The Spanish Civil War (80 page)

Eden eventually persuaded the cabinet to send more destroyers to the Mediterranean. Chamberlain also agreed to Delbos’s suggestion for a conference of ‘interested powers’. On 6 September, all states with Mediterranean frontiers, except Spain, together with Germany and Russia, were invited by Britain and France to a conference, on the 10th. This was to be held at Nyon, on the Lake of Geneva, where it was not proposed to hold it for fear of angering Italy, who associated the city of Calvin with the League’s condemnation of her Abyssinian expedition. ‘The full orchestra,’ Ciano now noted, ‘the theme: Piracy in the Mediterranean. Guilty—the fascists. The Duce is very calm.’ García Conde, the Spanish nationalist ambassador in Rome, brought Ciano a message from Franco saying that, if the blockade lasted throughout September, it would be decisive. ‘True’, Ciano admitted, but he nevertheless ordered Admiral Cavagnari to suspend it, until further orders.
³

The Russian chargé in Rome, Helfand, accused Italian submarines of sinking the merchant ships
Tuniyaev
and
Blagaev.
He claimed irrefutable evidence of Italian guilt—‘from intercepted telegrams, I expect’, wrote Ciano airily, doubtless recalling the use which he himself made of that source of information.
⁴
Ciano disclaimed responsibility
and disputed the right of Russia to make such a judgement. Both Italy and Germany proposed that the Non-Intervention Committee, rather than a special conference, should handle the matter. But Eden and Delbos pressed on with their arrangements. Churchill and Lloyd George, from the south of France, wrote to Eden that now was ‘the moment to rally Italy to her international duty’.
¹

The conference followed, with Italy and Germany absent. It was successful. First, Delbos and Eden proposed that the Mediterranean should be patrolled by warships of all the riparian states, with Russia (and Italy) allotted the eastern Mediterranean. But the smaller countries had no warships to spare for this task, and did not wish to risk war. So it was decided that the British and French fleets should patrol the Mediterranean west of Malta and attack any suspicious submarine. This was decided on the first day of the conference. The agreement was signed on the 14th.
²
Mussolini was furious, and Litvinov spoke of his pleasure at an international agreement ‘with very considerable backing’. Churchill wrote to Eden that the agreement had shown the possibility of British and French cooperation. Further arrangements, between naval experts, were planned to consider attacks by aircraft. Ciano sent a note requesting ‘parity of duties’ for Italy with all the other states of Nyon. The wits in the Café Bavaria at Geneva suggested that the ‘unknown statesman’—Mussolini—should erect a monument to the ‘unknown submarine’ in Rome. On 17 September, the Nyon conference’s naval experts gave to the naval patrol the same power against aircraft that they had already against submarines. Warships which attacked neutral ships would be counter-attacked by the patrolling navies, regardless of whether they were in Spanish territorial waters. On the 18th, the French and British chargés in Rome gave Ciano the texts of the Nyon Agreements, and asked for an interpretation of his request for ‘parity’. They thus made possible the return to friendly relations with Italy which Chamberlain desired.

The same day, Negrín was before the League of Nations Assembly requesting that its political committee examine Spain. As usual, only Litvinov and Mexico supported the republic. Eden claimed that non-intervention had stopped a European war: echoing Baldwin a year be
fore, he compared non-intervention to a leaky dam, ‘better than no dam at all’.
¹
Negrín wished France to send 400 or 500 officers or NCOs to help the republic and asked for that.
²
He also talked with Eden, who said that British public opinion did not want Franco to win. The cabinet, he said, was divided. Chamberlain was afraid of communism and the government were unable to take a strong line against Germany until rearmament was complete.
³
Italy meantime was invited to send experts to Paris to ‘adjust’ the Nyon Agreement in accordance with Italian wishes. Ciano, therefore, felt that he had achieved a triumph. On 27 September, the British, French and Italians began naval talks in Paris. Italy was allotted a patrol zone between the Balearic Islands and Sardinia, and in the Tyrrhenian Sea. This enabled Italy to continue sending supplies to Majorca without fear of being watched. Also on the 27th, the League’s political committee did take up the question of Spain. Álvarez del Vayo spoke with eloquent bitterness at the news of Italian reinforcements to General Franco. Walter Elliott, the politician who was the British representative, persuaded the committee to omit any denunciation of Germany and Italy from the resolution to be put forward. But that document did refer to the ‘failure of non-intervention’, to the consideration of ending it (unless agreement could be reached on the withdrawal of volunteers) and to the ‘existence of veritable foreign army corps on Spanish soil’. However much the British might dislike such candour they could hardly object. For Mussolini, even while the resolution was being discussed, was publicly mourning the deaths of thousands of Italians on Spanish soil, during his visit to Germany—where he was impressed by the signs which he had seen of German preparedness for war. Privately, the Duce told Hitler that, Nyon or not, he would continue torpedoing. He boasted that he had already sunk nearly 200,000 tons of ships.
⁴
These remarks gave an
ironic quality to the apparently successful end, on 30 September, of the naval talks in Paris, Italy now being included in the Nyon patrol.

It was hard now to represent the Nyon conference as exactly a triumph of ‘strength’. Notes were prepared in the Foreign Office and in the Quai d’Orsay to invite the ‘pirate now turned policeman’ (as Ciano boasted himself to be)
¹
to general talks on Spain. This was put to Ciano on 2 October. The same day, the carefully drafted resolution of the League was passed. Álvarez del Vayo only agreed to the vagueness of the phrase ‘in the near future’ on the understanding that Britain and France needed ten days to see if Italy would reply amicably to their invitation. But Franco now wanted more, and not fewer, ‘volunteers’. The Italian troops had proved their usefulness in the campaigns in the north. But he did want General Bastico recalled, because of his subordinate’s impertinence during the Santander campaign in going so far as to negotiate with the Basques.

Franco was at the time preoccupied with the case of Harold Dahl, a former US air force pilot, who had enlisted in the republican air force. He had been forced to bail out over nationalist territory. A court-martial there sentenced Dahl, and two Russian pilots, to death for ‘rebellion’. The US government had to exert itself, and an American colonel who had fought in Morocco by Franco’s side telegraphed to his ex-comrade in arms to appeal for clemency. The death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
²

On 10 October, Ciano told Eden and Delbos that he could not act over Spain without Germany. So far from wishing to settle the situation in Spain, Ciano was wondering whether he could dispatch some regular Alpine troops there—‘to break through to Valencia’.
³
He also responded to Franco’s request over the command by naming General Mario Berti as the new commander of the Italian troops in Spain in succession to Bastico. When, at the end of October, a ceremony was held for the presentation of medals to men who had fought in Spain and to the widows of those who had fallen, Ciano ‘examined his conscience’ to ask if this blood had been shed in a good cause. ‘Yes, the an
swer is yes,’ he comforted himself, ‘at Málaga, at Santander, at Guadalajara, we were fighting in defence of our civilization and our revolution!’
¹

The French reaction to Ciano’s refusal to talk without consulting Germany was to consider opening the Pyrenean frontier fully to the passage of arms for the republic. Eden persuaded Delbos to go back first to the Non-Intervention Committee. Delbos said that if an agreement were not reached on volunteers within one week, France would open her frontier.
²
For the blockade of the Mediterranean was now almost complete; the sinking of the supply ship
San Tomé
had been a serious blow.
³
On 15 October, Eden told Grandi that this new appeal to the committee was ‘a last attempt’. He told a conservative audience at Llandudno that his patience with Italian intervention in Spain was ‘well-nigh exhausted’. Some days earlier, the Labour Party Conference, meeting at Bournemouth, had denounced non-intervention; Sir Charles Trevelyan, a rebel in 1936, introduced this year’s special resolution. (The Trades Union Congress some weeks before had followed the same line.)
⁴

On 16 October, the Non-Intervention Sub-Committee at last met again. Between then and 2 November, the British plan of July, which had proposed the grant of belligerent rights subject to the withdrawal of a ‘substantial proportion’ of volunteers in Spain, became the basis for discussion. After prolonged, wearisome, and confusing negotiations, in which the patient Eden played a leading role, this plan was accepted. The two Spanish parties were to be asked for their cooperation, to accept two commissions to number the foreigners in their zones, and to put the withdrawal into effect.
⁵
In the meantime, since more than a week had passed since Delbos made his stipulation, the French frontier was left open for the passage of arms by night. Eden cryptically told Delbos, ‘Don’t open the frontier but allow to pass what you want’.
⁶
Thenceforward, in Blum’s words, ‘we voluntarily and sys
tematically shut our eyes to arms smuggling and even organized it’.
¹
On 28 October, Azcárate talked with Eden in the House of Commons. Azcárate urged firmness.

EDEN
: What you want is a preventive war against Italy.

ZCÁRATE
: No, simply a clear political line which, if maintained with energy and determination, would be enough to calm the intemperance of Mussolini.

EDEN
: It is not easy to decide that line.

AZCÁRATE
: With respect to Spain it is easy: it is to make certain that the UK preserves Spain free from foreign entanglement and free from a fascism which would interfere with British strategic interests.

Eden [reported Azcárate] heard me with his head low, saying that it was easier for me to say this than for him to convince his colleagues. I asked him what the republic ought to do to give a guarantee that there was no communist danger in Spain. Eden merely agreed that it would be unreasonable to insist that the two communists leave the government.
²

At this time, despite Azcárate’s reservations, Eden was ‘very anxious to find a way of helping Valencia’.
³

The real motives of the intervening countries were becoming clear, at least to themselves. On 5 November, Hitler, while unfolding his desire for a war against Britain and France to an alarmed Neurath, Blomberg, and Beck, said that, in the Spanish war, ‘from the German point of view, a hundred per cent Franco victory is not desirable. We are most interested in the continuance of the war.’
⁴
Only thus, he went on, could the Italian position in the Balearic Islands—important from
the strategic point of view—be preserved. A little earlier, a Russian general had told Orlov, the NKVD representative, that the Politburo had adopted a policy much the same as that of Hitler: that is, that it would be best if the war in Spain dragged on and tied Hitler down there.
¹
Thus, for mutually hostile reasons, the two leading powers on the edge of the Spanish war reached the same conclusion. Not long before, even the British Foreign Secretary had made a slightly different judgement: British interests, Eden had told the cabinet at the end of September, would be best served by a stalemate. It was against British interests that Franco should win, while he was dependent on German aid. Prolongation of the war by six months would increase the strain on Italy.
²

On 6 November, Italy joined Germany and Japan in signing their so-called Anti-Comintern Pact. Although Ciano desired this to remain a ‘pact of giants’, he planned to bring Franco’s Spain in, so as to link the ‘Axis to the Atlantic’. On 20 November, however, Franco accepted the British ‘volunteer’ plan in principle. He made reservations about the proposed commission’s powers to guarantee the withdrawal. He suggested that the withdrawal of 3,000 volunteers would constitute the ‘substantial withdrawal’ upon which belligerent rights would be conditional. The figure no doubt occurred to Franco since precisely that number of Italian troops were now withdrawn, regardless of agreements, because they were sick or unreliable.
³
On 1 December, the republic also accepted the plan—though for different reasons: Azaña and Giral hoped that acceptance might mean the suspension of hostil
ities, which would thereafter not be renewed. Azaña had, for a long time, been hoping that a withdrawal of volunteers might lead eventually to an armistice. Negrín agreed that the start of a volunteer plan would mean a suspension of fighting, and liked the idea because, at worst, it would give the republic time to regroup.
¹

During the lull which followed the Asturias campaign, the stability of both Spains seemed such as would preserve a stalemate. Compared with the ‘lyrical illusion’ and the chaos, the mood of euphoria and massacre of July 1936, the coherent organization of two Spains, each with armies larger than any in Europe save that of France, was astonishing. War had in both zones forged order, though it was not one of which any man of peace could feel proud. Dionisio Ridruejo, the young falangist, disciple of Serrano Súñer, poet, and propagandist of the nationalist régime, reflected later that the war was the time in modern history when the Spanish people participated most fully in their own destiny;
¹
but that destiny was determined by weapons from abroad.

However politically conscious its people may have been, nationalist Spain (now two-thirds of the whole country) remained a military society. The aristocratic General Gómez Jordana still headed the
junta
técnica
at Burgos, the provisional government, free from bureaucracy, which wielded all the administrative power. Its departments were spread about several cities. Serrano Súñer, with vague powers, but no governmental post during 1937, was the political leader. An unconvincing but serviceable falangist past was created for him, his friendship with José Antonio at the university emphasized. His powers were not limited by the new national council, whose forty-eight members were named on 2 December. That body remained more advisory in character even than most such portentously named organizations. It resembled the Italian fascist grand council, since its members, their duties legislative, were nominated by Franco. There were three women—Pilar Primo de Rivera, Mercedes Sanz Bachiller, widow of Onésimo Redondo, the founder of Auxilio Social, and María Rosa Urraca Pastor, the Florence Nightingale of nationalist nurses, though known as
la Coronela.
There were six generals (Queipo, Dávila, Jordana, Yagüe, Monasterio and Orgaz), two colonels (Beigbeder, high commissioner in Morocco, and Gazapo), twenty old falangists (among them Fernández Cuesta, Sancho Dávila, Agustín Aznar, and José Antonio Girón), and eleven old Carlists (including Rodezno and Esteban Bilbao). The rest of the list were monarchists, conservatives or technicians of various sorts. The Carlist Fal Conde was asked to be a member. He refused and remained in proud but ineffective exile in Lisbon.

The new ‘national movement’ (the Falange Española Tradicionalista) developed little during 1937. Did it exist at all, who were its members, where were its offices? It was the instrument of Serrano Súñer, but what was that? Fascist, corporativist, militarist or ‘Francoist’? The movement had, admittedly, officers, if it lacked an ideology. Thus the FET chief of press and propaganda at Salamanca was Father Fermín Yzurdiaga, the falangist priest from Pamplona—a hybrid suitable for the hybrid party. Beneath him were Dionisio Ridruejo, chief of propaganda, and a Carlist, Eladio Esparza, press chief. Later, Serrano Súñer substituted Antonio Tovar, another ‘old shirt’, for Esparza. The mood of the Falange was now one of subservience to the army:
Arriba España,
the party paper, had the slogan ‘For God and Caesar’ on its front page. Apart from propaganda, the FET did little. It seemed to be a ‘parallel state’ but it was more a bureaucracy of sinecures. Nothing changed in this respect when, in October, Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, secretary-general of the Falange before the war, was exchanged from a republi
can gaol for Justino de Azcárate, brother of the ambassador in London. Prieto, alone of republican ministers, opposed this exchange, for who, he asked, was Justino de Azcárate? Some republicans hoped that Fernández Cuesta might create difficulties with the Falange if he were returned to Burgos. He did not do so, however, and Azcárate was of no service to the republic, since, severely shaken by his imprisonment, he stayed in France.
¹
Fernández Cuesta became secretary-general of the new united movement in Burgos. He lacked the energy to be a rival to Serrano Súñer, and the dream of Prieto and some others that he might found a ‘
Falange Española Auténtica
’, to divide the movement in nationalist Spain, remained a fantasy.
²

The Carlist representatives who stayed on the national council were all of the moderate wing who, following Rodezno, had accepted the Decree of Unification. On 5 December, Prince Xavier, the Carlist regent, condemned those who took the oath which was demanded by the council without asking his permission. He followed this with a journey to Spain, his usual headquarters being in France. In San Sebastián, he told Serrano Súñer that it was wrong to try and give to Spain a Gestapo on the German model. In Burgos, he told Franco: ‘If it were not for the
requetés,
I doubt whether you would be where you are.’ These remarks were not well received. The Prince went on a tour of the battlefronts. Having met a welcome in Seville, he reached Granada before he was ordered to leave Spain. He had another interview with Franco, who told him: ‘You are waging a campaign in favour of monarchy.’ The Prince replied: ‘I have not spoken a word of politics. But my name is Bourbon. And, after all, I thought you also were a monarchist.’ ‘Much of the army is for a republic,’ answered Franco, ‘and I cannot ignore that state of mind.’ ‘I believe that the main reason why you want me to leave Spain is that the Germans and Italians insist,’ said Prince Xavier. Franco surprisingly agreed, by saying: ‘If you remain in Spain, Your Highness, neither the Germans nor the Italians will give us any more war material.’ Prince Xavier, therefore, left Burgos for France, remarking, ‘Do not forget that I am the last link between you and the
requetés;
nor that I shall always work for Spain, but
never for you personally.’
¹
In fact, the Falange and the Carlists remained apart, in all senses save formally: the two youth movements never merged, and Xavier, like Fal Conde, remained an exile.

During the winter of 1937–8, the nationalists created a conventional cabinet. On 1 February, of this Second Triumphal Year, Franco became president of the council, with the Conde de Gómez Jordana vice-president and foreign minister. Gómez Jordana’s aristocratic style made a good impression on foreigners—particularly the English: ‘a man of another age’, Serrano spoke of him disdainfully.
²
He had been in charge of public education under Primo de Rivera. Dávila, keeping command of the Army of the North, was minister of defence. General Martínez Anido, the brutal civil governor of Barcelona after 1917, and a member of Primo de Rivera’s cabinets, a man with ‘rectangular ideas’ according to his colleague Sainz Rodríguez, returned from abroad at seventy-five, to be minister of public order. The other members of the government were non-military. Andrés Amado, a friend of Calvo Sotelo’s, became finance minister. A naval engineer, Juan Antonio Suances, an old friend of Franco, became minister of industry and commerce.
³
The Carlist Rodezno became minister of justice, Sainz Rodríguez, the monarchist intellectual, minister of education. The most powerful member of the cabinet was Serrano Súñer, minister of the interior, even though he had public order subtracted from it. He was also secretary-general of the movement. Fernández Cuesta, the only ‘old shirt’ in the government, was minister of agriculture, in addition to his honorific post of secretary-general of the national council. Pedro González Bueno, an engineer and characteristic ‘technocratic’ member of the new Falange, became minister of labour. The last member of the cabinet, Alfonso Peña y Boeuf, minister of public works, was also an engineer who had
played no previous role in politics. Of these ministers, four—Serrano, Fernández Cuesta, Suances, and Peña y Boeuf—had escaped from republican Spain during the war and thus at least knew what they were fighting against. Three were ex-collaborators of Primo de Rivera (Martínez Anido, Andrés Amado and Jordana). Amado and Sáinz Rodríguez had been monarchists. The latter had been a friend of Sanjurjo but also of Franco, whom he had known long before in Oviedo. Rodezno was the only Carlist, Serrano Súñer the only
CEDAista,
two were falangists (Fernández Cuesta and González Bueno) and two friends of Franco (Peña and Suances). Not one of these new men had been a minister under the republic, even in the right-wing régimes, and only Rodezno, Sainz Rodríguez and Serrano Súñer had been deputies. Colonel Beigbeder was confirmed, meanwhile, as high commissioner in Morocco.
¹
The cabinet took an oath of allegiance to Franco and to Spain in the romanesque monastery of Las Huelgas at Burgos: ‘In the name of God and His holy evangelists, I swear to fulfil my duty as minister of Spain with the most exact fidelity to the Head of State, Generalissimo of our glorious armies, and to the principles which constitute the nationalist régime in service of the destiny of the country.’
Sotto voce,
Rodezno remarked to Sáinz Rodríguez, after taking the oath: ‘What no one can now take from us is the rank of ex-minister—the most important thing to be in Spain’.
²

One omission was Queipo de Llano. He was unable to understand falangism, and disliked seeing falangists getting good jobs in the new régime. Gradually, though not yet entirely, his private fief in Seville was to be taken away from him. By the middle of 1938, he was no more than military commander in the south. Serrano was busy organizing a more predictable method of governing Spain than his. Queipo was angry at his exclusion, and brought an end to his broadcasts. Nationalist Spain was duller thereafter. Thousands of Spaniards had listened to him every night at 10 P.M.
³
and believed all that he had said. In the re
publican zone, he had also been heard—there was no interference—with either apprehension or enthusiasm. Barcelona Radio had often inaccurately accused him of being drunk. ‘Well why not,’ he bellowed in answer. ‘Why shouldn’t a real
hombre
enjoy the superb quality of the wine and women of Seville?’ He was taxed with his republican past. He replied that he had thought at one time that the republic could solve the problems of Spain. Now the future lay with Franco. But, he assured his listeners, if he should see that Franco was not acting in Spain’s best interests (an eventuality he considered impossible), his patriotism was such that he would fight even the Caudillo. This reflection was not popular at Salamanca. His farouche personal insults to ‘the Jew Blum’, Doña Manolita (Azaña) or English journalists such as Nöel Monks (whom he accused of being intoxicated when he wrote in the
Daily Express
that Guernica had been bombed), or Miaja, whom he despised, or Prieto, of whom he had been once a friend, were part of the folklore of rebel Spain. What entranced his hearers was his custom, at the end of an attack on the ‘rabble’ for one vice or another, of introducing an irrelevant message, such as, ‘And now, if my wife and daughter who are in Paris happen to be listening, I should like to say I hope they are well and to assure them that we here in Seville are thinking of them. Buenas noches, señores!’
¹
Actually, this early practitioner of radio propaganda was an efficient administrator. He did his best to expand the textile industry of Seville, and he tried to develop chemicals. He also arranged for the distribution of seed and favourable loans to farmers. He tried to protect tenant farmers by introducing a moratorium on mortgage payments and distributed estates belonging to republicans to peasants loyal to the nationalist cause. (Some land was given too by large proprietors such as the Duke of Alba, to help Queipo’s agrarian reform.) Queipo was also responsible for growing rice in the delta of the Guadalquivir to make up for the loss to the nationalists of the famous Valencian rice fields, at Albufera: 240,000 acres were converted in the marshes.

Two other omissions in the cabinet were Nicolás Franco and Sangroniz, the controllers of the nationalist household for eighteen months since October 1936. Neither was friendly with Serrano Súñer, who disliked their old-fashioned methods; and neither was protected
by Franco, for whom gratitude was never a virtue. Nicolás Franco went to Lisbon as ambassador, Sangroniz to Caracas.

The nomination of Martínez Anido as minister of public order was calculated to strike dread into the minds of all republicans. Yet either through senility or conservatism, Martínez Anido was one of the more humane of Franco’s ministers. Like Gómez Jordana, a man of another epoch, he despised fascism, and insisted on trials by military tribunals; so that few, henceforth, were executed in nationalist Spain ‘
por la libre
’.
¹

Among the bourgeoisie of nationalist Spain, there was no slackening in enthusiasm for the ‘crusade’. The leaders might not be on such good terms as they made out. The defeated might be maltreated. But this was war, was it not, and these ugly matters were the obverse side of one’s own sacrifices. The currency was fairly stable, food prices had not risen much, and stocks would have been adequate to provision all republican Spain. The spectre of hunger in the cities did not exist. Even coal was now in ample supply. Thus, away from the front, middle-class life could be carried on without much interruption. Bullfights had been resumed in the summer, as had the regular
ferias.
²
In the evening, one would, as of old, walk up and down the main street of the town at the hour of the
paseo,
and notice perhaps a number of uniforms. There would be posters encouraging patriotic service. One would hear news of so-and-so’s daughter, working with the Auxilio Social. The national lottery had been re-established. One would have to give, before the evening was out, at a café or in the cinema, a contribution to war victims or to subsidize state meals or to aid refugees. As the evening progressed, war might seem nearer. At ten o’clock, there would be Queipo de Llano on the radio in cafés, private houses or, if one were able to find a table, in one of the crowded restaurants. Then, at midnight, there would be the daily communiqué, the list of casualties and of prisoners: and then, with the ‘Royal March’, to bed.