Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  —Everyone had an absolutely blind faith in Franco’s leadership; there were hard battles for sure, but people never lost faith in the final victory. The other side seemed to have all the advantages, the big cities, industry, the main ports, the gold reserves. But they lacked our victory morale; we were always sure we would win, reflected Tomás BULNES, Onésimo Redondo’s collaborator in the sugar-beet growers’ union in Valladolid …

  Even the ‘defeated’ sometimes felt relief. A Málaga chemist, Isidro ANTUÑA, a lifelong republican, member of the radical socialist party and a mason, felt that after the nationalist conquest life returned to normal again.

  —What do I mean by normal? That anyone could do what he wanted as long as he didn’t say anything which gave offence to the authorities. That was the thing: silence. Thoughts were best kept to oneself. Apart from that, no trouble at all. You could do what you wanted. After the chaos before the war, after the fearful domination of the reds for seven months during the war, it was a relief. I had always been more frightened of a proletarian revolution than of a military uprising which I had known for years was bound to happen …

  The silence covered many things, especially in Málaga where the nationalist repression reached new levels of ferocity. But for those participating in the creation of the new state, the apparent ‘elasticity’ of the social structures offered revolutionary opportunities.

  * * *

  1. Azul (Córdoba, 9 January 1938).

  Militancies 10

  DIONISIO RIDRUEJO

  Falangist leader

  Having found in the falangist variant of fascism a solution to his personal situation, he was determined to help lay the bases of the falangist revolution. Young, dynamic, a powerful orator and poet – he had written a stanza of the Falange anthem Cara al Sol – his rapid promotion to the leadership of the Valladolid Falange put him in a position to make the attempt. The key, he believed, was the falangist syndicalist principles. These meant organizing the business firm or enterprise syndically: the managerial, technical and labour sides must form a single community which would be hierarchically structured according to the functions of each, not on the principle of ownership or non-ownership. His interpretation of the Falange’s corporative syndicalism, he knew, was not widely accepted; corporative, or vertical, syndicalism, could mean the subjection of the workers to the bosses, or the subjection of managers, technicians and workers to the superior economic interests of the nation as a whole.

  —In truth, I had to invent a large measure of these ideas, since they were more implicit than explicit in Falange ideology. It was only in the second phase of José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s thinking that syndicalism had been mentioned as a form of self-management of the economy, and it had been worked out fully only in regard to the land. In this phase, José Antonio was striving to go beyond Mussolini-type fascism of a corporative state modelled on Catholic thinking, to discover a form in which traditional Spanish utopian syndicalism could be used to collectivize the economy. I understood his thinking to mean that the economy must be run by a vast federation of trade unions representing the different branches of production which would lead to self-managing industries within a planned economy …

  Primo de Rivera, son of the former dictator, believed that the Italian and German models could not transcend their countries’ personal dictatorships. Fascism would have to be made anew in each country.

  —José Antonio was never completely at ease in his role as a fascist leader; he lacked the high degree of resentment which marked petty bourgeois fascist leaders. He was a rather shy man at heart who entered politics to defend his father’s memory, for he felt that the dictator had been betrayed by his own class, the upper class. While very critical of the latter, José Antonio knew only too well that, in as far as his own class wanted a domesticated fascism, he was in some respects its instrument. This made him all the more hostile to it. At the same time, he was attracted by the parliamentary system and believed that the British Empire was magnificent. He always had a copy of Kipling’s If on his table. But as Spain could not be a parliamentary imperialist nation, he found himself advocating a new solution …

  Though critical of Italian fascism and Nazism, Primo de Rivera was clearly a fascist.2 Indeed though few would admit it today, all falangists had felt themselves fascists, had been attracted to politics by fascist models.

  —We spoke like fascists, saluted like fascists, wore fascist uniforms and aspired to fascist ideals. At the same time, we believed that fascism as it existed was an excessively limited type of nationalist reaction to the situation which had arisen from the end of the First World War, and was not a sufficiently substantive doctrine to become the third force between an outworn liberalism and an unacceptable marxism …

  It was as this third force that Falangism had attracted him, solved his personal contradiction. Born in a small Castilian town, he had received a ‘traditional Catholic, patriotic upbringing’. He was the only male in his family, his father having died. His mother lived on income and he grew up without a firm idea of the relationship between money and work. At home, they received few newspapers and he was not well-informed. ‘In short, I came from what I call the “traditional class”.’3

  Aged eighteen when the republic was proclaimed, his personal crisis started when he went to the university at the Escorial run by Augustinians. A small but lively socialist group, composed mainly of building workers, existed amidst a generally conservative and Catholic community, and he began to feel himself attracted to socialism. At the same time, he had religious reservations about being unambiguously committed to the left. The fact that large sectors of the left were violently hostile to the church, engaging in polemics which he found unnecessarily crude, influenced him and, he believed, great numbers of the petty bourgeoisie. Though not uncritical he remained convinced of the validity of traditional Catholicism.

  Ill at ease in this contradictory situation, caught between a nonconformist social posture and traditionalism, his crisis was ended, his problem solved, when the Falange came on the scene.

  —You could be a revolutionary and still be a conservative, a nonconformist and a conformist. There was no need to reject your traditional upbringing, especially nationalism. Indeed, the latter formed part of the new equation: the diminished state of Spanish society, the poverty of large sectors of its inhabitants went hand in hand with the loss of Spain’s power as a nation. The fact that Spain was a poor, semi-industrialized country, dominated by foreign – especially British and French – capital was in large part the cause …

  He found himself accepting the critical categories of fascism. The latter he understood as the riposte of those countries defeated in the First World War or dissatisfied with the colonial carve-up which that war had consolidated. British national imperialism had shown these countries that there was an equivalence between internal prosperity and colonial expansion. In other words, the metropolitan proletariat could be satisfied at the expense of a colonial proletariat. The other reasons were obvious: the bourgeoisie’s reaction to the Soviet revolution and the international capitalist crisis of 1929; and also, in his view, a sort of ‘dogmatic contagion of a Bolshevik thesis, namely that revolutions were the work of a minority substituting for the masses’.

  —I accepted all these uncritically. Only an enlightened minority can transform the country; a proletarian revolution destroys the traditional elements of a society, cuts the latter off from its own history. Only territorial expansion can provide the conditions which will produce general prosperity in the metropolitan country, thus reducing class differences and finally eliminating the class struggle … 4

  Once in the Falange, he felt himself on the extreme left of the movement. This motivated his concern for implementing the falangist revolution during the war. The countryside concerned him most – it was also where Primo de Rivera had most systematically worked out his ideas in terms of creating large cooperatives of smallholders. The Falange defended small owner
s, whether industrial, agricultural or artisanal, believing that this form of ownership provided incentives which were otherwise unobtainable. However, his revolutionary attempt was not helped by the Falange’s rapid growth from some 75,000 members at the outbreak to several hundred thousand within a few months and close on 1 million by the end of the war. The newcomers who joined en masse were right-wingers.

  —Falangists like myself with more ideological commitment began to favour the entry of left-wingers into the movement. Within the nationalist camp, the Falange after all represented the most left-wing posture possible. For sectors of the previously non-unionized proletariat – large numbers of the Castilian day-labourers, for example – the Falange was an acceptable solution. For the hostile there was a powerful initial argument for joining: the repression. In the Falange a man had a chance: he was either accepted or shot.

  Cases of left-wingers joining became so notorious that the right called the Falange the FAIlange. Firstly because our flag was the same red and black; secondly because of our pseudo-revolutionary demagogy, and lastly because we accepted everyone …

  Despite its mass membership, the Falange never became a mass party, in his view. It lacked the leaders and the internal dynamic. It was a hierarchical party, much more similar to an army than a mass party – ‘and there’s nothing less like a mass party than an army’. Sovereignty of the party never lay with the base, it resided in the ‘leadership’; and since there was no real leadership, sovereignty was nowhere. Had it been a mass party, the base would have produced its own leaders.

  José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s imprisonment and subsequent execution by the republic had left the Falange leaderless. There was no one of his stature to replace him; potential leaders, like Onésimo Redondo or Ruiz de Alda, had also been killed. The myth was propagated that José Antonio was still alive, while a collegiate junta, over which Manuel Hedilla, a Santander worker, presided, took over on a provisional basis. The myth, he believed, was both decisive and disruptive.

  —Decisive in maintaining morale and in postponing the leadership struggle amongst the mediocre contenders. Disruptive in making it easier for the leadership to be taken over from outside. Without an obvious leader, the Falange was left headless, and it was all the easier to put a noose around it and strangle it.5

  To translate falangist-syndicalist principles into practice, he started to organize the trade union. He met passive resistance from the workers.

  —They found that the sindicato could serve them as a place of refuge – and that was about the measure of it. In any case, it didn’t last long, for after Franco took over, there was an outright capitulation and we had to accept two unions, one for management, the other for workers, within the national-syndicalist structure. This duality, with the important role allotted to union bureaucrats, portended little more than what in fact happened: the Franquista vertical trade unions.

  What I didn’t see then was that the military – which, politically speaking, I would have called a neutral force – would be influenced by the old conservative forces so that the war would end with all our efforts negated and the wealthy classes dominating again. The counter-revolution to our revolution went on throughout the war but, believing we could win, I went on fighting for our revolutionary principles …

  The ‘strangling’ of the Falange, in RIDRUEJO’S words, was shortly to be carried out in public. Talks between falangist and Carlist representatives on the fusion of the two movements had taken place two months earlier, without concrete results. Franco now decided to bring about the unification – and with it the final suppression of the other remaining political parties – by decree.6 Head of the new movement would be none other than the head of state. The old parties, argued his brother-in-law Serrano Suñer, a former CEDA deputy who had recently escaped from the Popular Front zone, did not answer the needs of the moment. The military uprising had been a movement against republican disorder and the threat to the nation’s unity. The situation now was similar to that faced by the Catholic Kings at the beginning of their reign in the fifteenth century; here was the possibility of founding a new state …

  The manoeuvre to unify all political organizations in one body under his command – a logical continuation at one level of the decree banning political and trade union activity issued before Franco’s appointment as head of government – had another important dimension. Keeping the noose round its neck, it would strangle not so much the Falange but the falangist populist anti-capitalist elements; ‘revolutions’ such as RIDRUEJO was proposing were to be dealt a death blow.

  Taking advantage of a confused situation arising out of a leadership struggle within the Falange, Franco imposed his decree on 19 April 1937. Manuel Hedilla, who the day before had been congratulated by the Caudillo for having won the leadership battle, was arrested a week later, court-martialled and sentenced to death. Although the sentence was commuted, Franco had crushed the main populist element in the Falange.7 Within nine months of the start of the war, Franco was head of state, generalísimo of the armed forces and head of the only political movement8 authorized in the nationalist zone.

  On guard duty at Franco’s H Q in Salamanca when the unification decree was announced, Juan CRESPO, the monarchist youth, heard the Caudillo speak. When the guard was relieved, he went home, took off his tailor-made uniform and cape, packed them up and went to the barracks where he handed them in.

  —‘I am not in agreement with the statement made by His Excellency, the Generalissimo,’ I told our chief, Miralles. ‘I hereby resign from the militias.’ I didn’t return home, expecting to be arrested, but went to the infantry barracks as the place where they would be least likely to look for me. I was disgusted. I couldn’t see why, because a man banged his fist on the table, we should suddenly now all have to believe the same thing …

  How could parties of such different ideologies be amalgamated? he wanted to know. It was one thing to defend common interests; another to be forced into a single party. While he disagreed fundamentally with the latter, the former remained important enough to keep him believing in the need to fight the war. Within a couple of weeks, he was at the front again, his age-group having been called up.

  When RIDRUEJO heard the news he wondered whether it was not his duty to take Salamanca militarily. Had he found three or four others in positions of command willing to support him, he would have captured the city and taken Franco prisoner.

  —Naturally, the Foreign Legion would have moved in the next day and captured us. But, much more important, such a move on our part would have brought the war to a halt. I didn’t dare take the step – who would have? In other circumstances, if there hadn’t been a war, the Falange would have killed Franco. None of us could accept our forced capitulation, our unification in which we had not had a word to say …

  He was with Hedilla drafting a memorandum demanding that Franco’s measure be reconsidered, when the police came to arrest the Falange leader. Accompanying Pilar Primo de Rivera, sister of the Falange’s founder, RIDRUEJO went to see Franco. Aged twenty-three, and looking even younger, he was taken for a bodyguard and not allowed in, until finally Serrano Suñer redressed the situation. Once in Franco’s presence, RIDRUEJO let flow a cataract of grievances.

  —I told him that a political party was not a regiment and could not be treated like one; if he proposed becoming a political leader he would have to interpret the wishes of the party’s base. The worst way of inspiring confidence in party members was to imprison their leaders. He listened to all this quite calmly, betraying nervousness only by a slight movement of his lips. Pilar was patently scared, thinking that no one should talk to Franco like that. After we left, he apparently said to Serrano Suñer that I seemed quite a sharp lad. An hour later, when I got home, I received a tip-off that I was about to be arrested. It seemed that after his relatively friendly reception of me, Franco rang the bell for the police …

  He took refuge in the Falange militia HQ under General Monasterio and wai
ted to see what would happen, emerging unscathed soon afterwards.

  Other pre-war falangists, like Rafael GARCIA SERRANO, who was working on the Falange paper Arriba España in his native Pamplona, were equally opposed to unification. In their view it meant that the Falange had lost a commanding position. Unification could be justified on military grounds, but never politically. GARCIA SERRANO carried his opposition to the point of never officially joining the new organization.

  —There were many like me. We could no longer be assured that our ideals would inspire the future. Though I admired Franco greatly as a general, I knew he was not imbued with falangist ideals. The threat José Antonio had so clearly seen and warned against – the danger of being overwhelmed by right-wingers after a successful rising – was coming true. Serrano Suñer had been a CEDA deputy, and that was enough to disqualify him totally in my eyes. The Carlists were reactionaries. ‘A pride of lions led by lambs’, a Carlist canon once correctly remarked. Their leaders displayed only the very right-wing aspects of Carlism, a movement which had, after all, in its deep Spanish roots, certain affinities with anarcho-syndicalism …

  While some Carlist politicians were found to serve in Franco’s unified organization, the bulk of the Carlist movement was opposed. Marquess de MARCHELINA, commanding a tercio of requetés in the south, saw it as a totalitarian coup d’état.

  —We expelled from our ranks all those who collaborated with it. It was evident from the moment Franco took over political and military power that the state was becoming falangist. The latter we saw as an extension of German and Italian fascism. Nothing could be further from our ideals than totalitarianism …

  But what could they do? Had they risen to oppose unification they would have been shot – worse, the war might have been lost. Troubled, worried, they continued to collaborate. Under cover of the new organization he saw that instead of the social justice he was fighting for, the old ruling capitalist order was being given a tremendous boost.