The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

The Rising of the Generals

The generals had planned a coup d’état with a rising of garrisons in Spanish Morocco and throughout Spain. The success of such an action depended more on the psychological effect of speed and ruthlessness than on numbers. Although the rebel generals did not achieve an outright coup, the Republic failed to crush the rising in the first 48 hours, the most important period of the whole war, when the possession of whole regions was decided.

The hesitancy of the republican government was fatal in a rapidly developing crisis, because the initial uncertainty enforced a defensive mentality. The prime minister did not dare arm the UGT and CNT. He refused to depart from the legal constitution of the state, even though a state attacked by its own ‘spinal column’ has ceased to exist for all practical purposes. The delay in issuing weapons discouraged pre-emptive or counter-offensive moves against the rebel military. ‘The republican authorities were not prepared to give us arms,’ recalled a carpenter from Seville, ‘because they were more afraid of the working class than they were of the army. We communists did not share the government’s confidence that the rising would be suffocated in twenty-four hours.’¹

Republicans made a virtue of necessity. They encouraged the idea that ‘to resist was to win’, as a slogan later put it. Even during the rising the communist deputy La Pasionaria had expressed this dangerously appealing idea with ‘No Pasarán! (They shall not pass!)’, her famous plagiarism of Pétain’s phrase at Verdun.

The military plotters seldom had complete surprise on their side, but doubt and confusion were certainly in their favour. If the workers held back on the advice of a civil governor who was afraid of provoking the local garrison into revolt they were lost. They paid for this hesitation with their lives. But if they demonstrated from the beginning that they were prepared to assault the barracks, then most of the paramilitary forces would join them and the garrison surrender.

The final orders, sent out by General Mola in coded telegrams, provided for the Army of Africa to revolt at 5 a.m. on 18 July and the army in mainland Spain to rise 24 hours later. The difference in timing was to allow the Army of Africa to secure Spanish Morocco before being transported to the Andalucian coast by the navy. The rebel generals could count on this force because the rank and file were not conscripts, but regulars or, more accurately, mercenaries, whose reliability had been proved in the crushing of the Asturias rebellion. There were few officers of liberal sympathies, perhaps because colonials always exaggerate what they believe are national virtues. They despised politicians and had a virulent hatred of ‘reds’, a term including liberals and all those opposed to a right-wing dictatorship. It was an attitude which Mola expressed with all clarity in his instructions for the rising: ‘He who is not with us is against us.’

The elite force, and the most introvert, was the Foreign Legion. Composed in large part of fugitives and criminals, its ranks were indoctrinated with a cult of virility and slaughter. They were taught to be useful suicides with their battle cry of ‘Viva la Muerte!’ (Long live death!)’. The Legion was organized in banderas, compact battalions with their own light artillery. The Moroccan troops, on the other hand, were divided into tabores of some 250 men each. These regulares were Riffian tribesmen commanded by Spanish officers. Their ferocious efficiency had been amply proved resisting colonial power during the first quarter of the century. Probably their most important skill was the ability to move across country using the folds in the ground. Such stealth had a decided advantage over the Spanish idea of conspicuous bravery. These Moroccans had been recruited with the offer of higher wages than those which the French colonial authorities paid and also with an engagement bonus of two months’ pay. Widespread unemployment in Spanish Morocco prompted thousands to enlist.²

The rebels could hardly have failed to take Spanish Morocco. With only a handful of officers loyal to the Republic, the legionnaires obeyed the order to join the rising without question and the regulares were told that the Republic wanted to abolish Allah. The Spanish workers, who had virtually no arms and little contact with the indigenous population, found themselves completely isolated.

Towards midday on 17 July the plan for the next morning was discovered in the Moroccan town of Melilla, but General Romerales, a loyal republican described also as ‘the fattest of the 400 Spanish generals and one of the easiest to trick’,³ could not make up his mind whether to arrest the officers concerned. Colonel Seguí moved faster and arrested the general, having decided that it would be dangerous to delay, even though the other conspirators would not be ready. The Assault Guard were persuaded to join the rising and key buildings in the town were rapidly seized. The Foreign Legion and regulares attacked the casa del pueblo, where trade unionists fought to the end. While the remaining pockets were being finished off, Seguí had General Romerales and the mayor arrested.⁴ He signalled Colonels Sáenz de Buruaga and Yagüe commanding the garrisons at Tetuán and Ceuta. General Franco in Las Palmas was also informed by telegram about this premature action.

At ten past six the following morning, Franco sent his reply. ‘Glory to the heroic Army of Africa. Spain above everything. Accept the enthusiastic greeting of those garrisons which join you and all the other comrades in the Peninsula in these historic moments. Blind faith in victory. Long live Spain with honour!’ The same text was sent to all the divisions on the mainland, the headquarters of the Balearic Islands, to the commander of the cavalry division and the naval bases.⁵ In Las Palmas, Franco ordered the troops on to the street where, joined by Falangists, they besieged government buildings until they were surrendered. Franco then handed over command of the Canaries to General Orgaz and set off by sea to the aerodrome, which he reached at three in the afternoon of 18 July.⁶

As dusk fell on 17 July in Spanish Morocco, the commanders of the Legion and the regulares moved their forces into position in the other garrison towns. The Spanish working-class areas were quickly occupied and prominent unionists shot on sight. The declaration of a general strike was no more than a brave gesture as the Moroccan regulares were let loose. In Larache the workers fought desperately with very few weapons through the night, but in Ceuta, Yagüe’s legionnaires crushed the resistance in a little over two hours, killing the mayor. All this time the commander-in-chief in Morocco, General Gómez Morato, was gambling. Having carried out Azaña’s reshuffle, he was hated by the rebel officers. He knew nothing of the rising until a telephone call for him from Madrid from Casares Quiroga was put through to the casino. He immediately took an aeroplane to Melilla where he was arrested as soon as he landed.

The only remaining centres of resistance at dawn in Morocco on the 18th were the high commissioner’s residence and the air force base at Tetuán; both surrendered a few hours later when threatened with artillery. All those who had resisted were executed, including the high commissioner and Major de la Puente Bahamonde, whose fate was approved by his first cousin, General Franco. In a single night the rebels had killed 189 people.⁷

Colonel Beigbeder, who spoke Arabic, approached the Caliph Muley Hassan to secure his support. He warned him that the republican government could declare Morocco independent in order to undermine the rebel cause. And any encouragement of Moroccan nationalism would put him in danger after his collaboration with the colonial power.

In Madrid the republican government had been aware of the rising since the evening of 17 July. The next morning it issued the following communiqué: ‘The government states that the movement is confined to certain areas in the Protectorate and that no one, absolutely no one, on the mainland has joined this absurd venture.’ At 3 p.m. on 18 July Casares Quiroga firmly rejected offers of aid from the CNT and UGT. He urged everyone to carry on as normal and to ‘trust in the military powers of the state’. He claimed that the rising in Seville had been suppressed, still believing that General Queipo de Llano would secure central Andalucia for the Republic. In fact, Queipo de Llano had already done precisely the opposite. ‘Thanks to preventative measures taken by the government,’ Casares Quiroga proclaimed, ‘it may be said that a vast anti-republican movement has been wiped out.’ He again refused to arm the workers, saying that ‘anybody who hands out weapons without my approval will be shot’.⁸

That night the CNT and UGT declared a general strike over Unión Radio. It was the nearest they could get to ordering mobilization. The news coming in showed the administration’s statements to be a mixture of contradictions, lies and complacency. The workers began to dig up weapons hidden since the Asturian events of October 1934 and, although Casares Quiroga’s government finally began to understand what it faced, its basic attitude did not change. ‘His ministry is a madhouse,’ an observer remarked, ‘and the maddest inmate is the prime minister. He is neither sleeping nor eating. He shouts and screams as if possessed. He will hear nothing of arming the people and threatens to shoot anybody who does it on his own initiative.’⁹

When the rising was successful in a town, the pattern of events usually started with the seizing of strategic buildings, such as the town hall. If there was no military garrison, the rebel forces would consist of civil guards, Falangists, and right-wing supporters armed with hunting rifles or shotguns. They would proclaim a state of war in official terms, and in several places confused townsfolk thought that they were carrying out the orders of the Madrid government.

The response of the CNT and UGT was to order a general strike and demand weapons from the civil governor. Arms were either refused them or were unobtainable. Barricades were rapidly constructed, but workers who resisted the rebels were massacred, and potential opponents who survived, from the civil governor down to the lowest union official, were executed. On the other hand, if the troops wavered or delayed in coming out of their barracks, and the workers were ready, the outcome was usually very different. An immediate attack, or an encirclement of the barracks, was enough to ensure the rebels’ surrender.

A very important factor was the decision of the paramilitary forces, who were much better trained and armed than the conscript infantry. But it was wrong to say that their loyalty or disloyalty to the government was the crucial element. Like the general population, they were often unsure in their own minds, and only the most dedicated would fight when the battle was obviously lost from the beginning. They often hung back to see which way things were going before committing themselves. If the workers’ organizations took immediate and firm action, then they usually remained loyal, although the Civil Guard often revealed their true colours later on. Of the two corps, the Assault Guard showed more loyalty to the government than the Civil Guard, but then they tended to be an urban force and the big cities had a better prepared working class.

The city of Seville was of great strategic importance in the plans of the rebels as a base for the advance on Madrid. The intelligent chief of staff there, José Cuesta Monereo, was the true brains behind the coup which enthroned General Queipo de Llano, the commander of the carabinero frontier guards, as the ‘viceroy’ of Andalucia. Queipo was irreverent, cynical, unpredictable and possessed a macabre sense of humour. Early on the morning of 18 July, accompanied by his ADC and three other reliable officers, he marched into the office of the commander of the military region, General José Fernández de Villa-Abrille, who was given no time to recover from the surprise intrusion. When told to decide immediately whether he was with the rising or against it, Villa-Abrille dithered. Queipo arrested him and had a corporal guard the door with orders to shoot anyone who attempted to leave the room.

Queipo next went to the San Hermenegildo infantry barracks where he found the 6th Regiment drawn up on parade, fully armed. He went straight to the colonel to congratulate him on joining the rising. The colonel replied that he was for the government. Queipo suggested that they should discuss the matter in his office. Once inside, he arrested him too. He then tried other officers to see if they would lead the regiment, but Sanjurjo’s failure was evidently strong in their thoughts. Eventually a young captain, who was a Falangist, volunteered and all the other officers were locked up.

With the infantry on his side, Queipo managed to persuade the artillery regiment to join him as well. Falangists, who arrived to help, were given weapons from the armouries. Nationalist legend claimed that Queipo seized Seville with only a small force, when in fact he had some 4,000 men.¹⁰ An artillery salvo ensured the surrender of the civil governor and the Assault Guard. Then, despite Queipo’s promise to save the lives of those inside if they gave in, they were all shot. Just before the chief of police was due to be executed, he was told that his wife would be given his full salary if he handed over the secret files on the workers’ organizations. He explained where they were hidden, but his widow probably received nothing after he was shot.

The Civil Guard joined the rebels as soon as they saw the surrender of the Assault Guard. It was only then that the workers started to react. A general strike was ordered over Radio Seville and peasants were called in from the surrounding countryside to help. Barricades were constructed in desperate haste, but the feud between anarchists and communists undermined the organization of an effective counter-attack. The workers withdrew into their own districts of Triana and La Macarena around the perimeter of the town where they prepared their defence. The rebels captured the radio station, which was used by Queipo to broadcast threats of violence against those who resisted him and, more important, to deny government claims that the revolt had been crushed on the mainland. The rising of 18 July 1936 was the first modern coup in which radio stations, telephone exchanges and aerodromes were of major importance.

On 22 July General Queipo de Llano declared over the radio that he ‘was not playing politics’ and that what the generals wanted was to ‘reestablish order subverted by foreign powers, and that the Marxist conglomerate had deformed the character of the Republic’. He added, ‘As a Spaniard, I regret the blind obstinacy of those who with weapons in their hands oppose this movement of liberation. This obliges me to be implacable in punishing it.’¹¹

In Málaga the workers were strong but they had no weapons. Their leaders maintained contact with the Assault Guard, the only government force they felt they could trust. On the afternoon of 17 July, when the news of the rising in Melilla arrived, a rash young army officer, Captain Agustín Huelin, had led his company out towards the centre of the town. On the way they ran into a strong force of Assault Guards, who attacked at once. The soldiers came off worse. The senior officer in Málaga, General Paxtot, felt that he had no option but to move immediately. The rest of the garrison was marched out, but their commander changed his mind and marched them back to barracks. The colonel in charge of the Civil Guard was, most unusually for that corps, arrested by his own men when he also declared for the rising. The workers then surrounded the army barracks and set fire to a number of buildings. The garrison surrendered immediately.

In Almería the civil governor refused to arm the workers, using the argument that he did not wish to provoke the military into open revolt. He later claimed that he had no weapons to issue anyway. Only the arrival on 21 July of the destroyer Lepanto with a loyal captain secured the port for the Republic. Its guns were trained on the headquarters of the Civil Guard, which surrendered immediately. The threat of shelling proved a strong factor in many towns.

The civil governor in Jaén took a more positive approach. He called in the Civil Guard and persuaded them to lay down their weapons, even though they protested that they were loyal to the Republic. He then gave the weapons to the UGT and CNT for distribution and the town was secured. Obviously many more towns would have been saved if such a course had been followed, but there were few governors prepared to admit the total ineffectiveness of normal channels.

In the naval port of Cádiz, Colonel Varela was freed from prison by the local garrison and took command of the rising there. His troops attacked the comandancia, which was defended by the civil governor and members of an improvised workers’ militia. The town hall was another centre of resistance, but artillery was brought up. Then at first light on the next day, 19 July, the destroyer Churruca arrived with the first reinforcements from the Army in Africa. The insurgents had captured a major naval port on the Andalucian coast.

The rebels were also to secure most of the coast to the Portuguese frontier, including Algeciras, La Línea (where the Carlists shot 200 Freemasons) and Jeréz. The repression was savage. Professor Carlos Castilla del Pino, who was then thirteen years old, described the killings in his birth place of San Roque. ‘They took an anarchist couple, whose son was a friend of mine at school, off to a village 25 kilometres away and shot them there. Later, a Falangist who witnessed the execution told me that before being executed, the wife was raped by all the Moroccan soldiers who made up the execution squad…Five wounded carabineros were dragged from their hospital beds. The Moors seized them by their arms and legs and threw them into the back of a lorry…When they got them out to the highway, there was no way that the wounded could stand up to be shot, so the Moors bayoneted them.’¹²

In Huelva, however, the left retained control for the first few days. The Civil Guard commander in Madrid ordered the local detachment to attack Seville but it joined Queipo’s forces immediately on arrival.

In the capital Casares Quiroga resigned as prime minister at four o’clock in the morning of 19 July. The atmosphere in Madrid had been very tense throughout the night. Even the backfiring of a car would lead people to think that the rising had started there too. During the hot night the cafés stayed open and the streets were noisy. Popular frustration and anger at the government was increased by contradictory news items broadcast on the wireless. The UGT and CNT were beginning to suspect treachery.

On receiving Casares Quiroga’s resignation, Azaña asked his friend, Diego Martínez Barrio, the president of the Cortes, to form a government. His cabinet was composed of republican parties only and purposely ignored the left-wing elements of the Popular Front alliance, since it was the new prime minister’s intention to achieve a reconciliation with the right. This moment of crisis revealed the crucial division between the liberal government of the Popular Front and the left.

Nevertheless, Martínez Barrio’s peace overture to General Mola by telephone was firmly rejected. ‘It is not possible, señor Martínez Barrio,’ said Mola. ‘You have your people and I have mine. If you and I should reach agreement, both of us will have betrayed our ideals and our followers.’¹³ It was perhaps ironic that a rebel general should remind the prime minister that he was the representative of those voters to whom he owed his appointment. The workers were furious with what they regarded as an utterly fainéant, if not treacherous, government. ‘Large demonstrations are formed simultaneously,’ an eyewitness wrote. ‘They move towards the interior and war ministries like avalanches. The people shout “Traitors! Cowards!”’ Militants shouted, ‘We’ve been sold down the river! We’d better start taking them out and shooting them!’¹⁴

Martínez Barrio’s government collapsed instantly. He described the event himself: ‘Within a few minutes the political demonstration had brought about the ruin of my government. It was senseless to ask me to combat the military rebellion with mere shadows, stripped of authority and ludicrously retaining the name of ministers.’¹⁵ His ministry had lasted just a few hours.

Azaña asked yet another personal friend to form a government. José Giral, a university professor, was the only liberal politician who realized that the politicians of the Republic could not refuse to face reality any longer. During the morning of 19 July he dissolved the army by decree and ordered that arms should be given to the workers’ organizations. Julian Marías, who went to mass with his fiancée Lolita in the Church of the Carboneras near the Puerta del Sol, did not imagine that it would be the last one held there until April 1939. When they emerged on to the street afterwards, it seemed as if the city had changed hands during the church service. Requisitioned motorcars decorated with red or red and black flags careered around with rifles pointing out of the windows. The weapons had been handed out from the Assault Guard barracks in the Calle del Correo nearby.¹⁶

Even so, there were governors and officials who refused to carry out this instruction. In Madrid the government had to order General Miaja point-blank to comply with the order. More than 60,000 rifles were then delivered in lorries to UGT and CNT headquarters, where the heavy grease was cleaned off with party newspapers. Only 5,000 of them had bolts; the remainder were stored in the Montaña barracks where Colonel Serra, who was one of the conspirators, refused to hand them over.

David Antona described the scene inside CNT headquarters, which the government had closed only a few weeks earlier: ‘A narrow dark room. We could hardly move. A jabber of voices, shouts, rifles–many rifles. The telephone never stopped ringing. It was impossible to hear yourself speak. There was only the noise of rifle bolts from comrades who wanted to learn quickly how to handle them.’¹⁷

The loyalists were lucky that there was also confusion among the conspirators in Madrid. Nobody seemed certain who was to take command, until eventually General Fanjul assumed this ill-fated responsibility. The rebel generals had known how hard it would be to seize Madrid at once. But considering that their strategy was based on a holding action until reinforcements arrived from Pamplona, Saragossa and Barcelona, astonishingly little preparation had been made for a siege.

Late in the afternoon of 19 July Fanjul went to the Montaña barracks, where he addressed the officers and those Falangists who had come to help. But when they attempted to march out, they found that they were hemmed in by crowds of madrileños who had been directed there by the UGT and CNT. Fire was exchanged and the troops withdrew into the barracks. The rebels’ action had more the air of a ritual than a military operation. Outside, La Pasionaria’s speech on the radio calling for resistance was relayed over loudspeakers, then the besiegers settled down to wait for the morning.

While the fighting on the mainland intensified during the afternoon of 18 July, the Dragon Rapide aeroplane, organized by Luis Bolínin London, collected General Franco in civilian clothes. The English pilot was supposed to match half a torn playing card with its counterpart in his passenger’s possession. Franco dispensed with such a trivial touch of amateur conspiracy; perhaps he felt it beneath the dignity of a man of destiny. Sanjurjo may have been accepted as the figurehead, but Franco had an unshakeable belief that his own abilities were indispensable to the success of the rebels’ great undertaking.

Franco flew to Casablanca, in French Morocco, where Luis Bolín awaited him, but first he needed to be sure that the Army of Africa was in control. He telephoned officers in Larache who advised him not to land in Tangier. At dawn on 19 July he left for Tetuán, changing into uniform in mid flight. Senior rebel officers were waiting for him at the airport. They included Yagüe, Solans, Seguí, Sáenz de Buruaga and Beigbeder.¹⁸ A conference was held around the aircraft. Franco learned that the rising had not been entirely successful. He decided that Bolín should leave at once with an authorization to ‘purchase aircraft and supplies for the Spanish non-Marxist army’–a somewhat bland description for the forces of what was later to be called La Cruzada.

The second decision which Franco took in Tetuán that day was to order that those loyal to the Republic should be held in a concentration camp near the city and in the castle of El Hecho in Ceuta. After a rapid selection, Falangists came each morning to shoot them in groups.¹⁹

Reinforcements were needed urgently on the mainland and, since the rising in the fleet had failed, aeroplanes were essential to carry the Army of Africa to Spain. On 22 July the German consul in Tetuán passed on to the Wilhelmstrasse a message from Colonel Beigbeder, a former Spanish military attaché in Berlin: ‘General Franco and Lieutenant Colonel Beigbeder send greetings to their friend, the honourable General Kühlental, inform him of the new nationalist Spanish government, and request that he send ten troop-transport planes with maximum seating capacity through private German firms. Transfer by air with German crews to any airfield in Spanish Morocco. The contract will be signed afterwards. Very urgent! On the word of General Franco and Spain.’²⁰

On the northern coast of Spain, the port of Santander was secured for the Republic without bloodshed on the morning of 19 July, when the 23rd Infantry Regiment refused to rise. But in Oviedo the left was too confident after the strength it had demonstrated in the Asturian rebellion of 1934. The local military commander, Colonel Aranda, had managed over the previous months to convince the civil governor and most of the workers’ leaders that he was loyal to the government. Aranda, insisting that he acted on Madrid’s orders, refused to hand over any weapons. The civil governor, reassured by his promises of loyalty, described him to the workers’ leaders as a man of honour. Aranda suggested that he hold Oviedo while the miners form a column to go and help in Madrid. But as soon as they had left, he declared for the rising. The trusting governor was among the first to be executed once Aranda’s troops and civil guards secured the town. After the workers realized that Aranda had tricked them, they surrounded the town and a long and furious siege began.

In Gijón, the rising failed thanks to the decisive action of dockers who confronted the troops under the command of Colonel Pinilla. They withdrew to the Simancas barracks, where they were besieged for over a month until dinamiteros blew up the buildings.

Events were much less dramatic in the Carlist city of Pamplona. On the morning of 19 July General Mola, the ‘Director’, scrupulously followed his own timetable and declared a state of war in Navarre. There was little resistance in this stronghold of traditionalism, often described as the Spanish Vendée. Those in the casas del pueblo who tried to resist perished in a massacre.²¹ All that day a continual stream of Carlist farmers arrived in the main square to volunteer. Wearing their large scarlet berets, they shouted the old battle cry, ‘Viva Cristo Rey!’ A French observer of the scene said that he would not have been surprised to see an auto-da-fé of heretics organized at the same time. A total of 8,000 requetés assembled, singing:

Give me my beret,

Give me my rifle,

I’m going to kill more reds

Than there are flowers in April and May.²²

Navarre had voted to reject the statute of Basque autonomy offered by the Republic, so the Basques were well aware of the threat posed by the Carlists joining the military rebellion. On 19 July the nationalists also captured the city of Vitoria, heart of the southern Basque province of Alava, but in Bilbao the civil governor managed to intercept Mola’s telephone call to the military commander.²³ A council of defence for the province of Vizcaya was set up, the fortress of Basurto was surrounded and the soldiers were disarmed.

In Basque territory to the east, the initiative came almost entirely from working-class organizations, such as the UGT in Eibar and the CNT in San Sebastián. In San Sebastián events resembled those which had taken place in Oviedo. Colonel Carrasco declared that he was loyal to the government, so a column was sent off to help at Mondragón. When the colonel eventually showed his hand, his men were besieged in the María Cristina Hotel and the Gran Casino Club. San Sebastián, the summer capital and the most fashionable seaside resort in Spain, contained a considerable number of right-wing supporters, but they were unable to withstand the workers’ unexpectedly ferocious attack. In their defence of the María Cristina the rebels were alleged to have used live hostages as sandbags in the windows, but this was probably an example of the exaggerated rumours of the time being used as propaganda. The anarchists seized the weapons in the Loyola barracks, since they were not certain that the Basque nationalist party would oppose the rising. This, and their subsequent shooting of some right-wing prisoners, worsened relations with their Basque Catholic allies in the PNV.

In Old Castile, Burgos, the city of soldiers and priests was ‘nationalist to the very stones’, as the Countess of Vallellano said later to Doctor Junod of the Red Cross.²⁴ There was virtually no opposition, but that did nothing to lessen the mass executions once names and addresses had been obtained from police headquarters. Generals Batet and Mena, who stayed loyal to the government, were among the first to be shot. The most prominent right-wing civilians in the conspiracy–Sáinz Rodríguez, Goicoechea, the Count of Vallellano, Vegas Latapié, Yanguas, Zunzunegui and the Marquess of Valdeiglesias–had already gathered at Burgos to welcome General Sanjurjo as the new head of state, but they waited in vain. His aeroplane from Portugal had crashed on take-off and the ‘Lion of the Rif’ was killed instantly, burned in the wreck along with his dress uniforms and decorations.

In Valladolid, the heart of that austere Castile romanticized by José Antonio, the Assault Guard rebelled against the civil governor, Luis Lavín, and seized Radio Valladolid and the post office. The governor was arrested and the rebel officers he had locked up were freed. Generals Saliquet and Ponte entered the headquarters pistols in hand to take command of the rising. General Nicolás Molero and those loyal to him fought back and in the exchange of fire, three men were killed and five wounded, including Molero himself, who was executed several days later. Saliquet proclaimed a state of war and ordered the troops into the street. The railwaymen of the UGT fought with great bravery, but were soon annihilated. The 478 people who had sought refuge in the casa del pueblo were imprisoned.²⁵

The failure of the left to secure Saragossa, the capital of Aragón, was a major disaster, especially for the anarchists. The government, suspicious of General Cabanellas’s intentions, sent a friend of his, General Nuñez de Prado, to confirm his loyalty to the Republic. Cabanellas declared for the rising and had Nuñez de Prado and his ADC shot. There were about 30,000 CNT members in Saragossa, but their leaders insisted on working through the civil governor, even though he gave them no arms. Troops led by Colonel Monasterio marched into the streets at dawn on 19 July and the virtually defenceless workers suffered a fearful massacre.

Barcelona presented a very different story, even though it had been regarded by the military conspirators as the most certain conquest of all. The nationalists, relying on UME officers who were right-wing and anti-Catalan, had 12,000 troops to bring in from their barracks to dominate the central area. General Goded was to fly in from Majorca, once the island was secured, and take command. The plotters, however, never took into account the determination of the workers’ organizations, nor did they foresee that the Assault Guard and, more surprisingly, the Civil Guard, would oppose them.

On the evening of 18 July Companys, the president of the Catalan Generalitat, refused to issue arms to the CNT, even though news of events in Morocco and Seville had reached him and he had been given documentary proof of plans for the rising in Barcelona. Catalan police arrested anarchists carrying arms, but they were released after vigorous protests by the CNT regional committee.

The anarchists, who knew very well what awaited them if the army seized the city, decided not to leave their fate in the hands of politicians. During that night the CNT local defence committees went ahead with full preparations for war. Isolated armouries were seized (a couple with the active assistance of sympathetic NCOs) and weapons were taken from four ships in the harbour. Even the rusting hulk of the prison ship Uruguay was stormed, so as to take the warders’ weapons. The UGT dockers’ union knew of a shipment of dynamite in the port, and once that was seized, home-made grenades were manufactured all through the night. Every gun shop in the city was stripped bare. Cars and lorries were requisitioned and metal workers fixed crude armour plating while sandbags were piled behind truck cabs. Vehicles were given clear identification with large white letters daubed on the roof and sides. The vast majority were the anarchist initials, CNT-FAI, but POUM and PSUC were also in evidence. Some bore the letters UHP (United Proletarian Brothers), the joint cry of the workers’ alliance in the Asturian revolt.

The atmosphere of that hot night was highly charged. The Popular Olympiad (organized as a boycott of the Olympics in Nazi Germany) was due to open the next morning. The event was forgotten in the threatening crisis, and the foreign athletes waited uneasily in their hotels and dormitories. (Many of them joined the fighting the next day alongside the workers and around 200 later joined militia columns.) Companys, realizing he was superfluous for the moment, went for a walk on the Ramblas, a felt hat pulled down over his eyes to avoid being recognized. The streets were crowded and noisy, with loudspeakers attached to the trees playing music interrupted by announcements. In the favourite anarchist meeting place, the Café La Tranquilidad, CNT members were dashing in and out to hear the latest news and report on the arming of the workers. The members of the regional committee, such as Buenaventura Durruti, Juan García Oliver and Diego Abad de Santillán, maintained a close liaison with the Generalitat despite Companys’s decision. In fact a few assault guards ignored the Generalitat’s instructions and handed out rifles to the CNT from their own armoury.

Just before dawn on 19 July, the soldiers in the Pedralbes barracks were given rum rations by their officers, then told that orders had been received from Madrid to crush an anarchist rising. Falangists and other supporters wearing odd bits of uniform joined the column as it set off up the Diagonal, one of the major thoroughfares of Barcelona.²⁶ Almost immediately factory sirens all over the city sounded the alarm. Also at about five in the morning, the Montesa cavalry regiment moved out of its barracks in the calle Tarragona, the Santiago regiment of dragoons left the Travessera de Gràcia barracks and a battery of the 7th Light Artillery Regiment marched forth from the Sant Andreu barracks, where more than 30,000 rifles were held.

The deployment of troops into the streets was badly co-ordinated. The infantry regiment from the Parque barracks was vigorously attacked and forced to make a fighting retreat back behind its own walls, while the Santiago cavalry regiment was scattered at the Cinc d’Oros. Some units never even broke out into the streets. Those that did manage to march out, advanced to seize strategic buildings near the Plaza de España and the Plaza de Cataluña. They barricaded themselves in the Hotel Colón, the Ritz and the central telephone exchange. Detachments attacked en route made barricades to defend themselves, but these were charged by heavy lorries driven in suicidal assaults. The soldiers were also attacked with home-made bombs lobbed from rooftops and by snipers. Barricades to bar their way to the centre were constructed by almost everyone who could not take part in the fighting. Those made with paving stones could withstand light artillery if properly laid, as the workers knew from the street fighting during the Semana Trágica in 1909.

At about 11 a.m. General Goded arrived from Majorca by seaplane. The island had been easily secured for the rising, although Minorca, with its submarine base at Port Mahon, was won for the left by soldiers and NCOs who resisted their officers. Goded went immediately to the capitanía (the captain-general’s headquarters), where he arrested the loyal divisional commander, Llano de la Encomienda. It was not long, however, before all the rebel-held buildings in the centre of the city were besieged. The black and red diagonal flag of the CNT-FAI appeared on barricades, lorries and public buildings. Loudspeakers in the streets continued to relay news, instructions and exhortations throughout the long hot Sunday. Churches were set on fire after reports of sniping from church towers (not by priests, as rumour said, but by soldiers who had occupied the belfries of los Carmelitas and Santa Madrona). Summary executions were carried out, including a dozen priests in the Carmelite convent wrongly accused of firing at people from its windows.

Attacks across open ground surrounding the besieged buildings caused heavy casualties. Then, at about two o’clock, when it was evident that the army would not be able to defeat such determined numbers, Colonel Escobar brought in his civil guards on the side of the workers, with a column of 800 mounting the Vía Layetana to the Commission of Public Order where Companys waited on the balcony. A mounted squadron trotting along the Ramblas gave the clenched fist salute to roars of approval from the crowds. It was the first time that this paramilitary force had been cheered by the workers of Barcelona, though their instinctive suspicion of the Civil Guard did not disappear. With their excellent marksmanship, the civil guards were to prove a great help in the attack on the Hotel Colón and the Ritz, although the anarchists recaptured the telephone building on their own.

The real turning point came in the Avenida Icaria, where barricades were improvised with huge rolls of newsprint to stop cavalry and the 1st Mountain Artillery Regiment on their way to help the besieged rebels in the centre. At one moment during the fighting, a small group of workers and an assault guard rushed across to an insurgent artillery detachment with two 75mm guns. They held their rifles above their heads to show that they were not attacking as they rushed up to the astonished soldiers. Out of breath, they poured forth passionate arguments why the soldiers should not fire on their brothers, telling them that they had been tricked by their officers. The guns were turned round and brought to bear on the rebel forces. From then on more and more soldiers joined the workers and assault guards.

It was a salvo from captured artillery under the command of a docker which brought the surrender of General Goded in the capitanía. Many Republicans wanted to shoot this leading conspirator on the spot, but he was saved by a communist, Caridad Mercader, the mother of Trotsky’s assassin. Goded was taken to Companys, who persuaded him to broadcast a statement over the radio to save further bloodshed. ‘This is General Goded,’ he said. ‘I make this declaration to the Spanish people, that fate has been against me and I am a prisoner. I am saying this so that all those who are still fighting need feel no further obligation towards me.’²⁷ His words were of great help to the left-wing forces in other parts of Spain, especially in Madrid where they were broadcast over loudspeakers to the rebels defending the Montaña barracks. But agreeing to make the statement did not save him. A court martial of republican officers in August condemned him to death for rebellion.

By nightfall only the Atarazanas barracks, near the port, and the Sant Andreu barracks still held out. The machine-gun emplacements round the Columbus monument had been silenced in the early evening. The airport at Prat was commanded by a sympathetic officer, Colonel Díaz Sandino, and his planes had attacked the monument, enabling a wave of workers and assault guards to overrun it. In the castle of Montjuich the garrison had shot the rebel officers and then handed over the weapons in the armoury to the CNT.

The next morning the anarchists, insisting that the capture of the Atarazanas barracks was their prerogative, told the paramilitary forces to stay clear. Buenaventura Durruti gave the order for the mass attack: ‘Adelante hombres de la CNT!’ He led the charge with his companion in arms, Francisco Ascaso, who was killed almost immediately. That final action brought total casualty figures to about 600 killed and 4,000 wounded. As in all the fighting, a desperate, selfless bravery was shown by the attackers. Many of the casualties were unnecessary, especially those suffered in the final assault when the anarchists had artillery and air support available. Nevertheless, the courage of that attack passed into anarchist folklore, obscuring the fact that dash and bravery are dangerous substitutes for military science.

The Struggle for Control

The plan for the military rising had given the navy a key role. Their ships were needed to bring the Army of Africa to the mainland. This had been worked out in advance between General Franco and senior naval officers, on fleet exercises near the Canaries. Warships were to make all speed for Spanish Morocco on the outbreak of the rising.

On 18 July General Queipo de Llano demonstrated his confidence in this strategy during the first of his garrulous broadcasts over Radio Sevilla, totally unconcerned that he might be revealing their plans in the process: ‘The navy, always faithful to the heartbeat of the nation, has joined us en masse. Thanks to its help, the transport of troops from Morocco to the Peninsula has to be carried out very quickly and soon we will see arriving in Cádiz, Málaga and Algeciras the glorious columns of our Army of Africa, which will advance without rest on Granada, Córdoba, Jaén, Extremadura, Toledo and Madrid.’¹

Such sweeping assumptions, however, proved premature. The overwhelming majority of officers in the navy certainly supported the rising. In common with the naval officers of most Latin countries, those in Spain were more aristocratic than their counterparts in the army. The Spanish army had acquired liberal pockets, having become a ladder for the social climbing middle class in the nineteenth century. Spanish naval wardrooms, on the other hand, tended to be strongly monarchist and the average officer’s attitude towards the lower deck at that time was scarcely enlightened.

On the morning of 18 July the ministry of marine in Madrid instructed three destroyers to sail for Melilla from Cartagena. They received orders by radio to bombard the insurgent town. The officers on board thus knew that the rising had begun. In two of the destroyers all hands were called on deck, where their captains explained the objectives of the rebellion. But if the officers had been expecting shouts of enthusiasm, they were to be disappointed.

The junior ranks in the navy were far better organized than their counterparts in the army. They had held a secret conference in El Ferrol on 13 July to discuss what they should do if the officers rebelled against the government. In Madrid a telegraphist, Benjamín Balboa, intercepted the message dictated by General Franco in Tenerife. He passed it at once to the ministry of marine and arrested the officer in charge of the radio section, Lieutenant-Commander Castor Ibáñez, who was part of the conspiracy. Balboa, on orders from the ministry, immediately contacted all signals operators with the fleet to warn them of what was going on and asking them ‘to watch their officers, a gang of fascists’. As a result of his actions, the majority of ships’ crews were informed of events and could not be tricked by false stories. Following this up, Giral, still at this point minister of marine, sent a signal dismissing all officers who refused government orders.

Of the three destroyers off Melilla only the officers on the Churruca stayed in command. This was because the radio was out of order. On the Almirante Valdés and Sánchez Barcaíztegui (the ship on which Azaña had been imprisoned) the crews, forewarned by radio operators, rushed their officers and overpowered them. They then elected a ship’s committee, bombarded Melilla and Ceuta, and returned to the loyal naval base of Cartagena. The rebels thus had only one destroyer and one gunboat, the Dato, to start ferrying the badly needed reinforcements from the Army of Africa across to Spain.

By the morning of 19 July the government had ordered all available warships to steam to the Straits of Gibraltar to prevent the Army of Africa from crossing. The officers who wished to join the rising could not prevent the news from reaching the lower deck. On the cruiser Miguel de Cervantes the officers resisted to the end, but on most ships they surrendered once ratings had seized the ship’s armoury. The only seaworthy battleship, the Jaime I, was won back by the sailors, as were the cruiser Libertad and even the destroyer Churruca, after it had landed half a tabor of regulares at Cádiz. The nationalists later claimed that ‘mutinous’ sailors had assassinated their officers and accused Giral of being responsible.

After the ministry of marine had sent instructions relieving rebel officers of their command, the following famous exchange of signals occurred: ‘Crew of Jaime I to ministry of marine. We have had serious resistance from the commanders and officers on board and have subdued them by force…Urgently request instructions as to bodies.’ ‘Ministry of marine to crew Jaime I. Lower bodies overboard with respectful solemnity. What is your present position?’²

The officers of the Royal Navy at Gibraltar were watching events carefully. The very idea of such action by the lower deck sent shudders down their spines. The Invergordon mutiny of 1931, even though it had been little more than a strike, was fresh in their memories, and only seventeen years had passed since the much more serious revolt of the French fleet in the Black Sea.³ There was no doubt as to where their sympathies lay, and this was to have an appreciable influence in several areas. Voelckers, the German chargé d’affaires in Spain, informed the Wilhelmstrasse in October: ‘As for England, we have made the interesting observation that she is supplying the whites with ammunition via Gibraltar and that the British cruiser commander here has recently been supplying us with information on Russian arms deliveries to the red government, which he certainly would not do without instructions.’⁴

With the rising crushed on most ships, many of the rebels were sure that they were doomed, since it seemed the Army of Africa could not cross to the mainland. Mola, convinced that their project had failed, continued only because there was no choice. The German chargé d’affaires reported to the Wilhelmstrasse that the defection of the fleet might frustrate Franco’s plans. It could mean the sacrifice of garrisons in the major cities.

This setback did not turn out to be a disaster for the nationalists because they managed to start the first major airlift of troops in history.⁵ Although the airlift began almost immediately with a few Spanish air force Breguets, Nieuports and Italian Savoias, it was chiefly effected by Junkers 52s sent by Hitler, who remarked later that Franco should erect a monument to the plane because it was so vital to his victory.⁶ But the nationalists also benefited from the fact that the new ships’ committees were badly co-ordinated, thus severely reducing the effectiveness of the republican navy. The republican navy was also deterred from attacking ships transporting units of the Army of Africa because they were screened by the German pocket battleships Deutschland and Admiral Scheer. In this way the rebels managed to bring across the so-called ‘convoy of victory’ with 2,500 troops and much equipment, including heavy weapons which could not be flown over.

The most furious fighting within the navy did not take place at sea, but in the port of El Ferrol at the north-west tip of Spain. On 19 July the CNT and UGT demanded that the civil governor comply with the order to issue arms, but the head of the naval arsenal refused to hand any over and a state of war was declared by the conspirators. The 29th Marine Infantry and detachments from the 3rd Regiment of Coastal Artillery managed to clear the town for the rebels, but many workers joined with sailors to seize the arsenal.

Loyalist sailors also manned the cruiser Almirante Cervera, which was in dry dock, as well as the immobilized battleship España. These two ships managed to knock out the destroyer Velasco, which had been secured by its officers for the rising, but they could not traverse their heavy guns landwards at the coastal batteries because of installations alongside the dock. The destruction caused by a major naval battle in such a restricted area was enormous. Eventually, on 21 July nationalist officers faked a signal from the ministry of marine ordering the ships to give in and avoid useless bloodshed. The loyalist commander of the Almirante Cervera, Captain Sánchez Ferragut, and Rear-Admiral Azarola accordingly offered to surrender on the condition that there were no executions. This was promised, but later ignored.

The military rising elsewhere in Galicia had begun, after a delay, early on 20 July. In Corunna the civil governor, Francisco Pérez Carballo, a personal friend of Casares Quiroga, refused arms to the UGT and CNT. He assured them that the military governor had received a solemn promise from his officers that they would not rebel. But General Pita Romero was then arrested and shot. The divisional commander, General Enrique Salcedo, was shot later, as was Pérez Carballo. The fate of his pregnant wife, Juana Capdevielle, was terrible. She was imprisoned, then miscarried when she heard that her husband had been murdered. She was let out of prison, but in August some Falangists raped and killed her.⁷

Groups of workers with very few weapons held out against the troops and a large detachment of the Falange under Manuel Hedilla. They were finally crushed in a last stand near Sir John Moore’s grave, just as reinforcements were arriving in the form of dinamiteros and miners from Noya armed with rifles. Finding they were too late and coming up against strong counterattacks, the relief column fell back into the hills. Some broke up into guerrilla forces, others made their way eastwards towards Bilbao.

In Vigo, which also fell to the nationalists, the soldiers of the Mérida Regiment were given a great deal of alcohol, so the column marched to the centre of the town half-drunk. In the Puerta del Sol the officer in command proclaimed a state of war and, when unarmed civilians shouted protests, gave the order to fire. The soldiers started shooting in every direction.

Early in the morning of 20 July the sparsely armed citizens of Madrid around the Montaña barracks were joined by many others, including women. Two 75mm Schneider guns were towed into place. A retired captain of artillery, Orad de la Torre, sited them in the calle Bailén some 500 metres from the barracks. Later, a 155mm gun, commanded by Lieutenant Vidal, was brought to within 200 metres of their target.⁸

Thousands of people surrounded the barracks along the Paseo de Rosales and from the North Station. It was a mass which advanced and retreated without order. A lawyer who was with them described the scene: ‘Rifle shots were cracking from the direction of the barracks. At the corner of the Plaza de España and the Calle de Ferraz a group of assault guards were loading their rifles in the shelter of a wall. A multitude of people were crouching and lying between the trees and benches of the gardens.’ Some loyalist planes arrived from the nearby airfield of Cuatro Vientos where the rising had been suppressed the day before. At first, they dropped leaflets calling on the soldiers to surrender. Later, when they dropped bombs on the barracks the thousands of civilians cheered and jumped for joy, but the machine-guns in the barracks opened up again, killing some of them. The young British poet Jack Lindsay wrote a poem about that day:

We found an odd gun,

We brought it up on a truck from a beer-factory.

We rushed the Montaña barracks

With some old pistols and our bare hands through the swivelling machine-gun fire.

I was there.

I saw the officers cowering, their faces chalked with fear.⁹

Not surprisingly, emotions were often stronger than common sense. Old revolvers were fired at the thick stone walls by those privileged few who had weapons. The assault on the Montaña barracks was to prove what horrors can result from confusion. Many of the soldiers wanted to surrender and waved white flags from their windows. The crowds ran joyfully forward but the machine-guns commanded by officers opened up again, killing many in the open. This happened several times so the mass of people were utterly enraged by the time the barracks were stormed. This was achieved only because a republican sapper sergeant within managed to throw open the gate before being shot down by an officer. The slaughter which followed was terrible.¹⁰

In Granada, General Miguel Campins stayed loyal to the Republic and assured the civil governor that his officers could be trusted.¹¹ But Colonels Muñoz and Leon Maestre set the rising in motion. Campins was arrested on 20 July and shot later on the orders of General Queipo de Llano for having opposed the ‘movimiento salvador de España’. The workers, who had believed that the garrison and the Assault Guard would not revolt, realized too late what was happening that day. The military rebels had seized the centre of the city by nightfall. Their opponents withdrew to the district known as the Albaicín, which they barricaded and defended for three days, but artillery was brought up and scores of families were buried in the rubble of their houses.

Of all the major towns, Valencia experienced the longest delay before the situation was clear because General Martínez Monje, the military commander, refused to declare himself for either side. General Goded’s broadcast from Barcelona was a great blow to the conspirators there, who found it very difficult to persuade fellow officers to join. The CNT had already declared a general strike in the Valencian region and joined the executive committee set up by the Popular Front parties in the office of the civil governor. This dignitary had been deposed by the committee because he refused to hand over arms.

The CNT, with its docker membership, was the largest of the worker organizations and insisted on various conditions before co-operating with the Popular Front. One of these was that the paramilitary forces should be divided up among much larger groups of workers in order to ensure their loyalty. This was accepted and the mixed ‘intervention groups’ occupied the radio station, telephone exchange and other strategic buildings. Even so, when a detachment of the Civil Guard was sent together with some workers to help in another area, they shot their guardians and went off to join the nationalists.

General Martínez Monje continued to insist on his loyalty although he refused to hand over any weapons as ordered by the government. Few were convinced by his protestations, since he was evidently waiting to see how events developed in other towns. The argument over whether to storm the barracks was further confused when a delegation under Martínez Barrio arrived from Madrid. Eventually even those who were afraid of forcing neutrals into the enemy camp agreed that the situation was intolerable. The barracks were finally taken two weeks after the rising had begun. This failure to take Valencia was a grave blow for the plotters, because they could not advance on Madrid from the east.

In Andalucia Queipo de Llano’s forces had not managed to secure much more than the centre of Seville and the aerodrome. The private planes housed at the aeroclub were to prove very useful for reconnaissance work and amateur bombing raids. But the vital function of the airstrip was to provide a landing ground for the airlift from Morocco, including the 5th Bandera commanded by Major Castejón. Their arrival on 21 July led to an all-out assault on the working-class district of Triana (where the Emperor Trajan is supposed to have come from). Castejón and his men then attacked the districts of la Macarena, San Julián, San Bernardo and el Pumarejo, which held out until 25 July.

Queipo de Llano’s press assistant, Antonio Bahamonde–who later changed sides–described the action against these areas, which were defended by their inhabitants with hardly any weapons, claiming that more than 9,000 had been killed in the repression: ‘In the working-class districts, the Foreign Legion and Moroccan regulares went up and down the streets of very modest one-storey houses, throwing grenades in the windows, blowing up and killing women and children. The Moors took the opportunity to loot and rape at will. General Queipo de Llano, in his night-time talks at the [Radio Seville] microphone…urged on his troops to rape women and recounted with crude sarcasm brutal scenes of this sort.’¹²

News of these actions triggered off reprisal killings in the Andalucian countryside, where the peasants had risen against their landlords and the Civil Guard. Then, once Queipo’s forces had secured Seville, the rebels started to dominate the countryside around. Some Falangist sons of landowners organized peasant hunts on horseback. This sort of activity was jokingly referred to as the ‘reforma agraria’ whereby the landless bracero was finally to get a piece of ground for himself.

In many outlying areas of Spain a shocked stillness followed the sudden violence, but there was little pause for breath after control of the major towns had been decided. Columns were rapidly organized to help in other areas, or recapture nearby towns. In Madrid the UGT had organized an effective intelligence system through the railway telephone network to find out where the rising had succeeded and where it had failed. Lorryloads of worker militia rushed out from the capital. Guadalajara was retaken after a bitter struggle, Alcalá de Henares was recaptured from the Civil Guard who had declared for the rising and Cuenca was secured by 200 men led by Cipriano Mera. Other hastily formed militia detachments moved quickly north to block General Mola’s troops along the line of the Guadarrama mountains.

A large column of militiamen drove south in a convoy of lorries, taxis and confiscated automobiles across the Castilian plain towards Toledo, where Colonel Moscardó was organizing the nationalists’ defence of the military academy in the Alcázar fortress. Only a handful of the cadets assembled, as it was the summer vacation, but a strong force of civil guards had been brought in from the surrounding countryside. A mixed bag of officers and a large number of Falangists brought the total of active defenders to around 1,100. Inside the fortress were also more than 500 women and children and 100 left-wing hostages. Moscardó, who had not been involved in the conspiracy, was acting on his own initiative. He had managed to stall the war ministry’s orders to despatch the contents of the Toledo arms factory to Madrid, and his men had withdrawn into their fortress with most of its contents just as the militia column reached the edge of the town. The siege of the Alcázar had begun. It was to be exceptionally rich in emotive symbolism for the nationalists.

In Barcelona the greatest concern of the anarchists was the fall of Saragossa to the army and the resulting slaughter of their comrades. Flying columns of armed workers assembled in great haste and rushed forth into the Aragón countryside. Villages and small towns which had been secured for the rising by the local Civil Guard detachment and right-wing sympathizers were seized on the way. The militia usually shot all those whom they felt represented a threat before moving on. However, the columns were primarily made up of urban workers. Their fighting effectiveness lay in the streets, not in the countryside where they had no sense of terrain. ‘We didn’t have maps,’ recounted Jordi Arquer, a POUM leader, ‘and I am not talking about proper military maps, but a simple Michelin road map.’¹³

During their advance, the anarcho-syndicalist columns, armed with the 30,000 rifles from the Sant Andreu barracks, seized towns and villages which had fallen into rebel hands, and shooting suspected supporters of the rising. Of the advancing columns only Durruti’s did not fall to the temptation of securing rural areas, which was shown to be a dangerous distraction when the principal town was in enemy hands. The regular commander of the republican forces, Colonel Villalba, even ordered Durruti not to rush on so tempestuously towards Saragossa. A strong detachment of Carlists, sent by General Mola in Pamplona, arrived to reinforce the Saragossa garrison and Durruti’s force was unsupported. The militia columns from Barcelona, amounting to about 20,000 men, would have been far more effective if they had been concentrated on fewer objectives. But such a spontaneously mobilized body could not act like troops controlled by a general staff.

The fighting was chaotic. Improvisations on both sides ranged from the inspired to the impractical. Field guns were fixed on to the rear of lorries, forming an early version of self-propelled artillery; armoured cars were built round trucks, sometimes effectively, although often the weight of steel plate was far too heavy for the engine. Every form of grenade, or petardo, was tried out (the so-called Molotov cocktail was in fact invented a little later by the Foreign Legion when attacked by Russian tanks outside Madrid that autumn). But with the originality came a contempt for more prosaic military customs, such as digging trenches. To fight from the ground was utterly contrary to the Spanish concept of war. There was a subconscious moral certainty that bravery must lead to victory.

It was not until the early days of August that the respective zones became clear and fronts recognizable. The insurgents had a broad horizontal strip of territory from Galicia and León in the west to Navarre and north Aragon in the east. This surrounded the coastal regions of Asturias, Santander and the Basque country, which had defeated the rising. In the south and west the rebels had seized no more than a small part of Andalucia.¹⁴

Only at this stage did the realization that Spain faced civil war, rather than a violently contested coup, penetrate people’s minds. The republican failure to win outright in the early days, when dash and instinct outweighed weaponry and military science, meant that they were to become involved in a totally different type of fighting, one in which very different qualities were needed to win.

The nationalists’ greatest military asset was the 40,000 men of the Army of Africa, with its combat experience.¹⁵ They had also secured 50,000 men from the badly trained and poorly equipped metropolitan army. In addition, seventeen generals and 10,000 officers had joined the rising. They had about two-thirds of Queipo’s carabineros, 40 per cent of the Assault Guard and 60 per cent of the Civil Guard. In all, this represented about 30,000 men out of the combined strength of the three paramilitary forces. In total they could count on around 130,000 officers and men. The Republic, at the time of Giral’s decree dissolving the army, counted on 50,000 soldiers, 22 generals and 7,000 officers, in addition to some 33,000 men from the paramilitary security forces. In theory, this represented a total of 90,000 men.¹⁶

For a long war it looked as if the Republic had the advantage: the large cities with their industry and manpower, mining areas, most of the navy and merchant marine, two-thirds of the mainland territory, the gold reserves and the citrus fruit export trade from Valencia, which was the country’s largest foreign-currency earner. However, the nationalists were more than compensated by help from outside Spain and control of the main agricultural areas. Their primary supply of recruits for some time was to be the Riffian tribes. Hitler and Mussolini were to provide military, naval, air, logistical and technical support, while American and British business interests supplied vital credits and oil.

The nationalists at this point were starting to organize a military state, while in the republican zone revolutionary processes were set on foot. The army’s attempt at what they claimed was a pre-emptive counterrevolution had destroyed what little remained of the republican state. Andrés Nin of the POUM described it thus: ‘The government does not exist. We collaborate with them, but they can do no more than sanction whatever is done by the masses.’ The rising of the right had pushed an unplanned revolution into the eager arms of the left.

The Red Terror

The most emotive issue in warfare is that of atrocities. It is nearly always the most visually horrific of them which become fixed in the imagination. Spain witnessed many during its civil war, but it was also one of the very first in which the techniques of mass propaganda played an important role.

The Spanish Civil War was a magnet for foreign correspondents and the enemy atrocities related by press officers provided sensational copy. In the early days little was done, or could be done, by correspondents to check the truth and background of most incidents. Refugees often justified their panic with exaggerated or imagined tales of horror. The gang of Barcelona workers said to be covered in blood from a massacre on 19 July were, in fact, from the abattoirs and had rushed straight out to resist the military rising. Wild estimates of the killing were reported: the nationalists stated at the time that half a million people had been slaughtered in republican territory and claimed the still excessive figure of 55,000 after the war. Perhaps the confusion and speed of events made journalists fall back on clichés, rather than investigate what lay behind the ferocity of the war. Having tended to ignore Spain, Europe did not understand the turbulent cycles of repression and revolt which had now built up to an explosion affecting every corner of the country.

The initial, hasty impressions passed on by journalists with little firsthand evidence seriously affected the Republic’s foreign relations when it needed to buy arms in the crucial months of the war. The violent excesses recounted in many papers justified that distaste for the revolution in the republican zone which ran strongly in British conservative and diplomatic circles. The left-wing administration in France under Léon Blum suppressed its own natural sympathies and, alarmed by Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland that spring, felt obliged to follow the British idea of refusing aid to both sides (a policy which was bound to favour the nationalists). Not until the bombing of Guernica in April of 1937 did the battle for world opinion really change in the Republic’s favour, but by then the republicans were already losing the war.

The Spanish war saw many terrible acts, but it was those of a religious significance that tended to prevail in people’s minds: ‘reds’ killing priests and disinterring the mummies in convent vaults; it was even said that Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, had bitten the jugular of a priest; or Carlist requetés making a republican lie in the form of a cross before hacking off his limbs to the cry of ‘Long live Christ the King!’.

If people in other countries were reminded of the Thirty Years’ War, or the religious persecutions of the Dark Ages, and shuddered at this ‘new barbarism’, it was not surprising. The slaughter did not follow the same pattern on each side. In nationalist territory the relentless purging of ‘reds and atheists’ was to continue for years, while in republican territory the worst of the violence was mainly a sudden and quickly spent reaction of suppressed fear, exacerbated by desires of revenge for the past.

The attacks on the clergy were bound to cause the greatest stir abroad, where there was little understanding of the Church’s powerful political role. The Catholic Church was the bulwark of the country’s conservative forces, the foundation of what the right defined as Spanish civilization. Not surprisingly, the outside world had a fixed impression of Spain as a deeply religious country. The jest of the Basque philosopher Unamuno, that in Spain even atheists were Catholic, was taken seriously. Centuries of fanatical superstition enforced by the Inquisition had engraved this image on European minds. Even so, it was surprising how few foreign newspapers made the connection between the religious repression dating back to the Middle Ages and the violent anti-clericalism that developed in the nineteenth century. The rage which led to such excesses in some areas was fired by one great conviction: the promise of heaven for the meek was the age-old trick by the rich and powerful to make the poor accept their lot on earth. For the anarchists, at least, the Church represented nothing less than the psychological operations branch of the state. As such it was a target which ranked in importance with the Civil Guard.

During the war the nationalists claimed that 20,000 priests had been slaughtered; afterwards they said that 7,937 religious persons were killed. This figure was still over a thousand too high. Today, we know that out of a total ecclesiastical community of around 115,000, thirteen bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 members of other orders and 283 nuns were killed, the vast majority during the summer of 1936.¹ It was a terrible slaughter, yet liberal Catholics abroad were later to state that the killing of priests was no worse than the right’s killing of left-wingers in the name of God. The Spanish Church was furious at this attitude, yet it said nothing when the nationalists shot sixteen of the Basque clergy including the arch-priest of Mondragon. Only the Bishop of Vitoria took a stand and persuaded the Pope to protest to General Franco, who was furious and declared that he would send bishops who supported him to Rome.² Some twenty Protestant ministers were also killed by the nationalists, yet protests were useless.³ The most sensational item of propaganda in the world press involved the raping of nuns, yet the detailed nationalist indictment of republican crimes published in 1946 offers no evidence for any such incident, while hinting at only one.

There were certainly occasions when wanton cruelty was inflicted on priests before they died, particularly in Aragón, Catalonia and Valencia. Some were burned to death in their churches and there are reports of castration and disembowelment, and that some were buried alive after being made to dig their own graves. Many more churches were set alight and vandalized. Copes were used for mock bullfights in the street. A republican who dressed himself in the archbishop of Toledo’s ceremonial garments as a joke was nearly shot by a drunken miliciano who mistook him for the primate. Communion wine was drunk out of chalices, stained-glass windows were broken and militiamen shaved in the fonts.⁴

Following the collapse of law and order in the republican zone, the anger of the masses was directed first against the rebel generals and their supporters and then against class enemies: clergy, landowners and their señorito sons, factory owners, cacique political bosses, members of the learned professions and shopkeepers. This violence of the first days was like a brutal explosion. But the vengeance was not as indiscriminate and blind as has sometimes been claimed.

The killing of the clergy was far from universal and with the exception of the Basque country, where the Church was untouched, there was no marked regional pattern. In depressed rural areas the priests were often as poverty-stricken and ill-educated as their parishioners. Those who had taken as much trouble over burying the poor as the rich were often spared. The same was usually true of the killing of shopkeepers and members of the professional class. A lawyer or shopkeeper who had not taken advantage of the poor or showed arrogance was usually left alone. Factory owners and managers with a reputation for dealing fairly with their workforce were nearly always spared and in many cases kept on in the new co-operative. On the other hand, any ‘known exploiter’ had little chance of survival if caught in the early days. Obviously there were exceptions to this pattern, but the rumours of people being shot merely for wearing hats and ties were the product of an inevitable middle-class persecution complex.

Left-wing parties and unions requisitioned buildings and set up their own ‘commissions of investigation’, usually known by the Russian names of checas.⁵ Supporters of the rising were dragged in front of these revolutionary tribunals when they were not shot out of hand. The names and addresses of those belonging to groups involved in the rising were taken from official departments or the respective party headquarters, if their records had not been destroyed in time. Evidently some victims were denounced by servants, debtors and enemies. With the intense atmosphere of suspicion and the speed of events, many mistakes were undoubtedly made.

This pretence of justice happened mainly in cities and large towns where the socialists and communists were dominant. Fake Falange membership cards, said to belong to the defendant, were often produced so as to ensure that the proceedings were rapid. When declared guilty, prisoners were taken away to be shot. Their bodies were then often left in prominent positions with placards stating that the victims were fascists.⁶ Anarchists tended to despise this farce of legality and simply got on with the shooting. Believing in the individual’s responsibility for his actions, they rejected any form of corporate ‘statism’ for officials to hide behind. The other reason for immediate execution was their genuine horror of putting anyone in a prison, the most symbolic of all state institutions.

The establishment of the checas was unsurprising, considering the spy mania and the frustration caused by the government’s lack of resistance to the military rising. Some of them became gangs ruled by opportunist leaders. One checa set up in the palace of Count del Rincón in Madrid was run by García Altadell, a former secretary-general of the Communist Youth, who set off for Argentina with his loot, but was captured by the nationalists en route and later garrotted.

Exploiting the fear and turmoil, a great number of criminals found it easy to act under political flags of convenience. Many of those who took real and imagined fascists for rides (in the movie jargon used at the time) were teenage workers or shop assistants who were not political fanatics, but young men excited by their sudden power. The actress Maria Casares (daughter of the ex-prime minister), who worked at a Madrid hospital with her mother, described what happened when they found blood in their car one morning. Their young driver, Paco, gave ‘an imperceptible shrug. Then he said, “We took a guy for a ride at dawn, and I’m sorry I haven’t had time to clean up the car.” And in the rear-view mirror I saw his indefinable little smile; a smile of bragging and shame at the same time, and also a sort of atrocious innocence. The expression of a child caught red-handed.’⁷

In spite of the wave of political killings in Madrid during the first few weeks, there remained a very large population of nationalists, judging by the numbers to emerge two and a half years later when Franco’s troops approached. Those of the upper and middle classes who knew they were in danger usually tried to go into hiding, disguise themselves as workers to flee Madrid, or seek refuge in overcrowded embassies. Foreign legations were estimated to have held a total of 8,500 people at the beginning of February 1937.⁸ Some embassies, representing governments sympathetic to the nationalists, acted as espionage centres, using both radio and diplomatic bag to pass information to the other side. One checa opened a fake embassy some months later and killed all those who came there for shelter. The indiscriminate killing began to decline only when control was exercised over the criminals released from prison and military action began in the Madrid area.

The worst mass killing in Madrid occurred on the night of 22–23 August, just after an air raid and the arrival of reports of the massacre of 1,200 republicans in the bullring at Badajoz. Enraged militiamen and civilians marched on the Model Prison when rumours spread of a riot and a fire started by Falangist prisoners. Thirty of the 2,000 prisoners, including many prominent right-wingers, several of them former ministers, were dragged out of the prison and shot.⁹ A horrified Azaña came very close to resigning as president of the Republic.¹⁰

In Barcelona the top priorities for revenge (after certain police officials like Miguel Badía) were the industrialists who had employed pistoleros against union leaders in the 1920s and, of course, the gunmen themselves. This wave of repression was carried out mainly by ‘investigation groups’ and ‘control patrols’ created by the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias, but also by unscrupulous and sometimes psychologically disturbed individuals, taking advantage of the chaos.

There was inevitably a wide-ranging settlement of accounts against blacklegs. One or two killings even went back to old inter-union disputes. Desiderio Trillas, the head of the UGT dockers, was shot down by a group of anarchists because he had prevented CNT members from receiving work. This murder was condemned at once by the CNT-FAI leadership and they promised the immediate execution of any of their members who killed out of personal motives. It was a threat which they carried out. Several prominent anarchists, such as their building union leader, Josep Gardenyes, who had been freed from prison on 19 July, and Manuel Fernández, the head of the catering syndicate, were executed by their own comrades in the FAI for taking vengeance on police spies from the time of Primo’s dictatorship.¹¹

The army officers who had supported the rising and then been captured soon became victims. A column of militiamen attacked the prison ship Uruguay and shot the majority of the rebels held there between 29 and 31 August.¹²

It appears that freed convicts were responsible for a considerable part of the violence and much of the looting. The real anarchists burned banknotes because they symbolized the greed of society, but those they had released from prison did not change their habits with the arrival of the social revolution. The excesses of unreformed criminals caused the CNT-FAI to complain bitterly that the ‘underworld is disgracing the revolution’, but they were reluctant to admit that they had allowed almost anybody to join their organization. Falangists sought refuge in their ranks, as well as others who had no interest in libertarianism. Many on the left also alleged that civil guards were often the most flagrant killers, as they sought to protect themselves from suspicions of sympathizing with the right.¹³

The worst of the violence occurred in the first few days throughout the republican zone of Spain, though it varied greatly from region to region. On the whole the depressed areas saw more ferocity, especially in New Castile, where over 2,000 people were killed by the left during the course of the war. In Toledo 400 were killed between 20 and 31 July, in Ciudad Real some 600 were killed in August and September. There was great savagery also in parts of Andalucia, such as Ronda where the victims were thrown over the cliffs. (Hemingway used this incident in For Whom the Bell Tolls.) But in Ronda, as in many towns and villages, the executions were carried out by groups from other parts. It was a phenomenon which bore a remarkable resemblance to the way in which peasants during the nineteenth century had burned the church of a neighbouring village, but not their own.

There was relatively little violence in Málaga before 27 July, but on that day nationalist aircraft bombed the market, killing women and children. Coming just after Queipo de Llano’s boasts over Seville Radio that he knew from spies everything that happened in the town, the air raid had a traumatic effect. Suspects were hauled out of prison and shot against the nearest wall and there was a further round-up in the wealthy areas of the town. Altogether some 1,100 people, including General Paxtot, were killed in Málaga between late July and the end of September. During the same period Valencia and Alicante also experienced terrible violence, which killed 4,715 people throughout the region.

The main characteristics of the situation in the republican zone were the almost total lack of control in the first days of the rising, the intensity and rapidity of the killings, and the attempts by left-wing and republican leaders to stop the violence. There would be one or two renewed outbreaks later in Madrid. At the end of October, 31 prisoners, including Ramiro de Maeztu, the author of Defensa de la Hispanidad, and Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, founder of the JONS, were taken out of the Prison de las Ventas and shot. There was an even more infamous event in November, when Franco’s forces were at the gates of Madrid and 2,000 prisoners were shot when evacuating them to the rear to prevent them being liberated by the nationalists.

In September Largo Caballero’s ‘government of unity’, made up of socialists, republicans and communists, took firm steps to re-establish law and order. They set up popular tribunals which, although far from perfect, were an improvement, and created municipal councils to replace the patrols whose members were ordered to the front. The cases of looting and murder rapidly diminished.

Even during the worst of the violence, leaders from all organizations and parties did what they could to save people. In Madrid, President Azaña managed to rescue the monks from his old college at the Escorial. Galarza, the minister of the interior, saved Joaquín Ruiz Jiménez. La Pasionaria intervened on behalf of many victims, including nuns. So did Juan Negrín and many others. In Catalonia Companys, Ventura Gassol, Frederic Escofet and other leading members of the Generalitat, the rector of the University Pere Bosch Gimpera, and the anarcho-syndicalist leader Joan Peiró, among others, spoke out strongly against the crimes and helped hundreds of those at risk to escape or to leave the country. And this did not happen only in the big cities. In many towns and villages civil governors, teachers, mayors and others did what they could to protect prisoners from being lynched, even when nationalist forces were close.¹⁴

In all, the victims of the red terror in the Republican zone during the civil war rose to some 38,000 people, of whom almost half were killed in Madrid (8,815) and in Catalonia (8,352) during the summer and autumn of 1936.¹⁵ On the republican side there was a strong mixture of feelings when the worst of the rearguard slaughter was over. The majority of republicans were sickened by what had happened. The anarchist intellectual Federica Montseny referred to ‘a lust for blood inconceivable in honest men before’. Although La Pasionaria intervened on several occasions to save people, other communists took a fatalistic attitude to the violence. Stalin’s ambassador is said to have commented, with a shrug, that the scum was bound to come to the top at such a time. The dubious rationale that the atrocities had been far worse on the other side was not used until the Republic’s propaganda campaign became effective in 1937. And yet the different patterns of violence were probably even more significant than the exact number of victims.

The White Terror

The pattern of killing in ‘white’ Spain was indeed different. The notion of a ‘limpieza’, or ‘cleansing’, had formed an essential part of the rebel strategy and the process began as soon as an area had been secured. General Mola, in his instructions of 30 June for the Moroccan zone, ordered the troops ‘to eliminate left-wing elements, communists, anarchists, union members, Freemasons etc.’¹ General Queipo de Llano, who described their movement as ‘the purging of the Spanish people’, did not specify political movements. He simply defined their enemies as anybody who sympathized ‘with advanced social currents or simple movements of democratic and liberal opinion’.²

The nationalists in fact felt compelled to carry out a harsh and intense repression, partly to destroy the democratic aspirations encouraged under the Republic and partly because they had to crush a hostile majority in many areas of the country. One of General Franco’s press attachés, Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera, even said to the American journalist John Whitaker that they had ‘to kill, to kill, and to kill’ all reds, ‘to exterminate a third of the masculine population and cleanse the country of the proletariat’.³ Between July 1936 and early 1937 the nationalists allowed ‘discretionary’ killing under the flag of war, but soon the repression became planned and methodically directed, encouraged by military and civil authorities and blessed by the Catholic Church.

The repression in nationalist Spain began as soon as an area had been conquered. The first to be killed, apart from those captured in the front line who were frequently shot on the spot, were union leaders and representatives of the republican government, above all civil governors and mayors, but also other officials who had remained loyal. From the start, even republicans who were promised their lives in return for surrendering were killed. Officers who had stayed loyal to the government were also shot or imprisoned. Military custom required that loyalist or neutral regular officers be accorded court martials where possible. On the whole, waverers were imprisoned, while most of those who had continued to serve the government, including seven generals and an admiral, were shot on the grounds of ‘rebellion’. This remarkable reversal of definitions had also occurred in the navy, where nationalists described sailors who followed ministry of marine instructions as ‘mutinous’.

Once the troops had moved on, a second and more intense wave of slaughter would begin, as the Falange, or in some areas the Carlists, carried out a ruthless purge of the civilian population. Their targets included union leaders, government officials, left-of-centre politicians (40 members of the Popular Front in the Cortes were shot),⁴ intellectuals, teachers,⁵ doctors, even the typists working for revolutionary committees; in fact, anyone who was even suspected of having voted for the Popular Front was in danger. In Huesca 100 people accused of being Freemasons were shot when the town’s lodge did not even have a dozen members.⁶

The nationalist counterpart to the checas in republican territory were the local committees, usually consisting of leading right-wingers, such as the major landowner, the local Civil Guard commander, a Falangist and quite often the priest, although some risked their lives trying to prevent massacres. All known or suspected liberals, Masons and leftists were taken before the committee. A few prisoners might try to accuse others in a panic-stricken attempt to save themselves, but otherwise they had either a dazed or a defiant manner. Their wrists were tied behind their backs with cord or wire before they were taken off for execution. In Navarre a priest gave last rites to Basque nationalists en masse in front of an open trench before the volley, but in most places the condemned were taken in batches to the cemetery wall. Those who ‘knew how to die well’ shouted ‘Viva la República!’ or ‘Viva la Libertad!’ in the same way as condemned nationalists called out ‘Viva España!’.

The Falange often resorted to using the local prison as a reserve of victims when their squads could not find anyone outside to execute. In Granada alone, some 2,000 people died in this way. Nobody can tell what proportion of the victims were seized at home or at work, then shot at night lined up in front of car headlights. People lying awake in bed would cross themselves instinctively on hearing shots in the distance. The corpses of these ‘clients’, as they were sometimes called, were left in the open. If they were union members they often had their membership cards pinned to their chest as proof of guilt.

In some areas, as was the case in Seville and Huelva, special lorries were used, known as ‘meat wagons’, to take the corpses to the cemetery.⁷ At times, however, corpses were displayed as a warning, as happened to the body of the mother of the communist leader Saturnino Barnero, which was left for a number of days in the Plaza del Pumarejo in Seville. In Huelva also the body was displayed of a confectioner who had thrown an espadrille at General Sanjurjo after his failed coup in August 1932. The practice of displaying bodies continued for a long time,⁸ until the nationalist authorities had to insist on burial for reasons of public health.

It seemed to make little difference to the Nationalists whether or not there had been open opposition to their forces. In the military centre of Burgos and the Carlist capital of Pamplona they had not been resisted, yet the purge began immediately. In Burgos, the capital of Castille, groups were taken out each night to be shot by the side of the highway. Ruiz Vilaplana, president of the College of Clerks of the Court, recounted in his memoirs that he witnessed 70 people killed in one batch.⁹

In Pamplona on 15 August, while the procession of the Virgin del Sagrano was taking place, Falangists and requetés took 50 or 60 prisoners, including some priests suspected of Basque separatism. Before killing them, the requetés wanted to give them the opportunity of confession, but the Falangists refused. In the confusion some prisoners tried to escape but were shot down. ‘In order to sort out the situation, priests gave absolution en masse to the remainder. The executions were carried out and the trucks returned to Pamplona in time for the requetés to join the procession as it entered the cathedral.’¹⁰ The Association of Families of the Murdered of Navarre have identified 2,789 people executed in the province.¹¹

As might be expected, the repression was much more intensive and systematic in places where the UGT and the CNT had many members, especially in areas where the Popular Front had won in the elections of February. In Rioja, for example, over 60 per cent of the victims belonged to Popular Front parties. Over 2,000 people were executed and buried in mass graves outside Logroño.¹² There was practically no village in the Rioja which did not have inhabitants buried in the mass grave of La Barranca.¹³ In Teruel the wells of Caudé, 84 metres deep, were used for dumping the corpses of the killed. A peasant living nearby heard and recorded in a notebook 1,005 coups de graˆce.¹⁴

In Seville, where Queipo de Llano’s bluff had won over the confused soldiers, the initial killing was said to be part of a military operation. But when reinforcements from the Army of Africa arrived under Major Castejón, the mopping-up was nothing more than a fearful massacre, with survivors finished off by knife or bayonet. Immediately afterwards Colonel Díaz Criado was put in charge of public order and almost all the local officials were killed. Because the prison was not large enough, the nationalists used the Jáuregui cinema as a holding centre for more than 2,000 people, also the Variedades music hall, the Falangist headquarters and even two boats anchored near the Torre del Oro. Francisca Díaz, the eighteen-year-old sister of the secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party was interrogated for a whole night. She saw many of the workers from the olive oil factory roped together. They were going to be taken out to be shot.¹⁵ The nationalist repression in the province of Seville accounted for 8,000 lives during 1936.

Córdoba had been seized on 18 July in a few hours, with little resistance. Queipo de Llano, furious because no reprisal had been carried out, immediately sent Major Bruno Ibáñez of the Civil Guard to the city. He started with 109 people from the lists given him by landowners and clergymen. A few days later they began to shoot the prisoners out on the roads and in the olive groves. ‘The basement of Falange headquarters in which people were held was like a balloon which was blown up in the afternoon and was empty the following morning. Each day there were executions in the cemetery and along the roads leading out of the city.’¹⁶ It is calculated that a total of 10,000 were killed in Córdoba during the war, a tenth of the population. ‘Don Bruno could have shot the whole city,’ a Falangist lawyer recounted. ‘They sent him to Córdoba with carte blanche.’¹⁷

In Huelva, a town which the nationalists did not fully take until the middle of September, more than 2,000 people were killed, including the civil governor, Diego Jiménez Castellano, and the commanders of the Civil Guard and the carabineros who had stayed loyal to the Republic. It is calculated that another 2,500 inhabitants disappeared, but many of them may have escaped across the border to Portugal.¹⁸

When Major Castejón’s ‘Column of Death’ reached Zafra on the road to Badajoz, he ordered the local authorities to provide him with a list of 60 people to be shot. ‘Little by little, those on the list were locked up in a room of the town hall. Some inhabitants who came into the mayor’s office were shown the growing list. They were allowed to remove three names providing they wrote down three others.’ In the end, 48 of the names were substitutes.¹⁹

One of the great lieux de mémoire of the Spanish Civil War was Badajoz itself.²⁰ The massacre perpetrated there by the troops of Lieutenant Colonel Yagüe during its capture and the following repression turned into the first propaganda battle of the war. The nationalists exaggerated their losses in the battle and also the numbers of right wingers killed by the left beforehand. In fact, Yagüe lost no more than 44 killed and 141 wounded. But even after the war, the nationalists could not ascribe more than 243 killings to the left, while estimates on nationalist killings in the province range from over 6,000 to 12,000.²¹

On the road to Madrid the nationalist columns followed the same pattern. They subdued villages along the way, laying waste and daubing on the whitewashed walls graffiti such as ‘your women will give birth to fascists’. Meanwhile, General Queipo de Llano menaced republicans who listened to Radio Sevilla with stories about the sexual powers of the African troops, to whom he promised the women of Madrid as an inducement. War correspondents were held back from Toledo so that they should not witness the events which followed the relief of the Alcázar. There 200 wounded militiamen in hospital were finished off with grenades and bayonets. The conduct of the campaign was compared to the furia española of Philip II’s infantry in the sixteenth century, which terrorized Protestant Holland in its all-destructive advance.

Near Gibraltar a Falangist reported that the wife of a left-winger was raped by a whole firing squad of Moors before being shot. An American journalist, John Whitaker, was present when two young girls were handed over to Moroccan troops near Navalcarnero by their commanding officer, Major Mohamed Ben Mizzian, who told him calmly that they would not survive more than four hours.²² The Major subsequently reached the rank of lieutenant-general in Franco’s army and regulares were later made ‘honorary Christians’ by the nationalists. The horror they inspired in republican territory led to two of them being torn to pieces by a crowd when the truck in which they were being sent back as prisoners stopped to fill up with petrol.

Another of the great places of suffering was Granada, known above all for the murder of the poet Federico García Lorca, the most celebrated victim of the civil war. The fascist and military attitude to intellectuals showed itself to be one of deep distrust at the least, and usually consisted of an inarticulate reaction mixing hate, fear and contempt. This was shown in Granada where five university professors were murdered. García Lorca had returned to his house outside the city in the Huerta de San Vicente just before the rising. (With the start of the summer holidays many on both sides were saved or killed simply by their travel plans.) He was in danger because of his liberal sympathies although he belonged to no party. Even the refuge given him by the Falangist poet Luis Rosales and his family could not save him.

On Sunday, 16 August, a few hours after the murder of his brother-in-law, Manuel Fernández Montesinos, the mayor of Granada, he was seized by a former deputy of the CEDA, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, who later asserted that Lorca ‘did more damage with his pen than others with their guns’. He was accompanied by Luis García Alix, secretary of Acción Popular, and the Falangist landowner Juan Luis Trescastro, the perpetrator of the crime, who would say later: ‘We killed Federico García Lorca. I gave him two shots in the arse as a homosexual.’²³ H. G. Wells, the president of PEN, demanded details on the fate of Lorca as soon as the news reached the outside world, but the nationalist authorities denied any knowledge of his fate. Lorca’s death remained a forbidden subject in Spain until the death of Franco in 1975.

The nationalists justified the brutality of their repression as reprisals for the red terror, but as had been the case in Seville, Córdoba and in Badajoz, and as would be the case in Málaga six months later, the subsequent nationalist killings exceeded those of the left several, if not many, times over. In Málaga the nationalist executions took place after the militia, and undoubtedly almost all those responsible for killing right wingers, had escaped up the coast. This shows that there was little attempt to identify the guilty. But above all, the contrast in the numbers killed by each side could not be starker.

In August 1944 the British consul in Málaga obtained the nationalists’ own figures and forwarded them to the ambassador in Madrid, who passed them on to London. He reported that while ‘the “reds” were in control of Málaga from 18 July 1936 until February 7th 1937…they executed or murdered 1,005 persons’. But that ‘during the first week of Liberation, that is from February 8th to 14th…3,500 persons were executed by the Nationalists’. And ‘from February 15th 1937 to August 25th 1944, a further 16,952 persons have been “legally” sentenced to death and shot in Málaga’.²⁴ According to other sources, more than 700 people were shot against the walls of the San Rafael cemetery just between 1 and 23 March 1937,²⁵ but one local historian put the total figure for Málaga at 7,000 executions,²⁶ roughly a third of the number given to the British consul. Whatever the exact figure, the nationalist ‘reprisals’ were clearly not just a question of revenge, they were also motivated by the idea of establishing a reign of terror especially in areas where the right had been numerically weaker.

Even in areas where they were strong, however, the ‘killing machine’ was also used as a conspicuous message. In Valladolid the Falangist ‘dawn patrols’ shot 914 people, but the main reservoir of victims was once again the mass of prisoners seized just after the rising. They were locked into tram coaches and most days the Falangists would take out a dozen to execute them in public.²⁷ ‘It wasn’t just a crowd of illiterates who came to watch the spectacle,’ recounted Jesús Álvarez, a chemist in the town. ‘They were people of standing, sons of distinguished families, educated people, people who called themselves religious…they went so regularly to see the executions that stalls selling coffee and churros were set up so that they could eat and drink while they watched.’²⁸ On 24 September the office of the civil governor of Valladolid published a statement that it had been noticed recently that although ‘military justice’ satisfied the need for punishment, large crowds were gathering at the place of execution. The civil governor appealed to pious people that they ‘should not come to watch such things, and even less bring their wives and children’.²⁹

In the rear areas the Falange had rapidly developed into the nationalists’ paramilitary force, assuming the task of ‘cleaning up’. The young señoritos, often aided by their sisters and girlfriends, organized themselves into mobile squads, using their parents’ touring cars. Their leader, José Antonio, had declaimed that ‘the Spanish Falange, aflame with love, secure in its faith, will conquer Spain for Spain to the sound of military music’. The real militants were obsessed with their task of cutting out ‘the gangrenous parts of the nation’ and destroying the foreign, ‘red’ contagion. The rest simply seemed to find sanctified gangsterism appealing. The Carlists, on the other hand, were fired by religious fanaticism to avenge the Church by wiping out such modern evils as Freemasonry, atheism and socialism. They also had a far higher proportion of their able-bodied men at the front than the Falange and, despite their violent excesses on many occasions, were reputed to have treated their prisoners of war the most correctly.

Nationalist killings reached their peak in September and continued for a long time after the war was over. Not surprisingly, people wondered if Franco wanted to repeat the deathbed answer of the nineteenth-century General Narváez when asked if he forgave his enemies: ‘I have none. I have had them all shot.’

In the course of the last ten years, detailed work has been carried out region by region in Spain to establish the number, the identity and the fate of the victims. Accurate statistics have now been compiled on 25 provinces and provisional figures on another four. For just over half of Spain, this comes to a total of over 80,000 victims of the nationalists.³⁰ If one takes into account the deaths which were never registered and allows for the provinces not yet studied, we are probably faced with a total figure for killings and executions by the nationalists during the war and afterwards of around 200,000 people. This figure is not so very far from the threat made by General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano to republicans when he promised ‘on my word of honour as a gentleman that for every person that you kill, we will kill at least ten’.³¹

The Nationalist Zone

A coup d’état does not need a positive creed, just an enemy. A civil war, on the other hand, demands a cause, a banner and some form of manifesto. During the preparation for the coup, the military plotters had not concerned themselves greatly over the exact form of government which their pronunciamiento would herald. The urgency of the conspiracy did not allow them to waste time discussing hypothetical constitutions. They would discuss the finer points and formulate a detailed justification for their actions after the country was secured. The substance was clear to all: centralized authoritarian rule. The form, however, was not clear, although the possibilities included Falangism, Carlism, a restoration of the Alfonsine monarchy and a republican dictatorship.¹

Until this problem could be resolved the nominal direction of nationalist Spain was constituted in Burgos on 24 July in the Junta de Defensa Nacional. General Cabanellas, the divisional commander at Saragossa, assumed the presidency supported by nine generals and two colonels. This figurehead establishment was organized by Mola, who commanded the Army of the North. It appears to have been an attempt to reduce the power of Franco, who commanded the most important military formation. Before the rising, General Hidalgo de Cisneros, the loyal commander of the republican air force, had said that ‘General Goded was more intelligent. General Mola a better soldier; but Franco was the most ambitious.’² (His verdict on Mola was to prove highly inaccurate.)

Mola had talked of a republican dictatorship which would maintain the separation of Church and state. He had even ordered that the monarchist flag be taken down in Pamplona. The Carlists were so horrified by his attitude that, in the last few days before the rising there had even been doubts whether they would commit their requetés, who were needed to assure the obedience of the regular troops to the nationalist cause. Queipo de Llano’s sudden rise to prominence in the rebellion with his seizure of Seville must have worried them almost as much. He not only finished his radio broadcasts with ‘Viva la República!’ and the liberal anthem, the ‘Himno de Riego’, but, worst of all, he was a Freemason. The idea of fighting under the republican tricolour was anathema to all traditionalists. Only the military plotters had sworn loyalty to it.

The Carlists’ main hope for safeguarding their interests was destroyed on 20 July with General Sanjurjo’s death. Major Ansaldo, the monarchist airman, had arrived in Portugal to fly him to Burgos with the announcement that he was now ‘at the orders of the head of the Spanish state’, which caused very emotional scenes among the general’s entourage. Their light aircraft crashed on take-off and Sanjurjo died in the flames. This accident has been attributed either to sabotage by a Franco supporter or to Sanjurjo’s vanity in taking so many cases of uniforms. The latter explanation seems the more probable, although Ansaldo claims it was sabotage.

During this time of uncertainty over the form of the new state, the Catholic Church provided the nationalist alliance with both a common symbol of tradition and a cause to transcend ideological confusion within their ranks. Its authoritarian, centralist nature and its attitude to property were acceptable to all factions, except the left wing of the Falange. Its hierarchy rallied to the cause of the right and prominent churchmen were seen giving the fascist salute. Cardinal Gomá stated that ‘Jews and Masons poisoned the national soul with absurd doctrines’.³ The most striking piece of ecclesiastical support for the nationalist rising came in the pastoral letter ‘The Two Cities’ published by the Bishop of Salamanca, Pla y Daniel, on 30 September. It denounced the left-wing attacks on the Catholic Church and praised the nationalist movement as ‘the celestial city of the children of God’.⁴ Pla y Daniel also demanded the reversal of all anti-clerical restrictions and reforms implemented under the Republic. He was not to be disappointed.

A few brave priests put their lives at risk by criticizing nationalist atrocities, but the majority of the clergy in nationalist areas revelled in their new-found power and the increased size of their congregations. Anyone who did not attend mass faithfully was likely to be suspected of ‘red’ tendencies. Entrepreneurs made a great deal of money selling religious symbols, which were worn ostentatiously to ward off suspicion rather than evil spirits. It was reminiscent of the way the Inquisition’s persecution of Jews and Moors helped make pork such an important part of the Spanish diet.

The disparate groups that made up the nationalist movement were well aware of the danger in their undertaking, for they controlled less than half of Spanish territory and just under half of the population. It was this uncertainty and the desire for strong leadership which Franco was able to exploit in the following months. He was a great admirer and worthy successor of that most cynical of statesmen, Ferdinand of Aragon, usually cited as the original of Machiavelli’s Prince. During August it became almost certain that Franco was to be the nationalists’ Caudillo, or leader, but nobody really knew what beliefs were hidden behind his bland, complacent expression, nor to what extent he would be able to reconcile the markedly different opinions about the future form of the nationalist state. The Falange was worried that it would be little more than an auxiliary force under army command. The monarchists wanted Alfonso returned. The Carlists wanted a royal Catholic dictatorship with a populist flavour, although they realized that their pretender to the throne, the eighty-year-old Don Alfonso Carlos, would not be accepted by their allies. (In any case, he died in September without heirs as a result of an automobile accident.)

Franco’s constitutional formula for unifying the nationalists was as brilliant in what it included as in what it left unresolved. The basis of his approach was to have a monarchy without a king. Alfonso was not acceptable to the majority of nationalists and he had little popular appeal: yet the arrangement satisfied the traditionalists without provoking the Falange or republicans like Queipo de Llano or Mola. It also avoided the kind of frustration Mussolini felt over King Vittorio Emanuele, which had resulted in serious tensions between royalists and fascists in the Italian armed services.

On 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption, a great ceremony was organized in Seville. The purpose was to pay homage to the old monarchist flag and adopt it as the banner of the ‘new reconquista’. The ceremony was also a part of Franco’s plan to assert his ascendency over potential rivals for the nationalist leadership. Queipo said that he would not attend, remarking that ‘if Franco wants to see me, he knows where I am’.⁵ Franco arrived with a large retinue, including General Millán Astray, the founder of the Foreign Legion. He was received by all the local dignitaries, headed by Cardinal Ilundaín, but not Queipo. They proceeded to the town hall on the Plaza de San Fernando. Queipo, who had decided to turn up at the last moment, made a long rambling speech which caused consternation among Franco’s entourage. The republican tricolour was lowered, then the monarchist flag of red-gold-red hoisted to the strains of the Royal March. Franco made a much briefer speech, in which he hailed ‘our flag, the authentic one, the one to which we have all sworn loyalty, and for which our forefathers died, a hundred times covered with glory’.⁶ He then embraced the flag, followed by Cardinal Ilundaín.

Seville had rapidly become the personal fief of Queipo and Franco was galled by his cavalier behaviour. Queipo’s portrait was everywhere. His face dominated the town and was reproduced even on vases, ashtrays and mirrors. Households where ‘reds’ had been killed were the first to be forced to display his photograph in their windows. Against this barrage of publicity Franco’s staff desperately sought to obtain exposure for their chief. Eventually they managed to arrange for his photograph to be projected on cinema screens to the tune of the Royal March. The audience gave the fascist salute during the five minutes that this lasted. Later on, public establishments in the nationalist zone were obliged to display his portrait. And whenever the Royal March was played on the radio all those who did not want their loyalty to be suspect rose to their feet and gave the fascist salute.

The publicity of other nationalist groups was just as strident. Posters appeared everywhere. The Carlist message proclaimed, ‘If you are a good Spaniard, and you love your country and her glorious traditions, enlist with the requetés.’ The Falange’s slogan was briefer and more threatening: ‘The Falange calls you. Now or never.’ More than 2,000 new Falange members were said to have enlisted in a 24-hour period in Seville alone. Queipo de Llano was both cynical and accurate when he referred to the blue shirt as a ‘life-jacket’. Many a left-winger or neutral who wanted to avoid the máquina de matar, the killing machine, rushed to enlist and often tried to prove himself more fascist than the fascists, a counterpart to the phenomenon in republican territory.

José Antonio’s pre-war fears were confirmed, when this influx of opportunists swamped the surviving camisas viejas, the ‘old shirts’. Nearly half of the pre-war veterans had died in the rising. Meanwhile, José Antonio was in Alicante jail guarded by militiamen, Onésimo Redondo had been killed and Ledesma Ramos was also in enemy hands. The Falange was thus in an uncomfortable position. Its membership was greatly swollen just at the time that its leaders were out of action.⁷ As a result the Falange operated in an unpredictable fashion. Some militia units went to the front, but the majority stayed in the rear areas to provide an improvised bureaucracy and an amateur political police. The Falangist patrols, supposedly checking suspicious characters, were blue-shirted and flamboyantly conspicuous as they forced passers-by to give the fascist salute and shout ‘Arriba España!’. Girl Falangists went into cafés to ask men why they were not in uniform. They then presented them with sets of doll’s clothing in a contemptuous manner while a backup squad of male comrades watched from the door. One German visitor reported to the Wilhelmstrasse: ‘One has the impression that the members of the Falangist militia themselves have no real aims and ideas; rather, they seem to be young people for whom mainly it is good sport to play with firearms and to round up communists and socialists.’⁸

José Antonio had been transferred to Alicante jail by the republican authorities early in July, just before the rising. He had been allowed such a lax prison regime that Count de Mayalde managed to pass him two pistols in the meeting room. Dramatic plans to rescue José Antonio never came to fruition, first on the day of the rising and then again the next day. A group of Falangists were discovered by assault guards and three of the rescue team were killed in the shoot-out.⁹ Further plans to release him were discussed in October on board the battleship Deutschland, but these were opposed both by Admiral Carls, the German squadron commander, and the German foreign ministry. Another failed project involved the German torpedo boat Iltis.¹⁰ One more attempt is said to have been thwarted by General Franco, who did not want such a charismatic rival at large.¹¹

The proceedings to bring José Antonio and his brother Miguel to trial began on 3 October in front of the Popular Tribunal of Alicante. They were charged with conspiracy against the Republic and military rebellion. When the trial itself started on 16 November, José Antonio was allowed to defend himself, his brother and his sister-in-law, Margarita Larios. His legal training helped him put up an impressive performance. Knowing he was doomed, he did not stoop to ask for clemency. He was, however, successful in having his brother’s and sister-in-law’s sentences reduced, remarking that ‘life is not a firework to be let off at the end of a party’.

José Antonio was executed swiftly by the local authorities on 20 November, in case the cabinet of ministers, which was due to meet that morning, reduced the sentence to life imprisonment. The Falange had a great martyr as a result, but was left without any leader of stature–a situation which could hardly have displeased Franco. He suppressed all news of the execution for two years when the Republic was doomed. Franco, who was far too pragmatic to be jealous of a dead rival, did not mind allowing the cult of José Antonio to develop later.

Behind the military edifice of nationalist Spain, attention had to be given to economic matters. One of the main priorities for the rebel generals was to obtain hard currency from exports to pay for the war. In Andalucia Queipo de Llano proved himself to be a surprisingly competent commercial administrator, albeit one with a pistol in his hand. Smuggling, fraud and the export of capital became capital offences. The foreign exchange earners, such as sherry, olives and citrus fruit, were given the highest priority and he organized trade agreements with the Salazar regime in Lisbon. Exporters had to hand over all their receipts in pounds or dollars to the military authorities within three days.¹² However, the granting of import licences, monopolies and commercial rights led to the corruption and profiteering which was to permeate nationalist Spain. Contributions to the movement were a good investment for those who were quick. At the same time charities mushroomed, occupying the time of clergy, beatas, war widows and other civilians with an ambitious eye to the future.

Meanwhile, the loudspeakers in the streets played music such as the violent Legion marching song ‘El Novio de la Muerte (the fiancé of death)’. And at the radio station every evening a bugler stood in front of the microphone to herald the daily bulletin from the Generalissimo’s headquarters. It was against this militaristic atmosphere that a remarkable act of moral courage was to take place, an incident highlighted by the emphasis on physical bravery in that war. On 12 October, the anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, a Festival of the Spanish Race was organized at the University of Salamanca. The audience consisted of prominent supporters of the nationalist movement, including a large detachment of the local Falange. Among the dignitaries on the stage sat Franco’s wife, the Bishop of Salamanca who had issued the pastoral letter, General Millán Astray, the founder of the Foreign Legion, and Miguel de Unamuno, the Basque philosopher who was the rector of the university. Unamuno had been exasperated by the Republic, so in the beginning he had supported the nationalist rising. But he could not ignore the slaughter in this city where the infamous Major Doval from the Asturian repression was in charge, nor the murder of his friends Casto Prieto, the mayor of Salamanca, Salvador Vila, the professor of Arabic and Hebrew at the University of Granada, and of García Lorca.

Soon after the ceremony began, Professor Francisco Maldonado launched a violent attack against Catalan and Basque nationalism, which he described as ‘the cancer of the nation’, which must be cured with the scalpel of fascism. At the back of the hall, somebody yelled the Legion battlecry of ‘¡Viva la muerte!’ (Long live death!). General Millán Astray, who looked the very spectre of war with only one arm and one eye, stood up to shout the same cry.¹³ Falangists chanted their ‘¡Vivas!’, arms raised in the fascist salute towards the portrait of General Franco hanging above where his wife sat.

The noise died as Unamuno stood up slowly. His quiet voice was an impressive contrast. ‘All of you await my words. You know me and are aware that I am unable to remain silent. At times to be silent is to lie. For silence can be interpreted as acquiescence. I want to comment on the speech, to give it that name, of Professor Maldonado. Let us waive the personal affront implied in the sudden outburst of vituperation against the Basques and Catalans. I was myself, of course, born in Bilbao. The bishop, whether he likes it or not, is a Catalan from Barcelona. Just now I heard a necrophilous and senseless cry: “Long live Death!” And I, who have spent my life shaping paradoxes, must tell you as an expert authority that this outlandish paradox is repellent to me. General Millán Astray is a cripple. Let it be said without any undertone. He is a war invalid. So was Cervantes.¹⁴

‘Unfortunately there are all too many cripples in Spain now. And soon there will be even more of them if God does not come to our aid. It pains me to think that General Millán Astray should dictate the pattern of mass psychology. A cripple who lacks the greatness of Cervantes is wont to seek ominous relief in causing mutilation around him. General Millán Astray would like to create Spain anew, a negative creation in his own image and likeness; for that reason he wishes to see Spain crippled as he unwittingly made clear.’

The general was unable to contain his almost inarticulate fury any longer. He could only scream ‘Muera la inteligencia! Viva la Muerte! (Death to the intelligentsia! Long live Death!)’. The Falangists took up his cry and army officers took out their pistols. Apparently, the general’s bodyguard even levelled his submachine-gun at Unamuno’s head, but this did not deter Unamuno from crying defiance.

‘This is the temple of the intellect and I am its high priest. It is you who profane its sacred precincts. You will win, because you have more than enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to persuade you would need what you lack: reason and right in your struggle. I consider it futile to exhort you to think of Spain.’

He paused and his arms fell to his sides. He finished in a quiet resigned tone: ‘I have done.’ It would seem that the presence of Franco’s wife saved him from being lynched on the spot, though when her husband was informed of what had happened he apparently wanted Unamuno to be shot. This course was not followed because of the philosopher’s international reputation and the reaction caused abroad by Lorca’s murder. But Unamuno died some ten weeks later, broken-hearted and cursed as a ‘red’ and a traitor by those he had thought were his friends.¹⁵

The Republican Zone

From the start, the rising of the generals had fragmented the country into a mass of localized civil wars. But this was not the main reason for the collapse of the republican state. The central government’s disastrous response to the crisis was one major factor: perhaps the inescapable paralysis of a centre-left government facing a right-wing revolt on one side and left-wing revolution on the other. Another was the disintegration of the mechanism of state, when so many of its functionaries, from the diplomatic corps to the police, to say nothing of the armed forces, supported the nationalists.

The CNT and the UGT, which had borne the brunt of the fighting, rapidly filled the vacuum, creating revolutionary organizations in republican territory. The only real exception was the Basque country. ‘There, the situation is not revolutionary,’ it was observed. ‘Private property is not questioned.’¹ The membership of the two unions increased enormously, partly out of admiration for what they had done, but mostly for opportunistic reasons as they were now the power in the land. They soon had around two million members each, a striking total when the lost territories are taken into account. The POUM and above all the Communist Party were also to increase rapidly. The communists’ vast gains, increasing their strength to 250,000 members in eight months, came from the middle class attracted by the Party’s disciplined approach, from the ambitious and from right-wingers afraid of arrest, just as left-wingers joined the Falange to survive in the nationalist zone.²

In the early days of the rising Madrid had the air of a revolutionary city. Militiamen of the UGT and CNT could be seen in almost every street checking identities. Their usual dress consisted of dark blue monos (which were like boiler suits) and badges or coloured scarves to denote their political affiliation: black and red for the anarcho-syndicalists, red for the socialists and communists. The lack of opportunity, or the unwillingness, to shave on a regular basis made most of them look especially villainous to foreign observers. None went anywhere without a rifle. ‘Idle young men,’ wrote Azaña in his diary, ‘instead of fighting in the trenches, they show off their martial kit in the streets, rifle slung across the shoulder.’³

The government’s original refusal to issue arms had left a deep mark. Workers remembered that feeling of impotence when facing the military uprising, and this meant that a vast number of weapons was kept in rear areas during the early months. Also, nationalist ruses like those at Oviedo and San Sebastián meant that there was a reluctance to commit too many men to the front in case there were more unpleasant surprises behind the lines.

The socialist UGT was still the most powerful organization in Madrid, even though the CNT continued to gain rapidly at its expense. Girls wearing the red and blue of the Socialist Youth were everywhere collecting money for left-wing charities, encouraged by their new freedom to talk to whomever they wanted without being thought loose. Schoolchildren dressed as Young Pioneers (an attempt to imitate the Soviet original) might be seen walking along in crocodile chanting slogans in shrill voices like a monotonous multiplication table. Foreign journalists made much of the fact that middle-class jackets and collars and ties were hardly to be seen in the streets any more. However, this probably owed as much to the exceptionally hot weather and the new informality as to the persecution of those in bourgeois clothes.

Once most of the militia left for the various fronts, the revolutionary aspect of Madrid began to wane. There were still beggars on street corners and expensive shops and restaurants soon reopened. The war could almost have been overseas. Only the foreign journalists who crowded the cafés and hotel bars of the Gran Vía seemed to think that the capital was at the centre of events. Meanwhile, the economic situation was deteriorating hopelessly. Because of the shortage of coins and banknotes, the unions began to issue ‘coupons’, which were then taken over by municipal authorities obliged to find ways to help the civilian population survive when every day became more precarious.

The shock of civil war made Spanish workers both outward-looking in their hope for international support against fascism and inward-looking in the way they trusted only the local community. Every town and village had its revolutionary committee, which was supposed to represent the political balance in the community. It was responsible for organizing everything the government and local authorities had done before. On the Pyrenean border, anarchist militiamen in their blue monos stood alongside smartly uniformed carabineros, checking passports. It was the committee of the border town, not an official of the central government, who decided whether a foreigner could enter the country.

The local committees organized all the basic services. They commandeered hotels, private houses and commercial premises for use as hospitals, schools, orphanages, militia billets and party headquarters. In Madrid the Palace Hotel, one of the largest in Europe, was used in the early days as a refuge for orphans and the Ritz as a military hospital. They established their own security forces to stop random and personally motivated killings disguised as anti-fascist operations. Justice became the responsibility of revolutionary tribunals, whose proceedings were an improvement on the sham trials of the early days. The accused were allowed to have legal assistance and to call witnesses, although standards varied widely and in some places justice remained a grotesque piece of play-acting. Once the initial fears of the first weeks had started to abate, the death penalty became much rarer.

In Asturias the CNT established the Gijón War Committee. The CNT’s strength came from dockers, seamen and, above all, fishermen, who set up a co-operative covering every aspect of their trade. In Avilés and Gijón the fishermen collectivized their boats, docksides and tinning factory.⁴ The UGT was stronger inland, among the miners. Eventually its committee merged with the anarchists, and a socialist became president of the joint council. On the other hand in Santander socialists took over the war committee, prompting anarchists to attack their authoritarian manner.

In the Basque country, things were very different. Juntas of defence were replaced by the autonomous Republic of Euzkadi, which came into existence on 1 October. (The Basque red, green and white flag, the ikurrina, had already replaced the republican tricolour.) The formal establishment of the Basque government, with José Antonio Aguirre as president, or lehendakari, was confirmed by a meeting of municipal delegates in traditional fashion exactly a week later when oaths were sworn under the sacred oak tree of Guernica. The conservative Basque nationalist party held the most important portfolios, while republicans and socialists were allowed the lesser ones.⁵ The anarchists, who were strong in San Sebastián and the fishing communities, neither demanded nor were offered any role in the administration. The Basque nationalists established a very rigid control with their paramilitary militia, the Euzko Godarostea, which excluded left-wingers and non-Basques. However, both the UGT and the CNT later formed their own battalions to fight in the army corps of Euzkadi. The mixed feelings of the Basques, loyal to the Republic which gave them autonomy, yet far closer in social and religious attitudes to the nationalists, was to create a disastrous mistrust within the alliance.⁶

Of all these regional moves to self-government, the most extraordinary and the most important took place in Catalonia. The journalist John Langdon-Davies described the contradictions in Barcelona, calling it ‘the strangest city in the world today, the city of anarcho-syndicalism supporting democracy, of anarchists keeping order, and anti-political philosophers wielding power’.⁷ On the evening of 20 July Juan García Oliver, Buenaventura Durruti and Diego Abad de Santillán had a meeting with President Companys in the palace of the Generalitat. They still carried the weapons with which they had stormed the Atarazanas barracks that morning. In the afternoon they had attended a hastily called conference of more than 2,000 representatives of local CNT federations. A fundamental disagreement arose between those who wanted to establish a libertarian society immediately and those who believed that it had to wait until after the generals were crushed.

Companys had defended anarchists for nominal fees when a young lawyer. His sympathy for them was unusual among Catalan nationalists, who often referred to them in almost racial terms as ‘Murcians’, because the major source of anarchist strength had been among non-Catalan immigrant workers. Although some Catalan politicians later denied his words, Companys is said to have greeted the anarchist delegates thus:⁸ ‘Firstly, I must say that the CNT and the FAI have never been treated as their true importance merited. You have always been harshly persecuted and I, with much regret, was forced by political necessity to oppose you, even though I was once with you. Today you are the masters of the city and of Catalonia because you alone have conquered the fascist military…and I hope that you will not forget that you did not lack the help of loyal members of my party…But you have won and all is in your power. If you do not need me as president of Catalonia, tell me now and I will become just another soldier in the fight against fascism. If, on the other hand…you believe that I, my party, my name, my prestige, can be of use, then you can depend on me and my loyalty as a man who is convinced that a whole past of shame is dead.’

Whether or not these were Companys’s exact words, Azaña later described this as a plot to abolish the Spanish state. But the Catalan president was a realist. Official republican forces in Barcelona amounted to about 5,000 men of the paramilitary corps and events elsewhere had shown that it was very dangerous to rely on them entirely. The regular army no longer existed in Barcelona, for most of the rebel officers had been shot and the soldiers had either gone home or joined the worker militias. Meanwhile, with rifles from the Sant Andreu barracks and from elsewhere, the anarchists were estimated to have some 40,000 weapons distributed among their 400,000 members in Barcelona and its suburbs. It would have been folly for Companys to have considered attacking them at their moment of greatest strength and popularity. The anarchists also appeared to be his best allies against the reimposition of Madrid government. Companys expressed the situation drily: ‘Betrayed by the normal guardians of law and order, we have turned to the proletariat for protection.’

The Catalan president had presented the anarchists with a fundamental dilemma. García Oliver described the alternatives: ‘Libertarian communism, which is tantamount to an anarchist dictatorship, or democracy which signifies collaboration.’⁹ Imposing their social and economic self-management on the rest of the population appeared to violate libertarian ideals more than collaborating with political parties. Abad de Santillán said that they did not believe in any form of dictatorship, including their own.¹⁰

At their Saragossa conference only seven weeks before, the anarchists had affirmed that each political philosophy should be allowed to develop the form of social co-existence which best suited it. This meant working alongside other political bodies with mutual respect for each other’s differences. Though genuine, this was a simplistic view, since the very idea of worker control and self-management was anathema both to liberal republicans and the communists. These two groups would in time win, first by forcing the anarchists to renounce many of their principles and then by expelling them from positions of power.¹¹

Even if the anarchist leaders sitting in the Catalan president’s ornate office, having just been offered the keys of the kingdom, could have foreseen the future, their choice would have been no easier. They had the strength to turn Catalonia and Aragón into an independent non-state almost overnight, but that would have created a major confrontation with the socialists and communists at a critical moment. The Madrid government also controlled the gold reserves, and a boycott by the rest of republican Spain and by foreign companies could have destroyed the Catalonian economy in a very short time. Yet what seems to have influenced their decision the most were the obvious needs of unity to fight the military rising and concern for their comrades in other parts of Spain. The demands of solidarity overrode other considerations. They could not abandon them in a minority which might be crushed by the Marxists.

The libertarian leaders therefore proposed a joint control of Catalonia with other parties. On their recommendation the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias was set up on 21 July. Although in the majority, they said that they would recognize the right of minorities and take only five of the fifteen posts. Ingenuously, they hoped that they would receive similar treatment in the other areas of republican Spain where they were in a minority.¹²

The Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias literally ran everything from security and essential services to welfare; the Generalitat was nothing more than a shadow government, or rather a government-in-waiting, ‘a merely formulaic artefact’.¹³ Its councillors might make plans and charts, but they had little to do with what was already being put into practice on the ground. The all-important conversion to war industry had been started by Juan García Oliver and Eugenio Vallejo during the initial fighting. The Generalitat did not set up a war industries commission until August and for a long time it had little influence,¹⁴ yet although the Catalan administration had lost the political initiative, it had not entirely lost power. The CNT was incapable of controlling either the economy, which stayed in the hands of the Generalitat, or the banking system, which was now in the hands of the socialist UGT.

The contradictions of political power were to confront the anarchists in many forms. Their manifesto of 1917, for example, had condemned all festivals, such as bullfights and indecent cabarets which can brutalize the people. But to act as dictatorial censors was an even worse affront to their beliefs. Meanwhile the anarcho-feminist Mujeres Libres, now 30,000 strong,¹⁵ were sticking posters over the walls of the red light district, trying to persuade prostitutes to give up their way of life. They offered and ran training courses for them to acquire skills for productive work, but other anarchists were less patient. According to the sympathetic French observer Kaminski, they shot pimps and drug dealers on the spot.

A notable phenomenon of the war was the spontaneous growth of a women’s movement after the 1936 elections. It was born, not of literature or theory from abroad (except perhaps a few translations of Emma Goldman), but of women’s instinctive conviction that the overthrow of the class system should mean the end of the patriarchal system as well. The anarchists had always declared the equality of all human beings, but as the Mujeres Libres emphasized, relationships still remained feudal. The most blatant way in which the anarchists had failed to live up to their professed ideals was the different levels of pay for men and women in most CNT enterprises. The Socialist Youth was another major focal point for feminism.

Little headway was made outside the cities, although the greatest demonstration of the new equality was the fact of having militiawomen fighting in the front line. No figures are available, but there were probably not many more than 1,000 women at the front. There were, however, several thousand under arms in the rear areas and a women’s battalion took part in the defence of Madrid. (The German ambassador was shocked when, one day, Franco ordered the execution of some captured militiawomen and then calmly continued to eat his lunch.) This move towards equal participation was severely curtailed under the increasingly authoritarian direction of the war effort as the military situation deteriorated. By 1938 women had returned to a strictly auxiliary role.¹⁶

One observer in Barcelona commented on the attitude towards buildings. He wrote that the people were inclined to destroy symbols, but that they respected in a naive and sometimes exaggerated way everything which seemed useful. Religious buildings, patriotic monuments and the women’s prison were demolished or burned down, while hospitals and schools were respected almost with the reverence which the nationalists accorded to churches.

The most important achievement of the republican government of 1931–3 had been in education and reducing illiteracy. The measures limiting Church involvement in education created a great void in the system to begin with, but the school-building and teacher-training programmes were correspondingly ambitious. The Republic claimed to have built 7,000 schools as opposed to only 1,000 during the previous 22 years. An illiteracy rate of nearly 50 per cent in most areas under the monarchy was drastically reduced. Many imaginative projects, such as García Lorca’s travelling theatres, were part of an energetic attempt to help the rural mass free itself from the vulnerability of ignorance. All the time, independently of government-sponsored efforts, the casas del pueblo of the UGT and the ateneos libertarios of the anarchists continued their efforts in this direction.¹⁷ During the war it was above all the earnest study of uneducated militiamen in the trenches which so impressed foreign visitors like Saint-Exupéry.

The outward signs of working-class power were everywhere in Barcelona. Party banners hung from public buildings, especially the black and red diagonal flag of the CNT. The anarchists had installed their headquarters in the former premises of the Employers’ Federation, while the communist-controlled PSUC led by Joan Comorera had taken over the Hotel Colón. The POUM had seized the Hotel Falcón, though their main power base was in Lérida. The POUM was growing because it seemed to offer a middle course between the anarchists and the communists. But, as Andrés Nin, their leader, had once been closely associated with Trotsky, the Stalinists hated the POUM even more than the anarchists. They ignored the fact that Trotsky and his Fourth International frequently attacked the POUM.

Barcelona had always been a lively city and the July revolution hardly calmed it. Expropriated cars roared around at high speed, often causing accidents, but such antics were soon stopped when petrol was issued only for essential journeys. Loudspeakers attached to trees on the avenues relayed music and broadcast ludicrously optimistic news bulletins from time to time. These were seized on by groups discussing events such as the attack on Saragossa, whose fall they expected at any moment. It was a world of instant friendship, with the formal expression of address no longer used. Foreigners were welcomed and the anti-fascist cause was explained repeatedly. Workers possessed a simple faith that if everything was made clear, the democracies could not fail to help them against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini.

All around a heady atmosphere of excitement and optimism prevailed. Gerald Brenan said that visitors to Barcelona in the autumn of 1936 would never forget the moving and uplifting experience. Foreigners who gave a tip had it returned politely with an explanation of why the practice corrupted both the giver and the receiver. Probably the greatest contrast between Madrid and Barcelona was in the use of hotels. In the capital Gaylords was later taken over by the Communist Party as a luxurious billet for its senior functionaries and Russian advisers. In Barcelona the Ritz was used by the CNT and the UGT as Gastronomic Unit Number One–a public canteen for all those in need.

The most outspoken champions of private property were not the liberal republicans, as might have been expected, but the Communist Party and its Catalan subsidiary, the PSUC. Both were following the Comintern line of concealing the revolution. La Pasionaria and other members of their central committee emphatically denied that any form of revolution was happening in Spain, and vigorously defended businessmen and small landowners. This was at a time when rich peasants, kulaks, were dying in Gulag camps. The Comintern, without any acknowledgement of such a flagrant contradiction, recorded the communist slogans prescribed for the countryside round Valencia: ‘We respect those who want to work their land as a collective, but we also request respect for those who want to cultivate their land individually’; and ‘To oppress the interests of petty farmers means oppressing the fathers of our soldiers’.¹⁸

This anti-revolutionary stance, prescribed by Moscow, brought the middle classes into the communist ranks in great numbers. Even the traditional newspapers of the Catalan business community, La Vanguardia and Noticiero, praised the Soviet model of discipline. Meanwhile, the anarchist model had already made itself felt throughout the republican zone, but above all down the Mediterranean coastal belt.

This extraordinary mass movement of worker self-management still provokes powerful controversy. The liberal government and the Communist Party regarded it as a major obstacle to their attempts to organize the war effort. They were convinced that central control was vital in a country such as Spain with its strong parochialism and reluctance to react to a threat unless it was close. For example, the anarchists of Catalonia felt that to recapture Saragossa would be tantamount to winning the war. The advance of the Army of Africa in the south-west could almost have been in a foreign country, as far as they were concerned. The exponents of self-management, on the other hand, argued that there would be no motive for fighting if the social revolution were not allowed to continue. Having done the fighting in July when the government refused to arm them, the anarchists bitterly resented the way the government expected them to surrender all their gains. This fundamental clash of attitudes undermined the unity of the Republican alliance. The advocates of a centralized state were to win the struggle in 1937, but the morale of the population was mortally stricken by the Communist Party’s bid for power in the process.

The collectives in republican Spain were not like the state collectives of the Soviet Union. They were based on the joint ownership and management of the land or factory. Alongside them were socialized industries, restructured and run by the CNT and UGT as well as private companies under joint worker-owner control. Co-operatives marketing the produce of individual smallholders and artisans also existed, although these were not new. They had a long tradition in many parts of the country, especially in fishing communities. There were estimated to have been around 100,000 people involved in co-operative enterprises in Catalonia alone before the civil war. The CNT was, of course, the prime mover in this development, but UGT members also contributed to it.¹⁹

The regions most affected were Catalonia and Aragón, where about 70 per cent of the workforce was involved. The total for the whole of republican territory was nearly 800,000 on the land and a little over a million in industry. In Barcelona, worker committees took over all the services, the oil monopoly, the shipping companies, heavy engineering firms such as Vulcano, the Ford motor company, chemical companies, the textile industry and a host of smaller enterprises.

Any assumption by foreign journalists that the phenomenon simply represented a romantic return to the village communes of the Middle Ages was inaccurate. Modernization was no longer feared because the workers controlled its effects. Both on the land and in the factories technical improvements and rationalization could be carried out in ways that would previously have led to bitter strikes. The CNT woodworkers union shut down hundreds of inefficient workshops so as to concentrate production in large plants. The whole industry was reorganized on a vertical basis from felling timber to the finished product. Similar structural changes were carried out in other industries as diverse as leather goods, light engineering, textiles and baking. There were, however, serious problems in obtaining new machinery to convert companies which were irrelevant, like luxury goods, or underused because of raw-material shortages, like the textile industry. They were caused principally by the Madrid government’s attempt to reassert its control by refusing foreign exchange to collectivized enterprises.

The social revolution in Catalonian industry was soon threatened in several ways. A sizeable part of the home market had been lost in the rising. The peseta had fallen sharply in value on the outbreak of the war, so imported raw materials cost nearly 50 per cent more in under five months. This was accompanied by an unofficial trade embargo which the pro-nationalist governors of the Bank of Spain had requested among the international business community. Meanwhile, the central government tried to exert control through withholding credits and foreign exchange. Largo Caballero, the arch-rival of the anarchists, was even to offer the government contract for uniforms to foreign companies, rather than give it to CNT textile factories.²⁰ Recent studies indicate that reductions in industrial output during the course of the war cannot really be attributed to ‘revolutionary disorder’.²¹

There were sometimes long discussions and wrangles within the worker committees, but when the issues were clear, little time was wasted. Services such as water, gas and electricity were working under their new management within hours of the storming of the Atarazanas barracks. Using the framework agreed at the Saragossa conference, a conversion of appropriate factories to war production meant that metallurgical concerns had started to produce armoured cars by 22 July. Although not sophisticated, they were not all crudely improvised contraptions. The industrial workers of Catalonia were the most skilled in Spain. The Austrian sociologist Franz Borkenau also pointed out the great difference it made not to have technicians obstructed, as occurred in Soviet Russia.²²

After defeating the attempted coup in Barcelona and reorganizing production so quickly, the anarchists were angry at the Madrid government’s attempt to regain control through the denial of credits. A plan for seizing part of the Spanish gold reserves so as to bypass the central government’s denial of foreign exchange was considered, but rejected, by the CNT regional committee. Apart from finance, the other main weakness was the lack of co-ordination between co-operatives within a particular industry. However, government performance on industrial matters was such that it is doubtful whether ministers in Madrid would have done much better.

At the same time as the transformation of industry, there was a mushroom growth of agricultural collectives in the southern part of Republican territory. They were organized by CNT members, either on their own or in conjunction with the UGT. The UGT became involved because it recognized that collectivization was the most practical method of farming the less fertile latifundia. It would perhaps also be true to say that in many places the socialists followed this course to avoid being usurped by the anarchists in what they regarded as their fiefs.

In Aragón some collectives were installed forcibly by anarchist militia, especially the Durruti column. Their impatience to get the harvest in to feed the cities, as well as the fervour of their beliefs, sometimes led to violence. Aragonese peasants resented being told what to do by overenthusiastic Catalan industrial workers and many of them had fears of Russian-style collectives. Borkenau showed in an example how much more effective other means could be. The anarchist nucleus achieved a ‘considerable improvement for the peasants and yet was wise enough not to try to force the conversion of the reluctant part of the village, but to wait till the example of the others should take effect’.²³ Not surprisingly, a collective begun in that way worked best. Overall, studies of the collectivization conclude that ‘the experiment was a success for the poor peasants of Aragón’.²⁴

There were some 600 collectives in Aragón but far from all villages were completely collectivized.²⁵ The individualists, consisting chiefly of smallholders who were afraid of losing what little they had, were allowed to keep as much land as a family could farm without hired labour. In regions where there had always been a tradition of smallholding little tended to change. The desire to work the land collectively was much stronger among the landless peasants, especially in less fertile areas where small plots were hardly viable.²⁶

The only alternative systems to the free collectives for supplying the republican zone with food were either state collectives or dividing up the land into smallholdings. The nearest equivalents to state collectives were municipally organized farms. In the province of Jaén, for example, where the CNT was almost non-existent and the UGT weak, the municipality took over the land and organized it. Borkenau recorded that it employed the same braceros that the former landowners employed upon the same estates for the same endless working hours for the same starvation wages. ‘As nothing had changed in their living conditions so nothing had changed in their attitude. As they are ordered about as before and for the same wages, they start fighting the new administration of the estates as they did the old one.’²⁷ Borkenau also described how self-managed collectives were much happier when no better off than before. What mattered was that the labourers ran their own collectives–a distinct contrast to the disasters of state collectivization in the Soviet Union, which the peasants had resisted by slaughtering livestock and sabotaging the harvest.

The anarchists attacked the reparto, the division of land, because they thought that privately controlled land always creates a bourgeois mentality, ‘calculating and egotistical’, which they wanted to uproot for ever. But whatever the ideology, the self-managed co-operative was almost certainly the best solution to the food supply problem. The communists attacked the self-managed collectives as inefficient, but in Aragón production increased by a fifth.²⁸ Not only was non-collectivized production lower, but the individualists were to show the worst possible traits of the introverted and suspicious smallholder. When food was in short supply they hoarded it and created a thriving black market which, apart from disrupting supplies, did much to undermine morale in the republican zone. The communist civil governor of Cuenca admitted later that the smallholders who predominated in his province held on to their grain when the cities were starving.

The other criticism levelled against the collectives was their failure to deliver food to the front line in regular quantities at regular intervals. Obviously there were many cases of inefficiency, but overall the charge was unfair considering that all their vehicles and carts had already been commandeered. Whenever transport did arrive the peasants, not knowing when it would next be available, would pile on every possible foodstuff. The fault lay far more with the militia, who should have organized things the other way round and warned particular collectives of their needs in advance. The army and the International Brigades were also to suffer from bad distribution, often on an even worse scale.

The central government was alarmed by the developments in Aragón, where the anarchist militia columns exercised the only power in the whole of an area predominantly libertarian in sympathy. In late September delegates from the Aragonese collectives attended a conference at Bujaraloz, near where Durruti’s column was based. They decided to establish a Defence Council of Aragón and elected as president Joaquín Ascaso, a first cousin of Francisco Ascaso who fell in the Atarazanas assault.

Earlier that summer the government had tried without success to reestablish its control in Valencia by sending a delegation there under Martínez Barrio. It was brushed aside by the Popular Executive Committee, which consisted mainly of UGT and CNT members. Communist pleas for discipline and obedience to government orders went unheeded. Even so, the communists, who opposed free collectives, profited from local conditions in their recruiting drives. The rich Valencian countryside, la Huerta, was held in smallholdings by extremely conservative peasants, who were joined in their resistance to collectivization by many citrus farmers.

Giral’s government in Madrid did not share the anarchists’ enthusiasm for self-managed collectives. Nor did it welcome the fragmentation of central power with the establishment of local committees. Its liberal ministers believed in centralized government and a conventional property-owning democracy. They also felt, along with Prieto’s wing of the socialist party and the communists, that only discipline and organization could prevail against the enemy. Above all, they were appalled at having no control over the industrial base of Catalonia. But, after Martínez Barrio’s failure in Valencia, Giral’s administration could do little for the moment except try to keep up appearances. For the future, its continued control of supply and credit held out the prospect that concessions might gradually be wrung from the revolutionary organizations as a first step towards incorporating them into the state.

The Army of Africa and the People’s Militias

By the beginning of August battle lines had become much clearer. With the two sides developing such markedly different characters in the wake of the rising, it seemed as if two completely separate nations were at war. The rebel generals urgently needed to show rapid gains of territory at the beginning so as to convince a foreign as well as the domestic audience of their success. Having failed to achieve a coup, they required the international recognition, credits and material which a war demanded. General Franco’s Army of Africa was to make the most conspicuous contribution to this necessary impression of victory.

Although the forces under General Mola played a less conspicuous role, the ‘Director’ had rapidly sent three columns from Pamplona mainly made up of Carlist requetés. The first left immediately for Madrid, a second force of about 1,400 men moved south to Saragossa to reinforce the nationalist garrison in the third week of July and another, much larger, force was sent north towards the Basque coastline.

The column of 1,000 men under Colonel García Escámez, who had set out for the capital on 19 July, found that Guadalajara had already been captured by armed workers from Madrid. García Escámez then tried another line of advance on the capital, swinging round to the north to cross the Sierra de Guadarrama by the main Burgos road over the Somosierra pass. His force came up against Madrid militias at the summit where, a century and a quarter before, Napoleon’s Polish lancers had opened the route to the capital with a suicidal uphill charge against artillery. García Escámez’s men captured the pass after several days’ fighting, but could do little except consolidate their position since they were virtually out of ammunition.

A nationalist force from Valladolid commanded by Colonel Serrador was joined by some civil guards and part of a signals regiment which had fled from El Pardo.¹ They managed to secure the other pass at the Alto de los Leones to the south-west, but they also suffered from a shortage of ammunition. It was surprising that the chief architect of the conspiracy had not built up reserves in Burgos or Pamplona during the previous months. Mola’s difficulties were solved only when Franco sent him large supplies from Germany via Portugal with the assistance of the Salazar regime (the nationalists referred to Lisbon as ‘the port of Castile’). Some supplies also arrived on the cargo boat Montecillo, when it reached Vigo. But by the time the nationalist columns were resupplied, the militia forces in the mountains had become less haphazard in their organization and had established a front.

Mola’s largest force of 3,500 men attacked northwards from Pamplona. The plan was to thrust up the high hills of northern Navarre towards the coast to cut the Basques off from the French frontier, then to capture the summer capital of San Sebastián. On 11 August the column under Major Beorleguí drove a wedge between San Sebastián and the border town of Irún. Six days later the nationalist battleship España, the cruiser Almirante Cervera and the destroyer Velasco arrived to shell the seaside resort. The republican military governor threatened to shoot right-wing hostages if heavy civilian casualties were inflicted. The nationalists called his bluff. Their bombardment was followed by aerial attacks from Junkers 52s on both San Sebastián and Irún.

The defence of Irún demonstrated that untrained workers, providing their defensive position was well sited and prepared, could fight bravely and effectively against head-on attacks backed by modern weaponry. The CNT had been the main contributor to the defeat of the rising in the province of Guipúzcoa, and its members joined with Asturians, Basque nationalists and French communist volunteers organized by André Marty (later the chief organizer of the International Brigades) to make a total force of 3,000 men. Beorleguí’s force was numerically weaker, but it had all Mola’s artillery, light German tanks and the Junkers 52s in support. In addition, Franco sent a bandera of the Foreign Legion 700-strong and a battery of 155mm guns.

There was ferocious hand-to-hand fighting on the Puntza ridge to the south of Irún where positions were captured and retaken several times in the course of a week. The militia fought with remarkable skill and courage. They were aided by French peasants from just across the border signalling the positions of Beorleguí’s artillery.² The convent of San Marcial was held to the end by a handful of Asturian dinamiteros and militiamen. During the final attack, when out of ammunition, they hurled rocks at the Carlists who were storming their position.

In fact, the battle was lost partly because six ammunition trucks failed to reach the defenders after the French border was closed on 8 August. Telesforo Monzón, one of the Basque ministers, had travelled to Barcelona in search of weapons and ammunition. Unfortunately, he did not obtain more than a thousand rifles and six pieces of artillery. A few days later Miguel González Inestal, the head of the CNT fisherman’s union, had a meeting with García Oliver, Abad de Santillán and President Companys. They helped him with weapons and a train, which would be sent via France and Hendaye, but it was intercepted by the French authorities.³ Irún itself was left a burning ruin when the last of the workers withdrew, some of them having to swim to safety to reach French territory. A parting burst of machine-gun fire hit Major Beorleguí in the calf. The tough old soldier refused treatment and later died of gangrene.

The anarchists in San Sebastián were angry at the lack of support from the Basque nationalists, especially when they heard that the governor was negotiating the surrender of the city with the enemy. They were extremely suspicious after the betrayals which had occurred in the first few weeks of the war, but despite its conservatism the Basque nationalist PNV had not the slightest intention of changing sides. Nevertheless, it was totally opposed to the anarchists’ scorched-earth policy, which had led to the burning of Irún during the withdrawal and now meant defending San Sebastián to the last. The PNV prevailed, once their militia shot several anarchists. The nationalists occupied the city on 14 September, which meant that they now surrounded the northern republican zone.⁴

Without any doubt, the most important military development of the summer was the ruthlessly effective campaign of the Army of Africa. Its early arrival on the mainland was mainly due to the help of German and Italian aircraft. Not surprisingly, republican propaganda made much of this foreign intervention at such a vital stage of the war, but the vehement protests tended to obscure two uncomfortable truths. First, republican warships run by sailors’ committees seemed to lack the ability or desire for offensive action, especially with the German battleships Deutschland and Admiral Scheer screening the nationalist convoys across the straits. But they clearly had orders to avoid open conflict and in any case, as the senior Soviet naval adviser later stated, ‘The republican ships did not carry out their duty.’⁵

On land, the republican medley of indolent regular officers, urban worker militias and peasants intent on staying close to their pueblo proved incapable of launching any effective counter-attack in the vital south-western sector before the colonial troops arrived in strength. The military importance of the airlift by the Savoias and the Junkers 52s must, therefore, not be exaggerated, even though the arrival of 1,500 men between 28 July and 5 August had an enormous influence both on the nationalists’ morale and on the international assessment of their chances of victory. Altogether, some 12,000 troops were transported in this way during the first two months of the war, before the nationalists had won absolute control of the straits.

The airlift of legionnaires and Moroccan regulares from the Army of Africa was well under way during the first week of August. On 6 August Franco himself crossed to the mainland, leaving General Orgaz in command of the Protectorate. He established his headquarters in Seville, where he decided to split his forces so as to be able to secure Andalucia as well as advance rapidly on the capital.

The main force under Colonel Yagüe was to drive north, parallel to the Portuguese frontier, then swing north-eastwards on Madrid. Yagüe was to prove the most aggressive of all the Nationalist field commanders. In many ways these qualities underlined the contrast between the Army of Africa and the apathetic metropolitan army. Colonial officers have always tended to be less fashionable and more professional, but in Spain this difference was even more pronounced than in either the British or French services. Nevertheless Franco, the supposedly archetypal africanista, was extremely conventional in contrast to his impetuous subordinate.

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

The gaunt and erect figure of Moscardó waited in his dust-impregnated uniform. He greeted Varela with the words. ‘Sin novedad en el Alcázar (Nothing to report at the Alcázar)’. ‘Sin novedad’ was also the codeword for the rising which nobody had bothered to ask the passed-over colonel to join. He repeated the same performance for General Franco and the newspapermen the next day, 29 September. Moscardó was compared to the great warrior heroes of medieval Spain.¹⁸

The nationalists, especially the Army of Africa, had demonstrated their offensive abilities in these first two months of the war, while the republican militias possessed neither the training nor the cohesion to mount effective operations against organized troops. They were also desperately short of arms and ammunition. One of the first Soviet advisers reported back to Moscow that in August and early September 1936 there was only one rifle per three men, and one machine-gun per 150–200 men.¹⁹

In Oviedo, which had been won for the nationalists by Colonel Aranda’s trick, the siege still continued despite ingenious and brave attacks by Asturian dinamiteros. Armoured lorries manned by workers with improvised flame-throwers succeeded in making a breach, only to be forced back. Relief for the besieged in the form of a column under Colonel Martín Alonso was on its way from Galicia.

In the south, near Andújar, x guards and Falangists was holding out in the mountain monastery of Santa María de la Cabeza under Captain Cortés.²⁰ Nationalist pilots devised an original method of dropping fragile supplies. They attached them to live turkeys which descended flapping their wings, thus serving as parachutes which could also be eaten by the defenders. The besieged were eventually overcome in April of the next year by a mass assault. It was a defence at least as brave as that of Toledo, but it was given comparatively little recognition by the nationalists, perhaps because it risked stealing glory from Franco.

Although the worker militias represented the only possible response to the generals’ rising, since few regular army units remained in formation, the anarchists, the POUM and the left socialists, including Largo Caballero, regarded the militias as a virtue rather than a necessity. There was a powerful belief that morale and motivation must overcome an enemy which depended on the mercenaries of the Army of Africa or brother workers who would desert at the first opportunity. The republican left wing seriously underestimated the Catholic zeal of the conservative smallholders of Galicia, Old Castile and Navarre, who were to become the nationalists’ best troops after the colonial professionals.

The Madrid government, the regular officers, centrist politicians and the communists began to advocate a conventional army as the sole means of resisting the nationalists. The communists’ attitude derived from the knowledge that a centralized command could be infiltrated and seized. Hence their call for ‘Discipline, Hierarchy, Organization’. Such plans for ‘militarization’ were greeted with great suspicion by the left socialists, who described them as ‘counter-revolutionary’ and looked upon them as a tactic in the government’s effort to recover control of the workers’ movement. The anarchists were even more strongly opposed. For them a regular army represented the worst aspects of the state. They called it ‘the organization of collective crime’.

The two unions, the CNT and the UGT, provided the majority of the militia forces, though all the parties had their own. There were units from the republican left, the Catalan Esquerra, the POUM and the communists. A militiaman was paid ten pesetas a day at first by his local organization and later by the government. This was the equivalent of a skilled worker’s wage and it became a heavy burden on the ailing economy.²¹ Their uniforms consisted of blue overalls and either a beret or, more often, a fore-and-aft cap in party colours. The standard of equipment and weapons varied greatly. Some militiamen were still carrying only shotguns after six months of war. The maintenance of weapons was universally bad. A rifle without rust was almost unknown; hardly any were cleaned and oil was seldom issued. The few machine-guns were old and lacked spare parts. There was also such a wide variety of calibres that as many as sixteen different types of ammunition were needed within some units. Mortars and grenades, when available, were usually more dangerous to the operator than the enemy, so that the home-made variety, dynamite packed into tomato cans, was preferred.

The greatest shortcoming of the militia system remained the lack of self-discipline. At the beginning stories abounded of detachments leaving the front line without warning for weekends in Barcelona or Madrid. Anyone who stayed awake on sentry duty was thought a fool. Ammunition was wasted by firing at planes at impossible distances and positions were lost because nobody wanted to dig trenches. It is interesting that indiscipline was most marked among groups like factory workers, who had previously been subject to external constraints and controls. Those used to leading an independent existence like farmers and artisans had not had their self-discipline undermined. Much has been made of the fact that leaders were elected and political groupings maintained in the militias. But this was not so much a difficulty as a source of strength. It inspired mutual confidence among men suspicious of outsiders. The real problem came in the first few chaotic weeks, when the revolutionary atmosphere made militiamen react immediately against anything that could be remotely construed as authoritarianism. ‘Discipline was almost a crime,’ admitted Abad de Santillán.²²

The election of officers and the trial of offenders by rank-and-file courts were regarded by anarchists as fundamental principles. Each section, comprising ten men, elected its own corporal. Each centuria, comprising 100 men, elected its own delegate. A militia column varied greatly in its number of centuria. Durruti’s column had 6,000 men at its peak, while others consisted of only a few hundred. Most columns had a regular officer who acted as ‘adviser’ to the column leader, but unless he was known as a genuine sympathizer, he was usually distrusted. There were a certain number of very radical officers in the army, such as Colonel Romero Bassart, the colonial officer who resisted the rising at Larache and later became military adviser to the CNT. There was also the unconventional Colonel Mangada, who was treated as a hero in the first days of the war after his column advanced towards Avila and repulsed a column from Salamanca led by Major Doval in a very confused and inconclusive skirmish in which the Falangist leader, Onésimo Redondo, was killed. Generally, however, republican militia suspected the loyalty of army officers, because many had at first declared for the government, only to betray it later. Some genuine supporters of the Republic were probably shot in error and certainly in several cases loyal regular officers were made scapegoats for militia reverses.

In Catalonia, where the militia system was the most entrenched, the air force officer Díaz Sandino became the Catalan councillor of war while the secretary-general, the anarchist Juan García Oliver, took over militia organization. His main work was to arrange training programmes in the rear. Even though about a tenth of the militia force in Aragón were ex-soldiers who had joined the workers, the standard of training in the metropolitan army had been so abysmal that they provided little help.

Militia volunteers were kitted out at the former Pedralbes barracks, now the Miguel Bakunin barracks where García Oliver had based the Popular School of War. The same building was used for foreign anarchists who arrived to fight in the International Column. They came from all over Europe and Latin America. There were many Italians including Camillo Berneri, a philosophy professor who was murdered the following year during the events of May in Barcelona, and Carlo Roselli, who organized the Giustizia e Libertà column of liberals and anarchists, but who was assassinated in France the following June by members of the right-wing Cagoule. A group of Americans formed the Sacco and Vanzetti centuria and a detachment of Germans made up the Erich Muhsam centuria, named after the anarchist poet murdered two years before by the Gestapo. The POUM also used these barracks for their militia columns, which included foreign volunteers of whom the most famous was George Orwell. The communist PSUC, under Joan Comorera, found itself in a difficult position. Communist policy demanded a regular army, not militias, yet they could not antagonize their allies.

The largest operation in the east at this time was the invasion by Catalonian militia of the Balearic Islands. Ibiza was taken easily and on 16 August 8,000 men invaded Majorca under the command of an air force officer, Alberto Bayo, later to be Fidel Castro’s guerrilla trainer. The invaders established a bridgehead unopposed, then paused as if in surprise. For once the militia had artillery, air and even naval support, yet they gave the nationalists time to organize a counter-attack. Modern Italian aircraft arrived and strafed and bombed the invading force virtually unopposed. The withdrawal and re-embarkation, ordered by the new minister of marine, Indalecio Prieto, turned into a rout. The island then became an important naval and air base for the nationalists for the rest of the war.

The Aragón front became a stalemate after the Carlist reinforcements arrived at Saragossa. The only exception was an unsuccessful attack on Huesca organized by Colonel Villalba. The town was defended by 6,000 men against his besieging force of 13,000, but a supply line along the railtrack stayed open, allowing the nationalists to bring up supplies and reinforcements.²³ Militia detachments held each hill in a rough line along the front, while nationalist troops were installed on the far side of the valley. (The day-to-day existence is best described in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.)

In Madrid the Communist Party already had a military base on which to build. Their Worker and Peasant Anti-Fascist Militia (MAOC) provided the initial cadres for their 5th Regiment. The first communist objective was to make them look and act like disciplined soldiers. Practical military training was secondary to drilling. ‘Steel’ companies were formed (later to be imitated by other parties) and they paraded ostentatiously through Madrid causing an appreciable effect.²⁴ Marching in step presented a great contrast to the militias. The mentality of the 5th Regiment was best described by a party official: ‘We established special slogans designed to create an iron unity…“If my comrade advances or retreats without orders I have the right to shoot him.”’²⁵

The training of the International Brigades was to follow a similar pattern with drill, discipline and political indoctrination taking up most of the precious time before they were sent up to the front. The Party manual said that a soldier would only fight well if carefully instructed on why he was fighting. This ideological drilling was the work of political commissars and the 5th Regiment was responsible for their introduction. Officially they were there to watch over the ‘reliability’ of the regular commander. In fact, they were agents in the Communist Party’s plan to take over the republican army, which would have to be formed if a conventional war was fought. These ‘secular chaplains’ were later the cause of a great power struggle between the communists and the government.

The first commander of the 5th Regiment was Enrique Castro Delgado, who was assisted by foreign communist advisers. The Party’s ‘common front’ recruiting campaign, led by La Pasionaria, attracted many who admired the 5th Regiment’s professional appearance. Some 25 per cent of the new recruits were socialists; about 15 per cent left republicans. Later they discovered that promotion was virtually impossible without Party membership, since the 5th Regiment served chiefly as a training base for future communist officers. The Communist Party claimed that some 60,000 men served in its ranks, but a maximum of 30,000 is probably more accurate.²⁶ They included Juan Modesto, a former Foreign Legion corporal, and the Moscow-trained Enrique Líster, both of whom were to become important commanders.

Most regular officers preferred to co-operate with the communists because they were horrified by the militia system. On the whole these loyalist officers tended to be the older and more bureaucratic members of the metropolitan army, since the younger, more aggressive elements had sided with the rising. But only colonial soldiers had received any practical experience. The pre-war home army had seldom even carried out manoeuvres.

The republican commanders therefore had little to offer but secondhand theories left over from the First World War. Along with the communists and the government, who wanted all forces controlled through a central structure, they insisted that the militias adapt to an orthodox model. Eventually the militias would have to agree. They could not resist the enemy for long without major changes and their theorists had failed to put forward any alternative strategy. The government and its allies had an additional motive for wanting to create a regular military organization. They believed that the Republic must impress foreign governments as a conventional state possessing a conventional army.