Few among the conspirators either admired or trusted him, however. As the plans for the coup were being drawn up, General Mola assigned him the city of Seville, thinking it a relatively unimportant place to secure in the expectation of a swift victory in Barcelona and elsewhere in the country. As things turned out, though, not only did Queipo take Seville for the uprising in a spectacular fashion, he also secured the only safe foothold in the south, which would enable Franco to transport his vitally important Army of Africa to the mainland. Without Queipo, the Nationalists might never have won the war.
The story of how he single-handedly captured Seville, the capital of Andalusia and, with a large working-class population, home to many natural supporters of the Popular Front government, has become legend and has no doubt been subject to Queipo’s self-mythologizing.
Queipo arrived in Seville as the uprising was starting in Morocco, driving into the city in his plush Hispano-Suiza car, claiming he was there to inspect customs posts. He went to military headquarters accompanied by three other officers and his aide-de-camp. There they set themselves up in an office which had been abandoned owing to the summer heat. At around lunchtime he walked down the corridor and entered the office of General Villa-Abrille, the military commander, and offered him a choice: either the general joined him in the rebellion or Queipo would have to remove him.
‘Listen,’ he told Villa-Abrille when he received a negative response, ‘I’ve got an order from the military council to blow the top of your head off. But don’t be frightened. As a good friend I’m not going to resort to violence. I’m still confident you’ll repent of your ways.’
‘I can assure you,’ the general replied, ‘your jokes do not scare me. I am and will always be with the government. It is my duty.’
Queipo took a step backwards, looked around at his colleagues behind him, then turned back to Villa-Abrille.
‘I’m sorry for you,’ he said. ‘I can do one of only two things: kill you or imprison you.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I’ll imprison you.’9
Queipo ordered Villa-Abrille and his staff into the next room, but there was no key to lock the door, so he placed a corporal outside and ordered him to shoot anyone who tried to get out. He then went down to the infantry barracks with his aide-de-camp, where he found the men already on parade and armed. Without batting an eyelid he went up to the colonel in charge and congratulated him for joining the rebellion. ‘I am with the government,’ the colonel answered. Queipo gave a look of surprise and then suggested the two of them discuss the matter in private. Once inside, he arrested the colonel as well. No other officer would replace him, however, as they were all worried about the consequences should the rebellion fail. Finally Queipo found a captain to take charge of the men. All the other officers were imprisoned. At this point a handful of Falangists showed up, but with only 130 soldiers and now fifteen volunteers, it was going to take a lot to overcome a city of some quarter of a million people.
As luck would have it, at this point the artillery barracks agreed to join the rebellion. The civil government building, full of Assault Guards loyal to the government, was quickly surrounded and the governor handed himself in. Queipo promised the Assault Guards their lives would be saved if they surrendered, then had them shot once they gave themselves up. The Civil Guards now threw in their lot with the rebels and by that night the airport was in their hands. All that remained was to take control of the working-class districts, an operation which was carried out with bloodthirsty ruthlessness over the following weeks. The city was under Nationalist control.
As Queipo himself would later describe: ‘At quarter to two on the afternoon of that day frankly there was no one involved in the uprising except Major Cuesta, my ADC and myself … and one or two other officers. By two o’clock, two generals, two colonels, a lieutenant colonel and two majors were our prisoners. At half past two a state of war was declared. By three many government agents with their combat elements were in our hands. At five the artillery started firing. By six all the central government offices were under my command … At midnight Tablada aerodrome surrendered without a shot being fired. Seville woke up on the morning of the nineteenth completely Spanish and authentically Nationalist.’
Queipo’s account makes for a great story, but the fact remains that he was aided in his capture of the city by the weakness of his opponents, feuding between anarchists and other left-wingers, and the indecisiveness of the officers he arrested at the city barracks. The unions had few weapons with which to fight him, and once Radio Seville was in his hands he was able to control the information reaching the public about the outcome of the coup, denying claims from Madrid that the rebels had been easily crushed.
Queipo went on to rule his southern territories through a system of fear, terrorizing the people into a state of submission through violence. Mass executions and torture were the norm, soldiers often dragging men out of their homes and shooting them in the street or bayoneting them to death. At night the sound of gunfire ricocheted around Seville as small groups of union leaders, left-wingers or people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time were taken to the outskirts of the city to be shot. Simply having a callus on your hand or a sunburnt face (which suggested you were a manual labourer or a farm worker), or had a tattoo or your shirt undone were reasons enough to be imprisoned. Even by the standards of the war, where the killing of opponents behind the lines was widespread on both sides, the bloodshed was rife.
With Seville captured for the rebellion, what kept Queipo in the public imagination was his nightly radio broadcast, a weapon as effective as any gun or artillery battery on the battlefield during the confused early months of the conflict, when people were desperate for information. Through a nightly barrage of rambling insults and threats delivered in his ‘clear, flexible, rugged voice’, as one listener described it,10 he went a long way towards demoralizing the enemy, a group he invariably referred to as canalla, ‘the rabble’. So famous did the phrase eventually become that Republicans were sometimes heard referring to one another jokingly as canalla marxista in imitation of the ‘radio general’.
‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he would begin, before launching into the topics of the day, which might be anything from rebutting Republican claims about the course of the war, to urging the rich to return their savings to the banks to ease the money flow, to calling on men to help fill the ranks of the Legión, or simply trying to scare people out of their wits. Always delivered in his macho street-talk style.
‘I hereby order that if you find any Nancy-boy or poof spreading alarmist lies or false rumours about our glorious Nationalist movement you must kill him like a dog.’
Or on another occasion: ‘Our brave legionaries and Regulares have shown the Reds what it means to be a man. And in passing, they’ve shown the wives of the Reds as well, who at last have known real men, not just castrated militiamen. Kicking and screaming will not save these women.’
As the Nationalist troops moved closer to Madrid, Queipo promised the women of Madrid to the Moroccan soldiers of the Regulares. These men, who would often gang rape women before killing them, were later to be made into ‘honorary Christians’ for their part in Franco’s ‘crusade’.
Sometimes the threats or references to the violence of his troops came in almost throw-away lines: ‘Eighty per cent of families in [the Seville district of ] Santa Lucía are already in mourning. We will not hesitate to take even more rigorous measures to assure our victory.’
This was at a time, during the early months of the war, when victims of Nationalist repression were often left dead by the side of the road to rot, and mourning for the victims was officially banned. Wives of militiamen often had their breasts cut off after they’d been raped.
Sometimes the threats were personal, for example against the Republican governor of Huelva: ‘Oh, Cordero Bell, I’m going to flay you and use your skin to make something!’
At other times Queipo’s discourses concentrated on demonstratin
g the fearlessness and ruthlessness on the Nationalist side: ‘They don’t know that when we win, I have plans that for certain crimes the words “pity” and “amnesty” will be removed from the dictionary. After what has already happened in Seville, I have agreed to suppress in my own personal dictionary the word “surrender”.’
Often he made fun of the enemy and threats coming from Republican radio stations: ‘Oh Sevillanos, be afraid! Prepare to die of fear! They’re saying a powerful military column is moving towards Seville and that soon it will capture the city … We haven’t seen any military movements at all and today it has been relatively quiet in that area – not even any planes coming over to bomb the people … This column marching to Seville – which will reach us very quickly if we take into account its progress from Andújar where it’s been entrenched for the past two days without taking a single step forward – I calculate it will reach Seville in about forty or fifty years. So as I say: Sevillanos, be afraid!’
Queipo was fond of a drink and chasing women, much in line with the corrupt vice-regal style of his rule. Republican Radio Barcelona used to accuse him of being a drunk, but one evening he replied to their taunts with typical defiance: ‘Well, why not?’ he bawled into the microphone. ‘The whole world acknowledges the superb quality of the wine and women of Seville. Why shouldn’t a real man enjoy them?’
Some of his subordinates were known to take a similar attitude. One official, Manuel Díaz, used to arrive at his office the worse for wear at six in the evening, where over the course of an hour and a half he would sign death sentences – about sixty a day – without bothering to take statements from or even hear out the defendants. ‘It doesn’t matter if I sign one hundred or three hundred: the important thing is to clean Spain of Marxists,’ he used to say. Almost constantly drunk, he was surrounded by a group of lackeys, hanging out all night with flamenco dancers and singers. The only people allowed into his office were young women pleading on behalf of their loved ones. It wasn’t unknown for him to give in to their appeals in exchange for sex.11
It was all part of a culture of machismo within Nationalist-controlled Spain, where any man who wasn’t in uniform was taunted that he should wear a skirt. ‘Young men of Spain,’ went one of the phrases, ‘o castrenses o castrados – either you’re a soldier or you’ve got no balls.’ This was accompanied by faux-gentlemanly behaviour towards women, which led Queipo one night to surprise his audience by saying that from the following evening he would be starting his broadcasts half an hour later, because a group of pretty Seville girls had complained to him that they didn’t have enough time with their suitors in the evenings before everyone had to go and listen to him speak. This was at a time in Andalusia when girls typically sat at the balcony of a low first-floor barred window of their homes in the evenings while young men walking the streets would court them. Queipo couldn’t resist their request, and so the hour of his talks was changed. It only lasted a couple of nights, however: all the other radio stations in the Nationalist territories had to end their broadcasts and hook up with Radio Seville at ten to listen to the general, and his impromptu rescheduling was causing havoc among the networks.
His threats to the enemy continued. He warned the crews of the Republican navy, which sometimes shelled Nationalist-held towns from the sea: ‘Tired of asking them in vain not to carry out such attacks, I have ordered – despite it going against my instincts – the detention, in Huelva, San Fernando and the ports, of the families of these piratical sailors. For every victim that an attack of that kind produces, five of them will die. Perhaps this is what they want. In Badajoz a loathsome communist boss went to embrace his wife and stuck a knife in her heart. They say that because their wives smell so bad they want to be with younger girls … I repeat, the words “pardon” and “amnesty” will be wiped from the dictionary. I will pursue them like beasts until they all disappear.’
Meanwhile, leading figures on the Republican side – many of whom had been friends and colleagues of his, campaigning and plotting against the monarchy during the 1920s – came in for more personal attacks. President Manuel Azaña was always referred to as ‘Little Miss Manolita’, Queipo affecting a high girly voice whenever he mentioned his name in reference to Azaña’s rumoured homosexuality. Indalecio Prieto, the socialist leader, was ridiculed for being fat: ‘I already told you, Indalecio – leave now. We’re going to get you and the price of lard is going to tumble!’ General Miaja got the same treatment: ‘No matter where he hides we’ll pull him out like an insect, because if we squash him Spain will be awash with grease.’ The French prime minister Léon Blum was dismissed as ‘the Jew Blum’, while the British journalist Noel Monks was accused of being drunk when he wrote in the Daily Express that the Basque town of Guernica had been flattened by the Germans.
Queipo wasn’t averse to levelling criticism at his own colleagues either, particularly Franco, for whom he was to remain a thorn in the side for the duration of the war. Answering more taunts from Radio Barcelona about being a turncoat, he said that he had been a Republican until he had seen that the leaders of the Republic had taken a wrong turn and therefore should be overthrown. The future of Spain now lay in Franco’s hands, he said. But should he see one day in the future that the Caudillo was not acting in the country’s best interests, he would not hesitate to fight Franco for the sake of Spain as well. It is not clear how Franco reacted to this, but he certainly took measures to sideline Queipo as the war progressed.
Despite all his threats and boasts about the violent acts of his troops, in Queipo’s twisted mind cruelty only ever came from the Republican side. ‘The school of Marxism is murder, looting and theft. It is shameful that countries like England and the United States, and other countries so advanced they have organizations for the protection of animals, haven’t busied themselves as they should have done in prohibiting the very real hunting of men that the Marxists have been carrying out since 18 July …’ This from the mouth of a man who had overseen some of the worst atrocities of the war, including, in one instance, the stabbing to death of every man who could be found in the San Julián district of Seville.
How effective were his broadcasts as a tool of war? At the very least he was an easily identifiable figure on the Nationalist side, almost from day one. At a time when Franco was still stuck in Morocco and was then busy fighting his way up to the top of the Nationalist tree, Queipo was the public face of the rebellion, a character who could charm his audiences as well as terrify them. Apart from breaking into song on air, he would often finish off with a random personal message for friends or family: ‘And now if my wife and daughter, who are in Paris, happen to be listening I’d like to say I hope they’re well and to assure them we here in Seville are thinking of them.’
During the uncertain early days and weeks of the war, Queipo’s broadcasts became a rallying cry and morale booster for Nationalists, helping the advance of Franco’s army as it pushed northwards through Extremadura. On many occasions the defenders simply downed their weapons and fled on hearing that the Moroccans were on their way. Queipo, with his nightly barrage of vitriol and hyperbole, depicting in graphic terms the horrors that awaited them if they were caught by the Regulares, undoubtedly contributed to the levels of fear on the Republican side.
In January 1938 the radio broadcasts suddenly stopped, a year and a half after they had begun. By then his lectures had become, according to one English listener, ‘as familiar as the nine o’clock chiming of Big Ben’. Queipo simply informed his audience one night that he would no longer be continuing and disappeared from the airways, giving no reason for his decision. Nationalist Spain, it was said, became a much duller place as a result. As ever with Queipo’s changes of heart, the answer lay with his vanity: it later emerged that Franco had formed a cabinet and left Queipo out. Queipo had coveted the job of minister for war.
Militarily, his main contribution in the latter part of the war was to launch a successful campaign in the summer of 1938 against easter
n Extremadura, but politically he made little impact after he went off the air. His moment of glory had passed. After he had fallen into disfavour his career reached a stalemate and he lived out the rest of his days building up the myth of his exploits in the war, hankering after more medals and honours. He finally received his much coveted laureada, the highest honour in the Spanish Army, in 1944. He died in 1951 and was buried in the Macarena church in Seville.
While Nationalist propaganda dominated the airwaves, the Republicans concentrated more on visual images, driven by a desire to persuade the governments of Britain, the USA and France to come to their aid in the fight against fascism. Films could easily travel abroad and be shown to large audiences, who in turn would pressurize their representatives to come to the aid of the Republic. Ernest Hemingway was one of the prime movers of this trend.
Hemingway arrived in Spain in the spring of 1937, after he was invited to become the war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. It was the first of four trips he made to the country during the conflict and he spent a total of nearly eight months covering events there. The Spanish Civil War had become a rallying cry for the Left in the USA, much as it had across Europe, and Hemingway was immediately drawn to the Republican side, alive as he had become over recent years to the political and social developments of the 1930s. Even before he arrived in Spain he had written the commentary for the pro-Republican film Spain in Flames. His most noteworthy contribution to Republican propaganda, however, came once he got to Spain, where he worked with John Dos Passos on the script for the documentary The Spanish Earth. The fifty-minute film was narrated by Hemingway himself (Orson Welles was due to narrate but was replaced when he wanted to change some of the text; he and Hemingway came to blows over the issue, but were later reconciled) and premiered in New York at the 55th Street Playhouse on 20 August 1937. Later it was given a private showing at the White House, where the Roosevelts were involved in raising funds for a Republican ambulance fund. While the president’s natural sympathies lay with the Republic, there were many powerful interests in the country supporting Franco, not least the oil industry, and they applied pressure to ensure that no US aid ever reached the Spanish government.
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