By the morning of 19 June, a week after the initial breakthrough, the enemy was in command of the heights on both sides of the city. The order was given to abandon Bilbao; the road to Santander was left open by the enemy for the retreat. From the staff headquarters in the Basurto civil hospital, Ramón RUBIAL set out on foot to escape. As he made his way along the road, the sight of the streams of civilians in flight with all their possessions depressed him. Why had Bilbao not been another Madrid? No international brigaders to raise the population’s morale? Lack of the war matériel which had reached Madrid in the nick of time? It was difficult to know. Veteran commanders had come from the central front, a shipment of Czech arms had arrived, more men had been called up, a new commander of the army, General Gámir Ulíbarri, a Basque, appointed. It had all come very late. The enemy superiority in the air had been overwhelming. Still, it had taken the enemy seventy days to cover the 42 km to Bilbao.
Along the same road as the socialist battalion commander, Pedro BASABILOTRA was escaping in a car protected with mattresses. When he reached Castro Urdiales, the first town in Santander, a Russian major confronted him.
—‘Are you Basque?’ he said, forming the words very slowly in Spanish. ‘Yes.’ ‘The Basques are cowards.’ ‘Come out in the street and repeat that. What sort of soldier do you think you are?’ The Russian had the mentality of a shoe-mender, thought the secretary to the head of the Basque nationalist forces. ‘Destroy Bilbao? It was impossible to defend. It was stupid to die there when we could get our forces out so as to continue the fight’ …
The night before, in a characteristic gesture, the Basque nationalists had released all their right-wing prisoners and passed them through their lines to the enemy zone.
* * *
Militancies 13
JUAN MANUEL EPALZA
PNV engineer
It had fallen on him to transfer the prisoners. If he couldn’t, he was to remain in the Larrínaga prison and defend them from any and everyone until the enemy arrived. Then he was to escape. How? ‘Swimming’, the official replied. The mission was unofficial; the Basque government, which had left for Trucios to the west, knew of the plan but would not officially give the order. If things turned out badly, he would be held responsible, would have to take the blame.
He set off. It was another of the many tasks the war had saddled him with. A war, he thought, that had been lost from the moment the Army of Africa had been able to cross to the mainland, from the moment it became clear that Germany and Italy were going to support the insurgents. Well-led, the Spanish army always gave of its best. The little hope for the republic had been knocked on the head by Non-Intervention. Train-loads of arms waited in France while Irún fell on the other side of the river separating the two countries. The blame for all that lay with the government of his glorious majesty – and Blum wept. What a scene!
And the republic? Anarchy. Instead of assassinating, burning, expropriating, an army should have been organized immediately to counter-attack. The enemy had always held the initiative. Look at Catalonia. Despite its great economic potential, it had been incapable of waging a proper offensive on the Aragon front. Instead – endless committee meetings, talk, debates. POUM-pim-pam – even killing each other. Just a week after Guernica, they were fighting in the streets of Barcelona. How could you win a war like that?
Aged twenty-five, with degrees in law, industrial engineering and business administration, he came from one of the very few upper-class Bilbao families to have espoused Basque nationalism. His father, a director of the Banco de Bilbao – one of the leading Spanish banks which his great-grandfather had helped found – had been a PNV deputy. His family spoke only Basque at home. His second language was French, his third German, his fourth Spanish.
—Love of our language was one of the essential elements of nationalism. Kept alive by the peasantry and the church, it was a bulwark of religion, for the language knows no blasphemous words. (In the confessional one says to the priest that one has used ‘Spanish words’.) Language, religion, Basque patriotism, liberty and democracy, those were the constituents of nationalism. The upper class in Bilbao looked down on nationalism as ‘rustic’, provincial; they were centralist and liberal in the English sense of the word …
The Basques were Basques; and Euzkadi their homeland. It was as simple and as complicated as that, he maintained. They were not Spanish, even if they carried Spanish passports. Once that was recognized, the task of formalizing the relationship between Basques and Spaniards could be tackled; but not until then. The PNV was like a resistance movement whose aim was to get rid of the oppressor and win Euzkadi’s freedom. Its members came from all classes; possibly, when liberty was attained, it would split into its constituent class elements. The Basque spirit, he thought, was individualistic, closer to anarchism than socialism. The latter, openly centralist, drew its support in Vizcaya almost entirely from the workers who had migrated there from other regions. The socialist party had been the main enemy before the war.
Vice-president of the Bilbao Mendigoixales, the PNV’s youth movement, he had believed at the start that the war was a Spanish problem and the PNV should remain neutral: how could the Basque nationalists ally themselves with those who were their major enemies – the left?11 They had been forced to only because they’d been attacked; all the same, he had spent as much time during the war looking over his shoulder, fearing the stab in the back from his allies, as looking forward at the enemy in front.
—Even if we won the war, what was the point of allowing the country to fall into the hands of the communists and anarchists? …
He wasn’t a communist witch-hunter; but he didn’t like communism, nor did he want to have to choose between one form of dictatorship and another. Had he been forced to, he would probably not have chosen communism for ‘their dictatorship lasts longer than others’.
Ahead lay the prison. What an absurdity, he thought, to be rescuing potential enemies, ensuring their safety! The Basques valued human life above everything.
—Not to stain our hands in blood was always as big a problem for us as winning the war. Perhaps even bigger …
Five months before, at the beginning of January, after a German air raid, an infuriated mob had assaulted the prison. Soldiers of a UGT battalion who had been sent to repel the mob joined in the massacre, killing some 200 prisoners before the Ertzaina (the newly formed Basque police) arrived. Basque nationalist opinion was horrified;12 Radio Bilbao broadcast the names of those murdered, a special tribunal was set up to judge the guilty, six of whom were sentenced to death. Coming after two assaults on prison ships anchored in the estuary the previous autumn, it had been a tragedy. The Basques, he was convinced, were not prepared to be thought of as Spaniards, whether ‘red’ or ‘white’, who assassinated people; the Basques were different. Another prison assault and a great number of Basque nationalist units would have abandoned the front. Even now, at the last hour, the 900 prisoners in Larrínaga and in the adjoining Carmelo and Angeles Custodios convents, which had been turned into prisons, could not be left to their fate.
He found the prisoners lined up, awaiting orders. They had been given picks, shovels and blankets to make it look as though they were a work force going out to dig trenches. He and three previously selected military men set out up the road to Santo Domingo; two Basque nationalist battalions had retaken the heights the day before at enormous cost. At the last corner he sent the three men on their way. He couldn’t let the prisoners cross the lines without knowing first that it was safe.
—The three men would make the trial run. It was a moonlit night and the civil guard’s bald head shone in the light. I gave him my beret. I was determined that the prisoners should only cross at a place held by Basque nationalist troops. I could imagine the massacre if some unit we couldn’t trust spotted the prisoners and opened fire …
As he waited, giving time for the emissaries to cross, a lieutenant of the Basque nationalist Itxasalde battalion arrived, ve
ry frightened, with orders for him to return to the prison a kilometre down the road. A group of soldiers from a left-wing battalion had seen the prisoners drawn up and seemed about to take action. The gudaris guarding the prison had given orders for the prisoners to set out immediately. Going down, he found the prisoners in a long column behind the Basilica of Begoña. Some of them were armed, the gudaris had seen to that.
—I’d have done the same. We had only enough gudaris from our decimated battalions to protect the column’s rear. I gave the order for the prisoners to drop their spades and pickaxes. I’ll never forget the noise they made. Then the order for the column to move, the armed men to remain at the crossroads. It was one of the few times in my life that I swore: they weren’t walking fast enough …
The column included sick men on stretchers; it was 3 km from the prison to Santo Domingo. In the full moon, the column of 900 men winding up the road was plainly visible to those in the rear, who included Ernesto CASTAÑO, ex-CEDA deputy from Salamanca. Down from his normal 70 kilos to 30, he clutched a sub-machine-gun given him by a gudari . Little did the prisoners know that on the road behind them, EPALZA was preventing a shoot-out between Basque nationalist and socialist-led troops who had been alerted to the movement but were not sure what was happening. Finally, at his insistence, the commanders of both parties began negotiations.
—I was trying to gain time so that the column could get as far forward as possible. In the middle of all this we discovered that the armed prisoners and gudaris I had ordered to remain guarding the cross-roads had passed over to the enemy lines. I had no desire to join them. The war might have seemed lost from the first day, but that was no reason not to continue fighting. A friend of mine, whom I had been hiding in my house, suggested I remain in Bilbao. ‘What – so that your friends can cut off my head?’ ‘Hombre,’ he replied, ‘what do you expect them to do to someone with ideas like yours?’ That was the mentality the right-wing displayed …
* * *
Twenty minutes after EPALZA had successfully concluded his mission and withdrawn across the river to the centre of Bilbao, the bridges were blown up. The central government had ordered all industrial plant to be destroyed if the city could not be defended. The left bank of the estuary, from Bilbao to the sea, contained the bulk of the republic’s heavy industry. Three plants were totally evacuated, and some machinery taken from other large plants;13 but cartridge, mortar and high explosive plants were left intact, not to mention shipbuilding yards, heavy engineering works and steel-making plants. Among the latter, Altos Hornos at Baracaldo was the most important steel works in Spain. The left-wing units withdrawing from Bilbao expected it to be destroyed.
– What was the point of blowing up the bridges if Altos Hornos was to be left intact? asked Ramón RUBIAL, socialist battalion commander. All it needed was to blow up the main power plant in the works, and steel-making would have come to a stop for a couple of years …
Few knew why it did not happen; but Gonzalo NARDIZ, ANV agriculture minister in the Basque government, did, for he was instrumental in seeing that the works remained undamaged. Two or three days before Bilbao fell, President Aguirre invited him and General Gámir, commander of the army, to go with him to Baracaldo.
— A member of my party, Luis Urcullo, was the commander of the local battalion. There had never been any discussion in the government about blowing up Altos Hornos; the question was never posed. We talked to Urcullo, insisting that his mission was to defend Altos Hornos and, as far as possible, to prevent it being blown up. We didn’t give him written orders, we didn’t even have to say out loud what was on our minds; it was something understood between us, sotto voce, by hints …
It would, moreover, NARDIZ felt, have been difficult to have given orders to the contrary since most of the battalion members came from Baracaldo and depended on the steel plant for their livelihood. President Aguirre’s objective was to avoid any destruction which would leave people unemployed and open to enemy reprisal, EPALZA, for example, believed that no other policy was possible.
—If the first and only Basque government set about implementing a scorched earth policy, destroying the country’s productive capacity, our people would never have understood. We knew that it was betraying our allies to leave our factories intact, but it would have been an even greater betrayal of our people to have destroyed everything and left them without work …
And in any case, the defeat might be shortlived. Juan AJURIAGUERRA, president of the Vizcaya PNV, was convinced, as were other members of the party’s leadership, that a European war was going to break out and the Franco regime would be overthrown.
—We didn’t want to blow up the people’s wealth which we would soon take over again. Even though things didn’t turn out like that, I wouldn’t like to say categorically that it was a mistake not to blow up Altos Hornos …
Other PNV militants believed, however, that militarily speaking it was a serious error.
—The fact of the matter was that we never really succeeded in acquiring a military mentality, maintained Luis MICHELENA, the PNV militant from Guipúzcoa. We were always civilians who had been forced to fight a war … 14
*
Four days after Bilbao’s occupation, the victors placed all industry in Vizcaya under military control.15 For the first time the Franco regime had an industrial and mining base. Production was ensured. Within six months, iron-ore output, which under the Euzkadi regime had dropped from its pre-war level, was exceeding that level by nearly 6 per cent per month. Not having to suffer a blockade, the Franco regime was, by the following year, able to export 60 per cent of this output – Britain (by agreement with Nazi Germany) taking its pre-war share – which provided an extra £1,700,000 revenue per annum. In addition to Vizcaya’s war production, which could supply all his fronts – not just the north – Franco won a valuable source of foreign currency to import further war supplies.16
After the battle of Brunete on the Madrid front, planned by the republicans to relieve pressure on the north, and fought to a bloody stalemate throughout most of July, Franco was free to resume the northern campaign. In less than a fortnight in August, Santander, the second of the three northern republican provinces, was captured – a largely Italian victory, conceded by Franco in compensation for their recent defeat at Guadalajara.
In a previously negotiated arrangement, 25,000 men and 3,000 Basque nationalist officers capitulated to the Italians at Santoña in eastern Santander. It was the denouement of the Basque nationalist participation in the war.
The Basque units, which had done as much as any others to try to stem the rout as the Italian offensive gathered momentum, fell back on Santoña instead of Santander. Supported by a Basque nationalist battalion and on PNV orders, Juan Manuel EPALZA deposed the Santoña military commandant and took over the town.
—Then, half in jest, half seriously, we proclaimed the only independent Basque republic to have existed. A government was formed with all the normal portfolios except finance. I became vice-premier and justice minister.
For many of us Basque nationalists the war had ended with the fall of Bilbao. It is inadmissible to admit it, but that was the truth. We had asked the central government to send warships to transport our army to Catalonia; we had been refused. We weren’t in our country any longer; where was the liberty and democracy for which we had fought in Euzkadi? Nowhere – in neither republican nor Franquista zones …
This feeling was widespread; it had led to a meeting a fortnight after the fall of Bilbao between PNV leaders and their military commanders, who agreed that surrender was out of the question but that the politicians should seek a solution. Earlier Italian feelers to negotiate Vizcaya’s surrender had been rebuffed; now contacts were re-opened. Juan AJURIAGUERRA, who was convinced that the Basque army was neither materially nor morally in a condition to continue fighting, travelled behind enemy lines to negotiate a pact with General Roatta, commander of the Italian forces.17 Two PNV members came away from
discussions in Rome with Ciano, the Italian foreign minister, convinced that Mussolini was prepared to honour the pact. The Basque government was not involved; the initiative was an exclusively PNV matter, the Basque nationalists hoping to secure more humane treatment from the Italians than from the Spanish.
Determined to comply with the pact, Basque nationalist commanders tried to disarm Basque communist units, like Eugenio CALVO’S in Santoña, which wanted to continue fighting, and refused to allow a communist captain on a mission from the army of the north’s general staff to address their men.
AJURIAGUERRA returned – in Haile Selassie’s plane which the Basque government had purchased – from a second negotiating mission in France, to surrender with the Basque forces. As the Italians entered Laredo, he was taken to General Roatta’s headquarters, where the Italian army commander confirmed that the pact would be honoured.
—Everything was in order. Nothing was said at that moment about the fact that we had not fulfilled the time limits which had been set.18 There were no last-minute hitches …
Many Basque officers embarked on the Bobie and the Seven Seas Spray, two English ships which had arrived in Santoña at the request of the Basques. Among them were Pedro BASABILOTRA and his brother, Father José María. The former spoke to the captain who assured him they would be sailing with the tide. The two men went down to the holds, where black crewmen gave them some chocolate, to get some sleep. They woke at dawn to find the ship still there.
—The next thing we knew was that some small vessels flying the Spanish colours entered the port and Italian troops came aboard and ordered us all to disembark. They said they had to check that no one’s hands were stained with blood …
There was nothing in the pact that permitted such a measure, recalled AJURIAGUERRA, although it might have been tacitly understood between them (‘though I don’t now remember that it was’) that no one who had committed a blood crime would be allowed to leave.
Blood of Spain Page 62
