The Last Days of the Spanish Republic. Paul Preston
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is the story of an avoidable humanitarian tragedy that cost many thousands of lives and ruined tens of thousands more. It has many protagonists but centres on three individuals. One, Dr Juan Negrín, the victim of what might be termed a conspiracy of dunces, tried to prevent it. Two bore responsibility for what transpired. One of those, Julián Besteiro, behaved with culpable naivety. The other, Segismundo Casado, behaved with a remarkable combination of cynicism, arrogance and selfishness.
On 5 March 1939, the eternally malcontent Colonel Casado, since May the previous year commander of the Republican Army of the Centre, launched a military coup against the government of Juan Negrín. Ironically, he thereby ensured that the end of the Spanish Civil War was almost identical to its beginning. As General Emilio Mola, the organizer of the military coup of 1936, its future leader General Francisco Franco and the other conspirators had done, Casado led a part of the Republican Army in revolt against the Republican government. He claimed, as they had done, and equally without foundation, that Negrín’s government was the puppet of the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España, or PCE) and that a coup was imminent to establish a Communist dictatorship. The same accusation was made by the anarchist José García Pradas, who talked of Negrín personally leading a Communist coup.1 In that regard, it is worth recalling the judgement of the great American war correspondent Herbert Matthews, who knew Negrín well:
Negrín was neither a Communist nor a revolutionary … I do not believe that Negrín gave the idea of a social revolution any thought before the Civil War … Negrín retained all his life a certain indifference and blindness to social issues. Paradoxically, this put him in agreement with the Communists in the Civil War. He was equally blind in an ideological sense. He was a prewar Socialist in name only. Russia was the only nation that helped Republican Spain; the Spanish Communists were among the best and most disciplined soldiers; the International Brigade, with its Communist leadership, was invaluable. Therefore, Premier Negrín worked with the Russians, but never succumbed to or took orders from them.2
A not unsimilar view was expressed by Negrín’s lifelong friend Dr Marcelina Pascua:
Was Negrín a Communist? How ridiculous! Not by a thousand miles. He was congenitally individualistic, utterly disinclined to follow a collective discipline or to put up with tight rules and regulations imposed by a political party or to follow the personal requirements that the instruments of marxism impose on their adherents. As far as any hero worship was concerned, the person that he admired most was Clemenceau (and not his contemporary Lenin) despite being fully aware of his repressive and reactionary policies against the trade unions and his persistent hostility to the French Socialists. I always interpreted Negrín’s veneration for ‘the Tiger’ in terms of his being seduced by the energy and efficacy that he demonstrated during the First World War. This explains the contradiction because what Negrín admired in Clemenceau was exactly the pragmatic determination to win the war that was what he aspired to do in the Spanish conflict.
According to Pascua, Negrín adopted as a private slogan Clemenceau’s remark that ‘Dans la guerre comme dans la paix le dernier mot est à ceux que ne se rendent jamais.’3
Casado claimed that he launched his coup because he was sure that he could put a stop to what was increasingly senseless slaughter and that he could secure the clemency of Franco for all but the Communists. Even if this was genuinely his selfless motive, and there is ample evidence to the contrary, he went about it in the worst way imaginable. In his dealings with Franco, he behaved as if he had nothing to bargain with. He seemed to be oblivious of the fact that Franco was obsessed with capturing Madrid, the very symbol of resistance. The Caudillo had failed to do so in November 1936 and had also been thwarted at the battles of Jarama and Brunete in February and July 1937. Unlike Negrín, who could threaten continued resistance when Franco was being pushed by his German and Italian allies for an early end to the war, Casado took the position that the war was already lost. His only hope therefore was the naive, and rather arrogant, belief that Franco would be susceptible to a vague rhetoric of shared patriotism and the fraternal spirit of the wider military family, as if somehow they were equals.4 In consequence, his action would actually cause massive loss of life.
It is certainly the case that the defeat of the Spanish Republic was already in sight. What remained possible, however, was to ensure that the war ended in such a way as to secure the evacuation of the most at-risk politicians and soldiers and guarantees for the civilian population to be left behind. As Negrín had commented to Juan-Simeón Vidarte of the executive committee of the Spanish Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, or PSOE): ‘A negotiated peace, always; unconditional surrender to let them shoot half a million Spaniards, never.’5 Ernest Hemingway summed up Negrín’s position as follows: ‘In a war you can never admit, even to yourself, that it is lost. Because when you will admit it is lost you are beaten. The one who being beaten refuses to admit and fights on the longest wins in all finish fights; unless of course he is killed, starved out, deprived of weapons or betrayed. All of these things happened to the Spanish people. They were killed in vast numbers, starved out, deprived of weapons and betrayed.’6 With the Spanish Republic exhausted and internationally isolated, Casado’s fateful initiative merely precipitated its defeat in the worst imaginable conditions. His revolt against the Republican government sparked off a mini-civil war in Madrid, ensuring the deaths of 2,000 people, mainly Communists, and undermined the evacuation plans for hundreds of thousands of other Republicans.7
It has been suggested that what happened was the consequence of the ‘fact’ that Casado was a British agent. It is unlikely that he was an ‘agent’ or even in receipt of payment, but he was certainly in touch with British representatives – the Chargé d’Affaires Ralph Skrine Stevenson and Howard Denys Russell Cowan of the Chetwode Commission, which was trying to arrange prisoner exchanges. Given that the British government had long assumed that the Republic would be defeated, and wished to be free of what was seen as an unnecessary problem, there can be little doubt that Stevenson and Cowan at the very least encouraged Casado in his efforts to end the war. The ex-Communist Francisco-Félix Montiel claimed that ‘London was behind Casado.’8 At the end of February 1939, Casado met some Communist officers at his headquarters on the eastern outskirts of Madrid, given the military codename ‘Posición Jaca’. Completely out of context, he assured them that ‘the rumours that he was an agent of British intelligence were not true and it was not at his initiative that members of the British Embassy visited him and showered him with attention’.9 Within Negrín’s entourage there was a belief in British involvement in the coup. In 1962, the American journalist Jay Allen wrote to another newspaperman Louis Fischer, both friends of Negrín, ‘Who, besides Rafael Méndez, whose address I don’t have, could fill me in on the role of the British Intelligence agent who helped pull off the Casado coup?’10
Casado was born on 10 October 1893 in Nava de la Asunción in the province of Segovia. He was brought up under the strict discipline imposed by his father, an infantry captain, and became an officer cadet himself at the age of fifteen. He graduated as a first lieutenant in 1920 and made his career as a desk officer, albeit a very competent one. Apart from a brief and relatively tranquil eight-month period in Morocco, he had no battlefield experience. He had no political links, although in January 1935 he was appointed head of the presidential escort of Niceto Alcalá Zamora, whom he admired. After Alcalá had been replaced by Manuel Azaña in May 1936, Casado, who had reached the rank of major, found the post much less agreeable. In August 1936, he resigned from the presidential guard on the grounds that working with Azaña was ‘a horrible torture’. Promoted to lieutenant colonel, he then became chief of operations of the general staff when Francisco Largo Caballero became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. When Vicente Rojo was made chief of staff, a promotion that Casado never forgave since he aspired to the post himself,