Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  66. See p. 85; also P. Preston, ‘Spain’s October Revolution and the Rightist Grasp for Power,’ Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 10 (1975).

  67. Its adherence to the parliamentary road, its progressive acceptance of the republic after the 1933 elections, its ultimate unwillingness to embark on extra-parliamentary solutions (especially after October 1934), was what finally lost it its constituency: the bourgeoisie deserted when, after the defeat in the 1936 elections, the parliamentary road no longer appeared a guarantee against revolution.

  68. Gil Robles, cited Preston, op. cit, p. 567. The CEDA leader later claimed that he knew his party’s participation in the government would provoke a revolutionary movement and that he had joined deliberately so as to be able to smash it from within the government.

  69. M. Groosi, L’Insurrection des Asturies (Paris, 1972), p.36.

  70. Caballero argued against staging the peasants’ strike in June when, almost certainly, a massive confrontation was looming with the government; to the detriment of October, his advice was not heeded. But the UGT did everything possible to discourage acts of solidarity with the peasantry (see Maurice, La reforma agraria en España en el siglo XX, p. 52).

  71. ‘Ninety per cent of our defeat was due to the aviation which contributed the most to spreading panic and demoralization amongst the revolutionaries who were incapable of effectively combating it’ (Grossi, op. cit., p. 127).

  72. See Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, p. 174.

  73. Speech in the Monumental Cinema, Madrid, 2 June 1935. (García-Nieto, ‘La segunda república II’ (Bases documentales de la España contemporánea, vol. 9, p. 317.) The five-point programme was a reduced version of a thirteen-point programme launched the previous month calling for the formation of a new Workers’ and Peasants’ Alliance. Among the points dropped were: the dissolution of the armed forces and the arming of the workers and peasants in a Red guard; the nationalization of major industries, finance, transport and communications; immediate and unconditional liberation of northern Morocco and all other Spanish colonial territories; the radical reduction of taxes on small businessmen and smallholders (see S. Payne, The Spanish Revolution, London, 1970, p. 168).

  74. D. T. Cattell, Communism and the Spanish Civil War (Berkeley, 1955), p. 219.

  75. In the period 1934–6, one of the most marked phenomena on the left was the grouping of forces; the Workers’ Alliances, the fusion of the socialist and communist youth, the incorporation of the communist CGTU (Confederación General del Trabajo Unitaria) into the UGT, the return of the bulk of the treintista opposition unions to the CNT, the fusion of the Izquierda Comunista (trotskyist) with the Bloc Obrer i Camperol to form the dissident communist POUM, and the negotiations for the fusion of the four Catalan parties which were to form the PSUC in the first days of the war.

  76. See Prologue, p. 44.

  77. Qué es y qué quiere el Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, POUM pamphlet (Barcelona, 1936, republished Paris, 1972). The democratic-socialist revolution was defined as ’bourgeois and socialist at the same time’. Bourgeois for the peasantry to whom the slogan ’The land for him who works it’ would be applied, the nationalized land being given to the peasantry in usufruct; socialist elsewhere with big industry, mining, commerce and the banking system being nationalized.

  78. See section B, p. 525, n.1, for Andreu Nin’s formulation of this problematic.

  79. The liberal republicans’ dominance in the Popular Front electoral results – they seated 162 deputies (including the Esquerra’s 36) to 99 socialists and 17 communists – represented their political bargaining strength in determining the candidates’ slates rather than their social force in the country. This was seen as soon as the war started when the proletarian organizations were revealed as the real strength – as they had been since the elections.

  80. Both Cattell, op. cit., and Hermet (Les Communistes en Espagne) have made much lower estimates: 3,000 members in 1934, 10,000 in February 1936, 50,000 at the outbreak of the war. The importance is less in the absolute numbers than in the relative increase in the space of less than two years.

  81. There were 190 generals and 20,303 other officers for 240,564 men (see R. Salas Larrazábal, Historia del ejército popular de la república, Madrid, 1974, vol. 1, p. 8). I wish to thank Dr M. Alpert, author of El ejército de la república en la guerra civil (Barcelona, 1978), for his help in interpreting these and subsequent figures.

  82. See Tamames, La república, la era de Franco, p. 128.

  83. E. Mola, Obras completas (Valladolid, 1940), pp. 1096–8, cited in Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain, p. 274.

  84. The dictator’s appointment of officers to oversee local government, his abolition of the staff corps and of promotion by strict seniority (the closed scale – see pp. 565–6 below) were among the main causes of friction with certain sections of the army. Artillery officers’ resistance to the promotion measure led to the dictator dissolving the corps for a time. There were abortive military conspiracies against him in 1925 and 1926.

  85. Payne, Politics and the Military, p. 266.

  86. According to M. Alpert’s computation.

  87. A general view substantiated, if for other reasons, by a republican army officer, Antonio Cordón. At the time a member of Azaña’s Acción Republicana party (and later a distinguished communist party member), he wrote: ‘We saw that the army was going to continue to be led in large part by ex-legionary officers, by the most reactionary generals … This was the reason why so many officers who had welcomed the republic left the army in disillusion.’ Azaña’s reforms, in Cordón’s view, evinced an almost total blindness, a ‘suicidal legalism’ in respect to democratizing the high command (see A. Cordón, Trayectoria, Paris, 1971, p. 192–7).

  88. In the peninsular army, the officer viewed his rank ‘as his permanent bureaucratic status, unrelated to merit, ability, activity or competition … ’ according to Payne, op. cit., p. 127. The africanistas, on the other hand, tended to ‘look with scorn on those of their colleagues (peninsulares) who had not volunteered for the imperial adventure … [They] were an offensive elite, romantically moved by having “written a glorious page” in history … ’ (Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, p. 93). Among the africanistas who had benefited from accelerated combat promotion was Franco, who became in quick succession the army’s youngest captain, major, colonel and brigadier general. Other africanista generals – Mola, Goded, Queipo de Llano, Sanjurjo – were to be the prime movers of the 1936 uprising.

  89. See G. Hills, Franco (London, 1967), p. 66.

  90. During the election campaign in June 1931, Azaña spoke of putting all his energy into pulverizing the ‘tyrannic forces’ threatening Spain as he had already done to ‘pulverize [triturar] other, no less threatening forces … ’ (cited in Tamames, op. cit., p. 191). The allusion was as obvious as it was inaccurate, although Azaña later said that he had been referring to caciquismo and not the army (see Azaña, Obras completas, vol. II, pp. 38–9).

  91. Moroccan troops so called in contrast to the irregular tribesmen they were recruited to fight. The regulares were led by Spanish officers.

  92. Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain, p. 347.

  93. Payne, ibid., p. 288. Lt Bravo was one of those to rise, being then in Seville. But many other officers who might have joined were unaware of the conspiracy or of its aims.

  94. Payne, ibid., pp. 282–3.

  95. Even liberal republican officers were not immune to anti-Catalan sentiment and believed the statute was ‘contrary to national unity.’ (See Cordón, op. cit., p. 201.) A socialist artillery captain, Urbano ORAD DE LA TORRE, affirmed that Catalan autonomy and religious persecution were at this time the two major mobilizing areas of the right-wing in the army.

  96. Republicans and left-wingers in Seville credit Queipo de Llano’s easy seizure of the city in July 1936 in large part to the false sense of security which Sanjurjo’s defea
t there four years earlier had created among them.

  97. In the experience of Narciso JULIAN, communist railwayman, anyone who had been to gaol for political offences was now not called up to do his military service. Other left-wingers had the experience of being called up but of not being issued with uniforms or arms and, after a few months, of being sent on extended leave.

  98. See Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain, p. 315. The strength of the army and security forces in 1936, as computed by M. Alpert, was as follows: 103 generals, 15,728 officers, 120,286 soldiers, 32,869 civil guards, 17,660 assault guards, 14,113 carabineros (frontier guards), for a total of 15,831 officers and 184,928 men.

  99. Thomas, op. cit., p. 94.

  100. Despite its name, the Foreign Legion was almost entirely Spanish. It consisted at the time of two tercios comprising a total of about 4,200 men.

  101. FERNANDEZ left the army a fortnight before the uprising in July. As far as he was able to learn later, the committee was unable to prevent the regiment rising to the cry of ‘¡Viva la república!’ The corporal who was the committee’s moving spirit was a ‘brave but naïve man, and he paid for his naïvety with his life’. In Madrid, on the other hand, ABAD’s infantry regiment did not rise. See p. 117.

  102. See Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain, p. 317.

  103. See p. 103.

  104. See J. Pérez Salas, Guerra en España 1936–1939 (Mexico, 1947), p. 80, cited in Payne, op. cit., p. 327.

  105. Cited in Thomas, op. cit., p. 174.

  106. The full programme is contained in del Burgo, Conspiración y guerra civil, p. 534.

  107. See Maíz, Mola, aquél hombre, pp. 214–17.

  108. In March 1934, a commission of Carlists and monarchists had visited Mussolini to put forward a plan for overthrowing the republic. The Italian dictator agreed to provide 20,000 rifles, 20,000 grenades, 200 machine-guns and 1,500,000 pesetas. Only the financial part of the agreement was met. It was the only material assistance afforded to conspirators against the republic by a fascist government before the war started. A number of requetés went to Italy for military training in the guise of Peruvian officers. The Carlists later organized the dispatch of a ship-load of arms from private sources in Europe, but the cargo was embargoed by the Belgian authorities. See A. Lizarza, Memorias de la conspiración (Pamplona), 1953, p. 48, and del Burgo, op. cit., pp. 516 and 520.

  109. Thomas, op. cit., p. 199.

  110. See Maíz, Mola, aquél hombre, pp. 219, 271 and 281 for details of the communications between Mola and Franco.

  Author’s note

  All Spanish regional names have been anglicized in this book, while all provinces and capitals retain their Spanish spelling. There are two exceptions to the latter: following accepted tradition, I have anglicized Sevilla (Seville) and Zaragoza (Saragossa).

  Throughout the book I have used the word libertarian to indicate a member of one of the three anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist organizations (CNT, FAI and FIJL), or their social ideas and objectives.

  All CAPITALIZED SURNAMES in the book are those of participants and appear shortly before or after a quotation. The latter is introduced by — if not by the usual quotation marks.

  Glossary of Spanish words

  abuelo, abuela, grandfather, grandmother

  alférez provisional, provisional second lieutenant

  amatxu (Basque), mother

  bacalao, dried cod

  bandera, Foreign Legion battalion

  barrio, quarter or neighbourhood of town or village

  buenas tardes, good afternoon, evening

  butifarra (Catalan), sausage

  cabezalero (Andalusian), foreman, manager of collectivized farm

  cabrón (pej.), bastard

  cacique, political boss

  caciquismo, system of political bossism

  canalla (pej.), scum

  carabinero, frontier guard

  carca (pej.), reactionary

  casa del pueblo, workers’ club, usually socialist, often also the latter party’s and socialist trade unions’ local headquarters

  casino, club

  caudillo, leader (Franco)

  centinela, sentry

  chamizo (Asturian), narrow coal shaft

  checa, unofficial political court or prison

  chico, chica, boy, girl

  chirla, small clam

  churro, fritter

  compañero, compañera, companion

  cojones (lit. testicles), courage, guts

  coño (lit. cunt), hell! damn!

  cortijo, large farm

  denuncia, information or charge laid against a person

  detente, small piece of cloth bearing image of the Heart of Jesus worn on the chest

  dios mio, good lord!

  doble (measure in Aragon), 12 kilos of olives

  duro, five pesetas

  fanega (Andalusian land measure), 0·6 hectares, approx. 1·5 acres

  fueros, rights of self-government in Basque country and Navarre

  gazpacho, soup of bread, oil, vinegar, tomatoes, garlic

  generalísimo, supreme commander

  gente de orden, law-abiding citizens

  granuja (pej.), rogue

  gudari (Basque), Basque nationalist soldier

  guerrillero, guerilla

  hidalgo, minor noble

  hijo, son; anda hijo, come on, son; hijo mío, my son

  hombre, man

  labrador (Andalusian), large tenant farmer

  Madrileño, native of Madrid

  masía (Catalan), farmhouse

  me cago en la leche (lit. shit in the milk), well I’m damned!

  muchacho, lad

  mujer, woman, wife

  nada, nothing

  ¡no pasaran!, they shall not pass!

  novio, novia, boyfriend, girlfriend intending to marry

  obrada (Castilian land measure), 0·56 hectares, approx. 1·4 acres

  paella, rice, meat, fish dish

  paseo, to take for a ride, assassination

  peque (from pequeño, small), lad, kid

  por dios, for God’s sake

  practicante, medical assistant

  pronunciamiento, military revolt to change political regime

  pueblo, village or township

  puta, whore

  regulares, Moroccan troops

  rejoneador, mounted bullfighter

  reparto, division of large estates among landworkers

  requeté, Carlist militia or militiaman

  rojo (pej.), red

  saca, taking out (of prison cell etc.) to execute

  señorito, young gentleman

  sindicato, trade union

  sin novedad, nothing to report

  tabor, battalion of Moroccan troops

  tercio, Foreign Legion or Carlist regiment

  tertulia, informal social group meeting to talk

  torre (Catalan), villa

  treintista, member of movement expelled from CNT in 1932 for holding that revolution could not be made by small, audacious groups

  turrón, type of nougat

  Acknowledgements

  I wish to thank the more than 300 participants who have made this book possible. Over and above their help, their kindness made my task both easier and more pleasurable. With their agreement, the majority appear under their own names and I will not acknowledge them individually here. To those who participated and who do not appear in the book, I offer my apologies; the exigencies of space are alone responsible.

  My task would have been impossible without the help of many dozens of other persons who gave of their time and energy to suggest and locate participants. As I have acknowledged them individually in the Spanish edition of this book, I will not repeat the list here.

  Given the nature of the book, I wish to stress that appearance in it does not involve responsibility for the final product. Liability for any errors of fact or interpretation rests entirely with me.

  I owe a
very special debt of gratitude to Rosalind van der Beek, who has helped me see this project through from beginning to end, who has transcribed and typed many millions of words in the course of it, and has made invaluable editorial suggestions; and to Margarita Jiménez, who undertook the transcription and translation of a number of important interviews. I wish to thank Susan Harding for help with anarcho-syndicalist problems in Aragon, and Alastair Reid, to whom I owe the idea for this book.

  Finally, I must acknowledge the help of those who read parts of or the entire draft of the book: Dr Michael Alpert, Mark Fraser, Susan Gyarmati, Fred Halliday, Miren Lopategui, Juan Martínez Alier, Maxime Molyneux and Gareth Stedman-Jones. All made invaluable critical comments which have improved the book; but here again I must stress that they are in no way responsible for any errors which remain.

  Appendix

  A. Collectivization and foreign capital

  B. Non-libertarian collectivization

  A. Collectivization and foreign capital

  The Catalan collectivization decree mentioned compensation for owners of expropriated enterprises without spelling out the conditions. An original draft clause – in which the industrial credit fund would have been responsible for eventual compensation – was dropped from the published decree.1 The result of this ambiguity was that pressure of foreign capital on the compensation question became a major problem.

  —A sort of cat-and-mouse game, in which we were the mouse, recalled PEREZ-BARO. There wasn’t anything that we could do, because the legal conditions under which compensation would be paid had not been agreed on …

  There was nothing to offer foreign companies since the industrial credit fund had not been set up; moreover, these companies might not have accepted long-term government bonds – ‘they were always demanding compensation in foreign currency’ – had it been offered them. But at least, he thought, such an offer might have shut them up.

  Claims were made on behalf of just over 100 foreign firms, half of them French, sixteen British, five North American, nine Argentinian, PEREZ-BARO received the representatives.