Franco. Paul Preston
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the seeds of a rift between Franco and his kingmaker, Alfredo Kindelán. On 26 November, Kindelán wrote the Generalísimo a fierce protest against his high-handed action. Couched in formally respectful terms, it accepted Franco’s right to command as he felt best but spoke of the ‘personal mortification’ felt by Kindelán at not even having been consulted and of the ill feeling which had been provoked among Nationalist airmen whose reaction ranged ‘from those who accept that he be allowed to work in aeronautical matters outside Spain to those who demand that he be shot’.96 Franco simply ignored the letter and took his revenge against Kindelán by dropping him at the end of the war. Franco had taken to the prerogatives of his power with the skill and arbitrariness of a Borgia: they were attributes he was to need and to use to the full in the months ahead.
* Before the myth-makers began to work, ABC, Seville, 3 October 1936 claimed that ‘communications with the outside were totally cut throughout the siege’.
* At some point on either 20 or 21 September, Yagüe and Mola met to discuss the co-ordination of operations between their forces which had recently made contact over a long front. Their disagreements became increasingly heated. Mola told Yagüe that his behaviour constituted mutiny for which he could have him shot. Turning to his column commanders, Asensio, Castejón and Tella, Yagüe said ‘We don’t think so’ (¡Verdad que no!) at which Mola was forced to make a joke of his original remark and back down. (Letter to the author from General Ramón Salas Larrazabal, 9 May 1991, recounting the testimony of one of the column chiefs present at the meeting, probably Asensio Cabanillas.)
* The myth propagated by Franco’s hagiographers (Luis Galinsoga & Francisco Franco-Salgado, Centinela de occidente (Barcelona, 1956) p. 21) that he did not attend the meeting has no basis other than a determination to give the impression that the Generalísimo had power thrust upon him. Brian Crozier, Franco: A Biographical History (London, 1967) p. 212, mistakenly places the meeting on 29 September and so assumes Franco’s absence on the grounds that, on that day, he was in Toledo congratulating Moscardó.
* What Queipo called Franco is deemed by Cabanellas to be ‘unprintable’ and so ‘swine’ is merely a guess.
* It had a Secretaría General del Jefe del Estado, a Secretaría General of Foreign Relations and a Gobierno General. There were also seven ministerial departments or ‘commissions’, Finance; Justice; Industry, Commerce and Supply; Agriculture; Labour, Culture and Education; Public Works and Communications.
† Gil Robles told the author in Madrid in 1970 of his belief that Franco could not tolerate having around anyone who had been his superior.
* The seed had been first planted in Franco’s mind in the late 1920s. At that period, he spent time at a small Asturian estate owned by his wife known as La Piniella, situated near San Cucao de Llanera, thirteen kilometres from Oviedo. A particularly sycophantic local priest who fancied himself as the chaplain to the house was constantly telling both Doña Carmen and Franco himself that he would repeat the epic achievements of El Cid and the great medieval Caudillo Kings of Asturias. Franco’s wife had often reminded him of the priest’s comments.
* It was said that religious ceremonial bored Franco almost more than anything else and, in power, he suffered agonies when he had to receive religious delegations, commenting ‘we’re doing saints today’ (‘boy estamos de santos’).
* Several prominent Nationalists crossed the lines in these ways. The exchanges (canjes) included important Falangists like Raimundo Fernández Cuesta who was officially exchanged for a minor Republican figure, Justino de Azcárate, and Miguel Primo de Rivera who was exchanged for the son of General Miaja. Among the more significant escapees was Ramón Serrano Suñer.
VIII
FRANCO AND THE SIEGE OF MADRID
October 1936–February 1937
IRONICALLY, Franco had hoped, by the day on which the disagreeable incident between Millán and Unamuno had taken place, to have been celebrating the capture of Madrid. There had been a significant slowing down of the rhythm of operations during the two weeks in which he was otherwise occupied clinching his elevation to power. The war could not be delayed indefinitely and, on 6 October, Franco announced to journalists that his offensive against the capital was about to begin. Under the overall direction of Mola, the Nationalist forces began a co-ordinated push against Madrid on the following day. An extremely tired Army of Africa resumed its northward march under the command of General Varela, assisted by Colonel Yagüe as his second-in-command.1 The ten thousand-strong force was organized in five columns under Asensio, Barrón, Castejón, Colonel Francisco Delgado Serrano and Tella. Supplies of arms had been collected and they were augmented by the arrival of substantial quantities of Italian artillery and light tanks. Italian instructors quickly trained Spaniards in their use and, on 18 October, Franco, accompanied by the Italian military mission, was able to inspect the first Italo-Spanish motorised armoured units.2
After frequent consultations with Franco, Mola developed a two-part final strategy to take Madrid which was already surrounded on the west from due north to due south. The idea was first for the Nationalist forces to march on Madrid, simultaneously reducing the length of the front and tightening their grip on the capital, and then for Varela’s Army of Africa to make a frontal assault through the northern suburbs. The push which began on 7 October saw an advance from Navalperal in the north, near El Escorial, Cebreros to the west and Toledo in the south. The forward defences of the city were demoralised by Nationalist bombing and then brushed aside by motorised columns armed with fast Italian whippet tanks. Desperate counter-attacks from the capital were easily repelled, thereby intensifying the optimism of the attacking forces.3
However, a different kind of war was about to begin. From 18 July until 7 October, the brunt of the Nationalist effort had been borne by the Army of Africa, on a forced march, frontally attacking towns and villages and opposed only by untrained amateur militiamen. It was little different from the kind of colonial war in which Franco and the other Africanistas had received their early military experiences. In this type of warfare, the advantage was entirely with the Legion and the Regulares. Henceforth, there was to be a move towards a war of fronts. Paradoxically, as the Germans, Italians and Russians poured in material assistance in the form of the latest weaponry, in part at least by way of experiment for the next war, Franco would remain fixed in the strategic world of the Great War.
More than with the attack on Madrid, the Generalísimo was occupied with the operation to break the siege of Oviedo and the city’s liberation on 17 October gave him enormous pleasure. He seems to have taken less direct interest in the campaign for Madrid. It was not until 20 October, considerably after the diversion of the Army of Africa to Toledo, that he seemed to wake up to the extent to which the capital was being strengthened and issued the order to ‘concentrate maximum attention and available combat forces on the fronts around Madrid’.4 Indeed, his absence from the operations to take Madrid, and from the subsequent Nationalist chronicles thereof, was quite