The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (25 page)

A much smaller force of only 400
regulares
was to secure southern Andalucia under Colonel Varela, a secret instructor of Carlist
requetés
before the rising and the officer released from prison in Cádiz by the insurgents on 19 July. Colonial troops from Seville captured Huelva, before retiring to crush any remaining resistance southwards to Cádiz and Algeciras. Then, in the second week of August, Varela’s force moved eastwards to help the beleaguered nationalists in Granada. Once a salient to the city had been established, they prepared to attack Málaga and the coastal strip beyond the mountains: But Córdoba was threatened by a republican force of 3,000 men under General Miaja, so Varela moved rapidly on 20 August to reinforce Colonel Cascajo’s small force there. Once the Córdoba front was stabilized in the first week of September (it was hardly to change for the rest of the war), Varela marched southwards and captured Ronda on 18 September.

General José Miaja, the republican commander of the southern front and later of Madrid during the siege, was one of those senior officers who probably stayed loyal from force of circumstance rather than from conviction.
⁶
His force was composed of loyal regular troops, Madrid militiamen and local volunteers. The ineffectiveness of totally untrained men in conventional manoeuvres was to be expected, but the uselessness and sloth of the regular officers was extraordinary. Franz Borkenau visited the headquarters on 5 September, during heavy fighting which was going badly. ‘The staff’, he wrote, ‘were sitting down to a good lunch, chatting, telling dirty stories, and not caring a bit about their duty, not even trying to establish any contact with the fighting lines for many hours.’ Even the wounded were ignored.
⁷

Meanwhile, on the northern axis of advance Colonel Yagüe’s force was organized in five self-contained columns of some 1,500 men each, with legionnaires and
regulares
mounted in requisitioned lorries and accompanied by 75mm artillery. They were supported by Savoia Marchetti 81s, piloted by Italians in Legion uniform, and Junkers 52s flown by Luftwaffe personnel. Yagüe struck due north into Estremadura, maintaining a momentum of advance exceeded only by the armoured punches of 1940. His tactics were simple and effective. The lorry-borne force rushed up the main road at full speed until resistance was encountered at a town or village. (No ambushes were made in the open country because the inhabitants wanted to defend their homes and needed the feeling of security which walls gave.) The nationalists would order surrender over loudhailers provided by the Germans. All doors and windows were to be left open and white flags hung on every house. If there was no reply, or firing, then the troops would dismount and launch a rapid pincer attack.

Concentrations of defenders provided ideal targets for professional troops with artillery backed by bombers. Mobile groups would have inflicted higher casualties and delayed the nationalists’ advance more effectively. Once a village was captured, the ensuing massacre was supposed to be a reprisal for ‘red’ killings., but it was utterly indiscriminate. Queipo de Llano claimed that ‘80 per cent of Andalucian families are in mourning, and we shall not hesitate to have recourse to sterner measures’.

The nationalist attack demonstrated the psychological vulnerability of the worker militias. In street fighting, caught up in collective bravery, they were courageous to a foolhardy degree. But in the open the shelling and bombing were usually too much for them, since they refused to dig trenches (Irún was an outstanding exception). ‘The Spanish are too proud to dig into the ground,’ Largo Caballero later declared to the communist functionary Mije.
⁸
Most of the bombs dropped were, in fact, almost useless, but the enemy aircraft were skilfully handled, causing maximum terror to peasants who had little experience of modern technology. Also, having no idea of how to prepare a defensive position, the militiamen had a desperate fear of finding themselves facing the Moors’ knives alone. Outflanking movements which surprised them usually led to a panic-stricken stampede. Chaos was increased when the population of a village clogged the roads with their carts and donkeys as they too fled from the colonial troops. Sometimes they even seized the militias’ lorries for themselves. On the other hand, the nationalist tactic of terror provoked heroism as well as flight. Peasants, having seen their families on their way, would take up shotguns or abandoned rifles and return to die in their
pueblo
.

By 10 August Yagüe’s force had advanced more than 300 kilometres to Mérida. Just south of the town at the Roman bridge over the River Guadiana, Asensio’s forces met fierce opposition. The defence committee of the town was organized by Anita López, who greatly encouraged the ferocious resistance. She was among those killed when Yagüe’s troops finally entered the town that night and carried out a fearful massacre.
⁹
The next day the bulk of the Mérida militia counter-attacked with the aid of a strong detachment of assault guards and civil guards sent from Madrid. Yagüe left part of his force to hold them off while he advanced due west on Badajoz, on the Portuguese border. Franco had insisted on this diversion from the main axis. Apart from not wanting to leave an enemy strongpoint behind his line of advance, he wished to demonstrate that the northern and southern parts of the nationalist zone were now linked.

Badajoz was defended by no more than 2,000 militia, poorly armed, and 500 regulars under the command of Colonel Puigdengolas.
¹⁰
They also had to suppress the civil guards, who declared for the rising just before Yagüe’s arrival. His troops took up position outside the town walls on 14 August. A pincer attack was then launched at 5.30 in the afternoon, with the Foreign Legion assaulting two of the gates under the cover of artillery fire, while aircraft bombed the town. The colonial troops broke into the town and the slaughter began. Fighting from house to house with grenade and bayonet, the
regulares
made no distinction between combatant or civilian. Militiamen were even shot down on the altar steps of the cathedral. Any survivors were then herded into the bullring. The smell of blood in the heat was sickening.

Meanwhile, the looting of even nationalists’ property was explained by one officer as the ‘war tax they pay for salvation’. Officers organized the despatch of the
regulares’
s booty back to their families in Morocco because it helped recruiting. The legionnaires did not burden themselves with the often useless impedimenta which the Moors collected. They simply examined the mouths of the dead and smashed out any gold-capped teeth with their rifle butts.

On 2 September Yagüe reached the Tagus valley, where he swung eastwards towards Madrid. He had already ordered Asensio and Castejón’s forces to advance on Navalmoral de la Mata via the high hills to the south of the river. They were attacked ineffectively by an international air squadron organized by the French writer André Malraux, and then came up against a militia force of about 8,000 men under General Riquelme. The colonial troops’ rapid deployment, however, outflanked the republican forces, making them fall back in disorder. The Moors’ tactical movements achieved a surprise, which struck panic into the inexperienced city militiamen. Yet there were independent groups who attacked and harassed the colonial troops in guerrilla fashion.

Yagüe was determined to keep up his momentum. He pushed on to Talavera de la Reina, the last town of any size before Madrid. The rapidity and success of his advance had seriously demoralized the force of 10,000 militiamen awaiting him there. It seemed as if the Army of Africa was unbeatable. Once again a flanking motion supported by air and artillery bombardment was enough to start a republican retreat. On the evening of 3 September the road to Madrid was littered with abandoned weapons. The capital lay only 100 kilometres away.

Yagüe had advanced nearly 500 kilometres in four weeks. It was a feat which, even allowing for the experience and training of his troops, took all attention away from Mola’s Basque operation. The next move of the Army of Africa still provokes discussion. Franco did not force on north-eastwards to Madrid and so maintain the momentum of attack before a proper defence of the capital could be organized. Instead, he switched the axis of advance south-eastwards to Toledo, where nationalists were still defending the Alcázar. Yagüe argued bitterly against this decision, so Franco replaced him with Varela after the capture of Ronda on 18 September.
¹¹

As many had remarked, Franco was both ambitious and politically clear-sighted. The defence of the Alcázar had become the most potent source of nationalist propaganda. Its resistance was raised to an almost mystical level.
¹²
Franco was still, at this stage, little more than
primus inter pares
. To be the ‘saviour of the Alcázar’ would make his leadership of the nationalist movement unchallengeable. It has, of course, been argued that Franco would have achieved the same pre-eminence by capturing Madrid. But that represented a far more difficult undertaking. To outflank and bomb untrained militiamen in the countryside was one thing. Clearing a major city required a totally different operation. Franco was too wily to take an unnecessary risk before his leadership was officially confirmed. Then, too, while foreign backers and financiers might grumble if the war took a long time, only a very serious reverse would induce them to cut their losses. Franco did not believe that the fighting qualities of the Madrid militia, or their weaponry, would improve in the immediate future. He therefore felt that he could afford to wait a couple of weeks for reinforcements to arrive. It was Mola who was to make a fatuous boast about drinking coffee on the Gran Vía in a matter of days, but even Franco never expected Madrid to resist as it did. Another theory is that Franco wanted the advance to be slow so that there was sufficient time to purge the rear areas of potential opponents. The Italian general Mario Roatta recounted much later that Queipo de Llano had told him that military operations were conducted slowly as a sort of ‘olive oil press, in order to occupy and pacify, village by village, the whole zone’.
¹³

During August the militia troops besieging the Alcázar underestimated both the speed of Yagüe’s advance and the resilience of the fortress’s defenders. There was a relaxed atmosphere on the barricades surrounding the military academy. Enormous quantities of small-arms ammunition were wasted against its thick walls. It was some time before artillery was brought up and even the 175mm piece which eventually arrived brought down only the superstructure. The Alcázar was like an iceberg. Its strength lay within the submerged rock. There was something Buñuelesque about the scene: militiamen, wearing straw hats against the sun, lay on mattresses behind their barricades and exchanged insults with the Civil Guard defenders. Twice a day there was a tacitly agreed ceasefire as a blind beggar tapped his way along the calle de Carmen between the firing lines.

The most serious psychological mistake made by the republican besiegers was the attempt to use Colonel Moscardó’s son, Luis, as a hostage. On 23 July a local lawyer called Cándido Cabello rang the Alcázar, saying that they would shoot him unless the defenders surrendered. Moscardó refused and, according to the nationalist version, told his son, who was put on the telephone, to die bravely. In fact, Luis was not shot until a month later in reprisal for an air raid.
¹⁴
The dramatic appeal of the story also camouflaged the fact that the 100 left-wing hostages, including women and children, whom the defenders had taken into the Alcázar at the beginning of the siege were never heard of again.
¹⁵

None of this stopped the creation of the most emotive symbolism for the nationalist movement. The defenders, believing that Luis had been shot immediately, could not consider surrendering after such a sacrifice. The story was used as a moral lesson for everyone in nationalist territory. In addition, since the old city of Toledo was the centre of Spanish Catholicism and 107 priests were reputed to have been killed there by the left, the incident was projected with all the fervour of the ‘anti-atheist crusade’. It was enrobed with mystical implications of Abraham and Isaac, even of God and Christ, by those carried away with the parallel. Dramatic resemblances were also drawn with episodes from Spanish history–Philip II handing over his son to be executed by the Inquisition and Alonzo Guzmán leaving the Moors to crucify his son outside the besieged walls of Tarifa in the thirteenth century. The young cadets of the Alcázar were extolled by the nationalist press and their supporters abroad. In reality, there was only a handful of cadets there, since the rising took place during the Academy’s summer holiday. The courageous defence which tied down so many republicans was conducted by members of the less glamorous Civil Guard.

The rapid approach of the Army of Africa during September made the besiegers appreciate the gravity of their situation. Mines were dug into the rock under the fortress and, in a great show witnessed by the world’s press, one corner of the Alcázar was blown up. The presence of women and children inside, however, made the propaganda exercise counterproductive, while the rubble left a formidable barrier enabling the defenders to beat off the assault.

Towards the end of September Varela’s relief force arrived within striking distance. Some of the militia stayed on and faced the colonial troops with great courage, but the majority fled back towards Aranjuez. Varela ignored Moscardó’s promise that militiamen who surrendered would be spared. Blood ran down the steep and narrow streets of the city in reprisal. Many militiamen killed themselves rather than surrender. Pockets of resistance were burned out and in the hospital 200 wounded militiamen left behind in the hospital of San Juan Bautista were killed in their beds with grenades and bayonets.
¹⁶
Nationalist troops are also said to have taken twenty pregnant women whom they found in a maternity wing and shot them against the walls of the cemetery.
¹⁷