by Hugh Thomas
As for the lives of the combatants, the pilot Ansaldo, now returned to the war after recovering from his injuries in the air crash in which Sanjurjo died, gave one account of a day on the northern front:
8:30 A.M.
Breakfast with the family (at San Sebastián).
9:30 A.M.
Departure for the front. Bombardment of enemy batteries. Machine-gunning of trenches and convoys.
11 A.M.
A little golf at Lasarte …
12:30 P.M.
Sun-bath on Ondarreta beach and short swim in the calm sea.
1:30 P.M.
Beer, shrimps, and conversation in a café.
2 P.M.
Luncheon at home.
3 P.M.
Short siesta.
4 P.M.
Second war mission, similar to that of the morning.
6:30 P.M.
Cinema. Old but fine film of Katharine Hepburn.
9 P.M.
Aperitif at the Bar Basque (San Sebastián). A good ‘Scotch’. Animated scene.
10:15 P.M.
Dinner at Nicolasa’s, war songs, company, enthusiasm …1
Ansaldo here reflected the most dramatic side to the civil war, since the air continued still to be one part of war where individuals fighting in single combat could have an effect. In the course of the conflict, a series of nationalist air heroes had made great reputations: Carlos de Haya, a giant, who had flown Junkers most of 1937, and who was shot down by a Chato in early 1938, after 300 sorties; Angel Salas Larrazábal, who had 618 sorties in the war, including 49 aerial combats—the highest figure for pilots on his side; and, the most famous of all, Joaquín García Morato, who had 511 sorties, 56 combats, and shot down 40 enemy aircraft. Small, brave, sympathetic, García Morato was the hero of the nationalist aviation.2
If ‘heroes’ had come to the papers, saints were back in the schools. The year 1937 had seen the rehabilitation of religious teaching. In April, all schools were ordered to have images of the Virgin. All pupils were, as in the past, before the coming of the republic, to repeat, on reaching and leaving school, an Ave María. The crucifix reappeared in the schoolrooms. Staff and pupils were obliged to go to mass at festivals. Readings from the gospel were to be given once a week.
The Catholic church in fact permeated every aspect of Spanish nationalist culture. Monsignor Antoniutti, the new apostolic delegate, had resolved many problems of the relations between church and state in Spain: thus Cardinal Segura, expelled from the republic as primate, returned as archbishop of Seville, after the death of Archbishop Ilundaín. Segura was, from the start, almost as intransigent towards the new régime as he had been with the republic, refusing, for example, to have the names of dead falangists put on the cathedral wall, and holding himself aloof from the collective madness of war propaganda.
War brought many radical changes. A decree of 7 October obliged all fit women between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five who were not occupied by their families, war-work, or hospital duties, to undertake social service. A certificate of social service became essential to secure employment for Spanish women. The war thus brought change to women among nationalists, as well as republicans, as occurred during all wars of the century. ‘Women in the service of Spain’, ‘Frentes y hospitales’, ‘Work of assistance to the Front’, were some of the organizations to which eager women lent their labour, encouraged by slogans that told them that each stitch was a minor victory against the cold which tortured those at the front.
Largely under German inspiration, the nationalist régime was developing the ideology-less, aseptic ‘interventionism’ of the First World War: permission had to be sought to set up new factories, the function of the state was defined as to ‘discipline production’, even if banks and public companies were relieved of the need to hold shareholders’ meetings, or ensure a public audit of their books. Factories concerned with war production, including the steel and iron works in the Basque country, were placed under military control, and made to supply the armies with the cutlery, plates, uniforms needed, as well as war material. Food, soap and textiles were ‘syndicalized’, under the direction of the state. No strikes or collective bargaining were permitted. Industry was reorganized in branches according to category. Nationalist agricultural policy was the work of a national wheat council, the SNT (Servicio Nacional del Trigo), and then the SNRET (Servicio Nacional de Reforma Económico Social de la Tierra), set up respectively in August 1937 and April 1938. The first sought to control prices and distribution of wheat and other agricultural produce. Sales by farmers were prohibited; the SNT bought produce from farmers at fixed rates, reselling it to authorized millers or bakers. Cultivation of land over and above the previous year’s harvest was banned—a measure which led some farmers to close production. Even so, wheat was exported to Germany. Since, during 1937, more and more of Spain was captured, the surplus disappeared. Prices of bread were nevertheless stable. Oil, fruit, meat and some other foods were similarly organized. The SNRET was intended to reform agriculture by irrigation, modernization and mechanization, not redistribution. Another task was to hand back land to its old owners, after the suspension of the institute and laws of agrarian reform. This meant a return in some cases to 1932, not just July 1936.
Was this a totalitarian state? Its enemies said so, as did some of its own friends. Father Menéndez Reigada, for example, wrote a catechism in which one exchange ran, in answer to this very question, ‘The Spanish state is totalitarian if one understands that word correctly’. ‘But what is a totalitarian state?’ ‘A totalitarian state is one in which the state must intervene in all manifestations of social life …’1
The nationalist army now numbered 500,000 men: less than the republican army at the same time. Some eleven classes of reserves had been called up. These men included not only deserters from the republic, but many captured in the republican zone, even soldiers, and then made to change sides. In the winter of 1937–8, all these troops had mostly become reorganized into divisions. They slowly lost most of the territorial significance of their regional names. Although there was conscription, the number of volunteers was great: perhaps 100,000 Carlists, and over 200,000 falangists.2 These large forces were still organized in three main assemblies: the Army of the North, under Dávila; of the Centre, under Saliquet; and of the South, under Queipo de Llano. Two hundred battalions and seventy batteries (commanded by General Orgaz, the efficient organizer of military academies) formed the reserve.
Since the nationalists’ material was mostly bought abroad, there was no need of local arms factories (apart from explosive and ammunition plants), but Hispano Suiza had established a new factory in Seville, which dealt with repairs to, and reconstruction of, the Fiat fighters, and, of course, capture of the arms and explosives factories of the north made a substantial contribution to reducing the régime’s debt to Germany.1
Forty thousand of the nationalist troops were at this time probably Moroccan, a similar number Italian, while the German personnel numbered 5,000. But those 5,000 were important out of all proportion to numbers. The Army of Africa, both Foreign Legion and Regulares, were now divided up among the rest of the forces. While the commanders who had made their name in the advance on Madrid remained in the central zone, those responsible for the victories in the north, such as García Valiño or Alonso Vega, were high in the list of potential commanders of armies.
The nationalist command had also by this time a good intelligence section, headed by Colonel José Ungría, who had been on Miaja’s staff in Madrid until the war, and who had subsequently escaped from the capital. A student of the École Supérieure de la Guerre at Paris, and military attaché there in the early 1930s, Ungría brought together all the separate intelligence services of the nationalists, Fifth Columnists, and foreign agents into a single organization at first known as the SIM (Servicio de Información Militar), and then the SIPM (Servicio de Información y Policía Militar) established in November 1937.2 This concerne
d itself with counter-espionage as well as intelligence. By mid-1938, it had as many as 30,000 people working for it, with spies in the officers’ school at Barajas in Madrid, as well as several spy rings in Catalonia, run by secret falangists and monarchists. Over a hundred people were said later to have passed daily between Catalonia and France to give information.3 (The republic’s military intelligence was headed by the confusingly similarly named Colonel Domingo Hungría, who commanded the 14th Army Corps of ‘guerrilleros’ which was specially active behind the nationalist lines in the autumn of 1937. There was, however, no urban guerrilla movement in such cities as Saragossa, Burgos or Seville: the activities of these commandos, apparently with the Russian Colonel Rokossovsky as adviser, were confined to roads, railways lines and rural communications.)1
By 1938, many people were escaping from the republican zone as much out of opportunism as from idealism. These persons might receive the question ‘Why did you not cross before?’ on their arrival at Irún. Such people were carefully investigated. So were those who crossed from the republican front to the other side. If they had no friend or relation who could vouch for them, they might easily pass months in labour battalions, working for 2 pesetas a day.2 On the other hand, large numbers of accepted refugees were to be found in all the large cities of nationalist Spain, battening on relations and reinforcing the prejudices of the authorities.
Endlessly throughout 1937, all manner of slogans had been flung at Spaniards between Cádiz and Hendaye. The blue shirt of the Falange received eulogies from Giménez Caballero, poems on ‘imperium’ were written by Pemán, innumerable books exultantly described days at the front. What would Francoist Spain have been like without banners proclaiming ‘For Spain, one, great and free’, ‘For God and Caesar’, ‘For the Fatherland, Bread and Justice’ or ‘We have the vocation of empire’? ‘Franco commands, Spain obeys’ ran another motto, and a poster showed Franco saying, ‘My hand will be firm, my pulse will not tremble’. A new triptych, ‘Service, Brotherhood, Hierarchy’, took the place of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’. In the newspapers or in books, the men of the republic were reviled, and Joaquín Arrarás’s comments upon stolen sections from Azaña’s diaries of 1932 and 1933 set, in ABC and, later, in book form, a new low standard of personal invective. The falangist magazine Fotos published a gallery of ‘illustrious savages’ (the politicians of the republic), while the Navarrese civil governor of Corunna, José María de Arellano, made arrangements for the removal from all documents, from the register of births to the list of the college of lawyers, of the ‘hateful name’ of Santiago Casares Quiroga.3 Antisemitism, latent behind right-wing Spanish propaganda for years, grew steadily out of sympathy with Germany, despite the lack of grounds for it; Juan Pujol, the journalist, once a friend of Azaña’s and press chief to Franco for a time, embarked on the dangerous argument that Companys was the descendant of converted Jews, while some even alleged that ‘an enormous part of the Catalan population is Jewish’.1
On 7 March, the nationalists promulgated their ‘labour charter’. This marked the culmination of many discussions within the régime, and was very much a compromise.2 Many of the proposals sounded admirable. Conditions of work were to be regulated. A minimum wage was guaranteed, accompanied by social insurance, family allowances, and holidays with pay. Labourers’ wages were raised, and peasant families were to be allowed a plot of land adequate for their primary needs. Tenant farmers were to be safeguarded against eviction. Most of these aims remained, however, in the realm of aspiration. In practice, as in Italy under Mussolini, the old oligarchy never lost their economic mastery, despite the newness of their government’s pretensions. The only sections of the charter which were fully applied were those guaranteeing private property and threatening that acts which disturbed production would be regarded as treason.
The economic life of the country was to be controlled by the ‘vertical’ syndicates, whose officials were to be falangists. These prescribed a hierarchy of assemblies rising from local corporations in each district to five national chambers of agriculture, shipping, industry and commerce, public and national service, and culture, and ultimately to a national corporative assembly. These ideas were influenced by Mussolini’s Carta del Lavoro of 1927 and by Hitler’s Law of National Labour of 1934, but their effect on the economy was slight. Few businessmen paid more than token attention to the scheme. More important was the Press Law of April, by which the state assumed control of the media. Only registered journalists would be allowed to practice this craft, just as only registered newspapers and periodicals would be allowed to be published. El Debate, for example, the main paper of the CEDA, would never appear again, nor would the Carlists’ Época. The press would be an instrument of the state. Article 18 of the Press Law forbade all writings which threatened the prestige of the régime, placed obstacles in the way of the government, or ‘stirs pernicious ideas among the intellectually weak’. This broad definition secured the subservience of the press for many years. Monarchist, militarist, clerical and extreme conservative ideas were all more and more expressed with a coating of fascism.
Another innovation was ‘Plan 38’, an educational reform introduced by the intelligent but unpredictable Sainz Rodríguez, the new minister. It put Spanish secondary state education firmly under the Church, leaving the question of universities to be decided after the war. (Universities were suspended during the war on both sides, along with other luxuries.)
The obese Sainz Rodríguez did not last long as minister of education. His indiscretions were great; greater still was his reluctance to apologize for them. He was dismissed, and followed others of a different epoch, such as Lerroux and Gil Robles, into a Lusitanian exile. Under Sainz Rodríguez, state primary education had been formally reorganized, beginning with a purge of teachers and a substitution of traditional courses by four elements—those of religion, patriotism, civic and physical education. Physical education was supposed to concentrate on specifically Spanish sports. The details of the other three elements were decided by the teacher. Hence, the purge was the most important part of the programme. In teaching, as in politics, it is the man who counts, not the theory. Schoolteachers who practiced in the new Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella had to make a sworn declaration to the glorious national movement, had to swear that they had never belonged to any political party associated with the Popular Front, nor to any separatist party, nor to the old teachers’ association affiliated to the UGT. If they had spent any time in the ‘red zone’, they had to make an affidavit describing their activities there. They had also to procure a certificate of their religious, moral, political and social conduct before, and during, the national movement, by their parish priest, as well as a similar certificate, on the same subject, from the commander of the local garrison or ‘delegate of public order’. A report of the mayor had also to be procured, and the would-be teacher had finally to appear personally before an academic, civil or military interviewing authority. Having passed these hurdles, the teacher underwent a course telling him the true principles of education.1 Practice, no doubt, made these difficulties more easily overcome than might seem likely, but almost nobody of left-wing or liberal inclination was to be found in the nationalist state’s educational service in 1938.
The fight against frivolity, and France, continued: ‘Spanish Woman’, a manifesto of the ‘Catholic ladies of Seville’, appealed,
In these grave moments for the country, your way of life cannot be that of frivolity, but austerity; your place is not in the theatres, the paseos, the cafés, but in the church and the hearth. Your ornaments cannot be inspired by the dirty fashions of treacherous and Jewish France, but the modesty and pudeur of christian morality … Your duty is not to procure for yourself an easy life, but to educate your children, sacrificing your pleasures and helping Spain.2
Just as, in republican Spain, conservatism, reaction and christianity survived in embassies, in hiding, or in inconspicuous discretion, so did revolution and radic
alism continue within the shadows of those well-protected castles, half ancient, half new, which were the institutions of the Francoist state. Political life survived after a fashion in prisons, and one should not forget the scenes such as described by the Basque priest Father Gumersindo de Estella, in his prison diary:
3 February, 1938. Thursday. Present at two executions. One called Francisco Espinosa, native of Callosa de Segura (Alicante). Soldier of the republican army, taken prisoner at Celadas (Teruel). Did not wish to confess. He said that religion had been falsified by the rightists, that he who killed by the gun would die by the gun, and that soon the rightists would all be killed themselves. The other was a man of thirty, good physique. Made prisoner at Santoña. Native of Funes (Navarre), but lived in San Sebastián. Confessed, heard mass and received communion. This unhappy man had been in the labour battalion in San Juan de Mozarrifar, he said something against Franco, was detained and condemned to death. He felt panic before the idea of death and above all on seeing the picket of soldiers. Begged for chloroform, but they did not give it to him. They were both executed at seven in the morning in the cemetery. This last was called Florián Lacarra Iñigo.1