by Hugh Thomas
The Navarrese and Italian advance continued irresistibly. Gerona fell on 5 February, after incendiary bombing which infuriated the retreating republicans into a show of resistance. On the same day at day-break, Azaña, Martínez Barrio and Companys left Spain. Azaña’s departure was banal. The car in which Martínez Barrio was travelling broke down and blocked the road. Negrín personally tried to push it aside. To no avail: the President had to leave Spain on foot. Negrín and Azaña said goodbye at Las Illas, just in France. Then Negrín returned for a few hours more to Spain; Azaña went on into exile.1 Several nationalist prisoners were murdered. They included Colonel Rey d’Harcourt, the hero of Teruel, and the bishop of Teruel with him.2 Marty was only narrowly forestalled in an attempt to shoot a number of his old staff at Albacete, who might, so he feared in his narrow insanity, tell the world of some of his maniacal acts.3 To the west, García Valiño, the most successful of the younger nationalist generals, entered the old cathedral city of Vich. As the nationalists now suspected, the last resistance was over in Catalonia. The last-minute replacement of Hernández Saravia by Jurado as commander-in-chief was of no avail. The new general was experienced but nobody could re-create a front. (Hernández Saravia had desired to dismiss Modesto and give his command to the anarchist-minded Colonel Perea. Negrín and Rojo opposed that.)4 While Sir Robert Hodgson, on behalf of Britain, was putting Negrín’s peace points to the nationalists, four of Franco’s Army Corps were advancing towards the French frontier. On 8 February, the Navarrese entered Figueras. The same day, their advanced units came into contact with the rearguard of the retreating republicans. On 9 February, Solchaga and Moscardó reached the French frontier, the former at Le Perthus, the latter in the mountains of Nuria. By the 10th, the whole frontier was lined by the nationalist armies. Earlier in the day, Modesto had led the last units of the Army of the Ebro into France. It was at this moment that Giménez Caballero, the first fascist in Spain, then serving under Moscardó as a ‘provisional lieutenant’, recalled Louis XIV’s famous boast, and made the exuberant proclamation to his men: ‘At last, there are the Pyrenees!’
50
After the fall of Catalonia, the world concluded that the Spanish war was over. The nationalist peseta rose on the Paris Bourse to seventy times the value of the republican.1 At Chicote’s bar, in San Sebastián (the most ‘normal’ of the nationalist cities), pessimists had once been the most fashionable clients. Now optimists discouraged even those who laughed at notices announcing ‘Keep quiet, be careful, enemy ears are listening’. One could go to the cinema (to see, for example, the Italian fascist monumental historical film, Scipio in Africa, or one of the new Spanish documentaries—España Heroica, or Los Conquistadores del Norte, or even Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Seas of China) with an easy conscience.
The question of the relationship between the régime and the church was discussed by Serrano Súñer in a press conference on 6 February. (He was now minister of public order as well as of the interior after the death of the aged General Martínez Anido, on 24 January.) While praising Catholic tradition, he proposed a division of powers, especially in education. He also demanded the right of episcopal presentation which the state had enjoyed since the Concordat of 1851. But Serrano Súñer did not have his own way in everything. Cardinal Segura, now archbishop of Seville, had denounced the Falange as irreligious, and deplored the influence of the Nazis. A little later, the primate, Cardinal Gomá, returned to the matter more discreetly (as was his custom) in his Lenten pastoral letter, in which he criticized ‘exaggerated nationalism’. A decree of 15 December, meanwhile, gave back to the royal family the property and rights of citizenship taken from them by the republic. King Alfonso and his son Juan announced that they wished to be regarded as ‘soldiers of Franco’ until further orders.
The nationalist régime was now also courted by those who previously had scorned it. The French government, for example, dispatched Senator Bérard to Burgos to negotiate diplomatic relations. Bérard was treated coldly. Jordana demanded, first, recognition de jure, the return of republican ships in French waters, of Spanish art treasures taken by the republic to France, and of Spanish money in France. The nationalists refused to pay anything for the upkeep of the republican refugees in southern France, or to approve the French government to reimburse their expenses in this matter from Spanish assets in France.1
The government of the republic assembled in Toulouse. Negrín and Alvarez del Vayo arrived there, on 9 February, from Figueras, to discover the rest of the cabinet waiting for permission from the French authorities to fly to Valencia. After a brief meeting in the Spanish Consulate, the difficulties over transport were smoothed over. Negrín and Alvarez del Vayo flew to Alicante in an aeroplane belonging to Air France. They found the military leaders of central Spain low in spirit.2 This mood was exacerbated by the fact that, the same day that Catalonia fell, Minorca also surrendered. Franco had let it be known in London that he would occupy Minorca without Germans or Italians. Three battalions of the republican garrison then rebelled against Negrín, and the captain of one of them telephoned his brother, the nationalist head of the shipyard at Pollensa in Majorca, to send envoys to negotiate the surrender. As a result, the British cruiser HMS Devonshire brought negotiators from Majorca to Port Mahon. Its captain helped to negotiate the surrender of the island and transported six hundred republicans, led by the commander, Luis González Ubieta, the recent chief of the fleet, to Marseilles. Some felt in central Spain that this might be the model for their own capitulation.1
Now, in Madrid, a strange and, for many, fatal game was begun. Miaja, the political as well as the military generalissimo, still held one-third of Spain. He had 500,000 men under arms, and his four armies (under Generals Moriones, Escobar and Menéndez, and Colonel Casado respectively, all regular officers before 1936) were undefeated. But General Matallana, the military commander of these armies, was already either treacherous or defeatist. So was Matallana’s own chief of staff, Colonel Muedra. Casado’s assistant, Colonel Centaño de la Paz, had been working secretly for Franco throughout the war. Miaja himself was despondent and lived mostly in Valencia. The ‘communism’ of many such officers was shown to be very much an ideology for fair weather. Essentially middle- or upper-class soldiers such as Miaja himself, Matallana, Moriones or Prada, who had seemed impressed by the communists a year or so previously, were now moving away from that creed as from one more ship upon which they had taken refuge, and which was now, in its turn, sinking.2 Several senior officers, among them Casado, commander of the Army of the Centre (head of Azaña’s military household in 1936, one of the creators of the Mixed Brigades, and an army commander at Brunete), had concluded that Franco’s reluctance to negotiate derived from the communist colouring of Negrín’s government. Partly this conclusion derived from a jealousy of the prowess, as well as the predominance, of the communist officers. Casado and his friends had no knowledge of Negrín’s secretly undertaken peace efforts. Around these officers gathered other opponents of Negrín—anarchists, friends of Azaña, of Prieto, of Largo Caballero among them. The most prominent politician among these plotters was Besteiro, the reformist socialist who had remained throughout the war in Madrid, ill and old, a model of stoicism who, from a position of superior moral strength, was able seriously to envisage the possibility of defeat as a means of purging the rivalries inside the republican camp. His hatred of communism, and his contempt for the revolutionary terror, caused him to underestimate the nationalist repression and the evolution of ‘Francoism’ during the war.1
35. Division of Spain, February 1939
Besteiro’s plot might have been unsuccessful had it not been for the anarchists, who received instructions from Mariano Vázquez, their secretary-general, now in France, to prepare for the acceptance of the nationalists’ victory. Vázquez had become a friend of Negrín, as has been seen, but the one anarchist who had found himself as an effective army commander, Cipriano Mera, commander of the 4th Army Corps under Casado, was
far from it. (The other three corps commanders under Casado—Barceló, Ortega and Bueno—were communists.) A handful of members of the CNT in Madrid, such as the journalist García Pradas, Eduardo Val and Manuel Salgado, pressed Mera forward. Meantime, Miaja, the generalissimo of central Spain, had decided that there was no further point in continuing the war; the republic would lose in the end, even if it fought on another year. The nationalist spy organizations, a real Fifth Column, were also secretly active, probing, through trusted intermediaries, the loyalty of Casado, of Matallana, of Muedra (Matallana’s chief of staff) and of other officers. Casado had already embarked by early February on correspondence with the chief of Franco’s intelligence in Burgos, Colonel Ungría.2 The negotiations between Casado and Burgos envisaged a guarantee of life to those army officers who laid down their arms ‘and who had not committed crimes’.3 Casado also exchanged letters with an old friend, General Barrón, an army commander with Franco. Casado, the nerve of the plot, was able, cultivated, austere and hardworking: he lived as simply as if he were the most junior soldier, and worked as if he were the commander-in-chief.4 He also had been in touch since late 1938 with Denys Cowan, the British liaison officer of the Chetwode commission in Madrid. Probably acting unofficially on behalf of the British Government, Cowan was clearly interested in bringing the war to an end.1
The communists had, for a long time, been suspicious of Casado. He had opposed the Brunete offensive in 1937. Daniel Ortega, the communist deputy, a commissar of the Fifth Regiment in the early days, who worked in Casado’s headquarters, had told La Pasionaria earlier in the year of his suspicions.2 Casado knew of Azaña’s attempts at a mediated peace, through Besteiro. His wife, an influence on him, was suspected by some of treachery, though defeatism was probably the explanation. Casado is known at one point to have suggested that, if Negrín had insisted on a ‘Numantian struggle’ to the bitter end, and resolved that all should be lost rather than surrender, he would have continued, though reluctantly, to back him: what Casado and his friends found unacceptable was a public Numantian posture with, at the same time, preparation for flight (the ‘Numantinos, with aeroplanes and secret accounts in Switzerland’, as Azaña spoke of them).3 Casado’s headquarters was in the dilapidated estate of the Duke of Osuna outside Madrid, near Barajas: the Alameda, so charmingly portrayed by Goya. In this delightful palace, with its wonderful statues, staircases and lawns, Casado planned the end of the war.4
In Madrid, the commanders had been for a long time out of contact with their government. All were tired of fighting. The policy of resistance was only urged by the communist part—whose leaders in Catalonia and on the Ebro, Lister and Modesto, with their Italian éminence grise, Togliatti, had also returned to Spain from Toulouse. While many commanders such as Rojo, Hernández Saravia, Jurado, Perea, Pozas and others remained in France, the veteran communist leaders of the Army of the Ebro came back too.1 One professional officer, Jesús Pérez Salas, who had fought through the war, recalled later that anxiety as to what sort of political system there would be, even if the republic were to win, was then widespread.2 Meanwhile, from 8 to 11 February, the communists in Madrid held a conference at which many denunciations of defeatism were heard.3 The CNT, FAI and anarchist youth also met, and even had a meeting in Valencia, with Negrín, to discuss the situation. Negrín caused unnecessary anger when he refused to receive the new secretary of the FAI, José Grunfeld, because ‘he was not Spanish’.4 At this point, some anarchists in the Peninsula backed the idea of continued resistance; but from France, where many of the leaders now were (and remained), instructions came which accepted defeat, and tried to plan for the evacuation of anarchist leaders from central Spain.5
Álvarez del Vayo flew from Madrid to Paris to persuade Azaña to return to Spain also. But Azaña told him: ‘My duty is to make peace. I refuse to help, by my presence, to prolong a senseless battle. We must secure the best possible guarantees, and then conclude, as soon as we can.’ Alvarez del Vayo gave up his task as useless.6
Negrín reached Madrid on 12 February. That same day, he had an interview with Casado lasting four hours.7 Casado, speaking of the hunger and lack of fuel in Madrid, said that the war must be brought to an end. Negrín promised to send fifteen days’ worth of provisions. Casado replied with further complaints. He had no transport. Britain and France had abandoned the republic. The fall of Catalonia had cut the diminished raw materials of the republic by 70 per cent. Many troops had no shoes and no overcoat. There were only forty aircraft to serve his army, little artillery, few automatic weapons. The nationalists had 32 divisions south of Madrid, with masses of artillery, tanks, and 600 aircraft. Negrín told Casado that Russia was sending 10,000 machine-guns, 600 aircraft and 500 pieces of artillery. They were now in Marseilles and, despite the difficulties, would soon reach Spain. The peace negotiations with Franco, he added, had failed. Casado said that these Russian supplies would never arrive, since the only route was across the sea from Marseilles to Valencia. He beseeched Negrín to begin negotiations again, and offered his own services in assistance. Negrín accepted the offer. He added that he would have no hesitation in removing the communist party from the government if it should be necessary. He told Casado that he would promote him to the rank of general.
Negrín later met the leaders in Madrid of the Popular Front parties. He was vague about his aims. Casado saw the same politicians, and before them vented his irritation against the communists. Some communists in Madrid, such as Tagüeña, Domingo Girón (the local organizer) and Pedro Checa, began to prepare against the threat of a military conspiracy, rumours of which they had heard.1 A communist party delegation headed by La Pasionaria called on Negrín: ‘If the government is ready to go on with the fight, the communist party will back it; if the government wants to make peace proposals, the communist party will not be an obstacle.’ Negrín said that he saw continued resistance as the only possible course of action. Yet he seemed a man ‘overwhelmed by events who, having spent his forces in a difficult struggle against the currents of surrender, was allowing himself to be dragged to the bottom all the same, trying to maintain a fragment of honour’.2
Negrín’s policy in February 1939 has been the subject of controversy. He wished to fight on. But in private, he made sure that he and his friends had safe routes for escape. Did he, while presenting a front of resistance to the end, secretly welcome Casado’s conspiracies? Was he outmanoeuvred, or did he allow himself to be outmanoeuvred? Did he know of Casado’s (and Matallana’s) secret dealings with Franco, and if he did, why did he not arrest them? In retrospect, the communists, on whom he relied more and more, considered his conduct a ‘contradiction and incomprehensible’; while he reaffirmed his decision to resist, he did nothing to organize resistance.1 Negrín seems in truth to have been undecided. He desired peace but knew, better than Casado, that Franco’s terms would be harsh. Until the collapse in Catalonia, he had had an army behind him. Now, in the centre of Spain, he found himself with an untried army, headed by officers whose loyalty was questionable. Yet he knew too that the communist commanders, even if effective, had their first loyalty to the party. Negrín’s only strategy was to await the holocaust of a world war. His tactics could only be (and there he did see eye-to-eye with the communists) to be the last to abandon the fight.
On 16 February, Negrín held a meeting of republican military leaders in a hanger at Los Llanos aerodrome, just south of Albacete.2 There were present several veteran commanders of the republican army—men who, as captains or majors, had rallied to the republic in July 1936 and who now held, some of them, if precariously, the bâtons of general officers. To them Negrín spoke for two hours. He described the failure of his peace negotiations of the last month. He also described how, since May of the previous year, he had been seeking peace on honourable terms, through intermediaries. He said that now there was no other course but resistance. Next to speak was General Matallana, who argued that it was madness to continue to fight. He appealed to the humanit
y of the Prime Minister to bring an end to the war. Generals Menéndez, Escobar and Moriones, commanders of the Armies of the Levante, Estremadura and Andalusia respectively, agreed with Matallana. All of them regular officers before 1936, they represented in their own lives, in an acute form, the tragedy of the war: they were loyal to the government, hostile to revolution. Admiral Buiza, commander of the navy (he had been reappointed to that post to succeed González Ubieta), reported that a commission representing the crews of the republican fleet had decided that the war was lost, and that the nationalist air attacks would soon force the fleet to leave Spanish waters, unless peace negotiations were begun. Negrín told Buiza that the leaders of that commission should have been shot for mutiny. Buiza said that, while, in principle, he agreed with Negrín, he had not so acted, because he personally agreed with the commission’s views. Next, Colonel Camacho spoke on behalf of the air force. He said that he had left only three squadrons of Natasha bombers, two of Katiuskas and twenty-five Chatos or Moscas. He also proposed peace. But he did say that the air force had enough petrol for a year’s more war. General Bernal, military governor of the naval base at Cartagena, spoke likewise. Miaja, the ‘hero of Madrid’, complained that he had not been permitted to speak. Negrín now gave him the floor, saying that he had wanted him, as commander-in-chief, to speak last. Surprisingly, Miaja demanded resistance at all costs. Thereupon, Negrín summed up, without making firm suggestions as to the action to be followed; but he let it be understood that, since negotiations had failed, the war would have to continue.1
