The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (12 page)

The gradualist lines of social democrats could neither satisfy the inflamed aspirations of the workers, nor reassure landowners that private property would be respected. That spring strikes broke out not in pursuit of a particular demand but to show working-class muscle. There was a fierce satisfaction in the idea that the old saying of the downtrodden might come true: ‘when God in heaven wants justice to change/the poor will eat bread and the rich will eat shit.’
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Meanwhile in Madrid, on 3 April the Cortes reunited. Indalecio Prieto proposed the impeachment of the president of the Republic. Prieto’s accusation was that Alcalá Zamora had dissolved parliament unnecessarily, using a literal and sectarian interpretation of article 81 of the Constitution. His motion was won with 238 votes and only five against. Alcalá Zamora was unseated four days later. Less than a month after that, on 3 May, Manuel Azaña was elected president of the Spanish Republic. Prieto hoped to take over the leadership of the government, but his rival Largo Caballero was determined to prevent it by vetoing any socialist participation in the government. Azaña therefore appointed the Galician politician Santiago Casares Quiroga president of the council of ministers, the equivalent of prime minister.

During the following days a series of assassination attempts convulsed the country. The first victim was a judge, Manuel Pedregal, who had sentenced a Falangist to 30 years in prison for the murder of a vendor of left-wing newspapers. Then a bomb exploded next to the presidential saluting stand at a military parade on 14 April to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Republic. The escort of assault guards opened fire in error against a junior officer of the Civil Guard. This developed into a running battle between Falangists and members of the Assault Guard and more were killed and wounded. The Falange claimed the deaths of the journalist Luciano Malumbres in Santander, the journalist Manuel Andrés in San Sebastian, and in Madrid the socialist Carlos Faraudo, a captain. On 16 April Falangists opened fire with submachine-guns against workers in the centre of Madrid, killing three and wounding another 40.

The communists had meanwhile set up their own very effective paramilitary arm, the Milicias Antifascistas Obreras y Campesinas (MAOC), and the socialists organized their own column, the ‘Motorizada’, to take on the fascist squads. Weapons were carried almost as a matter of course, to such a point that members of the Cortes were asked to hand theirs in when they entered the parliament building. In Barcelona, which had been calmer than Madrid, a
pistolero
of the anarchist FAI shot down the two brothers Miquel and Josep Badia, leading members of Estat Català.

Largo Caballero’s rhetoric became even wilder. His declaration that ‘the revolution we want can be achieved only through violence’ was interpreted by the Socialist Youth as Leninist strategy. And on 1 May, when the great May Day parade swarmed through the streets and avenues of central Madrid, conservatives watched in trepidation from their balconies or from behind shutters. They eyed with mounting alarm the red flags and banners and portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Largo Caballero on huge placards, and listened to the chanting of the demonstrators, demanding the formation of a proletarian government and a people’s army. But it was not just these obvious political symbols that frightened them. The workers in the street had a new confidence or, in their view, insolence. Beggars had started to ask for alms, not for the love of God, but in the name of revolutionary solidarity. Girls walked freely and started to ridicule convention. On 4 May José Antonio delivered a diatribe from prison against the Popular Front. He claimed that it was directed by Moscow, fomented prostitution and undermined the family. ‘Have you not heard the cry of Spanish girls today: “Children, yes! Husbands, no!”?’
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Prieto attacked the ‘revolutionary infantilism’ of the left and warned that excesses in the streets and the burning of churches only pushed the middle classes into supporting a military rebellion. This formed part of his major speech on 1 May at Cuenca.
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Another socialist leader, Julián Besteiro, professor of logic at the University of Alcalá de Henares, tried to warn his party that Spain in 1936 was not Russia in 1917 and that the Spanish army was not about to mutiny like the Tsarist forces, exhausted by a long and terrible war. He was right, but after the left wing uprising of October 1934 it was almost certainly too late to expect either side to return to the rules of parliamentary democracy.

During that turbulent spring, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT tried to get work for its unemployed members, competing with the socialist union, the UGT. But anarchist purists of the FAI attacked this as reformist. They were convinced that to have anything to do with capitalist society was to be corrupted. In any case, the threat of a military rising began to unite syndicalists and members of the FAI. On 1 May the CNT held its national congress in Saragossa, ‘the second city of anarchism’. The Congress ratified the traditional position of making no pact with any political party, but listened attentively to Largo Caballero’s arguments in favour of unity between the UGT and the CNT. Neither he nor the anarchists realized that this also happened to be the communists’ secret strategy.

In spite of its restrained militancy, the Spanish Communist Party had a better organization and better discipline than other parties, and a firm will. This was what its recruits so admired as the only way to advance the cause of the working class. The Popular Front alliance was not enough for the communists. They wanted an integration of all working-class parties and unions to help them seize power. Largo Caballero, an unimaginative old trade unionist who was totally out of his depth, had no idea that Álvarez del Vayo, the adviser whom he trusted most and whom he later appointed to be foreign minister, was working closely with the Comintern agent Vittorio Codovilla. They were planning the wholesale defection of the Socialist Youth to the Spanish Communist Party, with promises of power and the argument that only the communists had the professionalism and the international support to defeat fascism.

Ettore Vanni, an important leader of the Italian Communist Party then working in Spain, said that communist discipline was accepted with a fanaticism which at times dehumanized them yet constituted their great strength. The determinist idea of ‘scientific socialism’ convinced the young militants that nothing could stop the final triumph of Marxism. They believed that absolute control of power was the only way to achieve their ideals. Spanish communists were strongly influenced by their own images of the Russian revolution, which they saw as a mixture of romantic heroism and a ruthless rejection of sentimentality to achieve what they thought would be a better society. They saw themselves as the only ones who could direct the masses correctly. Anyone who wavered or questioned this was a weak petit bourgeois, if not a traitor to the international proletariat. They derided the fears of libertarians on the corruptive influence of power, which they saw as the fussing of dilettantes on the eve of battle with an implacable enemy. Among those who responded to the call of communism was the head of the Socialist Youth, Santiago Carrillo. He had become all-powerful after having merged the socialist and communist youth movements into the Juventud Socialista Unificada. Then, when the civil war broke out Carrillo brought the organization’s 200,000 members entirely under communist control in a carefully staged manoeuvre during the chaos of the fighting.

In Catalonia the communists merged with the Unió Socialista, the Catalan arm of the PSOE and the Partit Català Proletari to constitute the PSUC (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya), which soon also came under total communist control. Communists who had followed Trotsky, on the other hand, had grouped themselves in 1935 in the POUM (Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista) under the leadership of Joaquim Maurín. In the Basque country or Euskadi, the statute of autonomy, was finally approved and in Galicia the statute of autonomy was passed with a massive majority on 28 June.
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During that early summer of 1936, the situation in Europe was tense. Hitler was remilitarizing the Rhineland in a flagrant violation of the Treaty of Versailles. He was also putting pressure on the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, as part of his strategy to prepare the
Anschluss
. Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and openly considered the possibility of extending his new empire in North Africa. In France the Popular Front won the elections, with Léon Blum leading the new government, but the reaction of the right revealed that France might face political turmoil.

In Spain, the pace of political violence and strikes increased with the onset of summer. On 1 June the UGT and CNT called all building workers, mechanics and lift operators out on strike. During the demonstration of 70,000 workers which followed, the stewards were attacked by armed Falangists, the strikers sacked food shops and the security forces had to be called in. At the beginning of July the UGT accepted arbitration but the CNT fought on. Members of the CNT responded to the Falangist attacks in kind and killed three of José Antonio’s bodyguards in a café. The government closed CNT centres in Madrid and arrested the strike leaders, David Antona and Cipriano Mera. Mera later became the most effective anarchist commander in the civil war.

In the middle of June in Málaga, anarchists and socialists became involved in battles condemned by the leaders of both CNT and UGT, while out in the countryside 100,000 CNT labourers declared themselves to be on strike. On 16 June Gil Robles stated in the Cortes that since 16 February 170 churches had been burned, 269 murders had been committed and 1,287 people injured. Altogether 133 general strikes and 216 local strikes had been called. His statistics, it must be pointed out, came from the less than impartial source of
El Debate
, but that did nothing to contradict the general impression that Spain was becoming ungovernable.
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Calvo Sotelo backed him up with a list of accusations against the government and warned that patriotic soldiers would save Spain from anarchy. When he personalized his insults, the president of the Cortes forced him to withdraw his words. There can be no doubt that his intention was to increase the sensation of complete disorder. The crescendo of insults and accusations from both sides tended to confirm that parliamentary government had broken down irretrievably.

Black propaganda was being used in a confusing profusion and at times it is hard to know what to believe. For example, the right claimed that the left was spreading rumours that nuns were handing out poisoned sweets to children, while the left claimed that the right itself spread these rumours to provoke anti-clerical outrages. Time and again, the right wing press compared Azaña to Kerensky and José Antonio reminded the Spanish army of the fate of Tsarist officers.
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In 1936 the Spanish army consisted of some 100,000 men. Nearly 40,000 of them were the tough and efficient troops based in Morocco, but the rest in the metropolitan army were of little use. ‘In Spain’, as one historian pointed out, ‘there was not enough ammunition for a single day of warfare, military production was in chaos, and there were hardly any armoured vehicles, anti-tank weapons or anti-aircraft guns.’
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Several thousand soldiers never received uniforms and many more never received any weapon training. Conscripts were often used as free domestic labour by officers.

The low military efficiency of the army had not stopped
pronunciamientos
in the past and, despite the fighting in Asturias, the officers plotting a rebellion did not appear to have been overly concerned by the opposition that they might face.
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Azaña’s government, while aware of a possible threat, did not deal with it effectively. Immediately after the elections, they took the unfortunate precaution of sending the most suspect generals to appointments far from the capital, such as General Franco to the Canary Islands and General Goded to the Balearics. In an age of aviation it was hardly a true island exile. In addition, Las Palmas was close to Morocco and Mallorca to Barcelona. General Emilio Mola, the main organizer of the conspiracy, who would take the codename the ‘Director’, was sent as military governor to Pamplona, the fief of the Carlists and their 8,000
requetés
who were ready to march.
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Mola, who had been in Morocco, preparing the garrison there for rebellion, returned to the Peninsula and stopped in Madrid on his way to Pamplona. Between 5 and 12 March he had meetings with other key conspirators: Orgaz, Goded, Ponte, Kindelán, Saliquet, Franco, Varela, Galarza, Fanjul and Rodríguez del Barrio. Mola told Goded that he was drafting ‘instructions and directives to set the conspiracy in motion first and then for a possible rising’.
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The initial plan involving Varela and Orgaz collapsed because José Díaz, the secretary-general of the Spanish Communist Party, read out in open session a confidential document from the plotters and forced the government to take action.

On 25 May Mola, a myopic and meticulous commander who could infuriate colleagues with his caution, sent off his ‘Instrucción reservada no. 1’. This indicated that the coup needed to unite the armed forces and non-military groups who supported their cause. They were counting, of course, on the Falangists, the
requetés
and the other right-wing parties. The figurehead of the rising would be General José Sanjurjo, known as ‘the lion of the Rif’, because he had won fame in the Alhucemas landing of 1925 which led to the defeat of Abd-el-Krim. A large, rather vain man, he was the descendant of Carlist officers who had fought the liberals in the nineteenth century.

Under his command came the man who was undoubtedly the most competent of the colonial officers known as
africanistas
, Francisco Franco Bahamonde. Franco, the son of a naval paymaster in El Ferrol, had joined the army because of a lack of openings in the navy. He was a hardworking cadet, but not brilliant at the Academy of Infantry–he passed out number 251 out of 312 candidates. In North Africa, however, he received rapid promotion in the Foreign Legion. This corps was modelled on its French equivalent. Unlike his robust soldiers, Franco lacked a military appearance. He was short, had a pot belly and a high-pitched voice, which provoked jokes among his fellow officers. They called him by the diminutives ‘comandantín’ and ‘Franquito’.
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The young general, although undoubtedly brave, was extremely cautious in his planning. In fact his reticence during the spring of 1936 led many colleagues to think that he might not join the rising because the left hated him so much after repressing the Asturias revolution. He was certainly not an expansive man and rarely gave away his thinking. He was also, at that time, not known for his religious beliefs and in the Legion he stood out for showing little interest in chasing women. He did have one passion, however. He was viscerally anti-communist and devoted himself to reading journals on the subject of the bolshevik threat.
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