The Spanish Civil War (29 page)

At Valladolid, that other cathedral city of the Castilian plain, General Andrés Saliquet, a conservative, moustachioed officer who had offended Azaña, and General Miguel Ponte, an indefatigable monarchist conspirator, unexpectedly appeared in the office of the commander of the division, General Nicolás Molero, a freemason and minister of war with the ill-fated Portela, and demanded his adhesion to their cause. The rebels gave their brother-officer a quarter of an hour to reflect, and retired into an outer room. While the minutes passed, the noise could be heard of the start of street-fighting between falangists and workers. Suddenly, General Molero flung open the door, and cried ‘
¡Viva la República!
’. One of his aides opened fire. A short fight ensued, two junior officers being killed on either side, but the rebels emerged victorious. Molero was led away, later to be condemned to death for ‘rebellion’, though he was merely held in prison for many years. In the city, the railway workers fought gallantly all day against their well-armed opponents, who included the civil guard, assault guards, and civilians as well as the falangists. The
casa del pueblo
never surrendered, and was razed to the ground. By evening, however, Valladolid had been conquered. Luis Lavín, the civil governor, who had been appointed by Casares Quiroga to control fascism in the city, found himself deserted by all his staff. He got into his motor-car and attempted to flee to Madrid. He was caught, and brought back a prisoner to his own house, where General Ponte had by then established himself.
²

Of the other towns of Old Castile, Segovia was won for the rebels without bloodshed, as were Salamanca and Avila, where many falangists, including Onésimo Redondo, were released from prison. Zamora and Palencia were also quickly captured, though the officers, civil guard, and right-wing politicians remained in both cities on tenterhooks for several days, due to the stories of the likely arrival of a train full of miners, who in fact returned to plague Aranda at Oviedo. In León, 2,000 miners did
arrive, demanding arms. The military governor, General José Bosch, agreed to give them what they wanted on condition that they left the town. In the event, 200 rifles and four machine-guns were handed over. León itself remained peaceful till the next day, when the miners were well on their way to Madrid.
¹
In Estremadura, Cáceres and its province were captured for the rising, but Badajoz, thanks to the loyalty of the garrison under General Luis Castelló (the new minister of war), remained republican. In New Castile and La Mancha, there was only one rebel success—at Albacete, captured by the civil guard. As for Andalusia during 19 July, Queipo de Llano tightened his hand on Seville, but its suburbs remained in working-class hands. In those Andalusian towns where the rising had been generally successful on 18 July, sporadic fighting continued, the nationalists being greatly assisted in Cádiz and Algeciras by the arrival of units of Moors from the Army of Africa, who had been shipped across the Straits in the destroyer
Churruca,
under the noses of the republican ships, in the dark. The stalemate of Granada persisted all day. Castelló, from the ministry of war, telephoned General Campins, the military governor, ordering him to equip a column to march on Córdoba. But two senior colonels of the garrison answered that it was doubtful whether the officers would support such a force. Another colonel, alluding to the general strike then beginning, declared that Granada was already in Marxist hands. Campins suggested that the militias of the Popular Front should undertake the expedition demanded by Madrid. He first went to the artillery barracks and to the assembled officers announced, ‘Gentlemen, the military rising has failed. I trust you to remain absolutely loyal to the republic. I have orders from the ministry of war to take over the arms of this garrison.’ A silence greeted his words, and that he took for consent. But by midnight the militiamen remained unequipped.
²

There was a similar stalemate at Valencia. In mid-morning, all was ready for the rising, with several thousand civilian supporters assured, when bad news came in from Barcelona. General González Carrasco, who had arrived from Madrid to lead the rebels, vacillated, to the fury of Major Barba, the chief organizer of the conspiracy there (he was national chief of the UME). The military governor, General Martínez
Monje, who had been trying for some months to play both sides against each other, similarly wavered. The civil governor resigned. The CEDA’s leader in the town, the unstable vice-president of the movement, Luis Lucia, who had eddied from regionalism to insurrectionism, condemned the rising, and thus prevented the mass middle-class rally for the rising which so helped it elsewhere.
¹
The Valencian workers, led by the anarchist dockers, were massing in the streets. The college of St Thomas of Villanueva and the church of the Two St Johns were pillaged and set on fire. The generals continued to dither, while left-wing officers of the civil guard, led by Captain Manuel Uribarri, began to distribute arms. The matter was thus left unsettled by the time night fell.
²
This uncertainty was reflected down the coast at Alicante, Almería and Gandia. But there was no doubt about the Popular Front success farther south and throughout all those parts of Andalusia where there had been no rising on 18 July. By nightfall, this poverty-stricken part of Spain was aflame with revolution.

In the Balearics, while Majorca had been secured by Goded for the rebels, the NCOs and troops of the garrison at Minorca prevented the success of the rising there by General José Bosch.
³
By nightfall, that officer had proclaimed a state of war at Port Mahon, but was closely besieged. In Ibiza, the rising triumphed, as in the other small Balearic islands. Discussion of the politics of this archipelago naturally prompts consideration of the whereabouts of the fleet.

On the disastrous dawn of 19 July, the cruisers
Libertad
and
Miguel de Cervantes
were sailing south from El Ferrol. They had been dispatched by the government to seek to prevent the Army of Africa from crossing the Straits of Gibraltar. Later, the only seaworthy Spanish battleship, the
Jaime I
(the
España
was under repair at El Ferrol), also left Vigo for the south. Upon all these ships, upon the destroyer
Churruca
which had already landed a cargo of Moors at Cádiz, and upon all the warships at Cartagena, the same revolutionary events occurred as
on the three destroyers which had been sent the day before to Melilla: that is, the men, stimulated by radio messages from the admiralty in Madrid addressed to them and not to their commanders, overwhelmed, imprisoned and in many cases shot those officers who seemed disloyal.
¹
The most violent battles occurred on the
Miguel de Cervantes
where the officers, in mid-ocean, resisted the ship’s company to the last man. (To the laconic question as to what should be done with the corpses—asked by the committee of the ship’s company which took over command—the admiralty replied: ‘Lower bodies overboard with respectful solemnity’.)
²
There was, however, little fighting on board the
Jaime I,
whose captain remained in command. So, by the evening of 19 July, an extraordinary fleet, run by self-appointed committees of their crews, was gathered in Gibraltarian waters, so obstructing access by General Franco to southern Spain. The gunboat
Dato,
which remained under the officers’ control, did, however, run a second cargo of
Regulares
across the Straits in the evening of 19 July, while part of the 5th
Bandera
of the Legion was flown to Seville by three Breguet aircraft which chanced to be in Morocco.

Confusion continued among the plotters in Madrid. Mola had failed to coordinate there the diverse elements—the army officers around Fanjul, those in the UME, the falangists—who were hostile to the republic. There was doubt whether General Miaja, the Infantry Brigade commander (and very briefly minister of war), was or was not with the rebels. Some said that he was a member of UME, and people remembered that he had been Mola’s first captain, in Morocco. At the last minute, there was even ambiguity as to who would lead the rising in Madrid: the politically active Fanjul, or García de la Herrán, the general in charge of the regiment at Carabanchel.
³
Also missing was the ‘nerve’ of the conspiracy, Colonel Galarza, ‘the technician’ and coordinator of the plot, who had been arrested. The nominal leader of the rebellion in Madrid, General Villegas, therefore decided that the assignment was too much for him and so General Fanjul, the deputy
who had once been under-secretary for war under Gil Robles, took his place. He arrived at the Montaña barracks in the afternoon. To that large, rambling edifice on the west of Madrid, overlooking the valley of the sluggish river Manzanares, and commanded by Colonel Francisco Serra, there also repaired, during the day, officers from other barracks in Madrid, and a number of falangists. General Fanjul gave a lecture on the political aims of the rising, and on its legality. Then the rebels attempted to sally out into the streets of the capital. But by this time a huge crowd, organized by the UGT and CNT, and the political parties, had assembled outside the gates, many of them armed with the UGT’s rifles or those 5,000 handed out by the government which did have bolts. The density of the crowd rendered it difficult for the rebels to move. They, therefore, resorted to firing with machine-guns. The crowd replied; but nothing else happened until the morning. Meantime, that night Dolores Ibarruri, La Pasionaria, made the first of many violent speeches, on the radio, calling on ‘workers, peasants, anti-fascists, and patriotic Spaniards’ not to permit the victory of ‘the hangmen of Asturias’:
no pasarán,
they shall not pass, an echo of Verdun, was the watchword, often repeated during the next months.

During the night of 19–20 July, fifty churches in Madrid were set on fire. The working-class parties, led by paramilitary units, of which the MAOC (the communist militia) was the most important, gained effective control of the streets, while loyal republicans consolidated their hold over the ministries, particularly the ministry of war. On 20 July, a crowd even larger than that which had gathered the previous day assembled in the Plaza de España. All shouted ‘Death to fascism’ and ‘All to the aid of the republic’ with exultant monotony. The lance of Don Quixote, whose statue stands in the centre of the square, was enthusiastically interpreted as pointing to the Montaña barracks.
¹
Five hours of bombardment of that fortress followed. Aircraft and three pieces of artillery (drawn by a beer lorry) were included among the weapons of assault. Loudspeakers encouraged counter-rebellion among the soldiers inside the barracks. Inside, Fanjul, though confident, with 2,000 troops and about 500 monarchists and falangists, had no means of concerting measures with the other garrisons in Madrid.
Those could only communicate with each other by signals over the roof-tops. Fanjul nevertheless by this means implored General García de la Herrán, at the suburb of Carabanchel, to send a force to relieve him. But there was no possibility of relief getting through. With hindsight, it seems that it was a fatal error to retire on the Montaña barracks in this manner; Fanjul hoped to await help there, but he only found disaster. At half past ten, Fanjul and Colonel Serra, the head of the garrison in the barracks, were wounded. The fall of a bomb into the courtyard from a loyal Breguet XIX, from the air base at Getafe, exercised the minds of the rebels. The artillery was also effective. Half an hour later, a white flag appeared at a window of the fortress. The crowd advanced to receive the expected surrender. They were greeted by machine-gun fire. This incident was repeated once more, maddening the attackers. Confusion among the defenders, rather than guile, was responsible. Some of the rank and file wanted to yield, and were, therefore, ready to betray their officers. Eventually, a few minutes before noon, the great door of the barracks broke beneath repeated assaults. The crowd burst into the courtyard, where for some moments all was hysteria and bloodshed. A militiaman appeared suddenly at an outside window, and began to throw rifles down to the crowd still in the street. One giant revolutionary conceived it his duty to fling officer after officer, disarmed and yelling, from the highest gallery upon the insensate mass of people in the courtyard beneath. The succeeding massacre beggared description. Several hundred of the defenders, including Serra, were killed. Those who were saved were flung into the Model Prison, many with wounds undressed. General Fanjul was with difficulty carried off to be tried for rebellion. The precious supplies of bolts (and ammunition) were also saved from mass distribution and borne off to the ministry of war by the assault guards, one of whose units in Madrid, led by Major Ricardo Burillo, was wholly loyal (the other two units were less sure).
¹

The successful attackers now marched to the Puerta del Sol. There, however, their victory parade was interrupted by firing from all sides. A unit of assault guards cleared the houses surrounding the square,
while the people lay on their faces. As for the other garrisons in Madrid, the engineers at El Pardo drove off northward towards Segovia, the officers telling their men that they were on their way to fight General Mola. Among those so tricked was Largo Caballero’s son, who was imprisoned for the remainder of the war. In the suburb of Getafe, the air force officers loyal to the government scotched an attempted rising at the air-base there, after one loyal officer at least had been murdered; in that of Carabanchel, the artillery barracks were also captured by loyal officers, together with units of the militias after the colonel, Ernesto Carratalá, one of the founders of the republican officers’ group UMRA, had been shot by his staff for attempting to hand out arms to the militia. General García de la Herrán was also killed by his own soldiers, for a contrasting reason. One by one the other garrisons fell.
¹
The communists La Pasionaria and Lister went to infantry barracks No. 1, and, by eloquence, won over the rather reluctant soldiers to the cause of the government.