Europe: A History (202 page)
The five years of constitutional government from 1931 to 1936 brought mayhem out of chaos. In 1931 the Primate, the Archbishop of Toledo, was exiled for denouncing the Republic. In 1932 an abortive
pronunciamiento
was launched by the generals. In 1933 the landowners of the south kept peasants off the land rather than accept reform. Legislation introducing state schools and divorce, and separating Church from State, could not be implemented. Agrarian reform was reversed and sequestrated land returned to its former owners. In 1934 a determined strike by miners in Asturias grew into a separatist rising which was broken only with massive bloodshed. In the elections of February 1936 the left-wing
Frente Popular
or ‘Popular Front’ of republicans, socialists, Catalans, and communists carried the day. But by then the central government was losing control. Recalcitrant peasants were occupying the great estates. Workers were organizing one general strike after another. The Catalans were claiming autonomy. Political murders and church-burning proliferated. ‘We are present today’ said the outgoing Catholic Prime Minister, ‘at the funeral service of democracy.’ The country was becoming ungovernable.
On 18 July 1936 the Generals struck for a second time. General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) crossed to Tetuán from his command in the Canaries and issued a manifesto. Spain was to be saved from Red revolution; the army in North Africa
would not hesitate to use its Moorish troops. ‘The Crusade against Marxism’, as one republican sympathizer put it, ‘was to be undertaken by Moors against Catholics.’
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At the outset, the political spectrum in Spain was extremely wide and complicated. In the Cortes, the Popular Front was opposed by a right-wing coalition, including the
Acción Popular
or ‘People’s Action’ and the Fascist
Falange Española
, recently founded by Primo de Rivera’s son. On the left, the Communist Party hold only 16 out of the Front’s 277 seats, compared to 89 for the Socialists headed by Largo Caballero and 84 for Manuel Azaña’s Left Republicans. Inexorably, however, the strains of civil war boosted the fortunes of the two most violent and radical extremes. The
Falange
was destined to become the main political instrument of the army. The communists were destined to dominate the beleaguered Republic. Franco said, and possibly believed, that he was fighting to forestall Bolshevism. His slogan was
Fe ciega en la victoria
‘Blind Faith in Victory’. It was beside the point that the communist menace was exaggerated, what counted was that many Spaniards feared it.
The pattern of political and geographical support became very complex. When Franco’s army command proclaimed its insurrection in Morocco, it rebelled against the Government of the Spanish Republic in Madrid, headed at the time by Azaña. The army could count on garrisons in each of the main cities of the mainland, on the paramilitary squads of the
Falange
, and, in some areas, on the ultra-Catholic formations, the
Requetes
, left over from the Carlist era. Generally speaking, they could count on the political support of the Catholic hierarchy, of the larger landowners, and of all who gave priority to the restoration of law and order. From an early stage they received military assistance from Portugal, from Nazi Germany, and from Fascist Italy. Portugal offered secure bases. The war-planes of the German Condor Legion provided air superiority. Early in 1937 Italian troops occupied the Balearic Islands, and the southern coast round Málaga.
The Government, in contrast, had few professional troops to call its own. In time, it trained and fielded a regular force; but it had to rely heavily on the armed militias of various left-wing unions—the socialist PSOE, the anarchist FAI, the Marxist but anti-Stalinist POUM, the UGT and the communist-run CNT. Generally speaking, it could count on the political support of the peasants in the countryside, of workers in the towns, of anticlericals everywhere, and of all who gave priority to constitutional government. From an early stage they received assistance from abroad: tanks, planes, munitions, and advisers from the USSR, and in the International Brigades a flood of perhaps 50,000 foreign volunteers. In the later stages, in 1938–9, it has to be said that the nightmare painted by Fascist propaganda
did
materialize. Under Dr Negrin, the Government did fall under the influence of hard-line communists, and its security agency, the Military Investigation Service (SIM), into the direct control of the Soviet GPU. The Spanish Republic’s gold, transferred to Odessa for safe keeping in September 1936, was never returned, [
ADELANTE
]
The fighting was long, fragmented, and often confused (see Appendix III,
p. 1324). Ragged and vicious local confrontations were more common than sustained campaigns or set-piece battles. Behind the lines, massacres of prisoners and civilians were perpetrated by both sides. The strategic layout was not simple. After the initial exchanges, when army garrisons in Madrid and Barcelona were shelled into submission, the Government held most of the country except for the northwest at Corunna and the extreme south at Seville. But once the army had re-established itself along the Portuguese frontier, and captured the central fortress of Toledo, it could gradually envelop the Government strongholds on the north coast and in the corridor linking Madrid and Valencia. The Army Junta established itself at Burgos, with HQ at Salamanca; the Government at Valencia. Outstanding events included the year-long nationalist siege of Oviedo, the German bombing of Guernica in April 1937, the lunging operations for control of the Ebro and the strong point of Teruel in 1938, and, in 1939, the terminal sieges first of Barcelona (January) and then of Madrid (March). In Barcelona, ‘the wildest city in Europe’, where Catalans and anarchists were opposed to any form of Spanish government,
whether Red or White, the tragedy ended with frightful massacres perpetrated by both the defeated communists and their erstwhile anarchist allies. In Madrid, where the rump Council of Defence of the Popular Front eventually renounced the communists, it ended with the rebels’ triumphal entry on 29 March. At the victory parade, Franco could at last voice his slogans with conviction: ‘Hay orden en el país’ (there is order in the country) and ‘España, una, grande, libre’ (Spain is one, great, and free). Republican leaders fled. Thousands of refugees poured over the Pyrenees.
51
Spain lay firmly in the Fascists’ grip for 40 years, [
FARAON
]
ADELANTE
I
N
September 1936, Comintern’s propaganda chief in Western Europe I advised Moscow to form a series of International Brigades to fight for the Spanish Republic. The idea had originated with Maurice Thorez of the Parti Communiste Francais, who remembered the ‘International Legion of the Red Army’ which had fought in the Russian Civil War.
1
From the start, therefore, though the Brigades were presented as the spontaneous action of volunteers, they were thoroughly subordinated to the Communist movement. They operated outside the regular command of the Spanish Republican Army; all their senior military and political staff were Communist appointees; and all recruits were vetted by Soviet agents. Their slogans were ‘Spain—the graveyard of European Fascism’,
No pasarán
(‘They will not pass’), and
Adelante
, ‘Forward’.
The principal recruiting office in Paris was headed by Jozip Broz, alias ‘Tito’, the future dictator of Yugoslavia. It organized a ‘secret railway’, using false passports to send recruits to the Spanish frontier and thence to the Brigades’ main base at Albacete in La Mancha.
In Europe of the Depression there was a large pool of manpower to draw on—unemployed workers, refugees from the Fascist states, rebel intellectuals. Of the 50,000 who served, the biggest contingents were raised by the Confederation Générale du Travail in France, by Polish miners’ organizations in Belgium and the French département of Le Nord, and by left-wing German exiles. Eighty per cent of them were working men. There was also a nucleus of foreign volunteers already serving at the front. These included German, Italian, French, and British ‘columns’ (see Appendix III, p. 1325). Their leaders included Carlo Rosselli, a socialist who had escaped from a Fascist gaol in Italy, and Hans Beimler, a German escapee from Dachau.
The intellectual recruits were few, but vocal. They answered the call, often without knowing the implications:
Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fisherman’s islands,
Or the corrupt heart of a city;
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.
2
The military leadership of the Brigades was not experienced in warfare. The commander-in-chief, Andre Marty, a Catalan sailor from Perpignan, had led a mutiny in the French fleet off Odessa in 1919. The chief military adviser, Col. Karol Swierczewski, alias ‘Walter’, was a Polish officer from the Soviet security service, and a professor at the military academy in Moscow. The inspector-general, Luigi Longo, and the chief political officer, Giuseppe di Vittorio, were Italian Communists. The one commander to show real talent was Lazar Stern, alias ‘General Kléber’, an Austrian Jew from Bukovina, who had gone over to the Bolsheviks as a POW in Russia. He, like many such comrades, would be shot on Stalin’s orders on his return to Russia.
The courage of the men was not in doubt. They lived in squalid conditions and were subject to ferocious discipline, including executions, for the slightest offence. They fought with desperate courage. At the siege of Madrid in November 1936, for example, the British battalion lost one third of its effectives. At the Jarama, the same unit suffered 375 casualties out of 600 men.
3
Worst of all, the Brigades were used to suppress the communists’ erstwhile socialist and anarchist allies by brute force.
By the end of 1938, the Kremlin agreed to pull the Brigades out. About 12,000 departed, leaving some 6,000 Germans with nowhere to go. A farewell parade in Barcelona on 15 November, held under portraits of Negrin, Azaña, and Stalin, was addressed by ‘La Pasionaria’:
You are history … You are legend … We will not forget you. And when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves again, and mingles them with the laurels of a victorious Spanish Republic … come back!
4
Thanks to later developments, when the Western powers adopted the anti-Fascist cause, the career of the International Brigades in Spain attracted much favourable publicity. In fact, they were always outnumbered by the foreigners fighting for Franco. The latter included some Fascist regulars, some idealistic volunteers, and some, like the Irish Brigade of General O’Duffy, blatant adventurers. To see the overall picture, one has to compare the recruits raised by the Communists in 1936–7 with those attracted by the Fascists both in Spain and in the Second World War [
LETTLAND
].
Franco’s victory over ‘the Spanish people’, as his opponents put it, was frequently attributed to his superior armaments and foreign help. But the truth was not so simple or so palatable. The ‘Spanish people’ were not all on one side, and neither were all of Spain’s ‘anti-democratic’ forces. It is hard to say whether the Spanish Republic was more discomfited by its nationalist enemies or by the totalitarian elements within its own ranks. Franco could unite his supporters; the Republic’s supporters could not organize a united or effective democracy.
For Spain, the Civil War was a tragic lesson in the fruits of fratricidal hatred. Estimates of casualties range from 400,000 to a million.
52
For Europe, it was yet another object lesson in the mechanisms whereby disciplined minorities can take control of countries which let them breed. Also, since Western sympathies were strongly behind the defeated Republic, it greatly magnified fears of a general fascist menace. By the same token, it diminished fears of the ‘Red Bogey’. Thanks to Franco’s unwelcome success, public opinion in the Western democracies entered the ‘anti-fascist’ mode which was to characterize its priorities for the duration. Franco strengthened the West’s resolve to stand up to Hitler and Mussolini, whilst lowering its sensitivity to Stalin. After March 1939 it was hard for any politician in the West to argue that communism was as great a menace as fascism.
FARAON
G
ENERAL
Franco’s mausoleum, at Cuel de Moros in the Valley of the Fallen near Madrid, was built after his victory in 1939. It consists of a grandiose underground basilica, larger than the nave of St Peter’s, which is approached through a tunnel hewn through the granite and lined with the tombs of the Civil War dead. On the exterior it is surmounted by ‘the largest Christian symbol ever erected’—a stone cross 492 ft high and weighing 181,740 tons.
1
It was constructed by the slave labour of ex-POWs, branded with the letter ‘T’ for
trabajador
or ‘worker’, who toiled for two decades between the work-site, the quarries, and compulsory church services in the nearby Escorial. They were officially employed by the ‘Board for the Redemption of Penalties through Labour’—a name reminiscent of Nazi slogans. Visiting the site in 1940, a Nazi officer was said to have remarked, ‘Who does [Franco] think he is—a new Pharaoh?’
Ironically enough, Franco’s victory came too late to arrest the general drift of events. If fascism had triumphed in Spain in 1937 or 1938, it is conceivable that the West would have been aroused to the danger in time to nip Hitler in the bud. It is conceivable that the whole sorry story of appeasement could have been avoided. As it was, in the three years that the Civil War in Spain dragged on, the dictators grew from strength to strength, and the chance for collective security was missed.
‘Collective security’ was one of several abortive brain-children of the Western Powers, especially of the British, who were past masters at getting somebody else to do the fighting for them. Discussions went back to late 1933 when Hitler first pulled Germany out of the League of Nations. Before then, since the Soviet Union did not impinge on the West directly, Western anxieties had remained low. But the prospect of Nazi Germany on the loose in central Europe brought the danger rather nearer home. The obvious solution was for London and Paris to revive the strategic triangle of the Great War, and to recruit the Soviet Union as a counterweight to Germany. It was a move which the British in particular had been hoping to make since 1917. There was something of a public-relations problem, of course, in that Western politicians had been given to bad-mouthing Soviet communism; but it was not beyond the ingenuity of diplomats to explain that the Soviet regime was now entering a constructive phase, or that Stalin was more democratic than Lenin and Trotsky. Hence, in the middle of the most enormous campaigns of mass killing in European history, Stalin was made respectable and brought into the fold of the peaceful nations. Hitler’s representative walked out of the League on 14 October 1933; Stalin’s representative, Maxim Litvinov, moved in on 18 September 1934.
