Franco. Paul Preston
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day of the war. That day we saw what the Legion was made of. The Moors were pressing strongly and we were fighting at twenty paces. We had a company and a half and we suffered one hundred casualties. Handfuls of men were falling, almost all wounded in the head or the stomach, yet our strength never wavered for a second. Even the wounded, dragging themselves along covered in blood, cried ‘¡Viva la Legión! Seeing them, so manly, so brave, I felt an emotion which choked me.’ Asked if he had ever felt fear, he smiled as if puzzled, and shyly replied ‘I don’t know. No one knows what courage and fear are. In a soldier, all this is summed up in something else: the concept of duty, of patriotism.’ The romantic note continued with references to the anxious vigils of his mother and bride-to-be. Ferragut asked him directly, ‘Are you in love, Franco?’ to which the affable interviewee replied ‘¡Hombre!, what do you think? I’m just off to Oviedo to get married.’7
On 21 March 1923, Franco arrived in Oviedo where his exploits ensured that he would be feted. At the beginning of June, local society turned out in force for a banquet at which he was presented with a gold key, the symbol of his recently acquired status as Gentilhombre de cámara, purchased for him after a local subscription. The King had still not granted the reglamentary permission for his wedding. Since this was a mere formality, the ceremony was being planned for June. However, while Carmen and Francisco were waiting to hear from the Palace, their plans suffered another reversal. Franco had gone to El Ferrol where he spent most of May with his family. In early June, Abd el Krim launched another attack on Tizi Azza, the key to the outreaches of the Melilla defence lines. If Tizi Azza fell, it would have been relatively easy for other Spanish positions to collapse in a domino effect. On 5 June 1923, the new commander of the Legion, Lieutenant-Colonel Valenzuela, was killed in a successful action aimed at breaking the siege.8
An emergency cabinet meeting three days later, on 8 June 1923, decided that the most suitable replacement for Valenzuela was Franco. The Minister of War, General Aizpuru, telegrammed to inform him that he had been promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel with retrospective effect from 31 January 1922 and that the King had bestowed command of the Legion upon him. His marriage would have to be postponed again. The ambitious Carmen may have found consolation for the loss of her bridegroom in his promotion, the signs of royal patronage and the enormous local prestige that he thereby enjoyed, although, interviewed in 1928, she talked of her anxieties while he was away and of his principal defect being his love for Africa.9
Prior to leaving Spain, Franco was the guest of honour at banquets in both the Automobile Club in Oviedo and at the Hotel Palace in Madrid. One of the principal Asturian newspapers dedicated an entire front page to his promotion and his prowess, complete with extravagant tributes from General Antonio Losada, the military governor of Oviedo, from the Marqués de la Vega de Anzó and other local dignitaries.10 Interviewed on arrival at the Automobile Club banquet on the evening of Saturday 9 June, Franco showed himself to be the public’s ideal young hero, dashing, gallant and, above all, modest. He dismissed talk of special bravery and showed himself perplexed by all the fuss that was being made. Clearly conscious of the dash he was cutting, he interrupted the journalist’s attempted eulogy by saying ‘I just did what all the Legionaires did, we fought with a desire to win and we did win’. A discreet reminder of what he was leaving behind brought a delicate glimpse of emotion which Franco quickly put behind him. The journalist remarked sycophantically ‘how the brave Legionaires will rejoice at your appointment!’. Franco replied ‘Rejoice? Why? I’m an officer just like …’, only to be interrupted by a passing ex-Legionaire who said ‘say yes, that they will all rejoice, of course they will rejoice’. Like a hero of romantic fiction, Franco replied with a modest laugh, saying ‘Don’t go overboard. Yes, you’re right, the lads care for me a lot.’
The interview ended with Franco being asked about his plans, at which he gave another hint of the sacrifice he was having to make. He replied with a curious mixture of virile enthusiasm and self-regarding pomposity: ‘Plans? What happens will decide that. I repeat that I am a simple soldier who obeys orders. I will go to Morocco. I will see how things are. We will work hard and as soon as I can get some leave I will come back to Oviedo to … to do what I thought was virtually done, which for the moment duty prevents, taking precedence over any feelings, even those with roots deep in the soul. When the Patria calls, we have only rapid and concise response: ¡Presente!’11 There is no doubt that this, and other interviews from this period, show an altogether more attractive figure than the one that Franco was later to become, in large measure as a consequence of the corrupting influence of constant adulation. The Minister of War and future President of the Second Republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, thought Franco’s near contemporary and rival, Manuel Goded, a more promising officer than Franco. However, he liked Franco’s air of modesty, ‘the loss of which when he became a general damaged him significantly’.12
Within a week of passing through Madrid, Franco had taken up his new command in Ceuta and was soon in the thick of the action. Shortly after Franco’s arrival in Africa, Abd el Krim followed up his attack on Tizi Azza with another on Tifaruin, a Spanish outpost near the River Kert to the west of Melilla. Nearly nine thousand men besieged Tifaruin and they were dislodged on 22 August by two banderas of the Legion under Franco’s command.13
Such was the accumulated military discontent about what was perceived as civilian betrayal of the Army in Morocco that since early in 1923 two groups of senior generals, one in Madrid and the other in Barcelona under Miguel Primo de Rivera, had been toying with the idea of a military coup.14 The incident which triggered it off took place on 23 August. There were a number of public disturbances in Málaga involving conscripts being embarked for Africa. Civilians were jostled and Army officers assaulted. Some of the recruits were merely drunk, others were Catalan and Basque nationalists making political protests. Order was finally restored by the Civil Guard. An NCO in the Engineering Corps (suboficial de ingenieros), José Ardoz, was killed and the crime was attributed to a gallego, Corporal Sánchez Barroso. Sánchez Barroso was immediately tried and sentenced to death. Since Annual, there had been a widespread public revulsion against the Moroccan enterprise and, in consequence, there was a huge outcry about the death sentence. On 28 August, Sánchez Barroso was given a royal pardon, at the request of the cabinet. The officer corps was outraged by the humiliation of the Málaga incidents, by the subsequent public rejection of their cause in Morocco and by what they saw as the slight involved in the pardon.15
On 13 September, the Falstaffian eccentric General Miguel Primo de Rivera launched his military coup supported by the garrisons of his own military region of Catalonia and by that of Aragón, under the control of his intimate friend General Sanjurjo. There is considerable debate about the King’s complicity in the coup. What is certain is that he acquiesced in the military demolition of the constitutional monarchy and happily embarked on a course of authoritarian rule. After six years of sporadic bloodshed and instability since 1917, and the fashionable ‘regenerationist’ calls for an ‘iron surgeon’, the Military Directory set up by Primo de Rivera met with only token resistance and, given widespread disillusion with the caciquista system, much benevolent expectation.16 Despite the mutual admiration which, at this stage of their careers, united Franco and Sanjurjo, neither Franco nor most of the officers of the Legion were particularly enthusiastic about the coup. They regarded most of the officers who supported Primo as primarily members of the Juntas de Defensa and therefore enemies of promotion by merit. In addition, they were fully aware of the belief of Primo himself that Spain should abandon her Moroccan protectorate.17 It is clear, however, that Franco had no objections in principle to the military taking political power, particularly as royal approval was quickly forthcoming.