The Last Days of the Spanish Republic. Paul Preston
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experiences at Brunete in July and Zaragoza in October 1937 were not crowned with success. Nevertheless, in 1938, by now promoted to full colonel, he was given two important posts, as head of the Army of Andalusia and shortly afterwards as head of the Army of the Centre.11 He seems to have held an extremely cordial meeting with the PCE top brass in Madrid on 25 July 1938. One of the topics discussed was how, in the event of Republican defeat, a staged evacuation might be mounted. Francisco-Félix Montiel claimed later that the purpose of this meeting was for the PCE to ensure that an incompetent traitor was in place to bring the war to an end in such a way as to absolve the party of responsibility. In fact, it is much more likely that the purpose of the meeting was to ensure the loyalty of Casado and the Army of the Centre just as the Republican army was crossing the Ebro, in the last great push for victory. If the Communists doubted Casado’s loyalty, Rojo doubted his competence.12
Casado was an irascible officer noted for his rectitude and austerity. In fact, his evil temper and his ascetic way of life were to some extent explained by the painful stomach ulcers from which he suffered. When the vice-president of the Socialist General Union of Workers (Unión General de Trabajadores, or UGT), Edmundo Domínguez Aragonés, was appointed commissar inspector of the Army of the Centre at the end of December 1938, he went to introduce himself to Casado. He found him prostrate on his bed. Casado’s unprovoked and gratuitous assertions of loyalty rang alarm bells: ‘I am a soldier whose only duty is to respect and obey the Government. You can see just how committed I am to this duty because anyone else in my situation, with an ulcer tearing through his guts, would have ample excuse to abandon it all and look after his health. Not me. Madrid has been entrusted to me and I will defend it or die trying. If I left, they would say that I am a coward.’ Domínguez was struck by the way in which, ‘emanating self-satisfaction’, Casado vehemently asserted that his principal concern was to alleviate the suffering of the women and children of the capital. Far from being convinced, Domínguez’s suspicions were aroused that Casado was insincere and trying to hide something.13
Fernando Rodríguez Miaja, the nephew and private secretary of General José Miaja, the erstwhile hero of the defence of Madrid, had similar doubts about Casado: ‘Intelligent and a technically a good soldier, Casado was ambitious, self-obsessed and histrionic with a bitter and unpleasant character … He had an uncontrollable desire to be always pre-eminent, in the limelight and centre-stage. He lived and behaved only in the first person singular. These characteristics of his personality had a great bearing on the way the Spanish war ended.’14
It is certainly the case that his behaviour during the last months of the Spanish Civil War suggest a self-serving arrogance which fed the ambition to go down in history as the man who ended the war. This was brazenly revealed in the dedication (to M.O.) of the memoir written shortly after his arrival in London in 1939. He wrote sarcastically: ‘I left my country because I committed the grave fault of ending a fratricidal struggle, sparing my people much sterile bloodshed.’ He went on to comment on the historical transcendence of his actions.15 While still in Spain he had told Dr Diego Medina Garijo, his personal physician and a member of the Francoist Fifth Column, that it was his intention to astound the world.16 This rather sustains the judgement of Vicente Rojo that Casado was a vacuous and sinister megalomaniac: ‘Casado is all talk. Casado does not serve the people and he never has. He is the most political and most crooked and fainthearted of the career officers in the Republican ranks.’17 Even more caustic was the opinion of Dolores Ibárruri, the Communist orator famed as ‘Pasionaria’: ‘It is difficult to conceive of more slippery and cowardly vermin than Colonel Segismundo Casado.’18
The bitterness of Pasionaria is comprehensible, given that the Communists would be among the most immediate victims of Casado’s coup. Less partisan perhaps is the view of his collaborator, General Miaja, who referred to him in private as ‘four-faced’ on the grounds that to call him ‘two-faced’ would barely reflect the reality.19 More intriguing is the contemptuous judgement of Antonio Bouthelier España, a member of the fascist party Falange Española and one of Casado’s contacts with the Fifth Column. He described Casado as ‘a soldier who did not feel pride in his profession, who did not understand the word “service”, restless and ambitious, envious of politicians in top hat and frock coat, author of long-winded and solemn speeches … an eternal malcontent who acted only in his own interests’.20
In a real sense, there was an inevitability about the eventual defeat of the Republic. The initial military rising took place on the evening of 17 July 1936 in Spain’s Moroccan colony and in the peninsula itself the next morning. The plotters were confident that it would all be over in a few days. Their coup was successful in the Catholic smallholding areas which voted for the right – the provincial capitals of rural León and Old Castile, cathedral market towns like Avila, Burgos, Salamanca and Valladolid. However, in the left-wing strongholds of industrial Spain and the great estates of the deep south, the uprising was defeated by the spontaneous action of the working-class organizations. Nevertheless, in major southern towns like Cadiz, Cordoba, Granada and Seville, left-wing resistance was soon savagely crushed.
Within days, the country was split into two war zones. The rebels controlled one-third of Spain in a northern block of Galicia, León, Old Castile, Aragon and part of Extremadura and an Andalusian triangle from Huelva to Seville to Cordoba. They had the great wheat-growing areas, but the main industrial – and food-consuming – centres remained in Republican hands. After vain efforts to reach a compromise with the rebels, a cabinet of moderate Republicans was formed under the chemistry professor José Giral. There was some reason to suppose that the Republic would be able to crush the rising. Giral’s moderate Republican cabinet had control of the nation’s gold and currency reserves and virtually all of Spain’s industrial capacity. However, it lacked a loyal functioning bureaucratic machinery, especially in the fields of public order and the economy.
There were three major advantages enjoyed by the military rebels that would eventually decide the conflict – the African Army, massive assistance from the fascist powers and the tacit support of the Western democracies. Republican warships were able for only three weeks to prevent the transportation from Morocco to Spain of the rebels’ strongest card, the ferocious colonial army under Franco. Moreover, the fact that power in the streets of Spain’s major cities lay with the unions and their militia organizations undermined the efforts of Giral’s government to secure aid from the Western democracies. Inhibited by internal political divisions and sharing the British fear of revolution and of provoking a general war, the French premier Léon Blum quickly drew back from early promises of aid. In contrast, Franco in North Africa was able to persuade the local representatives of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy that he was the man to back. By the end of July, Junkers 52 and Savoia-Marchetti 81 transport aircraft were starting to airlift the principal components of the Army of Africa, the bloodthirsty Foreign Legion and the Moroccan mercenaries of the so-called Native Regulars, across the Strait of Gibraltar to Seville. Fifteen thousand men crossed in ten days and a failed coup d’état became a long and bloody civil war. That crucial early aid was soon followed by a regular stream of high-technology assistance. In contrast to the state-of-the-art equipment arriving from Germany and Italy, complete with technicians, spare parts and the correct workshop manuals, the Republic, shunned by the democracies, had to make do with over-priced and obsolete equipment from private arms dealers.
The rebels swiftly undertook two campaigns that dramatically improved their situation. Mola attacked the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, cutting it off from France. Meanwhile, Franco’s Army of Africa advanced rapidly northwards to Madrid, leaving an horrific trail of slaughter in their wake, including the massacre at Badajoz where 2,000 prisoners were shot. By 10 August, they had united the two halves of rebel Spain. The rebels consolidated their position throughout August and September as General José Enrique Varela connected Seville,