The Spanish Civil War (46 page)

While the other powers were thus busy arranging to break their words, Eden took up an Italian suggestion for a permanent group to
supervise the working of non-intervention. After dispute as to its powers, a committee was arranged. This, deriving from the successful ambassadors’ conference at the time of the Balkan Wars, was to be convened at the Foreign Office in London. The first meeting was arranged for 9 September. Thus was born the Non-Intervention Committee, which was to graduate from equivocation to hypocrisy, and which was to last out the civil war.
¹
Eden had returned to London on 16 August; Baldwin, however, had been ordered three months’ rest, for medical reasons, and was away in South Wales. The cabinet ‘did not meet’, reported Eden later, ‘from the end of July until the beginning of September, and the British policy was decided by the Foreign Office’.
²

The Non-Intervention Committee met for the first time in London on 9 September. W. S. Morrison, financial secretary to the Treasury,
³
led the British delegation and took the chair. The other countries, represented by their ambassadors in London, included all the European countries except for Switzerland, which had banned the export of arms, but whose code of neutrality forbade her intervention even in a committee of non-intervention.
⁴

The first meeting of the committee was concerned with ‘the murky tide of procedure’, in
Pravda
’s unusually accurate words. The representatives present agreed to give to Francis Hemming, a British civil servant in the cabinet office whose knowledge of Spain was confined to the butterflies of the Pyrenees and who became the committee’s secretary, the texts of the laws their countries had passed
banning the export of arms. Apart from the British representative, the leading men at the committee were Corbin, the French ambassador; Grandi, the fascist ex–foreign secretary of Italy whom Mussolini had transferred to the Embassy at London for not being satisfactorily fascist; and Maisky, the Russian ambassador. Ribbentrop (who became German ambassador on 30 October), and his second-in-command, Prince Bismarck, the grandson of the Iron Chancellor, took a less prominent part than Grandi to whom, indeed, they had been instructed to leave the running. Ribbentrop later described how difficult he found working with Grandi—‘an intriguer if ever there was one’.
¹
Portugal, whose attendance the Russians had insisted upon, was not immediately represented. The Portuguese minister in Berlin said on 7 September (when the German ship
Usamoro
was refused facilities to discharge another cargo of arms for the nationalists at Lisbon due, it was thought in Berlin, to British influence) that she would not be represented until after a ban on volunteers.
²
Salazar apparently thought that to join the committee would to some degree imply a surrender of authority.
³
But the Portuguese need not have worried. Grandi had been instructed by Ciano ‘to do his best to give the Committee’s entire activity a purely platonic character’.
⁴
Ribbentrop later joked that a better name for the Non-Intervention Committee would have been ‘intervention committee’.
⁵
The German attitude to the committee was more ambiguous than the Italian, because the German foreign office was so ill-informed as to what the war ministry and Nazi party were doing. The German diplomats had not, indeed, decided whether real non-intervention would aid Franco or not. As for France and Britain, Bismarck reported that the first meeting of the committee left the impression that, for both countries, ‘It is not so much a question of taking actual steps immediately, as of pacifying
the aroused feelings of the Leftist parties … by the very establishment of such a committee’.
¹
From the start, the British and French governments were occupied less with the end of intervention on all sides, than with the
appearance
of such an end. In this way the flow of war material to the two sides in Spain might not be prevented, but, at the least, the extension of the Spanish war might be.

Britain accused Italy of landing aircraft in Majorca on 7 September.
²
On 12 September, Ingram, the British chargé in Rome, told Ciano that changes in the Mediterranean would ‘closely concern the British government’. Ciano replied that no such alteration had occurred or was contemplated.
³
But Majorca was nevertheless an Italian stronghold throughout the civil war. The main street, the Rambla, in Palma, was even renamed the Vía Roma, and statues of two Roman youths in togas with eagles on their shoulders stood at its entry. The Bay of Pollensa became an Italian naval base. War material poured into the island. The island was mined and refortified by Italians. The incident showed that Britain might protest when she felt her interests were threatened by some consequence of the Spanish war, but that she would not do so in respect of a simple breach of the Agreement. Yet, to give Baldwin’s and Blum’s Cabinets their due, both believed that their countries, and European peace, would be best served by the prevention of military help to Spain. Both governments made every effort to keep the pact, even though in France this continued to make trouble for Blum. But, at this time, the majority of expressed opinion in both countries supported this policy. The Labour party in England even deplored the delay in bringing non-intervention into being. As for the communists, Thorez tried to persuade Blum to change his policy on aid to Spain on 7 September.
⁴
Despite his failure, he undertook
that the communists would not vote against the government in the National Assembly. The Comintern sponsored in London a ‘Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Breaches of the Non-Intervention Agreement in Spain’. Such respectable persons as Philip Noel-Baker, Lord Faringdon, Professor Trend of Cambridge, and Miss Eleanor Rathbone were members. The two secretaries were Geoffrey Bing and the journalist John Langdon-Davies, of whom the first, a young lawyer, was then a member of the communist party.
¹
Langdon-Davies was also on the far Left. This was a typical communist tactic of those days, the favourite one, it would seem, of the inventive Willi Muenzenberg.

The second meeting of the Non-Intervention Committee occurred on 14 September, and set up a sub-committee, composed of Belgium, Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Sweden, to deal with everyday matters of non-intervention.
²
The smaller states even on the sub-committee were only too willing to follow the lead of the great powers and the real debates were confined to France, Britain, Germany, and Italy. The timidity before Hitler, and before all international responsibility, of the Scandinavian and (as they would now be called) the Benelux countries was indeed, in some ways, the most distasteful aspect of the diplomatic history of those days. But then, what could they do, if Britain continued with ‘appeasement’? And ‘appeasement’ seemed the only safe policy for an empire already embarked on a decline, however little she desired to admit it.

This meeting coincided with Pope Pius XI’s first public reaction to the war in Spain. He spoke on 14 September of the republicans’ ‘truly satanic hatred of God’ at Castelgandolfo to six hundred Spanish refugees.
³
The same day, a priest in Madrid who had sided with the republic, Father García Morales, adjured the Pope to denounce the rebels. Some days later, José Bergamín, a Catholic apologist who edited
Cruz y Raya,
described the generals, bishops, Moors, and Carlists who were fighting the republic as being implicated in some ‘fantastic mum
ming show of death’. Thus the Spanish Civil War caused a conflict within the Catholic church, throughout Europe and the world. Diplomatic manoeuvres were equalled by ecclesiastical. War within international opinion had also been declared. The conflict was by September 1936 thus no isolated Carlist war of the nineteenth century.

At the beginning of September 1936, Franco was at Talavera, and Mola was at Irún, threatening San Sebastián. The republic’s Majorcan expedition had failed. Saragossa, Huesca, Oviedo, and even the Alcázar at Toledo remained in rebel hands. In the south, much of Andalusia had been lost to the republic, as well as nearly all Estremadura. The experience of the well-armed Army of Africa was the chief explanation for the nationalists’ success. Bravery might win street-battles, but was inadequate against legionaries and the
Regulares.
Only the Fifth Regiment among the militias knew anything of discipline. The remains of the regular army, the civil guard and assault forces still with the government seemed demoralized. The republic, with their purchases of French aeroplanes and their initial numerical advantage in aircraft, might often have enjoyed command of the air; but the mercenary French pilots were not of high quality, and the nationalists’ concentration of their few, but impressive, new aircraft from Germany and Italy on the Estremaduran and Tagus fronts gave them superiority there. The young German pilots who flew these Junkers and Heinkels, alongside Spaniards, in the so-called squadron of ‘Pedros and Pablos’, were superior to their French counterparts. Political predilections also affected tactics. On the Talavera front, for example, the republicans had high hopes for an armoured train, a favourite development of the Russian Civil War. In Spain, that ‘vital shovelful of coal that keeps a
dying fire alive’, as Trotsky had called his own train, proved useless. The Russian Civil War was nevertheless constantly recalled by the Spanish officers of the republic in search of some precedent for their own problems.
¹
Their troubles were not only in the fighting line. The ministry of war had no real central staff, and the movement of militia forces from place to place entailed endless delays. The Catalan and anarchist forces still had no relation with the government in Madrid. There were few opportunities for rifle practice, and few rifles too for such training, since many workers continued to carry these weapons as symbols of liberty and because the political parties all kept back a proportion of arms for possible use against their friends. The CNT in Madrid, for example, were believed to possess 5,000 rifles at their headquarters. A food shortage also developed—this being due not only to the loss of Old Castile, but to the phenomenal waste of food at the front and the excessive slaughtering of herds, in many agricultural collectives.
²
Deep distrust prevented any understanding between communists and anarchists; La Pasionaria, on a delegation to France to seek arms as well as sympathy, with the ex-minister Marcelino Domingo, was held up for a long time in Barcelona by the crippled FAI leader, Manuel Escorza, and Aurelio Fernández, chief of the ‘Investigation Committee of Barcelona’.
³
The British and French governments’ championship of non-intervention was also demoralizing, less because there was as yet any shortage of weapons than because non-intervention made the republic seem isolated.

In the capital, the consequent gloom resulted in gathering support for Largo Caballero, now virtually king of Madrid. Nearly every day he and his foreign affairs adviser, Alvarez del Vayo, visited the Sierra to exhort and be welcomed by the militiamen. They wanted, however, to dominate, and not simply enter, the government. They and their followers coveted, too, a real proletarian administration. Even Prieto had
complained in
Informaciones
that the reading of socialist newspapers was frowned on at the still old-fashioned ministry of the interior. Prieto himself might have been an alternative Prime Minister, in August as in June. The Italian socialist Pietro Nenni described him in shirt-sleeves, immersed in activity: ‘He is nothing; he is not a minister; he is a deputy of a parliament in recess. But yet he is everything—the animator and coordinator of government action.’
¹
Prieto had for a long time opposed the idea of his party taking over the government, still thinking it possible to influence Britain and France to help the republic if a middle-class government were maintained. Retaining his dislike of Largo Caballero, Prieto realized, however, that he was the only possible successor to Giral.
²
He therefore suggested that socialist ministers should simply ‘guide’ the Giral government, as he himself was doing. The communists supported this policy.
³
Largo Caballero believed that that would compromise the socialists, as he believed that their share in Azaña’s government of 1931 had done, and help the anarchists. He wanted, in fact, to lead the government himself.

14. Division of Spain, August 1936

By this time, the atmosphere in the republic had been sensibly altered by the death of many of the political prisoners in the government’s hands. In Barcelona, Generals Goded and Fernández Burriel were tried in early August. A retired officer who had become a lawyer was engaged to defend the two generals, who behaved with dignity. General Llano de la Encomienda and the civil guard general, Aranguren, bore witness against them. The two were shot for rebellion in the fortress of Montjuich. The liberal members of the republican government agreed to confirm the death sentence with reluctance: many of them had known Goded well. A few days later, General Fanjul and Colonel Fernández Quintana, the chief rebels of the capital, were also shot after a court-martial in Madrid, the former after being married at the last moment to a widow who had been a messenger during the preparations for the rising.
⁴
They died before an appalling fate
overcame their fellow-prisoners in Madrid. For, on 23 August, a fire broke out at the Model Prison.
¹

Was this caused by the three thousand political prisoners imprisoned there who attacked their guards with mattresses to which they had set fire as part of an attempt at an escape? Or was it the work of common criminals in the prison, stimulated by CNT militiamen, who had been searching for arms? The fair-minded judge Mariano Gómez, who arrived shortly afterwards, thought that it was the first. But, at all events, the news that the political prisoners had rebelled spread in the city, at the same time as the ‘massacre of Badajoz’
²
began also to be talked about. A crowd gathered, headed by militiamen on leave. They demanded that the building be stormed so as to massacre the political prisoners. Socialist politicians arrived to urge moderation. But the militiamen refused to listen. The prison staff fled. Forty prisoners were shot in the courtyard. Another thirty people were shot the next morning. The dead included such well-known ex-ministers as Manuel Rico Avello, Melquíades Álvarez, founder of the reformist party in 1912, under whose leadership many republican leaders had first ventured into politics, and Martínez de Velasco, leader of the agrarian party; as well as prominent falangists such as Fernando Primo de Rivera, brother of José Antonio, and Ruiz de Alda. Also killed in the Model Prison were Dr Albiñana, the leader of the nationalist party, Santiago Martín Bagüeñas, the police chief in Madrid until the Rising, General Capaz, and General Villegas, leader of the revolt in the Montaña barracks. Ruiz de Alda, shot by the ‘republicans’, had married a daughter of Admiral Azarola, who had been shot by the ‘fascists’ in El Ferrol; while General Capaz, commander of western Morocco, ‘hero of the Rif’, had come in July to Madrid precisely to avoid having to declare himself about the Rising. These murders appalled more than the ‘fascists’: Azaña and Giral were desolated, the former wishing that he too had died, the latter weeping.
³
Where were the ‘normal forces of
order’? The minister of the interior, General Pozas, did what he could; others, who might have been expected to be present (such as the new director-general of security, Manuel Muñoz) were noticeably absent.

After these events, the ministry of justice established popular tribunals, intended to fill the gaps caused by the resignation, flight, or murder of the regular judicial authorities. These were composed of fourteen delegates from the popular front and the CNT, with three members of the old judiciary. Persons denounced to these tribunals were able to make some rough form of defence—though falangists were almost always shot, together, usually, with members of the CEDA or those who contributed to their funds. There continued to be miscarriages of justice: thus, a doctor, denounced by a patient who owed him money, was able to disprove the charge and secure the indictment of the informer; while an ordinary tradesman, nevertheless, only at the last moment managed to escape being castigated as a spy by a creditor. ‘Unauthorized’ executions nevertheless continued, with diminishing ferocity. Two brothers, the Duques de Veragua and de la Vega, descendants of Columbus, were shot by militiamen, who were afraid that the popular tribunal might acquit them. At the end of August, the government told everyone to lock doors at 11 P.M., abolished nightwatchmen (
serenos
), instructed concierges to allow no one to enter houses, and to telephone the police if ‘loud knocks indicate militiamen want to enter’.

On 4 September, Azaña bowed to the inevitable, accepted Giral’s resignation as Premier, and asked Largo Caballero to form a government. Largo Caballero, the obvious choice for the succession, refused to take office unless the communist party also did so. He invited the anarchists to join: they refused. They were not ready to abandon their theoretical contempt for governmental power; instead, they wanted a national defence committee, with UGT-CNT representation only—power delegated from the collectives and regions directly—the full realization, that is, of the syndicalist state. That was unacceptable; debates within the CNT as to what attitude to have to these matters continued. Thus, at a meeting of federations of the libertarian move
ment of Catalonia, at the end of August, García Oliver, weary of talk, expostulated—‘Either we collaborate or we impose a dictatorship. Make a choice!’
¹
The archpriest of opposition to the idea of governmental authority was the crippled Manuel Escorza, whose only post was his membership of the peninsular committee of the FAI. Honest, implacable, inaccessible, bitter and ironical, Escorza dominated the discussions within the anarchist movement by sheer strength of will, as well as, as the communists pointed out, by his use of a private police force, which carried out to the full their master’s orders of ‘no quarter to fascists or neutrals’. While this spirit of a grand inquisitor lived on, the arguments of realism—that is, of alliance with the other parties—were difficult to put with success.

On the other hand, the communists joined the central government. Their central committee had opposed this, but Moscow, however, gave instructions to join.
²
The communists explained that civil war demanded unity against fascism and that the main tasks of the bourgeois revolution were already fulfilled. Accordingly, Hernández, editor of
Mundo Obrero,
became minister of education, and Uribe, a Marxist theorist, of agriculture. There were six socialists in the cabinet, including Prieto as minister of navy and air, and Alvarez del Vayo as foreign secretary. It would have been more appropriate to have given Prieto the ministry of war, but Largo wanted to control that more important ministry himself. It was also foolish to hand over the ministry of the interior, so important from the point of view of preventing murders, to so incompetent a man as Angel Galarza, though he had had experience as director general of security during the early years of the republic. Juan Negrín, a
Prietista
socialist, became minister of finance; he had been professor of physiology at the University of Madrid and had, though a deputy, distinguished himself in organizing the new university city outside Madrid. Luis Araquistain was given the post of ambassador in Paris, a post which included the presidency of the republican Arms Purchase Commission in Paris.
³
The ambassador in London, López Oliván, a monarchist, gave up his charge to join the nationalists. He was replaced by Pablo de Azcárate, deputy secretary-
general of the League of Nations, who, being a high-minded liberal, seemed the best person to represent republican interests at the all-important London Embassy.

The republican cabinet was completed by two members of the Republican Left (including Giral, the ex-premier, as minister without portfolio) and one each of the Republican Union and the Esquerra.
¹

Largo Caballero, at the ministry of war, was supported by a new regular central staff organized by Major Estrada. Colonel Rodrigo Gil, an artillery officer of the old school, of marked left-wing views nevertheless, became under-secretary. Communist influence in the war ministry increased, since Estrada was about to join that party, and the chief of the technical secretariat was Antonio Cordón, another new communist, who controlled supplies.
²
Yet one more new communist, Major Díaz Tendero, the moving spirit in the pre-war UMRA, became the chief of a ‘classification committee’, whose task was to grade all officers in the republican zone by their political reliability: F for fascist, I for indifferent and R for republican were affixed to some 10,000 names; and all those with Rs were soon recalled to service. Similar reorganization, though on a smaller scale, came in the air force, where Prieto established a new general staff under Major Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, a regular air force officer and old collaborator of his, who had been in command of the air in Madrid since July.