Spain: A Unique History (44 page)

The Left Republican leaders perceived correctly that most of the military were not inclined to rebel. They undertook a lengthy series of measures to reassign or to remove altogether from command the senior officers suspected of strong rightist sympathies, though these efforts turned out to be inadequate. They also calculated that too rigorous an attempt to purge or to restrict the military might serve as a boomerang, stimulating greater opposition than already existed. A second consideration was the determination of Casares Quiroga not to play the "role of Kerensky" that had been openly assigned to him by some of the theorists of the revolutionary Left. Should it come to that, a reasonably strong and intact army might be needed to repress another effort at revolutionary insurrection by anarchists or Socialists. Yet a third factor was the conviction that those elements in the military strongly opposed to the government were so few and weak that they constituted a paper tiger. Thus what would presumably be no more than a feeble effort at rebellion should not necessarily be completely discouraged, but might even be desirable. It would presumably be easy to repress, and rapid victory by the government would strengthen it both against the Right and also against the revolutionary Left. Only a few days before July 18, these calculations were perhaps not so far wrong as they have always seemed in retrospect. Had the government maintained a greater semblance of constitutional order, they might have worked out as planned. Neither the government nor most of the military were eager to institute conflict. As leading revolutionaries such as Friedrich Engels and Leon Trotsky had pointed out, even the most aggressive and radical forces prefer to pretend to act defensively in response to an initiative from their adversaries, and this was very broadly the case with quite diverse sectors, politically and militarily, in the Spain of 1936.

The paradox of the military rebellion that began the Civil War is that it was probably more eagerly desired by its opponents than any other military revolt in Spanish history. The Casares Quiroga government did not seek deliberately to provoke an armed rebellion, but neither did it make a major effort to avoid one, calculating that the results would quickly redound to its benefit. As Santos Juliá has explained, military revolt also formed the basis of the calculations of the Caballeristas, the most important single sector of the revolutionary Left.
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Having no plans of their own to seize power directly, they calculated that the effect of a revolt would be so threatening and destabilizing that a weak Left Republican government would have no alternative but to hand power peacefully to the Socialists. By analogy with Russia in 1917, Casares Quiroga would play the role of Kerensky, and the Spanish military the role of the Russian General Kornilov. The calculation of Casares Quiroga failed disastrously, though that of the Caballeristas proved partially correct, as Azaña elected on July 19 to "arm the people" (something to which Casares Quiroga and the most moderate Left Republicans were firmly opposed) and then finally appointed an all-Popular Front government led by Largo Caballero on September 4. The ultimate weakness of both calculations, of course, was the complete failure to envision the potential strength of the revolt.

In the first edition of his
Spain: 1808-1939
, Raymond Carr followed the customary language in referring to the "generals' revolt" of July 18. In fact, exactly as the government calculated, most of the generals did not revolt. Though the insurrection would be led by a small group of generals, what gave the rebellion strength was the strong support provided by junior and middle-rank officers in approximately half the garrisons of Spain. The younger officers responded much more radically and with greater commitment, which was indispensable to the partial success of the revolt. There was concern that the ordinary recruits, who rarely were volunteers but normally draftees, often from leftist worker milieu, might not obey orders. In fact, the efforts by Communists and anarchists to subvert the military politically largely failed. There were, of course, individual desertions, but the great majority of recruits obeyed orders as long as they were resolutely led, even though they did not necessarily exhibit military enthusiasm or efficiency.
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The Civil War transformed the majority of officers politically. Whereas most were moderate and largely apolitical conservatives in 1936, those who joined the revolt quickly came to form a new cohort. The commanders and officers of the Nationalist Army of 1939 were strongly committed to their victorious movement and its regime, and also to a strongly right-wing and authoritarian ideology. Few of them had become converts to fascism, but they saw themselves as the genuine elite of a new nationalist system. The leaders of the military under the new dictatorship were more politically and ideologically mobilized than most of their predecessors. The new regime had begun in 1936-38 as a military dictatorship, the only complete military dictatorship in Spanish history, occupying both the role of chief of state and of the government in general. Though Franco insisted on complete military discipline and subordination to his personal command and formed a regular nonmilitary government in January 1938, the military saw the new system, not incorrectly, as a military-led regime, at least in its first phases. Military members of the Spanish "victory delegation" that visited Rome in May 1939 explained to their Italian Fascist hosts that the difference between the Mussolini and Franco regimes was that the role played by the Fascist Party in the former was played by the military in the latter.

Franco never planned a military government but intended to use senior officers in key roles, trusting some of them more than he did Falangists. The initial scheme of Franco's government in 1939-41 was not pretorianism — that is, giving the military any corporate political role — but simply to make special use of senior officers in important posts and also to make it the most militaristic regime in Spanish history. During the first year of peace, plans were drawn up for a gigantic construction program that would build an enormous navy and a 5,000-plane air force. This was so preposterous compared with the grave deficiencies of the postwar Spanish economy that within little more than a year, the plans were totally shelved. Rather than developing great new armed forces, the Franco regime soon reverted to the military norm of modern Spain: an army of poorly trained draftees led by a numerically bloated but technically deficient officer corps, provided with limited third-rate equipment. As the German consul in Tetuán reported to Berlin concerning the sizable Spanish forces in the Moroccan Protectorate: "One cannot describe the Spanish military organization here in bad enough terms."
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This reality did not prevent the regime's leaders and some of its generals from developing delusions of grandeur. Immediately after the fall of France there was enthusiasm for Spain's entry into the war, though among most of the military commanders this quickly dwindled, once the country's disastrous economic situation became even clearer by the end of 1940. It is a moot point exactly what role was played by the program initiated by the British government in the summer of that year of paying large bribes to more than thirty senior commanders to use their influence to maintain Spain's neutrality, an issue that cannot be resolved for lack of full documentation.
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Franco's use and control of the military was generally astute. Especially during the 1940s and 1950s he employed many senior officers (generally colonels and generals) in a wide variety of key state and administrative positions, more of which were held by the military than by the Falange during that period. Military men, such as Franco's childhood friend Juan Antonio Suanzes and others, in the economic institutions, particularly the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI — National Institute of Industry), implemented Franco's program of autarchy, which should be considered at first more a program of military economics than of fascist economics.
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Franco was careful to see to it, however, that they held offices as individuals, not as institutional representatives of the military. The armed forces were allowed no independent corporate power. An officer in government served as an appointee of Franco, not as a representative of the military themselves. In 1939 Franco separated the air force from the army and navy for the first time, beginning a practice of appointing three separate military ministers (army, navy, and air force) to his governments, averting any dangerous concentration of power.

Although they found little reason to quarrel with Franco's foreign policy, the military were keenly dissatisfied with the domestic situation in the first postwar years. In one sense, they became Spain's most important antifascists, for they bitterly resented the prominence of Serrano Súñer and the Falange during 1939-42, helping to produce the only two serious government crises of Franco's regime in May 1941 and again in August-September 1942. In each case Franco was careful not to award a clear-cut victory to the military, for he still considered the Falange important to his regime, and he did not wish to see the military become so powerful that they could dictate to him. Serrano was eliminated in 1942, but by that time this suited Franco as well. The nearest thing to a replacement for Serrano was Captain (later Admiral) Luis Carrero Blanco, much more discreet than Serrano. Moreover, as a naval officer, Carrero Blanco was not involved in the personal rivalries of the leading generals, who found him relatively colorless and not a menacing or challenging figure. As it was, Carrero Blanco became the most influential naval officer in modern Spanish government.
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Altogether there was more political discontent with Franco inside the Spanish regime during the first half of World War II than at any point during his long tenure as military dictator. All the different "families" of the regime expressed fairly strong criticism (though from diverse viewpoints), but none was in a position to act against Franco, not even the military. Leading generals criticized many aspects of policy, including the place given to the Falange and not excluding the personal decisions of Franco himself, but they were internally disunited and the leading personalities were astutely handled by Franco. The most dangerous ones were pro-Nazi generals like Juan Yagüe and Agustín Muñoz Grandes. Franco left Yagüe without active assignment and in internal exile for two years, and after Muñoz Grandes returned from leading the Blue Division on the Russian front, Franco personally kept him directly under his own thumb and without any direct command, until the danger that he might conspire on behalf of Hitler had passed.

Few of the Spanish generals were that strongly pro-Nazi, so that the only political alternative which began to gain any support was restoration of the monarchy in the person of Don Juan, the pretender to the throne. By 1942 this even began to gain the approval of some of the pro-Nazis, but conversely few of the generals were such committed monarchists that they were willing to stand up to Franco, the main exception being the air force general Alfredo Kindelán. Antonio Aranda, who seems to have been the leading individual recipient of British bribes, and several other generals were active in discussions with British diplomats, sometimes referring to a shadowy "junta of generals" that was about to take action. In fact, no such junta existed. As Javier Tusell has written, "The generals did not conspire, but only talked of conspiring."
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Franco reached a point of potential crisis with his military hierarchy on only one occasion, early in September 1943. Italy had just been knocked out of the war six weeks earlier, and the Allies had clearly gained the upper hand on every front. For the first time the future of the regime was directly placed in doubt, and on that occasion most of the lieutenant generals signed a very respectful letter to Franco asking if he did not think that circumstances had reached the point at which it was desirable to restore the monarchy. They swore complete loyalty and discipline during any transition.
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Franco, however, intended only to trim his policy and had already determined that in no circumstance would he ever step down voluntarily. He spoke with the lieutenant generals — but never with more than one or two at any one time — explaining that the situation was much too delicate for any change and that Don Juan would be incapable of dealing with such critical circumstances. Several of the lieutenant generals quickly withdrew their support from the initiative, while Franco promoted a number of his "incondicionales" (loyalists) from major general to lieutenant general, until he was certain that a majority of the top military hierarchy had become totally reliable once more. Subsequently he also incorporated hundreds of former "provisional officers" from the Civil War — more diehard franquistas than many of the ordinary officers — to regular or higher officer rank, further strengthening the political complexion of his officer corps.

What most effectively rallied the military around Franco was the beginning of the guerrilla insurgency, led by the Communists and later by anarchists, in October 1944. This threatened direct revival of the Civil War and the violent overthrow of the regime by the revolutionary Left. The armed forces completely closed ranks, and maintained firm support of the regime during the period of international ostracism that followed the end of World War II.

The regime assumed its more permanent form in the years following 1945, and by this time Franco had totally abandoned his fantasy of turning Spain into a modern military power. In fact, he settled for the opposite — a weak, third-rate army designed to police and garrison the country rather than to fight external enemies. The army settled into a rather stultified routine and continued to exhibit some of the worst features of its predecessors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — a bureaucratic mass of draftees led by a bloated, not very professional officer corps, which trained little and possessed antiquated equipment. Indeed, proportionate to other modern forces the Spanish army in the years 1945 to 1953 was the very opposite of what the regime had earlier planned, and by international standards had become weaker than in 1898, thoroughly failing to keep pace with military modernization.