The Spanish Civil War (44 page)

The ensuing battle was fought in dazzling sunshine, so close to the French frontier that Beorlegui had to restrain his men from firing in an easterly direction. Day after day, there was a prolonged rebel artillery bombardment, followed by an assault, after the Basque lines appeared to be evacuated. The defenders would then return and, in hand-to-hand fighting, recapture the position. After a delay, the artillery bombardment would begin again. The Puntza ridge, for example, was destroyed, evacuated, and recovered four times in this way before being finally captured, on 2 September. That day, the Navarrese also took the whitewashed convent of San Marcial, on the windy hill immediately commanding Irún, and the customs post at Behobia. The latter was surrounded, the men within fighting hand-to-hand to the last man, those who could having leapt into the Bidasoa to swim to France and to liberty. Both sides fought with complete disregard of personal safety, putting the lie to those accusations of cowardice that both shouted at each other when the firing had ceased, at night, or during the afternoon’s siesta.

The inhabitants of Irún began to flee across the International Bridge on the road to Hendaye. On foot, by wheelchair, by motor-car, by coach, by horse, with domestic and farm animals, with babies, with a few articles of furniture or pictures, the refugees fled to the frontier, impelled by panic, many in tears and penniless. The militiamen had hitherto been fed and urged on by their wives and families. Now they were alone, a rearguard who had nothing to defend. On 3 September, Beorlegui, having been visited the day before by the now anachronistic figure of Gil Robles, and commanding only 1,500 men, assaulted Irún. He was watched by spectators from the French side of the Bidasoa. The
attack was not immediately successful. At two in the morning, however, the frontier village of Behobia was captured. Most of the defenders of Irún, including the committee in charge, fled to France before the sun rose. A detachment of anarchists from Asturias, together with some local communists and the French and Belgians, stayed last. The former set several parts of Irún ablaze. They also shot a number of the right-wing prisoners in Fort Guadalupe at Fuenterrabía, and then escaped, leaving the rest free to cheer Beorlegui the next day, as he occupied the ruined town. Beorlegui suffered a mortal wound in the leg in a final battle at the International Bridge, apparently from a group of French communist machine-gunners. As for the refugees, those who wished to continue to fight—560 men, including the French and Belgians—were sent off by train to Barcelona, where they attached themselves to the columns in Aragon. The rest were dispatched to camps in France.

12. The campaign in Guipúzcoa, August–September 1936

This campaign handed over to the nationalists about 1,000 square miles of rich farmland, densely populated, with many important factories; it was also a victory of incomparable strategic importance, since its loss cut off the Basque nationalists, the Santanderinos and the Asturians from friendly France. The nationalists could also now travel by rail from Hendaye to Cádiz.
¹

Apart from their main strategic venture in the south of Spain, the nationalists mounted, in August, several forays to establish communications between Seville, Córdoba, Granada, Cádiz and Algeciras. The dashing son of a sergeant-major, General Varela, the ex-instructor of the Carlists,
²
drove across Andalusia with a
tabor
of Moroccans and relieved Granada.
³
Towns that briefly experienced the delights, or tortures, of libertarian communism were relieved, and much bloodshed followed. The massacres at Balna were especially numerous. The province of Málaga, though protected by mountains, was thus faced to the north as well as to the west by possible rebel advances. Varela was then ordered north to defend the nationalist position at Córdoba, threatened on 20 August by a republican attack under General Miaja, briefly minister of war on the night of 18–19 July, now leading a detachment of republican troops from Madrid, along with some militia-men of Andalusia, numbering about 3,000. The attack reached the gates of Córdoba, which, under the brutal nationalist Colonel Cascajo, might have fallen had it not been for the skilful use of Italian Savoia bombers. Then Miaja was beaten back, many men of the militia carrying rifles only for use against those stopping their flight.
⁴
Miaja’s failure raised the question of his loyalty to the cause of the republic. Possibly, Miaja did not advance on Córdoba because Cascajo threatened reprisals on his family who were there,
⁵
but more likely because he could not arouse his men to advance. It began then to be asked in Madrid, could any ex-regular officer be loyal?
⁶
Certainly, there was
spying on a large scale. Miaja’s adjutant, Captain Fernández Castañeda, was hoping to cross the lines and was doing his best to enable civil guards to escape from the republic (he himself did so in February 1937).
¹
Treachery, or at least ambiguity of loyalty, was indeed rife in Andalusia: ‘There was a man in charge of the trench diggers,’ recalled a schoolboy of the time, ‘who had been sent from Málaga for the defence of the village and he was made one of the youth leaders. You’d hardly believe it, he turned out to be a leading falangist when the nationalists entered.’
²
The repression in towns where the republic had briefly triumphed was considerable: a landowner, Felix Moreno, in Palma del Rio, had 300 killed on 27 August in revenge for the killing of his bulls.

The republic launched some other initiatives in August. The Aragon front was quiet, it is true, save from an attack on Huesca by Carlo Rosselli’s Italian anarchists and social democrats of the Giustizia e Libertá Column, which received a baptism of fire at Monte Pelato in the Sierra de Galoche on 28 August—a skirmish in which their commander, the lawyer Mario Angeloni, was killed.
³
More important, on 9 August, a Catalan and Valencian expeditionary force, under an air force captain, Alberto Bayo, and a civil guard captain from Valencia, Manuel Uribarri, arrived at Ibiza in a requisitioned liner (the
Marqués de Comillas
), two destroyers, a submarine, and six aeroplanes. The workers rose against the fifty men of the garrison and the island was returned to republican control. The socialist who was so bad an adviser to Largo Caballero, Luis Araquistain, and the communist poet Rafael Alberti were thereby released from gaol. Some days later, after a quarrel with Uribarri, Bayo arrived on the south coast of Majorca. This expedition was carried out under the authority of the
Generalidad,
and the ministry of war in Madrid seems not to have known much about it.

At dawn on 16 August, Bayo disembarked with about 8,000 men on the east coast near the small town of Porto Cristo, which was quickly occupied. But, after the success of the landing, the invaders passed the
morning indecisively. In the evening, six 75 millimetre guns and four of 105 millimetres were also disembarked, along with hydroplanes from Barcelona.
¹
They established themselves about eight miles inside the island. Perplexity at their own success continued, so allowing the nationalists to gather themselves for a counter-attack. A small Italian air squadron which proudly called itself ‘the Dragons of Death’, of three Savoia 81 bombers, and a group of Italian Black Shirts, led by Arconovaldo Bonaccorsi, a fanatical fascist from Bologna with a red beard, known as the ‘Conte Rossi’, arrived in their support,
²
together
with three Fiat (CR32) fighters and some other aircraft. The Fiats, with Italian pilots (among them an excellent flier named Cerestiato), outclassed their republican opponents. Henceforward, republican bombers were unable to bomb Palma. On 3 September, a nationalist counter-offensive, led by Colonel García Ruiz, began. To begin with, the garrison had 1,200 men, 300 carabineers and civil guards together with a number of falangists, led by the Marqués de Zayas. This raised their total to 3,500. The Catalan expeditionary force, which had no medical service, field hospitals or adequate supplies, fled back to their ships. The invaders were demoralized by the aviation, but the decision to withdraw the bridgehead was taken unnecessarily. The retreat was covered, to some extent, by the deployment of the battleship
Jaime I,
outside the harbour of Porto Cristo, with some other republican naval vessels. The beaches were covered with corpses, but many militiamen managed to escape, leaving their arms. Some wounded billeted in a convent, however, were shot in the sight of the mother superior.
¹
Few prisoners were spared execution.

13. The invasion of Majorca, August 1936

So the expedition came to an inglorious end, though Barcelona Radio announced: ‘The heroic Catalan columns have returned from Majorca after a magnificent action. Not a single man suffered from the effects of the embarkation, for Captain Bayo, with unique tactical skill, succeeded in carrying it out, thanks to the morale and discipline of our invincible militiamen.’
²
Thereafter, Majorca remained for some months almost the private fief of the ‘Conte Rossi’, who, dressed in his black fascist uniform, relieved by a white cross at the neck, roared over the island in a red racing-car, accompanied by an armed Falange chaplain. It was now that the murders of working-class Majorcans reached their height.
³
Ibiza and Formentera, meantime, were abandoned. (The
fate of Ibiza, a beautiful island, was appalling; the rebels first killed 55 in an air raid; the FAI then shot 239 prisoners; when the rebels finally returned, they shot 400.)
¹

In Asturias, meantime, the two battles for the Simancas barracks in Gijón and for Oviedo also continued into August. Only when the former had been reduced could the Asturian miners concentrate on Oviedo, where Colonel Aranda could not sally out of the town which he had held by such guile. His defence was made easier since Oviedo had been well equipped with armaments after the Asturias rising of 1934—particularly machine-guns. Aranda had at his disposal some 2,300 men, including about 860 volunteers, mostly falangists. The siege of the barracks at Gijón was rendered more difficult by bombardment by the nationalist cruiser
Almirante Cervera
which lay off shore. The 180 defenders, on the other hand, were constantly lulled by broadcasts from Radio Club Lisbon, Corunna, and Seville into false expectations that relief was on its way. The water supply of the defenders gave out, and the nightly smacking of lips by Queipo de Llano on Seville Radio turned several of the besieged half-mad. Still, they did not give in. Here, as less dramatically at Toledo, the sons of the colonel in command, the fanatical Antonio Pinilla, and of his second-in-command, Suárez Palacios, were brought by the militia to demand the surrender of the barracks. Pinilla refused. Eventually, the barracks were stormed by the miners using dynamite as their main weapon. Pinilla ordered no surrender even until the last moment. Finally, on 16 August, this commander sent a Roman message by radio to the nationalist warships off the town: ‘Defence is impossible. The barracks are burning and the enemy are starting to enter. Fire on us!’ The demand was obeyed, and the last defenders of the Simancas barracks died in the flames.

Thereafter, the miners could lay close siege to Oviedo. Their military chiefs were a socialist miner, Otero, and a CNT steelworker, Higinio Carrocera. Aranda lacked supplies, but the besiegers lacked almost all material except for their infernal dynamite. So neither side made a move. Aranda had to hold a whole city with enemies within as well as without with less than 3,000 men. His own cool but jovial personality was the mainstay of the defence,
²
but there also reappeared
under his orders a captain of engineers, Oscar Pérez Solís, who had once been briefly secretary-general of the communist party though now a falangist, perhaps anxious in combat to purge himself of the indiscretions, bank robberies and murders which he had carried out for the communists ten years before.

At Toledo, the battle was intermittent. The resistance of the Alcázar maddened the militiamen besieging it, but their incompetence defeated only their own commanders: who themselves varied from a regular general, such as Riquelme, to the socialist painter Luis Quintanilla. Rifle-fire went on all August from both sides. The well-trained defenders were good shots, and the militia made no attempt at an assault. Insults and boasts were exchanged through megaphones. Occasional bombs dropped made little difference to the defence of the ancient fortress, which had been thoroughly reinforced at the beginning of the century. The Catholic population of Toledo made the besiegers feel that they were surrounded by treason. The civilian authorities were, meantime, engaged in squabbling over the protection of the incomparable paintings in Toledo’s churches and in the El Greco Museum. Although the defenders in the Alcázar possessed all the ammunition that they needed, there seemed little hope of their relief. They were cut off from the rest of Spain. There was no electricity, and the saltpetre off the walls was used for salt. The rebels conducted themselves, nevertheless, with serenity. Parades were taken, and the one thoroughbred horse inside was looked after as if in a stud. A fiesta in honour of the Assumption was even held in the cellars of the Alcázar, with flamenco and castanets. Then, on 17 August, a nationalist aeroplane flew over them and dropped messages of encouragement from Franco and Mola and, more important, news. On 4 September came the fall of Talavera de la Reina, only forty miles away down the Tagus.
¹
The Alcázar received a message from the ‘young women of Burgos’: ‘The heroic epic which your valour for God and Spain has written on our glorious Alcázar will be the pride of Spanish chivalry for ever. Gentlemen cadets, we are
señoritas
radiant with joy and hope and, like you, we are the New Spain of the glorious dawn.’ (It was still widely believed that the Alcázar was held by cadets.)