Franco. Paul Preston
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The prospect of the British imposing an effective blockade galvanized him into giving serious consideration to the three strategic proposals made by the Italians. In effusively thanking Mussolini for his assistance, Franco told Anfuso that he would now accelerate the end of the war by undertaking a great decisive action. On 26 January, he accepted Roatta’s suggestion that, henceforth, the regular high-level advice of Faupel and Roatta on major strategic issues would be implemented by Franco’s own staff, in which were to be included ten senior German and Italian officers.84 Mussolini considered that he could send instructions to Franco as to a subordinate.85
Sensitive to any slur or slight, Franco cannot fail to have resented the clear insinuation of German and Italian disdain for his military prowess. Nevertheless, he showed no sign of it and accepted, along with the imposition of foreign staff officers, Mussolini’s strategic suggestions. According to Kindelán, anxious to play down Franco’s deference to the Duce, the Generalísimo was unsure of the military value of the new arrivals, despite the fact that they were well-equipped by comparison with his own troops and many had had experience in the Abyssinian war. He thus decided to test them in a relatively easy campaign in the south.86
It is indeed the case that, to offset the failure in Madrid, the Generalísimo had already accepted a proposal from Queipo for a piecemeal advance towards Málaga. A sporadic campaign to mop up the rest of Andalusia, as savage and bloodthirsty as the march on Madrid, had been intensified in mid-December with considerable success.87 However, after the arrival of Italian troops, the nature of the campaign changed dramatically. Rather than Franco skilfully blooding them in a campaign of his choice, they were engaged in an operation chosen by Mussolini. As the Black Shirts were setting out, Mussolini had reminded Roatta on 18 December 1936 of his own long-held conviction that a major attack should be launched against Málaga. Roatta immediately informed Franco of the Duce’s preference and found him grudgingly amenable (sufficientemente propenso) to it. Thereafter, the Duce followed the progress of the attack with an enthusiasm commensurate with it having been his own brainchild.88
Franco wanted to incorporate the newly arrived Italians into mixed units on the Madrid front but had to acquiesce in Mussolini’s desire to see them operate autonomously in Andalusia.89 In the light of the thin and scattered defences of Málaga, Roatta wanted a guerra celere (rapid strike) attack by his own motorised columns whereas Franco favoured Queipo’s original proposal for a gradual but thorough conquest of Republican territory. Franco was not much interested in a lightning victory for which Mussolini could take the credit and which might end the war before his leadership was consolidated. On 27 December, Roatta effectively overruled the Generalísimo’s preference for a slow advance backed up by political purges. They reached a compromise in which both types of assault would take place simultaneously. Franco had to bite his tongue when his request for two Italian motorised companies for the Madrid front was rejected by Roatta on the grounds of his own greater needs in preparing the attack on Málaga. On 9 January 1937, an optimistic Roatta and a sceptical Queipo agreed a division of responsibilities which reflected Franco’s concessions.90 Under the direction of Queipo de Llano who was installed on the battlecruiser Canarias, and of Roatta on land, two columns began to advance in mid-January. By the end of the month after the capture of Alhama on the Málaga-Granada road, they were ready for the final push.
Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, Chief of Staff of the Condor Legion, wrote in his diary on 3 February ‘nothing is known about the Italians, their whereabouts and their intentions. Franco knows nothing either. He really ought to go to Seville to put himself in the picture and hope for a share of the Málaga victory laurels.’91 To make good his ignorance and to give the impression of overall control of events, Franco was already travelling from Salamanca to Seville on 3 February, the same day on which, in torrential rain, the Italo-Spanish forces moved on Málaga. The advance took the form of troops distributed in a large concentric circle, the Spanish units moving eastwards from Marbella and the Italian motorized columns racing south west from Alhama without concern for their flanks.92 The Generalísimo visited the front and on 5 February at Antequera discussed the progress of the campaign with Queipo and Roatta. Convinced that the operation was going to be succesful, he did not wait for the fall of Málaga but returned to Seville on 6 February and to Salamanca on the following day to oversee a new push on the Madrid front.93
On 7 February, after a rapid march, Nationalists and Italians reached Málaga. Its military command had been changed with alarming frequency in the preceding days, morale was abysmally low, and after bombing raids by Italian aircraft and bombardment by Nationalist warships, the city collapsed easily. Italian troops were first to enter Málaga and briefly ruled the city before ostentatiously handing it over to the Spaniards. Roatta claimed the victory for Mussolini and sent a triumphant, and implicitly wounding, telegram to Franco: ‘Troops under my command have the honour to hand over the city of Málaga to Your Excellency’.94 In fact, given the massive numerical and logistical superiority of the attackers, the triumph was less of an achievement than it seemed at the time. Neglected by the Valencia government, the defending forces were in more or less the same state of readiness as the improvised militiamen who had faced Franco’s Army of Africa six months earlier.95 Neither the Nationalists nor the Italians showed much mercy. The international outcry was less than that provoked by the massacre of Badajoz, because Franco had ordered all war correspondents to be kept out of Málaga.96 After the battle, Queipo and Roatta sent a motorised column to pursue refugees escaping along the coast road. Within the city itself nearly four thousand Republicans were shot in the first week alone and the killings continued on a large scale for months. The refugees who blocked the road out of Málaga were shelled from the sea and bombed and machine-gunned from the air.97
When Roatta’s news of the victory at Málaga reached Salamanca, Franco unsurprisingly showed little interest. His humiliating subordination to Mussolini had been starkly underlined. Millán Astray, who came to congratulate the Generalísimo and found him absorbed gazing at a huge wall map, exclaimed: ‘I expected to find you celebrating the victory in Málaga not here on your own looking at a map.’ Franco diminished the Italian achievement by pointing at the map and saying ‘Just look what remains to be conquered! I can’t afford the luxury of taking time off.’98 This gloomy and contrived effect of unceasing military dedication was out of tune with Franco’s normally irrepressible faith in victory. He was certainly preoccupied by the progress of the battle in the Jarama valley which he had launched just as Málaga was about to fall but he could hardly have been immune to the fact that the loss of Málaga was a fierce blow to the Republic in terms of captured territory, prisoners and weaponry. He had gained the food-producing province of Málaga and most of Granada, deprived his enemies of a strategically crucial sea port with a population of one hundred and fifty thousand people and shortened the southern front. The feigned lack of interest revealed his resentment of the disdainful Roatta and the fact that he could take no pleasure in a triumph attributed by the world’s press to Mussolini.99
The fall of Málaga provoked a major internecine crisis within the Republic. The Communists began to reveal their impatience with Largo Caballero and obliged him to accept the resignation of General Asensio, his under-secretary of war.100 Ironically, the one negative consequence for Franco of such an easy victory was the totally erroneous notion that both he and Mussolini