by Hugh Thomas
General Dávila, head of the administrative junta at Burgos, who resembled Mola in his views, succeeded as commander of the Army of the North. He was a bureaucratic general, in height even shorter than Franco, but ‘pure, austere and Spanish’, as Admiral Cervera recalled him. General Gómez Jordana succeeded Dávila at Burgos. A member of Primo de Rivera’s governments, son of an officer whose name in Morocco was legendary for knowledge of, and interest in, the Moroccans, himself high commissioner of Morocco under the King, he was already old, and, therefore, recommended himself as being beyond personal ambition. Although a monarchist, he regarded himself as a liberal. In truth, he was a man of an age far from that of fascism, communism, and the industrial revolution. Courteous, loyal, indefatigable, and honest, he was later, as foreign secretary, to do much to commend Franco’s régime to foreign ambassadors.
On 11 June, the Army of the North returned to the attack. The preliminary artillery bombardment by 150 pieces, accompanied by aerial bombing by both the Condor Legion and Italian aircraft, was heavy, and the shock broke the Basque defenders of the last high point before the ‘ring of iron’. By nightfall, Colonels García Valiño, Bautista Sánchez, and Bartomeu, with three out of the six Navarrese brigades, had reached this famous line of defences. All night, the bombardment continued. Incendiary bombs dropped in a cemetery and caused a fiery resurrection of the dead.1 General Gámir had probably about 40,000 men in all, of whom some were Asturianos or Santanderinos and, therefore, considered unreliable; while about half the other units were socialist or communist in political flavour and therefore unable to share fully in the Basque nationalist adventure breathed by those brigades whose names were ‘Arana Goiri’, ‘Itxar Kundia’ or ‘Sukarrieta’.2
On 12 June, after the batteries and more aircraft (perhaps seventy bombers in action that day) had pounded away at the ‘ring of iron’ for several hours, Bautista Sánchez’s brigade attacked at the spot where the defence system had hardly been constructed at all. The treachery of Major Goicoechea had no doubt suggested this point for the assault, at Monte Urcullu. A ground attack followed the artillery bombardment. The defenders could thus hardly tell when firing from tanks succeeded the shelling. Confusion, smoke, movement was suddenly everywhere. Once again, Basque units found that they were in danger of being surrounded, and hastened to retreat. By dusk, Bautista Sánchez had broken the Basque lines on a front half a mile long. He was only six miles from the centre of Bilbao. The nationalists could then shell Bilbao as well as bomb it.1 On 13 June, all the Basques beyond the ‘ring of iron’ were withdrawn inside. Their morale had suffered a shattering blow: thereby proving the psychological unwisdom of an elaborate, fixed system of defence. In Bilbao, some prepared to flee to France. A conference was held at the Carlton Hotel, at which Aguirre asked the military commanders if Bilbao could be defended.2 The chief of artillery, Guerrica Echevarría, thought that it could not. The Russian General Goriev advised resistance. Another Russian adviser, Colonel Golmann, and a Frenchman, Monnier, were also firm. Gámir said nothing. During the night of 13–14 June, the Basque government decided to defend the city. Prieto gave precise orders from the ministry of defence to that effect. Industrial and other establishments useful to the enemy were to be destroyed. But as many as possible of the civilian population were evacuated to the west, towards Santander. This foreshadowed the abandonment of the city.
On 14 June, the Alsatian Colonel Putz, who had previously commanded the 14th International Brigade, took over command of the 1st Basque Division. The Italian Nino Nanetti was given a division also. Nevertheless, the flight of refugees from Bilbao went on all day, and the coast road to Santander was machine-gunned by the Condor Legion. Two vessels full of refugees were captured by the nationalist fleet. The Basque government withdrew to the village of Trucios, in western Vizcaya. They left behind a junta of defence for Bilbao composed of Leizaola (the minister of justice), Aznar (socialist), Astigarrabía, and Gámir. The government’s withdrawal was a reasonable act; less so the flight of Navarro, the chief of the navy off Vizcaya, the chief of artillery, Guerrica Echevarría, and others in the last ships available. On 15 June, thanks to Putz, a line at least was presented to the advancing Carlists and Italians: Belderraín was in the north, Putz in the centre, and, in the south, Nino Nanetti. It was again at a point where the treacherous Major Goicoechea had revealed the fortifications to be incomplete that the next attack was made. Nanetti’s men broke and fled across the river Nervión, without blowing up the bridges behind them. They thus laid open the road to Bilbao. The next day, 16 June, Prieto telegraphed to Gámir to hold Bilbao at all costs, especially the industrial region of the town. But the Fifth Column had begun to fire indiscriminately into the suburb of Las Arenas. An anarchist group silenced this outburst. There was, however, no aerial bombardment: the nationalists had learned a lesson from Guernica; while Leizaola discovered, and quashed, a plan to burn the city.1 Throughout the day, the nationalist advance continued. Putz’s division incurred heavy casualties. On 17 June, the field headquarters of these two commanders were in the centre of Bilbao. During that day, 20,000 shells dropped on the city. High points and isolated houses changed hands several times. A few factories were evacuated, some partially evacuated, the rest abandoned. Within Bilbao, men and material were transported along the railway line and the last two roads towards Santander. These routes were now beginning to come within artillery range of the advancing Black Arrows. In the evening, Leizaola chivalrously arranged for the delivery to the enemy of political prisoners in Basque hands to avoid leaving them without guards in the last stages of the resistance. He also prevented the communist and anarchist battalions from blowing up the university and the church of San Nicolás, which they had thought would make good enemy machine-gun nests. The nationalists had now gained all the right bank of the river Nervión from the city to the sea and most of the left bank as far as the railway bridge. At dusk on 18 June, the Basque units were ordered to evacuate their capital. In the morning of 19 June, the last of them did so. At noon, nationalist tanks made a preliminary reconnaissance across the Nervión, to find Bilbao empty. The Fifth Column, the opportunists, and the secret agents emerged, to hang red and yellow monarchist flags from their balconies. A crowd of two hundred nationalist sympathizers gathered to sing and shout. A Basque tank appeared from nowhere, dispersed the crowd, tore down, with bursts from its guns, three flags from the balconies, and drove along the last road of escape. Between five and six o’clock in the evening, the 5th Navarrese Brigade, under Bautista Sánchez, entered the city and placed the monarchist flag on the town hall.1
Thus ended the experiment of the Basque republic, Euzkadi, whose political leaders transferred themselves, a government-in-exile, to Barcelona. General Gámir preoccupied himself with withdrawing as many troops as he could towards Santander, losing as he did so, in an aerial attack, the new Italian commander of his second division, Nino Nanetti.2 His tasks were easier since Franco made no serious effort to follow up the capture of Bilbao quickly, as his air chief Kindelán complained.3 The nationalists had lost some 30,000 casualties since March, including 4,500 deaths; Gámir estimated a total of 35,000 casualties for the republic, of which 10,000 would have been the maximum for deaths.4
Franco had learnt his lesson from the ‘senseless shootings’ after the fall of Málaga. He forbade large troop detachments from entering Bilbao, so avoiding excesses.5 Immediate reprisals did not occur, and few civilian prisoners were made. But the conquerors made immediately every effort to extinguish Basque separatist feelings. Schoolmasters were dismissed unless they could positively prove at least their political neutrality. The Basque tongue was officially forbidden. Within a fortnight, Herr Bethke, of ROWAK, had visited the iron mines, blast furnaces, and rolling mills of Bilbao. He found them undamaged. Work could continue to provide for future offensives.6 Ores sent in the past to Britain, particularly to the Steel Company of Wales, were diverted.7 So, too, were the important chemical works at Galdacano, the only factor
y in Spain capable of the manufacture of artillery shells. Vizcaya had half the production of explosives in all Spain. The fall of Bilbao also meant that all three of Spain’s principal cableheads for telecommunications were in Franco’s hands (the others were Vigo and Málaga).1
The news of the fall of Bilbao was given by a priest to the Basque refugee children in England at their main camp at Stoneham (Hampshire). The assembled children were so appalled that they fell upon the bringer of such bad tidings with stones and sticks. Three hundred children out of the 3,500 broke out of the camp in grief-stricken purposelessness.2
The fall of Bilbao intensified an already heated worldwide controversy over the religious implications of the Spanish Civil War. The tone of the dispute had been set in January when Osservatore Romano, the Vatican periodical, had ruminated: ‘To a militant conception of life, struggle for a doctrine is a holy war … only liberal agnosticism, with its conception of tolerance in theory, as well as in practice … can be shocked by ideological struggles.’3 But, despite this, the republican affiliation of the Basques, ‘the most Christian people in Spain’,4 made Catholics look to their loyalties. In the spring, two eminent French Catholics, François Mauriac and Jacques Maritain, had issued a pro-Basque manifesto. Dr Múgica, Bishop of Vitoria, in Rome, wrote supporting the French manifesto even if he still refused to give his name publicly to the defence of the Basques:5 he kept his protests to the Vatican, where, however, his views had an effect. The destruction of Guernica strengthened the hands of those whom the right-wing French Catholic press dubbed the ‘chrétiens rouges’. On 15 May, two Spanish Dominicans in Rome, Father Carro and Father Beltrán de Heredia, published a violent pamphlet denouncing the idea ‘prevalent in too many Catholic homes’ that one could be neutral in the Spanish Civil War. For that meant giving equal rights to ‘the murderers, the traitors to God, and to the Fatherland’. Sin, like crime, had no rights. The archbishop of Westminster described the war as ‘a furious battle between Christian civilization and the most cruel paganism that has ever darkened the world’.1 The Pope officially declared all those priests who had been murdered to be martyrs. Claudel thereupon wrote his ode ‘Aux Martyrs Espagnols’, as a verse preface to a pro-nationalist book by Juan Estelrich, a Francoist diplomatic agent in Paris. On 1 July, Maritain replied with an article in La Nouvelle Revue française, in which he described those who killed the poor, ‘the people of Christ’, in the name of religion, as being as culpable as those who killed priests by hatred of religion.2
That day the Spanish hierarchy, led by Cardinal Gomá, archbishop of Toledo, took the unusual step of dispatching a joint letter to the ‘Bishops of the Whole World’.3 They explained that they had not wished an ‘armed plebiscite’ in Spain, though thousands of christians ‘had taken up arms on their personal responsibility to save the principles of religion’. They argued that the legislative power since 1931 had sought to change ‘Spanish history in a way contrary to the needs of the national spirit’. The Comintern had armed ‘a revolutionary militia to seize power’. The civil war was, therefore, theologically just.4 The bishops recalled the martyred priests and comforted themselves with the reflection that, when their enemies who had been fascinated by ‘doctrines of demons died under the sanction of law, they had been reconciled’ in their vast majority to the God of their fathers. In Majorca, only 2 per cent had died impenitent; in the southern regions no more than 20 per cent. The bishops concluded by naming the national movement ‘a vast family, in which the citizen attains his total development’. Despite this, they added that they ‘would be the first to regret that the irresponsible autocracy of parliament should be replaced by the more terrible one of a dictatorship without roots in the nation’. They finally reproved the Basque priests for not having listened ‘to the voice of the Church’. This letter was signed by neither the archbishop of Tarragona (in exile in Switzerland), nor by the bishop of Vitoria.1 The latter prelate denied from Rome that there was a religious freedom in nationalist Spain (even the Germans had complained about persecution of protestants),2 nor was it true that death sentences were only administered after trial.3 Despite this championship by their bishop, the Basque priests were accused before the Pope by the Spanish hierarchy of having acted as politicians and of carrying arms. The Basque clergy replied that none of their priests had ever been affiliated qua priest with the Basque nationalist party and that none, not even the corps of almoners, had carried arms.4 But, on 28 August, the Vatican formally recognized the ‘Burgos authorities’—as the British Foreign Office referred to them—as the official government of Spain. An apostolic delegate, Monsignor Antoniutti, was dispatched to the Castilian capital. Hence-forward any Catholic who sided with the republic or who even, like Maritain, preached that the church should be neutral, became technically a rebel against the Pope. But until late 1938, the rebels still felt aggrieved towards the Vatican, since the Pope did not accord them full recognition, and did not send a nuncio, only an apostolic delegate.
The pamphlet war continued during the rest of the Spanish conflict, above all in France. Accusations of espionage, or that foreigners were plotting with right- or left-wing terrorist groups, were made daily.5 Mauriac continued his articles in favour of the republic. Charles Maurras replied, in L’Action française, by proclaiming that the church was the only real International. Bernanos soon published Les Grands cimetières sous la lune, which gave a terrible account of the nationalist repression in Majorca. A right-wing writer replied, with Les Grands chantiers au soleil. A Jesuit priest, Juan Vilar Costa, who had sided with the republic, founded a Catholic institute for religious studies, to give the republic a better name than it had previously among the world’s Catholics. He also published a clever book, Montserrat, commenting on the Spanish bishops’ letter. In Liège, a characteristic prayer of the exiled Spanish priests to the Virgin of the Pillar appeared:
To You, O Mary, Queen of Peace, we always return, we the faithful sons of Your best-loved Spain, now vilified, outraged, befouled by criminal bolshevism, deprived by Jewish Marxism, and scorned by savage communism. We pray You, tears in our eyes, to come to our help, to accord final triumph to the glorious armies of the liberator and reconqueror of Spain, the new Pelayo, the Caudillo! Viva Christ the King!1
In England, judgements were almost as elated: for example, the prominent Catholic apologist Douglas Jerrold, who, a year previously, had constituted a small link in the chain leading to the rising, wrote in his autobiography, Georgian Adventure, of a visit to Franco: Franco might ‘not be a great man, as the world judges, but he is certainly something a thousand times more important—a supremely good man, a hero possibly; possibly a saint’.2
In America, the Basque priests relied upon protestants for active championship. But polls suggested that only four out of ten American Catholics were with the bishops. Opinion was so cautious that a project to bring certain Basque children to America was dropped as risking neutrality.3 Certainly, fear of alienating the Catholic vote was always a factor in Roosevelt’s decisions. In the Basque provinces themselves, persecution had started. Two hundred seventy-eight priests and 125 monks (including 22 Jesuits) suffered deprivation, imprisonment, or deportation to other parts of Spain.
In July 1937 the ‘Second International Writers’ Congress’, ‘a travelling circus’ of writers, was held at Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid, intended as a culmination to these controversies. The declared purpose was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals to the war. One concealed aim, however, was to condemn André Gide, who, in his recent book, Retour de l’URSS, had attacked the Soviet Union, where he had been received as a friend of the government. This congress was attended by Hemingway, Spender, Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Guillén, Octavio Paz, and most of the leading literary apologists for the republic. Others present included Julien Benda, André Chamson, Ilya Ehrenburg, Ludwig Renn, and Eric Weinert (of whom Weinert and Renn had both served in the International Brigades). The congress was dominated by Malraux, ‘with his nervous sniff and tic�
��, who gamely defended Gide from the accusations of being a ‘Hitlerian fascist’.1 The delegates drove about in Rolls-Royces and talked with the Spanish poets of the war—Rafael Alberti, Altolaguirre, Bergamín, Antonio Machado, and Miguel Hernández.
Of these, Rafael Alberti was the most prolific: there were few editions, for example, of Volunteer for Liberty, the paper of the 15th International Brigade, which did not contain one of his verses. The best new poet was, however, probably Miguel Hernández, a member of the Fifth Regiment at the start of the war. He was a shepherd who had been taught to read by a priest in the hills through examples of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing. The outbreak of the civil war inspired in him a sudden outburst of poetic activity. For example:
The winds of the people sustain me,
Spreading within my heart.
The winds of the people impel me,
And roar in my very throat …
I come not from a people of oxen,
My people praise
The lion’s leap,
The eagle’s straight swoop,
And the strong charge of the bull
Whose pride is in his horns.
Hernández was representative of a whole generation of young socialists or communists who believed that they were fighting for liberty in Spain. Most of them would not have put up with Stalinism for a minute had they known what it involved. They were scornful of defeatism and, rather than rendered political by the war, were made military by it.1
A speech by Bertolt Brecht was read at the congress.2 As on many occasions of this kind, the national anthems of the different nations were played, so that the English poet Stephen Spender found himself at Barcelona giving the salute of the clenched fist while the band trumpeted ‘God Save the King’. Azaña refused to give the closing address. He thought that nobody important had come from abroad, and that the Spanish delegation was ‘no more lucid’ than were the foreigners.3