The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  At Valencia, the stalemate continued for some days still, though the balance was tipped firmly on 20 July towards the republic. The local deputy, Carlos Esplá, together with Mariano Gómez, the local chief magistrate, succeeded in persuading General Martínez Monje, commander of the 3rd Division, with its headquarters in the city, to remain loyal to the government. For a day or two, this officer was, however, uncertain what to do, even though he had not been approached by the conspirators. Meantime, the garrisons of the city were besieged by thousands of workers. The putative chief conspirator, General González Carrasco, flitting uneasily from refuge to refuge, gave up all for lost, and sought to escape. This he eventually did, by sea, via North Africa, along with Major Barba. His followers in the garrisons remained beleaguered, while eleven churches were set ablaze and the archbishop’s palace was destroyed.2 A similar uncertainty was resolved at Alicante, where General García Aldave, the military governor, another vacillator, allowed himself also to be persuaded to remain loyal.3 (In Alicante prison, meanwhile, José Antonio Primo de Rivera and his brother Miguel continued to languish without hope of release.) In Almería, the colonel of carabineers, Crespo Puerta, rose on 20 July and occupied public buildings but was constrained upon to surrender by the arrival of loyal soldiers from Granada and the threat of bombardment by the loyal destroyer Lepanto.

  In Seville, the victory of Queipo de Llano was confirmed on 20 July. The capture of the airport, then tiny but an important one for southern Spain, was a great help to the rebels. A small number of men of the Legion arrived there in a Fokker from Morocco, under Major Castejón. This officer led his men into a final assault on Triana, the working-class district on the other side of the River Guadalquivir. All the districts resisted, with practically no arms. In that named San Julián, the slaughter was horrible. The legionaries forced all the men whom they found there into the streets and killed them with knives. The lower part of Triana was then blasted by cannon.1

  Also on 20 July, fighting began in Galicia. In Corunna, there were two generals, Enrique Salcedo, the general of the 8th Division, and Rogelio Caridad Pita, the military governor and commander of the 5th Infantry Brigade. The former was fat, cautious, old and lethargic, though he had fought in Morocco and even in Cuba. The latter was a supporter of the Popular Front though it had been he who had organized the defeat of the revolution of 1934 in Gijón. The leader of the conspiracy in Corunna was Major Martín Alonso, who had been imprisoned in Villa Cisneros for his part in the rising of 1932, and who had escaped thence in dramatic circumstances. Both generals and the civil authorities hesitated as to whether to arm the trade unions. During the delay, the local CNT held a large meeting of friendship with the UGT, in the bull-ring. A spontaneous orator announced that there were arms hidden in the church of San Pedro de Mezonzo, and a section of the crowd went off to sack that edifice. At last, at midday on 20 July, with the supporters of the Popular Front out in the streets, General Caridad Pita, bringing good news from Barcelona and Madrid, persuaded Salcedo to declare for the government. They arrested Major Martín Alonso. But Colonel Cánovas Lacruz, commander of the local engineers, nevertheless declared a state of war and sent his men to take over the town. The workers tried to resist, but they had no arms. The local Falange were quickly armed and, headed by Manuel Hedilla, the leader of the party in Santander who happened to be there, were most helpful to the army. Within a few hours, the rebels had cleared the centre of the town, and had captured the 27-year-old civil governor, Joaquín Pérez Carballo, who, with his wife Juanita, was shot. The two generals were captured by their chiefs of staff, and shot too, some months after, with other officers.1 The battle continued sporadically for days, the workers being reinforced by a column of tin miners from nearby Noya.2 Eventually, the fight was decided by the superior weapons of the rebels. The last skirmish here took place in the romantic garden where the grave of Sir John Moore, the Peninsular War hero, is still commemorated.3 In other places in Galicia, fighting also began: in Vigo, soldiers fell on an unarmed population with brutality, but skirmishing lasted for several days, particularly in the quarter by the port. In the delightful city of Pontevedra, the people of the surrounding villages came in to fight the soldiers as if to a fiesta, with sticks, sickles, knives and clubs—and some dynamite: to no avail. The province fell quickly, murder more than battle marking the victory.

  At the naval base at El Ferrol, a battle between the seamen in the warships and the rebels victorious on land also came to a head on 20 July. Hesitation and division of opinion led to the surrender of the cruiser Almirante Cervera. This was followed by the raising of a white flag on the battleship España. Thereafter, a number of torpedo boats and coastguard sloops, upon which there had also been revolutions, similarly gave in. Thirty officers had been assassinated, about a similar number of revolutionary seamen were shot. Admiral Antonio Azarola, ex-minister of the navy and commander of the base, declared for the government, in time only to be arrested. The nationalist capture of this naval shipyard was to be a serious blow to the government in a long war.4

  In León, the rising occurred at two in the afternoon of 20 July. The civil governor much regretted the absence of the miners who had left for Madrid the previous day. In great heat, the workers fought with tenacity against the troops who came out under General José Bosch. Nevertheless, the rebels won, as they did in all the province. The only battle of note was fought at Ponferrada, a centre of communications, where certain of the wandering miners who had left Oviedo, thinking it securely in the hands of Aranda, and who had gathered some arms, were massacred in the market-square.1 At Minorca, the other General Bosch was overwhelmed on 20 July by the combined forces of the Popular Front and of the other ranks in his own garrison. Thus the submarine base of Port Mahon, with most of Spain’s submarines, laid down during the First World War, was won for the republic.

  One further event of importance occurred on 20 July. Mola had sent to Lisbon a Puss-moth aircraft flown by a young monarchist pilot, Ansaldo, to carry General Sanjurjo, the general-in-chief of the rising, to Burgos. Ansaldo arrived at Sanjurjo’s villa to find forty excited people gathered round the ‘Lion of the Rif’, listening to contradictory news on the wireless, receiving confused telephone calls, and making incorrect predictions in an ex cathedra style. Ansaldo solemnly announced himself ‘at the orders of the head of the Spanish state!’ All present burst into singing the Carlist anthem, many wept with emotion, others cried ‘Long live Sanjurjo! Long live Spain!’ The Madrid government complained of the use of a Portuguese military airfield by a rebel pilot. The Portuguese authorities, though sympathetic to Sanjurjo, requested Ansaldo to take his plane to a more distant landing-ground. He eventually took off from a small field, surrounded by pine-trees, at Marinha. Here, to the pilot’s alarm, the general insisted on taking with him a heavy suitcase, which contained full-dress uniform for his use as head of the new Spanish state. It may have been this excessive luggage that made it hard for the aircraft to rise. The propeller struck the treetops and the machine burst into flames. Ansaldo was thrown out with injuries, but his passenger was burned to death—a victim of conformity rather than of sabotage.2 This casualty left the rising without a head; it was a blow to the Carlists, in particular. Following the murder of Calvo Sotelo, the continuing captivity of José Antonio, and the recent capture of Goded, Franco with Queipo and Mola were left as the outstanding men on the nationalist side; and, while Mola was coping with the consequences of a far from wholly successful revolution in the north of Spain, and was preparing to fight on three fronts, Franco was already in control of Morocco and of the Army of Africa. As for Queipo, his gifts seemed more those of a propagandist than of a political leader. Sanjurjo would have proclaimed Alfonso XIII king again. Now the future was in doubt.

  By 21 July, a rough line might have been drawn dividing the places where the rising had been generally successful from those where it had mostly failed. Running from half-way up the Portuguese-Spanish frontier in a north-easterly direct
ion, this line would turn to the southeast at the Guadarrama mountains near Madrid, and then to Teruel (about a hundred miles from the Mediterranean in Aragon). It would then run north to the Pyrenees, meeting the Spanish-French frontier about half-way across its length. Except for the long strip of coastline comprising Asturias, Santander, and the two coastal Basque provinces, all to the north and west of this line was rebel territory (which also comprised Morocco, the Canaries, and the Balearics, except Minorca). To the south and east, save for the main Andalusian cities of Seville, Granada, Córdoba, Cádiz, and Algeciras (all of which, save the last two, were isolated from each other), the territory was principally republican. Within the governmental territory, in Toledo, San Sebastián, Valencia, and Gijón, Albacete and Oviedo, certain buildings were held by the rebels. In many nationalist towns, skirmishing went on for some days more in working-class suburbs. There were also many places, such as the Sierra de Albarracín, which, lying between rebel Aragon and revolutionary Castile, was as empty of authority as it was of communication and served only as a desert through which secret agents, fugitives, and bandits could pass.

  In the Andalusian countryside, the situation was particularly confused. Events in the ancient wool town of Pozoblanco were characteristic. About a hundred and twenty civil guard carried out a successful rising, on 18 July. Then the Left, miners from Linares and some 150 loyal civil guard, surrounded the town and starved the civil guard into surrender. The besieged guards with their families (300 in all) were put on a train to Valencia where they were imprisoned in the ship Legazpi, and all but twenty-six were subsequently shot. Sixty-four of the besieged civilians were shot too.1 These days saw the culmination, in fact, of a hundred years of class war: violence provoked new brutality, the news of evil in one village causing a new crime in the next. Refugees, for example, would arrive from Queipo de Llano’s Seville, in one or other of the villages between there and Córdoba. Their stories would be so terrible that reprisals would be taken on whoever was available. Later in the war, the army might arrive, and the consequent repression would be worse still.2 In Baena for example, near Córdoba, the revolutionaries killed 92 people of the Right. The repression after the right-wing recovery of the town accounted for about 700.3

  8. Division of Spain at the end of July 1936

  16

  Behind this dividing-line, there were a hundred Spains, but two worlds. Rebel Spain was the reverse of rebellious. Foreign commentators called it ‘white Spain’, ‘insurgent Spain’ or ‘fascist Spain’, sometimes even ‘Christian Spain’; but the best word is the more neutral one, ‘nationalist’—the rebels called themselves the ‘nationals’ and spoke of the rising as ‘the movement’. It seemed to be more a military than a fascist society, because the Falange appeared military, uniformed, armed and belligerent. ‘Those who don’t wear uniforms should wear skirts’ was an incessant jibe. Martial law took over justice. Administrative and judicial officers were ‘investigated’, to prove their security in the new conditions. A judge had to be a man of right-wing sympathies and pliant to the military will. All political parties which had supported the Popular Front were banned. Political life ceased. Even the old right-wing and Centre parties, including the CEDA, vanished. The only active political organizations were the Falange and the Carlists, and these were ‘movements’ rather than parties. The casas del pueblo and left-wing newspaper offices were closed down. Strikes were made punishable by death. Private rail and road movement was banned. Throughout nationalist Spain, freemasons, members of Popular Front parties, members of trade unions, and, in some areas, everyone who had even voted for the Popular Front in the elections of February, were arrested and many shot. ‘That’s Red Aranda,’ the monarchist Conde de Vallellano remarked to Dr Junod, the astonished Swiss Red Cross representative, while driving past that town on the main Madrid-Paris railway line in August. ‘I am afraid we had to put the whole town in prison and execute very many people.’1 The remark raises an unavoidable subject: the nature and the extent of the repression.

  The number of executions varied from district to district, according to the whim of the local commander or authorities. Civil and military governors and officials of the civil government, if they had been appointed by the Popular Front government, were often shot. So were those who sought to maintain any general strike declared at the time of the rising. Well-known people, such as generals or civil governors, were usually given a semblance of trial by a court-martial perhaps lasting for two or three minutes. Most ordinary people, strikers, trade unionists, anarchists, were not. If the army did a lot of shooting so too did armed gangs of falangists or Carlists. The CEDA’s enlightened minister of agriculture, Giménez Fernández, narrowly escaped being shot by ‘some señoritos from Jerez’ who arrived at his house in Chipiona. His wife lost her reason. His son, who was present, thought that he would have been shot if the señoritos had not been so drunk.2 The wives, sisters or daughters of men executed occasionally shared their fate.

  These atrocities had a special purpose. Though the rebels were determined and often well armed, they were few in number. In places such as Seville or Granada, the large working-class population had to be terrified into acquiescence of the new order before the nationalist commanders could sleep peaceably in their beds. Hence, not only did the rebels act with ruthlessness towards their enemies, but they had also to act openly, and expose the bodies of those whom they killed to public gaze. All that the church officially insisted upon was that those to be killed after trial of any sort should have the opportunity for confession.3 ‘Only ten per cent of these dear children refused the last sacraments before being dispatched by our good offices,’ recorded the Venerable Brother at Majorca. Mourning, however, was generally prohibited even to relations of those who had thus made a good death.1 These shootings went on for months.

  The repression was an act of policy, decided upon by a group of determined men who knew that their original plans had gone awry. But Mola’s directives since April had prepared for this eventuality. At a meeting of mayors of the district near Pamplona, on 19 July, Mola repeated the tenor of those explicit, harsh instructions: ‘It is necessary to spread an atmosphere of terror. We have to create the impression of mastery … Anyone who is overtly or secretly a supporter of the Popular Front must be shot.’2 This occurred even in Navarre where the rising triumphed with hardly a fight. If the proscription were decided on at the top, it is evident that there was no difficulty whatever in finding officers and soldiers, police, falangists or Carlists, to arrest, try hastily and execute. Why was that? It is not enough to say that the moment was a passionate one. Nor can these atrocities be explained by the knowledge, which soon began to arrive, usually exaggerated, of comparable events in that part of Spain where the rising had not triumphed. There is no easy explanation. The spirit of the Right was enraged and fearful, and many people’s blood was up. The new military authorities in nationalist Spain found it almost as hard to control ‘spontaneous’ actions as the government did. Thus many were killed without the approval, or authority, of the army.

  Day after day, from the time of the success of the rising, the arrests continued. Who knew with what crime those taken would be charged, or whether they would ever come back? The French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, who was at the time in Majorca, described how men were arrested by the nationalist armed gangs

  every day from lost villages, at the time when they came in from the fields. They set off on their last journey, with their arms still full of the day’s toil, leaving soup untouched on the table, and a woman, breathless, a minute too late at the garden wall, with a little bunch of belongings hastily twisted into a bright new napkin: Adios: Recuerdos.1

  In most cases, however, arrests were made at night, and the consequent shooting also done in the dark. Sometimes the executions would be single, sometimes collective. Sometimes, plainly, prisoners would be tortured before being killed. Sometimes, the official in charge, out of compassion, would arrange for a supply of wine to
be at hand, so that the doomed might steep their despair in the wisdom of intoxication. The next morning, the bodies would be found. Often these would be of distinguished members of the parties of the Left, or of officers loyal to the republic. But no one would dare to identify these corpses. For example, the corpse of a loyal colonel of cavalry (Rubio Saracibar), and other well-known citizens of Valladolid were condemned to rest for ever beneath a tomb marked ‘Seven unidentified bodies. Found on the hill near the 102 kilometre stone on the road to Valladolid.’2 An eyewitness living nearby says that a ‘dawn patrol’ of falangists shot forty persons daily at the beginning of the war: Onésimo Redondo, the founder of the JONS of Castile, recently released from gaol, gave himself over to this work of purging. Prisoners were taken in that city from the prisons in lorries to a certain point outside the city where they were shot—so regularly that a stall selling churros was set up to cater for the spectators who would drive up to watch.3 A Capuchin priest recalled how he was sent for at midnight to hear mass confessions in an open grave from a crowd of condemned men, near Estella (Navarre), afterwards all being shot.4 One day the body of a requeté named Castiella was being buried at Tafalla (twenty miles south of Pamplona). He was a casualty of the battlefield. An indignant public demanded that the fifty prisoners in the town prison should be killed in reprisal. The mayor remonstrated that not all of them deserved to be killed. The public insisted, and the mayor referred the question to the Carlist junta de guerra in Pamplona. The junta said no: but the public broke into the prison just the same, and hauled out all within, carried them by bus fifteen miles to Monreal, and there in the solitude of the night shot them, including a number of bewildered women.1