Franco. Paul Preston
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Fernández Cuesta waiting in Toledo, he drove to Madrid and consulted with the Chief of the General Staff who, as could have been foreseen, told him that the scheme was impracticable and badly timed.70
Franco made it clear that he resented these initiatives from civilians as attempts to take advantage of the ‘most distinguished officers’ for their own partisan purposes. Moscardó was one of a number of officers, to whom he referred as ‘simplistic comrades’, who brought such proposals to him. He told them all that to precipitate matters was to guarantee failure. The job of the Army was to maintain its unity and discipline to be ready to intervene if and when the Republic proved itself totally unviable. What the Army could not do was to try to destroy the Republic before the population was ready.71 After Gil Robles was replaced as Minister of War by General Nicolás Molero, Franco was left as Chief of the General Staff. Like his predecessor, Molero was happy for Franco to get on with a job which he did well. Franco wrote to a friend on 14 January 1936, ‘I am still here in my post and I don’t think they’ll move me’. His contentment, along with his natural caution, may well have contributed to his inclination against conspiratorial adventures.72
The elections were scheduled for 16 February 1936. Throughout January, rumours of a military coup involving Franco were so insistent that, late one night, the interim prime minister Manuel Portela Valladares sent the Director-General de Seguridad, Vicente Santiago, to the Ministry of War to see Franco and clarify the situation. The Chief of the General Staff was clearly still in the same cautious mood in which he had greeted Moscardó a few days earlier. Nevertheless, there was a double-edge in his reply. ‘The rumours are completely false; I am not conspiring and I will not conspire as long as there is no danger of Communism in Spain; and to put your mind at rest even more, I give you my word of honour, with all the guarantees that this carries between comrades in arms. While you are in the Dirección General de Seguridad, I have complete confidence that law and order, which is of such importance to all Spaniards and above all to the Army, will not be overthrown. Our job is to co-operate.’ The Director-General de Seguridad then said something which was uncannily prophetic: ‘If you and your comrades at any time feel that the circumstances which you mention come about and you are pushed to a rising, I dare say that if you don’t win in forty-eight hours there will follow misfortunes the like of which were never seen in Spain or in any revolution.’ Franco replied ‘We will not make the same mistake as Primo de Rivera in putting the Army in charge of the government’.73 That Franco should discount the possibility of military government after a coup reflected his recent discussions with Goded and Fanjul about the plan to put Gil Robles in power, a plan rejected as unsafe.
Inevitably, the election campaign was fought in an atmosphere of violent struggle. In propaganda terms, the Right enjoyed an enormous advantage. Rightist electoral funds dramatically exceeded those of the poverty-stricken Left, although Franco was to remain convinced that the reverse was the case. He believed that the Left was awash with gold sent from Moscow and money stolen by the revolutionaries in October 1934.74 Ten thousand posters and 50 million leaflets were printed for the CEDA. They presented the elections in terms of a life-or-death struggle between good and evil, survival and destruction. The Popular Front based its campaign on the threat of fascism and the need for an amnesty for the prisoners of October.
In fact, Franco was absent from Spain during part of the election campaign, attending the funeral of George V in London. He was chosen to attend because he was Chief of Staff and because he had once served in the Eighth Infantry Regiment of which the King of England was Honorary Colonel. He attended the funeral service at Westminster Abbey on Wednesday 28 January and, along with other foreign dignitaries, accompanied the coffin to its final resting place in St George’s Chapel, Windsor.75 On the return journey by cross-channel ferry, Franco made some significant remarks to Major Antonio Barroso, the Spanish military attaché in Paris, who had accompanied him on the trip. He told Barroso that the Popular Front was the direct creation of the Comintern and was intended as a Trojan Horse to introduce Communism into Spain. He said that Mola and Goded were equally worried and everything now hinged on what the Popular Front did if it won the elections. The Army had to be ready to intervene if necessary.76
The Chief of the General Staff returned to Madrid on 5 February. Franco’s instinctive caution was to the fore during a meeting that he held with José Antonio Primo de Rivera, at the home of Ramón Serrano Suñer’s father and brothers, just before the elections in mid-February. The leader of the Falange was obsessed with the need for a military intervention of surgical precision as a prelude to the creation of a national government to stop the slide into revolution. In fact, despite a seductive charm which made him the darling of Spanish high society, the young fascist leader had never attracted or impressed Franco, who, at this meeting, was evasive, rambling and cautious. Almost certainly, at the back of his mind was the madcap scheme which José Antonio Primo de Rivera had recently put to Colonel Moscardó. Franco was not about to become the accomplice in conspiracy of a young Falangist leader whom he did not respect and who had little popular support. Rather than get to the point of the meeting, he chatted aimlessly. José Antonio was deeply disillusioned and irritated, saying ‘my father for all his defects, for all his political disorientation, was something else altogether. He had humanity, decisiveness and nobility. But these people …’.77
The elections held on 16 February resulted in a narrow victory for the Popular Front in terms of votes, but a massive triumph in terms of seats in the Cortes.78 In the early hours of the morning of 17 February, as the first results were coming in, the popular enthusiasm of the masses was sending panic through right-wing circles. Franco and Gil Robles, in a co-ordinated fashion, worked tirelessly to hold back the decision of the ballot boxes. The main target of their efforts was the Prime Minister (who was also Minister of the Interior). Gil Robles and Franco both saw clearly that it was crucial to persuade him to stay on in order to ensure that the Civil Guard and the crack police units (the Guardias de Asalto) would not oppose the Army’s measures to reimpose ‘order’.
At about 3.15 a.m. on 17 February, Gil Robles presented himself at the Ministerio de la Gobernación and asked to see Portela. The CEDA leader was outraged to discover that Portela had gone to his rooms at the Hotel Palace. Portela was woken to be told that Gil Robles was waiting to see him. Three quarters of an hour later, the Prime Minister arrived. Gil Robles, claiming to speak in the name of all the forces of the right, told him that the Popular Front successes meant violence and anarchy and asked him to declare martial law. Portela replied that his job had been to preside over the elections and no more. He was, nevertheless, sufficiently convinced by Gil Robles to agree to declare a State of Alert (a stage prior to martial law) and to telephone Alcalá Zamora and ask him to authorize decrees suspending constitutional guarantees and imposing martial law.79
At the same time, Gil Robles sent his private secretary, the Conde de Peña Castillo, to instruct his one-time aide Major Manuel Carrasco Verde to contact Franco. Carrasco was to inform Franco of what was happening and urge him to add his weight to Gil Robles’ pleas urging Portela not to resign and to bring in the Army. Carrasco woke the Chief of the General Staff at home with the message. Franco leapt to the unjustified conclusion that the election results were the first victory of the Comintern plan to take over Spain. Accordingly, he sent Carrasco to warn Colonel Galarza and instruct him to have key UME officers alerted in provincial garrisons. Franco then telephoned General Pozas, Director-General of the Civil Guard, an old Africanista who was nonetheless loyal to the Republic. He told Pozas that the results meant disorder and revolution. Franco proposed, in terms so guarded as to be almost incomprehensible, that Pozas join in an action to impose order. Pozas dismissed his fears and told him calmly that the crowds in the street were merely ‘the legitimate expression of republican joy’.