Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  50,000 MILLIONS OF URBAN PROPERTY

  25,000 MILLIONS OF PRIVATE INVESTMENTS

  20,000 MILLIONS OF STATE INVESTMENTS

  50,000 MILLIONS IN INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL FIXED INVESTMENTS

  15,000 MILLIONS OF BANKING CAPITAL, DEPOSITS AND CURRENT ACCOUNTS

  5,000 MILLIONS OF RAILWAY INVESTMENT

  3,500 MILLIONS IN SAVINGS BANKS, ETC.

  The fortune of Spain, 300,000 million pesetas, will be nationalized and taken over or destroyed by soviet communism. Those who haven’t lost their lives, will be out of work – in the street with only the clothes on their backs.

  Workers, employees, civil servants: if you vote for the communist-socialist-leftist revolutionary bloc, you will be slaves, working only for bad food and poor clothing!

  Spaniards: if you have an ounce of sense, an atom of self-preservation, vote with iron discipline for the candidates of the anti-revolutionary front!

  For the Salvation of Spain

  La Nación, right-wing monarchist (Madrid, 15 February 1936)

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  * * *

  WORKERS, DEMOCRATIC CITIZENS

  The CED A and its accomplices are asking you for your votes in order to continue their work of terror, injustice and theft of the past two years.

  The Popular Front asks for your help and your votes to free 30,000 men from gaol, to make sure 70,000 return to their work places, and to demand retribution of the torturers and thieves.

  VOTE FOR THE POPULAR FRONT

  * * *

  The Problem of Spain is not one of Political Change but of Transforming the Economy.

  In the elections, the proletariat is aligning with the bourgeois parties, forgetting its essential mission of preparing and organizing itself to transform society.

  Solidaridad Obrera, CNT (Barcelona, 14 February 1936)

  * * *

  1. The right-wing monarchist leader had been assassinated by members of the police forces acting on their own initiative the previous week (see pp. 102–3).

  2. Created by the republican regime as a loyal urban police force, the assault guards were a counter-balance to the guardia civil, the highly trained para-military rural police corps which had been in existence for nearly a century.

  3. The Carlists derived their name from don Carlos, whose claim to the throne in the early nineteenth century founded the movement in reaction to the introduction of liberalism. They remained staunchly traditionalist, Catholic, and anti-liberal in the twentieth century (see Prologue, p. 35). A requeté was a military body of about 250 Carlists and, by extension, a Carlist soldier.

  4. At about the same time, eighteen hours after Queipo had risen, Rafael MEDINA (later duke of Medinaceli) was surprised to find himself only the 187th volunteer to join the military in Seville. The provincial bourgeoisie preferred to leave it to the army to do what was needed.

  5. The PNV was a confederal party, and the decision affected only the party in Vizcaya (Biskai-Buru-Batzar). Later the same day, the Guipúzcoa PNV reached the same decision, as did delegates from Alava. Subsequently, following the military’s triumph in Vitoria, provincial capital of Alava, the PNV there called on its members to put themselves at the disposal of the military authorities, expressing the hope thereby of avoiding a fratricidal war and of preventing anarchy.

  6. Martínez Barrio subsequently denied having made such a call. DIEZ PASTOR: ‘He never mentioned the phone conversation to me. But the new minister of communications mentioned it in a radio broadcast, saying he had spoken with the generals who had risen.’ On Mola’s side, several accounts have mentioned such a call and another from General Miaja, whom Martínez Barrio had appointed war minister in his ephemeral government.

  7. The socialist-inspired rising against the centre-right government which had its epicentre in Asturias (see Prologue, p. 43, and Points of Rupture, E).

  8. Sometimes called anarcho-bolsheviks, this group was to provide the libertarians’ leading military commanders on the Aragon front during the war (see Points of Rupture, D).

  9. See F. Escofet, Al servei de Catalunya i de la república (Paris, 1973), pp. 184, 189.

  10. Escofet, op. cit., pp. 213, 426.

  11. Part of a small contingent which the Army of Africa, the only professional fighting force in the Spanish army, had managed to ferry across by sea before the republican fleet blocked the strait of Gibraltar.

  12. A cluster of barracks on the south-western outskirts of the capital.

  13. See Points of Rupture, B.

  14. The initials of ‘Unite, Brother Proletarians!’ – a slogan made famous during the October 1934 rising in Asturias.

  February to July 1936

  In February the Popular Front had won a narrow victory in the general elections in terms of the popular vote.1 Immediately afterwards the uneven development of Spain began to show in the uneven spread of agitation and violence. In the advanced seaboard peripheries of Catalonia and the Basque country – engaged respectively in the primary (textiles) and secondary (metalworking) phases of industrialization – there was relative calm. In Catalonia, the Left Front had won 59 per cent of the popular vote. The Lliga Catalana, representing the bourgeoisie, had accepted its defeat and the role of loyal opposition. The Esquerra, the left republican petty bourgeois party, and principal victor, had become more moderate. Tomás ROIGLLOP, a Catalan nationalist lawyer and a prominent member of the Lliga, believed there was no reason for anyone in Catalonia to favour a military uprising, least of all fear of a proletarian revolution. ‘A military coup could only threaten us with the loss of what it had cost us so much effort to win – our autonomy statute.’

  Catalonia’s relative calm – ‘oasis of peace’ – did not mean that the working class was necessarily satisfied with the state of affairs. CNT militants, in particular, railed at the republic for its failure to satisfy working-class needs. None the less, the CNT had refrained from calling on its members to abstain in the recent elections as it had done in 1933. Their votes, to free the thousands of political prisoners being held since October 1934, had contributed to the Popular Front victory. In the opinion of Andreu CAPDEVILA, CNT textile worker, the people voted to give the republican government carte blanche to put down the threat of fascism.

  —Everyone knew the officer corps was conspiring. Why didn’t the government take action, create a new army loyal to the republic? Failing that, call on the working class to throw up barricades around all the barracks in Spain under the leadership of trusted officers. Encountering the working class face to face, there was an 80 per cent chance that the troops would not have risen. But the republicans were more frightened of the working class than of the military …

  *

  In the regions of the predominantly medium and small landholding peasantry, stretching in a wide arc east and west above Madrid, there was no particular violence, but a generalized feeling of hostility. The republic had done nothing to ease the difficulties of these people: indeed, the right could argue that the republic had worsened their plight. Wheat producers, their production permitted only a slender and fluctuating surplus at the best of times. Two excellent wheat harvests, foreign imports and the depression had pushed down prices. Amongst this largely Catholic peasantry, the view that the ‘republic represented disorder’ was widespread. ‘What we needed was law and order, peace and well-being. Those who supported the republican regime were constantly declaring strikes and stopping people from working,’ recalled the son of a largeholding peasant in the Castilian village of Castrogeriz.

  Antonio GINER belonged to no political party. An employer of labour, he supported the workers’ right to a union to defend their interests, but not when its leaders demanded that members abjure their Catholicism, ‘a faith dear and traditional to us’, which denigrated the very concept of union. He wanted a fair price for wheat: on the farm they had two years’ crops stored in the hope that they could be sold at a reasonable price. ‘We were lucky to have the space and the money. Most of t
he smaller farmers had to sell at the ridiculous prices being offered.’ But his real needs, he felt, could be summed up succinctly. ‘I was a farmer and wanted only three things: family, religion and work. Nothing else.’ Supporting this view, a local ploughman, Fernando SANCHEZ, put his reasons for being on the right.

  —I liked order. I liked to work honourably. We received little in wages, we ate garlic and a small piece of bread, and on that we worked all day – and we lived on what we earned. I belonged to no political party, I belonged to the land …

  Castrogeriz2 had voted for the right by a 570 to 270 majority, a proportion even higher than in Burgos province as a whole. The left’s failure to organize the Castilian peasantry was not only self-evident but would have dramatic consequences in the future, thought a mechanic and CNT sympathizer in the provincial capital. The working class, José BESAIBAR could see, needed the peasantry on its side to prevent a successful capitalist counter-revolution. If the peasantry went over to the capitalists – as it was almost certain to do if left unorganized – it would provide the bulk of the capitalists’ cannon fodder. The left’s failure was due above all, in his view, to one reason.

  —The working-class organizations refused to leave the religious question alone. Instead of uniting around their real interests – to make the revolution – they concerned themselves with whether people went to church. It was a fatal mistake as far as the peasantry was concerned …

  The electoral defeat of the right, particularly of the CEDA, the mass Catholic party, left many of the latter’s supporters disillusioned: the parliamentary road to the corporative authoritarian state had been blocked. The disillusionment was particularly strong in the largest right-wing Catholic youth movement, the JAP, many of whose members deserted to the Falange. A Burgos working-class JAP member felt that Gil Robles, the CEDA leader, had made a fatal mistake in not seizing power when he was in the government a few months earlier. Ever since the convent burnings of May 1931,3 it had been evident to Maximiano PRADA, printworker and member of the Burgos Catholic Workers’ Circle, that things were going badly. The Popular Front victory only confirmed it. He had believed, even hoped, that the beating the Asturian miners had taken after their insurrection in October 1934 would quieten things; instead, they appeared to have worsened. ‘We wanted a strong republic, one that would bring law and order to the country, one that allowed political parties but that forbade religious persecution. Gil Robles was too soft.’ PRADA’s view of the situation was sharpened by the increased unemployment after the elections which resulted from capital’s investment boycott.

  —The capitalists boycotted labour, refusing to give workers jobs, and the left-wing unions boycotted us Catholic workers. Things got so bad we had to be paid at midday on Saturday; if we got our wages in the evening, they might be stolen by out-of-work left-wingers …

  The radicalization of the country’s youth, right and left, was a distinctive phenomenon of the political crisis, the flight of JAP members into the Falange foreshadowing the parent party’s future during the war. In Valladolid, Old Castile’s major city, Mariano ESCUDERO, a leading CEDA member, tried unsuccessfully to staunch the flow to the Falange. A lawyer and local secretary of the Valladolid branch of the National Catholic Association of Propagandists, as well as former deputy mayor, he understood the reasons for his failure: ‘Everyone was convinced there was going to be a communist revolution; the JAP militants believed we were all acting like cowards in the face of the threat.’ The Falange, with its local strength, was the only organization prepared to confront it. Even he, to his regret, had come to believe that republican legality, shattered first by the socialists in the October insurrection, could no longer be restored by parliamentary means. The real cause of the regime’s breakdown lay in the failure to develop a dialogue between the CEDA and the socialist party. The CEDA must take its share of the blame. It had attracted people who had joined simply out of fear, who had become sufficiently strong within the party to block reforms such as those proposed by their own agricultural minister.4 Catholics, he believed, had an obligation to practise a social justice which would keep people ‘from thinking of extreme left-wing solutions’. Dollfuss in Austria came the closest to the ideal. But the CEDA had often been retrograde. The socialists had turned to violence. No dialogue had been possible. And now he saw violence coming.

  —I laughed, but I didn’t feel any laughter within me. Whatever was going to happen, the outcome was certain to be very cruel …

  His colleague, Ernesto CASTAÑO, had come to Valladolid to talk to members of the garrison about rising. One of the chief organizers of the Salamanca Agrarian Bloc,5 he had been re-elected as a CEDA deputy to parliament in the elections and, with two others from his home province, unseated on dubious grounds of electoral malpractice, CASTAÑO believed that the republic had irremediably failed, and for much the same reasons as the monarchy before it: the refusal to permit the political spectrum to be expanded to its limits, right and left. The left republicans would tolerate no competing influence and maintained that Gil Robles was dominated by the church, and wanted to ‘join the republic only to sink it’. Nothing was farther from the truth. ‘If the CEDA had won the 1936 elections we would not have changed an iota of the republic. Gil Robles never dreamt of doing what his enemies accused him of: seeking to gain power to install a fascist regime. No one was a greater enemy of fascism’ … 6

  CASTAÑO found the Valladolid garrison indifferent to the idea of rising – something that would not change until May. As to the local falangist leadership, they were maintaining the ‘absurd position’ that a rising should take place without military participation. Acting without the knowledge of Gil Robles or any of the CEDA leadership, CASTAÑO continued to make soundings in different parts of the country for the rising which he considered the only solution.

  Valladolid was the birthplace of the JONS, the national syndicalist movement which, in 1934, had merged with the recently created Falange in the same city. It recruited mainly among university students, service employees (waiters, taxi-drivers), artisans and small farmers. Onésimo Redondo, co-founder of the JONS, ran a sugar-beet growers’ union, which had been able to improve the lot of the small peasantry in this sector. His close collaborator, Tomás BULNES, believed that the peasantry was anti-republican, not a priori ‘but because of what the republic had turned out to be: anti-religious, tolerating if not fostering a nation-wide anarchy, ruinous for the farmer. Castile, above all, was religious, patriarchal. It was not for nothing that the Castilian peasantry provided the bulk of Spain’s priests, friars and nuns.’

  * * *

  Militancies 2

  ALBERTO PASTOR

  Falangist farmer

  In the small village of Tamariz de Campos, north-west of Valladolid, Alberto PASTOR, a member of the JONS since 1932, helped his uncle work the family 400-obrada (just over 200 hectare) farm. Tamariz – ‘a village of a few who owned a lot’ – boasted 100 pairs of mules (and, in consequence, the same number of day-labourers to work them), but its population of between 800 and 900 did not enjoy paved streets or running water in their houses, many of which were built of adobe. None the less, it was a place of prosperous wheat-growing farmers, two or three of whom owned twice as much land as PASTOR. The Tierra de Campos was good cereal-growing land.

  For the past couple of months PASTOR had been languishing in Valladolid gaol. Ever since the republic came in, things had changed. Before, there had been, he remembered, a sense of camaraderie between the labourers and the farmers. Although he was the owner’s son, he worked alongside the labourers in the fields, ate the same food, sat and smoked and talked about anything during the rest breaks. ‘There really had been no difference between us.’ But the republic had spoilt all that. The labourers had changed, agitators came to stir them up, it became dangerous to go out to the fields. He carried a pistol in his pocket when he went to work; men who had been like brothers to him before the republic would now barely talk to him. But they knew
him, knew he went armed.

  He had always preferred being with workers to being with people of his own class. His father (a doctor) and mother had brought him up like that; his best friends as a child had been the poorest kids. One of his brothers was among the first to join the JONS. Less than a year after its creation, he, too, had joined. He was attracted to it by the social injustice he saw around him and the battle against terrorism and subversion it waged. Other nations might be ready for democracy but, he was firmly convinced, ‘the latin race could live only under dictatorship’. Democracy was an ideal, but in Spain liberty immediately became libertinism. The national-syndicalist revolution the JONS proposed would be different.

  —It meant redistributing part of the wealth of the country in a new, more just manner; it meant that everyone would have to work – but work in harmony together; it was pure evangelism, the doctrine of Jesus Christ that everyone should live better, not that some should be well-off and others poor …

  This did not mean that everyone who owned wealth was to be expropriated. It meant that the rich must sacrifice a part of their wealth in order that the poor should live better. A landowner with 2,000 hectares who refused to farm the land properly had no right to so much while there were 2 million Spaniards crying out for land; the latifundist would be taken over and compensated – though at not very high prices. But a landowner who paid decent wages would not be expropriated, even though it might be necessary to ask him to make a profit of 7 per cent instead of 10 per cent so that others could live better.

  —Our ideas were revolutionary – not evolutionary. But we offered not a bloody, destructive revolution but a constructive one. We were neither of the left nor right nor centre. We were a movement with our own spirit, out not to defend the rich but also not to put the poor above the rich. In many points we agreed with the socialists. But they were materialist revolutionaries, and we were spiritual ones. What differentiated us most was that we lacked the hatred of capitalism which they exhibited. The marxists declared war on anyone with wealth; our idea was that the right must give up a part in order to allow others to live better …