Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  —If they were seen to break the pact, they feared the open intervention of France and Britain. That would be detrimental to our cause, they insisted. For that reason it was necessary to find some way of camouflaging the aid – although everyone knew it was being given …

  As part of the camouflage, the Italian foreign minister, Count Ciano, initiated a curious procedure. SAINZ RODRIGUEZ had to visit him at his office in the greatest secrecy at 7 a.m. to discuss the war in Spain.

  —But when, in the evening, I went to dine at the Casino, he would come in with a great number of friends and sit down openly with me and drink champagne. One day I asked him to explain. Ah, he said, people thought I was just a visiting Spanish professor and paid me no attention. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s a strange idea of secrecy’ …

  The Italians immediately dispatched twelve Savoia 81s to Morocco to help airlift the Army of Africa to Seville, nine of which arrived safely. Franco meanwhile sent a freighter, the Montecillo, which succeeded in running the republican fleet’s blockade, to Vigo with rifle ammunition for Mola.

  The republican government had appealed to the French Popular Front government for aid almost at the same time. The final outcome was very different. Initially, the French – both government and private arms dealers – provided some seventy planes; but then, fearful of splitting the Popular Front and alienating Britain, the French government on 2 August proposed a Non-Intervention pact. Faced with German rearmament – Hitler had marched unopposed into the Rhineland but four months earlier – the French socialist prime minister, Léon Blum, feared the prospect of France’s isolation. At the same time he could not afford an ally of Italy and Germany on his south-western flank. Britain had already unilaterally banned the sale of arms to Spain on 31 July; on 8 August, without waiting to determine the intentions of Germany, Italy or Portugal, France closed her frontier with Spain to military traffic. The effect was to deny the Spanish government its right under international law to purchase arms abroad for its self-defence. The capitalist order – the USA preaching non-involvement but permitting large quantities of oil (a ‘non-war’ material under the Neutrality Act) to reach the insurgents – had made its choice: ‘fascist’ counter-revolution was, for the moment, less dangerous to it than ‘communist’ revolution. Parliamentary democracy would not confront international fascism for the sake of an unstable member whose bourgeois order was threatened from below.

  * * *

  In various villages of which I have heard, right-wing people are being held prisoner and threatened with barbarous fates. I want to make known my system with regard to this. For every person killed I shall kill ten and perhaps even exceed this proportion.

  The leaders of these village movements may believe that they can flee; they are wrong. Even if they hide beneath the earth, I shall dig them out; even if they’re already dead, I shall kill them again.

  General Queipo de Llano

  (Broadcast over Seville radio, 25 July 1936)

  * * *

  The movement we are proclaiming has nothing in common with petty politics; it is a nationalist Spanish movement with the sole aim of saving Spain. It is said that the movement is against the working class; precisely the opposite is the case. We are in favour of the humble class and the middle class … Fear nothing, Spanish working people. Our movement is dangerous only for those who live like princes, for those who use trade union funds without rendering accounts, for those who do nothing but attack the republic. Something has to be done rapidly to save the republic.

  General Franco

  (Broadcast over the guardia civil radio, Tetuán, 22 July 1936)

  * * *

  I order and command that anyone caught inciting others to strike, or striking himself, shall be shot immediately.

  Don’t be frightened.

  If someone tries to compel you, I authorize you to kill him like a dog and you will be free of all responsibility …

  General Queipo de Llano

  (Broadcast over Seville radio, 22 July 1936)

  * * *

  ANDALUSIA

  The insurgents held the cities of Seville, Córdoba, Cádiz, and Granada, but not the villages and townships in the surrounding countryside where the situation was still more than uncertain for their cause. In some pueblos, a secret civil war, unknown and unheard of by the forces of either camp, was being waged.

  BAENA Córdoba province

  Its whitewashed houses rising up the side of a hill, Baena was a large agro-township, some 20 km from Castro del Río6 on the same road between Córdoba and Granada. Its topography, rising from the lower flanks of the hill, where the 8,000-odd day-labourers lived, to the main square at the top where, beneath the ruins of a castle and the main church, the well-to-do landowners had their houses, represented a social pyramid of its 21,000 inhabitants. It was, in many ways, typical of latifundist Andalusia.

  On 19 July, the guardia civil lieutenant, on orders from the military governor of Córdoba, proclaimed martial law. The town was already paralysed by its second labourers’ strike since April which was now in its fourth week. The wheat harvest stood unreaped in the fields. Soon news came that labourers were assaulting the cortijos looking for arms, and inciting all the permanent hired hands to join them.

  —They told us, ‘The fascists have taken the town. We have to attack them by surprise,’ Miguel CARAVACA, a permanent hand who had been forced to join, recalled. Anyone who had any sort of work implement, a sickle, a hoe, a wooden pitchfork was to stay in the countryside. Those who had nothing were to slip into the town, get an axe, a stick, anything and return …

  As they were setting out, a lorry and a couple of cars appeared with guardias and civilian volunteers. The confrontation was immediate and bloody. Three workers were killed, and three guardias, including the lieutenant, wounded. Miguel CARAVACA fled: ‘I wanted nothing to do with all this.’

  That night, the ninety civil guards and civilian supporters of the uprising took up armed positions in the Telephone Exchange building, guardia civil barracks, castle and hospital at the top of the town, as well as in one or two outposts on its western flanks. In the preceding months, the guardia civil lieutenant, a former Foreign Legion officer, in collaboration with the landowners’ and farmers’ association, had been arming as many people of ‘law and order’ as he could. Recently, the association, on his advice, had purchased 4,000 rounds of rifle ammunition.

  It was not long before they were under attack. When the labourers couldn’t advance up the streets because of the defenders’ fire, they broke holes through the inside walls of the terraced houses and tunnelled their way to the top. Very few had firearms.

  —And those they had were so old they must have come from the Cuban war of 1898. Most of them had bamboo canes with a metal point at the end, axes, sickles, wooden pitchforks, weeding hoes. When one of them found an old sabre he came out with it as though he were going to conquer the world …

  As soon as he had heard the first shooting, Manuel CASTRO, a baker’s son, had hurried home from the family’s smallholding and bolted the door of his house. He knew things were going to be bad. It was the workers against the bosses. Hatred had reached boiling point. For the past eighteen months the labourers had been demanding higher wages, and many landowners had stopped working their land, saying life was impossible. That, he remembered, was when people started to have arguments from which violence sprang. Wearing a tie was enough to arouse hatred; it was a symbol of someone who didn’t have to earn a day-wage. The labourers thought that everyone ought to have to work for a living, ought to be equal. That’s what they were fighting for.

  —For three days they tunnelled their way up. They were wild, they were gaining ground, they thought they would win. The women were the worst. They shouted at the men to get to the top. ‘Let’s get the fascists, granujas, they’ve killed one of ours.’ On the fourth day they reached our home …

  The family was ordered out, hands in air; a shot was fired which ripped through h
is mother’s dress but didn’t hit her. They were marched off between ranks of men and women carrying every imaginable sort of weapon. Red flags were everywhere, on bits of cane stuck out of windows and balconies. ‘More red than the anarchists’ red and black’, he observed. His father wasn’t on the left, belonged to no trade union, but neither was he a known right-winger. The crowd wanted to take them to the eighteenth-century convent of San Francisco, which they had made their headquarters and where they were keeping hostage many of the wives, children and relatives of the besieged right-wingers.

  —‘To San Francisco,’ shouted some in the crowd. ‘She’s a good woman,’ shouted others who knew my mother, ‘let her go where she wants.’ A swineherd, whom later I learnt was on the revolutionary committee, intervened in our favour. Finally, we were allowed to go free …

  After five days of fighting, the labourers reached the heights and set fire to the church, only to be driven back by a hand-grenade attack. But the right-wingers’ situation was desperate. Water, electricity and the telephone had been cut off by the besiegers; morale was affected by knowing that wives and children were in the attackers’ hands. The lieutenant tried to get a message out; it was captured. The attackers sent a note demanding the defenders’ surrender. In vain. They dispatched a group of women hostages, followed by armed men, towards the square. Before the women could open their mouths, the lieutenant fired his revolver, the bullets ricocheting at their feet. Screaming, the women fled back to the San Francisco convent.

  A priest was dragged down the street, a halter round his neck, by men who were insulting him. A few minutes later, Manuel CASTRO, who witnessed the scene, heard the sound of a shot. One of the men had fired his shotgun in the priest’s face, blinding him. He was taken to San Francisco, shot again and burnt.

  —Why kill a priest? Because they were close to the rich, if only because they had to get money from the rich to be able to give alms to the poor. But the poor always believed that a part of the money, the best part perhaps, remained in the priest’s hands. There were many priests who knew nothing of the labourers’ lives, who lived aloof from the people …

  But the majority of the workers didn’t want priests killed, he was sure. In the first couple of days of fighting, the labourers killed only a dozen of the town’s rich.

  —And there was every justification for killing them, they were the harshest of the right-wing ruling-class landowners, the forty or fifty to whom the labourers had to go, cap in hand, to ask for work. And there would have been no more deaths, I’m convinced, if the guardias and the gentry hadn’t resisted. It was this which drove the labourers wild. They were determined to take the town and make it their own …

  At dawn on 28 July, after nine days of fighting, the attackers reached the heights, capturing the hospital from which they could fire down on the defenders. The lieutenant summoned a meeting of the most influential among them: to resist was to meet an honourable death, to surrender was to be put to death vilely. He spoke of patriotism, bravery, asked who would stand by his side. All those present agreed; with tears in his eyes, the officer embraced them.

  While selecting positions to renew their offensive, the attackers did not immediately press home their advantage. It was noon. Looking up at the sierra from the Telephone Exchange, the defenders saw Moroccan troops, legionaries and civil guards on the heights. It was an expeditionary force from Córdoba, sent not to relieve the town but to take it, for they believed, having no news, that it was in the hands of the left. Seeing that fighting was in progress, Col. Sáenz de Buruaga ordered two cannons to fire over the town. Shooting stopped and the attackers, now suddenly become defenders, began to withdraw. As the Moroccan troops entered they began rounding up labourers and taking them to the square at the top.

  —Our landowner’s son vouched for us, recalled Miguel CARAVACA, and the lieutenant stamped our handkerchiefs and we tied them round our arms to show we were free …

  Not all were as lucky. According to one account, thirty-eight men were executed in the square that afternoon.7

  —The Moors shot the men; some of them were eating tins of sardines when they were given the order to fire. Not that many men were shot in the square, perhaps a dozen or so. The rest were taken down to the cemetery wall, CASTRO remembered. I counted seven lorry-loads, each of about eight or ten men. In all, close on 100 were executed …

  That night, knowing that all was lost, the remaining defenders in San Francisco, which darkness had obliged the military to postpone taking, slaughtered their hostages. It was an indescribable massacre; eighty-one people, including women and children, were killed.

  —Massacred not by the mass of local labourers, but by a few men, possibly outsiders, who managed to escape during the night …

  Shattered by the tragedy, the insurgents, their sympathizers and the uncommitted tried to recover. The column returned to Córdoba, leaving a reinforcement of twenty-seven guardias in the town. For a week Baena seemed safe.

  —Then, at dawn on 5 August, we woke to find the pueblo surrounded and under attack by republican militia. General Miaja’s forces had advanced from Jaén, consolidated positions in neighbouring Castro del Río, and were now on the heights above us. Very rapidly, they took the castle ruins from which they could fire on the defenders who were again concentrated in the main square. One of them asked a friend to shoot him rather than let him fall into the hands of the ‘reds’ …

  There was desperate hand-to-hand fighting in which the republicans were temporarily held off. The next morning, as the besieged prepared to die fighting, the republican bugles were heard sounding the order to withdraw. An attack had been launched on Castro by the insurgents from Córdoba, and the militia hurried to its defence. Baena was saved a second time. Although the front was never more than a few kilometres away for the rest of the war, from 6 August the town remained in insurgent hands.

  The human cost of the three weeks fighting was twenty-two right-wing besieged and fifty-nine left-wing besiegers killed. The total of eighty-one combat deaths compared with a minimum of 119, and possible maximum of 180 people, killed by both sides in the repression.

  ARAGON

  At the same time as the second attack was made on Baena, Saturnino CAROD’S column was engaging in its first hard battle in Muniesa, 80 km by road from Saragossa. Throughout the blazing hot summer days the column had advanced through lower Aragon, gathering new members in each liberated village, skirmishing with an enemy who, rather than defend isolated villages, preferred to withdraw towards Saragossa. Progress was marked by a number of incidents. In the village of Calaceite, the church was fired after CAROD had placed the keys in the townhall, saying that the church now belonged to the people. The CNT leader gathered the column and villagers in the square.

  —‘You are burning the churches without thinking of the grief you are causing your mothers, sisters, daughters, parents, in whose veins flows Christian, Catholic blood. Do not believe that by burning churches you are going to change that blood and that tomorrow everyone will feel himself, herself an atheist. On the contrary! The more you violate their consciences, the more they will side with the church. Moreover, the immense majority of you are believers at heart’ …

  He demanded that all lives and all property – not only religious – be respected. The column’s task was to fight the enemy in open combat, not take justice into its hands.

  Alcañiz, Calanda, Alcorisa – taken with a phone call ordering the right-wingers to come out of the village with republican flags – Montalbán, the progress was steady. In honour of a guardia civil lieutenant who had joined the column with some eighty guards and who had become his military adviser, CAROD re-named his force the Carod-Ferrer column. In Montalbán he was on the point of executing two of the column’s men – common prisoners released from gaol with political prisoners – for theft. They were saved by the pleas of the women who had been robbed. Turning northwards, the column headed directly for Saragossa. In the township of Muniesa the situa
tion changed. A two-day battle cost the column heavy casualties.

  —It made me aware that we couldn’t go on fighting like this. There had to be more organization. The column was very poorly armed – shotguns, a few hunting rifles, pistols, knives – but the enemy wasn’t that much better armed either. In all truth, the rich, the right-wingers defended their positions in Muniesa with great courage, retreating only when we had inflicted heavy casualties. On both sides we were Spanish, had the same pride and arrogance, the same determination to defend honour with lives …

  He started to re-organize the column, to ‘militarize’ it into smaller units with a command structure. The result was a near disaster; the militiamen abandoned the column and he was left with almost the guardia civil alone.

  —It was understandable. For many years I had spoken to the peasants of Aragon not only about their problems – problems I knew because I had lived them – but of ideas. Opposition to capitalism, the state, the church, the military. They drank in these ideas; and now, when the revolution was happening, they couldn’t understand when I spoke of the need for militarization, of the need to respect republican institutions and political parties, the need to organize new town councils, new organs of authority. They simply left the column. But in their home villages great pressure was put on them to return. Many came back. I addressed them: ‘You can rejoin the column, but first you will have to do a fortnight’s training. And your instructors will be the guardia civil.’ Imagine telling a CNT militant he had to accept orders from a guardia! But I wasn’t going to back down. ‘In accepting, you will be demonstrating your willingness to become good combatants.’ They accepted the training …