Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  The sound of war had been plainly heard for some time in Madrid; every day saw the enemy getting closer. The first Russian tanks thrown into a counter-offensive failed to stop the advance;50 by 6 November 1936, the Army of Africa had reached the suburbs of the capital – a relatively small force of some 20,000 men which, in three months, had fought its way some 400 km from Seville and now stood poised to take a city of over 1 million inhabitants. A population which had struck a leading CNT–FAI militant returned from San Sebastián in September with its apparent insouciance. Miguel GONZALEZ INESTAL thought Madrid was mad after his experience in the Basque country,51 where ‘everybody was virtually living in the front line, everything was devoted to the war effort’. In Madrid, at the beginning of September, the front still seemed very distant, he thought, the war a long way off. The people hadn’t realized what was about to hit them.

  —With a few exceptions – to speak of my own organization (and the others were the same) – people weren’t taking the war seriously. The few thousand militants who were at the front knew what was at stake; but the majority simply remained in Madrid, quite content with what had been done, content to remain complacent spectators …

  By 6 November, eve of the nationalist offensive on the capital, things had changed. In a dramatic, last-minute move, the government of Largo Caballero, which the anarcho-syndicalists had just joined, left Madrid for Valencia that day. With it went the leaderships of the political parties and organizations. A silence fell: people retreated to their homes, confused by what initially seemed an open confession that the capital could not be defended.

  José VERGARA, agricultural ministry official, walked that night from the ministry in the Plaza de Atocha through the centre to the Calle Sagasta. Not a soul was about; he saw houses with doors open, everything looked abandoned. Artillery fire was plainly audible. There was nothing, he felt, to prevent Franco’s troops walking into Madrid.

  —The war was lost – had seemed lost to me for some time. The military leadership was patently absurd, the internal political fighting savage. It was impossible to win with such confusion, such lack of decisive action. It was all over …

  Others did not share this view. On the roof of the left republican party’s new headquarters in the Círculo Mercantil in the Gran Vía, Régulo MARTINEZ, the Madrid party president, was calling over a loudspeaker on the population to rally to the capital’s defence. The Madrid left republican committee had refused to leave with the government, whose hurried departure seemed to MARTINEZ a disaster. But there was talk of a defence junta being set up; and while there was life there was hope. With each passing hour, thought Lorenzo IÑIGO, secretary of the Madrid CNT metalworkers’ union, the population was getting over its initial shock. A general feeling of indignation arose. People prepared themselves to fight.

  —We libertarian youth were outraged that a government should flee in the face of the enemy. Some of Cipriano Mera’s militiamen stopped members of the government in their flight and wanted to force them to return to Madrid …

  Victoria ROMAN, a university student, saw young children beginning to drag cobblestones to where men and women were raising barricades. She was due to leave the city, but suddenly she felt she couldn’t go.

  —I felt myself completely identified with the people of Madrid. ‘I’m staying,’ I told the evacuation people, who wanted me to accompany the children I had been looking after to the Levant. I didn’t belong to any political party; I was a typically undisciplined Spaniard, prepared now to do anything to prevent fascism triumphing. ‘No one can leave Madrid at a time like this,’ I told them …

  Almost alone, the communists defended the government’s action, arguing that it could not remain besieged in the capital and govern effectively. Narciso JULIAN, communist railwayman who had returned to Madrid from Aragon and was now commander of the armoured train brigade, was critical of the scores of people who had left or attempted to do so in the government’s wake.

  —Without any excuse these people fled while the masses began to prepare to defend themselves amidst a desperate shortage of arms. We organized a railwaymen’s battalion and went to the war ministry to arm it; but there were no arms, and the battalion had to set out for the Casa de Campo and arm itself from the dead and deserters …

  The Franco army, which was in position to launch its initial offensive on the day of the government’s departure, delayed its attack by twenty-four hours. The population began to rally to the calls going out from all quarters for trade unionists to report for mobilization.

  —‘¡No pasarán! ¡No pasarán!’ That’s what you heard and saw everywhere all of a sudden, recalled Pedro GOMEZ, a UGT turner. It was like an ad which says ‘Use instant shaving cream’ and you do. Everyone believed it …

  A few hours earlier, as the government left, enemy shells began to whistle over the factory where GOMEZ worked. It was the plant where the famous English double-decker buses had been assembled before the war and which had been converted to ammunition production. The workers’ committee put out the word to evacuate all the machines and tools.

  —‘They won’t capture any of this,’ we said. We were in charge there. I hadn’t seen any of the former bosses because by the time I joined the plant three or four days after the uprising the factory committee had been elected. My older brother worked there as a turner and he taught me the job; I had been working in a small workshop making tortoise-shell combs before. So we piled all the machinery and equipment into lorries and moved to the north of the city out of artillery range. Then my brother and I went home. My mother looked at my brother. ‘Anda, hijo,’ she said, ‘there’s fighting to be done.’ ‘Wait a minute. Let’s see if it passes.’ But when he saw it wasn’t going to go away, he set off; he hadn’t far to go to the front …

  For the past month, Julián VAZQUEZ, communist garment workers’ union leader, had been organizing a tailors’ battalion. He and another union leader bought some books, amongst them an excellent French infantry manual, and set about training the men. Most unions organized battalions on the same lines. On 7 November 1936, the communist party issued orders that only women were to remain in the rear.

  —The communist party had been calling for the capital’s defence to be organized when Franco’s army was still in Estremadura. A socialist said to me: ‘You’re scaremongers, you’re trying to attract new members.’ ‘If the party has said it, me cago en la leche, it must be true,’ I replied. I had blind faith in the party. And now it had come true. But our tailors’ battalion had no arms. So we communist union leaders set off to wait in a trench in Carabanchel until there was a spare rifle, leaving the battalion behind …

  —At union headquarters the men stood silent, hands in pockets, waiting to go, recalled Pablo MOYA, a UGT turner. There were more men than rifles. An elderly couple turned up. The president of the socialist party’s East Circle came to ask what they were doing. ‘We’ve answered the call, we’ve come to do what everyone else is doing – ’ He asked them to go home; they refused. They had to be taken off almost by force. When some rifles came, the men went off, not singing, but silently, fully aware of what was at stake. They knew what might happen, and they preferred to die rather than let it happen …

  —My mother got a bit of firewood and a few litres of oil; she was prepared to boil it and pour it on the enemy soldiers’ heads if they came in. It was like 2 May,52 thought Josefa MORALES, a secretary. But different, too. On the one hand the fear of what would happen if they got in – we remembered Asturias after the October rising; on the other, complete faith that the city would resist …

  In the garment workers’ union secretariat, the women members remained all night at their posts. They could hear gunfire from the lower barrios of Usera and Carabanchel, see the flashes in the sky. At the North Station, María DIAZ accompanied her engine-driver father when the railwaymen’s battalion was ordered out to the Casa de Campo as the Franco forces began their attack. The men were without arms, the battalion had
just been formed.

  —There was chaos, confusion. We didn’t know where the enemy was, didn’t know whether they had cut us off. We were sent out as reinforcements in case the line broke; we had to get our arms from the dead …

  Within a few hours the railwaymen were ordered to return to the North Station. María DIAZ looked out of a window and saw aeroplanes overhead. ‘Those must be bombs, what else can they be?’ she said to herself as she watched the objects falling. The explosions threw people to the ground. No one was prepared for what was happening, she thought. Her father, a lifelong republican, had torn up his left republican party card when the government refused to arm the workers at the start of the uprising. Like him, she considered herself a republican. But now, in the station, she saw that while all the railwaymen were prepared to defend the republic, there were some who were different, who stood out by their discipline, their seriousness, their respect for others.

  —I learnt they were communists. I asked to join the party. ‘No,’ they said, ‘you’re only sixteen, you’ll have to join the youth movement.’ But I didn’t want that; I insisted until they let me join the party …

  The sky was grey, it was cold. The city seemed to reflect the sky’s colour, thought Alvaro DELGADO, the fourteen-year-old son of a shop manager who used to watch the men leaving for the sierra in the mornings of the early days of the war. Now he was watching men filing out of a communist party locale in Atocha and others from a socialist party branch in the Calle Valencia. They were in their ordinary clothes, rifles in their hands. Some of them carried canned fruit tins filled with dynamite.

  Overhead, he heard the distinctive sound of the ‘Three Marías’ – the popular name for the three-engined German Junkers – which flew over nearly every day on bombing missions. Adults and children gathered in the streets, oblivious to the risks, to watch the bombers. But that day, the boy saw some small planes with snub noses he had never seen before which began attacking the ‘Three Marías’. What were they? They bore the republican emblem. In the dogfight, enemy planes crashed to the ground; people cheered. Until then the republican air force had rarely attempted to fight off the enemy. These were Russian fighters, the chatos (snub-nose) as they were rapidly baptized. The situation suddenly seemed transformed.

  —When the government left, we felt betrayed. People talked openly in the streets about the enemy being in Carabanchel suburb already. Everyone expected the enemy to take the city. But they didn’t. The climate began to change. There were calls everywhere to defend the city. ‘Better to die than to live on your knees,’ as La Pasionaria said …

  —This was the moment when we liked the Russians, recalled Pablo MOYA, the UGT turner. It was marvellous to see those Russian fighters knocking the German planes out of the sky. The streets were full of people cheering and clapping. The Russians had come to our defence, we felt great sympathy for the USSR. Later, things changed …

  On the ground, the nationalist command was surprised by the stubborn resistance; fearful of attacks on their extended flanks, they had thrown only 3,000 troops into the main assault through the Casa de Campo on the first day, 7 November, with a further 2,000 engaged in diversionary attacks. That night, the hard-pressed republican command, which Caballero had put in the hands of General Miaja, enjoyed a stroke of luck: the nationalist plan of operation was discovered on a dead enemy tank officer. This gave the hurriedly organized republican staff the opportunity to reorganize the defence. Meanwhile, a defence junta, under General Miaja, had been set up. Composed of members of the Popular Front organizations – with the exception of the POUM which was vetoed by the communists, and the FAI, but with the inclusion of the two other branches of the libertarian movement – this was to become the revolutionary organ of power in Madrid. The bulk of its members were little-known militants, many of them under thirty years old. The communists and the JSU – most of whose leaders, including Santiago Carrillo, the secretary-general, now joined the communist party – were the dominant force.

  During this crucial period, the largest single massacre of right-wing prisoners in the republican zone took place. About 1,000 prisoners evacuated from the Model Prison were slaughtered by their guards in Paracuellos de Jarama and Torrejón de Ardoz, two villages north-east of Madrid, while officially being transferred to new prisons.

  Like many others, José MERA, a schoolteacher and UGT member, spent the night of 7–8 November waiting for the summons to go to the front. Along with university professors, teachers and porters who had answered their union’s call, he spent the night in a building in the Castellana. Nobody had come to tell them what to do; they had no arms.

  —Before dawn on 8 November I heard a sound that seemed like a miracle. Tring-tring-tring – the Number 8 tram on its normal route. I could hardly believe my ears. ‘They haven’t got in then,’ I said to myself …

  In the Plaza de Antón Martín, not long afterwards, Alvaro DELGADO heard a song he didn’t recognize, saw a group of well-uniformed soldiers wearing large blue berets and pulling machine-guns on rubber wheels behind them. They didn’t look at all like the militiamen in overalls the boy was used to seeing. These wore boots, had steel helmets attached to their belts, rifles slung over their shoulders, and some were carrying sub-machine-guns with cartridge drums on top, he observed. They were singing the International – but in a foreign language. They gave him the impression of great strength.

  —The arrival of the International Brigades impressed us all, remembered Eduardo de GUZMAN, a CNT journalist. And that first one, the 11th, was the best of the lot. Revolutionaries who fought magnificently, with a military organization and discipline the militias by and large lacked. In some ways they taught the militias how to fight. They dug foxholes which no one had thought of doing before …

  No one in Madrid, he believed, could ever say a word against the brigaders, even if most of them were communists and they were under communist command. At that moment everyone was united in the face of common danger. There were no party rivalries. A revolutionary spirit existed, everyone fought side by side, irrespective of organization or political creed. He would never forget the CNT building workers’ union which ordered its members to report with their lunch baskets because the union was not responsible for their food.

  —The civilian population was the most impressive of all. Everywhere I went I saw people building barricades. A lot of them, militarily speaking, were useless, but they raised the population’s morale. It reached tremendous, euphoric heights. Mikháil Koltsov, the Pravda correspondent, said to me one day that he didn’t understand the Spanish. ‘As soon as they see Moroccan cavalry they start to run. And then one says to the other: “You’re a coward,” and the other replies, “I’ve got more balls than you,” and he stays there and allows himself to be killed. How do you explain that?’ Koltsov was right: how do you explain it? …

  In the Calle de los Embajadores, several women were shouting at two or three militiamen who were coming up from the river Manzanares and Usera beyond. ‘Cowards, chickens, where are you going?’ Lorenzo IÑIGO, of the CNT metalworkers’ union, heard them cry. ‘If you aren’t brave enough to be in the front line, then give us your rifles because we haven’t got any. We’ll go down to take your place.’

  Victoria ROMAN, the university student who had refused to be evacuated, was working in the motorized brigade HQ when a dispatch rider came in.

  —‘They’re in the Calle Ferraz,’ he said. He was carrying a piglet he’d found somewhere. The Calle Ferraz! I didn’t know what to do. If they’d given me a machine-gun, I’d have gone out and used it. Everything was obliterated except the passionate desire to defend the city against the enemy. The enemy that had refused to accept the people’s freedom to elect the government they wanted. That was what angered me so profoundly, made any sacrifice worthwhile to prevent their victory …

  In raincoat, collar and tie, with a blanket under one arm, José MERA set off for the front. After hearing the welcome sound of the tram bell, a d
octor he knew had come in and told him he needed a draughtsman for his artillery battery. The doctor had been in the army only a couple of days and, being a mathematician as well as a doctor, had been put in charge of a battery. MERA set off with him to El Pardo, where he found another teacher and an industrial engineer as part of the battery which was attached to the International Brigade Commune de Paris battalion under the Frenchman, Col. Dumont. The brigaders impressed MERA deeply. The idea that men had come from all over the world to fight for the republic raised the population’s morale. Their discipline was something to marvel at, he thought.