by Hugh Thomas
The British ambassador to Spain, Sir Henry Chilton, meantime had set up the British Embassy in a grocer’s shop at Hendaye, on the French side of the International Bridge.6 He was an unimaginative diplomat, of the old school: his American colleague, Claude Bowers, an academic historian, who was republican in his sympathies, reported to Washington that everything Chilton did was ‘intended to cripple the government and serve the insurgents’.7 Chilton was convinced that a victory for Franco would be better for Britain.8
English opinion was soon as inflamed by the Spanish war as it had once been by the French Revolution. The publisher Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, which set out to publish a book each month against ‘Fascism and War’, had begun in May. It had been followed by the Right Book Club. Such literary commitment to politics was the reflection of the heavy social problems, as well as of general alarms caused by the lure of Russia, the decline of religion, ‘the breakdown of standards’ and the rise of Hitler. The official Labour opposition to Baldwin’s government seemed ineffective. Able leaders such as Churchill and Lloyd George glowered in the political wilderness. The time was to be well expressed by W. H. Auden in his poem ‘Spain 1937’:
Tomorrow, for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
Tomorrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But today the struggle.
Another verse of the same poem now seemed apposite:
What’s your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree, or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.1
Among intellectuals of the Left, Spain soon became the central point of life, work, and artistic inspiration. Stephen Spender thought that Spain ‘offered the twentieth century in 1848’.2 Philip Toynbee, an undergraduate member of the communist party, recalled how the news of the Spanish war made him think that at last ‘the gloves were off in the struggle against fascism’.3 Rex Warner, also a republican sympathizer, wrote, ‘Spain has torn the veil of Europe’. Among most intellectuals, there was no difficulty in deciding which side in the war was ‘right’. For Cecil Day Lewis, future Poet Laureate, the war was a battle of ‘light against darkness’. Spain gave British intellectuals a sense of freedom, the thought of rubbing shoulders with the dispossessed in a half-developed country, above all the illusion that their ‘action’ could be effective.1 ‘Spain’ seemed reality, England make-believe, scarcely to be roused from complacency save ‘by the roar of bombs’.2
But society in general was divided: the Morning Post, Daily Mail, Daily Sketch and Observer supported the nationalists, while the News Chronicle, Daily Herald, Manchester Guardian, Daily Express and Daily Mirror were generally republican. The Times and Daily Telegraph tried to be impartial. The humourous weekly Punch hailed the civil war, on 29 July, with one of Sir Bernard Partridge’s well-known cartoons: a guitarist named ‘Revolution’ appears at the window of a sad woman in a Seville-like street. ‘What, you again?’ says she. The assumption was clearly that the Left had begun the war. On 12 August, Sir Bernard appeared less partisan. Against a back-cloth of burning cities, the damsel Spain is fought over by two bandits, communism and fascism. The former’s head is tied in a kerchief. The latter wears a black hat. A more urgent or contemporary note was struck by Low’s ‘Turkish Bath’ cartoon of 29 July in the Evening Standard. Under the headline ‘Revolution at our Turkish Bath: Blimps Rise’, Colonel Blimp, favourite butt of the Left, was depicted broadcasting a proclamation from the Hot Room.
In France, public opinion was even more bitterly concerned than in England. Most prominent French writers quickly took up a stand even if, like that of François Mauriac, it was one which they afterwards changed.1 Spain was, after all, closer than it was to England, the communist party in France far larger and more serious. The wounds of the World War were greater. The Left in France saw Spain as the ‘symbol of liberty in peril’ and the ‘prefiguration of our own future’, in the words of André Chamson. The Right in France, who were more distinguished intellectually, more unconstitutional and more determined than in any other surviving democracy, saw Spain as the one country where communism was being resisted. The Camelots du Roi thought as Philip Toynbee did that the gloves were off, and ‘against the revolution’. But the Left took the initiative in public opinion.
21
While Eden and Blum were consulting in London, the humanist socialist Fernando de los Ríos, the new temporary republican representative in Paris, called on Daladier, the French war minister, Pierre Cot, the air minister, and Jules Moch, under-secretary in Blum’s private cabinet. The French undertook to supply pilots to fly to Spain the Potez bombers which the Spaniards had requested. ‘A member of the French cabinet’ also secretly told Count von Welczeck, German ambassador in Paris,1 at much the same time, that France was preparing to supply the Spanish republic with weapons and bombers.2 Welczeck reported this to Dr Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, acting head of the German foreign office, a solemn career diplomat, who told the German Embassy in London to take up the matter with Eden.3 Despite this, Dieckhoff informed the German war ministry that he thought the idea of helping Franco (Beigbeder’s telegraphed request from Tetuán had by then arrived) ‘out of the question’.4 The German foreign ministry thus reacted to the Spanish crisis much as did the British. Help to either combatant would increase the danger of general war. By this time, Franco’s messengers to Hitler had got no farther than Seville, where they were delayed by engine trouble.1
During the evening of 24 July, Léon Blum and Delbos returned to Paris. Waiting to meet them at Le Bourget was the silky radical minister, Camille Chautemps. He explained that the news of the government’s decision to aid the Spanish republic had leaked out to the right-wing publicist Henri de Kerillis (probably through Welczeck). Kerillis had already denounced the plan in the columns of L’Echo de Paris. ‘No one can understand,’ said Chautemps, ‘why we are going to risk war on the behalf of Spain when we did not do so over the Rhineland.’2 A radical protest against the idea of aid to Spain was beginning. Both the first rumblings of this, and the memory of Eden’s words, were in Blum’s ears when, late that night, he saw de los Ríos, together with Daladier, Cot, Vincent Auriol (minister of finance), and Delbos.3 De los Ríos pointed out to Blum that the civil war ‘could not be looked upon as strictly national’ because of Spain’s strategic relation with Italy and Morocco. Blum still desired to help the republic. The contracts for the supply of aircraft were ready. But he did not want to act in the face of Eden’s warnings. So he asked whether Spanish pilots could fly the aeroplanes to Spain. De los Ríos said that the shortage of pilots would make that impossible. Anyway, his government had hoped to be able to retain the services of the French pilots. At this, Daladier recalled a Franco-Spanish treaty of 1935. A secret clause of that provided that Spain would buy 20 million francs’ worth of war material from France. De los Ríos and Blum agreed that the aircraft and other material should be shipped under this clause. Later still that night, de los Ríos was roused from bed by Pierre Cot, a radical professor of international law but drifting to the far Left through anti-fascism, who telephoned to ask him to come immediately to see him at his house. He did. Cot said that Delbos could not be convinced that French pilots could take the aircraft to Spain. Cot, therefore, had suggested that they should fly to the south of France and the aircraft would then be transported by Spaniards. This seemed a good compromise.
The next morning, 25 July, de los Ríos visited the French air ministry. All seemed favourable for the shipment. But, in the meantime, Cristóbal del Castillo, the counsellor and chargé d’affaires at the Spanish Embassy, refused to sign the appropriate papers. Barroso, the military attaché, also refused to sign the cheque paying for it. Both these men now resigned, on the ground that they would not be a party to the purchase of arms for use against their own
people. They informed the press what they were doing.1 The uproar was immediate. All the French evening papers, especially L’Echo de Paris, published sensational accounts of the ‘arms traffic’. Lebrun, the President, warned Blum that he was leading France to war. Herriot, ex–Prime Minister and speaker of the chamber of deputies, did the same: ‘Ah je t’en prie, mon petit, je t’en prie, ne vas pas te fourrer là-dedans!’2 The Prime Minister was torn. In the afternoon, the French cabinet met. Daladier and Delbos were the spokesmen for a refusal to Spain, Cot for acceptance. Eventually, the government announced in a communiqué that it would refuse the Spanish government’s request for arms. But no hindrances would be placed in the way of private transactions, provided that the aircraft were not armed. Thus bombers were not to be sent.
These regulations were not kept. A quantity of military aircraft were secretly prepared. £140,000 in gold from the Spanish gold reserve arrived at Le Bourget as guarantee for the payment. Pierre Cot, the air minister, organized all these transactions, his chef du cabinet, Jean Moulin (the future hero of the Resistance), being charged to set up a team of specialists in matters of aviation to deal with the shipment. The young minister of sport, Léo Lagrange, also helped. The Byron of the age, André Malraux, then close to the communists, acted for a time as intermediary on behalf of the Spanish government,3 applying ‘the inventiveness of a great novelist to buying arms and gun-running’.4 The novelist had visited Spain on 20 July, and had become convinced that the fate of the republic depended on air power.1 Henceforward, the Spanish Embassy in Paris was a ‘veritable caravanserai’ where, at all hours of the day and during many of the night, individuals of every nationality came in and out offering all classes of arms, munitions, and aircraft, at all prices—with the gullible de los Ríos presiding over the arms purchase commission.2
In the more reserved atmosphere of fascist Rome, on 25 July, Goicoechea, accompanied by Pedro Sainz Rodríguez, the monarchist ideologue, arrived in Rome to support Bolín’s requests for arms. The connection between the plotters of 1934 and the rebels of 1936 was satisfactorily explained to Count Ciano.3 Mussolini was influenced by the reports of French aid to the republic. Ciano was still enthusiastic in favour of helping Franco and his view prevailed. Italy arranged to send twelve Savoia 81 bombers to Morocco in the next few days. A telephone call from ex-King Alfonso, staying with Princess Metternich in Czechoslovakia, to Mussolini hastened the shipment.4 By this time, also, the arch-financier, Juan March, had reached Rome, arranging credit for these first Italian shipments and coordinating other financial policies for the rebels.1
The motives of Mussolini in acting in this way were mixed. He was flattered to be asked. Aspiring to dominate the Mediterranean, he supposed that that ambition would be assisted by the establishment in Spain of a right-wing government. Such a ‘new Spain’ would draw off French troops from the Italian border and, in the event of a Franco-Italian war, help to prevent the passage of French troops in North Africa to France. The conquest of Abyssinia in April had left Mussolini both anxious to display his personality in some new way, and without any obvious place in which to do it. The Italians, he believed, had to be ‘kept up to the mark by kicks on the shins’. ‘When the war in Spain is over,’ he later remarked, ‘I shall have to find something else: the Italian character has to be formed through fighting.’2 In 1936, Mussolini was in a mood of elation; on 24 October, he was to announce: ‘At the close of the year 14 [of the fascist era] I raise a large olive branch. This olive branch rises from an immense forest; it is a forest of eight million bayonets well sharpened.’3 The public reason for Italian intervention in Spain was that Italy was ‘not prepared to see the establishment of a communist state’ in Spain. It was also the reason which he privately gave to his wife Rachele.4 Although, before July 1936, his propaganda had been more directed against the ‘decadent’ democracies than against communism, an even moderately left-wing government in Spain would be hostile to his designs. But it was still possible that internationally the Duce might draw closer to the bourgeois objects of his particular scorn than to Germany. His relation with Hitler was still exploratory. Here, as in his attacks upon communism, the Spanish crisis forced a change. The Spanish war would make Hitler and Mussolini allies. Later, Ciano told Cantalupo, his first ambassador in nationalist Spain, that the Duce had only ‘very reluctantly agreed to lend Franco military support’.1 King Victor Emmanuel opposed the idea of aid but he was impotent.2
The diplomacy of Ciano, who played an important part in subsequent events, was anti-British without the fascination mixed with the hatred felt for Britain by Ribbentrop and even by Mussolini. When three falangists later described to him how all Spanish miseries, since the reign of Philip II, had been caused by England, Ciano encouraged them ‘on this wise path’, warning of ‘the dangerous Anglomania of certain old stagers of diplomacy’.3 His task during the Spanish war was made easier by the desire of the British government to achieve an Italian alliance. This increased Ciano’s scorn for England, though he was friendly with Lord Perth, the roman Catholic convert and ex-secretary-general of the League who was ambassador to Rome and who so far exceeded his government’s instructions as to show himself to Ciano as ‘a man who has come to understand, even to love fascism’.4
Also on 25 July, Franco’s emissaries to Hitler, Captain Arranz, Bernhardt, and Langenheim arrived in Berlin. They had crossed with, and met, Mola’s messengers to Mussolini at Marseilles airport. Franco’s letter was given to Hitler through the foreign department of the Nazi party. At the foreign ministry, both Dieckhoff, the acting permanent secretary, and Neurath, the minister, were repeating to their own satisfaction that deliveries of arms to aid the nationalists in Spain were impossible, since they would become known, and since ‘there would be serious consequences to the German colony in Spain’.5 Both the Nazi party and Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr (that is, military intelligence), had other ideas. Canaris was recommending Franco to his superiors as a ‘tested man’ who ‘deserved full trust and support’, and whom he had apparently met on visits to Spain.6
Göring, chief of the Luftwaffe and of the German five-year plan, gave an account of what happened next at his trial at Nuremberg in 1946:
When the civil war broke out in Spain [testified the Reichsmarshal] Franco sent a call for help to Germany and asked for support, particularly in the air. Franco with his troops was stationed in Africa and … he could not get his troops across, as the fleet was in the hands of the communists … the Führer thought the matter over. I urged him to give support under all circumstances: firstly, to prevent the further spread of communism; secondly, to test my young Luftwaffe in this or that technical respect.1
Spain gave the Luftwaffe, in fact, its first wartime activity.
Hitler agreed to see Langenheim and Bernhardt on the same evening, 25 July, at Bayreuth in the Villa Wahnfried after a performance of Siegfried.2 Franco’s letter to Hitler had requested merely ten antiaircraft guns, five fighters and some other equipment. After the opera, Hitler demanded who Franco was, what he stood for, how he would be able to transport the army in Africa across the Straits of Gibraltar, and how he would pay his men, not to speak of Germany, if Hitler were to agree to assist him. The conversation lasted till two o’clock in the morning of 26 July. Hitler, to begin with accompanied only by Dr Kraneck, the head of the legal section in the Nazi party’s foreign department, the AO, ultimately agreed to help Franco in order ‘to keep the Straits of Gibraltar from falling into communist hands’. Either on 26 July, or the next day, he decided to send Franco transport aircraft, which Franco had not specifically asked for (though Beigbeder had). He also imposed conditions: German aid should go to Franco alone, so as to avoid conflicts between the different generals; and German assistance was to be defensive only, not offensive.1 Late in the discussion, Göring, the war minister, General von Blomberg and a senior naval officer from Hamburg participated.
Hitler later explained that he helped Franco in order ‘to distract the
attention of the western powers to Spain, and so enable German rearmament to continue unobserved’.2 But, in 1941, Hitler said: ‘If there had not been the danger of the Red Peril’s overwhelming Europe, I’d not have intervened in the revolution in Spain. The Church would have been destroyed,’ he added, not without relish.3 He gave this as a reason for intervention to Ribbentrop on 27 July.4 The Führer also thought that a nationalist success in Spain would establish a fascist power ‘athwart the sea communications of Britain and France’—so adding a strategic reason for intervention.5 In 1937, the Führer gave yet another explanation: Germany, who imported three-quarters of her ores, needed Spanish iron, and other minerals, and a nationalist government would maintain or increase sales to Germany, and a left-wing one might not. This last point does not seem to have been urged by Bernhardt, though it must have been implicit, since Spain had exported iron to Germany for many years and the Germans had known of the potentials of Morocco since 1900. Canaris, who must have been consulted very soon, recalling his experience of the First World War, no doubt believed that German submarines could not refuel in war if the Spanish bases were in unsympathetic hands. Hitler, like Mussolini, was also pleased to be asked for help by Franco, and treated by another country, for the first time since he came to power three years before, as if he were indispensable. The triumphant part played by Bernhardt and, to a lesser extent, Langenheim, shows that the policy followed was that of the Nazi party, not that of the foreign ministry. This was the pattern of many early Nazi decisions: scepticism among professional diplomats, shared by the army; independent action supported by Germans in the country concerned; and quick decisions by Hitler, leading to early successes which made the diplomats’ and generals’ caution seem foolish.1