The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  The first major step to resolve the leadership issue came when Franco requested a meeting of the Junta de Defensa Nacional at the military aerodrome outside Salamanca on 21 September. General Kindelán, the air force commander, had prepared the ground, assisted in the background by the rest of Franco’s camarilla, including his brother Nicolás Franco, Orgaz, Millán Astray, Luis Bolín and the diplomat José Antonio Sangróniz. They had worked painstakingly to place their chief in the most advantageous position. Colonel Walter Warlimont, Hitler’s envoy, had also applied discreet pressure on the question of military assistance.

  All the possible candidates for the leadership were present at Salamanca airfield that day: Franco, Mola, Queipo de Llano and Cabanellas, the nominal president of the junta, who chaired the meeting.1 The military were to take a decision on behalf of right-wing Spain. With the CEDA leader, Gil Robles, in self-imposed exile in Portugal (many nationalists blamed the civil war on his lack of nerve), José Antonio in Alicante prison, where he was to be executed, and Calvo Sotelo dead since just before the rising, only the wishes of the monarchists and the Carlists had to be considered. Mola, Queipo and Cabanellas were all tainted with republicanism or Freemasonry in varying degrees, so Franco benefited greatly from a lack of obvious defects and his political inscrutability.

  In a charade which was accepted with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the the monarchist General Kindelán proposed at the end of the meeting that Franco should be appointed supreme commander of all land, sea and air forces, with the title of Generalissimo. Mola, conscious that his reputation had suffered because his plan for the rising had not succeeded, gave in almost sycophantically. ‘He is younger than me,’ he acknowledged, ‘and of higher professional standing. He is extremely popular and is well-known abroad.’2 Queipo, with his habitual lack of tact, ran through the possibilities later. ‘So who were we going to nominate? Cabanellas could not take it on. He was a convinced republican and everyone knew that he was a Freemason. We couldn’t possibly nominate Mola either, because we would lose the war…And my reputation was badly damaged.’3 Only Cabanellas dissented. He demanded a military directory and it cost him dear. Six days later Toledo fell. Kindelán, believing that Franco would restore Alfonso to his throne, helped with the preparations for 28 September, when the ‘Saviour of the Alcázar’ was to return to Salamanca to be accepted as supreme commander by the other generals.

  The most active supporter of Franco behind the scenes was his brother Nicolás. He arranged for a mixed guard of Falangists and Carlists to hail his brother as chief when all the generals came together in Salamanca. Then, by omitting or changing key words in the text of the decree, he made Franco ‘Head of the Spanish State’, as opposed to ‘head of the government of the Spanish State’ for ‘the duration of the war’.4 This trick did not endear Franco to his colleagues, who found themselves presented with a fait accompli, one might almost say a coup d’état within the coup. Even Mola was deeply irritated that Franco had taken over supreme political power as well as military. It is said that Queipo called Franco a ‘son of a whore’, or according to other sources a ‘swine’. But Kindelán and Dávila somehow persuaded the other generals that Franco had simply been proclaimed head of government for the duration, as the original decree had stated. But there was in any case little that either Mola or Queipo could do once the event had been reported in the newspapers. To protest now could be represented as disloyalty to the nationalist cause.

  On 1 October 1936 Franco was invested with his powers in the throne room of the captain-generalcy in Burgos, in front of the diplomatic representatives of Portugal, Germany and Italy. General Cabanellas had been forced to accept total defeat. ‘Señor Chief of the Spanish State,’ he proclaimed. ‘In the name of the Council of National Defence, I hand over to you the absolute powers of the state.’ Franco went out on to the balcony to receive the cheers of the crowds. In his speech to them he promised ‘no home without a hearth, nor a Spaniard without bread’. The anniversary of this day was to be celebrated for almost forty years as ‘The Day of the Caudillo’.5 The military junta, which had been led by Cabanellas, was immediately replaced by a ‘Junta Técnica del Estado’ with General Dávila at its head.6

  Once Franco became the Caudillo, he never allowed opposition to develop. His speeches skilfully selected compatible aspects of the rival nationalist ideologies. He affected an intensity of religious feeling to woo the Carlists and the Church. The Falangist slogan, ‘Una Patria, Un Estado. Un Caudillo’, was converted to ‘Una Patria: España. Un Caudillo: Franco’. But it was not long before the chant of ‘Franco! Franco! Franco!’ was heard.

  Historical parallels were drawn by nationalist writers with the first Reconquista. This safely inspired the appropriate image in the appropriate mind. For the Falangists, it was the birth of the nation. For Carlist and Alphonsine monarchists it represented the establishment of a royal Catholic dictatorship; for the Church the age of ecclesiastical supremacy, and for landowners the foundation of their wealth and power. Franco was very different from Mussolini and Hitler. He was a cunning opportunist who, despite his rhetoric, did not suffer from overly dangerous visions of destiny.

  Franco’s new position was reinforced with good news. The recently completed nationalist cruiser Canarias had sailed round the Portuguese coast from El Ferrol, the Caudillo’s birthplace, to attack republican warships off Gibraltar. She managed to sink the destroyer Almirante Fernández and force the others to seek shelter in Cartagena harbour. The blockade of the straits was now finished and Moroccan reinforcements could be brought across without diverting aircraft from bombing raids.

  In the republican zone, Giral’s government had resigned on 4 September. It had never been able to reflect the reality of the situation, let alone win enough support to influence it. All the political parties recognized that there was only one man able to gain the trust of the revolutionary committees. Largo Caballero was enjoying a great wave of popularity after his visits to the militia positions in the Guadarrama mountains. ‘Largo Caballero’, wrote his fellow socialist Zugazagoitia, ‘retained in the eyes of the masses his mythical qualities and his pathos had started to work the miracle of a difficult rebirth of collective enthusiasm.’7

  Even Prieto, the middle-class social democrat, recognized that his great rival, the obstinate, often blinkered proletarian, was the only suitable successor to Giral.8 Both Prieto and the communists tried to maintain the liberal façade as far as possible, but Largo Caballero wanted a coalition which was preponderantly socialist. He felt strongly that he had been exploited by the liberals in the first republican government, undermining his work as minister of labour.

  The new government was presented as symbolizing unity against the common enemy since it brought together the liberal centre and the revolutionary left into one administration. This administration called itself ‘the government of Victory’ and was the first in Western Europe to contain communists. It marked also an important move towards the progressive recuperation of power from local committees. Faced with the nationalist successes (Talavera and Irún were about to fall), even the anarchists found it difficult to challenge its development. Nevertheless, the Republic was still far from that middle-class state which communist propaganda attempted to portray to the world outside. La Pasionaria and Jesús Hernández insisted that Spain was experiencing a ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ and that they were ‘motivated exclusively by the desire to defend the democratic Republic established on 14 April 1931’.

  In fact, the Spanish communists were far from happy that Largo Caballero, the man they had so recently lauded as ‘the Spanish Lenin’, was now leading the government. They reported to Moscow on 8 September that ‘despite our efforts, we were not able to avoid a Caballero government’. They had also tried, following Comintern orders, to evade being included themselves, but ‘everyone emphatically insisted on the participation of communists in the new government, and it was impossible to avoid this without creating a very dangerous
situation. We are taking the necessary measures to organize the work of our ministers.’9

  Marty, meanwhile, knew that communist power did not have to reside within the council of ministers. It lay in infiltrating the army and the police, as well as in its propaganda methods. ‘The political influence of the Communist Party has exceeded all expectations…Only our party knows what must be done. The slogans of the party are quickly taken up and reprinted by all the newspapers…Our party supplies cadres for the police…The main strength of the army has been directed towards the creation of what has become the pride of the People’s Army–the 5th Regiment of the militia. The 5th Regiment, enjoying well-deserved military glory, numbers 20,000 warriors. All the commanders of the regiment are communists.’ The aptly named Comrade Checa, the party official responsible for the army and the police, gave ‘directives for conducting the interrogation of those under serious arrest’.10

  President Azaña, who remained as a figurehead of liberal parliamentarianism, objected to the inclusion of communists in the government, but Azaña was increasingly isolated and Caballero’s will prevailed. The two communist ministers accepted their posts only after instructions to do so from Moscow. Jesús Hernández became minister of education and Vicente Uribe was given the agriculture portfolio; Alvarez del Vayo, whom Largo Caballero did not yet know to be a communist supporter, became foreign minister.

  Caballero’s government also included three of his left socialist supporters and Prieto with two of his social-democrat followers, one of whom, the future prime minister Juan Negrín, became minister of finance. Largo Caballero kept the ministry of war for himself and gave Prieto the air force and the navy. There were also two republican left ministers (one of whom was José Giral), one Catalan Esquerra, one Basque nationalist and two representatives of the centrist Republicans.11

  Caballero had invited his old rivals, the anarchists, to join the governing coalition to broaden the representation of the anti-nationalist groups. The anarchists made the counter-proposal (which was not accepted) of a National Defence Council with Largo Caballero as president, five CNT members, five from the UGT, four liberal republicans and no communists. Such a structure was no more than a euphemism for government and thus a sop to their conscience. They had tacitly admitted the necessity of central co-ordination and collaboration in conventional war. No anarchists, however, joined the government.

  The committees started to be given new names and, although most of the original delegates stayed on, they gradually submitted to control from above. A new form of political parity also crept into the municipal councils which replaced the local committees. This distorted their reflection of local political strengths, especially in Catalonia, and assisted the communists, who gained more representation than the actual size of their following justified.

  In Valencia the Popular Executive Committee, which had so contemptuously waved aside Martínez Barrio’s delegation from the previous Madrid government, acknowledged the new one on 8 September. But the Comintern envoys were furious when a ‘very popular anarchist from Valencia’ declared at a mass meeting in Madrid on 25 September, ‘There is one party that wants to monopolize the revolution. If that party continues its policy, we have decided to crush it. There is a foreign ambassador in Madrid [the Soviet envoy, Marcel Rosenberg] who is interfering in Spanish affairs. We warn him that Spanish affairs concern only the Spanish.’12

  The effective administration in Catalonia, the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias, merged with the Generalitat in a new government on 26 September. It was led by Josep Tarradellas and all the workers’ organizations and all the parties of the Popular Front were represented. This brought together the anarchist CNT, the communist PSUC and the anti-Stalinist POUM. It marked the first outright acceptance of government by the anarchists. They compromised their principles because they knew that the Madrid government would otherwise continue to starve their self-managed collectives of credits and currency for raw materials.

  The POUM had been the most outspoken critic of the CNT leadership’s refusal of power in Catalonia; this was partly because it advocated an authoritarian route to the new society, but mainly because it was more aware of the Stalinist threat than the Catalonian anarchists, who could not imagine themselves being challenged in Barcelona. Andreu Nin, the POUM leader and now councillor of justice, had lived long enough in Russia to appreciate how the infiltration of key posts made the size of the Communist Party’s following almost irrelevant. From the Catalan nationalists’ point of view, Companys’s moderate policy was starting to prove its effectiveness. The anarchists might call the Catalan government, which they had joined, the Regional Defence Committee, but what mattered was that three of them were now members of it. This marked the first major step in the loss of anarchist power in Catalonia.13

  By the end of September the Defence Council of Aragón was the only major non-governmental organization in the southern part of republican territory which retained control over its own area. This anarchist creation, controlled by the FAI and headed by Joaquín Ascaso, was under heavy pressure from the communist campaign for centralized control. By October its committee acknowledged that it would have to make concessions in order to survive. Popular Front parties were brought into the council and Joaquín Ascaso made a successful diplomatic visit to Madrid. Mutual recognition was agreed upon without compromises that appeared to be too damaging, but it later became clear that the central government and the communists had no intention of allowing the Aragonese council to remain in existence any longer than necessary.14

  Largo Caballero did not realize at this stage that he was being used to re-establish central state power by the liberals, social democrats and communists. Not until November did he start to understand that he had reloaded what Lenin called ‘the pistol of the state’ and that others were waiting to take it from him.

  Although Caballero’s appointment had been greeted with joy by many, the Comintern was the least impressed. Marty described him in a report to Moscow on 17 October as ‘a bad union bureaucrat’, and recorded that he and Prieto spent most of the time attacking each other in their respective newspapers, Claridad and El Socialista.15

  One of the arguments for central control was that evidence of a stable, authoritative government in Madrid might persuade the British and French governments to change their policy on arms sales. This hope was dashed when the reality of non-intervention became clear. The first interventionist states, Germany and Italy, had initially given the nonintervention plan a very cool reception. But then they realized the potential advantage. Ciano soon agreed to the policy in general, but insisted that it should cover every facet, even ‘propaganda aid’. Italy and Germany would then be able to accuse Russia of violating the agreement and so justify their interventionist activities. The Germans agreed to the pact in principle, but argued that it would require a blockade to be enforced. The Soviet government, eager not to be outmanoeuvred, followed similar tactics by insisting that Portugal must be disciplined. Portugal was to become Stalin’s whipping boy on the Non-Intervention Committee, since attacking the dictators was too risky for his tastes.

  There seems to be little doubt that the French government had been sincere in its original intentions. The same cannot be said of Eden. His later realization that the ambitions of the Axis were only encouraged by appeasement tends to obscure his conduct in 1936. It was hypocritical to duck responsibility by saying that ‘the Spaniards would not feel any gratitude to those who had intervened’, when the British government failed to act impartially while maintaining its pretensions to being the ‘international policeman’. Moreover, Eden’s argument that supplying the Republic with arms would make Hitler aid Franco was already shown to be fallacious. Even the nationalist recruitment of Riffian mercenaries, a blatant contravention of the Treaty of Fes in 1912 which established the Spanish protectorate, was ignored. And the republican government was so concerned not to upset the French and British empires that it neither granted Morocco
its independence nor made serious attempts to stir up anti-colonial feelings there.

  Meetings of the Non-Intervention Committee began in London on 8 September, after numerous delays. These were caused mainly by Germany’s refusal to participate until a crash-landed Junkers 52 was returned by the Republic. The committee was organized by the British Foreign Office in London. Lord Plymouth was chairman and the rest of the committee consisted of the ambassadors of the signatory nations, which included every European country except Switzerland. The ambassador of the Republic in London, Pablo de Azcárate, referred to ‘confused discussions, embroiled and sterile at which denunciations and counter-denunciations took place’.16 Eden himself had to admit that ‘the lengthy meetings continued…accusations were met with flat denials and the results of both were sterile’.

  The British foreign secretary tried to claim that in October ‘the Russians were openly sending supplies to Spain and the evidence we had at this time was more specific against them than against the dictators in Rome and Berlin’.17 Yet in Geneva at the end of September he had recorded that Álvarez del Vayo, the Republic’s foreign minister, ‘left with me documents and photographs to prove the extent to which Hitler and Mussolini were violating the agreement’. Even the German chargé d’affaires was concerned at the way Wehrmacht uniforms were being cheered openly on the streets of Seville. And considering the sympathies of the Royal Navy in Gibraltar, it was perhaps not surprising that a blind eye had been turned on the streams of Junkers and Savoias over Gibraltar, which had ferried the Army of Africa between Tetuán and Seville. The American ambassador to Spain, Claude Bowers, later condemned the whole procedure: ‘Each movement of the Non-Intervention Committee has been made to serve the cause of the rebellion…This Committee was the most cynical and lamentably dishonest group that history has known.’18