Franco. Paul Preston
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real purpose. On 8 July, Bolín went to Midhurst in Sussex to speak to Hugh Pollard, a retired army officer and adventurer, and make the arrangements. Pollard, his nineteen year-old daughter Diana and her friend Dorothy Watson would travel as tourists to provide Bolín with a cover for his flight. Leaving Croydon in the early hours of the morning of 11 July, the plane was piloted by Captain William Henry Bebb, ex-RAF. Despite poor weather, it reached Bordeaux at 10.30 a.m. where Luca de Tena and other monarchist plotters awaited Bolín with last-minute instructions. They arrived in Casablanca, via Espinho in Northern Portugal and Lisbon, on the following day, 12 July.51
Although the date for his journey to Morocco was now imminent, Franco was having ever more serious doubts, obsessed as usual with the experience of 10 August 1932. On 8 July, Alfredo Kindelán managed to speak briefly with Franco by telephone and was appalled to learn that he was still not ready to join. Mola was informed two days later.52 On the same day that the Dragon Rapide reached Casablanca, 12 July, Franco sent a coded message to Kindelán in Madrid for onward transmission to Mola. It read ‘geografía poco extensa’ and meant that he was refusing to join in the rising on the grounds that he thought that the circumstances were insufficiently favourable. Kindelán received the message on 13 July. On the following day, he sent it on to Mola in Pamplona in the hands of a beautiful socialite, Elena Medina Garvey, who acted as messenger for the conspirators. Mola flew into a rage, furiously hurling the paper to the ground. When he had cooled down, he ordered that the pilot Juan Antonio Ansaldo be found and instructed to take Sanjurjo to Morocco to do the job expected of Franco. The conspirators in Madrid were informed by Mola that Franco was not to be counted on. However, two days later, a further message arrived to say that Franco was with them again.53
The reason for Franco’s sudden change of mind were dramatic events in Madrid. On the afternoon of 12 July, Falangist gunmen had shot and killed a leftist officer of the Republican Assault Guards, Lieutenant José del Castillo. Castillo was number two on a black list of pro-Republican officers allegedly drawn up by the ultra-rightist Unión Militar Española, an association of conspiratorial officers linked to Renovación Española. The first man on the black list, Captain Carlos Faraudo, had already been murdered. Enraged comrades of Castillo responded with an irresponsible reprisal. In the early hours of the following day, they set out to avenge his death by murdering a prominent Right-wing politician. Failing to find Gil Robles who was holidaying in Biarritz, they kidnapped and shot Calvo Sotelo. On the evening of the 13th, Indalecio Prieto led a delegation of Socialists and Communists to demand that Casares distribute arms to the workers before the military rose. The Prime Minister refused, but he could hardly ignore the fact that there was now virtually open war.
The political outrage which followed the discovery of Calvo Sotelo’s body played neatly into the hands of the military plotters. They cited the murder as graphic proof that Spain needed military intervention to save her from disaster. It clinched the commitment of many ditherers, including Franco. When he received the news in the late morning of 13 July, he exclaimed to its bearer, Colonel González Peral, ‘The Patria has another martyr. We can wait no longer. This is the signal!’.54 Fuming with indignation, he told his cousin that further delay was out of the question since he had lost all hope of the government controlling the situation. Shortly afterwards, Franco sent a telegram to Mola. Later in the afternoon, he also ordered Pacón to buy two tickets for his wife and daughter on the German ship Waldi which was due to leave Las Palmas on 19 July bound for Le Havre and Hamburg.55 His foresight did not extend to warning other members of his family. His sister-in-law Zita Polo underwent enormous dangers in escaping from Madrid with her children. Pilar Jaraiz, his niece, was imprisoned with her new-born son.56
Franco’s English teacher wrote later that ‘the morning after the news of Calvo Sotelo’s murder had reached us, I had found him a changed man, when he came for his lessons. He looked ten years older, and had obviously not slept all night. For the first time, he came near to something like losing his iron self-control and unalterable serenity … It was with visible effort that he attended to his lesson.’57 The heady decisiveness with which Franco responded to the news is not incompatible with Dora Lennard’s comment on his sleepless night.* The decision was of sufficient enormity to provoke agonizing doubts, as his precautions for the safety of his wife and daughter demonstrated.
Later, the assassination of Calvo Sotelo was used to obscure the fact that the coup of 17–18 July had been long in the making. It also deprived the conspirators of a powerful and charismatic leader. As a cosmopolitan rightist of wide political experience, Calvo Sotelo would have been the senior civilian after the coup and unlike many of the ciphers that were to be used by Franco. It is difficult not to imagine that he would have imposed his personality on the post-war state. His death, even if no one could have judged it in such terms at the time, removed an important political rival to Franco.
In the short term, Calvo Sotelo’s assassination gave a new urgency to plans for the uprising. The Dragón Rapide had left Bolín in Casablanca and was still en route for the Canary Islands. It arrived at 14.40 on 14 July at the airport of Gando near Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria. Hugh Pollard and the two girls took a ferry to Tenerife where he was to make known his arrival by presenting himself at the Clínica Costa with the password ‘Galicia saluda a Francia’. Bebb was left with the aircraft on Gran Canaria to await instructions from an unknown emissary who would make himself known with the password ‘Mutt and Jeff’. Meanwhile, at 2 a.m. on the morning of 15 July, the sleek diplomat José Antonio Sangróniz appeared at Pacón’s hotel room in Santa Cruz de Tenerife with news of the latest developments and the date scheduled for the rising. At 7.30 a.m. on the same morning, Pollard went to the clinic where he contacted Doctor Luis Gabarda, a major of the military medical service, who was acting on behalf of Franco. He was told to return to his hotel and await an emissary from Franco with his instructions.58
Franco had acute immediate problems which took precedence over any long-term ambitions. As military commander of the Canary Islands, his headquarters were in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The Dragon Rapide from Croydon had been instructed to land at the airport of Gando on Gran Canaria in part because it was nearer to mainland Africa, also because it was known that Franco was being watched by the police but, above all, because of the low cloud and thick fog which afflicts Tenerife. In order to travel from Santa Cruz to Gran Canaria, Franco needed the authorization of the Ministry of War. His request for permission to make an inspection tour of Gran Canaria was likely to be turned down, not least because it was barely a fortnight since his last one. The rising was scheduled to start on 18 July, so Franco would have to leave for Morocco on that day at the latest. In the event he did so, yet none of his biographers seem to regard it as odd that the Dragon Rapide should have been directed to Gran Canaria with confidence in Franco’s ability to get there too. That he got there at all was the result of either a remarkable coincidence or foul play.
On the morning of 16 July, Franco failed to appear for his scheduled English lesson.59 On the same morning, General Amado Balmes, military commander in Gran Canaria, and an excellent marksman, was shot in the stomach while trying out various pistols in a shooting range. Francoist historiography has played down the incident as a tragic, but fortunately timed, accident. Allegedly, a pistol blocked and in trying to free it, holding it against his stomach, it went off.60 To counter suggestions that Balmes was assassinated, Franco’s official biographers have claimed that Balmes was himself an important figure in the plot. His cousin has portrayed Balmes as an intimate friend of Franco. Balmes was allegedly to organize the coup in Las Palmas and thus had to be replaced by Orgaz who was conveniently exiled there.61