The Spanish Civil War (134 page)

1.
This psychological war is excellently analysed in Abella, p. 369f. This radio station in Salamanca was directed by Jacinto Miquelarena, whose brief ‘
Comentarios
’ were well edited. An ex–radical socialist, Joaquin Pérez Madrigal, had an amusing programme entitled ‘
La Flota Republicana
’. He also gave details of the menus in the restaurants of Salamanca designed to make mouths water in Barcelona. Whether that had a good effect on the half-starving anti-republicans in republican territory is doubtful. See his nine volumes of apologia,
Memorias de un converso
(Madrid, 1943).

1.
GD,
p. 796.

2.
One alleged plot concerned the British consul in San Sebastián, Harold Goodman, in whose suitcase secret nationalist documents were found. Was it a police plant or an attempt by the republic to gain information? A servant killed himself; perhaps, therefore, the latter. Thompson, p. 145, considered the Gestapo responsible: ‘what spy would draw a trench system on a sheet?’

3.
Payne,
The Spanish Revolution,
p. 193. Yet this Catholicism had strange bedfellows: ‘
Caminos de la guerra española; caminos del imperio hispano; caminos del Islam; trinidad que resulta en la sola meta del afán sin horizontes
’. Thus Antonio Olmedo in
ABC de Sevilla,
5 April 1938. (Paths of the Spanish war; paths of the Spanish empire; paths of Islam; trinity resulting in the sole goal of struggle without end.)

1.
GD,
pp. 795–6. The date of the agreement was 19 November. See Harper, p. 112.

1.
See comment by Harper, p. 117, and Salas Larrazábal in Palacio Atard, p. 123. In ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’, Orwell wrote, ‘though the war may end soon or may drag on for years, it will end with Spain divided up either by actual frontiers or into economic zones’.

2.
The nationalist army was composed of sixty-one infantry divisions (840,000 men), 15,323 cavalry, 19,013 artillery, 119,594 auxiliary services, 35,000 Moroccans (with Spanish officers), 32,000 CTV (half Spanish), and 5,000 Condor Legion: total—1,065,041. (Bolín’s figures, p. 349.)

3.
Sainz Rodríguez went down to Seville to find out his real plans and to calm him (Sainz Rodríguez, p. 271).

1.
Peirats, vol. III, p. 278.

2.
Diario de Sesiones,
30 September 1938.

3.
Lawrence Fernsworth,
New York Times,
23 March 1938, qu. Jackson, p. 458.

1.
A. Toynbee,
Survey,
1938, vol. I, pp. 271, 389.

2.
The exact figures here were 700 grammes of bread dropping to 400, 250 of meat to 150, 200 of vegetables to 180.

3.
Bosch Gimpera, Memorandum No. 2.

4.
See discussion in Jackson, p. 447, and also Norah Curtis and Cyril Dilby,
Malnutrition
(London, 1944), p. 46f.

1.
Campo Libre,
14 January 1939, gives the following figures for sowing in the season 1938–9:

2.
Eight million quintals.

3.
See conversation between Trifón Gómez and Azaña, Azaña,
op. cit.,
vol. IV, p. 900.

4.
Soviet army records, qu. Payne,
The Spanish Revolution,
p. 344.

5.
Bricall, pp. 48 and 101.

1.
Bricall, p. 55.

2.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
Terre des hommes
(Paris, 1939), p. 210.

1.
Gorkin, pp. 268–80; Peirats, vol. III, pp. 297–300. See also Suárez’s general account of the trial. One of the POUM leaders, David Rey, was freed. He was shot by Franco after the end of the war. After the end of this trial, three leading anarchists—Federica Montseny, Abad de Santillán and García Birlán—visited Azaña to denounce Negrín as a dictator and demand a change of government. But Azaña, as usual, would do nothing definite, though apparently agreeing with his visitors (Peirats, vol. III, p. 318).

2.
He did eventually do so, in France.

3.
GD,
p. 796.

1.
USD,
1938, vol. I, p. 255. I discussed the failure of this plan with A. A. Berle in 1963.

2.
Though the Chetwode commission (see above, p. 831) persuaded the nationalists to delay 400 executions.

3.
J. Salas has (p. 432) 197 fighters, 93 ‘aviones de cooperación’, 179 bombers.

4.
Franco’s headquarters staff in 1938 was directed by the now General Francisco Martín Moreno, beneath whom were Colonels Villanueva, Ungría, Barroso, Villegas and Medrano (organization, information, operations, services, maps): the essential if forgotten men in the organization of Franco’s war. Cervera and Kindelán continued as chief of staff of the navy and head of the air force, while Generals García Pallasar and García de Pruneda directed the artillery and the engineers. See Martínez Bande,
Los cien últimos dias de la república
(Barcelona, 1972), p. 39.

5.
Aznar, pp. 814–15.

1.
García Lacalle, p. 445. Many aircraft were short of machine-guns.

2.
Zugazagoitia, p. 447. The English editor Kingsley Martin told Negrín in December that Churchill had ‘changed his mind’ over the Spanish republic. ‘Too late’, said Negrín. (Kingsley Martin, p. 136.)

3.
See the accusations in De la Cierva,
Historia ilustrada,
vol. II, pp. 474–5. Matallana certainly was in touch with the nationalists two months later.

4.
García Lacalle, p. 431.

1.
See Hidalgo de Cisneros, vol. II, pp. 445–52. García Lacalle, by then head of the republican fighters, urged this visit to Moscow in November. Hidalgo agreed, and undertook to go. Weeks later, Lacalle returned from the front and found him still there. Hidalgo explained that he had not gone because Negrín and he had thought that the under-secretary, a communist of long standing, Núñez Maza, should go. Lacalle returned to the front, picturing yet again an emissary to be already in Moscow. Weeks later, which again seemed like years, Lacalle returned to find Núñez Maza still in Barcelona because he believed this to be a manoeuvre by Hidalgo to remove him from his job. Hidalgo de Cisneros then went: too late (letter from García Lacalle, July 1964).

2.
See Buckley; Alvarez del Vayo,
Freedom’s Battle,
p. 262f.; Aznar, p. 816f.; Rojo,
España heroica;
Lojendio, p. 547f.

3.
A. Santamaria,
Operazione Spagna, 1936–1939
(Rome, 1965), p. 115.

1.
Ciano,
Diaries 1939–43,
p. 5.

2.
Ibid.,
p. 10.

3.
Alvarez del Vayo,
Freedom’s Battle,
p. 262; Azaña, vol. IV, p. 907.

1.
Azaña, vol. IV, p. 906.

1.
Azaña, vol. III, p. 537. According to Azaña, the government left behind all the papers relating to espionage in nationalist Spain. This was fatal for many.

2.
Vicente Rojo,
¡Alerta los pueblos!
(Buenos Aires, 1939), p. 173.

3.
García Lacalle, p. 490.

4.
‘In killing the revolution, the anti-fascist war was killed too.’ Thus M. Casanova, in
Cahiers de la quatrième internationale
(Paris, 1971), p. 5.

5.
Ciano,
Diaries 1939–43,
p. 15.

1.
Junod, p. 133.

2.
Cabanellas, vol. II, p. 1047; Cabanellas speaks of 10,000 shot between 26 and 31 January, 25,000 other executions later on. He gives no evidence for these figures. He may be right.

3.
Ciano,
Diaries 1939–43,
p. 34.

4.
Abella, p. 401.

1.
Ridruejo, in Sergio Vilar, p. 485.

2.
Cf. ‘El Tebib Arrumi’, qu.
Catalunya sota …,
p. 147. This book contains a full analysis of the persecution of Catalanism in 1939.

1.
Azcárate MS.

2.
On 23 January.

3.
FDR papers, Hyde Park. The same point of view was urged in a book by Allen Dulles and Hamilton Fish Armstrong of
Foreign Affairs
(
Can America Stay Neutral?
).

1.
Ickes, p. 569.

2.
From an unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
The Spanish Civil War,
by H. J. Parry of the University of California, qu. Taylor, p. 195. There were three other polls of British opinion, collected by the British Public Opinion Institute, during the civil war. In January 1937, 14 per cent considered that the Burgos
junta
should be considered the true government of Spain, against 86 per cent who did not. In March 1938, 57 per cent considered themselves in sympathy with the government, 7 per cent with Franco and 36 per cent neither. In October 1938, the answers were much as in the previous March.

3.
So Martínez Barrio told Azaña, in Azaña, vol. III, p. 541.

4.
García Lacalle, pp. 494–5.

5.
GD,
p. 844.

1.
Hills, p. 324, speaks of anger between Kindelán and the German military attaché, Baron von Funck, on this matter.

2.
They were soon off to Toulouse.

3.
Figures are discussed in Pike, pp. 213–14. Basing himself on the Mexican Embassy in Paris, De la Cierva gives a figure of 527,800 exiles from Spain between February and late April 1939. Azaña (vol. III, p. 534) has 220,000. Alvarez del Vayo (in Azaña, vol. III, p. 553) said a total of 400,000 crossed. Sir John Simpson,
The Refugee Problem
(London, 1939), has 270,000 soldiers, 170,000 civilians and 13,000 ill—a total of 453,000.

1.
Howard Kershner,
Quaker Service in Modern War
(New York, 1950), p. 24.

2.
La Dépêche
(Toulouse), 3 March 1939, qu. D. W. Pike,
Vae Victis!
(Paris, 1969), p. 14.

3.
Regler,
Owl of Minerva,
p. 321. See Pike,
Vae Victis!,
pp. 216–17.

4.
Giuliano Pajetta had been the youngest commissar in the International Brigades. A young communist from Turin at fourteen, he had been arrested, fled to France and then to Russia and had been in Spain almost since the beginning. I met him in 1978. Such old warriors in Spain as Longo, Vidali and Togliatti also left Catalonia (Spriano, p. 271).

1.
The new republican ambassador in Paris, Marcelino Pascua (transferred from Moscow), tried to get Machado to Paris, but his attempt failed due to the gravity of Machado’s state (letter to the author from Marcelino Pascua).

2.
Regler,
Owl of Minerva, loc. cit.
For sympathizers with the republic, the care of the refugees was the last and most painful of the ‘causes’ of the Spanish war. See Nancy Cunard,
Manchester Guardian,
17 February 1939, and Ch. XV of Nancy Milford,
The Pursuit of Love.

3.
A. Toynbee,
Survey,
vol. I, pp. 397–9.

4.
Astorga’s method of maintaining discipline had been to shoot five people for every prisoner who escaped. See for an account Juan Pujol in
Historia y vida,
January 1975.

1.
Gorkin,
Caníbales políticos,
p. 237; and Pike,
Vae Victis!,
p. 53.

2.
Diario de Sesiones,
No. 69, February 1939. See the description of the scene in Zugazagoitia, p. 508f.

3.
USD,
1939, vol. II, pp. 739–49.

4.
Alvarez del Vayo,
The Last Optimist,
p. 294; Azaña, vol. III, p. 554.

1.
Azaña’s account is in his letter to Ossorio, 28 June 1939, in
Obras,
vol. III, p. 552f.

2.
The General Cause,
p. 178.

3.
Regler,
Owl of Minerva,
p. 325.

4.
Earlier tension between Rojo and Hernández Saravia is expressed in a note of a meeting between them published by R. Salas, vol. IV, p. 3345. Saravia had been quite isolated from his troops for over two weeks, being kept informed only by the fighter commander, García Lacalle, where the enemy was. See García Lacalle, p. 495.

1.
The real value was nearer the unofficial rate of 100 to the pound than the fixed one of 42. The
vales,
issued by municipalities, by Popular Front committees, and by the
Generalidad
in the early days of the war (nicknamed ‘pyjamas’, because they could only be used at home), were no longer accepted.

1.
Madariaga,
Spain,
p. 431.

2.
Alvarez del Vayo,
Freedom’s Battle,
p. 275.

1.
GD,
p. 835; Bruno Alonso, pp. 117–18. Captain Alan Hillgarth, British consul in Majorca (vice-consul, 1932–7, and future chief of naval intelligence), had been asked to arrange the surrender by the nationalists. The Foreign Office agreed with the request but stipulated that no German or Italian troops should be allowed on the island for two years. These conditions were kept.

2.
Guy Hermet,
Los comunistas en España
(Paris, 1971), p. 30.

1.
Saborit,
Julián Besteiro,
p. 410.

2.
A decisive part was played by the head of the spy ring, ‘Antonio’ (called after Antonio de Luma, a university professor). Professor Julio Palacios, an agent of ‘Antonio’s’, was instructed to make contact through intermediaries with Casado in January. (From an unpublished ‘Memoria’ by Palacios, qu. Martínez Bande (
Los cien últimos días,
1972, p. 119). Colonel Bonel in Toledo also played an important part in negotiations between Madrid and Burgos.

3.
Martínez Bande,
op. cit.,
p. 120.

4.
Zugazagoitia’s comment in his book,
Historia de la guerra en España,
p. 546.

1.
Ibarruri, p. 429. It was said that Casado was paid by the British government to try and bring the war to an end. This unlikely story seems disproved by the manner in which he was received when he arrived in Britain at the start of April. Broué and Témime (p. 261) suggest that Cowan initiated the plot. I feel that that was a survival of the old French respect for ‘
l’intelligence
’, which it has not always merited.

2.
The following account of the end of the war in Spain and the
coup
of Colonel Casado is pieced together from, chiefly, the narrative of Colonel Casado himself (confused and contradictory though it is, his second edition is different from his first), Castro Delgado, La Pasionaria, Bruno Alonso, Alvarez del Vayo, García Pradas (
Cómo terminó la guerra de España
), Wenceslao Carrillo (
El último episodio de la guerra civil española,
Toulouse, 1945), and Jesús Hernández. Also Negrín’s speech in the Cortes Committee on Paris on 31 March; Bouthelier (
Ocho días
) and Edmundo Dominguez (
Los vencedores de Negrín
). Martínez Bande’s
Los cien últimos días de la república
is a sober, careful account, as is usual with that author, and gives information about Casado’s contacts with Burgos. See also Mera’s memoirs, p. 193f., and most recently
Así terminó la guerrade España
by Ángel Bahamonde and Jaime Cervera (Madrid, 1999).

3.
Prieto recalls this in
Convulsiones,
vol. II, p. 83.

4.
Martínez Bande,
Los cien últimos días,
p. 82.

1.
Tagüeña, p. 304. Díaz had been in Moscow since November (Spriano, vol. III, p. 272).

2.
Pérez Salas, p. 232.

3.
Ibarruri, pp. 436–7.

4.
Peirats, vol. III, p. 353. He was an Argentinian.

5.
The instructions dated 10 February were signed by Mariano Vázquez of the CNT and Pedro Herrera of the FAI (
ibid.,
p. 356). Cf. Juan López,
Una misión sin importancia: memorias de un sindicalista
(Madrid, 1972).

6.
Alvarez del Vayo,
Freedom’s Battle,
p. 278f.

7.
Casado says this was 25 February. I accept Martínez Bande’s view that it was not. Mera confirms, p. 194.

1.
Tagüeña, p. 306.

2.
Ibarruri, p. 440. The other communists included Checa, Delicado and Isidro Diéguez.

1.
Ibarruri, p. 427.

2.
R. Salas, vol. IV. pp. 3392–8, gives Camacho’s report. I accept the dating of Martínez Bande which dates this meeting 16, not 27, February.

1.
Casado, p. 121; cf. Benavides,
La escuadra,
p. 451.

2.
Attacks on Negrín’s way of life in this last stage of the Spanish republic were made by Casado (p. 135) and García Pradas (p. 34). Was he really surrounded by chorus girls, were there really crates of champagne? Or do these stories derive from the imagination of puritans?

1.
Kershner, p. 47.

2.
Martínez Bande, p. 121.

1.
These facts were related to the author by Azcárate. They are described on p. 221 of his unpublished memoirs. Cf. also Álvarez del Vayo,
Freedom’s Battle,
p. 285.

2.
Feiling, p. 394.

1.
Martínez Bande (
op. cit.,
pp. 124–6) quotes Centaño’s report. Casado in his book says that he only met Centaño in March and that his visit was a surprise. This seems not to have been true.

2.
Martínez Bande,
op. cit.,
p. 126.

3.
Azcárate,
loc. cit.

1.
Martínez Bande,
op. cit.,
p. 128.

1.
Qu. Watkins, p. 118.

2.
The opposition, ever since they had decided in October 1936 that non-intervention was a ‘farce’, had actively supported the Spanish republic, and had had good relations with Azcárate at the Spanish Embassy.

3.
Later he handed over the Spanish Embassy in London to the Foreign Office who delivered it to the Duke of Alba. Similar scenes were taking place in other capitals.

4.
García Pradas, p. 82.

1.
Martínez Bande,
op. cit.,
p. 128.

1.
Hidalgo de Cisneros, pp. 463–4; Álvarez del Vayo,
Freedom’s Battle,
p. 291.

2.
Jackson, p. 474, is perceptive on this moment of ‘passivity’.

1.
Bruno Alonso,
La flota republicana y la guerra civil de España
(Mexico, 1944), pp. 136–7. Galán took over from Bernal on the night of the 4th.

2.
Ibid.,
pp. 141–3.

1.
Bruno Alonso, p. 146.

2.
Some 1,200 died.

3.
For this day’s events in Cartagena, see Manuel Martínez Pastor,
Cinco de marzo 1939
(Madrid, 1971). There is also Luis Romero’s non-fiction novel
Desastre en Cartagena
(Madrid, 1971). Galán wrote an account in
España republicana
(Buenos Aires, March–April 1968).

4.
Ibarruri, p. 450.

1.
Antonio Pérez, a railway worker, was a socialist, a follower of Prieto. He had been a member of the executive committee of the socialist party. A rump of this body had met to discuss what to do, and had been forced (according to its vice-president Edmundo Domínguez) to back the council by a vote achieved by a packed meeting. Neither Domínguez nor the secretary of the UGT, Rodríguez Vega, had wanted to accept a post in the council, and so Pérez did—against his will.

1.
Saborit,
Julián Besteiro,
p. 411. The writer Julián Marías came forward to act as Besteiro’s secretary.

2.
Casada, p. 150. Mera had wanted to arrest Negrín and take him to Burgos!

3.
An echo of Casares Quiroga’s question, so long before, to General Gómez Morato: ‘What is going on in Melilla?’ (see above, p. 206).

4.
Alvarez del Vayo,
Freedom’s Battle,
p. 224. There are other versions of this conversation. See García Pradas, p. 75.

1.
Hernández, p. 197. Iaborov’s fate, origin and character are unknown. Lister mentioned him in passing. He and his staff no doubt left that day, with their records.

2.
Castro Delgado, p. 731; Tagüeña, p. 312.

1.
Ibarruri, pp. 453–5; Tagüeña, p. 318.

2.
Tagüeña, p. 316.

3.
The manifesto is, it seems, printed in R. Salas, vol. IV, p. 3414. Togliatti’s authorship was attested by Ettore Vanni,
Io, comunista in Russia
(Bologna, 1948), pp. 6–18, qu. Spriano, vol. III, p. 272. Vanni was then the director of the Spanish communist daily of Valencia,
Verdad.

1.
Lister, pp. 256–7. See, too, Castro Delgado, p. 733.

2.
Alvarez del Vayo,
The Last Optimist,
p. 316; Lister, p. 257.

3.
These were Colonels López Otero, José Pérez Gazzolo and Aflredo Buznego, and Commissar Peinado Leal (Martínez Bande,
op. cit.,
p. 220).

1.
W. Carrillo in
El Mundo
(Mexico, 1 September 1944, qu. Bullejos, p. 226).

2.
For all this see Togliatti’s letter to the communist leaders abroad published in
Histoira internacional
(Madrid, February 1976).

3.
Martínez Bande, p. 212.

4.
Ibarruri, p. 455. Miaja may have suggested it.

1.
R. Salas, vol. II, p. 2318. Ramos Oliviera, vol. III, p. 392, says 1,000.

1.
Martínez Bande,
Los cien últimos, días,
p. 221. These telegrams went from Colonel Ungría in Burgos to Colonel Bonel, in La Torre de Esteban Hambrán (Toledo), who communicated with Centaño and other agents in Madrid.

1.
For this first interview, at the aerodrome at Gamonal near Burgos, see Martínez Bande,
Los cien últimos días,
p. 229. During the course of a conversation on 23 March, Colonel Ungría said that the professional officers in the republican army had prolonged the war; Colonel Garijo spiritedly replied that the republic had lost the war only because those officers had not been allowed to do as they wanted. Further, if the professionals had had a cause in which they really believed, it was doubtful if they would have lost.

2.
For the second conference at Gamonal, see Martínez Bande,
Los cien últimos días,
p. 246f.

1.
Domínguez,
op. cit.

2.
Spriano, vol. III, p. 272.

3.
Aznar, p. 845.

1.
Guy Hermet,
Les Espagnols en France
(Paris, 1967), p. 168.

1.
One who observed the entry of Franco’s armies into Madrid was the eldest son of the US ambassador in London, Kennedy. The young Joseph Patrick Kennedy had arrived in Barcelona in January, having written a doctoral thesis at Harvard on ‘Intervention in Spain’. When Barcelona fell, Kennedy left for Valencia and thence to Madrid, technically designated as press attaché to the US embassy in Paris. In Madrid, Kennedy was both arrested by an anarchist patrol and entered into contact with the Fifth Column. He remained in the capital until early April.

1.
British Foreign Office papers, P.R.O. The captain decided that Casado and his party were ‘fit persons for embarkation in one of HM ships’. He did not think that the 300 ‘armed communists’, who suddenly appeared on the quay, were so. Altogether the British Navy took off some 650. There were at least ten times that number left behind. Martínez Bande,
Los cien últimos días,
p. 287, suggests that there were between 10,000 and 20,000 at Alicante. (I am grateful to Michael Alpert for his help in framing this interpretation. See his article in
Sábado Gráfico,
April 1975.)

2.
Diáz de Villegas, p. 384. Another reaction was Mussolini’s comment to Ciano, pointing to an atlas open at the map of Spain: ‘It has been open in this way for nearly three years, and that is enough. But I know already that I must open it at another page.’ Ciano,
Diaries 1939–43,
p. 57. Italy attacked Albania the following week (6 April).

3.
Ev. of Don Álvaro de Orléans.