Franco. Paul Preston
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who would each play a crucial role in the Civil War: the brutal Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, head of the Carabineros (the Spanish frontier guards), the austere monarchist Alfredo Kindelán, the key link with conspirators in the Air Force and the easy-going Miguel Cabanellas, head of the Zaragoza military division.30 Franco was fully informed through Galarza. As part of the post-1939 propaganda effort to wipe away the memory of Franco’s minimal participation in the preparations, it was claimed that he carried on a twice-weekly correspondence with Galarza. These thirty coded letters have never been traced.31 In fact, Franco was anything but enthusiastic, commenting to the optimistically headstrong Orgaz, who had been banished to the Canary Islands in the early spring, ‘You are really mistaken. It’s going to be immensely difficult and very bloody. We haven’t got much of an army, the intervention of the Civil Guard is looking doubtful and many officers will side with the constituted power, some because it’s easier, others because of their convictions. Nobody should forget that the soldier who rebels against the constituted power can never turn back, never surrender, for he will be shot without a second thought’.32 At the end of May, Gil Robles complained to the American journalist H. Edward Knoblaugh that Franco had refused to head the coup, allegedly saying ‘not all the water in the Manzanares could wash out the stain of such a move’. Discounting the choice of a less than torrential river, this and other remarks suggest that the experience of the Sanjurjada of 1932 was on his mind.33 Not to be able to turn around or change his mind must have been Franco’s idea of hell.
With the conspiracy developing rapidly, Franco’s caution was stoking up the impatience of his Africanista friends. On 25 May, Mola had drawn up his second directive to the plotters, a broad strategic plan of regional risings to be followed by concerted attacks on Madrid from the provinces.34 Clearly, it would be an enormous advantage to have Franco as part of the team. Captain Bartolomé Barba was sent by Goded to the Canary Islands on 30 May to tell Franco to make his mind up and abandon ‘so much prudence’. Colonel Yagüe told Serrano Suñer that he was in despair at Franco’s mean-minded carefulness and his refusal to take risks.35 Serrano Suñer himself was baffled when Franco told him that what he really would have liked was to tranfer his residence to the south of France and direct the conspiracy from there. Given Mola’s position, there was no question of Franco organizing the rising. The clear implication was that he was more concerned with covering his personal retreat in the event of failure.36 This inevitably suggests that selfless commitment to the rising had not been his main reason for trying to stand for election in Cuenca.
The rationale for the conspiracy was the fear of the middle and upper classes that an inexorable wave of Godless, Communist-inspired violence was about to inundate society and the Church. Their panic was generated assiduously by the rightist press and by the widely reported parliamentary speeches of the insidious Gil Robles and the belligerent monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo. Their denunciations of disorder found a spurious justification in the street violence provoked by the Falange’s terror squads. In their turn, the activities of Falangist gangs were financed by the same monarchists who were behind the military coup. The startling rise of the Falange was a measure of the changing political climate. Cashing in on middle class disillusionment with the CEDA’s legalism, the Falange expanded rapidly. Moreover, attracted by its code of violence, the bulk of the CEDA’s youth movement, the JAP, went over en masse. The rise of the Falange was matched by the ascendancy within the Socialist movement of Largo Caballero. Intoxicated by Communist flattery – Pravda had called him “the Spanish Lenin” – he undermined Prieto’s efforts at a peaceful solution. Largo toured Spain, prophesying the triumph of the coming revolution to crowds of cheering workers. The May Day marches, the clenched fist salutes, the revolutionary rhetoric and the violent attacks on Prieto were used by the rightist press to generate an atmosphere of terror among the middle classes and to convince them that only a military coup could save Spain from chaos.
Certain factors made the conspirators’ task much easier than it might otherwise have been. The government failed to act decisively on the repeated warnings that it received of the plot. At the beginning of June, Casares Quiroga, as Minister of War, set out to decapitate the conspiracy in Morocco by removing the officers in charge of the two Legions into which the Tercio was now organized. On 2 June, he sent for Yagüe who was head of the so-called Segunda Legión. On the following day, he removed Yagüe’s fellow-conspirator Lieutenant-Colonel Heli Rolando de Tella from command of the Primera Legión. When Yagüe was received by the Minister on 12 June, Casares Quiroga offered him a transfer either to a desirable post on the Spanish mainland or to a plum position as a military attaché abroad. Yagüe told Casares that he would burn his uniform rather than not be able to serve with the Legion. After giving him forty-eight hours to reconsider, Casares weakly acquiesced in Yagüe’s vehemently expressed desire to return to Morocco. It was a major political error given Yagüe’s key role in the conspiracy.37 A comparable stroke of luck protected the overall director of the plot. The Director-General of Security, Alonso Mallol, pointed the finger at Mola. On 3 June, Mallol made an unannounced visit to Pamplona with a dozen police-filled trucks and undertook searches allegedly aimed at arms smuggling across the French frontier. Having been warned of the visit by Galarza who in turn had been informed by a rightist police superintendent, Santiago Martín Báguenas, Mola was able to ensure that no evidence of the conspiracy would be found.38
The ineffective efforts of the Republican authorities to root out the conspirators helps explain one of the mysteries of the period, a curious warning to Casares Quiroga from the pen of General Franco. He wrote to the Prime Minister on 23 June 1936 a letter of labyrinthine ambiguity, both insinuating that the Army was hostile to the Republic and suggesting that it would be loyal if treated properly. The letter focused on two issues. The first was the recently announced reintegration into the Army of the officers tried and sentenced to death in October 1934 for their part in the defence of the Generalitat. The rehabilitation of these officers went directly against one of Franco’s greatest obsessions, military discipline.39 The second cause of Franco’s outrage was that senior officers were being posted for political reasons. The removal of Heli Rolando de Tella from the Legion and the near loss of Yagüe must have been on his mind. He informed the Minister that these postings of brilliant officers and their replacement by second-rate sycophants were arbitrary, breached the rules of seniority and had caused immense distress within the ranks of the Army. No doubt he regarded his own transfer from the general staff to the Canary Islands as the most flagrant case.
He then wrote something which, although absolutely untrue, was probably written with sincerity. In Franco’s value system, the movement being organized by Mola, and about which he was fully informed, merely constituted legitimate defensive precautions by soldiers who had the right to protect their vision of the nation above and beyond particular political regimes. ‘Those who tell you that the Army is disloyal to the Republic are not telling you the truth. Those who make up plots in terms of their own dark passions are deceiving you. Those who disguise the anxiety, dignity and patriotism of the officer corps as symbols of conspiracy and disloyalty do a poor service to the Patria.’ The anxieties which he shared with his brother officers about the law and order problem led Franco to urge Casares to seek the advice ‘of those generals and officers who, free of political passions, live in contact with their subordinates and are concerned with their problems and morale’. He did not mention himself by name but the hint was unmistakeable.40
The letter was a masterpiece of ambiguity. The clear implication was that, if only Casares would put Franco in charge, the plots could be dismantled. At that stage, Franco would certainly have preferred to reimpose order, as he saw it, with the legal sanction of the government rather than