The Spanish Civil War (116 page)

1.
Some discussions in the cabinet about oil supplies are described by Azaña in his diaries.

1.
The decline in share prices was admittedly accompanied by hoarding, to almost the same extent as investment in equities had fallen: post-office savings stood at 239 million pesetas in 1928—and at 370 million in 1935. Savings-bank deposits were at 1,608 million pesetas in 1928; they had reached 2,778 million in 1934.

1.
From 230,646 Tm in 1927 to 340,917 Tm in 1931–34.

2.
Figures in Tamames, pp. 86–91. The percentage of Spanish exports represented by oranges was 11.7 per cent in 1926–30, and (for the sake of contemporary comparison), 12.67 per cent in 1959.

3.
The population increased from 23.6 million in 1930 to 25.88 million in 1940—a regular rate of increase of just under 1 per cent per year, even taking into account the civil war.

1.
39,582, 37,376 and 24,927 in 1931, 1932 and 1933 respectively (Ramón Tamames,
La república, la era de Franco,
Madrid, 1973, p. 58).

2.
In 1933, there were well over 1,000 strikes, losing some 14 million work days: such figures are only perhaps meaningful if they are compared with what went before. Thus the number of strikes for the seven years 1929–35 were 96, 402, 734, 681, 1,127, 594 and 164 respectively (Balcells, p. 175).

3.
Balcells, p. 53.

1.
The phrase was the inspiration of the economist Joaquín Costa. Cf. too Unamuno’s ‘let us kill Cervantes’ which so shocked Lorca.

1.
Documents diplomatiques français,
1932–39, 2
^e
Série, Tome IV, p. 171.

1.
The phrase occurred in the ‘
treintista
’ manifesto, qu. Peirats, vol. I, p. 45.

2.
Though not in the same order as they had been in the past. For example, in the First Carlist War, the liberals were the advocates of control by Castile against the regional claims of the Basques and Catalans, while, in 1936, the heirs of the liberals stood for federation.

1.
Qu. Robinson, p. 115.

2.
Prieto in
El Liberal,
26 June 1936.

3.
Azaña, vol. IV, p. 559.

1.
See Raymond Carr,
The Republic and the Civil War in Spain
(London, 1971), p. 14: ‘the republic represented a wholesale process of politicization: for five years it incorporated, for good or evil, the mass of Spaniards into political life’. The collapse of the republic might thus be explained by the revolution in communications.

2.
‘
Cara al Sol
’ was written by Agustín de Foxá, Dionisio Ridruejo and José María Alfaro, with José Antonio’s help, and first sung in public in February 1936. The martial music was by Juan Tellería. The image of dying face to the sun is a direct copy, presumably conscious, from the poem ‘The White Rose’ by the Cuban ‘apostle’ of Liberty, José Martí. The anthem of the Catholic youth began: ‘Forward, with faith in victory, For the country and for God, To conquer or to die; The laurel of glory awaits us, for History is with us, the future is on our side’.

1.
‘
Hijos del Pueblo
’, a song in can-can rhythm, despite its words, was selected as the anthem of the anarchist movement at the Second Literary Competition, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Barcelona (1890). A better song than any of these was the Carlists’ ‘
Por Dios, Patria, Rey
’, composed in the 1830s.

1.
Cruzada,
IX, p. 523.

2.
Ansaldo, p. 42.

3.
José Antonio,
Obras,
pp. 1113–14.

1.
C. Lorenzo, p. 209 fn. 49. Azaña, vol. III, p. 499, says that in 1937 there was a public meeting to celebrate the anniversary of the building strike, ‘among whose merits, in the minds of its panegyrists, was that it precipitated the rising’.

2.
González Peña got in by 10,993 to 2,876. A second poll gave him a narrower majority.

1.
The remark was made to Henry Buckley, then the
Times
correspondent in Madrid. Araquistain himself, who later became a passionate anti-communist, alleges that he often at this time saw the Comintern agent, Codovilla, arriving to call on Alvarez del Vayo (he lived in a flat above). Santiago Carrillo (
Demain Espagne,
p. 43) confirmed that Codovilla was partly instrumental in making him a communist. He had even visited him in prison in 1935. Carrillo says that he attended meetings of the communist central committee from March 1936 though not yet a communist. Carrillo also went to Russia and came back delighted. Araquistain’s political trajectory in the 1930s is hard to follow; at first a strong social democrat, he had become a revolutionary by 1934. After 1936, he was again cautious and became a right-wing socialist. The July issue of his journal
Leviatán,
however, could not have been more pro-Soviet.

2.
Tagüeña, p. 92. De Rosa had been sentenced to five years in Belgium and served two. He went to Spain, took part in the revolution of 1934, was gaoled, and was a hero to the socialist youth.

1.
Martín Blázquez, p. 72.

2.
Carlist Archives, Seville. The ‘certain things’ were an assurance to the Falange that the rising would occur on 15 July, and the hiring of an aircraft to take Franco to Morocco.

3.
Carlist Archives.

4.
Lizarza, p. 97.

1.
See Payne,
Politics and the Military,
p. 335 and references. It is possible that Franco only decided to act when, some time between 10 and 13 July, he was told that the others would go ahead even if he did not join them. See, e.g., Robinson, p. 288. Others think that Franco and Mola had had a good understanding since late 1935.

2.
Robinson, p. 288. Though the Spanish air arm had been incompetent in the Moroccan Wars, Kindelán had had an excellent fighting record there, and enjoys the dubious distinction of being among the first ever to use an aircraft for military purposes, against Moroccan tribesmen. His original surname was O’Kindelan and his ancestors left Ireland in the time of Cromwell.

3.
Iribarren, p. 70. Maiz records a meeting indicating that at least some of the conspirators thought failure a possibility. ‘Whose head will be the first to fall?’ Fanjul asked. ‘Yours, Joaquín,’ replied Lucius Arrieta, a Carlist (Maiz, p. 247). His head fell, though not the first.

1.
Luca de Tena had been passed the order by General Kindelán, now one of the communication channels of the conspiracy. Bolín’s memoirs have now been published as
Spain, the Vital Years
(London, 1967). Juan March paid (Gil Robles, p. 780). For March’s help, see also the testimony of Tomás Peire, quoted De la Cierva,
Historia,
vol. II, p. 148.

2.
News Chronicle
(7 November 1936) published an account of these events by the pilot Captain Bebb, with whom I also discussed the matter. Bebb believed that he was being asked to carry a ‘Rif chieftain to a revolution’.

3.
Cruzada,
XIII, pp. 62–3. Pollard had had, as Jerrold put it, ‘experience of revolutions’ (Douglas Jerrold,
Georgian Adventure,
London, 1937, p. 371). Jerrold, chairman of Eyre and Spottiswoode, had been active in putting the case against the republic.

4.
Peirats, vol. I, p. 136.
‘¿Ellos se levantan? Yo me voy a acostar.’

5.
Ibarruri, p. 244.

6.
Evidence of Francisco Giral, Giral’s son.

1.
Payne,
Politics,
p. 337; Blinkhorn,
op. cit.;
see also accounts in Robinson, p. 300; and Burgo, p. 123. François-Xavier de Bourbon-Parme, a remote cousin of the Spanish royal family, had been adopted by Alfonso Carlos as regent and his heir earlier in the year.

2.
Cruzada,
IX, p. 557.

3.
Evidence of Luis Bolín, Douglas Jerrold and Captain Bebb.

1.
Tagüeña, p. 99;
El Sol,
July 14, 1936. The murderers of Castillo were apparently falangists. One of them seems to have been Angel Alcázar de Velasco, later a prominent if rebellious member of the Falange, who gained the falangist silver medal of valour for his part in this ‘victory’ (Iturralde, vol. II, p. 107, and private information). Eduardo Alvarez Puga,
Historia de la Falange
(Barcelona, 1972), p. 30, says that the assassins were men of the UME.

1.
She was supposed to have cried in the Cortes, ‘That is your last speech,’ as Calvo Sotelo sat down after another violent oration. But there is no record of the remark in
Diario de Sesiones,
nor was it heard by two such reliable witnesses then present as Henry Buckley and Miguel Maura.

2.
Juan Simeón Vidarte,
Todos fuimos culpables
(Mexico, 1973), p. 215.

1.
The above derives from a personal account by the then lieutenant of the 6th Company of assault guards of Pontejos, Alfredo León-Lupin (Caracas), and from another by the late Manuel Tagüeña, then a socialist student leader and present in the ministry of the interior when Castillo’s body arrived. See also Tagüeña’s memoirs, pp. 99–100; Zugazagoitia, p. 30; and Prieto,
Convulsiones,
vol. III, p. 133. The possibilities of a premeditated murder cannot be quite excluded, but the government was surely not involved. Other versions identify this Cuenca as Vitoriano Cuenca, a ‘bodyguard of the ex-dictator of Cuba, Gerardo Machado’. A very different interpretation of this murder is given by Major Manuel Uribarri (
La quinta columna española,
Havana, 1943, p. 171f.) who argued that Condés, a friend of his, deliberately ‘executed’ Calvo Sotelo in order to rid the republic of a dangerous enemy.

2.
After the start of the civil war, Condés and Cuenca were both killed in the Guadarrama. The documents in the ministry of the interior relating to the investigation were seized by a group of militiamen on 25 July and presumably destroyed.

3.
Sergio Vilar, p. 636.

4.
Zugazagoitia, p. 22.

1.
Iribarren, pp. 63, 91n.; Maiz,
op. cit.
Goded’s motives in demanding this change are not quite clear. Iturralde (vol. I, p. 86) alleges that Goded thought Barcelona a suitable place in which to arrange a compromise if the rising should fail. Payne (
Politics,
p. 509) and Prieto,
Palabras al viento
(Mexico, 1942), p. 280, discuss the possibility that Goded had desired to withdraw from the conspiracy when he suspected that Mola might be going to make arrangements with Italy: Goded was a nationalist, not a fascist.

1.
For an impression of Madrid in July, see the novel
Visperas de San Camilo 1936,
by Camilo José Cela (Madrid, 1969).

2.
Lizarra, p. 31.

1.
Iribarren, p. 89; Maiz, p. 251.

1.
The monarchist polemicist Vegas Latapié had, however, approached the navy. See Gil Robles, p. 726 fn. 68.

2.
Bebb’s journey had been full of incident: in Casablanca, he had lost his radio operator, dead drunk in the Casbah; at Cape Yubi there had been a banquet at which Bebb’s passengers had celebrated immoderately. Bebb reached Las Palmas on 14 July.

3.
Maiz, p. 232.

4.
Gibson, p. 51.

5.
Lerroux, p. 581.

1.
Cruzada,
X, p. 17.

1.
See Salvador Fernández Álvarez,
Melilla, la primera en el alzamiento
(Melilla, 1939), and Fernández de Castro,
El alzamiento nacional en Melilla
(Melilla, 1940).

2.
Maximiniano García Venero,
Falange,
p. 185. According to some, military members of the Falange in July 1936 numbered 30 per cent of the total. This must be an exaggeration.

3.
Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–45,
Series D, vol. III (‘Germany and the Spanish Civil War 1936–9’), p. 9. This volume of the German Foreign Ministry Documents is hereinafter referred to as
GD.

1.
The news of the rising in Morocco caused confusion among the peninsular plotters: should they keep to the date planned, or also advance their action?

2.
See De la Cierva,
Historia ilustrada,
vol. I, p. 252.

3.
Cruzada,
X, p. 44.

4.
A
bandera
was a self-contained battalion of 600 men, including maintenance units and mobile artillery.

1.
Cruzada,
X, pp. 34–40. A left-wing account of the rising in Tetuán was given by Antonio Mata Lloret in
La batalla,
reprinted in
El Sol,
25 August 1936. Mata, a telegraph officer, alleged that detainees were forced to drink a half-litre of castor oil.

2.
Ibid.,
p. 44.

3.
Ibid.,
pp. 44–5.

4.
Text in Fernando Díaz-Plaja,
La historia de España en sus documentos, el siglo XX: la guerra 1936–1939
(Madrid, 1963), p. 150f. Nor did Franco make any mention of Sanjurjo as the nominal head of the movement. The manifesto was apparently written by the ‘auditor of the juridical corps of the army’, Lorenzo Martínez Fuset, Franco’s legal adviser and a man who played a critical part in the institutionalization of Franco’s dictatorship; he accompanied Franco on this journey. Curiously, he had in his youth been an intimate friend of the poet Lorca.

1.
Cruzada,
X, pp. 67–71.

2.
Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros,
Memorias
(Paris, 1964), vol. II, p. 267.

3.
Zugazagoitia, p. 41.

4.
R. Salas Larrazábal, vol. I, p. 128.

1.
The Times,
20 July 1936.

2.
The indefatigable German historian of the anarchist movement, Max Nettlau, who arrived shortly in Barcelona, later tried rather unsuccessfully to rationalize this. ‘Where a measure of autonomy existed,’ he wrote in the CNT-FAI bulletin, on 25 July, ‘the people could and did get arms at the right time. Where autonomy did not exist, little or nothing could be done and the enemy thus—and only thus—gained a temporary advantage.’

1.
A vivid and detailed account is Luis Romero,
Tres dias de julio
(Barcelona, 1967).

1.
Canalla, canaille,
or rabble, remained Queipo’s favourite word throughout the war. For a study of Queipo de Llano, see a recent new biography by his granddaughter, Ana Quevedo (Madrid, 2001). For Seville, see also
Cruzada,
XI, pp. 154–202;
ABC de Sevilla,
18 July 1937; Antonio Bahamonde,
Un año con Queipo de Llano
(Barcelona, 1938), p. 26f.

2.
For the rising in Cádiz (described by the Right as
Rusia Chica,
due to the extent of socialist control) see Antonio Garrachón Cuesta’s
De Africa a Cádiz y de Cádiz a la España Imperial
(Cádiz, 1938).

1.
Ronald Fraser,
In Hiding, The Life of Manuel Cortes
(London, 1972), p. 131. For an interesting impression of Málaga, see Brenan,
Personal Record,
p. 285.

2.
Left-wing resistance continued at Santa Cruz de la Palma till 28 July. Otherwise the Canaries were also conquered for the rising by 20 July. (
Cruzada,
X, p. 76.)

3.
Where he would be murdered, for his pains.

4.
He was subsequently expelled from the republican army as too revolutionary, and became military adviser to the CNT. See R. Salas Larrazábal, vol. I, p. 88. Gómez Morato was condemned to thirty years’ imprisonment for having opposed the rising.

1.
André Malraux,
L’Espoir
(Paris, 1937), p. 8. Avila did not rise till 19 July. The telephone exchange itself continued to serve both parties impartially—as it did throughout the civil war—a feat of which its American management were justly proud. See the comment by Luis Romero in
Tres dias de julio.

2.
The anarchists in Madrid appeared indifferent to all these events, being still preoccupied by the building strike (Zugazagoitia, p. 57).

1.
The most popular song, played interminably during these hot nights, was ‘The Music Goes Round and Round and It Comes Out Here’.

2.
Constancia de la Mora,
In Place of Splendor
(New York, 1939), p. 227.

3.
Evidence of Margarita Nelken (who accompanied a delegation of the Madrid
casa del pueblo
to Rodrigo Gil) to Burnett Bolloten,
The Grand Camouflage
(London, 1961), p. 29.

1.
Evidence of Francisco Giral.

2.
See below, pp. 253 and 259, for calculations.

1.
Azaña, vol. IV, p. 714; cf. Jackson, p. 243; Maximiniano García Venero,
El General Fanjul
(Madrid, 1967), p. 287, for the programme which Sánchez Román suggested for this government.

2.
Bertrán Güell, p. 76; Iribarren, pp. 101–2; Maiz, p. 304.
Diario de Navarra
of 19 July gave news of the conversation. See also the account by Ramón Feced, minister of agriculture in this government, to García Venero, in his
El General Fanjul,
p. 287. Gil Robles (p. 792) says Mola was right not to treat: it was too late.

3.
It was said that Cabanellas was finally persuaded to join the rising by a young officer who put a revolver to his head and told him that he had a minute to decide. His son denies this.

1.
Pozas was, surprisingly, an
africanista,
who had led troops to reoccupy Annual in 1925 and with Mola had helped put down the end of the Riffian revolt the following year.

2.
Evidence of Francisco Giral.

3.
Evidence of Francisco Giral. It appears, however, that one further attempt at compromise was put forward, a few days later, by Sánchez Román, at a cabinet meeting with Prieto and Largo Caballero present. The plan of Sánchez Román was for a general withdrawal to the positions of 19 July, amnesty, disarmament, prohibition of strikes, formation of a national government formed by all the political parties, dissolution of the Cortes, etc. This initiative was not accepted by the new government and probably was impossible. (García Venero,
Historia de las Internacionales,
vol. III, pp. 102–5.)

4.
Fernando de Valdesoto,
Francisco Franco
(Madrid, 1943), p. 123. Franco left Las Palmas in the Dragon Rapide on the morning of 18 July. Luis Bolín (
Spain, the Vital Years,
p. 48) records a conversation with Franco during the night of 18–19 July in the aeroplane in which the general said, ‘It may take longer than most people think but we are certain to win’. The aircraft stopped at Agadir and Casablanca before reaching Tetuán. It is possible that the prudent general delayed his arrival in Morocco till it was certain that his friends had won there. He had placed his wife and daughter on a German passenger boat,
El Wadi,
bound for Le Havre (Luis de Galinsoga,
Centinela de occidente,
Barcelona, 1956, p. 226).

1.
El Campesino, p. 5.