Franco. Paul Preston
Читать онлайн книгу.
them agrarian reform’. After the capture of Almendralejo, one thousand prisoners were shot including one hundred women. Mérida fell on 10 August. In a little over a week, Franco’s forces had advanced 200 kilometres. Shortly afterwards, initial contact was made with the forces of General Mola.88 Thus, the two halves of rebel Spain were joined into what came to be called the Nationalist zone.
The terror which surrounded the advance of the Moors and the Legionaries was one of the Nationalists’ greatest weapons in the drive on Madrid. After each town or village was taken by the African columns, there would be a massacre of prisoners and women would be raped.89 The accumulated terror generated after each minor victory, together with the skill of the African Army in open scrub, explains why Franco’s troops were initially so much more successful than those of Mola. The scratch Republican militia would fight desperately as long as they enjoyed the cover of buildings or trees. However, they were not trained in elementary ground movements nor even in the care and reloading of their weapons. Thus, even the rumoured threat of being outflanked by the Moors would send them fleeing, abandoning their equipment as they ran.90 Franco was fully aware of the Nationalists’ superiority over untrained and poorly armed militias and he and his Chief of Staff, Colonel Francisco Martín Moreno, planned their operations accordingly. Intimidation and the use of terror, euphemistically described as castigo (punishment), were specified in written orders.91
Given the iron discipline with which Franco ran military operations, there is little possibility that the use of terror was merely a spontaneous or inadvertent side effect. There was little that was spontaneous in Franco’s way of running a war. On being informed of the bravery of a group of Falangist militiamen in capturing some Republican fortifications, Franco ordered them to be shot if they ever again contravened the day’s orders, ‘even though I have to go and place the highest decorations on their coffins’.92 In late August, Franco boasted to a German emissary of the measures taken by his men ‘to suppress any Communist movement’.93 The massacres were useful from several points of view. They indulged the blood-lust of the African columns, eliminated large numbers of potential opponents – anarchists, Socialists and Communists whom Franco despised as rabble – and, above all, they generated a paralysing terror.
He wrote Mola on 11 August an extraordinarily significant letter, revealing his expectations of a quick end to the war, his strategic vision and the colonial mentality behind his views on the conquest of territory. He agreed that the priority should be the occupation of Madrid but stressed the need to annihilate all resistance in the ‘occupied zones’, especially in Andalusia. Franco mistakenly assumed that the early capture of Madrid would precede attacks on the Levante, Aragón, the north and Catalonia. He suggested that Madrid be squeezed into submission by ‘tightening a circle, depriving it of water supplies and aerodromes, cutting off communications’. Crucially, in the light of his later remarkable diversion of troops away from Madrid, he ended with the words: ‘I did not know that [the Alcázar of] Toledo was still being defended. The advance of our troops will take the pressure off and relieve Toledo without diverting forces which might be needed’.94
At the time that Franco’s letter was being written, Mola was complaining about the difficulties of liaison.95 Telephone contact between Seville and Burgos was established immediately after the capture of Mérida. The two generals spoke on 11 August. Apparently oblivious to any eventual political implications, Mola agreed with Franco that there was no point duplicating his successful international contacts and therefore ceded to him the control of supplies. Mola’s political allies were appalled at his naïvety. José Ignacio Escobar asked him if he had therefore agreed on the telephone that the head of the movement be Franco. Mola replied guilelessly, ‘It is an issue which will be resolved when the time comes. Between Franco and I there are neither conflicts nor personal ambitions. We see entirely eye-to-eye and to leave in his hands this business of the procurement of arms abroad is just a way of avoiding a harmful duplication of effort.’ When Escobar insisted that this made Mola the second-in-command as far as the Germans were concerned, he brushed aside his remarks. The control of arms supplies guaranteed that Franco and not Mola, with all the attendant political implications, would dominate the assault on the capital.96
After the occupation of Mérida, Yagüe’s troops turned back south-west towards Portugal to capture Badajoz, the principal town of Extremadura, on the banks of the River Guadiana near the Portuguese frontier. Although encircled, the walled city was still in the hands of numerous but ill-armed left-wing militiamen who had flocked there before the advancing Nationalist columns. Many were armed only with scythes and hunting shotguns. Most of the regular troops garrisoned there had been called away to reinforce the Madrid front.97 If Yagüe had pressed on to Madrid, the Badajoz garrison could not seriously have threatened his column from the rear. It has been suggested that Franco’s decision to turn back to Badajoz was a strategic error, contributing to the delay which allowed the government to organize its defences. Accordingly, Nationalist historians have blamed Yagüe but the decision smacks of Franco’s caution rather than Yagüe’s frenetic impetuousness. Franco made all the major daily decisions merely leaving their implementation to Yagüe. He had personally supervised the operation against Mérida and, on the evening of 10 August, received Yagüe in his headquarters to discuss the capture of Badajoz and the next objectives.98 He wanted to knock out Badajoz to clinch the unification of the two sections of the Nationalist zone and to cover completely the left flank of the advancing columns.
On 14 August, after heavy artillery and bombing attacks, the walls of Badajoz were breached by suicidal attacks from Yagüe’s Legionarios. Then a savage and indiscriminate slaughter began during which nearly two thousand people were shot, including many innocent civilians who were not political militants. According to Yagüe’s biographer, in ‘the paroxysm of war’, it was impossible to distinguish pacific citizens from leftist militiamen, the implication being that it was perfectly acceptable to shoot prisoners.99 The Legionarios and Regulares unleashed an orgy of looting and the carnage left streets strewn with corpses, a scene of what one eyewitness called ‘desolation and dread’. After the heat of battle had cooled, two thousand prisoners were rounded up and herded to the bull-ring, and any with the bruise of a rifle recoil on their shoulders were shot. The shootings went on for weeks thereafter. Yagüe told the American journalist John T. Whitaker, who accompanied him for most of the march on Madrid, ‘Of course, we shot them. What do you expect? Was I supposed to take four thousand Reds with me as my column advanced racing against time? Was I expected to turn them loose in my rear and let them make Badajoz Red again?’.100 In fact, the savagery unleashed on Badajoz reflected both the traditions of the Spanish Moroccan Army and the outrage of the African columns at encountering a solid resistance and, for the first time, suffering serious casualties. In retrospect, it can be seen that the events of Badajoz might have been taken to anticipate what would happen when the columns reached Madrid. The clear lesson was that the easy victories of the Legionarios and Regulares in open country were not replicated in built-up cities. This was not widely perceived in the Nationalist camp but the stiffening of Republican resistance does seem to have dented Franco’s earlier optimism.
The distant cloud of potential difficulties at Madrid could hardly dim Franco’s appreciation of the benefits won at Badajoz. Now, crucially, there was unrestricted access to the frontier of Portugal, the Nationalists’ first international ally. From the beginning, Oliveira Salazar had permitted the rebels to use Portuguese territory to link their northern and southern territories.101