In Vigo, which also fell to the nationalists, the soldiers of the Mérida Regiment were given a great deal of alcohol, so the column marched to the centre of the town half-drunk. In the Puerta del Sol the officer in command proclaimed a state of war and, when unarmed civilians shouted protests, gave the order to fire. The soldiers started shooting in every direction.
Early in the morning of 20 July the sparsely armed citizens of Madrid around the Montaña barracks were joined by many others, including women. Two 75mm Schneider guns were towed into place. A retired captain of artillery, Orad de la Torre, sited them in the calle Bailén some 500 metres from the barracks. Later, a 155mm gun, commanded by Lieutenant Vidal, was brought to within 200 metres of their target.8
Thousands of people surrounded the barracks along the Paseo de Rosales and from the North Station. It was a mass which advanced and retreated without order. A lawyer who was with them described the scene: ‘Rifle shots were cracking from the direction of the barracks. At the corner of the Plaza de España and the Calle de Ferraz a group of assault guards were loading their rifles in the shelter of a wall. A multitude of people were crouching and lying between the trees and benches of the gardens.’ Some loyalist planes arrived from the nearby airfield of Cuatro Vientos where the rising had been suppressed the day before. At first, they dropped leaflets calling on the soldiers to surrender. Later, when they dropped bombs on the barracks the thousands of civilians cheered and jumped for joy, but the machine-guns in the barracks opened up again, killing some of them. The young British poet Jack Lindsay wrote a poem about that day:
We found an odd gun,
We brought it up on a truck from a beer-factory.
We rushed the Montaña barracks
With some old pistols and our bare hands through the swivelling machine-gun fire.
I was there.
I saw the officers cowering, their faces chalked with fear.9
Not surprisingly, emotions were often stronger than common sense. Old revolvers were fired at the thick stone walls by those privileged few who had weapons. The assault on the Montaña barracks was to prove what horrors can result from confusion. Many of the soldiers wanted to surrender and waved white flags from their windows. The crowds ran joyfully forward but the machine-guns commanded by officers opened up again, killing many in the open. This happened several times so the mass of people were utterly enraged by the time the barracks were stormed. This was achieved only because a republican sapper sergeant within managed to throw open the gate before being shot down by an officer. The slaughter which followed was terrible.10
In Granada, General Miguel Campins stayed loyal to the Republic and assured the civil governor that his officers could be trusted.11 But Colonels Muñoz and Leon Maestre set the rising in motion. Campins was arrested on 20 July and shot later on the orders of General Queipo de Llano for having opposed the ‘movimiento salvador de España’. The workers, who had believed that the garrison and the Assault Guard would not revolt, realized too late what was happening that day. The military rebels had seized the centre of the city by nightfall. Their opponents withdrew to the district known as the Albaicín, which they barricaded and defended for three days, but artillery was brought up and scores of families were buried in the rubble of their houses.
Of all the major towns, Valencia experienced the longest delay before the situation was clear because General Martínez Monje, the military commander, refused to declare himself for either side. General Goded’s broadcast from Barcelona was a great blow to the conspirators there, who found it very difficult to persuade fellow officers to join. The CNT had already declared a general strike in the Valencian region and joined the executive committee set up by the Popular Front parties in the office of the civil governor. This dignitary had been deposed by the committee because he refused to hand over arms.
The CNT, with its docker membership, was the largest of the worker organizations and insisted on various conditions before co-operating with the Popular Front. One of these was that the paramilitary forces should be divided up among much larger groups of workers in order to ensure their loyalty. This was accepted and the mixed ‘intervention groups’ occupied the radio station, telephone exchange and other strategic buildings. Even so, when a detachment of the Civil Guard was sent together with some workers to help in another area, they shot their guardians and went off to join the nationalists.
General Martínez Monje continued to insist on his loyalty although he refused to hand over any weapons as ordered by the government. Few were convinced by his protestations, since he was evidently waiting to see how events developed in other towns. The argument over whether to storm the barracks was further confused when a delegation under Martínez Barrio arrived from Madrid. Eventually even those who were afraid of forcing neutrals into the enemy camp agreed that the situation was intolerable. The barracks were finally taken two weeks after the rising had begun. This failure to take Valencia was a grave blow for the plotters, because they could not advance on Madrid from the east.
In Andalucia Queipo de Llano’s forces had not managed to secure much more than the centre of Seville and the aerodrome. The private planes housed at the aeroclub were to prove very useful for reconnaissance work and amateur bombing raids. But the vital function of the airstrip was to provide a landing ground for the airlift from Morocco, including the 5th Bandera commanded by Major Castejón. Their arrival on 21 July led to an all-out assault on the working-class district of Triana (where the Emperor Trajan is supposed to have come from). Castejón and his men then attacked the districts of la Macarena, San Julián, San Bernardo and el Pumarejo, which held out until 25 July.
Queipo de Llano’s press assistant, Antonio Bahamonde–who later changed sides–described the action against these areas, which were defended by their inhabitants with hardly any weapons, claiming that more than 9,000 had been killed in the repression: ‘In the working-class districts, the Foreign Legion and Moroccan regulares went up and down the streets of very modest one-storey houses, throwing grenades in the windows, blowing up and killing women and children. The Moors took the opportunity to loot and rape at will. General Queipo de Llano, in his night-time talks at the [Radio Seville] microphone…urged on his troops to rape women and recounted with crude sarcasm brutal scenes of this sort.’12
News of these actions triggered off reprisal killings in the Andalucian countryside, where the peasants had risen against their landlords and the Civil Guard. Then, once Queipo’s forces had secured Seville, the rebels started to dominate the countryside around. Some Falangist sons of landowners organized peasant hunts on horseback. This sort of activity was jokingly referred to as the ‘reforma agraria’ whereby the landless bracero was finally to get a piece of ground for himself.
In many outlying areas of Spain a shocked stillness followed the sudden violence, but there was little pause for breath after control of the major towns had been decided. Columns were rapidly organized to help in other areas, or recapture nearby towns. In Madrid the UGT had organized an effective intelligence system through the railway telephone network to find out where the rising had succeeded and where it had failed. Lorryloads of worker militia rushed out from the capital. Guadalajara was retaken after a bitter struggle, Alcalá de Henares was recaptured from the Civil Guard who had declared for the rising and Cuenca was secured by 200 men led by Cipriano Mera. Other hastily formed militia detachments moved quickly north to block General Mola’s troops along the line of the Guadarrama mountains.
A large column of militiamen drove south in a convoy of lorries, taxis and confiscated automobiles across the Castilian plain towards Toledo, where Colonel Moscardó was organizing the nationalists’ defence of the military academy in the Alcázar fortress. Only a handful of the cadets assembled, as it was the summer vacation, but a strong force of civil guards had been brought in from the surrounding countryside. A mixed bag of officers and a large number of Falangists brought the total of active defenders to around 1,100. Inside the fo
rtress were also more than 500 women and children and 100 left-wing hostages. Moscardó, who had not been involved in the conspiracy, was acting on his own initiative. He had managed to stall the war ministry’s orders to despatch the contents of the Toledo arms factory to Madrid, and his men had withdrawn into their fortress with most of its contents just as the militia column reached the edge of the town. The siege of the Alcázar had begun. It was to be exceptionally rich in emotive symbolism for the nationalists.
In Barcelona the greatest concern of the anarchists was the fall of Saragossa to the army and the resulting slaughter of their comrades. Flying columns of armed workers assembled in great haste and rushed forth into the Aragón countryside. Villages and small towns which had been secured for the rising by the local Civil Guard detachment and right-wing sympathizers were seized on the way. The militia usually shot all those whom they felt represented a threat before moving on. However, the columns were primarily made up of urban workers. Their fighting effectiveness lay in the streets, not in the countryside where they had no sense of terrain. ‘We didn’t have maps,’ recounted Jordi Arquer, a POUM leader, ‘and I am not talking about proper military maps, but a simple Michelin road map.’13
During their advance, the anarcho-syndicalist columns, armed with the 30,000 rifles from the Sant Andreu barracks, seized towns and villages which had fallen into rebel hands, and shooting suspected supporters of the rising. Of the advancing columns only Durruti’s did not fall to the temptation of securing rural areas, which was shown to be a dangerous distraction when the principal town was in enemy hands. The regular commander of the republican forces, Colonel Villalba, even ordered Durruti not to rush on so tempestuously towards Saragossa. A strong detachment of Carlists, sent by General Mola in Pamplona, arrived to reinforce the Saragossa garrison and Durruti’s force was unsupported. The militia columns from Barcelona, amounting to about 20,000 men, would have been far more effective if they had been concentrated on fewer objectives. But such a spontaneously mobilized body could not act like troops controlled by a general staff.
The fighting was chaotic. Improvisations on both sides ranged from the inspired to the impractical. Field guns were fixed on to the rear of lorries, forming an early version of self-propelled artillery; armoured cars were built round trucks, sometimes effectively, although often the weight of steel plate was far too heavy for the engine. Every form of grenade, or petardo, was tried out (the so-called Molotov cocktail was in fact invented a little later by the Foreign Legion when attacked by Russian tanks outside Madrid that autumn). But with the originality came a contempt for more prosaic military customs, such as digging trenches. To fight from the ground was utterly contrary to the Spanish concept of war. There was a subconscious moral certainty that bravery must lead to victory.
It was not until the early days of August that the respective zones became clear and fronts recognizable. The insurgents had a broad horizontal strip of territory from Galicia and León in the west to Navarre and north Aragon in the east. This surrounded the coastal regions of Asturias, Santander and the Basque country, which had defeated the rising. In the south and west the rebels had seized no more than a small part of Andalucia.14
Only at this stage did the realization that Spain faced civil war, rather than a violently contested coup, penetrate people’s minds. The republican failure to win outright in the early days, when dash and instinct outweighed weaponry and military science, meant that they were to become involved in a totally different type of fighting, one in which very different qualities were needed to win.
The nationalists’ greatest military asset was the 40,000 men of the Army of Africa, with its combat experience.15 They had also secured 50,000 men from the badly trained and poorly equipped metropolitan army. In addition, seventeen generals and 10,000 officers had joined the rising. They had about two-thirds of Queipo’s carabineros, 40 per cent of the Assault Guard and 60 per cent of the Civil Guard. In all, this represented about 30,000 men out of the combined strength of the three paramilitary forces. In total they could count on around 130,000 officers and men. The Republic, at the time of Giral’s decree dissolving the army, counted on 50,000 soldiers, 22 generals and 7,000 officers, in addition to some 33,000 men from the paramilitary security forces. In theory, this represented a total of 90,000 men.16
For a long war it looked as if the Republic had the advantage: the large cities with their industry and manpower, mining areas, most of the navy and merchant marine, two-thirds of the mainland territory, the gold reserves and the citrus fruit export trade from Valencia, which was the country’s largest foreign-currency earner. However, the nationalists were more than compensated by help from outside Spain and control of the main agricultural areas. Their primary supply of recruits for some time was to be the Riffian tribes. Hitler and Mussolini were to provide military, naval, air, logistical and technical support, while American and British business interests supplied vital credits and oil.
The nationalists at this point were starting to organize a military state, while in the republican zone revolutionary processes were set on foot. The army’s attempt at what they claimed was a pre-emptive counterrevolution had destroyed what little remained of the republican state. Andrés Nin of the POUM described it thus: ‘The government does not exist. We collaborate with them, but they can do no more than sanction whatever is done by the masses.’ The rising of the right had pushed an unplanned revolution into the eager arms of the left.
8
The Red Terror
The most emotive issue in warfare is that of atrocities. It is nearly always the most visually horrific of them which become fixed in the imagination. Spain witnessed many during its civil war, but it was also one of the very first in which the techniques of mass propaganda played an important role.
The Spanish Civil War was a magnet for foreign correspondents and the enemy atrocities related by press officers provided sensational copy. In the early days little was done, or could be done, by correspondents to check the truth and background of most incidents. Refugees often justified their panic with exaggerated or imagined tales of horror. The gang of Barcelona workers said to be covered in blood from a massacre on 19 July were, in fact, from the abattoirs and had rushed straight out to resist the military rising. Wild estimates of the killing were reported: the nationalists stated at the time that half a million people had been slaughtered in republican territory and claimed the still excessive figure of 55,000 after the war. Perhaps the confusion and speed of events made journalists fall back on clichés, rather than investigate what lay behind the ferocity of the war. Having tended to ignore Spain, Europe did not understand the turbulent cycles of repression and revolt which had now built up to an explosion affecting every corner of the country.
The initial, hasty impressions passed on by journalists with little firsthand evidence seriously affected the Republic’s foreign relations when it needed to buy arms in the crucial months of the war. The violent excesses recounted in many papers justified that distaste for the revolution in the republican zone which ran strongly in British conservative and diplomatic circles. The left-wing administration in France under Léon Blum suppressed its own natural sympathies and, alarmed by Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland that spring, felt obliged to follow the British idea of refusing aid to both sides (a policy which was bound to favour the nationalists). Not until the bombing of Guernica in April of 1937 did the battle for world opinion really change in the Republic’s favour, but by then the republicans were already losing the war.
The Spanish war saw many terrible acts, but it was those of a religious significance that tended to prevail in people’s minds: ‘reds’ killing priests and disinterring the mummies in convent vaults; it was even said that Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, had bitten the jugular of a priest; or Carlist requetés making a republican lie in the form of a cross before hacking off his limbs to the cry of ‘Long live Christ the King!’.
If people in other countries were reminded
of the Thirty Years’ War, or the religious persecutions of the Dark Ages, and shuddered at this ‘new barbarism’, it was not surprising. The slaughter did not follow the same pattern on each side. In nationalist territory the relentless purging of ‘reds and atheists’ was to continue for years, while in republican territory the worst of the violence was mainly a sudden and quickly spent reaction of suppressed fear, exacerbated by desires of revenge for the past.
The attacks on the clergy were bound to cause the greatest stir abroad, where there was little understanding of the Church’s powerful political role. The Catholic Church was the bulwark of the country’s conservative forces, the foundation of what the right defined as Spanish civilization. Not surprisingly, the outside world had a fixed impression of Spain as a deeply religious country. The jest of the Basque philosopher Unamuno, that in Spain even atheists were Catholic, was taken seriously. Centuries of fanatical superstition enforced by the Inquisition had engraved this image on European minds. Even so, it was surprising how few foreign newspapers made the connection between the religious repression dating back to the Middle Ages and the violent anti-clericalism that developed in the nineteenth century. The rage which led to such excesses in some areas was fired by one great conviction: the promise of heaven for the meek was the age-old trick by the rich and powerful to make the poor accept their lot on earth. For the anarchists, at least, the Church represented nothing less than the psychological operations branch of the state. As such it was a target which ranked in importance with the Civil Guard.
During the war the nationalists claimed that 20,000 priests had been slaughtered; afterwards they said that 7,937 religious persons were killed. This figure was still over a thousand too high. Today, we know that out of a total ecclesiastical community of around 115,000, thirteen bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 members of other orders and 283 nuns were killed, the vast majority during the summer of 1936.1 It was a terrible slaughter, yet liberal Catholics abroad were later to state that the killing of priests was no worse than the right’s killing of left-wingers in the name of God. The Spanish Church was furious at this attitude, yet it said nothing when the nationalists shot sixteen of the Basque clergy including the arch-priest of Mondragon. Only the Bishop of Vitoria took a stand and persuaded the Pope to protest to General Franco, who was furious and declared that he would send bishops who supported him to Rome.2 Some twenty Protestant ministers were also killed by the nationalists, yet protests were useless.3 The most sensational item of propaganda in the world press involved the raping of nuns, yet the detailed nationalist indictment of republican crimes published in 1946 offers no evidence for any such incident, while hinting at only one.