Franco

Franco was anxious not to jeopardize his new found comforts. Despite his proven capacity to put up with physical discomfort and to work hard in the most difficult conditions, Franco always enjoyed physical comfort when it was available. In the interval between leaving Morocco and taking on the task of building up the Zaragoza Academy, he had enjoyed a light work load and a full social life. Now, in La Coruña, he was effectively military governor, and had a splendid life-style, with a large house and white-gloved servants. La Coruña was then a beautiful and peaceful seaport and not the bustling and anonymous town that it was to become during the later years of his dictatorship. Franco’s minimal duties as military commander permitted him to be a frequent visitor to the yacht club (Club Náutico) where he was able to indulge, on a small scale, his love of sailing. It was there that he made the acquaintance of Máximo Rodríguez Borrell, who after the war would become his regular fishing and hunting companion. Max Borrell was to be one of his very few close civilian friends and to remain so until his final illness.67

The fact that Franco was not prepared to take risks for Sanjurjo does not mean that he was enthusiastic about the political situation. However, he was altogether more cautious than many of his peers and he carefully distanced himself from the coup attempt of 10 August 1932. Nonetheless, as might have been expected given his long African association with Sanjurjo, he knew about its preparation. On 13 July, Sanjurjo visited La Coruña to inspect the local carabineros and had dinner with Franco, discussing with him the forthcoming uprising. According to his cousin, Franco told Sanjurjo at this meeting that he was not prepared to take part in any kind of coup.68 The monarchist plotter Pedro Sainz Rodríguez organized a further, and elaborately clandestine, meeting in a restaurant on the outskirts of Madrid. Franco expressed considerable doubts about the outcome of the coup and said he was still undecided about what his own position would be when the moment arrived, promising Sanjurjo that, whatever he decided, he would not take part in any action launched by the government against him.69

Franco was sufficiently vague for Sanjurjo to assume that he would support the rising. According to Major Juan Antonio Ansaldo, an impetuous monarchist aviator, conspirator and devoted follower of Sanjurjo, Franco’s ‘participation in the 10 August coup was considered certain’, but ‘shortly before it took place, he freed himself of any undertaking and advised several officers to follow his example’.70 It is probably going too far to suggest that Franco first supported Sanjurjo’s plot and then changed his mind. However, given Franco’s labyrinthine ambiguity, it would have been easy for Sanjurjo and his fellow-plotters to allow themselves to take his participation for granted. His hesitations and vagueness while he waited for the outcome to become clear would have permitted such an assumption. It is certainly the case that Franco did nothing to report what was going on to his superiors.

Franco’s final refusal to become part of the conspiracy was based largely on his view that it was inadequately prepared, as he indicated to the right-wing politician, José María Gil Robles, at a dinner in the home of their mutual friend, the Marqués de la Vega de Anzó.71 He was afraid that a failed coup would ‘open the doors to Communism’.72 He was, however, also highly suspicious of the links between Sanjurjo and Lerroux whose involvement in what was being prepared could be perceived in a speech which he made in Zaragoza on 10 July. Aligning himself with the cause of the plotters, Lerroux was trying to push the government to adopt a more conservative line, tacitly threatening the military intervention which would follow if it did not. As ever the outrageous cynic and flatterer of the military, Lerroux declared that, when he came to power, he would reopen the Academia General Militar and reinstall Franco as Director.73

Franco himself visited Madrid at the end of July in order ‘to choose a horse’.74 It was rumoured, to his annoyance, that he had come to join the plot. When asked by other officers, as he was repeatedly, if he were part of the conspiracy, he replied that he did not believe that the time had yet come for a rising but that he respected those who thought that it had. He was outraged to discover that some senior officers were openly stating that he was involved. He told them that, if they continued to ‘spread these calumnies’, he would ‘take energetic measures’. By chance, he met Sanjurjo, Goded, Varela and Millán Astray at the Ministry of War. Varela told him that Sanjurjo wanted to sound him out about the forthcoming coup. Sanjurjo at first denied this but agreed to meet Franco and Varela together. Over lunch, Franco told them categorically that they should not count on his participation in any kind of military uprising. In a barely veiled rebuke to Sanjurjo for his behaviour in April 1931, Franco justified his refusal to join the plot on the grounds that, since the Republic had come about because of the military defection from the cause of the monarchy, the Army should not now try to change things.75 This meeting could account for the caustic remark made by Sanjurjo in the summer of 1933 during his imprisonment after the coup’s failure: ‘Franquito es un cuquito que va a lo suyito’ (‘little Franco is a crafty so-and-so who looks after himself’).76

The Sanjurjo coup was poorly organized and, in Madrid, easily dismantled. It was briefly successful in Seville but, with a column of troops loyal to the government marching on the city, Sanjurjo fled.77 The humiliation of part of the Army and the reawakening of the mood of popular fiesta which had initially greeted the establishment of the Republic occasioned by Sanjurjo’s defeat cannot have failed to convince Franco of the wisdom of his prognostications about the rising.78 The fact that the armed urban police, the Guardias de Asalto and the Civil Guard had played no part in the rising had underlined their importance. Franco was more convinced than ever that any attempted coup d’état needed to count on their support.

Azaña had long been worried that Franco might be involved in a plot against the regime and in the course of the Sanjurjada had feared that he might be part of the coup. However, when he telephoned La Coruña on 10 August, he was relieved to find that Franco was at his post. Curiously, he very nearly was not. Franco had requested permission for a brief spell of leave in order to take his wife and daughter on a trip around the beautiful fjord-like bays of Galicia, the rías bajas, but it had been refused since his immediate superior, Major-General Félix de Vera, had also been about to go away. Accordingly, when the coup took place, Franco had been in acting command of military forces in Galicia.79

The conspiratorial Right, both civilian and military, reached the more general conclusion which Franco had drawn in advance – that they must never again make the mistake of inadequate preparation. A monarchist ‘conspiratorial committee’ was set up by members of the extreme rightist group Acción Española and Captain Jorge Vigón of the General Staff in late September 1932 to begin preparations for a future military rising. The theological, moral and political legitimacy of a rising against the Republic was argued in the group’s journal Acción Española, of which Franco had been a subscriber since its first number in December 1931.80 The group operated from Ansaldo’s house in Biarritz. Substantial sums of money were collected from rightist sympathizers to buy arms and to finance political destabilization. One of the earliest operations was to set up subversive cells within the Army itself, and the responsibility for this task was given to Lieutenant-Colonel Valentín Galarza of the General Staff.81 Galarza had been involved in the Sanjurjada but nothing could be proved against him. Azaña wrote in his diary, ‘I have left without a posting another Lieutenant-Colonel of the General Staff, Galarza, an intimate of Sanjurjo and Goded, who before the Republic was one of the great mangoneadores (meddlers) of the Ministry. Galarza is intelligent, capable and obliging, slippery and obedient. But he is definitely on the other side. There is nothing against him in the prosecution case. Nevertheless, he is one of the most dangerous’.82 All that Azaña could do was to leave Galarza without an active service posting. Galarza aimed to recruit key generals and Franco, already a friend, was one of his prime targets.83

Azaña seems to have assumed that Franco’s presence at his post during the Sanjurjada meant that they were now totally reconciled. When the Prime Minister visited La Coruña from 17 to 22 September 1932, however, Franco made slight efforts to disabuse him of the idea. Franco, according to his own account, was no more than stiffly polite to the Prime Minister. In the course of a stay in Galicia during which he was received enthusiastically, Azaña made an effort to be friendly but Franco did not respond with any warmth.84 If indeed Franco set out to put distance between himself and the Prime Minister, Azaña seems not to have noticed.*

Franco’s account probably reflects his desire to wipe away the disagreeable memory of the time when he was Azaña’s subordinate. In fact, at this time, Franco was immensely careful.85 When Sanjurjo requested that he appear as his defender in his trial, he refused. His glacial coldness was revealed when he said to his one-time commander, ‘I could, in fact, defend you, but without hope of success. I think in justice that by rebelling and failing, you have earned the right to die’.86 Nor did he join the conspiratorial efforts which led eventually to the creation of the Unión Militar Española, the clandestine organization of monarchist officers founded by Lieutenant-Colonel Emilio Rodríguez Tarduchy, a close friend of Sanjurjo, and Captain Bartolomé Barba Hernández, like Galarza an officer of the general staff. The UME emerged finally in late 1933 and was linked, through Galarza, to the activities of Ansaldo and Vigón.87

On 28 January 1933, the results of the revisión de ascensos were announced. Franco’s promotion to colonel was impugned, that to general validated. Goded’s promotions to brigadier and major-general were both annulled. However, they were not demoted but rather frozen in their present position in the seniority scale until a combination of vacancies arising and seniority permitted them to catch up with their accelerated promotions. So Franco kept his rank with effect from the date of his promotion in 1926. He nevertheless dropped from number one in the escalafón (list) of brigadier generals to 24, out of 36. Like most of his comrades, Franco smouldered with resentment at what was perceived as a gratuitous humiliation and nearly two years of unnecessary anxiety.88 Years later, he still wrote of promotions being ‘pillaged’ (despojo de ascensos) and of the injustice of the entire process.89

In February 1933, Azaña had him posted to the Balearic Islands as comandante general, ‘where he will be far from any temptations’.90 It was a post which would normally have gone to a Major-General and may well have formed part of Azaña’s efforts to attract Franco into the Republican orbit, rewarding him for his passivity during the Sanjurjada. After the preferments with which he had been showered by the King and Primo de Rivera, Franco did not perceive command of the Balearic Islands as a reward. In his draft memoirs, he wrote that it was less than his seniority merited (postergación).91 More than two weeks after the appointment, he had still not made the reglamentary visit to the Ministry of War to report on his impending move. The Socialist leader, Francisco Largo Caballero, told Azaña that Franco had been heard to boast that he would not go.92 Finally on 1 March, having been in Madrid for two days, he came to say his farewells to Azaña, in his capacity as Minister of War. The delay was a carefully calculated act of disrespect. Azaña perceived that Franco was still furious about the annulment of promotions but the subject did not arise, and they spoke merely of the situation in the Balearic Islands.93 The new military commander arrived at Palma de Mallorca on 16 March 1933, and with Mussolini’s ambitions heightening tension in the Mediterranean, dedicated himself to the job of improving the defences of the islands.

Throughout 1933, the fortunes of the Azaña government declined. By the beginning of September, the Republican-Socialist coalition was in tatters. Right-wing success in blocking reform had undermined the faith of the Socialists in Azaña’s Left Republicans. On 10 September, the increasingly conservative and power-hungry Lerroux began to put together an all-Republican cabinet. It was reported in ABC that he had offered Franco the job of Minister or undersecretary of War. Although he came from the Balearic Islands to Madrid for discussions with the Radical leader, Franco finally declined the offer.94 The post was one of those to which he aspired, but the Lerroux cabinet of 12 September was expected to last for no more than a couple of months since it could not command a parliamentary majority. Convinced that the only way to implement reform was to form a government on their own, the Socialists refused to rejoin a coalition with Azaña and it was widely assumed that President Alcalá Zamora would soon be forced to call general elections. In such conditions, taking over a ministry would have given Franco no opportunity to introduce the changes which he regarded as essential.

During the campaign for the November 1933 elections, with the possibility that the Socialists might win and establish a government bent on sweeping reform, Franco, although busy and fulfilled in the Balearics, was pessimistic about the prospects for the armed forces. He talked to friends of leaving the Army and going into politics. According to Arrarás, rumours to this effect reached rightist circles in Madrid and he was visited in Palma by a messenger from the increasingly powerful Catholic authoritarian party, the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups). The envoy allegedly offered Franco inclusion as a candidate in both the CEDA’s Madrid list and in another provincial list in order to guarantee his election. He refused outright.95 He did, however, vote for the CEDA in the elections.96 With the Left divided and the anarchists abstaining, a series of local alliances between the Radicals and the CEDA ensured their victory. The Radicals got 104 deputies and the CEDA 115 to the Socialists’ 58 and the Left Republicans’ 38. The subsequent period of government by a coalition of the ever-more corrupt Radicals and the CEDA would see Franco come in from the cold, as he perceived his comfortable exile in the Balearics, and much nearer to the centre of political preferment.

* This differs from the version given by Franco to his friend and biographer, Joaquín Arrarás. According to this version, Azaña said ‘I have re-read your extraordinary order to the cadets and I would like to believe that you did not think through what you wrote’, to which Franco claims to have replied, ‘Señor Ministro, I never write anything that I haven’t thought through beforehand’. Azaña’s version, written on the day, is altogether more plausible than that recounted by Franco six years later in the heat of the civil war. Joaquin Arrarás, Franco (Valladolid, 1937) p. 166.

* He later claimed that he had gone to great lengths not to be photographed with the Prime Minister, pointing out that his superior, Major General Vera, took priority. Franco also said that, by using the pretext that Doña Carmen was unwell, he had avoided being present at a morning reception given on Sunday 19 September by the La Coruña Sporting Club for Azaña and his friend and host, Santiago Casares Quiroga, the Minister of the Interior, and a prominent gallego. There exist photographs of them together during the visit to the city, next to each other and certainly with Franco nearer to Azaña than was General Vera. Similarly, the local press of the time reported Franco’s presence at Azaña’s table at a much more lavish occasion than the morning function, a dinner given that same evening at the Hotel Atlántida, in La Coruña and again at another lunch on Wednesday 21 September. See the photograph in Xosé Ramón Barreiro Fernández, Historia contemporánea de Galicia 4 vols (La Coruña, 1982) II, p. 241.

IV

IN COMMAND

Franco and the Second Republic, 1934–1936

AFTER THE vexations of the previous two years, the period of Centre-Right government, which came to be known by the Spanish Left as the bienio negro (two black years), moved Franco back into the sunlight. After what he perceived as the harsh persecution to which he and like-minded officers had been subjected by Azaña, the forty-two year-old general found himself lionized by politicians as he had not been since the Dictatorship. The reasons were obvious. He was the Army’s most celebrated young general of rightist views, and was untainted by collaboration with the Republic. His renewed celebrity and favour coincided with, and indeed to an extent fed upon, the bitter polarization of Spanish politics in this period.

The Right saw its success in the November 1933 elections as an opportunity to put the clock back on the attempted reforms of the previous nineteen months of Republican-Socialist coalition government. In a context of deepening economic crisis, with one in eight of the workforce unemployed nationally and one in five in the south, a series of governments bent on reversing reform could provoke only desperation and violence among the urban and rural working classes. Employers and landowners celebrated victory by slashing wages, cutting their work forces, in particular sacking union members, evicting tenants and raising rents. The labour legislation of the previous governments was simply ignored.

Within the Socialist movement, rank-and-file bitterness at losing the elections and outrage at the vicious offensive of the employers soon pushed the leadership into a tactic of revolutionary rhetoric in the vain hope of frightening the Right into restraining its aggression and pressuring the President of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, into calling new elections. In the long term, this tactic was to contribute to the feeling on the Right, and particularly within the high command of the Army, that strong authoritarian solutions were required to meet the threat from the Left.

Alcalá Zamora had not invited the sleek and pudgy CEDA leader, José María Gil Robles, to form a government despite the fact that the Catholic CEDA was the biggest party in the Cortes. The President suspected the immensely clever and energetic Gil Robles of planning to establish an authoritarian, corporative state and so turned instead to the cynical and corrupt Alejandro Lerroux, leader of the increasingly conservative Radicals, the second largest party. But Lerroux’s power-hungry Radicals were dependent on CEDA votes and became the puppets of Gil Robles. In return for introducing the harsh social policies sought by the CEDA’s wealthy backers, the Radicals were allowed to enjoy the spoils of office. The Socialists were angered by the corruption of the Radicals but the first working class protest came from the anarchists. With irresponsible naivety, a violent uprising was called for 8 December 1933. However, the government had been forewarned of the anarcho-syndicalists’ plans and quickly declared a state of emergency (Estado de alarma). Leaders of the CNT and the FAI were arrested, press censorship was imposed, and union buildings were closed down.

In traditionally anarchist areas – Aragón, the Rioja, Catalonia, the Levante, parts of Andalusia and Galicia – there were sporadic strikes, some trains were derailed and Civil Guard posts were attacked. After desultory skirmishes with the Civil Guard and the Assault Guards, the revolutionary movement was soon suppressed in Madrid, Barcelona and the provincial capitals of Andalusia, Alicante and Valencia. Throughout Aragón and in the regional capital, Zaragoza, however, the rising enjoyed a degree of success. Anarchist workers raised barricades, attacked public buildings, and engaged in armed combat with the forces of order. The government sent in several companies of the Army which, with the aid of tanks, took four days to crush the insurrection.1 The movement reinforced the conviction of many of the more right-wing officers that, even with a conservative government in power, the Republic had to be overthrown.2

The difficulties experienced in the suppression of the revolt led, on 23 January 1933 to the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, Manuel Rico Avello, who was packed off to Morocco as High Commissioner. He was replaced by Diego Martínez Barrio, the Minister of War, who was replaced in turn by the conservative Radical deputy for Badajoz and crony of Lerroux, Diego Hidalgo who knew more about the agrarian problem than about military questions.* However, with engaging humility, he admitted his lack of military knowledge and his need for professional advice.3 He also set out to cultivate military sympathies for his party by softening the impact of some of the measures introduced by Azaña and reversing others.4 When the new Minister of War had been in post barely a week, at the beginning of February, Franco made his acquaintance in Madrid. Clearly impressed by the young general, at the end of March 1934, Hidalgo successfully placed before the cabinet a proposal for his promotion from Brigadier to Major-General (General de División), in which rank he was again the youngest in Spain.5 Hidalgo, expecting an effusive response, was dismayed by the cold and impersonal telegram which Franco sent him on receiving the news of his promotion. Reflecting on it later, Hidalgo commented, ‘I never ever saw him either joyful or depressed’.6

The relationship between Franco and Hidalgo was consolidated in June during a four-day visit made by the Minister to the Balearic Islands where Franco was Comandante General. Hidalgo was much taken by the general’s considerable capacity for work, his obsession with detail, his cool deliberation in resolving problems. One incident stuck in his mind. It was the Minister’s custom on visiting garrisons to request that the commanding officer celebrate his visit by releasing any soldier currently under arrest. Although there was only one prisoner, a captain, in Menorca, Franco refused, saying ‘if the Minister orders me I will do it; if he merely makes a request, no.’ When Hidalgo asked what crime could be so heinous, Franco replied that it was the worst that any officer could commit: he had slapped a soldier. It was a surprising remark from the officer who had had a soldier shot for refusing to eat his rations. Both incidents in fact showed his obsession with military discipline. Hidalgo was so impressed by Franco that, before leaving Palma de Mallorca, and contrary to military protocol, he invited him to join him as an adviser that September during military manoeuvres in the hills (montes) of León.7

As 1934 progressed, Franco became the favourite general of the Radicals just as, when the political atmosphere grew more conflictive after October, he was to become the general of the more aggressively right-wing CEDA. The favour of Hidalgo contrasted strongly with the treatment Franco perceived himself to have suffered at the hands of Azaña. Moreover, with the Radical government, backed in the Cortes by the CEDA, pursuing socially conservative policies and breaking the power of one union after another, the Republic began to seem altogether more acceptable to Franco. For many conservatives, ‘catastrophist’ solutions to Spain’s problems seemed for the moment less urgent. The extreme Right, however, remained unconvinced and so continued to prepare for violence. The most militant group on the ultra Right were the Carlists of the Traditionalist Communion, break-away royalists who had rejected the liberal heresy of the constitutional monarchists and advocated an earthly theocracy under the guidance of warrior priests. The Carlists were collecting arms and drilling in the north and the spring of 1934 saw Fal Conde, the movement’s secretary, recruiting volunteers in Andalusia. The Carlists, together with the fascist Falange Española, and the influential and wealthy ‘Alfonsists’, the conventional supporters of Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera, constituted the self-styled ‘catastrophist’ Right. They were so-called because of their determination to destroy the Republic by means of a cataclysm rather than by the more gradual legalist tactic favoured by the CEDA. Their plans for an uprising would eventually come to fruition in the summer of 1936.