by Hugh Thomas
4. Ciano, p. 206. Throughout this time, an Italian spy in the domestic service of Perth gained possession of the telegrams between Rome and England by fitting a removable false back to the ambassador’s private safe. Ciano was thus able to act with unusual freedom in his relations with Britain.
5. GD, pp. 10–11.
6. Viñas plays down Canaris’s role and he may be right to do so. Still, Canaris had been responsible for Spain placing her order in 1926 for submarines with a Dutch firm which was secretly financed by the German admiralty. Cf. F. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics 1918–1933 (Oxford, 1966), p. 243. Franco later granted asylum and a pension to Frau Canaris after her husband’s death in 1944. According to Ian Colvin, Canaris advised Franco as to how to resist Hitler’s demands that Spain enter the world war (Ian Colvin, Hitler’s Secret Enemy, London, 1957, p. 130). See also Karl Abshagen, Canaris (London, 1956), p. 112. Canaris had first been in Spanish Morocco in 1916 where he had set up a supply base for German submarines, prepared a system of observation of allied ships in the Mediterranean and even allegedly directed risings against France.
1. International Military Tribunal, The Trial of the Major War Criminals, Nuremberg, 1947–49, ix, pp. 280–81.
2. Bernhardt to the author, Buenos Aires, 1971.
1. Conversation with Johannes Bernhardt. A reconstruction in detail can be seen in Viñas, p. 350.
2. Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hill (London, 1948), p. 34.
3. Hitler’s Table Talk, ed. by Hugh Trevor-Roper (London, 1953), p. 320.
4. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Memoirs (London, 1954), p. 59.
5. Liddell Hart, loc. cit.
1. See Karl Bracher, The German Dictatorship (London, 1970), p. 323.
2. Milch’s diary for 26 July in David Irving, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe (London, 1974), p. 48.
3. Captain Carranza, a retired army officer, was made a formal partner to Bernhardt. Viñas prints the original contract of the company. ROWAK was not founded till later.
4. See Whealey, loc. cit., p. 215 and reference there; for the Junkers, see José Larios, Combat over Spain (London, 1966), p. 27; cf. evidence of General Warlimont, submitted to US Army Intelligence, 1945 (UN Security Council Report on Spain, 1946).
5. Viñas’s dates.
6. There also were dispatched to Spain at this time twenty 20 mm anti-aircraft guns, two short-wave stations, some machine-guns, bombs, anti-gas equipment, stocks of aviation motors and medical equipment.
1. Liddell Hart, op. cit., p. 98.
2. These figures derive from the nationalist historian of the war in the air, José Gomá, La guerra en el aire (Barcelona, 1958), p. 66. One hundred and seventy transport ships apparently made the journey to Spain during the entire war, chiefly leaving Hamburg.
3. Recollection of Johannes Bernhardt.
4. GD, p. 14.
5. Ribbentrop, p. 60.
6. GD, p. 114.
7. Ernst von Weizsäcker, Memoirs (New York, 1951), p. 112.
1. GD, p. 16.
2. Adolf Galland, The First and the Last (London, 1957), p. 23.
3. ‘Wir werden weitermarschieren, wenn alles in Scherben fällt, Unsere Feinde sind die Roten, die Bolschewisten der Welt’.
4. In his poem ‘The Flowering Rifle’. Campbell was caught in his house at Toledo by the outbreak of the revolution in that city. Narrowly escaping with his life (and that of his family), he later became one of the most ardent apologists for the nationalists, without, however, actually fighting for them. Southworth, El mito, p. 116f., makes a severe comparison between the version of ‘The Flowering Rifle’ published in 1939 and that of 1957.
5 Eden, p. 400. So Monteiro, Portuguese foreign minister, told Eden on 30 July, adding that he was afraid of a Spain too closely linked with Germany.
6. The scheme was, however, examined and rejected. See Hugh Kay, Salazar and Modern Portugal (London, 1970), p. 86f.
1. Eventually ‘several thousand’ Portuguese volunteers fought for the nationalists (Salazar, speech of May 1939, qu. Kay, p. 92).
2. Iturralde, vol. II, p. 113.
3. GD, p. 53. Feeling against Portugal shortly became as strong as against Franco on the international Left. The novelist Louis Golding even agitated in England for a boycott on port.
4. The source of this statement is the same as in fn. 4, p. 325.
5. Nollau (p. 139) says that the Comintern executive (ECCI) set up a special committee on Spain composed of La Pasionaria, André Marty, Togliatti, André Bielov, and Stella Blagoyeva. The last two were cadre functionaries of the Comintern, possibly NKVD appointees: Stella Blagoyeva, a Bulgarian, finished her days as Bulgarian ambassadress to Moscow after 1945.
1. A Jewish polymath of Hungarian extraction. He and his wife were both murdered, being then over eighty, by the Gestapo in 1944. For the meeting, see Langlois, loc. cit.
2. Hernández, p. 36.
3. Report of 1936 TUC, quoted K. W. Watkins, Britain Divided (London, 1963), p. 153.
4. F. J. Taylor, The United States and the Spanish Civil War (New York, 1956), p. 39f.
1. Roosevelt was ignorant of Spanish politics: ‘I hope that if Franco wins, he will establish a liberal régime,’ he apparently told the subsequent republican ambassador, de los Ríos, over their first interview, in the summer of 1936 (Azaña, vol. IV, p. 630).
1. See Allen Guttmann, The Wound in the Heart (New York, 1962).
2. See Caute, p. 139.
3. Savoia Marchetti 81.
4. L’Echo de Paris, 1 August 1936. Cf. Bolín, p. 172. Bonomi said in his book that he received the orders to go to Morocco on 28 July.
5. Note telephone call to Paris, 4 August (FO 371/205/26/23); also, conversations with the late Francis Hemming.
1. See Jean Gisclon, Des avions et des hommes (Paris, 1969), for an account of what happened to the seventeen Dewoitines flown to Montaudran.
2. The exact number, and of what make, is difficult to be certain about. The figure of seventy is Pierre Cot, The Triumph of Treason (Chicago, 1944), p. 343. See also Lacouture, p. 229; Salas Larrazábal, vol. I, p. 436; Sanchis, p. 11; and Les Événements survenus, p. 219. The probable shipment was something like: 5 Bloch 210 bombers; 20 Potez 54 bombers (some being 540, some 543); 10 Breguet XIX reconnaissance planes; 17 Dewoitine 371 fighters; 2 Dewoitine 500 and 510 fighters; 5 Amiot bombers; and 5 Potez 25-A-2 bombers. Pike, pp. 44–6, has a list of 38 planes leaving Francazal (Toulouse) for Barcelona between 2 and 9 August; and 56 between 9 August and 14 October, from Montaudran, the neighbouring airfield owned by Air France. The latter included 6 Loire 46 fighters, and 1 Blériot Spad 510 fighter. There were probably more of the latter. Jules Moch, Rencontres avec Léon Blum (Paris, 1969), p. 146, speaks of another 13 Dewoitines going on 8 August.
3. Jesús Salas, p. 83.
4. A. García Lacalle, Mitos y verdades: la aviación de caza en la guerra española (Mexico, 1974), pp. 134–5.
1. Jesús Salas, p. 64, prints a contract with one pilot. The average junior Spanish officer’s wage was 333 pesetas a month. Later, these huge sums for foreign aviators dropped by half, and, by the winter, volunteer pilots were paid 1,000 pesetas for every enemy shot down. The first 13 pilots were French (Darry, Valbert, Bernay, Thomas, Heilmann) but soon Englishmen appeared (Smith-Piggott, Doherty, Cartwright, Clifford, Collins) and later some Americans (Dahl, Tanker, Leider, Allison, etc.). All were mercenaries though most had, too, some political views.
2. Pierre Péan, Vies et morts de Jean Moulin (Paris, 1998), p. 141ff. Malraux flew, though he had no pilot’s licence. His task was to galvanize and to inspire. Many of his men at the Hotel Florida in Madrid made a bad impression. See Lacouture, p. 230; the novel by Paul Nothomb (Julien Segnaire), La Rançon (Paris, 1952), whose author appears in L’Espoir as ‘Attignies’; Koltsov, p. 93; Pietro Nenni, Spagna (Milan, 1958), p. 196. A negative comment can be seen in Hidalgo de Cisneros, vol. II, p. 323f.
1. Gastone Sozzi was an Italian socialist killed by the Bla
ck Shirts.
2. Thaelmann had been a Hamburg harbour worker, whose hearty but semi-illiterate incoherence commended him to Stalin in the late twenties as a leader of the German communists. He was at this time in a concentration camp, where he was later murdered (1944). Beimler had been imprisoned in Dachau and had escaped by strangling his SS guard and walking out in his clothes.
3. Cornford was accompanied (on a different part of the same Aragon front) by Richard Bennett, also from Trinity College, Cambridge. After a short while on the front-line, Bennett joined the Barcelona Radio Services and broadcast as ‘Voice of Spain’.
4. John Cornford, A Memoir, edited by Pat Sloan (London, 1938), p. 199. See also P. Stansky and W. Abrahams, Journey to the Frontier (London, 1966), a memoir of Cornford and of another Englishman who went to Spain, Julian Bell. Cornford’s resolution, and perhaps even more a famous resolute photograph of him, makes him the best known ‘volunteer for Spain’ of all, in England. His decision to go was fairly casual (Stansky and Abrahams, p. 314). He was a poet of rare promise.
1. Martínez Bande, La invasión de Aragón, p. 70.
2. Les Événements survenus, p. 219.
3. One soon appeared. See FO, 371/205/26/83; 96; and 120; also 28/177.
4. CNT-FAI bulletin, 28 July.
1. GD, p. 20.
2. The republic also attempted to gain native troops from the fetid Spanish colony of Ifni, before it fell at the start of August.
3. R. Salas, vol. I, p. 441.
4. Whealey, in Carr, The Republic, p. 217, quoting German naval documents.
5. Viñas, p. 429.
22
1. 12,000 men were flown to Spain from Africa in August and September in some 677 flights. After the end of September, the need for such airlifts ceased as Franco gained command of the sea. See below, p. 413. (Kindelán, in Guerra de liberación, Saragossa, 1961, p. 365.)
2. Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 687. The very first airlift in the Spanish war was constituted by the modest flights of Fokkers and Dorniers from Tetuán to Seville carried out by Spanish pilots between 20 and 29 July, carrying 10 legionaries in each flight, 837 men between 20 and 31 July, according to J. Martínez Bande, in La campaña de Andalucía (Madrid, 1969), p. 36.
3. For a description of the day, the bands, Franco watching on the hill of El Hacho near Ceuta, and the arrival of the singing warriors, see Larios, p. 32, Bolín, p. 173, and Martínez Bande, op. cit., p. 40f. The aircraft active on this day were the 5 Savoias, 3 Fokker Trimotors, a DC2 captured in Seville, 2 hydroplanes, 2 Nieuport fighters and a squadron of Breguet XIXs (R. Salas Larrazábal, vol. I, p. 295). Cf. also the memoir by the Italian Colonel Bonomi on the Italians’ role.
1. See above, p. 206, fn. 4.
2. A tabor was a battalion of 225 men.
3. Larios, p. 44. The republican air command concentrated—or, rather, split up—its still superior forces in the Sierras to the north of Madrid. See Jesús Salas, p. 64.
1. O Seculo, 11 August 1936. The Portuguese press was, during the early months, frank in its comments on nationalist massacres. See Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth, p. 225, and Southworth, El mito, p. 215, for comment. For this campaign, see also Aznar, p. 102f.; Lojendio, p. 138f.; Sánchez del Arco; and Harold Cardozo, The March of a Nation (New York, 1937); Cecil Gerahty, The Road to Madrid (London, 1937); and H. R. Knickerbocker, The Siege of the Alcázar (Philadelphia, 1936).
1. The news of the ‘massacre of Badajoz’ was first given to the world by two French journalists, Marcel Dany and Jacques Berthet, and a Portuguese journalist, Mario Neves. Their account was later denied by Major McNeil Moss in The Legend of Badajoz (London, 1937), which was itself countered by Koestler in Spanish Testament, pp. 143–5. McNeil Moss got his story from two British volunteers for Franco (Captains Fitzpatrick and Nangle) who, however, only joined the nationalist army on 9 September. Inquiries by the author in Badajoz in 1959 left him convinced of the truth of the story as described above. The exact number of those killed will probably never be known. It may not be quite as many as 1,800—the figure named by Jay Allen of the Chicago Tribune. Southworth’s El mito (p. 123) contains new material on these events. There was certainly fighting inside the cathedral, as eye-witnesses separately testified to the author, and as is suggested anyway in nationalist accounts (e.g., Sánchez del Arco, op. cit., p. 9). See Jay Allen’s report published at the time in the Chicago Tribune (30 August 1936), reprinted in Robert Payne, The Civil War in Spain, 1936–1939 (New York, 1962), pp. 89–91; and J. T. Whitaker, ‘Prelude to War’ (Foreign Affairs, October 1942), p. 104f. A false account of this massacre in which Yagüe was accused of having organized a fiesta at which the prisoners were shot before the wealth and beauty of Badajoz was published in La Voz of Madrid, 27 October 1936, and had a disastrous effect, causing reprisals in Madrid.
1. Yagüe did not intervene to prevent bloodshed. But, on Franco’s orders, he did usually restrain the Moors from castrating corpses of their victims—an established Moorish battle-rite.
2. Malraux, pp. 99–105; Lacouture, p. 233.
1. Hidalgo de Cisneros, vol. II, p. 299. These Fiat-Ansaldo fighters, the CR 32s, were the most used Italian fighter on the nationalist side in the civil war. They had begun to arrive by sea on 14 August and were based at the end of August on Cáceres.
2. Aznar, p. 174. It was Hernández Sarabia’s last act as minister of war.
3. Iribarren, pp. 132, 135.
1. Iturralde, vol. II, p. 72.
2. Op. cit., p. 141. The brave, ruthless, simple giant, Beorlegui, was a man of character. Mola kept ringing him up but the colonel hated the telephone and persuaded Major Martínez de Campos to serve as go-between. ‘You must take San Sebastián,’ Mola would yell; ‘Let him take Madrid,’ Beorlegui would call back. See Martínez de Campos, p. 45. Beorlegui put up his umbrella in Oyarzún to protect himself from bombs (del Burgo, p. 206). See also Martínez Bande’s official history, La guerra en el norte (Madrid, 1969), pp. 37–99.
1. On his own admission in the Chambre des Députés on 16 March 1939, the French communist leader André Marty, member of the Comintern’s central committee, ECCI, future leader of the regularly organized International Brigades, was at Irún.
1. Martínez Bande, op. cit., pp. 91–2.
2. See above, p. 122.
3. Luis María de Lojendio, Operaciones militares de la guerra de España (Barcelona, 1940), p. 108; Martínez Bande, La campaña en Andalucía, p. 73f.
4. Borkenau, p. 158; Martínez Bande, op. cit., p. 61. Others fought bravely, but one survivor recalls a whole battalion of volunteers from Alcoy being knifed by the Moors in their trenches (José Cirre Jiménez, De espejo a Madrid, Granada, 1937, p. 20).
5. Evidence of Francisco Giral.
6. Zugazagoitia, p. 110.
1. Taking with him, secretly, Ramón Serrano Súñer. Fernández-Castañeda eventually became a general in nationalist Spain.
2. Fraser, The Pueblo, p. 74.
3. Charles Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies (Princeton, 1961), p. 181. See also José Luis Alcofar Nassaes, Spansky, vol. I (Barcelona, 1973), p. 23.
1. Figures in Guarner memorandum, p. 4. Originally, perhaps, only 2,000 disembarked but the total rose to about 8,000 probably (Martínez Bande, La invasión de Aragón, p. 141). The republic had made one other attempt at capturing Majorca: a destroyer anchored in the Bay of Pollensa, the captain landed alone, requisitioned a car and drove fifty miles to Palma, where, in full uniform, he called on the military governor to surrender. The audacious request was rejected and the captain detained (see De la Cierva, Historia ilustrada, II, p. 40).
2. Lojendio, p. 150; see too Elliot Paul, The Life and Death of a Spanish Town (New York, 1937); Jesús Salas, p. 98. Martínez Bande, La invasión de Aragón, has a useful chapter. This first Italian shipment to Majorca was financed by Juan March. See also the efforts of Mallorquin falangists, such as de Zayas, to buy arms direct in Rome for their island, reported in Martínez Bande, La invasión de Aragón, documento No
. 3, p. 268f.
1. Bernanos, pp. 111–12.
2. Qu. Jellinek, p. 405.
3. Dundas, p. 69ff. Georges Oudard (Chemises noires, brunes, vertes en Espagne, Paris, 1938, p. 196f.), a pro-Right writer, noted, ‘if Franco kept Majorca, it was thanks to the Italian aircraft’. Azaña, vol. IV, pp. 776 and 629, is specially contemptuous of this expedition for a ‘Greater Catalonia’, of which he was uninformed. De la Cierva, Historia ilustrada, vol. II, p. 83, says that there was virtually no repression in Majorca; perhaps Bernanos exaggerated, but everything points to there having been ‘numerosísimas ejecuciones’ as an informant told Azaña later (op. cit., p. 737).
1. These details are described in Elliot Paul’s book cited above.
2. See Oscar Pérez Solís, Sitio y defensa de Oviedo (Valladolid, 1938), passim; and a useful study, Oscar Muñiz Martín, El verano de la dinamita (Madrid, 1974).
1. Borkenau, p. 147; General Cause, pp. 317–41.
1. GD, p. 61.
23
1. Count Ciano, Diplomatic Papers (London, 1948), pp. 25–6.
2. Eden, p. 402.
3. GD, p. 27.
4. Ibid., p. 30.
1. FD, p. 120.
2. GD, p. 27.
3. The Times, 7 August 1936.
4. GD, p. 323.
5. USD, 1936, vol. II, p. 485.
1. Alvarez del Vayo (Freedom’s Battle, p. 70) reported the British ambassador’s words more strongly, and, though there is no evidence for other than the above in Sir George’s account (Paris telegram No. 252 of 7 August) and in the French Documents (FD, vol. III, pp. 158–9), it is possible that he did speak specially vigorously: Hugh Lloyd Thomas, British minister in Paris, wrote privately to Sir Alexander Cadogan, under-secretary at the Foreign Office, that the ambassador’s conversation with Delbos ‘might well have been the factor which decided the government [in France] to announce the policy of non-intervention’ (FO, 371/205/31/27). The French under-secretary, Pierre Vienot, later told Thomas that the ambassador’s ‘timely words’ had been most useful (loc. cit., 29/215), and Delbos later said that he had ‘listened’ to the ambassador’s appeal. The conventional view of the time was that ‘Perfide Albion’ had inspired non-intervention from the start.