Franco. Paul Preston
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to fight in peninsular Spain.4
The readiness of Franco to use Moroccan troops in Spain had already been demonstrated in October 1934. The gruesome practices of the Legion and the Regulares were to be repeated with terrible efficacy during the bloodthirsty advance of the Army of Africa towards Madrid in 1936. At a conscious level, it was no doubt for him a simple military decision. The Legion and the Regulares were the most effective soldiers in the Spanish armed forces and it was natural that he would use them without agonizing over the moral implications. The central epic of Spanish history, deeply embedded in the national culture and especially so in right-wing culture, was the struggle against the Moors from 711 to 1492. In more recent times, the conquest of the Moroccan protectorate had cost tens of thousands of Spanish lives. Accordingly, the use of Moorish mercenaries against Spanish civilians was fraught with significance. It showed just how partial and partisan in class terms was the Nationalists’ interpretation of patriotism and their determination to win whatever the price in blood.
Franco believed that he was rebelling to save the Patria, or rather his version of it, from Communist infiltration, and any means to do so were licit. He did not view liberal and working class voters for the Popular Front as part of the Patria. In that sense, as the Asturian campaign of 1934 had suggested, Franco would regard the working class militiamen who were about to oppose his advance on Madrid in the same way as he had regarded the Moorish tribesmen whom it had been his job to pacify between 1912 and 1925. He would conduct the early stages of his war effort as if it were a colonial war against a racially contemptible enemy. The Moors would spread terror wherever they went, loot the villages they captured, rape the women they found, kill their prisoners and sexually mutilate the corpses.5 Franco knew that such would be the case and had written a book in which his approval of such methods was clear.6 If he had any qualms, they were no doubt dispelled by an awareness of the enormity of the task facing himself and his fellow rebels. Franco knew that, if they failed, they would be shot. In such a context, the Army of Africa was a priceless asset, a force of shock troops capable of absorbing losses without there being political repercussions.7 The use of terror, both immediate and as a long-term investment, was something which Franco understood instinctively. During, and long after the Civil War, those of his enemies not physically eliminated would be broken by fear, terrorised out of opposition and forced to seek survival in apathy.
Because of his cool resolve and his infectious optimism, the decision of Franco to join the rising and to take over the Spanish forces in Morocco was a considerable boost to the morale of the rebels everywhere. Described as ‘brother of the well-known airman’ and ‘a turncoat general’ by The Times, he was stripped of his rank by the Republic on 19 July.8 He was one of only four of the twenty-one Major-Generals on active service to declare against the government, the others being Goded, Queipo and Cabanellas.9 There were officers whose decision to join the rising was clinched by hearing about Franco.10 More than one rebel officer in mainland Spain reacted to the news with a spontaneous shout of ‘¡Franquito está con nosotros! ¡Hemos ganado!’ (Franco’s with us. We’ve won).11 They were wrong in the sense that the plotters, with the partial exception of Franco, who expected the struggle to last a couple of months, had not foreseen that the attempted coup would turn into a long civil war. Their plans had been for a rapid alzamiento, or rising, to be followed by a military directory like that established by Primo de Rivera in 1923, and they had not counted on the strength of working class resistance.
Nevertheless, the plotters were fortunate that their two most able generals, Franco and Mola, had been successful in the early hours of the coup. While Franco to the far south of Spanish territory could rely on the brutal military forces of the Moroccan protectorate, Mola, in the north enjoyed the almost uniformly committed support of the local civilian Carlists of Navarre. In Pamplona, the Carlist population had turned the coup into a popular festival, thronging the streets and shouting ¡Viva Cristo Rey! (long live Christ the King). These two successes permitted the implementation of the rebel plan of simultaneous marches on Madrid.
On 18 July, that broad strategy was still in the future. The rising had been successful only in the north and north-west of Spain, and in isolated pockets of the south. With a few exceptions, rebel triumphs followed the electoral geography of the Republic. In Galicia and the deeply Catholic rural regions of Old Castile and León, where the Right had enjoyed mass support, the coup met little opposition. The conservative ecclesiastical market towns – Burgos, Salamanca, Zamora, Segovia and Avila, fell almost without struggle. In contrast, in Valladolid, after Generals Andrés Saliquet and Miguel Ponte had arrested the head of the VII Military Region, General Nicolás Molero, it took their men, aided by local Falangist militia, nearly twenty-four hours to crush the Socialist railway workers of Valladolid.12 Elsewhere, in most of the Andalusian countryside, where the landless labourers formed the mass of the population, the left took power. In the southern cities, it was a different story. A general strike in Cádiz seemed to have won the town for the workers but after the arrival of reinforcements from Morocco, the rebels under Generals José López Pinto and José Enrique Varela, gained control. Córdoba, Huelva, Seville and Granada all fell after the savage liquidation of working class resistance. Seville, the Andalusian capital and the most revolutionary southern city, fell to the lanky eccentric Queipo de Llano and a handful of fellow-conspirators who seized the divisional military headquarters by bluff and bravado. Related to Alcalá Zamora by marriage, Queipo had been considered a republican until the demise of the President inspired a seething hatred of the regime. Perhaps in expiation of his republican past, he would soon be notorious for the implacable ferocity first demonstrated by the bloody repression of working class districts during his take-over of Seville.13
In most major urban and industrial centres – Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao – the popular forces by-passed the dithering Republican government and seized power, defeating the military rebels in the process. In Madrid, the general in charge of the rising, Rafael Villegas, was in hiding and sent his second-in-command, General Fanjul, to take command of the one post they held, the Montaña barracks. Besieged by local working class forces, Fanjul was captured and subsequently tried and executed.14 After defeating the rebels at the Montaña barracks, left-wing militiamen from the capital headed south to reverse the success of the rising in Toledo. With loyal regular troops, they captured the town. However, the rebels under Colonel José Moscardó, the town’s military commander, retreated into the Alcázar, the impregnable fortress which dominates both Toledo and the river Tagus which curls around it on the southern, eastern and western sides.
The defeat of the rising in Barcelona deprived the conspirators of one of their most able generals, Manuel Goded, a potential rival to Franco both militarily and politically. In Barcelona, Companys refused to issue arms but depots were seized by the CNT. In the early hours of 19 July, rebel troops began to march on the city centre. They were met by anarchists and the local Civil Guard which, decisively, had stayed loyal. The CNT stormed the Atarazanas barracks, where the rebels had set up headquarters. When Goded arrived by seaplane from the Balearic Islands to join them, the rising was already defeated. Captured, he was forced to broadcast an appeal to his followers to lay down their arms. The defeat of the rebellion in Barcelona was vital for the government, since it ensured that all of Catalonia would remain loyal.15
In the Basque Country, divided between its Catholic peasantry and its urban Socialists, the Republic’s support for local national regionalist aspirations tipped the balance against the rebels. As Franco had foreseen, the role of the Civil Guard and the Assault Guards was to be crucial. Where the two police forces remained loyal to the government, as they did