by Preston Paul
The rising took place on the evening of 17 July in Spain’s Moroccan colony and in the peninsula itself on the next morning. The plotters were confident that it would all be over in a few days. Had they faced only the Republican government, their predictions might have come true. The coup was successful in the Catholic small-holding areas which voted for the CEDA – the provincial capitals of rural León and Old Castile, cathedral market towns such as Avila, Burgos, Salamanca and Valladolid. However, in the left-wing strongholds of industrial Spain and the great estates of the deep south, the uprising was defeated by the spontaneous action of the working-class organizations. Yet, ominously, in major southern towns such as Cadiz, Cordoba, Granada and Seville, left-wing resistance was swiftly and savagely crushed.
Within days, the country was split into two war zones. The rebels controlled one-third of Spain in a northern block of Galicia, León, Old Castile, Aragón and part of Extremadura and an Andalusian triangle from Huelva to Seville to Cordoba. They had the great wheat-growing areas, but the main industrial centres remained in Republican hands. Vain efforts were made by the government to reach a compromise with the rebels. Then, to appease the Great Powers, a new cabinet of moderate Republicans was formed under the chemistry professor, José Giral. There was some reason to suppose that the Republic would be able to crush the rising. Giral’s bourgeois Republican cabinet hoped to secure international assistance, and it controlled the nation’s gold and currency reserves and virtually all of Spain’s industrial capacity.
There would, however, be two big differences between the two sides that would eventually decide the conflict – the African Army and the help of the fascist powers. At first, the rebels’ strongest card, the ferocious colonial army under Franco, was blockaded in Morocco by Republican warships. However, the fact that power in Spain’s streets lay with the unions and their militia organizations – particularly as interpreted by the conservative newspapers of Europe and the United States – totally undermined the efforts of Giral’s unrepresentative government to secure aid from the Western democracies. Republican requests for assistance met only hesitance from the Popular Front government in Paris. Inhibited by internal political divisions and sharing the British fear of revolution and of provoking a general war, the French premier Léon Blum soon drew back from early promises of aid. Franco, in contrast, was quickly able to persuade the local representatives of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy that he was the man to back.
By the end of July, Junkers 52 and Savoia-Marchetti 81 transport aircraft were undertaking the first major military airlift in history. The bloodthirsty Foreign Legion and the so-called Native Regulars were carried across the Straits of Gibraltar to Seville. Fifteen thousand men crossed in ten days and a coup d’état going wrong became a long and bloody civil war. That crucial early aid was soon followed by a regular stream of high-technology assistance. In contrast to the state-of-the-art equipment arriving from Germany and Italy, complete with technicians, spare parts and the correct workshop manuals, the Republic, shunned by the democracies, had to make do with over-priced and obsolete equipment from private arms dealers.
While Mola attacked the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, cutting it off from the French border, Franco’s Army of Africa advanced rapidly northwards to Madrid, leaving a horrific trail of slaughter in its wake, including the massacre at Badajoz where two thousand prisoners were shot. In part because of their iron control of the despatches of foreign correspondents, rebel atrocities made little impression on public opinion in the democracies. In contrast, revolutionary terror had a profound impact on foreign perceptions of the war, to a large extent because of the way in which it was treated by the conservative press. The subsequent sympathy of many foreign correspondents for the plight of the Republican population had therefore considerable obstacles to overcome before they could influence popular opinion in favour of the democratic cause.
One of the greatest was the fact that an inadvertent result of the coup was to leave the Republican government virtually without the structures of law and order. The consequent terrorism in the Republican zone, mainly directed against the supporters of right-wing parties and the clergy, predisposed foreign opinion in favour of the rebels. The disappearance of the police force and the judiciary had permitted revolutionary crowds to open the jails and release the common prisoners. Accordingly, for about four months, behind rhetoric of revolutionary justice, acts of violence of all kinds were perpetrated. Revenge was directed at the sections of society on whose behalf the military was acting. Thus, hatred of an oppressive social system found expression in the murder or humiliation of parish priests who justified it, Civil Guards and policemen who defended it, the wealthy who enjoyed it and the employers and landlords’ agents who implemented it. In some cases, there was a revolutionary dimension – the burning of property records and land registries. But there were also criminal acts, murder, rape, theft and the settling of personal scores. Courts were replaced by revolutionary tribunals set up by political parties and trade unions.
About 55,000 civilians were killed in the Republican zone in the course of the war while more than three times that number were murdered in the rebel zone. Some, like the imprisoned army officers killed at Paracuellos del Jarama and Torrejón de Ardoz during the siege of Madrid, were victims of military decisions based on an assessment of their potential danger to the Republican cause. Some were executed as known fifth columnists. Others died in explosions of mass rage which occurred as news arrived of the savage purges being carried out in the Nationalist zone and especially of atrocities committed by Franco’s Moors. Air-raids on Republican cities were another obvious trigger of popular fury. Whatever the reasons behind the violence, it seriously damaged the reputation of the Republic abroad and undermined its efforts to secure international support. Most notably, the near indiscriminate violence of anarchist elements in Barcelona in the first months of the war branded the Republic – whose authorities were desperately trying, with gradual success, to re-establish law and order – as a bloodstained regime of terror. In contrast, the atrocities in the Nationalist zone did nothing to diminish its standing in British and French government circles, let alone in Berlin or Rome.
In the first days after the military coup, the events in Catalonia saw newspapermen flocking from around the world. One of the first to arrive was the swashbuckling Sefton ‘Tom’ Delmer of the Daily Express. He had set off with his new wife Isabel for a holiday in Mallorca. The military coup in Spain took place while they were motoring through France. He managed to bluff their way through the frontier by flourishing his League of Nations press card. As they neared Barcelona, they were stopped by anarchists who either did not respect or could not read the card. However, the presence of a Siamese cat in a basket in the car convinced them that they were indeed dealing with holidaymakers. The couple were taken to the village of Mollet, just north of Barcelona. After just one night there, a night interrupted by the sounds of firing squads executing fascist sympathizers, they were obliged to return to France.1
From Perpignan, Delmer sent a report on their adventure which set the tone for much early reporting from the Republic zone. Under the headline ARMED REDS BAR WAY TO CITY OF TERROR, he relayed unsubstantiated gossip about thousands killed in Barcelona despite the fact that he had been prevented from visiting the city:
The Red Terror wave that has broken out following the army’s uprising has given the excuse for the settlement in the Barcelona district at least, of many private feuds. I heard of no fewer than three similar murders which had taken place during the last twenty-four hours in Mollet and the villages around.2
In the following days, reports from the Reuters correspondent were equally lurid. It was alleged that bodies were piled in the underground stations and that: ‘The victorious Government civilian forces, composed of Anarchists, Communists and Socialists have burned and sacked practically every church and convent in Barcelona.’ The Reuters report went on: ‘The mob drunk with victory, afterwards pa
raded the streets of the city attired in the robes of ecclesiastical authorities.’3
Over the next few days the stories became ever gorier. The reign of terror was described under the sub-heading ‘Priests Die Praying. The mob is uncontrollable and class hatred rules.’ According to this account ‘Priests are being dragged with a prayer on their lips from their monasteries to be shot – in the back – by firing squads. Some of them have had their heads and arms hacked off after death as a final vindictive act.’ Delight in the bloodshed went hand in hand with an almost racist patronage of the simplicity of the perpetrators:
like children with a new and dangerous toy which they scarcely understand. Alongside them on the firing line are city clerks who have let their beards grow and are heavy eyed with free liquor and days without sleep. The Robespierre of Barcelona sits on a pedestal fashioned like a throne on the balcony of a magnificent house in the Ramblas, the famous thoroughfare between the Plaza Cataluña and the port… On either side of the throne the leader’s lieutenants sit on chairs with rifles over their knees and blood red silk scarves round head and waist. But for their menacing and unkempt appearance they would be like fancydress pirates. As armed men pass in the street below they salute the ‘Committee’ with a shout and shaking of the fist in the Communist salute.4
The Canadian James M. Minifie left the Paris office of the New York Herald Tribune with the instructions of his bureau chief, Leland Stowe, ringing in his ears: ‘Look under every stone and write what you find there.’ Accordingly, he confined his reports to what he knew to be true. Like Delmer and many of his fellow newspapermen, on his arrival on the Catalan side of the Spanish–French frontier, Minifie was confronted by a gun-toting anarchist in blue overalls who gave him a safe-conduct which would be regarded as valid only by other members of the same faction:
I found Catalan officials very gracious about giving interviews; they damned the Communists as little better than enemy agents, and blamed nightly murders and executions on them. I heard reports of mass graves, looted monasteries, raped nuns and the whole deck of cards; but I never found what I would accept as irrefutable evidence in support of these charges.
He did, however, find ample evidence of looting, whether of farms or urban luxury car showrooms. The anarchists had seized every Rolls Royce, Hispano-Suiza or Cadillac that they could lay their hands on, ostensibly to motorize their columns but often to destroy them in wild joy-rides. After a brief stay, the lack of decent cabling facilities obliged Minifie to return to Paris, prior to going to Madrid and capture by rebel forces three months later.5
As Minifie’s example made clear, not all the visiting firemen were in search of a sensational scoop. Indeed, the journalists who knew Spain well wrote more sober accounts of what was happening. However, passing British journalists who visited His Majesty’s Consul, Norman King, in search of orientation were treated to a gruesomely exaggerated account of what was happening. What he told them can be deduced from his consular despatches from Barcelona. He built a lurid picture in which ‘anarchists, and the escaped criminals with other armed hooligans for a time spread terror throughout the town’.6 Even when things had calmed down, he speculated almost gleefully that economic collapse ‘will produce widespread distress, and possibly lead to a massacre’, and predicted that ‘a time is not far distant when a wave of xenophobia might set in’.7 He confided in the British poet Stephen Spender that he wished Lluís Companys, the President of the Catalan Generalitat, had been shot after the rising of 1934.8
In stark contrast to King’s alarmism about ‘raw undisciplined youth armed to the teeth and mostly out of control’ were the considered reflections of Lawrence Fernsworth. The distinguished, grey-haired Fernsworth, who was born in Portland, Oregon in 1898, had lived in Barcelona for a decade and wrote for both The Times of London and the New York Times. He also wrote for a Jesuit weekly publication called America. A fervent Catholic, Fernsworth spoke both Spanish and Catalan. Reflecting on his first wartime experiences in Barcelona, he commented that ‘our escorts and the Republican crowds in the towns, all armed to the teeth, were the most amiable and solicitous revolutionaries one might wish to meet’ and that: ‘The danger to foreigners in Barcelona seems small. Even the Communists and Anarchists have shown respect for foreigners.’9 On 19 July, while the workers were fighting with the military rebels, Fernsworth noted groups of picnickers coming down the street with hampers hoping to get on a train for their customary Sunday trip out to the countryside. He also noted popular outrage that many military rebels and their civilian sympathizers had been permitted to establish machine-gun emplacements in numerous church towers before the coup. Fortified therein, these rebel supporters opened fire on the workers. The outrage fed the church burnings but, as Fernsworth also noted, the Catalan government made every effort to save those that it could, such as the cathedral. The Capuchin church in the Passeig de Gràcia was saved because the Franciscan friars were noted for their close relation to the poor. Of others, he wrote, ‘I could hardly consider that these churches were being desecrated. In my eyes, they had already been desecrated by the anointed money-changers and were no longer holy temples of worship.’ In describing the subsequent terror, in which those believed to be ‘enemies of the people’ were murdered, Fernsworth was careful to point out that the Catalan government, the Generalitat, was not responsible, and laboured incessantly to keep itself in business and to save property and lives. Of the efforts of the government to re-establish public order, Fernsworth wrote: ‘Persons in official positions risked the anger of extremists, and consequently their lives, to save priests, nuns, bishops and certain other Spanish nationals by getting them aboard foreign ships or across the frontier.’10
Fernsworth felt a deep sympathy for the Republic, but had strict professional ethics. Not only did he not attempt to diminish what he knew about atrocities, but he actually took considerable risks to get stories out when he knew them to be true. In the early days of the war, he crossed clandestinely into France in order to send a report about the liquidation of the ‘enemies of the people’ in Barcelona:
It was a dangerous story to bring out and I took care that my departure and return were unobserved and my passport had no telltale marks to show I had been in France. It was well that I did so, for the publication of the story caused a furore in Barcelona. It was an unpleasant task. I knew the facts would be harmful to the Republican cause for which, as an American, I felt a deep sympathy believing that in its essence the struggle was one for the rights of man. But it was the truth and had to be told. As a reporter I have never shirked at telling the truth regardless of whom it might please or displease.
He regularly used to board a Royal Navy cruiser in Barcelona harbour ‘to visit the captain’ and then be taken to Marseilles on a fast destroyer. Having sent his despatch, a day later he would step off the cruiser, having apparently just ‘visited the captain’.11
The unnamed Barcelona correspondent of Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail had none of the Spanish experience of Fernsworth but nor, it would appear, did he have need for much prompting from Norman King. Five days before the military coup, an editorial had already claimed that ‘The present year has seen Spain fall under the control of a Government bearing the sinister stamp of Bolshevism.’ A few days later, another alleged that ‘highly trained groups of revolutionaries were being sent to Spain, France and Belgium to direct operations on the spot’.12 The rising itself was acclaimed as Spain’s opportunity to be ‘brought back to order or turned into a vassal of USSR’ by the forces in Morocco and Spain gathered ‘for a simultaneous effort of liberation’ (printed in bold). The Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero, ‘the Spanish Lenin’, it was asserted, would try to ‘force the pace to make Spain a vassal state of Soviet Russia’.13
When reports began to reach London from Barcelona, they were printed in the most sensationalist manner possible. Refugees were quoted to the effect that ‘between 2,000–3,000 people’ had been killed: ‘The streets of Barcelon
a, they claim, are splattered with blood.’ In contrast, Harold Cardozo with General Mola’s forces at Soria approvingly quoted the general’s declaration (printed in bold) that the purpose of the coup was ‘to wrench out by the roots, for ever, all that represents the organisations and principles of Marxism’.14 Some of the stories sent were not without their inadvertently comic elements. Under the headline, LONDONERS FORCED TO FIGHT FOR REDS. REFUGEES TELL OF SPANISH TERROR, ran a story of a man who had his car commandeered by ‘some communists’ and was forced to give them driving lessons for two hours.15 The general line was that Republican Spain was in the hands of Moscow and that the crimes of the anarchists were committed at the behest of Soviet agents. An editorial declared: ‘As Moscow is the stronghold of the Reds in the east, so Madrid has become their headquarters in the west.’ In the same issue, under the headline MOB RULE PREVAILS IN BARCELONA TONIGHT, a report claimed that ‘The flag of the sickle and hammer floats over many buildings. Homes of the Spanish nobility are being plundered and burned by Communists and anarchists.’ Another asserted that ‘Anxieties caused by the Communists’ murderous reign of terror are spreading far beyond the frontiers of Spain.’ To add spice to the red-baiting, there was added an element of misogyny. Under the headline THE WOMEN WHO BURN CHURCHES – SPAIN’S RED CARMENS, it was asserted that female volunteers in the militias were women who had ‘thrown off religion, parental authority and all restraint’.16
The consequence was, as John Langdon-Davies of the News Chronicle wrote in September 1936, ‘Today most English people have been convinced that the government supporters are not only “reds” but ghouls; that the reason why they have not defeated the fascists is that they spend their time raping nuns and watching them dance naked.’17 Fernsworth, like Langdon-Davies, understood why things were happening as they were in Barcelona. It was not, as the Daily Express and the Daily Mail would have it, that it was to put a stop to the red terror that the military had risen, but rather that the coup had unleashed the red terror by removing the structures of law and order. As Fernsworth wrote later, ‘the props were knocked out from under directing authority. Such local and provincial governments as existed in the large provincial capitals were like ships without rudder or motive power or sail, desperately battling ungovernable waves.’18
