonel Serra, the head of the garrison in the barracks, were wounded. The fall of a bomb into the courtyard from a loyal Breguet XIX, from the air base at Getafe, exercised the minds of the rebels. The artillery was also effective. Half an hour later, a white flag appeared at a window of the fortress. The crowd advanced to receive the expected surrender. They were greeted by machine-gun fire. This incident was repeated once more, maddening the attackers. Confusion among the defenders, rather than guile, was responsible. Some of the rank and file wanted to yield, and were, therefore, ready to betray their officers. Eventually, a few minutes before noon, the great door of the barracks broke beneath repeated assaults. The crowd burst into the courtyard, where for some moments all was hysteria and bloodshed. A militiaman appeared suddenly at an outside window, and began to throw rifles down to the crowd still in the street. One giant revolutionary conceived it his duty to fling officer after officer, disarmed and yelling, from the highest gallery upon the insensate mass of people in the courtyard beneath. The succeeding massacre beggared description. Several hundred of the defenders, including Serra, were killed. Those who were saved were flung into the Model Prison, many with wounds undr
essed. General Fanjul was with difficulty carried off to be tried for rebellion. The precious supplies of bolts (and ammunition) were also saved from mass distribution and borne off to the ministry of war by the assault guards, one of whose units in Madrid, led by Major Ricardo Burillo, was wholly loyal (the other two units were less sure).1
The successful attackers now marched to the Puerta del Sol. There, however, their victory parade was interrupted by firing from all sides. A unit of assault guards cleared the houses surrounding the square, while the people lay on their faces. As for the other garrisons in Madrid, the engineers at El Pardo drove off northward towards Segovia, the officers telling their men that they were on their way to fight General Mola. Among those so tricked was Largo Caballero’s son, who was imprisoned for the remainder of the war. In the suburb of Getafe, the air force officers loyal to the government scotched an attempted rising at the air-base there, after one loyal officer at least had been murdered; in that of Carabanchel, the artillery barracks were also captured by loyal officers, together with units of the militias after the colonel, Ernesto Carratalá, one of the founders of the republican officers’ group UMRA, had been shot by his staff for attempting to hand out arms to the militia. General García de la Herrán was also killed by his own soldiers, for a contrasting reason. One by one the other garrisons fell.1 The communists La Pasionaria and Lister went to infantry barracks No. 1, and, by eloquence, won over the rather reluctant soldiers to the cause of the government.
Immediately afterwards, hastily-armed militia forces, along with elements of the demoralized civil guard and assault guards as well as what remained of the army, were dispatched in taxis, lorries, or requisitioned private motor-cars southwards towards Toledo and north-east towards Guadalajara. For in both these nearby towns the rising had been temporarily successful. At Toledo, the numerical superiority of General Riquelme’s combined regular troops and militia drove back a group of rebels, led by Colonel José Moscardó, the military governor and director of the central school of gymnastics in the army, into the Alcázar, the half-fortress, half-palace set on a height commanding the city and the river Tagus which had been, since the nineteenth century, the Spanish infantry officers’ school. Moscardó resisted attempts by the war office and the government to persuade him to surrender. Eventually, he was barricaded in, with about 1,300 people, of whom 800 were members of the civil guard, 100 officers, 200 falangists or other right-wing militants, and six cadets of the Academy (which was then on its summer vacation). The colonel also took with him 550 women and 50 children, mostly dependants of the defenders. Finally, he also took with him Manuel González López, the civil governor, ‘with his entire family, and a number of persons (about 100) of left-wing politics as hostages’.1 The garrison was well supplied with ammunition from the neighbouring arms factory, though food was scarce.
As for the militia making for Guadalajara, both that town and Alcalá de Henares on the way were captured quickly, though the officers at Guadalajara put up a valiant resistance under the leadership of Generals Barrera and González de Lara.2 In all these battles, new leaders appeared, such as the anarchists Cipriano Mera, David Antona, and Teodoro Moro—all builders by trade, street fighters by circumstances; communists such as Enrique Lister, Juan Modesto, and El Campesino; socialist students, such as Manuel Tagüeña; or old soldiers, whose fighting days were really done, such as the flamboyant littérateur Colonel Mangada, or Colonel Arturo Mena, another loyal officer in his sixties.
Victory over the rising meant, in Madrid and its surroundings as elsewhere, the start of a revolution. Large portraits of Lenin now appeared beside those of Largo Caballero on the hoardings of the Puerta del Sol. Manuel Azaña might still linger, gloomy and aghast, in the Royal Palace; his friends might still hold the portfolios of government; but, in the streets, the ‘masses’ ruled. The socialist-led UGT was the real executive body in the capital. With the communist-socialist youth as its agents, it maintained such order as existed. Syndicalism had thus come to Madrid as a result of a great anti-syndicalist rising. For the workers, 20 July was a day of triumph. But in the evening, many assassinations were committed by trigger-happy militiamen. Two republican officers, Colonel Mangada and Major Luis Barceló, set up summary courts in the Casa de Campo to try officers captured in rebel barracks—men whom, in many cases, they had known, and hated, all their careers. During the evening and the night, the first executions began under this inauspicious authority. Other murders followed in every quarter, the houses of the rich burned, while the clubs, hotels and public buildings became thronged with revolutionaries.
In Barcelona, the rising had also been subdued by the evening of 20 July. The San Andrés barracks, the main armoury of Barcelona, surrendered to the anarchists during the night and made available to them some 30,000 rifles (they had only had 200 the previous day). The Atarazanas barracks next surrendered at half past one, after a prolonged battle, to the anarchists. The anarchist Francisco Ascaso was killed in the assault. Mola’s brother, Captain Ramón Mola, killed himself during the night. Over 500 persons, of whom about 200 were ‘antifascists’, had been killed and 3,000 wounded in the two-day battle.1 Immediately, President Companys was visited by anarchist leaders, headed by García Oliver, Abad de Santillán, and Durruti. These formidable men of violence sat before Companys with their rifles between their knees, their clothes still dusty from the fight, their hearts heavy at the death of Ascaso.
Companys then spoke as follows:
First of all, I have to admit to you that the CNT and FAI have never been accorded their proper treatment. You have always been harshly persecuted, and I, who was formerly with you,2 afterwards found myself obliged by political exigencies to oppose you. Today you are masters of the city.
He paused, and then spoke deprecatingly of the part played by his own party in defeating the rising:
If you do not need me [he went on] or do not wish me to remain as President of Catalonia, tell me now, and I shall become one soldier more in the struggle against fascism. If, on the other hand, you believe that, in this position which, only as a dead man, would I have abandoned if the fascists had triumphed, if you believe that I, my party, my name, my prestige, can be of use, then you can count on me and my loyalty as a man who is convinced that a whole past of shame is dead, and who desires passionately that Catalonia should henceforth stand among the most progressive countries in the world.1
Of course, the rebels had risen against the government and the regular security forces had played a part in defeating them in Barcelona.2 But the civil guard and assault guards perhaps numbered, like the rebels, only 5,000, and the anarchists had now six times that figure of armed men. Nor was the loyalty of the security forces unquestionable. Companys was thus in a difficult position, but his clever oration posed an acute problem in the minds of the anarchists. Should they proceed, as they presumably could in Barcelona at least, to establish ‘libertarian communism’; or should they collaborate with the Catalan government? To choose the first might necessitate further fighting with, or at least the suppression of the view of, many republicans, Catalan nationalists, socialists and communists, and risk anarchist lives in other parts of Spain, where the CNT were weaker. To choose the second was a compromise with the state, forbidden by all their past experience. They chose the second alternative, not without hesitation.3 The demands of war already threatened the principle of the abolition of government.
But did Companys really have to speak so humbly? Could he not have reestablished the authority of both the Catalan and the Spanish state by the effective deployment of the loyal forces of order under Generals Llano de la Encomienda and Aranguren? Or did he hope to profit from the confusion to ensure once and for all, with anarchist help, the separation of Catalonia from Spain? It seems likely that the second alternative was his plan. In the meantime, to coordinate anarchist power in the city with that wielded by the other organizations, a so-called ‘Anti-Fascist Militias Committee’ of all the parties in Barcelona was set up,
Companys introducing the different groups in the Generalidad immediately after the conversation just described. This met nightly, and was composed of three representatives each of the UGT, CNT and Esquerra, two from the FAI, and one each from the Communists (PSUC),1 Acción Catalana, the POUM, and the vine-growers (rabassaires).2 This body, dominated at first by its anarchist members, was the real administration of Barcelona after the defeat of the rising.3 Though there were isolated instances of firing at militia-men by concealed rebel sympathizers, the main work thereafter of the committee was to prepare militia forces to march against Saragossa and to organize the revolution in Barcelona. In all this, Companys did not consult the central government and nor did the Anti-Fascist Militias Committee.
In Granada, the stalemate came to an end on 20 July. General Pozas telephoned from Madrid to urge upon the civil governor ‘desperate and bloody resistance’ against the least manifestation of military rising. This was being brewed by Colonels Muñoz and León. General Campins, unwisely making a further visit to the artillery barracks, was denounced as a traitor by one of his own captains. He heard, to his amazement, that the entire officer corps of the garrison, the civil guards, and the assault guards stood with the rebels. Campins turned to leave, to find his way barred. His ADC suggested that the general should sign the declaration of a state of war. This he did, after a visit to the infantry barracks had proved to him that the officers there also were with the rebels. The troops of the garrison of Granada soon received the order to sally out into the streets of the city. But their commander was not General Campins, who was confined to prison, but Colonel Muñoz. The city was then occupied. The crowds, being unarmed, dispersed at the arrival of the military before the town hall, and the civil governor and his staff were arrested without resistance. Only one nationalist soldier was killed in this conquest of the centre of the town. By night, only the working-class quarter of El Albaicín, directly beneath the Alhambra, held out. This was not reduced for some days. It was accomplished with innumerable casualties suffered by the working classes.1