The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  The Nazis, stupefied at the price Franco put on entering the war, showed little enthusiasm, but a few days later Hitler sent a message via Richthofen that he should prepare to collaborate in an imminent operation against Gibraltar, which would coincide with Operation Sealion, the invasion of Britain. Richthofen and Vigón met to co-ordinate plans of attack, but on 31 July Sealion was suspended because Admiral Raeder warned the Führer that the Kriegsmarine could not guarantee success.

  Hitler’s attention soon started to turn towards his ultimate ambition, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Offering Spain as a bastion for the Axis in the Atlantic, Franco wrote to Mussolini on 15 August, asking him to intercede with Hitler to persuade him to agree to his conditions so that Spain could enter the war ‘at the favourable moment’. But Hitler did not want to give Franco power over the western Mediterranean, since the sea was to be maintained as the preserve of Italy.14

  Hitler decided to have a private meeting with Franco on 23 October at Hendaye on the French frontier. Unfortunately, Franco was travelling by the Spanish railway system and arrived late, which deeply irritated the Nazi leader. Hitler again refused to give in to Franco’s claims over the French empire in North Africa. He was due to see Marshal Pétain the following day and wanted to consolidate the Vichy regime’s collaboration. In the end a protocol was drawn up stating that Franco would enter the war when requested, that Gibraltar would be given to Spain and vague affirmations were made about compensating him with some undefined African territories at a later date.

  In December Hitler sent Canaris to see Franco to tell him that the Wehrmacht was preparing a force of fifteen divisions to seize Gibraltar in Operation Felix. Franco expressed his concern that the British would reply by attacking the Canary Islands and demanded guarantees. Hitler was furious when he heard of Franco’s ‘treason’ to the agreement made in Hendaye. On 6 February 1941 Hitler sent Franco another letter, polite but imperative. This crossed with a memorandum from Franco asking for so much artillery, spare parts, signals equipment, trucks, locomotives and wagons, that German civil servants considered the list beyond the capacity of Germany.15 Hitler then wrote to Mussolini asking him to arrange things with Franco, thinking that the ‘Latin charlatans’ would understand each other.

  Mussolini had a meeting with Franco on 12 February in the Villa Margherita at Bordighera. Serrano Suñer, now minister for foreign affairs, was also present. Franco said that he was afraid of entering the war too late and complained that the Germans were so slow giving him the weapons that he needed. Mussolini told Hitler of the results of the meeting and recommended that Franco should not be pushed any further. It is certainly possible that Mussolini did not want Franco as a rival in the Mediterranean.16

  On their return to Madrid Serrano Suñer, who had recently met Hitler and had held five meetings with Ribbentrop, felt himself to be the man of the moment. But he failed to realize how much he was hated by the Spanish generals and by the ‘old shirts’ of the Falange. In recent months the British secret service had been paying large bribes to the more monarchist and religious generals to encourage them to oppose Franco and his brother-in-law. From the middle of 1940 to the end of 1941 some thirty generals between them had received $13 million and continued to be given more. Aranda alone was given $2 million in 1942. The financial arrangements were made by the great smuggler, Juan March, who had now allied himself with the British.17 General Vigón had a private interview with the Caudillo in which he warned him of the deep resentment of generals at the enormous power which Serrano Suñer had accumulated, and added that rumours were running around Spain saying that it was his brother-in-law who controlled everything.

  Even some Falangists began to turn against Serrano Suñer, but others were determined to increase their power. The situation was becoming dangerous, because German agents were encouraging them. Serrano Suñer felt that his best way to advance was to put increased pressure on Franco to enter the war as soon as possible. The Germans in that spring of 1941 had just conquered Yugoslavia and Greece, and captured Crete.

  Franco moved in stages with a series of changes at the top level. Serrano Suñer found that not only had he lost the ministry of the interior and control of the Movement, but his conduct of foreign affairs was being questioned in government circles. Then, on 22 June, the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. Two days later Falangists launched themselves on to the streets in a great demonstration shouting slogans against ‘atheist communism’. Serrano Suñer thought that this was his chance. In uniform, he made a speech from the balcony of the General Secretariat of the Movement which overlooked the Calle de Alcalá: ‘Russia is guilty! Guilty of our civil war!…The extermination of Russia is demanded by history and by the future of Europe!’ The Falangist demonstrators, in a bellicose frenzy, went on to yell at the British Embassy, ‘Gibraltar is Spanish!’

  Serrano Suñer thought that he could recover all his power if he managed to channel the onrush of Falangist energy. A move then occurred to him, which seemed to offer a resounding triumph in the eyes of Spaniards and Germans alike. He went to see Franco and spoke to him of the need to form a division of volunteer Falangists to go to Russia alongside the Wehrmacht to fight the ‘apocalyptic beast’. But the senior generals, using Varela as their spokesman, made it clear that they opposed Serrano’s attempt to meddle in military affairs, especially since this also involved the Falange. Franco once again adopted a double-edged solution. He would agree to a Falangist volunteer division, but it should be commanded by one of his generals.

  On 13 July the ‘División Española de Voluntarios’, usually known as the ‘División Azul’, or Blue Division, began to leave for the training camp of Grafenwöhr in Germany. Commanded by General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, it became the 250th Infantry Division in the German army and was sent to the Volkhov front near Lake Ilmen, east of Leningrad.18 A few days after their departure Franco made a speech on the anniversary of the rising in which he linked Spain’s destiny to Nazi victory and said that the Allies had lost. This speech, combined with the despatch of the Blue Division, alarmed the British and they began to prepare Operation Pilgrim, the invasion of the Canary Islands. In the end, Churchill cancelled it, but increased the pressure on Franco’s regime by reducing oil and wheat deliveries, and demanding that exports of wolfram to Germany should cease.

  Even after Hitler’s check before Moscow in December 1941, and the entry of the United States into the war, Serrano Suñer became increasingly confident. But on 16 August 1942, just as Hitler’s armies began to advance on Stalingrad and strike into the Caucasus, a curious incident happened in Bilbao. During a religious festival at the shrine of the Virgin of Begona, a confrontation took place between Carlist traditionalists and Falangists. The clash developed from insults and shoving into something more deadly. A Falangist Juan Domíngo threw a hand grenade, which wounded 30 people. General Varela, a traditionalist, took the disturbance as an assassination attempt against himself, and announced that it constituted ‘an attack against the whole army’ and sent telegrams to all the captaincy-generals. Domíngo was accused of being an agent provocateur in the service of the British and was executed. For Franco, this presented the perfect occasion for his policy of divide and rule. On 3 September he accepted Varela’s resignation in protest at the ‘Falangization’ of the regime, but to balance the account he also dismissed Serrano Suñer. He replaced him as foreign minister with General Gómez-Jordana, an anglophile. His brother-in-law’s political career was at an end.

  When the Allies launched Operation Torch, their landings in North Africa, in November 1942, Gibraltar was used as their main base. Roosevelt sent Franco a letter to reassure him about Allied intentions towards Spain and its possessions in Morocco. Meanwhile the British encouraged Kindelán to put pressure on Franco to restore the monarchy, but without success. Franco, under pressure abroad and at home, could only contemplate the collapse of his imperial dreams and of the hopes of the Axis. After the Allied success in North Africa, which comp
letely changed the balance of power in the western Mediterranean, Field Marshal Paulus capitulated at Stalingrad at the end of January 1943. Then, in July, the Red Army during the Battle of Kursk smashed the Wehrmacht’s armoured strength and the Allies landed in Sicily, which soon led to the fall of Mussolini. The following summer saw the Allied invasion of Normandy and the destruction of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Centre in Belorussia. France was liberated by the end of August, and at the end of the year the last major German offensive was crushed in the Ardennes. In May 1945, the Third Reich finally collapsed.

  Franco had adapted to these dramatic geopolitical changes by modifying his policy towards the Allies, using Gómez-Jordana. On 16 March 1943 he had opened the Franquist version of the Cortes with a speech calling for an agreement with the Allies to defend ‘Western civilization’ from the Soviets and in November his withdrawal of the Blue Division was accompanied by a return to neutrality from his position of ‘nonbelligerency’. In May 1944 he closed the German consulate in Tangier and halted exports of wolfram to Germany. In August, following the death of Jordana, he appointed José Felix de Lequerica as foreign minister, who showed the same obsequious approach to the Allies that Serrano Suñer had adopted towards the Axis.

  At home, he adopted a tougher policy. Following the pressure to restore the monarchy in June 1943, he declared to his senior generals that this was a Masonic conspiracy designed to subvert the regime of 18 July 1936. And in September of that year he dismissed a group of monarchist generals, afraid that he might face the same downfall as Mussolini at the hands of the Fascist Grand Council. On 4 November 1944 he gave an interview to United Press in which he declared that nationalist Spain had never been fascist or national socialist and had never been allied to the Axis powers. When Hitler heard of this he said that ‘the nerve of señor Franco’ had no limits.19

  Once the Second World War was over, Franco on 17 July 1945 issued a decree on the Rights of Spaniards, which conceded a general pardon for political prisoners from the civil war. He calmed the large landowners and senior generals alike, and turned once more to the Church. On 18 July 1945 he formed a new government, giving key posts to Catholic politicians, thus achieving a transition to national Catholicism which sidelined the Movement. On 13 December 1946, the United Nations Organization recommended the withdrawal of ambassadors from Spain, yet the start of the Cold War, which was to last over forty years, would prove the salvation of his regime. On 17 April 1948 General Franco ended the state of war in Spain. It was nearly twelve years after the beginning of the civil war.

  37

  The Unfinished War

  For many Spanish republicans, especially those in France, the Second World War had been an equally tough continuation of the civil war. Once the war began, many republican refugees enlisted to fight against the common enemy. One of the formations which contained the highest proportion of Spanish republicans (1,000 out of 2,500) was the 13th Half-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion. Many other units, French and British, had Spaniards fighting in their ranks, in North Africa and elsewhere. A company of Spanish republicans fought with Colonel Robert Laycock’s commandos in the final phase of the battle of Crete.

  Perhaps the best-known contingent with the 3rd March Battalion of Chad, fought in General Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division all the way to Paris. The 9th Company–known as ‘La Nueve’, even by the French–under the command of Captain Raymond Dronne, were the first to enter the French capital to the sound of pealing bells on the night of 23 August 1944. Their tanks bore such names as Madrid, Teruel, Ebro, Guernica and Don Quixote.1

  Their less fortunate companions in France were either sent to camps in Germany or used as forced labour by the Organisation Todt. In Mauthausen the 7,200 Spaniards were made to wear a triangle of Falangist blue on their striped uniforms, even though they were ‘reds’. Some 5,000 of them died there. Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg and Auschwitz also held many Spanish republican prisoners.2

  In the Soviet Union some 700 Spanish republicans served in the Red Army and an equal number as partisans. Many others attempted to enlist but were told that they had fought in their own war and would serve the Soviet Union better by working in factories.3 Altogether 46 pilots, most of whom had been training in the Soviet Union at the end of the civil war, were sent to aviation regiments after appealing to La Pasionaria and other communist leaders of ‘the Moscow emigration’ to intercede on their behalf.4 More surprisingly, considering the Stalinist suspicion of foreign communists, 119 Spanish men and six women served in the OMSBON (the Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade of Special Designation of the NKVD of the USSR), which was the key praetorian unit in Moscow to defend the Kremlin. Six of them were officers and one became a company commander.5

  Others served in the 1st Special Air Brigade of NKVD Frontier Guards, stationed at Bykovo twenty kilometres south of Moscow, ready to defend the Soviet capital. Another 700 joined partisan units in the German rear, many of them parachuted in. They included a group of Catalans led by José Fusimaña, while another detachment of eighteen fought with Medvedev, one of the most renowned of all the Soviet partisan leaders.6 A number of republican soldiers who spoke good Russian served in the front-line Red Army as if they were Soviet citizens. La Pasionaria’s son, Rubén Ruiz Ibárruri, was made a Hero of the Soviet Union and died in the fighting before Stalingrad, while two others were awarded the Order of Lenin. It is also said that 150 Spanish orphans took part in the defence of Leningrad.7

  Many other republican refugees fought in the French resistance and the Forces Francçaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). During the first phase, until November 1942, their networks co-operated with Allied intelligence and helped with the escape routes for shot-down aircrews. Libertarians and poumistas were also active, such as Francisco Ponzán, (‘Francçois Vidal’), a former anarchist member of the Council of Aragón, who took part in the Pat O’Leary group. Captured by the Germans in August 1944, he was shot and his body was burned in a wood. Josep Rovira of the POUM managed to escape.

  During 1943 and the first half of 1944 there was a certain unification of Spanish resistance groups under Spanish communist direction in the south-west of France. In the last phase of the resistance in France, republican groups formed an important element during what became a virtual civil war against the Vichy Milice. As soon as the fighting in France was over they began looking at the Spanish frontier, expecting the imminent collapse of the Franquist regime.

  After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and following Comintern orders, the Spanish Communist Party had made urgent calls from Independent Spanish Radio and from Radio Toulouse to establish an anti-fascist front of all Spanish republican forces, including the CNT. The communists called this the Unión Nacional Española and it became the political arm of XIV Guerrilla Corps. From the start of 1944, XIV Corps controlled almost all Spanish units in 31 départements in the southern half of France. In May 1944 its name was changed to the Group of Spanish Guerrillas, and over the following months it took over all Spanish state property, consuls and trade councils in the region, hoisting the republican flag. The UNE called for a general mobilization on both sides of the border ready to ‘reorganize our patriotic army for the reconquest of Spain’.8 But Franco’s Spain would never be overthrown.

  Those who had taken to the hills, ‘los hombres de la sierra’, having escaped from prison or labour battalions, formed small, scattered groups which could not communicate effectively. Yet the first examples of armed resistance to nationalist conquest had started from the very beginning of the civil war. In Galicia, where so many had escaped the brutal Falangist repression, groups had formed in the hills, especially the Sierra do Eixe. In 1937 there were some 3,000 fugitives around Vigo and Tuy. There were other bands in León, Asturias, Santander, Cáceres, Badajoz, Granada, Ronda and Huelva, but they too were improvised and acted more for reasons of survival than as a co-ordinated resistance force. Most of those in the south were annihilated in
1937, but in the north the struggle continued until the end of the war and beyond. When the Asturias front had collapsed in 1937, over 2,000 soldiers fled to the mountains and the nationalists needed to deploy fifteen tabors of regulares and eight battalions of infantry for many months hunting them down.

  In the central zone during the war the fugitives grouped themselves in the mountains of Toledo under a former socialist mayor, Jesús Gómez Recio, and the communist José Manzanero, who had also escaped from prison, in his case on the day he was due to be executed after terrible tortures. From 1941, after many of the groups had been broken, the Civil Guard became the principal force engaged in anti-guerrilla operations. The guerrillas, having to survive by stealing food, often alienated the local population and helped the Franquist regime in its attempts to brand them as common brigands. The police also sent agents, pretending to have escaped from prison, to infiltrate their groups.

  After the liberation of France in 1944 the Spanish Communist Party prepared a double plan for its ‘reconquest’ of Spain–one was to invade across the Pyrenees, the other was to send small detachments of guerrillas into Spain to link up with other groups and organize a more co-ordinated resistance. The vain hope was that this would encourage the victorious Allies to take a more robust line against Franco’s regime. In September 1944 the communist leader Jesús Monzón gave the order to attack from the Valle de Arán, and from there advance on Lérida, with the idea of establishing a bridgehead in which a ‘government of national union’ could be set up to lead a mass rising across Spain. The operation was entrusted to the so-called 204th Division, which consisted of less than 4,000 men, under the command of Colonel Vicente López Tovar.