The Spanish Civil War (31 page)

In León, the rising occurred at two in the afternoon of 20 July. The civil governor much regretted the absence of the miners who had left for Madrid the previous day. In great heat, the workers fought with tenacity against the troops who came out under General
José Bosch. Nevertheless, the rebels won, as they did in all the province. The only battle of note was fought at Ponferrada, a centre of communications, where certain of the wandering miners who had left Oviedo, thinking it securely in the hands of Aranda, and who had gathered some arms, were massacred in the market-square.
¹
At Minorca, the other General Bosch was overwhelmed on 20 July by the combined forces of the Popular Front and of the other ranks in his own garrison. Thus the submarine base of Port Mahon, with most of Spain’s submarines, laid down during the First World War, was won for the republic.

One further event of importance occurred on 20 July. Mola had sent to Lisbon a Puss-moth aircraft flown by a young monarchist pilot, Ansaldo, to carry General Sanjurjo, the general-in-chief of the rising, to Burgos. Ansaldo arrived at Sanjurjo’s villa to find forty excited people gathered round the ‘Lion of the Rif’, listening to contradictory news on the wireless, receiving confused telephone calls, and making incorrect predictions in an
ex cathedra
style. Ansaldo solemnly announced himself ‘at the orders of the head of the Spanish state!’ All present burst into singing the Carlist anthem, many wept with emotion, others cried ‘Long live Sanjurjo! Long live Spain!’ The Madrid government complained of the use of a Portuguese military airfield by a rebel pilot. The Portuguese authorities, though sympathetic to Sanjurjo, requested Ansaldo to take his plane to a more distant landing-ground. He eventually took off from a small field, surrounded by pine-trees, at Marinha. Here, to the pilot’s alarm, the general insisted on taking with him a heavy suitcase, which contained full-dress uniform for his use as head of the new Spanish state. It may have been this excessive luggage that made it hard for the aircraft to rise. The propeller struck the treetops and the machine burst into flames. Ansaldo was thrown out with injuries, but his passenger was burned to death—a victim of conformity rather than of sabotage.
²
This casualty left the rising without a head; it was a blow to the Carlists, in particular. Following the murder of Calvo Sotelo, the continuing captivity of José Antonio, and the recent capture of Goded, Franco with Queipo and
Mola were left as the outstanding men on the nationalist side; and, while Mola was coping with the consequences of a far from wholly successful revolution in the north of Spain, and was preparing to fight on three fronts, Franco was already in control of Morocco and of the Army of Africa. As for Queipo, his gifts seemed more those of a propagandist than of a political leader. Sanjurjo would have proclaimed Alfonso XIII king again. Now the future was in doubt.

By 21 July, a rough line might have been drawn dividing the places where the rising had been generally successful from those where it had mostly failed. Running from half-way up the Portuguese-Spanish frontier in a north-easterly direction, this line would turn to the southeast at the Guadarrama mountains near Madrid, and then to Teruel (about a hundred miles from the Mediterranean in Aragon). It would then run north to the Pyrenees, meeting the Spanish-French frontier about half-way across its length. Except for the long strip of coastline comprising Asturias, Santander, and the two coastal Basque provinces, all to the north and west of this line was rebel territory (which also comprised Morocco, the Canaries, and the Balearics, except Minorca). To the south and east, save for the main Andalusian cities of Seville, Granada, Córdoba, Cádiz, and Algeciras (all of which, save the last two, were isolated from each other), the territory was principally republican. Within the governmental territory, in Toledo, San Sebastián, Valencia, and Gijón, Albacete and Oviedo, certain buildings were held by the rebels. In many nationalist towns, skirmishing went on for some days more in working-class suburbs. There were also many places, such as the Sierra de Albarracín, which, lying between rebel Aragon and revolutionary Castile, was as empty of authority as it was of communication and served only as a desert through which secret agents, fugitives, and bandits could pass.

In the Andalusian countryside, the situation was particularly confused. Events in the ancient wool town of Pozoblanco were characteristic. About a hundred and twenty civil guard carried out a successful rising, on 18 July. Then the Left, miners from Linares and some 150 loyal civil guard, surrounded the town and starved the civil guard into surrender. The besieged guards with their families (300 in all) were put on a train to Valencia where they were imprisoned in the ship
Legazpi,
and all but twenty-six were subsequently shot. Sixty-four of
the besieged civilians were shot too.
¹
These days saw the culmination, in fact, of a hundred years of class war: violence provoked new brutality, the news of evil in one village causing a new crime in the next. Refugees, for example, would arrive from Queipo de Llano’s Seville, in one or other of the villages between there and Córdoba. Their stories would be so terrible that reprisals would be taken on whoever was available. Later in the war, the army might arrive, and the consequent repression would be worse still.
²
In Baena for example, near Córdoba, the revolutionaries killed 92 people of the Right. The repression after the right-wing recovery of the town accounted for about 700.
³

8. Division of Spain at the end of July 1936

Behind this dividing-line, there were a hundred Spains, but two worlds. Rebel Spain was the reverse of rebellious. Foreign commentators called it ‘white Spain’, ‘insurgent Spain’ or ‘fascist Spain’, sometimes even ‘Christian Spain’; but the best word is the more neutral one, ‘nationalist’—the rebels called themselves the ‘nationals’ and spoke of the rising as ‘the movement’. It seemed to be more a military than a fascist society, because the Falange appeared military, uniformed, armed and belligerent. ‘Those who don’t wear uniforms should wear skirts’ was an incessant jibe. Martial law took over justice. Administrative and judicial officers were ‘investigated’, to prove their security in the new conditions. A judge had to be a man of right-wing sympathies and pliant to the military will. All political parties which had supported the Popular Front were banned. Political life ceased. Even the old right-wing and Centre parties, including the CEDA, vanished. The only active political organizations were the Falange and the Carlists, and these were ‘movements’ rather than parties. The
casas del pueblo
and left-wing newspaper offices were closed down. Strikes were made punishable by death. Private rail and road movement was banned. Throughout nationalist Spain, freemasons, members of Popular Front parties, members of trade unions, and, in some areas, everyone who had even voted for the Popular Front in the elections of February, were arrested and many shot. ‘That’s Red Aranda,’ the monarchist Conde de Vallellano
remarked to Dr Junod, the astonished Swiss Red Cross representative, while driving past that town on the main Madrid-Paris railway line in August. ‘I am afraid we had to put the whole town in prison and execute very many people.’
¹
The remark raises an unavoidable subject: the nature and the extent of the repression.

The number of executions varied from district to district, according to the whim of the local commander or authorities. Civil and military governors and officials of the civil government, if they had been appointed by the Popular Front government, were often shot. So were those who sought to maintain any general strike declared at the time of the rising. Well-known people, such as generals or civil governors, were usually given a semblance of trial by a court-martial perhaps lasting for two or three minutes. Most ordinary people, strikers, trade unionists, anarchists, were not. If the army did a lot of shooting so too did armed gangs of falangists or Carlists. The CEDA’s enlightened minister of agriculture, Giménez Fernández, narrowly escaped being shot by ‘some
señoritos
from Jerez’ who arrived at his house in Chipiona. His wife lost her reason. His son, who was present, thought that he would have been shot if the
señoritos
had not been so drunk.
²
The wives, sisters or daughters of men executed occasionally shared their fate.

These atrocities had a special purpose. Though the rebels were determined and often well armed, they were few in number. In places such as Seville or Granada, the large working-class population had to be terrified into acquiescence of the new order before the nationalist commanders could sleep peaceably in their beds. Hence, not only did the rebels act with ruthlessness towards their enemies, but they had also to act openly, and expose the bodies of those whom they killed to public gaze. All that the church officially insisted upon was that those to be killed after trial of any sort should have the opportunity for confession.
³
‘Only ten per cent of these dear children refused the last sacraments before being dispatched by our good offices,’ recorded the
Venerable Brother at Majorca. Mourning, however, was generally prohibited even to relations of those who had thus made a good death.
¹
These shootings went on for months.

The repression was an act of policy, decided upon by a group of determined men who knew that their original plans had gone awry. But Mola’s directives since April had prepared for this eventuality. At a meeting of mayors of the district near Pamplona, on 19 July, Mola repeated the tenor of those explicit, harsh instructions: ‘It is necessary to spread an atmosphere of terror. We have to create the impression of mastery … Anyone who is overtly or secretly a supporter of the Popular Front must be shot.’
²
This occurred even in Navarre where the rising triumphed with hardly a fight. If the proscription were decided on at the top, it is evident that there was no difficulty whatever in finding officers and soldiers, police, falangists or Carlists, to arrest, try hastily and execute. Why was that? It is not enough to say that the moment was a passionate one. Nor can these atrocities be explained by the knowledge, which soon began to arrive, usually exaggerated, of comparable events in that part of Spain where the rising had not triumphed. There is no easy explanation. The spirit of the Right was enraged and fearful, and many people’s blood was up. The new military authorities in nationalist Spain found it almost as hard to control ‘spontaneous’ actions as the government did. Thus many were killed without the approval, or authority, of the army.

Day after day, from the time of the success of the rising, the arrests continued. Who knew with what crime those taken would be charged, or whether they would ever come back? The French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, who was at the time in Majorca, described how men were arrested by the nationalist armed gangs

every day from lost villages, at the time when they came in from the fields. They set off on their last journey, with their arms still full of the day’s toil, leaving soup untouched on the table, and a woman, breathless, a minute too late at the garden wall, with a little bunch of belongings hastily twisted into a bright new napkin:
Adios: Recuerdos.
¹

In most cases, however, arrests were made at night, and the consequent shooting also done in the dark. Sometimes the executions would be single, sometimes collective. Sometimes, plainly, prisoners would be tortured before being killed. Sometimes, the official in charge, out of compassion, would arrange for a supply of wine to be at hand, so that the doomed might steep their despair in the wisdom of intoxication. The next morning, the bodies would be found. Often these would be of distinguished members of the parties of the Left, or of officers loyal to the republic. But no one would dare to identify these corpses. For example, the corpse of a loyal colonel of cavalry (Rubio Saracibar), and other well-known citizens of Valladolid were condemned to rest for ever beneath a tomb marked ‘Seven unidentified bodies. Found on the hill near the 102 kilometre stone on the road to Valladolid.’
²
An eyewitness living nearby says that a ‘dawn patrol’ of falangists shot forty persons daily at the beginning of the war: Onésimo Redondo, the founder of the JONS of Castile, recently released from gaol, gave himself over to this work of purging. Prisoners were taken in that city from the prisons in lorries to a certain point outside the city where they were shot—so regularly that a stall selling
churros
was set up to cater for the spectators who would drive up to watch.
³
A Capuchin priest recalled how he was sent for at midnight to hear mass confessions in an open grave from a crowd of condemned men, near Estella (Navarre), afterwards all being shot.
⁴
One day the body of a
requeté
named Castiella was
being buried at Tafalla (twenty miles south of Pamplona). He was a casualty of the battlefield. An indignant public demanded that the fifty prisoners in the town prison should be killed in reprisal. The mayor remonstrated that not all of them deserved to be killed. The public insisted, and the mayor referred the question to the Carlist
junta de guerra
in Pamplona. The
junta
said no: but the public broke into the prison just the same, and hauled out all within, carried them by bus fifteen miles to Monreal, and there in the solitude of the night shot them, including a number of bewildered women.
¹

After a while (at least in the north), the exposure of corpses to the public gaze was suspended, at the request of General Mola. He declared himself inconvenienced by the bodies on the roadside. Hence-forward, the executions occurred discreetly in the orchards of a remote monastery or among the boulders on some desolate hillside, while in many places, the executions would be conveniently in the cemetery itself.

Many details of these days remain obscure. Stories were invented for propaganda purposes, sometimes by republican Spaniards, sometimes abroad. Arthur Koestler, then working with the propaganda department of the Comintern in Paris, described how distortions were deliberately written into his book
L’Espagne ensanglantée
by his superior, the Czech impresario of propaganda, Otto Katz.
²
But some of the most damning allegations of atrocities were prepared by the respectable council of lawyers in Madrid. Horrible stories echo down the years; how a schoolmaster of Huesca was beaten almost to death by falangists to make him confess knowledge of ‘revolutionary plots’; to try and commit suicide, he opened a vein with his teeth.
³
In Navarre, and Alava, Basque nationalists were shot without confessors. One man was apparently told by certain
requetés
to extend his arms in the form of a cross and to cry ‘
Viva
Christ the King!’ while his limbs were amputated. His wife, forced to watch, went mad as he was finally bayoneted to death.
⁴
A few priests who attempted to intervene were
shot also.
¹
Whether or no these particular atrocities occurred quite as has been alleged, there need be no doubt that many such events did happen up and down nationalist Spain. They even happened in places such as Córdoba and Granada, where the rebellion had been almost immediately successful.
²

As for the authors of these atrocities, most of them were members of the army or the old parties of the right, or merely civil servants or officers of the civil guard. Of course, the falangists shot a lot of people, but they were not in command and if they sometimes were in execution squads, there were also some who, like the Falange’s interim national leader Hedilla, tried (in some cases successfully) to stem the tide by protest or the use of influence.
³
The bishop of Pamplona, Marcelino Olaechea, called for an end to blood-letting in Navarre, and there were places where executions were carried out by ‘uncontrollables’ against the express orders of the authorities. Many large cities, however, had blood-thirsty, even sadistic, new police chiefs or military governors who prevented protest: Captain Díaz Criado in Seville, Major Doval (already well-known from Asturias) in Salamanca, Colonel Cascajo and Major Bruno Ibañez in Córdoba, Captain Rojas and Colonel Valdés Guzmán in Granada, the ex-republican Joaquín del Moral in Burgos: their names live in history as master-butchers of their own people. Jesús Muro, the falangist leader in Saragossa, the Falange in Andalusia, and Andrés and Onésimo Redondo, in Valladolid, also had much to answer for.
⁴

The leaders did not react warmly to pleas for compassion. Mola, when approached to exchange prisoners on one side for those on the other, by the Red Cross representative, Dr Junod, replied: ‘How can you expect us to exchange a Spanish gentleman for a Red dog? If I let the prisoners go, my own people would regard me as a traitor … You have arrived too late, Monsieur, these dogs have already destroyed the most glorious spiritual values of our country.’
⁵
Fear of being thought a
traitor was, it is true, an obsession with Mola, but the statement reflected the reality of what many rebels, now that they had burned their boats, believed, their conviction that their opponents were worthless being daily reinforced by the news coming to them from the cities where the rising had been defeated.

It will always, probably, be difficult to know the number of those killed by the rebels or their supporters in these early days of the war. Records were not kept unless there were courts-martial. It was simply part of the process of cleaning up, the
limpieza,
ridding Spain of noxious freemasonry, Marxism, and Jewry, a trilogy still menacing to the Spanish Right even though its first leg, so to speak, was relatively harmless and its third had been destroyed in the sixteenth century. Still, a patient examination of mortuary statistics for the whole of Spain may one day tell much, though perhaps not all, of the truth.

Figures have already been given, though often as matters of propaganda rather than based on evidence. They may have been exaggerated without desire to deceive, because the recollection by, say, a survivor from a prison in which there were innumerable nocturnal executions can easily be magnified by imagination. The best independent study commanding conviction is that done for Granada; 2,137 are listed in the interment records and the cemetery of that city as being shot in Granada between 26 July 1936 and 1 March 1939.
¹
The greatest number in a single month was August 1936: 572 were killed. The historian may well suppose, therefore, that the likely numbers shot in Granada and its immediate surroundings were about 4,000 and perhaps for the whole province about double that number.
²

Probably what happened in Granada was characteristic of nationalist Spain generally, both at the moment of the rising and afterwards. Granada had, it is true, a high level of political consciousness, and
right-wing bitterness was great, because of the by-elections in June, when the Right believed that they had been thwarted. Nevertheless, the hatreds in Granada existed in Seville, Córdoba, Valladolid, Saragossa, Pamplona and in Corunna too, to name only a few of the capital cities won for the rising. For each of these places substantial figures have been suggested for the dead behind the lines: probably 2,000 were shot in the first few weeks in the city of Córdoba,
¹
about 3,000 in Sevilla,
²
5,000 in Saragossa and its surroundings,
³
2,000 in Navarre
⁴
and 2,000 in the Canary Islands.
⁵
The killings in Valladolid do not seem to have been investigated but there, in Zamora, Galicia, León and other places in Castille, thousands were certainly killed. The numbers for all Spain must have been in the tens of thousands: possibly 50,000 for the first six months of the war, and perhaps half that again for the subsequent months, taking into account such repression as was carried out in places conquered by the rebels.
⁶