The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  3. Thomas and Witts, p. 212.

  1. Thomas and Witts, pp. 197–8.

  2. See below, p. 623.

  3. Martínez Bande, p. 110.

  4. See Hills, p. 281.

  5. The Italian raids on Barcelona in 1938 were against a city with some air defences. But see below, p. 785.

  6. Though he had not lived in Spain since 1903, Picasso in 1936 had accepted the (honorary) post of director of the Prado and reported on the condition of the paintings which had been removed from Madrid to Valencia. In January he had etched a series of satirical strips, ‘The Dream and the Lie of General Franco’, in the style of the Aleluyas for which Spanish politics had been known since the eighteenth century—and revived during the civil war.

  7. Guernica was an international journalistic watershed in the civil war. Thereafter, for instance, Time magazine, Life, and, after a while, Newsweek took the side of the republic (Guttman, pp. 61–2).

  1. The Times, 5 May 1937.

  2. Evidence of Father Alberto Onaindía. The priest who collected the signatures, Father Fortunato de Unzueta, wrote an account of how this letter was prepared, in El clero vasco, p. 244f.

  3. It appears nevertheless that he was transferred from his post immediately. Bolín’s memoirs were only published in 1967. His Appendix III and Ch. 33 are, I fear, untrue.

  4. In Talón’s Arde Guernica.

  5. See De la Cierva, Historia ilustrada, vol. II, p. 158.

  1. Galland, loc. cit.

  2. NIS (c), forty-ninth meeting.

  3. R. Salas Larrazábal, vol. II, p. 1561.

  1. The best book on this event is Julio de Urrutia, El cerro de los héroes (Madrid, 1965), a passionate work of investigation. The heroes did not receive their due reward in nationalist Spain.

  36

  1. See above, p. 492.

  1. All the above and the following derived from the Carlist Archives, Seville. The falangists taking part in the discussions were Sancho Dávilla, Pedro Gamero del Castillo (a leading ‘new shirt’ of Seville), and José Luis Escario. The Carlists were Fal Conde, the Conde de Rodezno, and José María Arauz de Robles. Hedilla, the provisional head of the Falange, knew of the negotiations but disapproved of them (GD, p. 268). He did not know of the part played by Dávila (García Venero, Falange, p. 324). Another who played a part was José María Valiente, sometime leader of the CEDA youth, and now a Carlist.

  2. The most remarkable document was a series of ‘bases for a union’ of the two groups, included in a falangist note of 1 February. By this, the Falange would ‘agree to install, at an opportune moment, a new monarchy, as a guarantee of the continuity of the national-syndicalist state and as the basis for its imperium. The new monarchy would break all links with the liberal monarchy.’

  3. See above, p. 413.

  1. Serrano Súñer was not a member of the Falange before 1936. His escape from the republican zone was thanks to his move to a clinic, and his subsequent escape thence with Miaja’s ex–chief of staff on the Córdoba front. The republican minister without portfolio, Irujo, was responsible for his move to the clinic (see Lizarra, p. 125) on the initiative of Dr Gregorio Marañón.

  2. Hoare, p. 56. Hoare compared him to Stendhal’s Count Mosca (p. 167).

  1. Serrano Súñer, pp. 29–31.

  1. For this, see García Venero, Falange, p. 317. The event occurred on 2 February. The speech had contained such phrases as ‘we do not want a Marxist revolution. But we know Spain does need the revolution.’ The speech had been an attack on both Left and Right in the elections of 1936.

  2. The case made for him by García Venero, Falange, p. 237f., appears convincing, though Southworth (Antifalange, p. 159) says that what distressed him was the number of those shot without trial, rather than those shot at all.

  3. Cantalupo, pp. 117–18; García Venero, Falange, p. 249; and Southworth, Antifalange, p. 160. Italian fascists were often shocked by Spanish conservatives’ brutality.

  1. Angel Alcázar de Velasco, Serrano Súñer en la Falange (Madrid, 1940), pp. 64–6.

  1. Haartman’s memoir, qu. Southworth, Antifalange, p. 197.

  2. The conflict of evidence is summarized in Southworth, op. cit., p. 198 and pp. 219–24.

  3. See Cartas entrecruzadas entre el Sr D. Manuel Hedilla Larrey y el Sr D. Ramón Serrano Súñer (Madrid, 1947). See also L. Pagés Guix (possibly a pseudonym for Garcerán), La Traición de los Franco (Madrid, 1938); Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 166–7; and García Venero, Falange, p. 372f. For Peral, see Ortiz Villalba, p. 242.

  1. García Venero, Falange, p. 394. The text is in Díaz Plaja, pp. 398–401. The writer and wit Agustín de Foxá referred to the monstrously entitled party as the ‘Compañia Internacional de Coches Camas y de los Grandes Expresos Europeos’. It was written some days before—no doubt before 16 April (see Escobar, p. 178).

  2. Carlist Archive. The official party uniform henceforth consisted of the blue shirt of the Falange and the red beret of the Carlists. Neither party liked the compromise, and the falangists put the Carlist beret into their pockets whenever they could. On one celebrated occasion, a group of falangists with bare heads were greeted by the Carlist Rodezno in ordinary clothes. Asked why he was so dressed, the old cynic answered: ‘It is because I cannot put my blue shirt into my pocket …’ (Ansaldo, p. 78).

  1. Serrano Súñer, p. 42.

  2. They were José Luis Escario, the ‘technocrat’; Colonel Gazapo, the rebel officer of Melilla at the beginning of the war, active in Saragossa since, a falangist since about May 1936; Miranda, the Seville chief; Giménez Caballero, an early Spanish fascist, expelled by José Antonio and recently readmitted; López Bassa, an arriviste, from Majorca; and Pedro González Bueno, another (very) ‘new shirt’.

  1. See Southworth, Antifalange, p. 213.

  2. There appears no truth in the story put out by Cardozo, p. 308, that Franco was personally challenged by Hedilla.

  3. García Venero, Falange, p. 406. This was the very time when the Guernica attack of 26 April was conceived and carried out.

  4. An exception was José Luis Arrese, who was condemned to death in Seville for helping Hedilla but became, nevertheless, secretary-general of the movement in 1941.

  1. His vexations were added to by his fellow prisoners who were ‘reds’ and who hated him.

  2. Gil Robles, ex-leader of the CEDA, announced his support for Franco, but he spoiled the effect by aligning himself at the same time with the (orthodox) monarchists. He remained in exile, taking no part in politics (though he occasionally helped with arms traffic), and did not return to Spain till 1957.

  1. Serrano Súñer, p. 38. This text was written in 1947 and the mention of the ‘immoral’ side to German practice was thus a post-1945 reflection.

  2. GD, p. 274.

  3. Serrano Súñer, p. 49.

  1. ABC de Sevilla, 19 July 1937.

  2. At least one man, a pastry-cook from Estremadura, Fernando Gordillo Bellido, unwisely used the back of one of these posters for a different purpose: to write a letter renewing a subscription to a journal. He was arrested, tried, and gaoled for six years and a day, and met another innocent man, Hedilla, in the gaol of Las Palmas (García Venero, Falange, p. 444).

  3. W. González Oliveros, in Falange y Requeté orgánicamente solidarios (Valladolid, 1937), as qu. Cabanellas, vol. II, p. 939. González Oliveros became civil governor in Barcelona after the war.

  1. ‘El Tebib Arrumi’ was Víctor Ruiz Albéniz, who had worked for eight years as a doctor at the Monte Uixan mines. For a general picture of press relations in Salamanca, see Southworth, La Destruction, p. 63f.

  2. Gay was succeeded soon by Major Arias Paz of the corps of engineers.

  37

  1. Bricall, p. 137.

  2. Surprisingly, April 1937 was the best month in the metallurgical industry for many months.

  3. 29,228,088 kW in comparison with 40,265,603 in 1937 (Bricall, p. 55).

  4. I quote Jackson’s figure (op. cit., p
. 365).

  5. FAI minutes, published Barcelona 1937. Qu. Cattell, Communism, p. 110. (La Pasionaria to Azaña, in Azaña, vol. IV, p. 820.)

  6. An imaginative description appears in Castro Delgado, pp. 475–80.

  7. Díaz, Por la unidad, pp. 13–15.

  1. Lister, p. 106.

  2. The Spanish Revolution (POUM newspaper), 3 February 1937.

  3. Gorkin, El proceso de Moscú, p. 45.

  4. Martín Blázquez, p. 320.

  1. See above, p. 562, where this idea is first discussed; and Payne, Spanish Revolution, pp. 271–2.

  2. Hernández (p. 66), from whom comes our knowledge of this meeting, says that it was Togliatti who proposed the destruction of Largo Caballero. Togliatti himself (Rinascita, December 1962) denied that he was in Spain until July 1937 and there is such general agreement that he was in Moscow until then (see Spriano, op. cit., p. 215, fn. 1) that we must admit that Hernández must be wrong. The version is repeated by Spriano in his introduction to Palmiro Togliatti’s Escritos sobre la Guerra de España (Barcelona, 1980), p. 9. It is possible though that Togliatti could have come to Spain on a special mission, as stated before. (See p. 340 above.) See further discussion in Giorgio Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti (Rome, 1973), p. 285f.

  1. Peirats, vol. II, p. 172.

  2. Now the Plaza San Jaime.

  1. Ruta, journal of JLC (Catalan anarchist youth), 25 March 1937.

  2. ‘Uncontrollables’ at the CNT’s orders robbed the Generalidad of 18,000 pounds of flour, 5 lorry-loads of wheat, 40 of potatoes: Solidaridad Obrera defended them. See report in Martínez Bande, La invasión, p. 278.

  3. The new government consisted of Tarradellas (Premier), Sbert (culture), and Ayguadé (internal security), all of the Esquerra; Isgleas, Capdevila, Domenech and Aurelio Fernández (of the CNT, responsible for defence, economy, public services, and health); Miret, Vidiella and Comorera (of the PSUC, responsible for food, labour and justice); while Calvet (rabassaires) was responsible for agriculture. The appointment of a onetime pistolero, such as Aurelio Fernández, scarcely inspired confidence.

  1. I am grateful to Mariano Puente for his help in elucidating this obscure brawl. See also Benavides, Guerra y revolución en Cataluña, p. 405f., where the accusation is made that Martín and his men were attempting to extend their area of control, over the village of Bellver on the road to Seo. The collective had 170 members, with a salary of 50 pesetas per man, 35 per woman. See La Révolution prolétarienne, 25 June 1937. Martín has his defenders.

  2. This was the impression of George Orwell, who returned to Barcelona from the front on 26 April—he had been serving with the POUM column (Homage to Catalonia, pp. 169ff.). His account of the following riots, marvellously written though it is, is a better book about war itself than about the Spanish war. But see Cruells, Mayo sangriento (Barcelona, 1970), pp. 41, 52. Auden commented in ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’ (New English Weekly, 29 July 1937, qu. Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. I, p. 269) that ‘the Spanish government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan government) is more afraid of the revolution than it is of the fascists’.

  3. José Peirats, Los anarquistas en la crisis política española (Buenos Aires, 1964), pp. 241–3; Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-revolution in Spain (New York, 1938), p. 87.

  1. Miravitlles, p. 141.

  2. Some still think that the plot was carefully worked out; suggestions supporting this conspiracy theory are contained in Krivitsky (p. 128), who wrote that, on 2 May, he met (presumably in Holland) an important Spanish communist, one ‘García’, head of ‘the loyalist secret service’, who had been sent to Moscow for a holiday by Orlov, who wanted him ‘out of the way’. But who is this ‘García’? Victor Serge (op. cit., p. 335) speaks of a discussion in March in Brussels with someone who had been told by a ‘prominent Spanish communist’ that in Barcelona ‘they’re getting ready to liquidate thousands of anarchists and POUM militants’. The matter is intelligently discussed by Radosh et al., 173–74. The authors quote from a report by a Comintern representative that the crisis had to be hastened and if necessary provoked. Abad de Santillán talks of a prediction, also in Brussels, by the Spanish ambassador, Ossorio y Gallardo, that the CNT and FAI would soon be finally dealt with. Gorkin (The Review of the Imre Nagy Institute for Political Research, October 1959) claims that the Comintern’s man in Catalonia, Ernö Gerö, ‘provoked in 1937 the famous May Days in Barcelona … the great provocator of Budapest in 1956 [thus] held his dress rehearsal’. Azaña censured Ayguadé for ‘giving battle without having prepared for it’ (vol. IV, p. 577), and, in his La insurrección libertaria y el ‘eje’ Barcelona-Bilbao (vol. III, p. 514), pointed out that ‘all the elements were present for a conflagration in Barcelona, without the “novelesque” explanation of a “foreign power” being involved’.

  1. Who were the ‘Friends of Durruti’? Young FAIistas, such as Pablo Ruiz, Careño, Eleuterio Roig and, above all, Jaime Balius, who had disliked the collaborationist politics of the CNT since November. The real old friends of Durruti, the solidarios and the men around the journal Nosotros, were, however, not friendly to the ‘Friends of Durruti’. The ideas of the latter were to be seen in the journal El Amigo del Pueblo. They were, as Lorenzo says (p. 269), bolshevik anarchists, in the sense that they wanted to capture power, not the dissolution of the state. They were Leninists, perhaps, without being Marxists, if that is possible. Another dissident group had been formed around the journal Acracia, edited in Lérida by José Peirats.

  1 A minor attack which had no consequences.

  2. GD, p. 286. Cruells, p. 47, argues that Franco’s agents did little beyond supply information to the nationalists.

  3. Richard Bennett (with Barcelona Radio) described to me how at this time his door in Barcelona was opened by two men carrying bombs who bluntly asked him: ‘Whose side are you on?’ ‘Yours,’ he wisely answered. Another witness of these events was Willy Brandt, representing Norwegian newspapers in Spain from February to May 1937. Sympathetic to the POUM though critical of their excesses, Brandt returned to Norway hating the communists (see Terence Prittie, Willy Brandt, London, 1974, p. 34).

  1. There was some possibility of some sectors of the CNT, especially the FIJL, going over to the POUM. See Wildebaldo Solano, The Spanish Revolution: The Life of Andrés Nin (London, no date), p. 18. Wildebaldo Solano was secretary-general of the POUM youth movement.

  2. Julián Gorkin, Caníbales políticos, p. 69.

  3. Peirats, La CNT, vol. II, p. 274.

  4. Ibarruri, p. 377. This story is also told by Hidalgo de Cisneros, vol. II, p. 210, who says that anarchists and POUMistas had already left the front.

  1. Semprún Maura, p. 219.

  2. Members were Sesé (UGT), Valerio Mas (CNT), J. Pons (rabassaires), and Martín Faced (Esquerra).

  3 Who by? The two Italians were arrested, by presumably PSUC or Generalidad police, on 5 May, as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. They were never seen again. Berneri was working on a dossier listing relations between Italian fascism and Catalan nationalism (Peirats, La CNT, vol. II, p. 198). He had become a kind of intellectual centre for the backers of ‘revolution without delay’ and, as Semprún Maura puts it, was an ‘obvious target for the Russian-directed secret police’. Italian anarchists had been active in Barcelona for a generation. Spriano (p. 209) assumes that the murder of Berneri was an example of ‘Stalinist methods introduced into Spain’. Berneri had only two days before publicly regretted, on Barcelona Radio, the death of Antonio Gramsci, in magnanimous terms (op. cit., p. 154). See the testimony of Giovanna Berneri, widow of Camillo, in Lezioni sull’antifascismo (Bari, 1962), p. 190f.

  4. Orwell, with a POUM firing-post, shared this fear.

  5. CAB, 20(37) of 5 May.

  1. Solidaridad Obrera, 14 May 1937. Some thirty or forty anarchists were killed in Tarragona, more in Tortosa. In both places, the fighting began, as at Barcelona, with a would-be police takeover of the telephone exchanges (Peirats, La CNT, vol. II, p. 342)
. In Gerona, and Lérida, where the CNT or the POUM had complete control, there were no incidents; everywhere else in Catalonia, where the PSUC or the Esquerra had influence, there was fighting.

  2. Angel Ossorio y Gallardo, Vida y sacrificio de Companys (Buenos Aires, 1943), p. 210.

  3. Sanz, Los que fuimos, p. 145.

  4. Peirats, vol. II, p. 206. Abad de Santillán (p. 138) speaks of 1,000 dead, and several thousand wounded. The anarchist leaders regretted afterwards that they had secured this cease-fire, since it led to their final surrender before the communists (Abad de Santillán, p. 140f.).

  1. Peirats, vol. II, p. 346. Mas had been secretary of the CNT in Catalonia. He was succeeded in that post by Dionisio Eroles, and he, soon afterwards, by Juan Domenech.

  2. Azaña, vol. IV, p. 575. Of the government that he formed in February 1936, only two people (Giral and Casares), as he noted bitterly, were in Spain: the rest had gone into exile or were, safely, ambassadors.

  3. Zugazagoitia, p. 213. Martínez Bande, La invasión, p. 282, prints the text of Azaña’s telephone conversations with the ministry of war and subsequently with Prieto.

  1. The Estremadura plan (drawn up by Colonel Alvarez Coque) is printed by Martinez Bande in La ofensiva sobre Segovía, pp. 237–40, and discussed there on p. 53f.

  2. See Radosh et al., 261, 274, 285.

  3. Hernández, pp. 80–81.

  4. Casado, pp. 71–3.

  1. Ibid. A state department memorandum (sent from Valencia) estimated that at this moment the republic possessed 460 aircraft. Of these, 200 were said to be Russian fighters, 150 Russian bombers (bimotor Martin type), and 70 Russian observation planes (Cattell, Communism, p. 228). See also Jackson, p. 372 fn., where the views of Rudolfo Llopis, Largo’s cabinet secretary, and Julio Just, minister of public works, are compared with those of Prieto as to the practicality of the scheme.

  2. Azaña, vol. IV, p. 594. Baráibar subsequently gave a report on this project to Azaña (op. cit., p. 613) in which he assured the President that the rising was a ‘matter of days—when the religious fiestas come to an end’. Azaña believed rightly that similar sums were being spent in Morocco by the nationalists. There was also a plan for Moorish women to be paid to go to Spain to persuade their husbands in Franco’s army to throw down their arms: ‘We make a Moroccan adaptation of Lysistrata,’ said Azaña grimly!