Franco

When he drove into Tetuán from the aerodrome at 7.30 a.m. on the morning of Sunday 19 July, the streets were already lined with people shouting ‘¡Viva España!’ and ‘¡Viva Franco!’. He was greeted at the offices of the Spanish High Commission by military bands and gushingly enthusiastic officers. One of his first acts in his new headquarters was to draw up an address to his fellow military rebels throughout Morocco and in Spain. The text throbbed with self-confidence. Declaring that ‘Spain is saved’, it ended with words which summed up Franco’s unquestioning confidence, ‘Blind faith, no doubts, firm energy without vacillations, because the Patria demands it. The Movimiento sweeps all before it and there is no human force that can stop it’. Broadcast repeatedly by local radio stations, it had the instant effect of raising rebel spirits. When he reached Ceuta in the early afternoon, the scenes which he encountered were more consistent with the beginning of a great adventure than of a bloody civil war. Later in the day, he drove to the headquarters of the Legion in Dar Riffien. Nearly sixteen years earlier, he had arrived there for the first time to become second-in-command of the newly created force. His sense of destiny cannot fail to have been excited by the fact that now he was met by wildly euphoric soldiers chanting ‘Franco! Franco! Franco!’. Yagüe made a short and emotional speech: ‘Here they are, just as you left them … Magnificent and ready for anything. You, Franco, who so many times led them to victory, lead them again for the honour of Spain’. The newly arrived leader, on the verge of tears, embraced Yagüe and spoke to the Legionarios. He recognized that they were hungry for combat and raised their pay, already double that of the regular Army, by one peseta per day.1

That practical gesture was evidence that, behind the rhetoric, he was aware of the need to consolidate the support of those on whom he would have to rely in the next crucial weeks. Immediately on arriving at the High Commission, he had spent time in conclave with Colonels Saenz de Buruaga, Beigbeder and Martín Moreno discussing ways of recruiting Moorish volunteers.2 Now, on his return to Tetuán from Dar-Riffien, he took a further measure to secure Moroccan goodwill. He awarded the Gran Visir Sidi Ahmed el Gamnia Spain’s highest medal for bravery, the Gran Cruz Laureada de San Fernando, for his efforts in containing single-handed an anti-Spanish riot in Tetuán.3 It was a gesture which was to facilitate the subsequent recruiting of Moroccan mercenaries to fight in peninsular Spain.4

The readiness of Franco to use Moroccan troops in Spain had already been demonstrated in October 1934. The gruesome practices of the Legion and the Regulares were to be repeated with terrible efficacy during the bloodthirsty advance of the Army of Africa towards Madrid in 1936. At a conscious level, it was no doubt for him a simple military decision. The Legion and the Regulares were the most effective soldiers in the Spanish armed forces and it was natural that he would use them without agonizing over the moral implications. The central epic of Spanish history, deeply embedded in the national culture and especially so in right-wing culture, was the struggle against the Moors from 711 to 1492. In more recent times, the conquest of the Moroccan protectorate had cost tens of thousands of Spanish lives. Accordingly, the use of Moorish mercenaries against Spanish civilians was fraught with significance. It showed just how partial and partisan in class terms was the Nationalists’ interpretation of patriotism and their determination to win whatever the price in blood.

Franco believed that he was rebelling to save the Patria, or rather his version of it, from Communist infiltration, and any means to do so were licit. He did not view liberal and working class voters for the Popular Front as part of the Patria. In that sense, as the Asturian campaign of 1934 had suggested, Franco would regard the working class militiamen who were about to oppose his advance on Madrid in the same way as he had regarded the Moorish tribesmen whom it had been his job to pacify between 1912 and 1925. He would conduct the early stages of his war effort as if it were a colonial war against a racially contemptible enemy. The Moors would spread terror wherever they went, loot the villages they captured, rape the women they found, kill their prisoners and sexually mutilate the corpses.5 Franco knew that such would be the case and had written a book in which his approval of such methods was clear.6 If he had any qualms, they were no doubt dispelled by an awareness of the enormity of the task facing himself and his fellow rebels. Franco knew that, if they failed, they would be shot. In such a context, the Army of Africa was a priceless asset, a force of shock troops capable of absorbing losses without there being political repercussions.7 The use of terror, both immediate and as a long-term investment, was something which Franco understood instinctively. During, and long after the Civil War, those of his enemies not physically eliminated would be broken by fear, terrorised out of opposition and forced to seek survival in apathy.

Because of his cool resolve and his infectious optimism, the decision of Franco to join the rising and to take over the Spanish forces in Morocco was a considerable boost to the morale of the rebels everywhere. Described as ‘brother of the well-known airman’ and ‘a turncoat general’ by The Times, he was stripped of his rank by the Republic on 19 July.8 He was one of only four of the twenty-one Major-Generals on active service to declare against the government, the others being Goded, Queipo and Cabanellas.9 There were officers whose decision to join the rising was clinched by hearing about Franco.10 More than one rebel officer in mainland Spain reacted to the news with a spontaneous shout of ‘¡Franquito está con nosotros! ¡Hemos ganado!’ (Franco’s with us. We’ve won).11 They were wrong in the sense that the plotters, with the partial exception of Franco, who expected the struggle to last a couple of months, had not foreseen that the attempted coup would turn into a long civil war. Their plans had been for a rapid alzamiento, or rising, to be followed by a military directory like that established by Primo de Rivera in 1923, and they had not counted on the strength of working class resistance.

Nevertheless, the plotters were fortunate that their two most able generals, Franco and Mola, had been successful in the early hours of the coup. While Franco to the far south of Spanish territory could rely on the brutal military forces of the Moroccan protectorate, Mola, in the north enjoyed the almost uniformly committed support of the local civilian Carlists of Navarre. In Pamplona, the Carlist population had turned the coup into a popular festival, thronging the streets and shouting ¡Viva Cristo Rey! (long live Christ the King). These two successes permitted the implementation of the rebel plan of simultaneous marches on Madrid.

On 18 July, that broad strategy was still in the future. The rising had been successful only in the north and north-west of Spain, and in isolated pockets of the south. With a few exceptions, rebel triumphs followed the electoral geography of the Republic. In Galicia and the deeply Catholic rural regions of Old Castile and León, where the Right had enjoyed mass support, the coup met little opposition. The conservative ecclesiastical market towns – Burgos, Salamanca, Zamora, Segovia and Avila, fell almost without struggle. In contrast, in Valladolid, after Generals Andrés Saliquet and Miguel Ponte had arrested the head of the VII Military Region, General Nicolás Molero, it took their men, aided by local Falangist militia, nearly twenty-four hours to crush the Socialist railway workers of Valladolid.12 Elsewhere, in most of the Andalusian countryside, where the landless labourers formed the mass of the population, the left took power. In the southern cities, it was a different story. A general strike in Cádiz seemed to have won the town for the workers but after the arrival of reinforcements from Morocco, the rebels under Generals José López Pinto and José Enrique Varela, gained control. Córdoba, Huelva, Seville and Granada all fell after the savage liquidation of working class resistance. Seville, the Andalusian capital and the most revolutionary southern city, fell to the lanky eccentric Queipo de Llano and a handful of fellow-conspirators who seized the divisional military headquarters by bluff and bravado. Related to Alcalá Zamora by marriage, Queipo had been considered a republican until the demise of the President inspired a seething hatred of the regime. Perhaps in expiation of his republican past, he would soon be notorious for the implacable ferocity first demonstrated by the bloody repression of working class districts during his take-over of Seville.13

In most major urban and industrial centres – Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao – the popular forces by-passed the dithering Republican government and seized power, defeating the military rebels in the process. In Madrid, the general in charge of the rising, Rafael Villegas, was in hiding and sent his second-in-command, General Fanjul, to take command of the one post they held, the Montaña barracks. Besieged by local working class forces, Fanjul was captured and subsequently tried and executed.14 After defeating the rebels at the Montaña barracks, left-wing militiamen from the capital headed south to reverse the success of the rising in Toledo. With loyal regular troops, they captured the town. However, the rebels under Colonel José Moscardó, the town’s military commander, retreated into the Alcázar, the impregnable fortress which dominates both Toledo and the river Tagus which curls around it on the southern, eastern and western sides.

The defeat of the rising in Barcelona deprived the conspirators of one of their most able generals, Manuel Goded, a potential rival to Franco both militarily and politically. In Barcelona, Companys refused to issue arms but depots were seized by the CNT. In the early hours of 19 July, rebel troops began to march on the city centre. They were met by anarchists and the local Civil Guard which, decisively, had stayed loyal. The CNT stormed the Atarazanas barracks, where the rebels had set up headquarters. When Goded arrived by seaplane from the Balearic Islands to join them, the rising was already defeated. Captured, he was forced to broadcast an appeal to his followers to lay down their arms. The defeat of the rebellion in Barcelona was vital for the government, since it ensured that all of Catalonia would remain loyal.15

In the Basque Country, divided between its Catholic peasantry and its urban Socialists, the Republic’s support for local national regionalist aspirations tipped the balance against the rebels. As Franco had foreseen, the role of the Civil Guard and the Assault Guards was to be crucial. Where the two police forces remained loyal to the government, as they did in most large cities, the conspirators were defeated. In Zaragoza, the stronghold of the CNT, where they did not, the decisive united action of the police and the military garrison had taken over the city before the anarcho-syndicalist masses could react. In Oviedo, the audacious military commander, Colonel Antonio Aranda, seized power by trickery and bravery. He persuaded both Madrid and the local Asturian left-wing forces that he was true to the Republic. Several thousand miners confidently left the city to assist in the defence of Madrid only for many of them to be massacred in a Civil Guard ambush in Ponferrada. Aranda, after speaking with Mola on the telephone, declared for the rebels. By the following day, Oviedo was under siege from enraged miners.16 The insurgent triumphs in Oviedo, Zaragoza and the provincial capitals of Andalusia had faced sufficient popular hostility to suggest that a full-scale war of conquest would have to be fought before the rebels would control of all of Spain.

After three days, the conspirators held about one third of Spain in a huge block including Galicia, León, Old Castile, Aragón and part of Extremadura, together with isolated enclaves like Oviedo, Seville and Córdoba. Galicia was crucial for its ports, agricultural products and as a base for attacks on Asturias. The rebels also had the great wheat-growing areas, but the main centres of both heavy and light industry in Spain remained in Republican hands. They faced the legitimate government and much of the Army, although its loyalty was sufficiently questionable for the Republican authorities to make less than full use of it. The government was unstable and indecisive. Indeed, the rebels received a promising indication of the real balance of power when Casares Quiroga resigned to be replaced briefly by a cabinet bent on some form of compromise with the rebels. When Casares withdrew, President Azaña held consultations with the moderate Republican, Diego Martínez Barrio, with the Socialists Largo Caballero and Prieto and with his friend, the conservative Republican, Felipe Sánchez Román. As the basis of a compromise, Sánchez Román suggested a package of measures including the prohibition of strikes and a total crack-down on left-wing militias. The outcome was a cabinet of the centre under Martínez Barrio. Convinced that this was a cabinet ready to capitulate to military demands, the rebels were in no mood for compromise.17

It was now too late. Neither Mola nor the Republican forces to the left of Martínez Barrio were prepared to accept any deal. When Martínez Barrio made his fateful telephone call to Mola at 2 a.m. on 19 July, the conversation was polite but sterile. Offered a post in the government, Mola refused on the grounds that it was too late and an accommodation would mean the betrayal of the rank-and-file of both sides.18 On the following day, Martínez Barrio was replaced by José Giral, a follower of Azaña. After his Minister of War, General José Miaja, also tried unsuccessfully to negotiate Mola’s surrender, Giral quickly grasped the nature of the situation and took the crucial step of authorizing the arming of the workers. Thereafter, the defence of the Republic fell to the left-wing militias. In consequence, the revolution which Franco believed himself to have been forestalling was itself precipitated by the military rebellion. In taking up arms to fight the rebels, the Left picked up the power abandoned by the bourgeois political establishment which had crumbled. The middle class Republican Left, the moderate Socialists and the Communist Party then combined to play down the revolution and restore power to the bourgeois Republic. By May 1937, they would be successful, suffocating the revolutionary élan of the working class along the way.

In the interim, a beleagured state, under attack from part of its Army and unable to trust most of those who declared themselves loyal, with its judiciary and police force at best divided, saw much day-to-day power pass to ad hoc revolutionary bodies. Under such circumstances, the Republican authorities were unable, in the early weeks and months, to prevent extremist elements committing atrocities against rightists in the Republican zone. This gave a retrospective justification for a military rising which had no prior agreed objectives. The fact that it would be the Communists who eventually took the lead in the restoration of order and the crushing of the revolution was simply ignored by officers like Franco who believed that they had risen to defeat the Communist menace. That generalised objective was the nearest that the conspirators had to a political plan. Franco’s own bizarre declaration in the Canary Islands before setting off for Africa ended ‘Fraternity, Liberty and Equality’. Many of the declarations by other officers ended with the cry ‘¡Viva la República!’. At most, they knew that they planned to set up a military dictatorship, in the specific form of a military directory.19

Equally vague were the military prognostications. There were those, like General Orgaz, who believed that the rising would have achieved its objectives within a matter of hours or at most days.20 Mola, realizing the crucial importance of Madrid, and anticipating a possible failure in the capital, expected that a dual advance from Navarre and the south would be necessary and therefore require a short civil war lasting two or three weeks. The reverses of the first few days sowed doubts in the minds of the early optimists. Almost alone among the conspirators, Franco, with his obsessions about the importance of the Civil Guard, had taken a more realistic view. Not even he had anticipated a war which would have gone on much beyond mid-September. However, he took the disappointments of the first few days phlegmatically, resourcefully seeking new solutions and insisting to all around him that they must have ‘blind faith’ in victory. There can be little doubt that his ‘blind faith’ was sincere. It reflected both his temperament and his long-held conviction that superior morale won battles, something learned in Africa. From his first days with the Legion, he retained the belief that morale had to be backed up by iron discipline. The categorical optimism of his first radio broadcasts in Tetuán was complemented with dire warnings about what would happen to those who opposed the rebels. On 21 July, he promised that the disorders (‘hechos vandálicos’) of the Popular Front would receive ‘exemplary punishment’. On 22 July, he said ‘for those who persist in opposing us or hope to surrender at the last minute, there will be no pardon’.21

Unaware as yet of the fate of the rising on the mainland, Franco had set up headquarters in the officers of the Spanish High Commission in Tetuán. One of the first issues with which he had to deal provided an opportunity to demonstrate precisely the kind of iron discipline from which he believed the will to win would grow. On arrival at Tetuán, he was informed that his first cousin Major Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde had been arrested and was about to undergo a summary court martial for having tried to hold the Sania Ramel airport of Tetuán for the Republic and then, when that was no longer possible, disabling the aircraft there. According to Franco’s niece, he and Ricardo de la Puente were more like brothers than cousins. As adults, their ideological differences became acute. Franco had had him removed from his post during the Asturian rising. In one of their many arguments, Franco once exclaimed ‘one day I’m going to have you shot’. De la Puente was now condemned to death and Franco did nothing to save him. Franco believed that a pardon would have been taken as a sign of weakness, something he was not prepared to risk. Rather than have to decide between approving the death sentence or ordering a pardon, he briefly handed over command to Orgaz and left the final decision to him.22

While Franco consolidated his hold on Morocco, things were not going well for the Nationalists on the other side of the Straits. The losses of Fanjul in Madrid and Goded in Barcelona were substantial blows.23 Now, as Mola and other successful conspirators awaited Sanjurjo’s arrival from his Portuguese exile to lead a triumphal march on Madrid, at dawn on 21 July, they received more bad news.24 Sanjurjo had been killed in bizarre circumstances. On 19 July, Mola’s envoy, Juan Antonio Ansaldo, the monarchist air-ace and playboy who had once organized Falangist terror squads, had arrived in Estoril at the summer house where General Sanjurjo was staying.25 His tiny Puss Moth bi-plane seemed an odd choice for the mission the more so as the far more suitable Dragon Rapide used by Franco had just landed in Lisbon almost certainly with a view to picking up Sanjurjo. The journey could also have been made by road. However, when Ansaldo arrived, he announced dramatically to an enthusiastic group of Sanjurjo’s hangers-on that he was placing himself at the orders of the Spanish Chief of State. Overcome with emotion at this theatrical display of public respect, Sanjurjo agreed to travel with him.26

To add to the problems posed by the minuscule scale of Ansaldo’s aeroplane, the Portuguese authorities now intervened. Although Sanjurjo was legally in the country as a tourist, the Portuguese government did not want trouble with Madrid. Accordingly, Ansaldo was obliged to clear customs and depart alone from the airport of Santa Cruz. He was then to return towards Estoril and collect Sanjurjo on 20 July at a disused race-track called La Marinha at Boca do Inferno (the mouth of hell) near Cascaes. In addition to his own rather portly self, Sanjurjo had, according to Ansaldo, a large suitcase containing uniforms and medals for his ceremonial entry into Madrid. The wind forced Ansaldo to take off in the direction of some trees. The overweight aircraft had insufficient lift to prevent the propeller clipping the tree tops. It crashed and burst into flames. Sanjurjo died although his pilot survived.27 Contrary to Ansaldo’s version, it was later claimed in Portugal that the crash was the result of an anarchist bomb.28

Whatever the cause, the death of Sanjurjo was to have a profound impact on the course of the war and on the career of General Franco. He was the conspirator’s unanimous choice as leader. Now, with Fanjul and Goded eliminated, his death left Mola as the only general to be a future challenger to Franco. Mola’s position as ‘Director’ of the rising was in any case more than matched by Franco’s control of the Moroccan Army which would soon emerge as the cornerstone of Nationalist success. When war broke out, the military forces in the Peninsula, approximately one hundred and thirty thousand men in the Army and thirty-three thousand Civil Guards, were divided almost equally between rebels and loyalists. However, that broad stalemate was dramatically altered by the fact that the entire Army of Africa was with the rebels. Against the battle-hardened colonial Army, the improvised militiamen and raw conscripts, with neither logistical support nor overall commanders, had little chance.29 Apart from Mola, the only other potential challenger to Franco’s pre-eminence was the Falangist leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, but he was in a Republican prison in Alicante.

In these early days of the rising, it is unlikely that even the quietly ambitious Franco would have been thinking of anything but winning the war. The death of Sanjurjo was a harsh demonstration to the conspirators that the alzamiento was far from the instant success for which they had hoped. The collapse of the revolt in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Málaga and Bilbao obliged the insurgents to evolve a plan of attack to conquer the rest of Spain. Since Madrid was seen as the hub of Republican resistance, their strategy was to take the form of drives on the Spanish capital by Mola’s northern Army and Franco’s African forces. The rebels, however, confronted unexpected problems. Mola’s efforts were to be dissipated by the need to send troops to San Sebastián and to Aragón. Moreover, the mixed columns of soldiers, Carlist Requetés and Falangists sent by Mola against Madrid were surprisingly halted at the Somosierra pass in the Sierra to the north and at the Alto del León to the north-west by the improvised workers’ militias from the capital. Threatened from the Republican-held provinces of Santander, Asturias and the Basque Country, the northern Army was also impeded by lack of arms and ammunition.

Franco’s Army was paralysed by the problem of transport to the mainland. The conspirators had taken for granted that the fleet would be with them but their hopes had been dashed by a below-decks mutiny. In facing the daunting problem of being blockaded in Morocco, Franco displayed a glacial sang froid. His apparent lack of nerves prevented his being dismayed by the numerous reverses that the rebels had encountered in the first forty-eight hours. Even the worst news never disturbed his sleep.30 Franco’s optimism and his determination to win was the dominant theme of an interview which he gave to the American reporter Jay Allen in Tetuán on 27 July. When Allen asked him how long the killing would continue now that the coup had failed, Franco replied ‘there can be no compromise, no truce. I shall go on preparing my advance to Madrid. I shall advance. I shall take the capital. I shall save Spain from Marxism at whatever cost.’ Denying that there was a stalemate, Franco declared ‘I have had setbacks, the defection of the Fleet was a blow, but I shall continue to advance. Shortly, very shortly, my troops will have pacified the country and all of this will soon seem like a nightmare.’ Allen responded ‘that means that you will have to shoot half Spain?’, at which a smiling Franco said ‘I repeat, at whatever cost.’31