Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (65 page)

The Nationalist killings behind the lines were on a similar scale, but army units carried them out for the most part. The method was Leninist: to destroy the Left as an organized political force by killing all its activists, and to impose abject fear on its supporters. As General Mola put it, in Pamplona (19 July 1936): it is necessary to spread an atmosphere of terror. We have to create this impression of mastery …. Anyone who is overtly or secretly a supporter of the
PR
must be shot.’
⁶⁷
Arrests took place at night and shootings in the dark, sometimes after torture. The Church insisted all must be confessed first (10 per cent refused) and this made secret murders difficult. But there were some blasphemous atrocities: one man was stretched out in the form of a cross and had his arms and legs chopped off while his wife was forced to watch – she went insane. Priests who attempted to intervene were shot.
⁶⁸
The killings in Majorca were described by Georges Bernanos in his novel
Les Grands cimitières sous la lune.
But Arthur Koestler, in
The Invisible Writing
, also described how fascist atrocities were manufactured in the lie-factory run by Otto Katz from the Comintern office in Paris.
⁶⁹

The most famous Nationalist victim was the poet Garcia Lorca, whose brother-in-law was the Socialist mayor of Granada. He was shot about 18 August 1936, but his grave has never been found. Some 571 were killed in the city the same month. An authoritative modern estimate of Nationalist killings lists about 8,000 in the province of Granada, 7–8,000 in Navarre, 9,000 in Seville, 9,000 in Valladolid, 2,000 in Saragossa, 3,000 in the Balearics. In the first six months of the war the Nationalists killed six generals and an admiral, virtually all the Popular Front deputies they captured, governors, doctors and schoolmasters – about 50,000 in all.
⁷⁰
So the killings on both side were roughly equal, and both were of a totalitarian nature – that is, punishment was meted out on the basis of class, status and occupation, not individual guilt.

Foreign intervention was important from the start. Without it the military
putsch
would probably have failed. The rising was a fiasco in five out of the six biggest cities. The government had a large numerical superiority on land, soon increased by political militias. The navy murdered its officers: its two cruisers and two destroyers
prevented the Army of Africa from crossing the straits by sea. The Nationalists had air superiority at first, but top few planes to transport more than 200 men a day into Spain. General Mola, who commanded the rising from Burgos, had too little ammunition and seriously thought of giving up and escaping.
⁷¹
Franco’s first act, when he arrived at Tetuán from the Canaries on Sunday 19 July 1936, was to send to Rome for a dozen bombers; three days later he asked the Germans for air-transports. The German aircraft arrived in Tetuán on 28 July, the Italian two days later. Early in August Franco flew 600,000 rounds of ammunition to Mola, and got 3,000 men across the Straits in a single day. That turned the tide. The armies of the north and south linked up on 11 August and the following month Franco, who had achieved a stunning propaganda success by relieving the officer cadet academy in the Toledo Alcázar, was appointed Chief of State and Generalissimo, ‘with all powers in the new state’.
⁷²
He hoped that Republican morale would now collapse and he could take Madrid. But the arrival of French and Russian aircraft gave the government air-control oyer most of the front – the great lesson of the war was the importance of tactical air-support – and the appearance of Russian tanks in Madrid ruled out its capitulation. Thus foreign aid prevented a quick decision by either side.

The outcome of the war, however, was not determined by great power intervention, which cancelled itself out, nor by the nonintervention policy of Britain and France, since arms could always be obtained for gold or hard currency. The Germans provided a maximum of 10,000 men at any one time, including 5,000 in the Condor Legion, an experimental tank-and-aircraft unit, and suffered 300 killed. They also provided instructors, who performed a valuable service in the rapid training of army officers and pilots, 200 tanks, 600 aircraft and superb 88-millimetre anti-aircraft guns, which neutralized Republican air-superiority early in 1937. The Italian contribution was much bigger: 40–50,000 men at any one time (of whom 4,000 were killed), 150 tanks, 660 aircraft, 800 pieces of artillery, some of them of very high quality, and masses of machine-guns, rifles and other supplies. They claimed they shot down 903 aircraft and sunk 72,800 tons of Republican shipping. The Nationalists also had the help of several thousand Portuguese, 600 Irishmen under General O’Duffy, and a few French, White Russians, British, Americans and Latin-Americans, plus of course 75,000 Moroccan troops classed as ‘volunteers’.
⁷³

The Russians supplied the Republic with 1,000 aircraft, 900 tanks, 300 armoured cars, 1,550 pieces of artillery and vast quantities of military equipment of all kinds. The French supplied about 300 aircraft. In quantity, the Republic received as much
matériel
from
abroad as the Nationalists. But it was more variable in quality, was much less effectively used and far too much of it was left on the battlefield when Republican units retreated. The Russian tanks were heavier, better armed, faster and in every way superior to the German and Italian models – as the Japanese were to find in 1939 and Hitler in 1941–2 – but these too were under-exploited and easily abandoned: by the end of the war the Nationalists had an entire regiment equipped with Russian armour.
⁷⁴

The Russians also sent 1,000 pilots and about 2,000 other specialists, but no large units. They regarded Spain mainly as an international propaganda exercise, and their effort went into organizing the international brigades. Altogether 40,000 foreigners fought for the Republic, 35,000 in the brigades, though never more than 18,000 at any one time. In addition there were 10,000 doctors, nurses and civilian specialists. The largest contingent, about 10,000, came from France, followed by 5,000 Germans and Austrians, 5,000 Poles, 3,350 Italians, about 2,500 each from Britain and the United States, 1,500 each from Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, 1,000 each from Scandinavia, Canada and Hungary, and smaller contingents from over forty other countries. Casualties were very high, though all the figures are matters of dispute. One calculation, for instance, puts the British contribution as 2,762, of whom 1,762 were wounded, 543 killed. About 900 Americans died.
⁷⁵

Foreign aid and intervention did not tip the military balance either way. The Nationalists won primarily because of the capacity and judgement of Franco. Though Franco was an unlovable man and is unlikely ever to win the esteem of historians, he must be accounted one of the most successful public men of the century. His cold heart went with a cool head, great intelligence and formidable reserves of courage and will. His father was a drunken naval officer, his younger brother a record-breaking pilot and hell-raiser; Franco embodied all the self-discipline of the family. He was not interested in women, drinking or cards. His passion was maps. At twenty-two he was the youngest captain in the army; at thirty-three the youngest general in Europe. He saw a great deal of desperate fighting in Morocco, especially during the Rif War in the 1920s, when in 1925 he led the assault-wave of one of the biggest amphibious landings to date. His military views were very advanced for the time; he believed, like De Gaulle, in the ‘war of movement’; in 1928 he reorganized the Spanish military academy and turned it into what the French War Minister, André Maginot, called ‘the most modern centre of its kind in the world … the last word in military technique and instruction’.
⁷⁶

Franco’s philosophy is worth examining briefly because it was
so remote from all the prevailing currents of the age, both liberal and totalitarian. The soldier-statesman he most resembled was Wellington, a figure much admired in Spain. Franco thought war a hateful business, from which gross cruelty was inseparable; it might sometimes be necessary to advance civilization. He was in the tradition of the Romans, the crusaders, the conquistadors, the
tercios
of Parma. In Africa his Foreign Legionaries mutilated the bodies of their enemies, cutting off their heads. But they were under strict discipline: Franco was a harsh, but just and therefore popular, commander. He saw Spanish Christian culture as unarguably superior; he found ‘inexplicable’ the Moroccan ‘resistance to civilization’. Later, putting down the Asturian miners, he was puzzled that, while ‘clearly not monsters or savages’, they should lack ‘that respect for patriotism or hierarchy which was necessary for decent men’.
⁷⁷
His own motivation he invariably described as ‘duty, love of country’.

For Franco, the army was the only truly national institution, ancient, classless, non-regional, apolitical, incorrupt, disinterested. If it was oppressed, it mutinied, as it had done since the sixteenth century and as recently as 1917; otherwise it served. Everything else in Spain was suspect. The Church was soft. Franco was
croyant –
he made the sceptical Mola pray for ammunition supplies – and he deliberately courted the approval of the hierarchy by setting up an ‘ecclesiastical household’, but he was in no sense a clericalist and never took the slightest notice of ecclesiastical advice on non-spiritual matters.
⁷⁸
He hated politics in any shape. The Conservatives were reactionary and selfish landowners. The Liberals were corrupt and selfish businessmen. The Socialists were deluded, or worse. He exploited the two insurrectionary movements, the Falange and the Carlists, amalgamating them under his leadership, but their role was subservient, indeed servile. Franco was never a fascist or had the smallest belief in any kind of Utopia or system. At his headquarters only one politician had influence: his brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Suñer, and he was a functionary. Franco said: ‘Spaniards are tired of politics and of politicians.’ Again: ‘Only those who live off politics should fear our movement.’ He spent his entire political career seeking to exterminate politics.
⁷⁹

Franco made better uses of his human and material resources because he fought a military war, and the Republicans fought a political war. He was a master of the nuts and bolts of war: topography, training, infrastructures, logistics, signals, air control. No genius but very thorough and calm; he never reinforced failure and he learnt from mistakes. Having stamped out politics he had no one nudging his elbow and he possessed, virtually throughout, unity of command. Perhaps his greatest psychological asset was that he
quickly established, and was seen to do so, complete independence of his foreign allies. There is a point here often overlooked. Although idealism was an element in the war at the level of the ordinary men and women who fought it, at a nation-to-nation level it was severely hard-headed. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, and all other governments who supplied arms and services, expected to be paid. In one sense finance was the key to the war, and Franco and his advisers handled it shrewdly. Their greatest achievement was to maintain a respectable paper currency without the benefit of the nation’s gold reserves and central banking system. The Nationalist peseta remained stable between 70 and 80 to the pound-sterling. By contrast, the Republican peseta fell from 36 in June 1936 to 226 in December 1937, and thereafter collapsed.
⁷⁹
From an early stage, Franco put the bite on the monarchy, British and other foreign businesses in Spain, tycoons like Juan March and Juan Ventosa. He made prodigious and increasingly successful efforts to maintain exports. As a result, he was able to stabilize the currency, raise loans within Spain and, most important of all, obtain virtually all his foreign arms on credit. Hence both Germany, which was owed $225 million, and Italy, whose final bill was agreed at $273 million in 1940, had a strong practical interest in ensuring that Franco won the war and so survived to pay them off – as he did.

By contrast, the Republicans handled their finances with consummate folly. They started with one of the largest gold reserves in the world: 700 tons, worth £162 million (or $788 million). Instead of using this to raise loans, or for direct payments in the ‘hard’ arms markets of the capitalist countries of the West, while getting arms from the Russians on credit, they handed over more than two-thirds of their gold to Stalin. In return for arms of varying quality, which otherwise he might well have supplied on credit or for paper, Stalin swallowed up $500 million in gold, plus another $100 million earned in exports; and at the end of it all claimed he was still owed $50 million. In late 1938 he blandly told the Republic’s negotiator that its credit was ‘exhausted’. At no stage was Stalin owed large sums and therefore he never had a vested interest in ensuring that the Republic survived to pay him.
⁸⁰

Still more disastrous, from the Republic’s point of view, was Stalin’s insistence, while being paid in gold on the nail, on a political price for supplying arms at all. The moment the fighting started, and the need for arms became desperate, the influence of the Spanish
CP
rose dramatically. This might not have mattered so much if it had led an independent existence. In fact it was controlled through the Russian embassy, by
NKVD
and
OGPU
units under Alexander Orlov – who himself went in mortal terror of Yezhov – and by such
Comintern figures as the French witch-hunter André Marty, whose face, wrote Hemingway, ‘had a look of decay, as if modelled from the waste material you find under the claws of a very old lion’.
⁸¹
It is not clear to this day how anxious Stalin was to win the war; but in any event he was determined to control the Republican side.