The Spanish Civil War (124 page)

4.
‘El café se le enfrió Y en Madrid no entró.’

1.
R. Salas Larrazábal, vol. I, p. 625, gives the very low figure of 266 dead, 6,029 wounded for the defenders. He may not have found documentary proof for more deaths, but the figure is likely to be higher. Returns of deaths cannot be counted upon.

2.
Koltsov, pp. 261–2. After this a false Embassy was opened under the national flag of Siam. The aim was to attract secret nationalists. Various persons (apparently only six) came to seek refuge. Their conversations were listened to by secret microphones, and they were later murdered.

3.
It seems he was murdered by anarchist members of the special services’ brigade of the ministry of war, then run by the anarchist Manuel Salgado, because of his activities as a spy (Cervera, p. 230;
General Cause,
pp. 162–3).

4.
In the beginning of this engagement Hans Beimler, the German commissar, had been killed—though probably not, as is sometimes alleged, liquidated by his communist comrades. See Gustav Regler,
Owl of Minerva
(London, 1959), p. 286, where his death is adequately described. The theory of murder is revived in Martínez Amutio, p. 240f. There it is bluntly stated that Beimler was killed for discrepancies with Moscow, and that nine members of the International Brigades were killed near Albacete to cover up his death. Beimler was replaced by Franz Dahlem, a communist deputy for the Reichstag in 1928, and German communist leader after the arrest of Thaelmann, described by Victor Serge as ‘the toiler without personality, the militant without doubts … the communist NCO’ (Serge,
Memoirs,
p. 162).

1.
López Muñiz, p. 56.

1.
Eight (out of the original eighteen) had been killed in their two previous actions, south-east of Madrid and in the University City. One of the survivors was Esmond Romilly, who shortly returned to England and who lived on to be killed fighting as a bomber pilot in the Battle of Britain. Romilly’s
Boadilla
(reprinted London, 1971) is an inspired description of this battle.

1.
A 13th International Brigade had also been formed and was at this time established before Teruel. It was chiefly composed of East Europeans. Its commander was a German communist, Wilhelm Zaisser, known as ‘General Gómez’, its political commissar a Pole (Ferry), and the chief of staff another German, Albert Schindler.

2.
Nathan had been in Ireland in the early twenties. It seems that he was attached to the Black and Tans, and was a member of the so-called Dublin Castle Murder Gang. As such, he was later identified as the murderer of the Lord Mayor and ex–Lord Mayor of Limerick (George Clancy and George O’Callaghan) in March 1921 (see Richard Bennett’s article in the
New Statesman,
24 March 1961).

3.
Marcel Acier (ed.),
From Spanish Trenches
(New York, 1937), p. 113. For Ryan, see J. Bowyer Bell,
The Secret Army
(London, 1970), p. 189.

4.
Fox was aged thirty-six when he died. In an introduction to a memoir published in his memory, Harry Pollitt claimed Byron as Fox’s precursor in dying for a foreign cause (see Fox, p. 6). Byron seems to have been a preoccupation of Pollitt’s at this time. Having urged yet another poet, Stephen Spender, to join the communist party purely to be able to help over Spain, he advised him that the best way he could help the party was ‘to go and get killed, comrade, we need a Byron in the movement’.

5.
See Stansky and Abrahams, p. 384f., for an account of his death.

6.
Moreno, p. 303.

1.
See Tom Wintringham,
English Captain
(London, 1939), pp. 83–6. According, however, to the not very reliable José Esteban Vilaró (
op. cit.,
p. 123) Delasalle had been a member of the Deuxieme Bureau in 1919 at Odessa and there tricked Marty in his first revolutionary exploit. See comments by Marty in the French Senate in March 1939, quoted by Pike, pp. 197–9. Delasalle was denounced by his commissar, the communist André Heussler, who was himself executed during the Resistance by his own comrades on a charge of treachery. See Delperrie and Castells, pp. 132, 163f, the best account of this incident. Marty was obsessed by spies but there were certainly some such. See, for example, the account by Henri Dupré of how he deceived Marty into giving him a post of confidence when he was in fact a Cagoulard in
La
‘
Légion Tricolore
’
en Espagne
(Paris, 1942). Dupré was shot in France as a collaborator in 1951. There were other spies: thus Leon Narvich, who presented himself in the Brigades as a Russian, an opponent of Stalin and the purges in Russia, was a provocateur of the NKVD. He was murdered in 1939 by the friends of those whom he had betrayed in Barcelona.

1.
Mauricio Amster, a Polish volunteer, then a communist, told me (in Chile, in 1971), that ‘Kléber’ had sent for him and told him that he wanted a chief of staff and desired to put to him three questions: did your father come from the middle class, were you once a social democrat, and did you desire to be a priest when you were young? To the first two questions, Amster answered yes. To the last he had to answer no. He did not get the job. Years later, in Santiago de Chile, then an exile, he spoke with Durán, by then an official of the UN, and told him this story. Durán told him that he too had had this conversation with ‘Kléber’ but he had answered yes to all the questions. Such were the makings of a career in the world of ‘Kléber’. Durán had in the weeks before the civil war been a leading figure in ‘
la Motorizada
’, the motorized section of the socialist youth movement associated with Prieto.

2.
Tagüeña, p. 142. The Russian success was obtained with the armour-piercing shell soon adopted by Germany. Among those killed on 5 January was Guido Picelli, an Italian socialist, ‘hero of the
giornata di Parma
’ in 1922, at the head of two companies. See Spriano, p. 135, and, for a suggestion that he too was murdered by the communist police, Paz, p. 520, and Julián Gorkin,
El proceso de Moscú en Barcelona
(Barcelona, 1974), p. 54.

1.
Lise Lindbaeck,
Internationella Brigaden
(Stockholm, 1939), pp. 87–90.

2.
Not to be confused with the Polish General ‘Walter’. (Walter Ulbricht, also in Spain for some time in 1937, was also, confusingly, known as ‘Walter’.) Another international meeting at Las Rozas was that between the Russian Colonel Rodion Malinovski (‘Malino’), who came to the front as aide to General Kulik (‘Kupper’), with a White Russian, Captain Karchevski, who was fighting as chief of
‘servicios’
in the 14th International Brigade (
Bajo la bandera,
p. 15). (Karchevski was killed at Lérida in 1937.) Other White Russians, such as Colonel Boltin, accompanied by his ‘pope’, and Captain Rachewsky, fought for Franco.

3.
Acier, p. 82.

1.
Cunningham was a man of great physical strength, and, at a low level of command, possessed marked qualities of leadership. He was for a time nicknamed the ‘English Chapaev’—after the guerrilla leader of the Russian Civil War—and, thanks to the Russian film then on in Madrid, there could not at that time have been a greater compliment.

2.
Regler,
Great Crusade,
pp. 219–41; Koltsov, p. 303. Koltsov’s own role with the tanks in this battle seems to have been considerable. During this battle died Pablo de la Torriente Brau, a Cuban communist writer who had taken a part in the struggle against Machado in his own country. See Teresa Casuso,
Cuba and Castro
(New York, 1960), p. 81.

3.
López Muñiz, p. 64. Martínez Bande,
La lucha en torno a Madrid
(Madrid, 1968), estimates 6,000 republican casualties (dead 500) and 1,500 nationalist, in these battles.

1.
Orwell,
Homage to Catalonia,
pp. 20–23. Orwell reached Barcelona at the end of December and joined a POUM column on the Aragon front, with whom he stayed till April. He returned to the front a month later but finally returned to England in June.

2.
Evidence of Francisco Giral.

1.
Junod, p. 114.

1.
These efforts are described in García Venero, p. 197f. See Southworth,
Antifalange,
p. 145f., where José Antonio’s last interview with a foreign journalist (Jay Allen) is published (reprinted from the
Chicago Tribune,
9 October 1936). See also Jackson, p. 339, for what seems to have been another effort to save José Antonio, earlier on.

1.
Letter to Martínez Barrio, quoted in F. Bravo Morata,
Historia de Madrid
(Madrid, 1968), vol. III, p. 208.

2.
Ximénez de Sandoval, p. 617.

3.
Monzón was a communist of good family from Navarre who earlier in the war had saved at least one old friend and ideological enemy, the Carlist conspirator Lizarza, from death.

4.
Largo Caballero, p. 21.

5.
Abad de Santillán, p. 21, wrote: ‘Spaniards of this stature, patriots such as he, are not dangerous, and are not to be found in the ranks of the enemy … How much would the destiny of Spain have changed if an agreement between us had been … possible, as Primo de Rivera desired.’

1.
The cabinet had shown itself equally ineffective two months earlier when the radical ex-minister Salazar Alonso had been unjustly condemned to death by a revolutionary tribunal. The cabinet reprieved the condemned man but then went back on their decision, as a result of the judge’s intervention.

2.
The magistrate at the popular tribunal was Federico Enjuta Ferrán, a career magistrate. Years later he became a professor in Puerto Rico and was thrown by his pupils out of the window of a lecture hall and killed. This murder was never fully explained.

1.
The novelist Pío Baroja, saved from execution by Carlists led by Colonel Martínez Campos, fled from the republic to nationalist Spain, which he also abandoned.

2.
He was reported as saying this in an interview in
Le Petit Parisien
of that date. On 12 August, the government of Madrid had deprived Unamuno of his rectorship for ‘disloyalty’, and on 1 September the Burgos
junta
had confirmed it.

3.
Quoted Aurelio Núñez Morgado,
Los sucesos de España vistos por un diplomático
(Buenos Aires, 1941), p. 169f.

4.
This prelate, it seems, had already used the word ‘crusade’ to describe the nationalist movement, in a pastoral letter of 30 September,
Las dos Españas
(see Abella, p. 177).

1.
Unamuno was at this time seventy-two. Next day, the Salamanca papers published the speeches of Pemán, Heredia, Francisco Maldonado and José María Ramos, but made no mention that Unamuno had even spoken.

1.
See
Unamuno’s Last Lecture
by Luis Portillo, whose version of Unamuno’s remarks this is. Published in
Horizon,
and reprinted in Cyril Connolly,
The Golden Horizon
(London, 1953), pp. 397–409. For another account see Emilio Salcedo’s recent
Vida de don Miguel
(Madrid, 1964), p. 409f. I am grateful to Ronald Fraser for advice on details. There will never be full agreement on what was said and the tone in which it was said. I discussed this version with Luis Portillo, and with Ilse Barea, who translated it. But see Pemán’s account
‘La Verdad de aquel dia’, ABC,
12 October 1965. One may well wonder why the Falange were present in such strength.

1.
Miguel García,
Franco’s Prisoner
(London, 1972), p. 25.

2.
Luis Bolin, the ex-journalist of
ABC,
looked after the foreign press, along with Captains Aguilera and Rosales. All three were free with threats of execution to journalists whom they accused of being spies; others who worked in this section included the obscure writer Vicente Gay, who succeeded Millán Astray; Agustin de Foxá, a clever falangist writer; José Ignacio Escobar and Eugenio Vegas Latapié, both monarchist writers.

3.
See Admiral Juan Cervera’s
Memorias de guerra
(Madrid, 1968), pp. 33–4, and Bolin, p. 219.

1.
See for this José Bertrán y Musitu,
Experiencias de los servicios de información del nordeste de Espana (SIFNE) durante la guerra
(Madrid, 1940). The SIFNE had been founded with a base in Biarritz in August 1936 by Mola and had, as its chief organizers, Quiñones de León, Colonel Bertrán y Musitu, and the Conde de los Andes. By the end of 1936, it had a good organization in Catalonia, based partly on ex-members of Primo de Rivera’s Somaten, the old civil guard of Catalonia. Other organizations of espionage included several groups in France, such as the ‘Mapeba’ group directed by Nicolás Franco, several private persons and several effective organizations in Madrid such as the ‘Organización Antonio’, headed by Lieutenant Antonio Rodriguez Aguado, and several individuals in Miaja’s headquarters, the military hospitals and later the School of Officers at Barajas. (See Vicente Palacio Atard,
La quinta columna,
in his
Aproximación histórica a la guerra civil española,
Madrid, 1970, p. 241f.) See also the recent work of Angel Bahamonde and Jaime Cervera.

1.
Bolin, p. 223.

2.
Payne, pp. 145–7.

3.
By October 1937 it had 711 branches; in October 1938, 1,265, and in October 1939, 2,847. It was a ‘voluntary organization’, though of course backed by the authorities.

1.
See description of a visit in Julian Amery,
Approach March
(London, 1973), p. 99.

2.
The above derives from Fal Conde’s Archives, Seville, which I was able to consult thanks to the late Melchor Ferrer. See also del Burgo, p. 692.

3.
GD,
p. 189.

1.
This story may be apocryphal but, even if so, it expresses Carlist sentiment in this ‘Fourth Carlist War’, as they thought it.

2.
De la Cierva,
Historia ilustrada,
vol. I, p. 440.

1.
The words of Federico de Urrutia, quoted in Abella, p. 109.

2.
See Abella, p. 119, for other diverting instances.

3.
Handel’s oratorio
Israel in Egypt
was rendered
Mongol Fury
in Berlin.

1.
A. de Castro Albarrán,
Este es el cortejo
(Salamanca, 1941), pp. 101–3. See also J. Luca de Tena,
Mis amigos muertos
(Barcelona, 1971).

1.
Ruiz Vilaplana, p. 191.

2.
Montero, p. 287.

3.
Speech on 14 September 1936.

4.
GD,
p. 267.

1.
Cardinal Gomá,
El caso de España
(Pamplona, 1936), p. 12.

2.
Lisón Tolosana, p. 232. Of course, as he dourly adds, by then many non-communicants might have fled or been shot.

3.
Letter published in
El clero vasco,
p. 365f.

4.
See Monsignor Múgica’s apologia,
Imperativos de mi conciencia
(Buenos Aires, 1945).

5.
See Iturralde, vol. II, pp. 384f, 414. The names of the 14 were first published in nationalist Spain by Father Montero in 1961 (
op. cit.,
pp. 70, 77). Two subsequent shootings (Father Ituricastillo and Father Román de San José) occurred.

1.
Monsignor Múgica’s second letter to the Pope is on p. 389 of
El clero vasco,
vol. II.

2.
It was also said that the archbishop of Santiago de Compostela denounced the crimes of the falangists in Galicia.

3.
Cantalupo, p. 130.

1.
Testimony of Johannes Bernhardt. The only persons to whom Franco showed mercy were his brother, the aviator, Ramón, sometime republican conspirator against the King, who was military attaché in Washington in 1936, and who delayed two months before throwing in his hand with the rebels; and Manuel Aznar, the editor of
El Sol
in Madrid, who had done much to help Azaña in 1931–2 and who, seen in militia uniform early in the war, later escaped to Saragossa, where he was arrested. Ramón Franco became commander of the air base at Palma, Aznar escaped being shot and, after much war journalism, ended up an ambassador of Spain. See García Venero, p. 243f. His military history, though Francoist, is the best of its kind. On good authority, Hills (p. 254) argued that Franco was inclined to shoot the leaders, pardon the followers, on the ground that the former should have known what they were doing.

2.
O. Conforti,
Guadalajara
(Milan, 1967), p. 32.

3.
As General Burguete said in a similar context in 1917. Cf. Dionisio Ridruejo, in Sergio Vilar, pp. 482–3.

1.
These and other instances can be seen in the diary of Father Gumersindo de Estella, in
El clero vasco,
vol. II, p. 289f.

2.
See
El clero vasco,
vol. II, p. 144f.

1.
Abella, p. 128.

2.
Hedilla, in García Venero,
Falange.

3.
Evidence of Johannes Bernhardt. The English firm of Bradbury and Wilkinson, which usually printed Spanish money, had been approached and refused. Thereafter, all currency in the republican zone was regarded as, and where necessary stamped as, invalid.

1.
I was grateful to Mr Norman Cooper for help on these matters.

2.
In case the point was missed, one poster called out: ‘Spaniard! Do not shake the hand of a man or woman who, after ten months of war, still wears a gold wedding ring which the country demands of her. That person is not a Spaniard.’

1.
See, for a discussion, Glenn T. Harper,
German Economic Policy in Spain
(The Hague, 1967), pp. 32–59.

2.
See article in
Cambio 16,
15 September 1975.