The Spanish Holocaust (59 page)

Franco ordered Yagüe to mount a three-pronged attack on Mérida, the old Roman town on the road to Cáceres, and an important communications centre between Seville and Portugal. Mérida was subjected to fierce air and artillery bombardment. Yagüe chose as his senior artillery commander Captain Luis Alarcón de la Lastra, the landowning Africanista from Carmona. Mérida fell on 11 August, at a cost of nine rebels and 250 defenders left dead. The defence had been based naively on an antique cannon aimed across the Roman bridge over the River Guadiana. In the event, demoralized by an artillery bombardment, the poorly armed defenders were no match for the machine-guns of Asensio’s troops. The usual bloody repression took place. Those leftists who were unable to escape took refuge in the cellar of the Casa del Pueblo. They were obliged to file out one by one and were shot as they emerged. In the following days, house after house was searched, mass arrests were made and more men were shot and women were sexually humiliated.
²⁴

The repression in Mérida went on for months at the hands of Falangists under the overall charge of a sinister Civil Guard, Manuel Gómez Cantos. After acquiring a reputation for perverse brutality in various southern postings, especially in Málaga, he had been posted to Villanueva de la Serena in the north-east of Badajoz. On 19 July, he had led an uprising of the town’s Civil Guard garrison. After a bloody victory, helped by local Falangists, Gómez Cantos detained members of the town council and of the Casa del Pueblo and other leftists. When Republican relief forces neared the town, he led his men and his prisoners to Miajadas in the rebel-dominated province of Cáceres. The hostages were taken to the provincial capital where some were shot and others taken back for execution in Villanueva when it was captured in 1938. In
Miajadas, Gómez Cantos was joined by a substantial number of other rebel Civil Guards.
²⁵

Thereafter, he rose to a point where he had a virtually free hand in the repression. He was promoted to major on 11 August. In Mérida, he supervised nightly executions of men held in the Casino, which had been turned into an improvised prison. One of his prisoners was a liberal Republican, Dr Temprano. Each day for a month, Gómez Cantos would walk around the town centre with the doctor, taking note of anyone who greeted him. The doctor’s friends were thus identified and then arrested. Gómez Cantos himself shot the doctor. In February 1938, Queipo de Llano would send Gómez Cantos as Delegate for Public Order for Badajoz. Despite the fact that the repression under his predecessors had virtually eliminated the left, he had the idea of having a stripe of red paint brushed on to the jacket of anyone suspected of left-wing sympathies.
²⁶

On reaching Mérida, Franco’s forces had advanced 125 miles in a week. The battle experience of the African Army in open scrub easily explains the success of Asensio and Castejón. The scratch Republican militia would fight desperately as long as they enjoyed the cover of buildings or trees. However, they were not trained in elementary ground movements or even in the care and reloading of their weapons. Bunched near roads, seemingly unaware of better positions on nearby hill slopes, they made easy targets. The accumulated terror that accompanied the advance of the Moors and the Legionarios, a terror amplified after each victory, ensured that even the rumoured threat of being outflanked would send them fleeing, abandoning their equipment as they ran. John T. Whitaker of the
New York Herald Tribune
commented, ‘Marching with these Moors, I watched them flank, dislodge, and annihilate ten times their numbers in battle after battle. Individual heroism among untrained soldiers is not enough against professionals supported by aircraft.’
²⁷

Franco was fully aware of the columns’ superiority over untrained and poorly armed militias and he and his chief of staff, Colonel Francisco Martín Moreno, planned their operations accordingly. Intimidation and terror, euphemistically described as ‘castigo’ (punishment), were specified in written orders.
²⁸
Martín Moreno summed up the situation in an order of 12 August, in which he observed:

The quality of the enemy that faces us, with neither discipline nor military training, lacking trained leaders, and short of arms, ammunition and support services, means that, in combat, resistance is generally
feeble … Our superiority in weaponry and our skilful use thereof permits us to achieve our objectives with very few casualties. The psychological impact of mortars or the accurate use of machine-gun fire is enormous on those who don’t have such weapons or don’t know how to use them.
²⁹

The use of terror was neither spontaneous nor an inadvertent side-effect. The Legion as well as the Regulares mutilated casualties, cutting off ears, noses, sexual organs and even heads. Such practices, along with the massacres of prisoners and the systematic rape of working-class women, were permitted by the rebel officers in Spain as they had been in Morocco by Franco and others. As had been the case in Asturias in 1934, they were useful in several ways. They indulged the bloodlust of the African columns, they eliminated large numbers of potential opponents and, above all, they generated a paralysing terror among others.
³⁰
The rebels were sufficiently uneasy about what they were doing to feel the need to conceal it. On or around 13 August, General Queipo de Llano was interviewed in Seville by the immensely sympathetic correspondent of the London
Daily Mail
, Harold Cardozo. Queipo de Llano assured the British journalist that:

Except in the heat of battle or in the capture by assault of a position, no men are shot down without being given a hearing and a fair trial in strict accordance with the rule of procedure of our military courts. The trials are held in public and those only are condemned to death who have personally taken part in murders and other crimes punishable according to our military code by death, or who by their position of authority are responsible for having allowed such crimes to be committed. I have taken thousands of prisoners, and today more than half of them are at liberty.
³¹

However, Harold Pemberton, the correspondent of the equally pro-rebel
Daily Express
, reported that, after the capture of Mérida, members of the Legion tried to sell him and his photographer ‘Communist ears as souvenirs’.
³²

After the occupation of Mérida, Yagüe’s troops turned south-west towards Badajoz, the principal town of Extremadura, on the banks of the River Guadiana near the Portuguese frontier. If the columns had hastened onwards to Madrid, the Badajoz garrison could not seriously have threatened them from the rear. Francoist military historians have
implied that Yagüe turned to Badajoz on his own initiative. If this had been the case, he would have been in serious trouble with Franco, who made all the major daily decisions, which were then implemented by Yagüe. Franco personally supervised the operation against Mérida and, on the evening of 10 August, received Yagüe in his headquarters to discuss the capture of Badajoz and the next objectives. He wanted to knock out Badajoz to unify the two sections of the rebel zone and leave the left flank of the advancing columns covered by the Portuguese border. It was a strategic error, contributing to the delay which allowed the government to organize its defences. However, Franco, as he showed repeatedly during the war, was more concerned with a total purge of all conquered territory than with a quick victory.
³³

One of the first villages after Mérida was Torremayor. There, the Popular Front Committee had ensured that there was no violence. No rightists had been imprisoned, no atrocities committed, and Yagüe’s troops passed by without incident.
³⁴
Midway between Badajoz and Mérida lay the contiguous towns of Lobón, Montijo and Puebla de la Calzada. When news of the military conspiracy had reached all three, Defence Committees had been set up with representatives of all the left-wing parties and trade unions. Local ‘militias’ were created and armed with the few hunting shotguns possessed by workers or confiscated from the rich. In Puebla de la Calzada, the ‘militia’ had thirty-three members; in Montijo, it was one hundred strong. In all three towns, the Committees arrested those wealthy members of the local population who supported the military uprising. In Puebla de la Calzada, many of the sixty-six men detained were landowners who had refused to pay workers placed on their estates. Nineteen were property-owners, twelve were farmers and four were owners of small factories. All were well treated, their families being allowed to bring them food, tobacco, mattresses and blankets. Those who paid the wages owing to their labourers were released. The Committee ensured that no prisoners were killed but, when Yagüe’s column arrived at dawn on 13 August, the prisoners claimed falsely that they were about to be burned alive in the village church. In Montijo, fifty-six rightists were detained in a convent. Their families were allowed to bring them food, but the prisoners were obliged to work in the fields and some were mistreated by their guards. Nevertheless, when some militiamen from Badajoz tried to burn down the convent, the town’s Committee prevented them.
³⁵

Faced with Yagüe’s three thousand hardened mercenaries, many left-wingers of both Puebla de la Calzada and Montijo fled, some to join in
the defence of Badajoz, others east towards Don Benito. When Yagüe received the surrender of the villages, he named a right-wing committee to run each and gave them the following instruction: ‘leave no left-wing leader alive’. Falangists sacked the Casa del Pueblo of Puebla de la Calzada, burning most of its contents other than membership lists. Despite the efforts of the president of the new Committee, once of the CEDA and now of the Falange, twenty-nine men and one woman were shot. She, along with other female trade unionists and wives of leftists, was taken to the town square where they all had their heads shaved and were forced to drink castor oil. After being made to witness her execution, the others were then slowly paraded back to their homes, soiling themselves as they went. In addition to this systematic humiliation, most of them found it extremely difficult to find work again.

To lure back those who had fled, the new administrations of both towns issued a statement that those not guilty of ‘crimes of blood’ could safely return home. Once again, those who naively returned were arrested and shot. In Montijo, a major religious festival was arranged on 28 August, the culmination of which was the exhibition of the town’s remaining left-wingers and trade union leaders who were forced at gunpoint to ask forgiveness for their grave sins. At dawn on 29 August, fourteen of them, including the Mayor Miguel Merino Rodríguez, were shot. His land was confiscated and his widow and six children were left in extreme poverty. The shootings went on for years thereafter and claimed well over one hundred victims.
³⁶

On 2 September in nearby Torremayor where, it will be recalled, no violence had occurred, a group of Falangist thugs arrived. They burst into the houses of the president of the Popular Front Committee, of its secretary, a schoolteacher, and of the president of the Casa del Pueblo. After searching the houses and stealing money and jewellery, the Falangists took the three men away and murdered them. When she heard the news, the seriously ill wife of the schoolteacher died, leaving two daughters, one aged twenty-one months and the other four years. Her brother, a senior Falangist in Seville, endeavoured to get some sort of pension for the children. This was refused because their father was not officially dead. An inquiry then revealed that the Falangists had taken the three men to the local Civil Guard post where a ‘tribunal’ consisting of their leader and two Civil Guards had condemned the men to death. The parish priest of Torremayor then accompanied them to the cemetery where they were shot. The Falangists said that they were obeying the instructions left by Yagüe in Lobón, Montijo and Puebla de la Calzada to
shoot all left-wingers ‘responsible for the anarchic state in which Spain found itself’. The death of the schoolteacher was finally registered, but no action was taken against the Falangists.
³⁷

After capturing Puebla de la Calzada, Montijo and Lobón, Yagüe’s troops proceeded westwards to Talavera la Real. There, too, eighty-two local rightists had been arrested by the Popular Front Committee. They had been paraded through the town streets and insulted. Many were forced to pay outstanding wages to workers. Fifty-nine were detained in a church, the other twenty-three in the municipal storehouse. When Yagüe’s troops were on the point of entering the town, an attempt by drunken militiamen to burn the church down was prevented by two local leftists. Others, together with members of the committee, fled, taking with them twenty-three rightist prisoners. Half a mile outside Talavera, they shot them, killing twenty-one. Not surprisingly, one of the two survivors took part in the subsequent repression in which, according to local estimates, nearly 250 people were shot.
³⁸

Yagüe’s column moved on to Badajoz. The military coup had failed there. This was thanks in part to the decisive action of the Popular Front Defence Committee led by the Civil Governor Miguel Granados Ruiz, the Socialist deputy Nicolás de Pablo and the Mayor Sinforiano Madroñero. The Committee had quickly ordered the arrest of more than three hundred rebel supporters and organized the creation and (utterly inadequate) arming of militia groups. The rebel failure in Badajoz also reflected indecision and divisions among the local military commanders and the fact that in Badajoz, unlike other southern cities, there was a group of firmly pro-Republican officers. On 26 July, the Madrid government sent Colonel Ildefonso Puigdengolas Ponce de León to take over the defence of the town. Wearing the blue overalls of the militia and fresh from overcoming the uprising in Guadalajara and Alcalá de Henares, Puigdengolas was welcomed as a hero by the left in Badajoz. He arrested some of the more suspect officers and began training the militias.
³⁹