Franco

That Millán was hardly the best man to present the cause of Franco’s New State to the outside world was made starkly clear on 12 October 1936, during the celebrations in Salamanca of the Day of the Race, the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America. The magnificent and regal choreography stressed the permanence of the New State. A tribune was erected in the Cathedral for the distinguished guests. Franco was not present but was represented by General Varela and by Doña Carmen. A sermon by the Dominican priest Father Fraile praised Franco’s recuperation of the ‘the spirit of a united, great and imperial Spain’. The political, military and ecclesiastical dignitaries then transferred to the University for a further ceremony under the presidency of the Rector Perpétuo, the seventy-two year-old philosopher and novelist Miguel de Unamuno. He announced that he was taking the chair in place of General Franco who could not attend because of his many pressing commitments.

A series of speeches stressed the importance of Spain’s imperialist past and future. One in particular, by Francisco Maldonado de Guevara, who described the Civil War in terms of the struggle of Spain, traditional values and eternal values against the anti-Spain of the reds and the Basques and Catalans, seems to have outraged Unamuno, who was already devastated by the ‘logic of terror’ and the arrest and assassination of friends and acquaintances. (A week earlier Unamuno had visited Franco in the Bishop’s Palace to plead vainly on behalf of several imprisoned friends.)76 The vehemence of Maldonado’s speech stimulated a Legionaire to shout ‘¡Viva la muerte!’ (long live death), the battle cry of the Legion. Millán Astray then intervened to begin the triple Nationalist chant of ‘¡España!’ and back came the three ritual replies of ‘¡Una!’, ‘¡Grande!’ and ‘¡Libre!’ (United! Great! Free!). When Unamuno spoke, it was to counter the frenzied glorification of the war and the repression. He said that the civil war was an uncivil war, that to win was not the same as to convince (vencer no es convencer), that the Catalans and Basques were no more anti-Spanish than those present. ‘I am a Basque and I have spent my life teaching you the Spanish language which you do not know’. At this point he was interrupted by a near apoplectic Millán Astray who stood up to justify the military uprising. As Millán worked himself into a homicidal delirium, Unamuno stood his ground pointing out the necrophiliac inanity of the slogan ‘Long live death’. Millán shouted ‘Death to intellectuals’ to which Unamuno replied that they were in the temple of intelligence and that such words were a profanity.

With shouting and booing rising to a crescendo and Unamuno being threatened by Millán Astray’s armed bodyguards, Doña Carmen intervened. With great presence of mind and no little courage, she took the venerable philosopher by the arm, led him out and took him home in her official car. It has been suggested by two eyewitnesses that Millán Astray himself ordered Unamuno to take the arm of the wife of the Head of State and leave.77 Such was the ambience of fear in Salamanca at the time that Unamuno was shunned by his acquaintances and removed at the behest of his colleagues from his position in the University.78 Under virtual house arrest, Unamuno died at the end of December 1936 appalled at the repression, the ‘collective madness’ and ‘the moral suicide of Spain’.79 Nevertheless, he was hailed at his funeral as a Falangist hero.80 Nearly thirty years later, Franco commented to his cousin on what he saw as Unamuno’s ‘annoying attitude, unjustifiable in a patriotic ceremony, on such an important day and in a Nationalist Spain which was fighting a battle with a ferocious enemy and encountering the greatest difficulties in achieving victory’. In retrospect, he regarded Millán Astray’s intervention as an entirely justified response to a provocation. Nevertheless, at the time, it was thought prudent to have Millán Astray replaced.81

The incident with Unamuno was a minor embarrassment in the process of consolidation of Franco as undisputed leader. In political terms, everything was going his way. In the course of the attack on Madrid, Franco was fortunate to see, indeed to an extent to facilitate, the removal from the scene of one of his last remaining potential rivals. The panic provoked by the advance on the capital and the broadcast of boasts by Mola about the imminent capture of Madrid by his ‘Fifth Column’ of secret Nationalist sympathisers had seen violent reprisals taken among rightists, either against individual saboteurs who were caught or against the large groups of prisoners taken from Madrid jails and massacred at Paracuellos de Jarama.82 The conservatives and other middle class victims of atrocities in Madrid were not the only Nationalist civilians to lose their lives. The most celebrated was José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Although the Falangist leader had been in a Republican jail in Alicante since his arrest on 14 March 1936, an escape bid or a prisoner exchange was not inconceivable.* Obviously, given the pre-eminence of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, his release or escape would not be easy. In the event, however, lack of co-operation by Franco ensured that it would not happen.

This was entirely understandable. Franco needed the Falange both as a mechanism for the political mobilization of the civilian population and as a way of creating an identification with the ideals of his German and Italian allies. However, if the charismatic José Antonio Primo de Rivera were to have turned up at Salamanca, Franco could never have dominated and manipulated the Falange as he was later to do. After all, since before the war, José Antonio had been wary about too great a co-operation with the Army for fear that the Falange would simply be used as cannon fodder and fashionable ideological decoration for the defence of the old order. In his last ever interview, with Jay Allen, on 3 October, published in the Chicago Daily Tribune on 9 October and in the News Chronicle on 24 October 1936, the Falangist leader had expressed his dismay that the defence of traditional interests was being given precedence over his party’s rhetorical ambitions for sweeping social change.83 Even taking into account the possibility that José Antonio was exaggerating his revolutionary aims to curry favour with his jailers, the implied clash with the political plans of Franco was clear. In fact, Allen told the American Ambassador, Claude G. Bowers, that José Antonio’s attitude was defiant and contemptuous rather than conciliatory and that he had been obliged to cut short the interview ‘because of the astounding indiscretions of Primo’.84

Franco, as something of a social climber, might have been expected to admire the dashing and charismatic socialite José Antonio who was after all son of the dictator General Primo de Rivera. However, despite the efforts of Ramón Serrano Suñer over the previous six years, their relationship had never prospered. José Antonio had come to regard Franco as pompous, self-obsessed and possessed of a caution verging on cowardice. Their relationship had definitively foundered in the spring of 1936, during the re-run elections in Cuenca when José Antonio had vehemently opposed the general’s inclusion in the right-wing list of candidates. Franco had never forgiven him.

For some time before his elevation to the overall leadership of the Nationalist side, Franco had been considering plans to subordinate the various political strands of the Nationalist coalition to a single authority. In late August, he had told Messerschmidt that the CEDA would have to disappear. In his conversation on 6 October with Count Du Moulin-Eckart, the new Head of State had informed his first diplomatic visitor that his main preoccupation was the ‘unification of ideas’ and the establishment of a ‘common ideology’ among the Army, the Falange, the monarchists and the CEDA. He confided in his visitor his cautious belief that ‘it would be necessary to proceed with kid gloves’. Given his own essential conservatism and the links of the elite of the Nationalist coalition with the old order, such delicacy would indeed be required. Unification could only be carried out at the cost of the political disarmament of the ever more numerous and vociferous Falange. Such an operation would be easier to perform if the Falangist leader were not present.

Early attempts to liberate José Antonio were initially approved by Franco. His grudging consent was given for the obvious reason that to withhold it would be to risk losing the goodwill of the Falange which was providing useful para-military and political assistance throughout the rebel zone. The first rescue attempt had been the work of isolated groups of Falangists in Alicante. Then in early September, when the Germans had come to see the Falange as the Spanish component of a future world political order, more serious efforts were made. German aid came from the highest levels on the understanding that the operation was approved by General Franco something for which there were precedents.

Franco had already intervened personally with the Germans to get help for the rescue of the family of Isabel Pascual de Pobil, the wife of his brother Nicolás. Thanks to the efforts of Hans Joachim von Knobloch, the German consul in Alicante, eighteen members of the Pasqual de Pobil family were disguised as German sailors and taken aboard a ship of the German Navy. The efforts to free the Falangist leader hinged largely on the co-operation of German naval vessels anchored at Alicante and of von Knobloch. Knobloch co-operated with the rash and excitable Falangist Agustín Aznar in an ill-advised scheme to get Primo de Rivera out by bribery which fell through when Aznar was caught and only narrowly escaped. An attempt was made on von Knobloch’s life and shortly after he was expelled from Alicante by the Republic on 4 October.85

On arriving at Seville on 6 October, von Knobloch and Aznar renewed their efforts to liberate José Antonio. Von Knobloch elaborated a scheme to bribe the Republican Civil Governor of Alicante while Aznar prepared a violent prison break-out. They were received in Salamanca by Franco who, after thanking von Knobloch for securing the escape from Alicante of the family of his brother Nicolás, gave his permission for them to continue their efforts. However, that verbal permission obscured the fact that his backing was less than enthusiastic. While von Knobloch returned to Alicante to implement his scheme, Franco informed the German authorities that he insisted on a number of conditions for the continuation of the operation. These were that efforts be made to rescue José Antonio without handing over any money, that if it was necessary to give money then the amount should be haggled over, and that von Knobloch should not take part in the operation. These strange conditions considerably diminished the chances of success but the Germans in Alicante decided to go ahead. Franco then issued even more curious instructions. In the event of the operation being a success, total secrecy was to be maintained about José Antonio being liberated. He was to be kept apart from von Knobloch, who was the main link with the Falangist leadership. He was to be interrogated by someone sent by Franco. He was not to be landed in the Nationalist zone without the permission of Franco. He informed the Germans that there existed doubts about the mental health of Primo de Rivera. The operation was aborted.86

A further possibility for Primo de Rivera’s release arose from a suggestion by Ramón Cazañas, Falangist Jefe (chief) in Morocco. He proposed that an exchange be arranged for General Miaja’s wife and daughters who were imprisoned in Melilla. Franco apparently refused safe-conducts for the negotiators although he later agreed to the family of General Miaja being exchanged for the family of the Carlist, Joaquín Bau. The Caudillo also refused permission for another Falangist, Maximiano García Venero, to drum up an international campaign to save José Antonio’s life.87 Similarly, Franco sabotaged the efforts of José Finat, Conde de Mayalde, a friend of José Antonio. Mayalde was married to a granddaughter of the Conde de Romanones and he persuaded the venerable politician to use his excellent contacts in the French government to get Blum to intercede with Madrid on behalf of Primo de Rivera. Franco delayed permission for Romanones to go to France until after the death sentence was announced.88

José Antonio Primo de Rivera was shot in Alicante prison on 20 November 1936. Franco made full use of the propaganda opportunities thereby provided, happy to exploit the eternal absence of the hero while privately rejoicing that he now could not be inconveniently present. The news of the execution reached Franco’s headquarters shortly after it took place.89 It was in any case published in the Republican and the French press on 21 November. Until 16 November 1938, Franco chose publicly to refuse to believe that José Antonio was dead. The Falangist leader was more use ‘alive’ while Franco made his political arrangements. An announcement of his death would have opened a process whereby the Falange leadership could have been settled at a time when Franco’s own position was only just in the process of being consolidated. The provisional leader of the Falange, the violent but unsophisticated Manuel Hedilla, made the tactical error of acquiescing in Franco’s manoeuvre. The first news of the execution coincided with the Third Consejo Nacional of the Falange Española y de las JONS in Salamanca on 21 November but Hedilla failed to make an announcement, out of a vain hope, built on a hundred rumours, that by some subterfuge or other, his leader had survived. Thereafter, Franco would have to deal only with a decapitated Falange.90

Franco’s attitude to José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s ‘absence’ was enormously revealing of his peculiarly repressed way of thinking. ‘Probably’, he told Serrano Suñer in 1937, ‘they’ve handed him over to the Russians and it is possible that they’ve castrated him’.91 Franco used the cult of el ausente (the absent one) to take over the Falange. All its external symbols and paraphernalia were used to mask its real ideological disarmament. Some of Primo de Rivera’s writings were suppressed and his designated successor, Hedilla, would be imprisoned under sentence of death in April 1937. While the public cult was manipulated to build up Franco as the heir to José Antonio, the Caudillo in private expressed his contempt for the Falangist leader. Serrano Suñer was always aware that praise for José Antonio was guaranteed to irritate Franco. On one occasion, the Generalísimo exploded ‘Lo ves, siempre a vueltas con la figura de ese mucbacho como cosa extraordinaria’ (‘see, always going on about that lad as if he was something out of the ordinary’). On another, Franco claimed delightedly to have proof that Primo de Rivera had died a coward’s death.92

It is possible that José Antonio might have worked to bring an early end to the carnage although whether, in the hysterical atmosphere of the times, he would have had any success is entirely a different matter. He was certainly open to the idea of national reconciliation in a way never approached by Franco either during the war or in the thirty-five years that followed. In his last days in prison, José Antonio was sketching out the possible membership and policies of a government of ‘national concord’ whose first act was to have been a general amnesty. His attitude to Franco was revealed clearly in his comments on the implications of a military victory which he feared would merely consolidate the past. He saw such a victory as the triumph of ‘a group of generals of depressing political mediocrity, committed to a series of political clichés, supported by old-style intransigent Carlism, the lazy and short-sighted conservative classes with their vested interests and agrarian and finance capitalism’.

The papers in which he put these thoughts down were sent to Prieto by the military commander of Alicante, Colonel Sicardo. Eventually, the Socialist leader forwarded copies to his two executors, Ramón Serrano Suñer and Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, in the hope of provoking dissent among the Falangist purists. This was a political error on Prieto’s part. With José Antonio dead, the validation of Serrano Suñer and Fernández Cuesta as his executors gave them his authority to carry out Franco’s policy.93 Had José Antonio Primo de Rivera reached Salamanca, he would have been a certain, and influential, critic of Franco. Franco’s exploitation of the Falange as a ready-made political base would have been made significantly more difficult.94 However, to assume that Franco would not have seen off Primo de Rivera in the same way as he disposed of so many rivals is to take too much for granted.

In contrast to the ruthlessness with which Franco disposed of his rivals was the alacrity with which he bent rules in the interests of his family. The examples of this during the Civil War presaged the protection under which the so-called ‘Franco clan’ would prosper in the post-war years. His intervention on behalf of Nicolás’s in-laws was an example of his readiness to do things for his family. Even more striking was the rehabilitation of his left-wing extremist brother Ramón despite the vehement opposition of many important military figures. In September 1936, Ramón Franco who was in Washington as Spanish air attaché, wrote to a friend in Barcelona to ascertain how he would be received in the Republican zone. Azaña allegedly said to the mutual friend ‘he shouldn’t come, he’d have a really hard time’. In the wildly precipitate way that had always characterized his behaviour, Ramón decided to go instead to the Nationalist zone shortly after hearing of his brother’s elevation to the Headship of State.95

Despite his past as an anarchist agitator and as a freemason and his involvement in various revolutionary activities, all ‘crimes’ for which others paid with their lives, Ramón was welcomed by his brother. In Seville, Queipo de Llano had already executed Blas Infante, the Andalusian Nationalist lawyer who had stood with Ramón in the revolutionary candidacy in the 1931 elections. The exquisite care for appearances which had allegedly prevented Franco opposing the execution of his cousin Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde at the beginning of the military uprising did not apply in the case of his brother. Ramón was sent to Mallorca to take over as head of the Nationalist forces there and given the acting rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. This caused very considerable ill feeling within the Nationalist Air Force and planted the seeds of a rift between Franco and his kingmaker, Alfredo Kindelán. On 26 November, Kindelán wrote the Generalísimo a fierce protest against his high-handed action. Couched in formally respectful terms, it accepted Franco’s right to command as he felt best but spoke of the ‘personal mortification’ felt by Kindelán at not even having been consulted and of the ill feeling which had been provoked among Nationalist airmen whose reaction ranged ‘from those who accept that he be allowed to work in aeronautical matters outside Spain to those who demand that he be shot’.96 Franco simply ignored the letter and took his revenge against Kindelán by dropping him at the end of the war. Franco had taken to the prerogatives of his power with the skill and arbitrariness of a Borgia: they were attributes he was to need and to use to the full in the months ahead.

* Before the myth-makers began to work, ABC, Seville, 3 October 1936 claimed that ‘communications with the outside were totally cut throughout the siege’.

* At some point on either 20 or 21 September, Yagüe and Mola met to discuss the co-ordination of operations between their forces which had recently made contact over a long front. Their disagreements became increasingly heated. Mola told Yagüe that his behaviour constituted mutiny for which he could have him shot. Turning to his column commanders, Asensio, Castejón and Tella, Yagüe said ‘We don’t think so’ (¡Verdad que no!) at which Mola was forced to make a joke of his original remark and back down. (Letter to the author from General Ramón Salas Larrazabal, 9 May 1991, recounting the testimony of one of the column chiefs present at the meeting, probably Asensio Cabanillas.)

* The myth propagated by Franco’s hagiographers (Luis Galinsoga & Francisco Franco-Salgado, Centinela de occidente (Barcelona, 1956) p. 21) that he did not attend the meeting has no basis other than a determination to give the impression that the Generalísimo had power thrust upon him. Brian Crozier, Franco: A Biographical History (London, 1967) p. 212, mistakenly places the meeting on 29 September and so assumes Franco’s absence on the grounds that, on that day, he was in Toledo congratulating Moscardó.

* What Queipo called Franco is deemed by Cabanellas to be ‘unprintable’ and so ‘swine’ is merely a guess.

* It had a Secretaría General del Jefe del Estado, a Secretaría General of Foreign Relations and a Gobierno General. There were also seven ministerial departments or ‘commissions’, Finance; Justice; Industry, Commerce and Supply; Agriculture; Labour, Culture and Education; Public Works and Communications.

† Gil Robles told the author in Madrid in 1970 of his belief that Franco could not tolerate having around anyone who had been his superior.

* The seed had been first planted in Franco’s mind in the late 1920s. At that period, he spent time at a small Asturian estate owned by his wife known as La Piniella, situated near San Cucao de Llanera, thirteen kilometres from Oviedo. A particularly sycophantic local priest who fancied himself as the chaplain to the house was constantly telling both Doña Carmen and Franco himself that he would repeat the epic achievements of El Cid and the great medieval Caudillo Kings of Asturias. Franco’s wife had often reminded him of the priest’s comments.

* It was said that religious ceremonial bored Franco almost more than anything else and, in power, he suffered agonies when he had to receive religious delegations, commenting ‘we’re doing saints today’ (‘boy estamos de santos’).

* Several prominent Nationalists crossed the lines in these ways. The exchanges (canjes) included important Falangists like Raimundo Fernández Cuesta who was officially exchanged for a minor Republican figure, Justino de Azcárate, and Miguel Primo de Rivera who was exchanged for the son of General Miaja. Among the more significant escapees was Ramón Serrano Suñer.

VIII

FRANCO AND THE SIEGE OF MADRID

October 1936–February 1937

IRONICALLY, Franco had hoped, by the day on which the disagreeable incident between Millán and Unamuno had taken place, to have been celebrating the capture of Madrid. There had been a significant slowing down of the rhythm of operations during the two weeks in which he was otherwise occupied clinching his elevation to power. The war could not be delayed indefinitely and, on 6 October, Franco announced to journalists that his offensive against the capital was about to begin. Under the overall direction of Mola, the Nationalist forces began a co-ordinated push against Madrid on the following day. An extremely tired Army of Africa resumed its northward march under the command of General Varela, assisted by Colonel Yagüe as his second-in-command.1 The ten thousand-strong force was organized in five columns under Asensio, Barrón, Castejón, Colonel Francisco Delgado Serrano and Tella. Supplies of arms had been collected and they were augmented by the arrival of substantial quantities of Italian artillery and light tanks. Italian instructors quickly trained Spaniards in their use and, on 18 October, Franco, accompanied by the Italian military mission, was able to inspect the first Italo-Spanish motorised armoured units.2

After frequent consultations with Franco, Mola developed a two-part final strategy to take Madrid which was already surrounded on the west from due north to due south. The idea was first for the Nationalist forces to march on Madrid, simultaneously reducing the length of the front and tightening their grip on the capital, and then for Varela’s Army of Africa to make a frontal assault through the northern suburbs. The push which began on 7 October saw an advance from Navalperal in the north, near El Escorial, Cebreros to the west and Toledo in the south. The forward defences of the city were demoralised by Nationalist bombing and then brushed aside by motorised columns armed with fast Italian whippet tanks. Desperate counter-attacks from the capital were easily repelled, thereby intensifying the optimism of the attacking forces.3