The Spanish Civil War (39 page)

In the meantime, the battles of the Alto de León and Somosierra, the first real conflicts of the civil war, were fought with ferocity. The republic should have had the upper hand, for though the numbers of men must have been about equal, they had Madrid’s three artillery regiments, and their closeness to the capital made for logistic superiority. They possessed some 100,000 rifles and probably had an advantage in the air. The government had released by decree all soldiers from their duty to obey their officers (helping to leave the rebel officers without troops) and had then called for the formation, under regular officers, of twenty volunteer battalions which would include ex-soldiers, and which would fight alongside the militia. But difficulties between military commanders’ and political leaders’ interests were incessant. Thus the anarchists abandoned a post which controlled the reservoirs and water of Madrid, because of differences with the republican command.
²

On both sides, prisoners were shot.
³
The aerial combats were slight, as in Aragon, and, indeed, it seemed little use having so many fighters as the republic had, if there were few enemy aircraft to attack, and few pilots capable of exerting much effect on the battle on the ground.
⁴
The small number of nationalist aircraft had a definitely demoralizing effect.

How many died in these days will never be known; for no one knows how many or who set out to fight: certainly not more than 5,000. Judging from the large numbers of regular officers who died on the republican side, captains of the civil guard or the assault guard, the militia losses must have been high, due to the confusion between militia groups and regulars, and also to the naïve courage of the militiamen.
(The falangist Onésimo Redondo was killed by militiamen who had penetrated behind the lines, in an ambush at the village of Labajos on the Madrid high road.) On the republican side, Colonel Castilló, in command at Alto de León, was either killed by his own men or killed himself after his son had died in action. But it was not easy for an officer to lead a body of men who insisted on a show of hands before an attack. Both Captain Condés and Luis Cuenca, the men responsible for the death of Calvo Sotelo, found their own deaths here, with many others of their generation in the assault guards and in the socialist youth movement.

Like the armies which had gone out from Barcelona, the Madrid militiamen (probably in August 40,000 in all) were organized in columns of approximately three hundred men each. These assumed distinctive names, many of them evocative of old revolutions and far-off street-battles, such as ‘Commune de Paris’ or ‘October No. 1’. Others took the name of contemporary political leaders, such as La Pasionaria. There were several units known as the Steel Battalion, so-called because it was assumed to be the picked corps of the union of political parties which had formed it. Columns organized by the war ministry were led by regular officers, but militia battalions were not. The most famous republican militia in the Sierras was that organized by the communist party, the Fifth Regiment.
¹

This force was based upon the communist militia, the MAOC; but others joined as a result of a recruiting drive led by La Pasionaria, the first headquarters being the Salesian convent of Francos Rodríguez in Madrid.
²
By the end of July, 1,000 members of ‘the Fifth Regiment’ had gone to the front.
³
It had its own reserves, system of supplies, and artillery. It also adopted the use of political commissars employed by the Red Army in the Russian Civil War, with the aim of making clear
to the soldiers what they were fighting for. In theory, in the Fifth Regiment, as in the Red Army, commissars were attached to commanders at all levels down to that of company commander. Also, in theory, the counter-signature of commissars was necessary for every order. But neither of these stipulations was fulfilled.

The first commander was a young communist named Enrique Castro Delgado.
¹
But the moving spirits were the communist deputy for Cádiz, Daniel Ortega, and the Italian communist Vittorio Vidali (‘Carlos Contreras’). The latter was an indefatigable, ruthless and imaginative professional revolutionary. While, for instance, he early gained a reputation for shooting cowards, he also made the Fifth Regiment march in step by chartering the band of the Madrid UGT, under the direction of the composer Oropesa.
²
Under Carlos’s guidance, certain famous military leaders appeared—notably Enrique Lister, once a quarryman, and Juan Modesto, an ex-woodcutter who had been an organizer of the MAOC since 1933 and a corporal with native troops in Morocco. Lister had been taken from Galicia while a boy to Cuba, had learnt politics on the building-sites of Havana, in the days of the dictator Machado, had joined the communists in an Asturian gaol in 1931, had spent three years in Moscow, following courses, and working on the underground, and had returned the previous September. Probably the men who really trained the Fifth Regiment were a Portuguese exile, Captain Oliviera, and ‘Captain Benito’ Sánchez, one of the officers condemned for rebellion after the events of 1934.

Another communist leader to appear (though not in the Fifth Regiment) during the battles of the Sierras was Valentín González, ‘El Campesino’ (the Peasant), being notorious for his beard, volubility and physical strength. His enemies said that his name, as well as his beard,
was given to him by the communists to attract the peasants to the communist party. He himself said that he had been known by this sobriquet ever since the time when, aged sixteen, he had blown up four members of the civil guard in a lonely Estremadura sentry-box and then taken to the hills. Later he had fought in Morocco—on both sides, according to himself. He was a brilliant guerrilla leader, if scarcely suited to his subsequent command of a brigade and a division.

The most celebrated incident of this period in the Spanish war occurred at Toledo. From Madrid, the minister of education, the minister of war, and General Riquelme had been furiously telephoning the 58-year-old infantry colonel, Moscardó, commander of the nationalist garrison still holding out in the Alcázar, in an attempt to persuade him to surrender. Finally, on 23 July, Cándido Cabello, a republican barrister in Toledo, telephoned Moscardó to say that if Moscardó did not surrender the Alcázar within ten minutes, he would shoot Luis Moscardó, the Colonel’s 24-year-old son, whom he had captured that morning. ‘So that you can see that’s true, he will speak to you,’ added Cabello. ‘What is happening, my boy?’ asked the colonel. ‘Nothing,’ answered the son, ‘they say they will shoot me if the Alcázar does not surrender.’ ‘If it be true,’ replied Moscardó, ‘commend your soul to God, shout
Viva España,
and die like a hero. Good-bye my son, a last kiss.’ ‘Good-bye father,’ answered Luis, ‘a very big kiss.’ Cabello came back on to the telephone, and Moscardó announced that the period of grace was unnecessary. ‘The Alcázar will never surrender,’ he remarked, replacing the receiver. Luis Moscardó was not, however, shot there and then, but was executed with other prisoners in front of the Tránsito synagogue on 23 August, in reprisal for an air raid.
¹
This heroic tale became a legend in nationalist Spain. Subsequently, the accusation has been made that the telephone had been already cut by 23 July, and that no one recorded the telephone conversation at the time. Some exchange of this sort, nevertheless, assuredly occurred.

The Alcázar remained besieged. Though food was short, there was water and ammunition. The provisions were supplemented by a raid on a nearby granary which brought back two thousand sacks of wheat. Horsemeat (there had been 177 horses in the Alcázar at the start of the siege) and bread were the basic diet of the besieged. As the days wore on, Moscardó became less the real leader in the siege than the colonel of the local civil guard, Pedro Romero Bassart. But Moscardó remained the heroic symbol. The number of attackers varied between 1,000 and 5,000, of whom many were ‘tourists’ of war, who drove out with their wives or girlfriends from Madrid for an afternoon’s sniping.
¹
As for the hostages taken in with the defenders at the beginning, they were never heard of again, and all fifty of them must be supposed to have shared the fate of Luis Moscardó, though on the other side of the lines.

While the Alcázar at Toledo continued to hold out, the Loyola barracks in San Sebastián surrendered to the Basques on 27 July, and the civil guard of Albacete were overwhelmed on 25 July. The officers in Valencia were also stormed in their barracks on 31 July, after a rising by NCOs and soldiers against them. Those who were not killed in the assault were tried and, in many cases, executed. The remaining points of nationalist resistance within republican territory were, therefore, Oviedo, the Simancas barracks at Gijón, the Alcázar, and one or two isolated spots in Andalusia.

At the same time, the dividing-line in Spain itself was being altered, in the south and in the north and north-east. The as yet few members of the Army of Africa, legionaries and
Regulares,
who had been transported across the Straits of Gibraltar were enough to enlarge substantially the area dominated by General Queipo de Llano from Seville.
Huelva, the whole of the southern coast from that port up to the Portuguese border, the once rich though now neglected land between Seville, Cádiz and Algeciras, and that between Seville and Córdoba, passed into nationalist hands, after a series of rapid marches by officers and men trained in the Moroccan Wars.
¹
Instead, therefore, of merely controlling in Andalusia a few cities where the rising had been successful, the nationalists held a compact territory striking a wound into the heart of the revolutionary south. As yet, Granada and several towns on the way to it were still beleaguered. But their relief did not seem distant. In all such towns or villages as were captured, bloody reprisals were enacted as atonement for the atrocities of the preceding days.

Between Barcelona and Madrid, the two main republican centres and fronts, the battle-line was uncertain. The column which had captured Guadalajara and Alcalá advanced to capture the cathedral city of Sigüenza. But further advances were precluded, as on the nationalist side, by a shortage of ammunition. From Valencia, a militia column drove north-west towards Teruel, the most southerly rebel town of Aragon. The civil guard, which formed part of that force, deserted to the nationalists as soon as they reached the front. Though Teruel was surrounded on three sides, and Major Aguado, its nationalist commander, was killed, no progress was made towards its capture. Here, as elsewhere, revolution occupied the militiamen as much as war. The confusion of the region was increased by the release of the common criminals of the Valencian prison of San Miguel de los Reyes. These chiefly joined the CNT’s Iron Battalion. One of the released convicts (aged thirty-four at the time of release, after eleven years of gaol) described how he and his comrades ‘changed the mode of life in the villages through which we passed, annihilating the brutal political bosses who had robbed and tormented the peasants and placing their wealth in the hands of the only ones who know how to create it …’ He added how the bourgeoisie (still in control of events, by his definition) plotted the Iron Battalion’s later destruction, since ‘they can be injured … by the wildly irrepressible desires we carry in our hearts to be free like eagles on the highest mountain peaks’.
²

Yet, while rhetoric might inspire fighting hearts, the railways were as important in carrying men, and provisions, from cities to fronts and from one city to another. Behind the republican lines, the CNT strove to keep as many trains as before the war—a waste of resources, since there were different needs.

Between these main battlefields, along the line of division soon referred to as a ‘front’, nearly 2,000 miles long, there were many gaps whence it was easy, from either side, to cross into the other Spain. Many refugees crossed secretly in these early weeks, from one ‘zone’ to another. Many ‘loyal’ civil guards joined their friends thus, others escaped by boat.

Thus gradually the passions in Spain matured, or became debased, into a regular war.

The war which now began was in many respects a class war. But as usual in such circumstances, that meant that the middle class was divided. There were innumerable instances of fathers and sons or brothers being on different sides. General Pozas, head of the civil guard and republican minister of the interior, had a brother who became ADC to General Mola; Colonel Romero Bassart, military adviser to the militia in Málaga, had a brother who led the defence of the Alcázar at Toledo; the brother of the commander of the republican fleet, Admiral Buiza, soon died in Andalusia fighting for the Legion. Hidalgo de Cisneros, soon to be the commander of the air force in the republic, also had a brother with Franco. Four Pérez Salas brothers were to be, in 1936, fighting in the republican army, while a fifth was with the Carlists in Beorlegui’s column. Franco himself, as has been said, sentenced a cousin to be shot. (Another first cousin, Captain Hermenegildo Franco Salgado, and a brother of his own ADC, was the captain of the
Libertad;
he was murdered by his sailors at El Ferrol.) Carlos Baráibar, editor of
Claridad,
and Largo Caballero’s adviser on military matters, had a brother who was an official in Franco’s engineers. That list could be endlessly extended. The great anarchist Durruti’s brother, Pedro, was a falangist.

Largo Caballero’s misery at the (false) news that his favourite son had been shot on the nationalist side affected his judgement. ‘Almost everyone had someone on the other side,’ remarked an old supporter of the CEDA who fought ultimately for the Right, adding sourly
though perhaps not accurately, ‘the immense majority didn’t want to fight for one side or the other’.
¹

The rebellion of the Right was partly a rebellion of youth. The establishment at the head of the
junta de defensa
of the 64-year-old General Cabanellas obscures the fact that Franco was the youngest general of a Spanish division, and that the leaders of the Falange were mostly twenty years younger than their enemies. In Seville a colonel, Santiago Mateo, was condemned to death for seeking to resist the rebellion; he was defended at the summary Council of War by his son, an officer who sided with Queipo.