The Spanish Civil War (117 page)

1.
See Jaume Miravitlles,
Episodis de la guerra civil espanyola
(Barcelona, 1972), p. 35.

2.
I have examined photocopies of these orders in a useful memorandum sent to me by Colonel Vicente Guarner.

3.
The enthusiasm in Barcelona when a troop of mounted civil guard rode slowly down the Rambla giving the red salute knew no bounds. See Jesús Pérez Salas,
Guerra en España
(Mexico, 1947), pp. 83–100, for further details of republican commands in Barcelona.

1.
Paz, p. 282. A good picture of the fighting in Barcelona from the point of view of the civil guard is in Frederic Escofet’s
Al servei de Catalunya i de la república
(Paris, 1973), vol. II.

2.
Francisco Lacruz,
El alzamiento, la revolución y el terror en Barcelona
(Barcelona, 1943), p. 202.

3.
Dépêche de Toulouse,
26 July, 1936, quoted Pierre Broué and Émile Témime,
La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne
(Paris, 1961), p. 96.

1.
Manuel Goded,
Un ‘faccioso’ cien por cien
(Saragossa, 1939), p. 58. This volume, by Goded’s son, defends the father against the slur that he was becoming a democrat.

2.
This account of the battle of Barcelona was based on the narratives in
Cruzada, The Times,
del Castillo and Alvarez, Pérez Salas, Escofet, Jellinek, Lacruz, Abad de Santillán,
Por qué,
and Franz Borkenau,
The Spanish Cockpit
(London, 1937).

3.
Zugazagoitia, p. 33f.; Peirats, vol. I, pp. 148–9.

1.
Colonel Pérez García Argüelles refused to join the rebellion. He did nothing. He was condemned to death by the republic but absolved. When Santander fell to Franco in 1937 he was shot (García Venero,
Falange,
p. 157).

2.
The population of Alava is partly Basque, partly Navarrese. Alonso Vega was a childhood friend of Franco, entered the Legion with him, was taken by him to Saragossa and was later for many years minister of the interior.

3.
Iturralde, vol. II, pp. 208–11.

1.
The Times,
30 July 1936.

2.
Cruzada,
XXVI, p. 242f.; Lizarra, pp. 20f., 40; Iturralde, vol. II, p. 202f.

3.
Marcel Junod,
Warrior without Weapons
(London, 1951), p. 98.

4.
Cruzada,
XII, pp. 401–11; Ruiz Vilaplana, p. 30f.; Iturralde, pp. 31–2. See also Romero, p. 189.

5.
Cruzada,
XV, p. 196f.

6.
Peirats, vol. I, p. 149. The failure of the anarchists in Saragossa gave rise to a lively polemic. See Gaston Leval,
L’Espagne libertaire
(Paris, 1971), p. 139f. There was a general strike, but no fighting. This did not prevent a fearful repression. The nerve of the rising there was Colonel Monasterio, who had been one of Gil Robles’s aides in 1935.

1.
Another theory is that Villalba waited to see on what side Franco was and took the other one.

2.
Cruzada,
VI, p. 237.

3.
Cruzada,
XIII, pp. 460–83.

4.
Diario de Navarra,
20 and 21 July. It had ‘Camino de la Victoria’ (Path of Victory) permanently as its subtitle thereafter.

1.
Martínez de Campos in St Antony’s papers, qu. Carr, p. 652. See also Martínez de Campos’s memoir,
Ayer 1931–1953
(Madrid, 1970), ch. II, and del Burgo, p. 13f.

2.
For Valladolid, see Iturralde, vol. II, p. 107f., and a revealing novel,
Capital del dolor,
by Francisco Umbral (Madrid, 1996).

1.
Cruzada,
XV, pp. 134–7.

2.
Cruzada,
XI, pp. 275–89.

1.
Lucia took refuge from anarchist mobs in a farm, was arrested and kept in gaol as a right-wing deputy. Notwithstanding, after the civil war, he was gaoled by the victorious nationalists and died young in 1942. See tribute by Prieto in
Convulsiones,
vol. II, p. 251. The question whether Lucia’s telegram supporting the republic was a fake is explored in del Burgo, p. 207f.

2.
Peirats, vol. I, pp. 145–6.

3.
Not to be confused with General Carlos Bosch of León.

1.
Those officers who were merely imprisoned were mostly shot at Cartagena during August. R. Salas Larrazábal (vol. I, p. 163) puts the figure at 230 out of 675 naval officers on active service, or 34.2 per cent of the total number.

2.
El Socialista,
21 July 1936.

3.
The literature is large on what follows; see, in particular, García Venero,
El general Fanjul,
p. 255f., and the same author’s
Madrid, julio 1936
(Madrid, 1973), p. 317f.

1.
The nationalists later pointed out that Don Quixote’s arm, in this statue, is outstretched in fascist salute, and not bent, with a clenched fist.

1.
Burillo, a left-wing aristocrat, puritanical, anti-clerical and romantic, soon became a communist: he told Azaña in 1937 that he had three loyalties: the army, the communist party and the masonic lodge (Azaña, vol. IV, p. 638).

1.
The chief sources used in the account of the battles in Madrid were
Cruzada,
XVII, pp. 386–481; Enrique Castro Delgado,
Hombres made in Moscú
(Barcelona, 1965), p. 270f.;
The Times,
5 August 1936;
El Socialista,
21–22 July 1936.

1.
The General Cause
(Madrid, 1943), pp. 320–21. The question of whether there were hostages or not in the Alcázar was thus laid to rest by this statement of Moscardó’s after the war. See Herbert Southworth,
El mito de la cruzada de Franco
(Paris, 1963, also Fr. edition), p. 54. Cf. Cecil Eby,
The Siege of the Alcázar
(London, 1966), p. 16, who says all the cadets were on leave, but that six were gathered together by Captain Vela Hidalgo, the Alcázar’s cavalry instructor (p. 28). The civil governor went of his free will, being on the Right.

2.
They were mostly murdered afterwards. Those who were not killed on the spot were judged and executed. The old conspirator General Barrera, however, succeeded in escaping, in civilian clothes, and made his way to Burgos. González de Lara had been released from prison by the rebels just before.

1.
CNT-FAI bulletin, 22 July 1936.

2.
An allusion to Companys’s previous practice as a barrister, when he would often defend anarchists in the courts for nominal fees.

1.
Juan García Oliver in
De julio a julio
(Barcelona, 1937), p. 193.

2.
See the remark of the Catalan politician (subsequently Premier) Juan Casanovas, to Azaña, in Azaña, vol. IV, p. 702.

3.
This decision is discussed in C. Lorenzo, p. 102; Abad de Santillán, p. 59; Vernon Richards,
Lessons of the Spanish Revolution
(London, 1953), pp. 33–9.

1.
The new Partit Socialist Unificat de Catalunya was composed of four left-wing groups which now drew together under socialist and communist leadership and was dominated by the communists. The four groups were the old Partido Comunista de Cataluña, the Unió-Socialista, the Partit Catala Proletari and the Catalan section of the Spanish Socialist party, which controlled the local UGT.

2.
The CNT was represented by Juan García Oliver, Durruti and José Asens; the FAI by Aurelio Fernández and Abad de Santillán; the UGT by José del Barrio, Salvador González and Antonio López; the PSUC by José Miret; the POUM by José Rovira; the Esquerra by Jaume Miravitlles, Artemio Ayguadé and Juan Pons; the
rabassaires
by José Torrents Rosell; and Acción Catalana by Tomás Fábregas. These CNT and FAI representatives were interchangeable since the
FAIistas
were members of the CNT and vice versa.

3.
The anarchists accepted parity on this committee with the other parties because (according to Abad de Santillán) they wished the same treatment in other areas where they were weak.

1.
Cruzada,
XI, pp. 281–8. The best brief account is in Gibson, p. 52f.

2.
Cruzada,
XXIII, pp. 460–502; Borkenau, pp. 114–15.

3.
Cruzada,
XXIII, pp. 533–48. The fates of these two generals were different. Martínez Monje remained as military governor, while García Aldave was shot.

1.
See the reports of these events by Bertrand de Jouvenel, no less, special correspondent for
Paris-Soir.

1.
Letter, 4 April 1962, of Domingo Quiroga (now in Ecuador). See also García Venero,
Falange
(p. 141f.), for the activities of Hedilla, together with Southworth,
Anti-falange,
p. 109. There were many rumours about the manner of the death of the governor’s wife. Pregnant, she had a miscarriage when she heard of her husband’s execution, tried to commit suicide and was subsequently arrested by falangists who shot her. (A different version appears in Arthur Koestler,
Spanish Testament,
London, 1937, p. 300, and is apparently a genuine, rather than a fabricated, horror story.)

2.
Peirats, vol. I, p. 151.

3.
Cruzada,
XIV, pp. 14–28. See also Iturralde, vol. II, pp. 114–15; Jean Flory,
La Galice sous la botte de Franco
(Paris, 1938); Alfonso Camín,
España a hierro y fuego
(Mexico, 1938), p. 88.

4.
For the naval strength of the two parties at the beginning of the war, see below, p. 318.

1.
Cruzada,
XV, pp. 134–47.

2.
Ansaldo, p. 51. Sanjurjo rejected the ‘splendid bimotor’ which Mola sent to Lisbon. For an inquiry into theories of sabotage see José Luis Vila San Juan,
¿Así fue? Enigmas de la guerra civil española
(Barcelona, 1972), p. 31f.

1.
I am grateful to Ronald Fraser for correcting an earlier version of this story. See also Moreno, p. 329.

2.
As for the few remaining Spanish colonies, events there were delayed, but Guinea, Fernando Po, Ifni, and Villa Cisneros all eventually declared for the nationalists—though Guinea declared first for the government. See Cabanellas, vol. I, pp. 512–14.

3.
Francisco Moreno Gómez,
La Guerra Civil en Córdoba
(Córdoba, 1985), p. 239.

1.
Junod, p. 89.

2.
Recollection in Sergio Vilar, p. 637.

3.
There is a description of Queipo’s shootings in Seville by Antonio Bahamonde, who worked for months for him as
delegado de propaganda:
see Antonio Bahamonde,
Un año con Queipo.
Bahamonde later escaped. Allowing for an element of propaganda, it is nevertheless a fearful indictment. There is also Flory,
La Galice sous la botte de Franco,
and for Burgos, Antonio Ruiz Vilaplana,
Burgos Justice.
Some of the details in these books may be wrong but they give overall a regrettably truthful picture of the
auto-da-fé
atmosphere of those days.

1.
Georges Bernanos,
Les Grands cimetières sous la lune
(Paris, 1938,). p. 68. The real terror in Majorca did not begin till after the republican attack on the island in August-September. See below, p. 381. The chief almoner of the prisons of nationalist Spain, Father Martin Torrent, later added a new theological point by saying: ‘Happy is the condemned man, for he is the only one who knows when he must die. He has thus the best chance of putting his soul in order before he dies.’ (Fr Martin Torrent,
¿Qué me dice usted de los presos?,
Alcalá, 1942, p. 68).

2.
Iturralde, vol. II, pp. 88–9. On this see also De la Cierva, in Carr,
The Republic and the Civil War,
p. 202.

1.
Bernanos, pp. 72–3. Bernanos was staying at this time in the house of the falangist family of de Zayas. After the outbreak of the civil war, the Marqués (then head of the Falange in Majorca) and his brother discussed what to do with Bernanos. They decided not to shoot him and he later left. The de Zayas brothers never read
Les Grands cimetières,
and the son of the Marqués afterwards married a daughter of Bernanos (evidence of Carlos de Zayas).

2.
Ruiz Vilaplana, p. 65.

3.
Descriptions of the events in Valladolid can be seen in Iturralde, vol. II, pp. 107–20. These derive from falangists who took part in them and were later imprisoned in the Hedilla affair (see below, p. 624).

4.
Testimony reported Iturralde, vol. II, p. 74.

1.
Ibid.,
p. 93. Other reports of murders in Navarre can be found in
No me avergoncé del Evangelio
by Marino Ayerra (Buenos Aires, 1958) and
Siete meses y siete días en la España de Franco
by Father Ignacio de Azpiazu (Caracas, 1964).

2.
Arthur Koestler,
The Invisible Writing
(London, 1954), pp. 333–5. See below, p. 341.

3.
Fernsworth, p. 205.

4.
Azpiazu, p. 115.

1.
Names given are: the priest of Carmona (Andalusia); and the Franciscans Father Revilla and Father Antonio Bombín killed in Burgos and Rioja respectively. (Iturralde, vol. II, pp. 427–8; see also Bahamonde.)

2.
See Gibson, p. 68f., for the best analysis.

3.
See García Venero,
Falange,
pp. 234–5, 242, 365; for Hedilla, see p. 516.

4.
For Díaz Criado, see Juan Ortiz Villalba,
Sevilla 1936
(Córdoba, 1997), p. 158ff.; for Ibañez, see Moreno Gómez, p. 285.

5.
Junod, p. 98. Junod did, however, wonderful work, even exchanging, only days after this, the socialist mayor of Bilbao, Ercoreca, for Esteban Bilbao, a Carlist deputy.

1.
The study is by Ian Gibson, p. 77 and pp. 167–9. The cause of death is described as ‘detonation of firearm’ and then ‘order of military tribunal’.

2.
The dead in Granada included the poet Lorca, the editor of the left-wing
El Defensor de Granada
(Constantino Ruíz Carnero), the professor of paediatrics in Granada University (Rafael García Duarte), the engineer of the road to the top of the Sierra Nevada (Juan José de Santa Cruz), the rector of the university (Salvador Vila), the professor of political law (Joaquín García Labella), the professor of pharmacy (Jesús Yoldi), the professor of history (José Palanco Romero), the best-known doctor in the city (Saturnino Reyes), the mayor (Manuel Fernández Montesinos), and 23 councillors, some socialist, some left republican. Of course, most of the 2,137 victims were ordinary people not easily recognizable by name.

1.
See Moreno Gómez, p. 705. For the entire civil war and the whole province the figure seems to be about 9,600.

2.
Francisco Espinosa Maestre, in A. Braojos, L. Álvarez and F. Espinosa,
Sevilla 36, sublevación fascista y represión
(Sevilla, 1990), p. 257; and Juan Ortiz Villalba,
Sevilla, del golpe militar a la guerra civil
(Córdoba, 1998), p. 323. A reasonable estimate for the whole of the civil war and the entire province is 8,000.

3.
J. Cifuentes Chueca and P. Maluenda Pons,
El asalto a la República, Los origenes del franquismo en Zaragoza, 1936–1939
(Saragossa, 1995). 6,000 for the province and the whole war.

4.
Altaffayala Kultur Taldea,
Navarre 1936, De la esperanza al terror
(Tafalla, 1986). 2,800 for the whole war.

5.
J. L. Morales and M. Torres, cited in Santos Juliá, et al.,
Las Victimas de la Guerra Civil
(Madrid, 1999), p. 411.

6.
50,000 was the estimate made in the course of the war by the Madrid Council of Lawyers (in
Franco’s Rule,
published by United Editorial, London, 1938, p. 223f.). Though made at the time, their report seems to be seriously compiled. In the earlier editions of this book, I gave a figure of 40,000 for all nationalist executions. Most people criticized it as too low: e.g., Jackson (
loc. cit.
) who suggests 200,000 for the whole war, and Gibson (p. 167), following him. Cabanellas avoids a figure (vol. II, p. 866); Payne,
Politics
(p. 415), also eschews judgement. Jesús Salas (
La guerra de España desde el aire,
Barcelona, 1969), p. 491, speaks of the 40,000 I named as ‘probably exaggerated’. De la Cierva (in Carr,
The Republic,
p. 202) believes the repression was equivalent on both sides,
ipso facto,
though ‘we cannot even begin to guess the figures’. Santos Juliá, et al., p. 410, suggests 72,000 for executions in fourteen provinces, and thinks the number should be doubled for all Spain for the entire period of the war and afterwards.

1.
See especially Hilari Raguer’s
El General Batet
(Barcelona, 1994).

2.
Evidence of Joaquín Maurín, New York, 1962.

3.
See list in
Franco’s Rule,
pp. 209–11.

4.
Moreno, p. 322.

1.
The most complete inquiry into Lorca’s death is in Ian Gibson’s
The Death of Lorca
(London, 1973), repeated with more details in the same author’s major biography of the poet. See also Brenan,
The Face of Spain
(London, 1950), pp. 127–47, and Marcelle Auclair,
Enfance et mort de García Lorca
(Paris, 1968).

2.
Ruiz Vilaplana, p. 159.

3.
Ansaldo, p. 83.

1.
These committees were formed everywhere save in Madrid, where the government of Giral was nominally in control, though power had passed to the UGT and Largo Caballero.

2.
The Carmelite church in the Calle Lauria in Barcelona had, however, been a rebel stronghold.

1.
De julio a julio,
p. 22.

2.
Buckley, p. 123. Protestant churches were not attacked, and remained open. There were, however, only about 6,000 Protestant communicants in all Spain at this time (Arnold Toynbee,
Survey of International Affairs 1937, The International Repercussions of the War in Spain,
London, 1938, vol. I, p. 286n.).

1.
Convents were emptied of all their denizens. To some, of course, this was an act of freedom.

2.
The figure is given as 54,594 in the National Sanctuary at Valladolid. Compare this figure with that in
The General Cause,
p. 402 (85,940). Gabriel Jackson suggests 17,000 killed in the first three months of the civil war, and only a few thousand later (
op. cit.,
p. 533). Having looked at the lists in the villages in Andalusia (and reprinted in, for example, the first to the fifth ‘
Avances
’ of the
Informe Oficial sobre los Asesinatos,
etc., published 1936–7), I think that he is over-optimistic. It was not only civil guards, priests or businessmen who were killed, but innumerable anti-socialist workers, shopkeepers, clerks, etc. (nor were all civil guards against the republic). Some women (say 4,000) were killed, and probably several hundred children. Jesús Salas in a recent article guesses 65,000 to 70,000.

3.
Diego Abad de Santillán (
La revolución y la guerra en España,
Buenos Aires, 1937, p. 176) speaks of a possible 5,000 killed in Catalonia.

4.
These were bishops of Jaén, Lérida, Segorbe, Cuenca, Barcelona, Almería, Guadix, Ciudad Real, and Tarragona (suffragan bishop), the apostolic administrator of Barbastro, who was titular bishop of Epirus, and the apostolic administrator of Orihuela, who ranked as a bishop. The bishop of Teruel was murdered in Catalonia in 1939. These figures derive from Father Antonio Montero’s monumental study
La persecución religiosa en España 1936–9
(Madrid, 1961), p. 762. The figures suggest that about 12 per cent of the Spanish monks, 13 per cent of the priests, and 20 per cent of the bishops perished; 283 nuns out of 60,000 is a small percentage.

5.
This poem was written as a prefatory note to Juan Estelrich’s propaganda book (
La Persécution réligieuse en Espagne,
Paris, 1937) on the murders in the church.

1.
Manuel Sánchez del Arco,
El sur de España en la reconquista de Madrid
(Seville, 1937), pp. 66–7; Luis Carreras,
The Glory of Martyred Spain
(London, 1939), p. 104.

2.
Assaults on women were rare in Popular Front Spain. Sánchez del Arco, a journalist of
ABC de Sevilla
with the advancing nationalist armies in southern Spain, notes that none had occurred at all in the villages which he visited (Sánchez del Arco, p. 55).

1.
Juan Estelrich,
La Persécution réligieuse,
p. 96.

2.
The under-secretary of the ministry wrote back saying, ‘It would seem advisable to abbreviate the long and complicated procedure where the necessity for the change of name appears justified by its notoriety’ (
General Cause,
pp. 196–7). The ‘atrocities’ have an enormous literature in nationalist Spain, nearly every province being meticulously covered.

3.
Estelrich, p. 115.

1.
Madariaga, p. 377.

2.
I benefited in the rewriting of this paragraph from discussion with Professor Bosch Gimpera. The same was true of doctors. Doctors known to be devoted to their poor patients were left at liberty.

3.
Broué and Témime cite
ABC
of 4 September, which indicates a priest married at Alicante; another entered the communist party.

4.
Simone Weil’s letter to Bernanos,
op. cit.

1.
Peirats, vol. I, p. 182.

2.
Pemán,
Un soldado en la historia,
p. 300; letter from Gerald Brenan, 22 June 1961. Julián Pitt-Rivers assures me that the executions were by shooting in the valley.

3.
Gerald Brenan,
South from Granada
(London, 1957), p. 169.

1.
See Jaime Cervera,
Madrid en Guerra
(Madrid, 1998), for a list of
checas
and their sites.

2.
García Atadell organized the communist youth in the late twenties. He later escaped from the republic with a quantity of loot, but was captured by the nationalists when the Argentinian ship, the
Primero de Mayo,
carrying him to South America, stopped at Santa Cruz de la Palma. Arthur Koestler met him in Seville prison in early 1937. He was garrotted soon after. He became a Catholic in gaol. See José Ignacio Escobar,
Así empezó
… (Madrid, 1974), and Arthur Koestler,
The Invisible Writing,
p. 347.

3.
Iturralde, p. 124.

4.
In small Spanish villages the purchase of a stamp was a complicated matter. Individual stamps were wrapped up in tissue paper, and folded neatly. The Altea incident was told me by Frank Jellinek, who lived in Altea. The anarchist was himself later killed by a communist.

1.
Azaña, vol. III, p. 393.

2.
Madariaga, p. 378.

3.
H. L. Kirk,
Pablo Casals
(New York, 1974), p. 401. The anarchists of the suburb in which Casals lived made several visits to his house in search of a friend of Casals, on the Right in politics, who was hiding there.

4.
For example, Julio de Mora, who headed a
checa
in the palace of the Conde de Eleta and became head of the special department of information (DEDIDE) with the rank of colonel; or Angel Pedrero, who was García Atadell’s assistant and successor, and who became later head of the SIM (Servicio de Información Militar) in Madrid in 1937.

1.
See Sergio Vilar, p. 450. Galarza became minister of the interior in September.

2.
Federica Montseny in
La Revista Blanca,
30 July, qu. Bolloten, p. 41.

3.
Juan Peiró in
Perull a la reraguarda
(Mataró, 1936), p. 91.

4.
Payne,
The Spanish Revolution,
p. 226. Escofet saved many.

1.
He was later shot in Ocaña gaol in 1939. See Sergio Vilar, p. 227.

2.
Maximiniano García Venero,
Falange,
p. 159; see also Jackson, p. 308.

3.
This individual, José Antonio Baruela, later enrolled in the republican air force, killed many militiamen by bombing them before being found out and shot in Santander. Others like him escaped across the lines.

4.
Letter from Gerald Brenan, 22 June 1961.