by Hugh Thomas
These actions infuriated the Generalidad. They were to them the culmination of ‘a sustained and systematic drive to diminish the authority of the Catalan government’. On all other matters, the government, they thought, was vacillating, and disorganized; it only seemed firm when it had to do with Catalonia. Young Catalans at the front did not know for whom they were fighting. These were the views of Carlos Pi y Súñer to Azaña in a complaint in September. The state, Pi went on, owed Catalonia 70 million pesetas for war services. Catalonia paid for the army of Aragon, but received no recompense, Catalan police had been dismissed, while a special intelligence service had been introduced which adversely affected Catalonia. The Catalans regarded the Army of the East as one of occupation, and feared that the communists were planning a military dictatorship. The heroic myth of Madrid’s resistance, they complained, was used to justify centralism. The state’s services of public order in Catalonia were not coordinated with the activities of the Catalan government. At the same time, the communists in Catalonia were supported by the central government, and tried to absorb everything. The Catalans wished to be assured that, once peace were re-established, they could recover their own régime.1 Azaña assured his visitor that nobody had thought of suppressing the Generalidad. The once agile Companys seemed, however, at this time, at the end of his resources: to most people, he seemed ill, to Prieto mad, to Negrín, worthless. He protested his desire to resign but his friends assured him that there was nobody to replace, him; and, indeed, Tarradellas and Comorera, his closest collaborators, seemed to Prieto ‘miserable canaille incapable of a noble reaction’,2 though they were competent men.
The Basques, after their defeat, were in no position to give similar trouble. Their leaders had moved, it is true, to Barcelona and had set up an ‘emigré government’. Azaña laughed disdainfully at Aguirre’s airs, particularly when he spoke of a ‘Barcelona-Bilbao Axis’, to coordinate the aims of the two regional governments. But a consequence of the transfer was that Catholic services were again held in the Catalan capital, at the Basque headquarters. In July, Irujo, minister of justice, proposed the reopening of churches. The council of ministers gave permission for services to be held in private homes licensed by the government. Then in October, the ministry of finance excepted religious silver and jewels from the law providing for the delivery of all precious stones and materials to the government to help finance the war—though, admittedly, much of it had already gone. By the winter, 2,000 priests had returned from exile to Barcelona. These went about in lay dress, though (from March 1938) they were not, as heretofore, called up for military service, but drafted into the medical corps. The Vatican, additionally, did not wish the formal re-establishment of religion in the republic. Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer was invited to return to his cathedral at Tarragona but refused.3
The triumph of Negrín and the central government over the Catalans left behind frustration. Prieto was concerned with a similar problem of authority. It will be remembered that Prieto, in his determination to oust Largo Caballero, had been willing to use the communist party to that end. He had even for a time advocated the unification of the socialist and communist parties. The courage, realism, and reliability in war of the communist party, during the winter of 1936–7, had led him to a tolerant attitude to the communists once he knew that he and they saw eye-to-eye over Largo, and indeed over the anarchists. Nevertheless, the affair of Nin and the POUM had shattered this confidence. Several incidents during his first month at the combined ministries of defence had led him to conclude as early as the end of June 1937 that communist policy was to capture ‘all the resources of the Spanish state’.1 Prieto clashed with the Russian advisers over the disposal of a Messerschmitt 109 which had fallen almost undamaged into republican hands. The communists wanted to give this aircraft to the Russians, while Prieto insisted on showing it first to the French.2 During the Aragon offensive in August, Prieto complained of the manners, as of the competence, of the Russian advisers, and found himself thwarted, as has been seen, by Russian behaviour over the destroyer Ciscar at Gijón.3 In the autumn, Prieto began a considered manoeuvre to restrict communist influence, even in the army: thus, officers were forbidden to engage in political proselytization, or to attend party meetings. In November, Álvarez del Vayo was replaced as chief political commissar by a friend of Prieto’s, Crescenciano Bilbao. Álvarez del Vayo had made of the commissariat of war an ‘almost wholly communist’ organization.4 Many of the commissariats at the fronts were abolished, despite protests by communists. That meant the transfer of Antón, commissar-general of the Army of the Centre, to a regular battalion. This young man, who, before the civil war, had worked as a railway clerk, was secretary of the Madrid party. He was the lover of La Pasionaria, twenty years his senior, and occupied a house with her and Togliatti in Madrid.1 Antón was a Spanish workers’ leader of the new bureaucratic generation. How different from Julián Ruiz, the Asturian miner whom La Pasionaria had married when young, and by whom she had two grown-up sons! Prieto’s order, of course, caused bad blood between him and La Pasionaria, with the upshot that Antón left his post as commissar but never went to the front.
The communist party also dominated the various republican police forces and had the prisons filled with their own special enemies, as well as more genuine enemies of the republic. George Orwell in February 1938, on return from Spain, estimated there to be 3,000 political prisoners in their gaols and probably that is a reasonable estimate if, however, there are taken into account the anarchists and others arrested, as mentioned above, for revolutionary crimes of the early days.2 Those POUM leaders who, unlike Nin, were still alive, had not yet been brought to trial. Orlov’s men were still at work, while, more important still, there was a new counter-espionage body, the SIM (Servicio de Investigación Militar). The purpose of this organization of deserved ill-repute was to restrict the activity of ‘uncontrollables’, anarchist or otherwise. It had been for that reason that Prieto, pressed by Russian ‘technicians’, agreed to establish the SIM in the first place.3 He hoped thereby to coordinate all the ‘intelligence’ services at work in the republic—some run by the army, some by the ministry of the interior, one by the Basques, one by the Catalans—nine, at least, in all.4 He appointed a socialist friend, Angel Díaz Baza, to be the first chief. That sympathetic man was, however, not the right person to direct a secret service in a civil war. A sometime leader of the left-republican youth, Prudencio Sayagües, previously second-in-command, took over provisionally—he, in the early days of the war, had led a reckless counter-espionage service in the war ministry.5 But problems continued: Prieto ordered the arrest of a communist major of militias, ‘El Negus’, who had travelled around Catalonia seeking support for a movement to remove Prieto from the ministry of defence. But it turned out, in the end, that it was not the SIM who carried out the arrest, but the communists, into whose dungeons the offending major passed—and indeed was never heard of again. Prieto was furious.1 Then came problems over the local chiefs of the SIM. One of the military successes of the war, a socialist intellectual militia officer, once chief of staff to ‘Kléber’, and commander of a division at Brunete was named to command the SIM in Madrid. Prieto learned that he had nominated mostly communists to his staff and transferred him back to active service. A Russian ‘technician’ complained to Prieto. Prieto refused to reinstate the man concerned and his relations with the Russians worsened.2 The officer was followed in Madrid by Angel Pedrero García, who had been with García Atadell in the odious ‘dawn patrol’ and, more recently, leader of one of the small counter-espionage forces which the SIM had been founded to get rid of.
The overall director of the SIM after Sayagües was Colonel Uribarri, a socialist officer who had commanded a guerrilla column in the Sierra de Gredos in October 1936 and who had begun the war as a captain of the civil guard in Valencia. He had also been commander on the Toledo front, where he lived, according to Lister, like a feudal baron, ‘his headquarters a nest of spies’, w
ith daughters of local landlords the sweethearts of his staff.3 To begin with, he served Prieto loyally in the SIM, describing to his chief how yet another Russian had tried to consult directly with him. Afterwards, the communists seem to have manipulated Uribarri’s personality. Exhausted by work, he let the SIM become precisely what Prieto had sought to avoid—a communist political police force. Here, as in so many aspects of the civil war, events played into communist hands. Only they were persistent enough to organize an efficient secret police. At all events, the SIM began soon to employ all the vile tortures of the NKVD: cells were made so small that prisoners could hardly stand, being paved with bricks set on edge. Powerful electric lights were available to dazzle, noises to deafen, baths to freeze, irons to burn, and clubs to beat. The SIM was responsible for the murder of several conscripted into the republican army, not merely the cowardly and inefficient, but also those unwilling to follow the orders of communist commanders. Local chiefs of the SIM, such as Appellániz in Valencia, or Francés in Andalusia, showed themselves brutal, whether or no they were technically communists (Appellániz was an ex–post office official turned policeman). Many of the SIM leaders were members of the socialist communist youth such as Santiago Garcés, who ultimately succeeded as the national head of the movement: one of the many whose dubiously legal activities before the war had helped bring the conflict about and to whom responsibility and power brought neither wisdom nor humanity.1
It was, however, apparently not the SIM, but a section of the republican army, which was responsible for a distasteful scheme in Madrid. A tunnel had been dug to run from a house in the suburb of Usera towards the nationalist lines. A number of nationalist sympathizers, including several sheltering in embassies, paid to avail themselves of this escape. When they arrived at the tunnel, clutching a few valuables and keepsakes, they were shot down. Sixty-seven people were duped by this tunnel of death.2
The SIM’s judicial counterpart were the military tribunals established for summary trials of spying and other crimes. The setting up of these bodies led, in January 1938, to the resignation of the Basque-born minister of justice, Irujo. He remained minister without portfolio, being replaced at the ministry of justice by the president of the UGT executive, Ramón González Peña, a hero of Asturias in 1934 and strong Prietista of early 1936. Thereafter, the tribunals worked under summary procedure, without normal guarantees for the defence of the accused. Evidence consisted of reports made by the special police, or the SIM.3
It is reasonable to denounce the injustice and illegality of these courts, but the plan was that no death sentences were to be carried out save after approval by the cabinet and, by and large, that was by then held to, except for those shot in the front line for desertion or cowardice in the face of the enemy.1 During 1938, some 240 death sentences would be passed and the security tribunals passed another 725. But many of these were not carried out. Probably less than 1,000 were shot behind the republican lines in the course of 1938.
However many were the police forces, they were unable to control all the potential threats or disguises. General Rojo described visiting a clothing factory which made uniforms for the army. Both he and Miaja knew that the ‘workers’ were nuns, and the supervisor the mother superior. Neither took any action.2
The republican army now theoretically numbered nearly 750,000. There were 1,500 pieces of artillery, including anti-aircraft guns. This enormous organization cost 400 million pesetas a month, larger than the entire national budget before the war. The non-political, or politically ambiguous, Vicente Rojo, promoted to general in November 1937, was still the efficient, if pessimistic, chief of staff. The Army of the Centre was still commanded by Miaja; that of the Levante, by Hernández Saravia; and that of the East, by Pozas. Two inactive armies, of Andalusia and of Estremadura, were commanded by Colonels Prada and Burillo, the former being the last commander in the north, the latter the comunizante aristocratic ex-commander of assault guards. Hidalgo de Cisneros, at the head of the republican air force, now had some 200 fighters, 100 bombers, and another 100 reconnaissance or other aircraft. This gave the republic a superiority in numbers of fighters, not of bombers. Most were now flown by Spanish, rather than Russian, pilots, but Russia still had an air mission, at whose head ‘Montenegro’ had been followed by a similarly unidentified Colonel ‘José’.3 The fleet also remained inactive. After he had lost one convoy from Russia on 7 September, due to the resilience of the captain of the nationalist cruiser Baleares, Admiral Buiza lost his job as admiral in charge, and was succeeded by Captain González de Ubieta. But the naval position continued to worsen. Morale remained low, initiatives were rarely taken and the republican fleet, unlike the nationalist one, was a veritable white elephant of the war.
The International Brigades were by then formally incorporated into the republican army. Officially, the Brigades took the place of the Foreign Legion in the old army. Careful attention was by now paid to discipline and dress. A five-point justification of the salute even appeared in Our Fight, a weekly paper published in English by the 15th International Brigade:
A salute is the military way of saying ‘hello’.
A salute is the quickest way for a soldier to say to an officer, ‘What are your orders?’
A salute is not undemocratic: two officers of equal rank, when meeting on military business, salute each other.
A salute is a sign that a comrade who has been an egocentric individualist in private life has adjusted himself to the collective way of getting things done.
A salute is a proof that our Brigade is on its way from being a collection of well-meaning amateurs to a steel precision instrument for eliminating fascists.1
Early in 1938, these admonitions were followed up by an appeal to all to learn Spanish. Volunteer for Liberty described this as ‘our antifascist duty’.
The Brigades were finding it harder to gain new recruits from abroad. Thus the party in Italy had set out to recruit first 400 a month, then 100 or 150. In the winter of 1937–8, this fell to 68, 77 and 34 in December, January and February.2 Volunteers returned home disgruntled. The liquidation of the POUM created a deservedly bad impression. The Brigades were more and more filled by Spanish volunteers. A crisis was also brewing in the Brigade organization. Vital Gaymann, the French manager of the base at Albacete, had been accused of embezzlement. He left for Paris. He and his henchmen apparently had taken many of the volunteers’ personal effects.1 His successor was ‘Gómez’ (Zaisser), who had earlier led the 13th International Brigade. This appointment intensified the quarrel between German and French communists at Albacete. Karpov, the Bulgarian quartermaster-general (in succession to Louis Fischer), and a French communist, Grillet, with his wife, were also accused of embezzlement. The Grillets were intimates of Pauline Marty. At last, the cry came that Marty himself had ‘volé les soldats de la Liberté’. The scandal grew so that the great man had to go to Moscow to justify himself. He did not return to Spain for some time.2
Another scandal affected the generals associated with Largo Caballero: Asensio, Martínez Cabrera, and Martínez Monje. After the fall of Gijón, they were arrested, with Colonel Villalba of Málaga, prior to charges of treason. They were all innocent, however, if in some cases incompetent, and their release was achieved.3
It would have been militarily wiser if the republic had worried less about potential spies than about such matters as the shortage of lorries in their reserve. This was caused as much by neglect as by destruction in battle.4 Disillusion, meantime, affected the whole of the army, not simply the International Brigades; in this second winter of war, fatigue, shock and demoralization were frequent, as can be seen from the number of cases brought against would-be deserters.5 A great many did desert, nevertheless. While the republic too had organized a modern army if anything sooner than their opponents had done, they had also reproduced the bureaucracy, and the jealousies, which characterized the old army: Miaja, for example, was strong enough to be able to insist that his reserves should no
t be taken from him to fight outside the central zone.
As to arms, thanks to Russia, the essentials were now being acquired, though, as Prieto put it to the US chargé, Stalin feared that what all the world already knew would soon be discovered—namely, that he was selling arms to the republic. The republic, Prieto pointed out, had to pay the full market-price for goods. Apart from Russia, the republic also bought from intermediaries and adventurers. All of them, Prieto complained, exacted vast profits.1 In the centre of these gun-runners and idealists, Comintern agents and gangsters, the American journalist Louis Fischer continued to direct the chain of arms-purchasing bodies from the Hotel Lutetia in Paris, in conjunction with Colonel Pastor. They sent some two hundred expeditions of material to Spain from France in the nine months between 1 July 1937 and 1 April 1938.2
Negrín’s difficulties continued with both the Caballerista socialists and the anarchists. Largo had offended his successors by speeches in Paris and in Spain. Nevertheless, his supporters had been edged out of Claridad, the Madrid socialist paper, which had done so much to press his cause in early 1936. On 1 October, the UGT, after an undignified squabble, expelled Largo Caballero and his friends from their executive on the technical, if unworthy, ground that the branches which supported him had not paid their subscriptions.3 The event was yet one more proof that war belittles as well as ennobles. On 19 October, the ex-Premier made a speech at Madrid criticizing Negrín’s conduct of the war. The government had permitted this speech on the assumption that Largo Caballero would appear foolish. The speech was, however, a dignified self-defence, without bitterness.4 His further activities were prohibited. The director-general of security, Carlos de Juan, himself telephoned Largo Caballero to stop him going to Alicante for another speech, on the ground that all large meetings were being banned. Largo complained, to no avail.5
