The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  21 Ahora, Madrid, 21 February 1936.

  22 Pedro C. González Cuevas, Acción española. Teología política y nacionalismo autoritario en España, 1913–1936, Madrid, 1998, pp. 172–4.

  23 Ismael Saz, Mussolini contra la Sunda República, pp. 139ff.

  24 Sheelagh Ellwood, Historia de Falange Española, Barcelona, 2001, pp. 65ff.

  25 Martin Blinkhorn, Carlismo y contrarrevolución en España, 1931–1939, Barcelona, 1979, p. 288.

  26 Ibid.

  CHAPTER 5: The Fatal Paradox

  1 Francisco Comín, Mauro Hernández and Enrique Llopis, op. cit., p. 285.

  2 See M. Requena Gallego, Los sucesos de Yeste, Albacete, 1983.

  3 Edward Malefakis, Reforma agraria y revolución campesina en la España del siglo XX, Barcelona, 1971, p. 434.

  4 Unemployment in Spain at this time was around 17 per cent, but it was closer to 30 per cent in Andalucia. In the summer of 1936 out of a total population of 24 million, 796,341 were unemployed and of those 522,079 (65 per cent) were agricultural workers, (Ibid., p. 331).

  5 ‘Cuando querrá el Dios del cielo que la justicia se vuelva/y los pobres coman pan y los ricos coman mierda’.

  6 ‘¿No habéis oído gritar las muchachas españolas estos días “¡Hijos, sí; maridos, no!”?’ Jose´ Antonio Primo de Rivera, ‘Carta a los militares de España’ in Obras completas, pp. 669–74.

  7 Indalecio Prieto, Discursos fundamentales, Madrid, 1976, pp. 272–3.

  8 There was an unusually high turnout of 70 per cent, with nearly a million votes in favour and little more than 6,000 against.

  9 Pedro Gómez Aparicio, Historia del periodismo español, Madrid, 1981, vol. iv, p. 467. Gabriel Jackson argues that the figure given for burned churches, considering that they were buildings made of stone, is highly improbable. In some cases people had merely lit a pile of newspapers on the steps as a gesture (Gabriel Jackson, La República española y la guerra civil, Barcelona, 1976, pp. 202–3).

  10 José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Obras completas, pp. 645–53. These parallels seem bizarre, since if followed through, they suggest that General Franco would have fared little better than General Kornilov, whose failed coup d’état helped trigger the bolshevik revolution.

  11 Gabriel Cardona, ‘Las operaciónes militares’ in M. Tuñón (ed.), La guerra civil española 50 años después, Barcelona, 1985, p. 205.

  12 The majority of the plots were being organized by members of the Unión Militar Española (UME), founded in 1933 by Captain Barba Hernández (the one who had accused Azaña over the Casas Viejas affair) and by a Falangist, Lieutenant-Colonel Rodríguez Tarduchy. The UME consisted of serving and retired officers. They did not represent more than 10 per cent of the officer corps, but maintained excellent relations with the Carlists, with Renovación Española, with the Juventudes de Acción Popular, with the Falange and with plotting generals. The UME held aloof from the ridiculous plot which Colonel Varela had planned for 19 April. Varela ended up in prison in Cádiz and General Orgaz who supported him was confined in Las Palmas (Carlos Blanco Escolá, Falacias de la guerra civil. Un homenaje a la causa republicana, Barcelona, 2005, p. 72).

  13 Sanjurjo was to be known as the chief–‘el Jefe’–and Valentín Galarza as the‘Técnico’.

  14 ‘Instrucciónes y directivas para el arranque de la conspiración, primero, y de un posible alzamiento, después’, Felix Maiz, Mola, aquel hombre, Barcelona, 1976, pp. 62–4.

  15 For details on Franco’s military career, see Paul Preston’s Franco, caudillo de España, Barcelona, 1994 and the highly critical Carlos Blanco Escolá, La incompetencia militar de Franco, Madrid, 2000, p. 21.

  16 See also Juan Pablo Fusi, Franco, Madrid, 1985, p. 26, and Herbert R. Southworth, El lavado de cerebro de Francisco Franco, Barcelona, 2000, pp. 187ff.

  17 The organization was created at the end of 1935 and its leading spirit was Captain Díaz Tendero, who was to die later in the concentration camp of Mauthausen.

  18 Julio Busquets and Juan Carlos Losada, op. cit., pp. 63ff.

  chapter 6: The Rising of the Generals

  1 Juan Campos, quoted by Ronald Fraser, Recuérdalo tú y recuérdalo a otros, p. 49.

  2 Gustau Nerín, La guerra que vino de áfrica, Barcelona, 2005, p. 178.

  3 Hugh Thomas, La guerra civil española, Barcelona, 1976, i, p. 239.

  4 General Romerales would be sentenced to death by a court martial on 26 August, accused of ‘sedition’ and ‘treason’, J. Casanova et al., Morir, matar, sobrevivir, Barcelona, 2002, p. 62.

  5 Luis Romero, Tres días de Julio, Barcelona, 1967, p. 12.

  6 José Millán Astray, Franco el Caudillo, Salamanca, 1939, pp. 22–6.

  7 J. Casanova et al., op. cit., p. 62.

  8 Quoted in Manuel Tuñón de Lara, La España del siglo xx, Paris, 1966, p. 429.

  9 Julián Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicisitudes de los españoles, Barcelona, 1977, p. 58.

  10 See Francisco Espinosa, La columna de la muerte. El avance del ejército franquista de Sevilla a Badajoz, Barcelona, 2003, p. 4.

  11 ABC de Sevilla, special supplement of 22 July 1936.

  12 Quoted by Fraser, Recuérdalo tú…, pp. 205–6.

  13 Quoted in Burnett Bolloten, La Revolución española, Barcelona, 1979, pp. 205–6.

  14 Eduardo de Guzmán, Madrid rojo y negro, Barcelona, 1938, p. 37.

  15 Hoy, México, D.F., 27 April 1940.

  16 Marías, Una vida presente, pp. 190–1.

  17 José Peirats, La CNT en la Revolución española, Paris, 1973, vol. i, p. 182.

  18 On the subject of the time Franco took to reach Morocco out of prudence, see Carlos Blanco Escolá, La incompetencia militar de Franco, pp. 216–18 and also Paul Preston, Franco, pp. 187–90.

  19 Carlos Blanco Escolá, Falacias de la guerra civil, p. 120.

  20 DGFP, Wegener to Foreign Ministry, pp. 3–4.

  21 Manuel Tuñon de Lara, Historia de España, vol. xii, pp. 456–9.

  22 ‘Dame la boina/dame el fusil/que voy a matar más rojos/que flores tienen/mayo y abril’.

  23 Gabriel Jackson, La República española…, p. 215.

  24 Marcel Junod, Warrior without Weapons, New York, 1951, p. 98.

  25 Ignacio Martín Jiménez, La guerra civil en Valladolid, 1936–1939, Valladolid, 2000, pp. 47ff.

  26 There cannot have been very many. According to Josep Fontana no more than 346 civilians in Barcelona took up arms against the Republic (Visions de guerra de reraguardia, Barcelona, 1977, prologue).

  27 ‘Soy el general Goded. Declaro ante el pueblo español que la suerte me ha sido adversa. En adelante, aquellos que quieran continuar la lucha no deben ya contar conmigo’, quoted in Tuñon, La España del siglo XX, p. 432.

  CHAPTER 7: The Struggle for Control

  1 Ian Gibson, Queipo de Llano, Barcelona, 1986, p. 76.

  2 Luis Romero, Tres días de Julio, p. 50.

  3 In 1919, when the French sent a squadron to the Black Sea during the Russian civil war to support the White Army, sailors of the battleships France and Jean Bart mutinied in support of the bolsheviks. Andre´ Marty, the French Comintern representative in Spain, had made an almost mythical reputation there when he played a leading part.

  4 Voelckels to Foreign Ministry, Alicante, 16 October 1936, DGFP, p. 112.

  5 Small bodies of troops had been flown before, including British soldiers sent from Cyprus to Iraq in 1932, but the transport of Franco’s troops across the Straits of Gibraltar is generally regarded as the first major air bridge.

  6 H. R. Trevor-Roper (ed.), Las conversaciónes privadas de Hitler, Barcelona, 2004.

  7 Santos Juliá (ed.), Victimas de la guerra civil, Madrid. 1999, pp. 87–8.

  8 Zugazagoitia, Guerra y vicissitudes, p. 70; Fraser, Recuérdalo tú y recuérdalo a otros, pp. 80, 86–7.

  9 Jack Lindsay, ‘On guard for Spain!’, Junta de Castilla y León, Salamanca, 1986, p. 132.

  10 Luis Romero, op. cit., p. 555.

  11 Ian
Gibson, Granada en 1936 y el asesinato de García Lorca, Barcelona, 1979, p. 75.

  12 Antonio Bahamonde, Un año con Queipo, or Memoirs of a Spanish Nationalist, London, 1939.

  13 Ronald Fraser, op. cit., p. 152.

  14 The rebels controlled approximately 235,000 square kilometres of the peninsular territory with eleven million people, and the Republic 270,000 with fourteen million.

  15 The Army of Africa comprised 15,000 regulares and 4,000 legionnaires, as well as 12,000 members of the Sultan’s forces and 1,500 Ifni riflemen. See Gustau Nerín, La guerra que vino de áfrica, Barcelona, 2005, p. 170.

  16 See Pierre Vilar, La guerra civil española, Barcelona, 1986, p. 66; Enrique Moradiellos, 1936. Los mitos de la guerra civil, Barcelona, 2004, p. 83; and Ramón Salas Larrazábal, Los datos exactos de la guerra civil, Madrid, 1980, pp. 62–3.

  CHAPTER 8: The Red Terror

  1 Callahan, La Iglesia católica en España, p. 282.

  2 Schwendemann, Salamanca, 27 December 1936 to Foreign Ministry, DGFP, p.189.

  3 The Rev. Dr Gerhard Ohlemüller, Secretary General of the Protestant World Council, protested to the Wilhelmstrasse on 28 November 1936, but the nationalist government refused to answer a German Foreign Ministry request to investigate (DGFP, pp. 144–5).

  4 See José M. Sanabre Sanromá, Martirologio de la Iglesia en la diócesis de Barcelona durante la persecución religiosa, Barcelona 1943; Hilari Raguer, La espada y la cruz: La Iglesia, 1936–1939, Barcelona, 1977; La pólvora y el incienso, Barcelona, 2001; Julián Casanova, La iglesia de Franco, Madrid, 2001.

  5 ‘Checa’ was the acronym for Chrezvichainaia Komissia, the ‘Extraordinary Commission’ to fight counter-revolutionary activities and sabotage. It was led by Feliks Dzherzhinsky, and became the forerunner of the OGPU, the NKVD and the KGB.

  6 The official Francoist account, Causa general, states that there were more than 200 checas in Madrid alone. See Santos Juliá (ed.), Víctimas de la guerra civil.

  7 Maria Casares, Residente privilégiée, Paris, 1980.

  8 Santos Juliá, Víctimas…, p. 131.

  9 Among the dead were the Falangists Julio Ruiz de Alda and Fernando Primo de Rivera; Jose´ María Albiñana, founder of the Nationalist Party, and the former ministers, Ramón Alvarez Valdés, Manuel Rico Avellot and José Martínez de Velasco and the old Melquíades Alvarez (Juliá, Victimas…, p. 73).

  10 Manuel Azaña, ‘Cuaderno de la Pobleta’ in Diarios completos, pp. 943ff.

  11 José Peirats, La CNT en la Revolución española, Toulouse, 1953, vol. i, p. 182.

  12 La guerra civil a Catalunya (1936–1939), vol. i, p. 152.

  13 For the repression by the left in Catalonia see J. M. Solé i Sabaté and J. Villarroya, La repressió a la reraguarda de Catalunya (1936–1939), Barcelona 1989, two volumes.

  14 In Huelva the civil governor, Diego Jiménez Castellano, did all that he could to protect the right-wingers put behind bars. On 12 August, in La Nava de Santiago (Badajoz), the municipal council stopped a crowd from setting fire to the church with 63 right-wing prisoners inside (Francisco Espinosa, La columna de la muerte, pp. 165–6). In Zafra the mayor, González Barrero, saved the prisoners just before Major Castejón’s troops arrived, (Espinosa, La columna de la muerte, p. 30). In Pozoblanco the head teacher, Antonio Baena, prevented an attack on the town jail (Juliá, Víctimas…, p. 165).

  15 Ibid., p. 412; see also G. Sánchez Recio, Justicia y guerra en España. Los tribunales populares, Alicante, 1991. Enrique Moradiellos raises the figure to 60,000 victims (1936. Los mitos de la guerra civil, p. 129).

  CHAPTER 9: The White Terror

  1 Mohammad Ibn Azzuz Akin, La actitud de los moros ante el Alzamiento, Algazara, 1997, p. 102.

  2 Dionisio Ridruejo, Escrito en España, Buenos Aires, 1964, p. 94.

  3 Casanova, Morir, matar…, p. 11.

  4 Santos Juliá, Victimas…, p. 92.

  5 This profession was one of the most heavily punished in the nationalist repression. Several hundred teachers were murdered in the first few weeks; 20 in Huelva, 21 in Burgos, 33 in Saragossa, 50 in León, etc. See Jesús Crespo, Purga de maestros en la guerra civil, Valladolid, 1987; F. Morente ‘La represió sobre el magisteri’ in Actes del IV Seminari sobre la República i la guerra civil, pp. 80 ff.

  6 Santos Juliá, Victimas…, p. 94.

  7 Julián Casanova, Morir, matar, sobrevivir, p. 106.

  8 Ibid., p. 107.

  9 Manuel Tuñón de Lara, La España del siglo XX, p. 451.

  10 Jackson, La República española y la guerra civil, p. 271.

  11 The same happened in Palencia, where the rising was immediately successful. In 1936 the freelance executions resulted in the death of 103 people, to which should be added the 169 sentences of death by military tribunals. In Soria 281 were killed and in Segovia, where little had happened before the war to justify the repression 358 were executed and another 2,282 imprisoned. See Jesús M. Palomares, La guerra civil en Palencia, Palencia 2002, pp. 121–44; Santiago Vega Sombría, De la esperanza a la persecución. La repressión franquista en la provincia de Segovia, Barcelona, 2005, p. 279.

  12 Juliá, op. cit., p. 101.

  13 Emilio Silva and Santiago Macías, Las fosas de Franco, Madrid, 2003, pp. 317ff.

  14 Ibid., pp. 151ff.

  15 Fraser, Recuérdalo tú, p. 369.

  16 Ibid., p. 211.

  17 Ibid., p. 213.

  18 When, in September 1936, a Falangist column reached Andavalo, where many of the miners for Rio Tinto worked, they killed 315 of the inhabitants. See Luciano Suero Sánchez, Memorias de un campesino andaluz en la revolución española, Madrid, 1982, p. 84.

  19 Espinosa, La columna de la muerte, p. 30.

  20 For the events at Badajoz see Espinosa, La columna de la muerte;Mário Neves, A chacina de Badajoz, Lisbon, 1985; Julián Chaves, La guerra civil en Extremadura, Editora Regional de Extremadura, 1997; Alberto Reig Tapia, Memoria de la guerra civil, Madrid, 1999 and Justo Vila, Extremadura: La guerra civil, Badajoz, 1983. The journalists who gave the news to the world soon afterwards included: Mario Neves, Marcel Dany of Havas, Jacques Berthet of Temps, Jean d’Esme of l’Intransige´ant, Rene´ Brut a cameraman with Pathé Newsreels, Jay Allen of the Chicago Tribune and John T. Whitaker of the New York Herald Tribune.

  21 The figure of 6,610 was compiled by Francisco Espinosa, but he added that the figure might well prove to be twice as high. La columna de la morte, p. 321.

  22 John Whitaker, We Cannot Escape History. New York, 1943, quoted by Reig Tapia, Memoria de la guerra civil, pp 140–1.

  23 Lorca was killed on 18 August along with the teacher Dióscoro Galindo González and the anarchist banderilleros Joaquín Arcollas and Francisco Galadí, in Fuente Grande, next to the gully of Víznar, where the bodies of hundreds of victims lay (Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca, vol. i, Barcelona, 1998, p. 485). Before ordering the killing of the poet, the new governor, Colonel Jose´ Valdés Guzmán, head of the Falangist squads, telephoned Queipo de Llano to consult him. He apparently replied, ‘Give him coffee, a lot of coffee.’ Café, it must be remembered, was formed by the initials of ‘Camaradas: Arriba Falange Española’. The death certificate stated: ‘died in the month of August 1936 as a result of war wounds’. See Ian Gibson, Granada en 1936 y el asesinato de Federico García Lorca, Barcelona, 1979.

  24 TNA, FO 371/39742, 9903.

  25 Juliá, Victimas…, p. 201.

  26 A. Nadal Sànchez, Guerra civil en Málaga, Málaga, 1984.

  27 See Ignacio Martín Jiménez, La guerra civil en Valladolid, 1936–1939, Valladolid, 2000.

  28 Fraser, Recuérdalo tú…, p. 219.

  29 Ibid., p. 217.

  30 Juliá, Victimas…, pp. 411–12.

  31 Article of 25 July 1936, quoted by Ian Gibson, Queipo de Llano, p. 83.

  chapter 10: The Nationalist Zone

  1 The junta assumed ‘all the powers of the state and legitimately represented the country to foreign powers’ (Boletin Oficial del Estado
of 25 July 1936).

  2 Constancia de la Mora, Doble esplendor, Barcelona, 1977, p. 247.

  3 Manuel Tuñón de Lara, La España del siglo xx, p. 479.

  4 The full text of the pastoral letter is in Antonio Montero, Historia de la persecución religiosa en España, 1936–1939, Madrid, 1961.

  5 Bahamonde, p. 34.

  6 La Unión, Seville, 15 August 1936.

  7 In October the Falange had 35,000 members, which represented 54 per cent of the nationalist militias and 19 per cent of the total nationalist forces, many more than the Carlist requetés.

  8 Messerschmitt of the Export Cartel for War Matériel, 8 September 1936, DGFP, p. 88.

  9 G. Sánchez Recio et al., Guerra civil y franquismo en Alicante, Alicante, 1990, p. 27; Gil Pecharromán, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, p. 455.

  10 Voelckers to Foreign Ministry, 17 October, 1936, DGFP pp. 114–15.

  11 Ellwood, Prietas las filas, pp. 90–1.

  12 For Queipo’s direction of the Andalucian economy see Banco Exterior de España, Política commercial exterior en España(1931–1975), Madrid, 1979, pp. 144ff.

  13 For a study of Millán Astray see Geoffrey Jensen, Irrational Triumph. Cultural Despair, Military Nationalism and the Ideological Origins of Franco’s Spain, Reno, 2002, pp. 140ff.

  14 Cervantes’s satire on chivalry in Don Quixote was said to have been partially inspired from his wounds received at Lepanto in 1571.

  15 No exact record of Unamuno’s speech was published. The Salamanca papers next day reported every other speech, but not his. This version was written down soon afterwards. See Emilio Salcedo, Vida de don Miguel, Salamanca, 1964; and Luis Portillo, ‘Unamuno’s Last Lecture’ in Cyril Connolly, The Golden Horizon, London, 1953.

  CHAPTER 11: The Republican Zone

  1 Pierre Vilar, La guerra civil española, Barcelona, 1986, p. 104.

  2 The Spanish Communist Party in a report to the Comintern on 15 February 1937 claimed 250,00 members, ‘of whom 135,000 are at the front’ (RGASPI 495/120/259, p. 3).

  3 Manuel Azaña, ‘La revolución abortada’ in Obras completas, México, 1967, vol. iii, p. 499.

  4 Fernando Solano, La tragedia del Norte, Barcelona, 1938, p. 73.

  5 The Basque government consisted of four PNV councillors, three from the PSOE, one for the ANV, one from Izquierda Republicana, one from Unión Republicana and one member of the PCE.