The Spanish Civil War (77 page)

The 14th and 15th Republican Army Corps were the nucleus of the defence of Santander. Generals Llano de la Encomienda and Martínez Cabrera had been sent back discredited to the central zone, and Gen
eral Gámir was now the supreme republican commander, while his two army corps were led by Colonels Prada and García Vayas. This force was supported by some 50 batteries, 33 fighters and bombers, and 11 reconnaissance aircraft. The republican army numbered 80,000. The bare figures give an inaccurate idea of the disproportion of the forces. Except for 18 Russian fighters, Gámir’s aircraft were slow and old. The nationalists’ air support included the latest German models, which were being used to test their efficiency. The same was true of their artillery. Relations between Santander and Asturias were no better than they had been when the Basques had been fighting alongside in Guipúzcoa, though the remains of the old Basque army were present alongside the Santanderinos. They were in bad fettle and morale had not been improved by rumours, firmly based, that they might surrender to the Italians, in return for their lives.
¹

The campaign began on 14 August. The battle lines lay across the Cantabrian range, whose highest points were in the hands of the republic. The field of war was thus, throughout the campaign, of rugged beauty. The republicans were overwhelmed by the aerial bombardment. On the first day of the attack, the front in the south was broken. The Navarrese brigades rolled up the foothills of the Cantabrians. Reinosa, with its armament factory, was captured on 16 August. Gámir and his Russian advisers disputed over whether or no Colonel García Vayas, chief of the 15th Army Corps, who had held Santander since the very beginning of the war, and was popular in the city, should be relieved by Colonel Galán, one of the famous group of communist brothers. Compromise was reached, but the front broke. Many were captured. Next, backed by their own weight of artillery, tanks, and aircraft, the Italian Black Arrows broke the front by the sea on 18 August. The March 23rd Division, in the centre, captured the critical pass of Escudo. Henceforward, there was no real front. The army of Santander retreated steadily. The Basques fought better for Santander than the Santanderinos had for Bilbao, but even they could not maintain their hold.
²
In Santander itself,
the factories and the port were closed, so that workers could be free to build fortifications. Once again, a Spanish city became filled with the cattle, the domestic animals, and the few personal belongings of peasants flying from the battle raging round their homes. Many Santanderinos (perhaps a majority) longed for Franco’s victory—theirs was a conservative city which had thrived because of its use as a resort by the Spanish aristocracy. The Basque émigré government, as it had now become, again occupied itself with evacuation. Many Basques refused to fight anymore and prepared for flight.

26. The Santander campaign, August 1937

On 22 August, a meeting was held of the military and political leaders. The soldiers, as usual, were more gloomy than the civilians.
¹
The Basque ‘President’ Aguirre took the chair. This time it was General Goriev, the Russian, who spoke little.
²
From Valencia came orders to retreat to Asturias. But the next day, the Basque armed forces inde
pendently withdrew to the port of Santoña, twenty miles to the east. They had no desire to continue to fight so far away from their homeland. They had high hopes that the negotiations which Father Onaindía had conducted with the Italian government in Rome would permit their orderly and separate surrender. But those negotiations had virtually failed due to differences on the subject between Aguirre and the other Basque leaders. But by nightfall the government’s orders had become impossible to fulfil, since the road to Asturias had been cut. Santander itself became the scene of riots, caused by a rising of the Fifth Column. Thousands of Santanderinos leapt into any boats which they could find to try to reach France or Asturias, preferring to brave the Bay of Biscay in any craft than to risk capture. Many were drowned. Gámir, Aguirre and Leizaola were among those who escaped. The remainder of the army was captured; 60,000 prisoners were made—the largest single victory in the civil war.
¹
The deputy for Santander, Ramón Ruiz Rebollo, was one of the last to leave. He survived to give a harrowing description of 100,000 people on the quays the night before the rebels arrived.
²
A selection of republican and Basque leaders, including mayors and members of parliament, were shot on the beach Barría on October 15.

Two Basque officers went from Santoña to negotiate the Basque surrender with the Italian commander, Colonel Farina, commander of the Black Arrows, in whose hands the Basques rightly judged themselves safer than in those of Franco. An agreement was reached. The Basques would surrender, deliver their arms to the Italians, and maintain order in the areas which they still held. They had already freed the 2,500 prisoners in the gaol of Santoña. The Italians would guarantee the lives of all Basque fighters. The Basques then agreed to surrender without further conditions. They failed to secure more general assurances.
³
In the event, many Basques refused to surrender and did their best to escape. A subsequent attempt by a Basque nationalist politician, Juan de Ajuriaguerra (who, unlike Aguirre, had been concerned with
negotiations with Italy from the spring onwards), at further negotiations with General Roatta was subsequently disowned by the nationalist high command.
¹
Meantime, Dávila and his army entered Santander. The Italians entered Santoña and the Italian Colonel Fagosi took over the civil administration. The British vessels
Bobie
and
Seven Seas Spray
stood by in Santoña harbour ready to carry refugees to France. But no instructions came to begin any shipment. On 27 August the commander of the
Bobie,
a French captain named Georges Dupuy, and Costa e Silva, a Brazilian non-intervention observer on the
Seven Seas Spray,
received permission from the Italians to embark all those in possession of a Basque passport. The embarkation therefore began. But at ten in the morning, Italian soldiers surrounded the ships and the waiting Basques with machine-guns. Colonel Fagosi informed Dupuy and Silva that no one was to leave Santoña, foreign or Basque. All the Basques on board the two ships were ordered to disembark. The ships were then searched by five falangists. At dawn, the next day, 28 August, Dupuy saw those who had so briefly been his passengers being marched as prisoners along the road towards the prison of Dueso. Colonel Farina had been disowned by his chief of staff, Major Bartolomé Barba.
²
The ships of hope then raised anchor, some refugees hiding in the machinery. Those left behind were treated simply as prisoners of the nationalists. Summary trials and executions followed. Ajuriaguerra was condemned to death but the sentence was commuted.

Mussolini nevertheless telegraphed his congratulations to the Italian commanders. The text of that telegram and the names of its addresses were published in the Italian papers on 27 August. For the first time the Italian public could know the names of their commanders in Spain: Roatta, Bergonzoli, Teruzzi, Bastico: new heroes of the new Italy! Ciano instructed Bastico to secure ‘guns and flags captured from the Basques’. He recorded in his diary, ‘I envy the French their Invalides and the Germans their Military Museum. A flag taken from the enemy’, added this fellow-countryman of Leonardo, ‘is worth more than any picture.’ The next day he wrote: ‘This is the moment to terrorize the enemy. I have given orders for the aircraft to bomb
Valencia.’
¹
Mussolini’s Spanish allies, however, were not so enthusiastic about the part played in these engagements by Italian troops: ‘Only an enemy without a command or cohesion, and in numbers insufficient to cover the fortifications constructed, could give way before an offensive as magisterially conceived … but as incompetently carried out as that of the legionaries.’ Thus Colonel Urbano, in a special report to the nationalist general staff.
²

The Germans in Spain were quarrelling among themselves. Sperrle, commander of the Condor Legion, and Faupel, the ambassador, hated each other. Sperrle even refused to see Faupel when he called to see him at San Sebastián. Sperrle also publicly criticized the monopoly held by HISMA, so encouraging the Spaniards to complain of it too. Franco even asked, through Sperrle, to have Faupel replaced, partly because of his intrigues with the Falange, chiefly because of his heavy-handed arrogance.
³

Franco received the news of the capture of Santander while attending to the start of another republican diversionary offensive, this time on the Aragon front. This was undertaken by the Catalan army—now reorganized, hispanized and renamed the Army of the East—commanded by General Pozas. Under him were ‘Kléber’, with the 45th Division, Colonel Trueba (an intelligent autodidact), with the 27th, and the communist Major Modesto’s 5th Army Corps, comprising the 11th, 46th and 35th Divisions led respectively by Lister, El Campesino, and Walter. These had been transferred from Brunete. Walter’s division included four International Brigades (not the 14th, because of his quarrel with Dumont).
⁴

Opposing this array was General Ponte, in charge at Saragossa, General Urrutia at Huesca and General Muñoz Castellanos at Teruel.
The front was not continuous, since only strategic heights were fortified. The Aragon front had been neglected. It was an area where the nationalists had not undertaken extensive fortifications.

Pozas’ offensive had another purpose. This was the communists’, and the central government’s, desire to break the Council of Aragon. Here, as in so many other matters, communist and ‘liberal’ supporters of the republic were as one. The moderate socialists fully supported the policy which followed: indeed, Prieto gave the orders on 4 August, though his motives in sending Lister’s division of 11,000 men to do the work may be open to question: did he hope to kill two birds with one stone?
¹
Azaña was delighted; one of the ‘councillors of Aragon’ was an ex-chauffeur of his.
²

This Council of Aragon, presided over by Joaquín Ascaso, had outraged both the Catalan and the central governments. Ascaso, an anarchist who had escaped from Saragossa, was a dynamic, violent and unscrupulous man.
³
Many of the collectives had been socially successful, but they had made too ineffective a contribution to the war. Complete figures for the economic performance of the region under the anarchists are difficult to establish; but the production of coal in the mine at Utrillas, near Montalbán, for example, was only a tenth of normal.
⁴

In late July, the communists had begun one of their ominous and intimidatory press campaigns against Ascaso. Carabineers confiscated food lorries passing from one collective to another. The communists, the UGT and the socialists set up a new organization, the Aragon Council, at Barbastro, which asked the government to establish a new ‘federal government’ of Aragon. On 11 August, after the harvest was in—an important element in the situation—the Council of Aragon was dissolved, José Ignacio Mantecón being named governor-general of the three Aragonese provinces. An old member of the Council of Aragon himself, Mantecón was a left republican then on the brink of joining the communists. Immediately after the decree was published, the 11th Division under Lister was sent ‘on manoeuvres’ to Aragon. Ascaso and the anarchist members of the Council of Aragon were detained (Ascaso on a charge of smuggling jewels). Six hundred other anarchists throughout Aragon were arrested. Peasants who had successfully held out of collectives took over many of those experiments by assault, ‘carrying away and dividing up the harvest and farm implements’.
¹
The offices of the CNT regional committee were seized, and their records impounded. Other communist army units took over collectives in the valley of the Ebro and upper Aragon. Anarchist troops at the front desired to attack the communists, but they were restrained. The anarchist divisions with their old homemade tanks and motley weapons were infinitely less well equipped than were Lister’s men with their Degtyareva machine-guns. The CNT national leadership did what they could to avoid executions, but it was a measure of their decline that they could do no more. Indeed, by this time, vigorous defenders of CNT-FAI principles such as Abad de Santillán or Escorza were increasingly left out of the deliberations of these movements. Mariano Vázquez, the secretary-general of the CNT, had become a
Negrinista
and so had many of the anarchists who held positions under the government. Some anarchist newspapers, so far as they could, denounced the communists’ actions, though not naming precisely what they had done. They resorted to general criticism of Russian practices and published articles describing the benefits of the collectives.
²
Later,
to try and save the next crop, some Aragonese collectives were restored, but about a third of them were destroyed, and those which were revived were less self-confident than they had been, while many anarchists remained in prisons or camps until the end of the war.