Guerra

by Jason Webster

  The period of the Reconquest was also the age of chivalry in Spain. Young men like Franco seeking adventure were naturally drawn to the new Protectorate, with the opportunities it gave for glory, exoticism, a life away from the humdrum and the chance to live out childhood fantasies about knights in armour beating up Moros. Franco was to draw on this romantic imagery when he referred to his later campaign against the Republic as a ‘crusade’, shamelessly using the language of Spain’s medieval past.

  Franco’s years in Morocco made him as a soldier, as he readily admitted. It was there that he famously led his troops from the front against Moroccan rebels in the attack on the coastal rebel-held town of Alhucemas, only one of several actions which earned him the respect of his men and saw him rise even faster through the ranks. He was seriously wounded once – a bullet in the abdomen which, some said, made him impotent – but his career was set on an upward trajectory. Mentored by his superior, Millán Astray, who seems to have hero-worshipped his brave young second-in-command, Franco was also brutalized by his Moroccan experiences. Committing atrocities against the men, women and children of rebel villages was the norm, while punishments within the Legión itself were extremely harsh. Franco even shot dead one of his own men after he refused to eat his ration of beans. All this was done with a coldness and apparent lack of regard for human suffering which would remain with him for life. Even when close to death in 1975, he insisted on the execution of two ETA members and three Maoist activists, despite calls from world leaders and even the Pope for the sentences to be commuted.

  Thanks to his Moroccan successes, in 1926, at the age of thirty-three, Franco was promoted to general. He was the youngest man of that rank in Europe at the time – an honour which Napoleon had enjoyed in his day. At the same time, Franco’s brother Ramón was in the public eye after successfully flying across the South Atlantic to Buenos Aires – the first ever such journey. The two brothers were national heroes, although Ramón, far more of a playboy than his serious and austere sibling, dominated the headlines. People associated the name ‘Franco’ in those days more with the airman than with the soldier. Ironically, one would end up an authoritarian dictator, the other an anarchist revolutionary, although the two were eventually reconciled once the Civil War broke out in 1936.

  Promotion took Franco away from Morocco and brought him back to the Spanish mainland. A favourite of the king and well liked in government, he was made head of the new military academy at Saragossa, a position he relished. Yet the abdication of Alfonso XIII and the establishment of the Spanish Republic in 1931, headed by a centre-left government, saw the first serious setback in his career. Manuel Azaña, the minister of war, closed the Saragossa academy and removed Franco from his post as part of his project to reform the top-heavy and inefficient armed forces. Franco was to hold a grudge against Azaña for this for life – the two would later become adversaries when Azaña became president of the Spanish Republic and Franco’s opposite number during the Civil War.

  In 1933, however, the left-wing government was voted out of office and a series of right and centre-right governments held power until February 1936. Franco was back in favour. Militarily, the most important event of these years, both for Franco and for Spain, was the crushing of the left-wing revolution in the northern region of Asturias. Franco was put in charge of the operation and took the innovative step of bringing in troops from Spanish Morocco to combat the Asturian miners. The troops, known as Regulares, were made up mostly of Moroccan Muslims who had joined the Spanish Army in their policing of the Protectorate. Brutalized, like the Spanish legionaries, by the harsh conditions in Morocco, they were highly effective and thoroughly ruthless against the Spanish revolutionaries, who were killed in their thousands. People were shocked that Moros should be used against Christian-born civilians, but their effectiveness had been proven. More importantly, a precedent had been set which would be followed on a much greater scale once the Civil War itself began – Franco, nicknamed the ‘hyena of Asturias’, once again sending Moorish troops to fight against his fellow countrymen.

  Franco did well under the right-wing governments of the Republic. He was promoted to chief of staff, while his success in Asturias hardened his belief in a role for the military in politics, preferably with himself in charge. The event, however, further polarized the left and right wings of Spanish society, both of which were trying to push the shaky new Republic to its limits. One half was calling for violent revolution to undo social injustices, the other half demanding violent authoritarian measures to maintain the status quo. Mutual hatred was growing by the day, and the country was very quickly falling apart, yet the role, if any, for Franco in the coming conflagration was still uncertain.

  Then, with the fall of the right-wing governments and the victory of the Popular Front in February 1936, Franco once again found himself in the cold. This time his enemy, Azaña, was prime minister. The close-won election had, if anything, heightened political tensions, and on the night the results came in Franco, still as chief of staff, had come close to backing calls for a coup d’état. Many on the Right were convinced that revolution was around the corner if the centre-left got back in.

  Once in power, Azaña had lost little time in sidelining Franco again, on this occasion giving him the post of military governor of the Canary Islands. It got him out of the way, while making contact between him and other potential conspirators that much more difficult.

  Franco, however, for all the suspicions surrounding him, did not spend his time in Tenerife plotting the downfall of Azaña’s government, although he did manage to communicate with those who were. He had learned from the mistakes of other coup attempts over the decades that had failed. His Galician caution made him hesitant about making such a move, while his evasiveness meant no one was ever sure quite what he was thinking.

  Franco may have been biding his time, but others quickly got down to the business of plotting the overthrow of the government. And they desperately wanted Franco, as one of the most able soldiers of his generation, to join them. General Mola, based in Pamplona, was setting out plans for a take-over of power by the military.

  As the plans for the coup progressed, Franco refused to say definitely whether he was with Mola and the others or not, while always making enough positive noises for them to think he was on the brink of throwing in his lot with them. Mola, however, was absolutely relying on him and was already working out how to get Franco from the Canaries to Spanish Morocco, where, as a highly respected founder member of the Legión, he would secure the Protectorate for the uprising and command the army there. Through various contacts and financial backing from wealthy Spaniards abroad, a plane was arranged to fly from England to the Canaries to pick Franco up. This plane was the Dragon Rapide, chartered by Hugh Pollard on the instructions of Luis Bolín, the ABC correspondent in London. It was decided that an English plane would be faster and an English pilot more reliable than their Spanish counterparts.

  Pollard decided to take his daughter and her friend along to give more credence to their cover story about the plane being used for nothing more sinister than a hunting jaunt in Morocco. But as they made their way down through France to Portugal and then on to Morocco, Franco, in the Canaries, was having more and more doubts about joining the uprising. On 12 July, the day the Dragon Rapide reached Casablanca, he sent a coded message to Mola reading ‘geografía poco extensa’ – the circumstances for a coup, in Franco’s mind at least, were still not right. But over the next few hours, events were to take place in Madrid that would change his mind.

  The news of Calvo Sotelo’s murder by police officers shocked the whole country, not least of all Franco. The event seemed to confirm to the Popular Front’s enemies that the government was unable to control the cycle of violence into which the country had fallen. It was one thing for the authorities to stand by while anarchists burned down churches; quite another for the very forces of law and order to murder a member of parliament in cold blood. It was the tr
igger Franco needed. ‘We can wait no longer,’ he said on hearing the news. ‘This is the signal.’ All doubts were cast aside and he immediately sent another telegram informing Mola he was on board. It was a momentous decision which would have huge repercussions both for him personally and millions of Spaniards over the course of the next forty years.

  But first he had to get from the Canaries to Morocco. On 14 July the Dragon Rapide left Casablanca to begin the secret part of its mission. Leaving Luis Bolín behind, Bebb and Pollard flew southwest, not to Tenerife, but to the island of Gran Canaria, where they landed that afternoon. Franco was being watched and to land on Tenerife would have aroused suspicions. Bebb stayed behind with the plane while Pollard and the two girls caught the ferry to Tenerife, where they were to make contact with Franco via a clinic on the island with the code phrase ‘Galicia saluda a Francia’. This done, Franco had to deal with the difficult question of how to get to Gran Canaria. In order to travel there he would need special permission from the ministry in Madrid. A trip to examine the coastal defences was out of the question as he had done precisely this only a couple of weeks beforehand; a repeat request would only have raised eyebrows and all efforts had to be made to avoid attracting attention. The government had wind of a potential coup, although as yet it was doing precious little to prevent it. On 16 July, however, the perfect excuse presented itself. That morning, the military commander of Gran Canaria, General Balmes, shot himself while out at target practice. It was a bizarre death, as Balmes was regarded as an excellent marksman, but meant that Franco was able to travel to Gran Canaria on the pretext of having to attend the general’s funeral the next day. The coup was due to begin on the eighteenth. There was no time to lose.

  No one has yet clarified the mystery surrounding Balmes’s timely demise. Was it really an accident? Did the general commit suicide because he knew what was coming and, as a loyal Republican, felt he could do nothing about it? Or did Franco have him bumped off? The fact is that this was just one of a series of ‘fortunate deaths’ which eased Franco’s rise to power throughout the course of the Civil War. The man seemed to have some sort of evil lucky star supporting him along the way, mercilessly removing people at just the right moment. None of the subsequent convenient deaths (Generals Sanjurjo, Goded and Mola, or the founder of the Falangist party José-Antonio Primo de Rivera, among others) were demonstrably of his doing, despite suspicions to the contrary. So perhaps Balmes’s accident should be seen in the same light, despite the temptation to suspect foul play.

  Whatever the reasons for Balmes’s death, Franco was granted permission to attend the funeral and that night, leaving instructions for his supporters about the uprising in Tenerife, he caught the midnight mail-boat over to Puerto de la Luz, Gran Canaria, along with his wife Carmen and their daughter. Pollard was also on the same boat. After spending the next morning presiding over the funeral ceremony, Franco spent the rest of the day in Las Palmas preparing for the coup and drawing up his manifesto. In it he made no mention of the other conspirators, claiming that he was rebelling in order to save the patria, the fatherland, from anarchy. Nothing in the document could pin him down to being either a monarchist or a Republican, while the ambiguous and rather out-of-place French Revolution rallying cry with which he signed off was changed in order from ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ to place ‘fraternity’ first. There was to be little room for ‘liberty’ in the future Spain that Franco had in mind.

  Everything was set for 18 July, but on the afternoon of the seventeenth rebel officers in the Spanish Moroccan town of Melilla anticipated the uprising by several hours when the plot was in danger of being discovered. Franco was woken with the news in the middle of the night, and by five o’clock in the morning on the eighteenth he had declared martial law on the island of Gran Canaria. Falangists and right-wing officers quickly joined him and Las Palmas was eventually secured for the rebellion. The rest of the island remained in government hands for some time, but Franco was itching to get to Morocco, where the main action would be. Securing his wife and daughter a passage on a German ship to France, he sailed around the island to where Captain Bebb was waiting for him with the Dragon Rapide at Gando airstrip. Lifted ashore on the shoulders of his men, he took off for Morocco, flying first to Agadir before heading north to Casablanca. Carrying a forged diplomatic passport in one pocket and, it is said, a letter addressed to the prime minister in the other explaining that he was travelling to Madrid to help defend the Republic, Franco changed into civilian clothes during the flight and threw his military identification papers out of the window, anxious in these delicate first hours of the uprising lest he be found out. Disorganized as the rebellion was, not all the garrisons across Spain had come out on the same day, some waiting to see how things developed before committing themselves. In the end the declarations were staggered over the next few days.

  At Agadir they had difficulty finding fuel to continue their journey, while at Casablanca, as they were coming in for a night landing, the landing lights suddenly went out. Were the French authorities on to them? Had the coup failed and the Spanish authorities requested Franco’s arrest, or, worse, were they trying to kill him? Bebb managed to land the plane anyway, and discovered that the blackout had been caused by a simple blown fuse.

  Franco and Bolín, who had joined him by this point, slept for a few hours in a Casablanca hotel that night. Here Franco famously shaved off his moustache to disguise himself further. A fellow conspirator, General Queipo de Llano, who despised Franco despite being on the same side, later quipped that this was the only sacrifice the future Generalísimo ever made for the rebellion.

  The following morning the Dragon Rapide set off again, this time for Tetuán, the capital of the Spanish Protectorate in the north. As soon as they crossed into Spanish airspace Franco put his military uniform back on. Arriving at Tetuán’s Samia Ramel airport, they circled around for a few moments, uncertain as to whether they were about to be greeted by friends or enemies. Finally Franco caught sight of one of his old comrades, whom he knew was with the rebellion, and he called out to Bebb that it was safe to land.4 He had good reason to be cautious. Until a few hours previously, his own cousin, Major Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde, had been trying to secure the airport for the Republic. Outnumbered by the rebels, he had had to surrender, but not before sabotaging the planes at the airfield. He was to pay for it with his life, Franco facilitating the execution of a man who, as a child, had been like a brother to him.

  Back on the ground, Franco immediately took charge of the uprising. But the Dragon Rapide’s mission was not over yet. Realizing he was short of military supplies, Franco instructed Bolín to leave immediately to secure more aircraft and bombs from abroad. Bolín set off with Bebb in the Dragon Rapide for Rome, where he would seek an audience with Mussolini.

  Meanwhile, in Tetuán, once he’d ensured the support of the local Muslim leaders and visited the barracks of the Legión, where the commander, Colonel Yagüe, gave him a hero’s welcome, Franco began to inform himself about how the rebellion was progressing across the rest of Spain. There had been some important successes: General Mola and his supporters had secured Pamplona and much of the north of the country, apart from a strip running along the coast including the Basque Country. Saragossa and Teruel were also captured. Meanwhile, in the south General Queipo de Llano had given the rebels a foothold in Andalusia by taking Seville. The coup had suffered some major setbacks, though, having failed or at that moment being crushed in the major cities of Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao and Málaga. In Madrid, the rebels had delayed in making their move and were soon to be massacred at their barracks by armed worker militias – fighting forces linked to leftwing parties and trade unions.

  As information about how the rebellion was faring came in to Franco, now based at Tetuán, his understanding of the importance of the Spanish Army in Morocco for its future success grew by the minute. The coup had essentially failed to deliver a knockout blow – a civil conflict of
some sort was becoming virtually inevitable. Yet the rebel-held territory on the mainland was split in two – with Mola in the north and Queipo with his pocket in the south. The conspirators controlled none of the big industrial areas in Catalonia or the Basque Country, while Spain’s biggest foreign export earner at the time – the rich fruit-and vegetable-growing area around Valencia – was in government hands. The titular head of the rebellion, General Sanjurjo, had been killed when the plane carrying him from Portugal back to Spain crashed on take-off, while the man leading the uprising in Barcelona, General Goded, one of the more able rebel generals, was about to be shot. In the circumstances, the only real asset in the rebels’ hands was Spanish Morocco, home to the best fighters in the armed forces. And with Franco in charge, they were being led by a man with watertight self-belief. ‘Stand firm,’ he telegraphed Mola in those difficult early days, ‘victory certain.’ This latecomer to the uprising was about to take over the whole operation.

  The main question, though, was how to get his soldiers across the Strait of Gibraltar to mainland Spain. The navy was largely in government hands, as on most ships the lower decks had mutinied against their largely pro-rebellion superiors once they’d heard about the uprising. These warships were now cruising around the Mediterranean watching for any sign of movement from Morocco. The only solution would be to fly the troops over to Seville. But there were virtually no planes available in the Protectorate. Franco would have to look for help from outside.