The Spanish Civil War (133 page)

1.
A local politician, Beltrán had been prominent in 1930 in the rising of Jaca and had been the left republican administrator of a state housing project in Canfranc. He had become a ‘communist’ in the war. See Prieto,
Convulsiones,
vol. II, p. 203, for his future adventures in Russia, his return to France with the
maquis,
his subsequent deportation to Corsica, his break with the communists, his work with US intelligence after 1945 in Spain, the US and Mexico, where, like many another Spanish hero of our time, he died in poverty, having quarrelled with his US masters. The Dodger’s nickname was inherited from his father and grandfather, famous Canfranc smugglers.

1.
The text of this speech was published only in the
Diario de Burgos,
19 April 1938. It is reprinted in García Venero,
Falange.
Yagüe was approached by Prieto in the spring of 1938 through Jakob Altmaier, a German journalist and socialist refugee, and an unnamed Austrian monarchist to try and secure a compromise peace. By the agreement, Franco and Negrín were to form a coalition government with Prieto, Gil Robles, and other ‘moderates’. There would be a plebiscite in two years on the monarchy. See Amery, pp. 108–9. Altmaier had been a socialist leader in Frankfurt during the revolution of 1919 and in World War II worked in British intelligence. See also Prieto,
Palabras,
p. 237, where it is implied that Negrín prevented him from negotiating as much as he might.

1.
See Circular No. 17 of the FAI, issued 3 May. Qu. Peirats, vol. III, p. 118. The thirteen points were discussed at a cabinet meeting on 30 April. Segundo Blanco said the CNT should be consulted. Negrín decided that was impossible since the British Embassy had to receive the document the same day, and it was, after all, primarily a statement for foreign consumption (
op. cit.,
p. 119).

1.
Azaña, vol. IV, p. 845.

2.
Azaña,
op. cit.,
p. 877. This conversation had been on 22 April, arising from Negrín’s desire for Azaña’s signature to forty-five death penalties. Azaña was reluctant. Negrín thought them essential to avoid
paseos.
Negrín reminded Azaña that he had himself regretted that he had pardoned Sanjurjo in 1932. (Negrín himself had been in favour of shooting Sanjurjo, though he had liked him; Azaña had disliked Sanjurjo but had supported his reprieve.)

3.
Franco’s speech, qu. Abella, p. 328.

1.
Ciano,
Diaries 1937–8.

2.
Azcárate, p. 153. The republican ambassador added that thereafter ‘shame and indignation’ at British policy caused the republic to keep relations with the UK to a minimum.

3.
W. Churchill,
The Gathering Storm,
p. 221. Churchill, for instance, was brought to have an amicable conversation with the republican ambassador, Azcárate, showing sympathy for the republic, after dinner at the Soviet Embassy. The conversion of Churchill to the republic was partly the work of his son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, who visited Barcelona in the spring of 1938. But Churchill’s ‘republicanism’ was always realistic. Thus, he told a Buenos Aires newspaper: ‘Franco has all the right on his side, because he loves his country. Also Franco is defending Europe against the communist danger—if you wish to put it in those terms. But I—I am English, and I prefer the triumph of the wrong cause. I prefer that the other side wins because Franco could be an upset to British interests.’ (
La Nación,
Buenos Aires, 14 August 1938.)

1.
GD,
p. 635.

2.
USD,
1938, vol. I, pp. 192–3.

3.
On 10 May, Ivone Kirkpatrick told Prince Bismarck, the German minister in London, that ‘If the German government would advise the British government confidentially what solution of the Sudeten German question they were striving after … the British government would bring such pressure to bear in Prague that the Czechoslovak government would be compelled to accede to German wishes.’ (
GD,
Series D, vol. II, doc. no. 1511.)

1.
Harvey, p. 124. ‘My colleagues are dictator-minded’, Eden had often said.

2.
New Orleans States,
9 May 1938, qu. Taylor, p. 169.

3.
R. J. Bendiner,
The Riddle of the State Department
(New York, 1962).

1.
Taylor, p. 174; Traina, p. 134f.; Bendiner, pp. 59–62;
USD,
1938, vol. I, pp. 183–95. The German ambassador in Washington reported to Berlin that the British influence was the decisive factor (
GD,
pp. 656–7). But Arthur Krock told me (9 January 1963) that, so far as he could recall, Hull or Welles gave him the information on which he had based this article, and that that was the policy his informant then wished to achieve. Ickes (vol. II, p. 390) says Roosevelt told him on 9 May that ‘to raise the embargo would mean the loss of every Catholic vote next fall and that the democratic members of congress were jittery about it and didn’t want it done’. This confirms the impression of Norman Thomas, with whom I discussed this matter in 1962. Jay Allen in
The Christian Science Monitor
later alleged that Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago telephoned Roosevelt on a later occasion to dissuade him from raising the embargo (Traina, p. 213). Krock’s son was apparently one of the few Americans fighting for Franco.

2.
L. Fischer, pp. 468–70. Litvinov himself had, for many months, a suitcase packed ready to take with him to gaol, as his wife recalls.

3.
Harvey, p. 157: ‘The French are getting increasingly restive as a result of having closed their frontier as a result of our urging,’ Harvey wrote on 2 July.

4.
Traina, p. 168. Sherover had first made news by selling $60 million of Soviet American Security bonds between 1931 and 1935. He had been commercial agent for the republic since 1936. In conversation with me in 1975, Sherover confirmed that Roosevelt gave him to understand that it was the Catholic vote which affected him.

1.
Ciano,
Diaries 1937–8,
p. 123.

2.
Speeches on Foreign Policy, 1934–9
(London, 1940), p. 164.

3.
Cf. Thompson, p. 122f.

4.
GD,
p. 684, Dirksen’s italics.

5.
Ibid.,
pp. 684–5.

6.
Ibid.,
p. 683.

7.
USD,
1938, vol. I, p. 208.

1.
USD,
1938, vol. I, p. 215. He had succeeded Vansittart on 1 January 1938.

2.
Parliamentary Debates,
vol. 337, col. 1011 (21 June 1938).

1.
Parliamentary Debates,
vol. 337, col. 1387 (23 June 1938).

2.
Feiling, p. 352.

3.
CAB,
27 (38), on 1 June.

4.
USD,
1938, vol. I, p. 231. One reaction was Low’s cartoon of 16 June, in which he caused Colonel Blimp to remark: ‘Gad sir, it is time we told Franco that, if he sinks another hundred British ships, we shall retire from the Mediterranean altogether.’

1.
Ciano,
Diaries 1937–8,
p. 132.

2.
See
CAB
(163) 38. For Reichenau, see R. J. O’Neill,
The German Army and the Nazi Party, 1933–1939
(London, 1966), p. 194. The lesson the Germans had drawn was that Franco did not have enough motor vehicles to enable Blitzkrieg.

3.
CAB,
32 (38) of 13 July.

1.
GD,
pp. 675–81. For commentary, see Harper, p. 98f.

2.
GD,
p. 689.

3.
According to R. Salas (vol. II, p. 1870), the republic refused to buy from the US the T-6 fighter, which would have had a considerable effect. But how would they have paid, and was it desirable to change from one supplier to another in mid-war?

4.
Aznar, p. 704; Buckley, p. 375.

1.
GD,
p. 711.

2.
Professor Bosch Gimpera gave me a copy of this letter.

3.
Evidence of Professor Bosch Gimpera.

4.
Azaña,
op. cit.,
p. 880.

5.
NIS,
twenty-ninth meeting;
NIS
(c), ninety-third meeting.

1.
GD,
p. 725.

2.
Cattell,
Soviet Diplomacy,
p. 119.

3.
Ansaldo, p. 63, says that this attack was the result of a personal initiative of Franco. Certain alarmists in nationalist Spain were convinced that the Germans were at the back of this campaign, in order to prolong the war.

4.
The first head of this was Luis Bolín, who bought twelve school buses from the US for the purpose (cf. Bolín, p. 302).

1.
See R. Salas, vol. IV, pp. 3284–6.

2.
Buckley, pp. 379–81.

1.
Lister, p. 220.

1.
Peirats, vol. III, p. 230.

2.
These were the Armies of the Centre (Casado), the Levante (Hernández Saravia), of ‘Manoeuvre’ (Menéndez) and Andalusia (Moriones).

3.
For an excellent pen-picture of the two, see Tagüeña, p. 187.

4.
It is interesting that a job was found for Tomás, who had been so unsuccessful but so presumptuous in the presidency of the Council of Asturias. The nationalists would have hesitated at such an act of kindness rewarding incompetence.

1.
An active member of the socialist youth before the war, Tagüeña fought in the Sierra in July and on the Tagus front in September, in Madrid in October, succeeding Fernando de Rosa, and became, in the winter of 1936–7, one of the first commanders of a Mixed Brigade. He joined the communist party in November 1936. His great success had been in the Aragon front in retreat in March.

1.
For the battle of the Ebro, see Luis María Mezquida,
La batalla del Ebro
(Tarragona, 1963–7); Julián Henríquez,
La batalla del Ebro
(Mexico, 1944); and the versions given by Tagüeña, Lister, Martínez de Campos, Kindelán, Rojo and Henry Buckley in their often-cited books. For the battle plan, see R. Salas, vol. IV, pp. 3287–97. Mezquida’s volumes have the merit of incorporating a large number of personal testimonies from junior ranks. For an impression of the war in the air, see García Lacalle, p. 381f. For an odd eye-witness account, see Francisco Pérez López,
A Guerrilla Diary of the Spanish Civil War
(London, 1972). See also R. Salas, vol. II, p. 1967f. I benefited from discussing this battle with the then Colonel Martínez de Campos and Manuel Tagüeña, and from correspondence with Colonel García Lacalle.

2.
Reconquista
(newspaper of the Army of the Ebro). The preparation of this offensive is well described in Tagüeña, p. 200f. Equally important, in these first days of the battle of the Ebro, was the reconstituted French 14th Brigade, led by Marcel Sagnier, commissar Henri Tanguy. See Delperrie de Bayac, p. 354f. The pontoon bridges and inflatable rubber boats were bought in France. Did the French military advise on their use, as implied by General Barroso to Hills (p. 319)? There is no evidence.

1.
Compare the western front in 1918, which was only 400 miles.

2.
Kemp, p. 172. He was wounded by a stray shell just before the battle began. For months previously he had been facing a onetime contemporary of his at Trinity College, Cambridge, Malcolm Dunbar, chief of staff to the 15th International Brigade.

1.
Martínez de Campos, p. 154.

2.
Haden Guest had been the inspiration of a whole generation of communists at Cambridge. Clive had rowed for Oxford University in the early 1930s.

1.
Letter from Lacalle, July 1964.

2.
GD,
p. 735. Immediately before the start of the Ebro battle, the Spanish nationalist ambassador in Berlin, the Marqués de Magaz, had complained that the German government were selling arms to the republic. Rifles at £1 apiece and also aircraft had been sold by Germany nominally to China and Greece, in fact to republican Spain. Magaz alleged that Göring knew of the transaction, wishing to prolong the civil war by this trickery. After two months, Germany denied that their government was implicated. (Documents quoted in
The International Brigades,
p. 44.)

3.
Aznar, pp. 744–5, prints several republican orders later captured which show that this threat was often carried out.

1.
See Peirats, vol. III, pp. 197–205.

2.
The average in Barcelona was 80,000 compared with 50,000 in January 1936.

3.
Qu. Azaña, vol. III, p. 511.

4.
On 9 August, Prieto attacked Negrín before the national committee of the Spanish socialist party. The speech was published as ‘How and why I left the ministry of defence’. See
Yo y Moscú,
pp. 137–227.

5.
A secret FAI circular of September 1938 pointed out that of 7,000 promotions in the army since May, 5,500 had been communists (Peirats, vol. III, p. 225).

1.
Zugazagoitia, pp. 438–40. See comment by Jackson, p. 457. By that time, Azaña’s diary is too fragmentary for much use to be made of it.

2.
Zugazagoitia, p. 90.

1.
The above owes much to Professor Bosch Gimpera. See also Zugazagoitia. I also discussed the event with Irujo. The rumour that at this time the Basques and Catalans sought a negotiated peace by asking the help of Bonnet and Halifax is false (it is reported as a fact in
USD,
1938, vol. I, p. 239).

2.
See below, p. 826.

1.
Azcárate, p. 174. Azcárate thought that Halifax saw the injustice of the discrimination, but could do nothing to counter Chamberlain’s desire not to offend Italy.

2.
GD,
pp. 765–6.

3.
This plan was not accepted by Franco till the end of September.

4.
Ciano,
Diaries 1937–8,
p. 148.

1.
GD,
p. 742.

2.
Ibid.,
p. 747.

3.
The US consul-general in Geneva reported that Negrín’s discussion was with the Duke of Alba (
USD,
1938, vol. I, p. 239). Bosch Gimpera and Juan Negrín Jr. told me explicitly that it was a German. Negrín also told this to Prieto’s secretary, Victor Salazar (
Convulsiones,
vol. III, p. 2222), with the clear intention that he should pass on the news. It is difficult to believe that Hitler’s emissary, whoever he was, said, as Prieto reported, that Hitler was willing to transfer his support to Negrín from Franco on the condition that Negrín set up a Nazi-style state. Perhaps it should be added that Negrín always had a line open to Berlin, through the beautiful singer Emerita Esparza, who travelled several times from Barcelona to Berlin in the course of the war, staying with Negrín in the Pedralbes Palace in Barcelona. Was she a spy? For whom?

4.
Ciano,
Diaries 1937–8,
p. 159.

5.
GD,
p. 479. Salazar had urged Franco to this attitude. See Kay, p. 117.

1.
Ciano,
Diaries 1937–8,
p. 163.

2.
Ibid.,
pp. 167–8; Feiling, p. 376.

3.
GD,
p. 754.

4.
Ibid.,
p. 756.

5.
Comment of Francisco Giral.

1.
GD,
p. 758. He had been counsellor in Madrid in 1936.

2.
ibid.,
p. 760.

3.
Médiation en Espagne
(Paris, 1938).

4.
GD,
pp. 776, 784–6. See below, p. 837.

5.
See above, p. 326. On 25 December 1937, a French journalist, Luciani, representing several French papers in Moscow, had been summoned by Litvinov, to be told that the Kremlin had ‘established contacts’ to initiate a German-Russian
rapprochement.
Litvinov told Luciani to tell his ambassador. But though he did so, no one took the message seriously. See
Le Monde,
19 February 1969, qu. Suárez, p. 25.

6.
See above, p. 809.

1.
The number of Russians in Spain had diminished, for Spanish pilots had been trained to fly the aircraft the Russians had given them: the Russian military mission seems to have been much smaller; and even Orlov, the NKVD representative, had defected, on 12 July 1938, fleeing first to Canada, then to the US (see his testimony before the internal security sub-committee of the Senate, 14–15 February 1957:
Hearings,
p. 3421).

2.
A leader of the revolt in the Asturias in 1934, Valledor had also fought in Asturias in 1936–7. He had escaped from a labour batallion in nationalist Spain in 1938.

3.
Rolfe, p. 234.

1.
Vincent Sheean,
The Eleventh Hour
(London, 1939), p. 237.

1.
From a pamphlet printed in Barcelona 1938. The same day, Colonel Ramón Franco, Franco’s brother, who had been for some time aerial commander of the nationalists in the Balearics, was shot down and killed in his hydroplane (J. Salas, p. 384).

2.
Nenni, p. 172.

3.
Three hundred five members of the British Battalion were greeted, amid excitement, at Victoria Station on 7 December by Attlee, Sir Stafford Cripps, William Gallacher, Tom Mann, and Will Lawther. Sam Wild then gave the battalion its last dismissal. The Dependants’ Aid Committee looked after the families of those killed as best it could.

1.
Toynbee,
Survey
(London, 1938), vol. I, pp. 392–3. The secretary to this commission was Noël Field, ex–State Department official, League official and future victim, or hero, of the cold war. He already was, or considered himself, in 1938, a Russian agent. See Flora Lewis,
The Man Who Disappeared
(London, 1965).

1.
Hemingway had gone back to America earlier in the year, having finished his bad play,
The Fifth Column,
in the Hotel Florida. One night in the summer, however, the friends of the republic were happy to hear on the wireless the announcement: ‘The writer, Ernest Hemingway, has suddenly left his home in Key West. He was last seen in New York, boarding a ship, without hat or baggage, to rejoin the Spanish republican troops at the front.’ (Regler,
Owl of Minerva,
p. 298.) Hemingway was disillusioned with ‘the carnival of treachery and rottenness on both sides’ by now (Baker, p. 401). See his
The Denunciation
and
The Butterfly and the Tank.

2.
Lister, p. 214; Tagüeña, p. 261; R. Salas, vol. II, p. 2021, and vol. IV, p. 3303. The latter gives deaths at 4,007, wounded 37,712, and ill 15,238, a total of 56,957. It would be reasonable to suppose that 10 per cent of the wounded and sick later died.

3.
Gambara, a young officer in the First World War, had fought in Ethiopia as chief of staff to Bastico. He was to become chief of staff to Graziani in 1943 in Mussolini’s ill-fated republic of Salò. The Cuerpo de Ejército Legionario under Gambara consisted of the Littorio Division (General Bitossi), the Frecce Nere (Colonel Babini), the Frecce Azzurre (Colonel la Ferla), the ‘Flechas Verdes’ (Colonel Battisti), and an artillery section, headed by General D’Amico. The corps had some 58 batteries (Aznar, p. 609). The Italians comprised now 26,000 NCOs and men, 2,000 officers (Belforte, p. 118). See Alcofar Nassaes,
CTV,
p. 176.

1.
Ciano,
Diaries 1937–8,
pp. 180–81.

2.
The Times,
5 November 1938.

3.
The aim of the Anglo-Italian Agreement was to wean Italy from Germany. Halifax wrote to Sir Eric Phipps in Paris: ‘Although we do not expect to detach Italy from the Axis, we believe the agreement will increase Mussolini’s power of manoeuvre and so make him less dependent on Hitler and, therefore, freer to resume the classic Italian role of balancing between Germany and the western Powers’ (
British Foreign Policy,
3rd series, vol. III, No. 285). Mussolini’s response was to launch a renewed campaign for the cession of the French territories of Nice, Savoy and Corsica.