Franco. Paul Preston
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the stronghold of the CNT, where they did not, the decisive united action of the police and the military garrison had taken over the city before the anarcho-syndicalist masses could react. In Oviedo, the audacious military commander, Colonel Antonio Aranda, seized power by trickery and bravery. He persuaded both Madrid and the local Asturian left-wing forces that he was true to the Republic. Several thousand miners confidently left the city to assist in the defence of Madrid only for many of them to be massacred in a Civil Guard ambush in Ponferrada. Aranda, after speaking with Mola on the telephone, declared for the rebels. By the following day, Oviedo was under siege from enraged miners.16 The insurgent triumphs in Oviedo, Zaragoza and the provincial capitals of Andalusia had faced sufficient popular hostility to suggest that a full-scale war of conquest would have to be fought before the rebels would control of all of Spain.
After three days, the conspirators held about one third of Spain in a huge block including Galicia, León, Old Castile, Aragón and part of Extremadura, together with isolated enclaves like Oviedo, Seville and Córdoba. Galicia was crucial for its ports, agricultural products and as a base for attacks on Asturias. The rebels also had the great wheat-growing areas, but the main centres of both heavy and light industry in Spain remained in Republican hands. They faced the legitimate government and much of the Army, although its loyalty was sufficiently questionable for the Republican authorities to make less than full use of it. The government was unstable and indecisive. Indeed, the rebels received a promising indication of the real balance of power when Casares Quiroga resigned to be replaced briefly by a cabinet bent on some form of compromise with the rebels. When Casares withdrew, President Azaña held consultations with the moderate Republican, Diego Martínez Barrio, with the Socialists Largo Caballero and Prieto and with his friend, the conservative Republican, Felipe Sánchez Román. As the basis of a compromise, Sánchez Román suggested a package of measures including the prohibition of strikes and a total crack-down on left-wing militias. The outcome was a cabinet of the centre under Martínez Barrio. Convinced that this was a cabinet ready to capitulate to military demands, the rebels were in no mood for compromise.17
It was now too late. Neither Mola nor the Republican forces to the left of Martínez Barrio were prepared to accept any deal. When Martínez Barrio made his fateful telephone call to Mola at 2 a.m. on 19 July, the conversation was polite but sterile. Offered a post in the government, Mola refused on the grounds that it was too late and an accommodation would mean the betrayal of the rank-and-file of both sides.18 On the following day, Martínez Barrio was replaced by José Giral, a follower of Azaña. After his Minister of War, General José Miaja, also tried unsuccessfully to negotiate Mola’s surrender, Giral quickly grasped the nature of the situation and took the crucial step of authorizing the arming of the workers. Thereafter, the defence of the Republic fell to the left-wing militias. In consequence, the revolution which Franco believed himself to have been forestalling was itself precipitated by the military rebellion. In taking up arms to fight the rebels, the Left picked up the power abandoned by the bourgeois political establishment which had crumbled. The middle class Republican Left, the moderate Socialists and the Communist Party then combined to play down the revolution and restore power to the bourgeois Republic. By May 1937, they would be successful, suffocating the revolutionary élan of the working class along the way.
In the interim, a beleagured state, under attack from part of its Army and unable to trust most of those who declared themselves loyal, with its judiciary and police force at best divided, saw much day-to-day power pass to ad hoc revolutionary bodies. Under such circumstances, the Republican authorities were unable, in the early weeks and months, to prevent extremist elements committing atrocities against rightists in the Republican zone. This gave a retrospective justification for a military rising which had no prior agreed objectives. The fact that it would be the Communists who eventually took the lead in the restoration of order and the crushing of the revolution was simply ignored by officers like Franco who believed that they had risen to defeat the Communist menace. That generalised objective was the nearest that the conspirators had to a political plan. Franco’s own bizarre declaration in the Canary Islands before setting off for Africa ended ‘Fraternity, Liberty and Equality’. Many of the declarations by other officers ended with the cry ‘¡Viva la República!’. At most, they knew that they planned to set up a military dictatorship, in the specific form of a military directory.19
Equally vague were the military prognostications. There were those, like General Orgaz, who believed that the rising would have achieved its objectives within a matter of hours or at most days.20 Mola, realizing the crucial importance of Madrid, and anticipating a possible failure in the capital, expected that a dual advance from Navarre and the south would be necessary and therefore require a short civil war lasting two or three weeks. The reverses of the first few days sowed doubts in the minds of the early optimists. Almost alone among the conspirators, Franco, with his obsessions about the importance of the Civil Guard, had taken a more realistic view. Not even he had anticipated a war which would have gone on much beyond mid-September. However, he took the disappointments of the first few days phlegmatically, resourcefully seeking new solutions and insisting to all around him that they must have ‘blind faith’ in victory. There can be little doubt that his ‘blind faith’ was sincere. It reflected both his temperament and his long-held conviction that superior morale won battles, something learned in Africa. From his first days with the Legion, he retained the belief that morale had to be backed up by iron discipline. The categorical optimism of his first radio broadcasts in Tetuán was complemented with dire warnings about what would happen to those who opposed the rebels. On 21 July, he promised that the disorders (‘hechos vandálicos’) of the Popular Front would receive ‘exemplary punishment’. On 22 July, he said ‘for those who persist in opposing us or hope to surrender at the last minute, there will be no pardon’.21
Unaware as yet of the fate of the rising on the mainland, Franco had set up headquarters in the officers of the Spanish High Commission in Tetuán. One of the first issues with which he had to deal provided an opportunity to demonstrate precisely the kind of iron discipline from which he believed the will to win would grow. On arrival at Tetuán, he was informed that his first cousin Major Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde had been arrested and was about to undergo a summary court martial for having tried to hold the Sania Ramel airport of Tetuán for the Republic and then, when that was no longer possible, disabling the aircraft there. According to Franco’s niece, he and Ricardo de la Puente were more like brothers than cousins. As adults, their ideological differences became acute. Franco had had him removed from his post during the Asturian rising. In one of their many arguments, Franco once exclaimed ‘one day I’m going to have you shot’. De la Puente was now condemned to death and Franco did nothing to save him. Franco believed that a pardon would have been taken as a sign of weakness, something he was not prepared to risk. Rather than have to decide between approving the death sentence or ordering a pardon, he briefly handed over command to Orgaz and left the final decision to him.22
While Franco consolidated his hold on Morocco, things were not going well for the Nationalists on the other side of the Straits. The losses of Fanjul in Madrid and Goded in Barcelona were substantial blows.23 Now, as Mola and other successful conspirators awaited Sanjurjo’s arrival from his Portuguese exile to lead a triumphal march on Madrid, at dawn on 21 July, they received more bad news.24 Sanjurjo had been killed in bizarre circumstances. On 19 July, Mola’s envoy, Juan Antonio Ansaldo, the monarchist air-ace and playboy who had once organized Falangist terror squads, had arrived in Estoril at the summer house where General Sanjurjo was staying.25 His tiny Puss Moth bi-plane seemed an odd choice for the mission the more so as the far more suitable Dragon Rapide used by Franco had just landed in Lisbon almost certainly with a view to picking up Sanjurjo. The journey could also have been