Paul Preston - Franco

* The necessary funds to hire Dragon Rapide G-ACYR – £2000 – were supplied by Juan March through the Fenchurch Street branch of Kleinwort’s Bank.

* On other occasions, Franco would show a similar determination to move on, apparently indifferent to the tragedy just recounted to him. The demise of Alfonso XIII in 1931, the death of Mola in April 1937 and Mussolini’s fall from power in 1943 all produced nearly identical responses.

* There they were met by Franco’s friend, the Spanish military attaché in Paris, Major Antonio Barroso who escorted them to Bayonne. They were to remain for the first three months of the Civil War in the home of the Polo family’s old governess Madame Claverie, under the protection of Lorenzo Martínez Fuset.

* After the civil war, Bebb and Pollard were decorated with the Falangist decoration the Knight’s Cross of the Imperial Order of the Yoke and the Arrows. Dorothy Watson and Diana Pollard were given the medal of the same order.

THERE CAN be no doubt that the unlikely figure of Franco, short and with a premature paunch, had a remarkable power to lift the morale of those around him. It was a quality which would play a crucial role in the Nationalist victory and would single him out as leader of the rebel war effort. Having finally shaken himself out of his spring-time hesitations, he once again temporarily resumed the adventurous persona which had served him so well in his rise to the rank of general. It could not have been better suited to the early days of the rising and would see him victoriously through the first months of the Civil War and take him to the doors of absolute power. At that point, caution would reassert itself.

When he drove into Tetuán from the aerodrome at 7.30 a.m. on the morning of Sunday 19 July, the streets were already lined with people shouting ‘¡Viva España!’ and ‘¡Viva Franco!’. He was greeted at the offices of the Spanish High Commission by military bands and gushingly enthusiastic officers. One of his first acts in his new headquarters was to draw up an address to his fellow military rebels throughout Morocco and in Spain. The text throbbed with self-confidence. Declaring that ‘Spain is saved’, it ended with words which summed up Franco’s unquestioning confidence, ‘Blind faith, no doubts, firm energy without vacillations, because the Patria demands it. The Movimiento sweeps all before it and there is no human force that can stop it’. Broadcast repeatedly by local radio stations, it had the instant effect of raising rebel spirits. When he reached Ceuta in the early afternoon, the scenes which he encountered were more consistent with the beginning of a great adventure than of a bloody civil war. Later in the day, he drove to the headquarters of the Legion in Dar Riffien. Nearly sixteen years earlier, he had arrived there for the first time to become second-in-command of the newly created force. His sense of destiny cannot fail to have been excited by the fact that now he was met by wildly euphoric soldiers chanting ‘Franco! Franco! Franco!’. Yagüe made a short and emotional speech: ‘Here they are, just as you left them … Magnificent and ready for anything. You, Franco, who so many times led them to victory, lead them again for the honour of Spain’. The newly arrived leader, on the verge of tears, embraced Yagüe and spoke to the Legionarios. He recognized that they were hungry for combat and raised their pay, already double that of the regular Army, by one peseta per day. 1

That practical gesture was evidence that, behind the rhetoric, he was aware of the need to consolidate the support of those on whom he would have to rely in the next crucial weeks. Immediately on arriving at the High Commission, he had spent time in conclave with Colonels Saenz de Buruaga, Beigbeder and Martín Moreno discussing ways of recruiting Moorish volunteers. 2 Now, on his return to Tetuán from Dar-Riffien, he took a further measure to secure Moroccan goodwill. He awarded the Gran Visir Sidi Ahmed el Gamnia Spain’s highest medal for bravery, the Gran Cruz Laureada de San Fernando , for his efforts in containing single-handed an anti-Spanish riot in Tetuán. 3 It was a gesture which was to facilitate the subsequent recruiting of Moroccan mercenaries to fight in peninsular Spain. 4

The readiness of Franco to use Moroccan troops in Spain had already been demonstrated in October 1934. The gruesome practices of the Legion and the Regulares were to be repeated with terrible efficacy during the bloodthirsty advance of the Army of Africa towards Madrid in 1936. At a conscious level, it was no doubt for him a simple military decision. The Legion and the Regulares were the most effective soldiers in the Spanish armed forces and it was natural that he would use them without agonizing over the moral implications. The central epic of Spanish history, deeply embedded in the national culture and especially so in right-wing culture, was the struggle against the Moors from 711 to 1492. In more recent times, the conquest of the Moroccan protectorate had cost tens of thousands of Spanish lives. Accordingly, the use of Moorish mercenaries against Spanish civilians was fraught with significance. It showed just how partial and partisan in class terms was the Nationalists’ interpretation of patriotism and their determination to win whatever the price in blood.

Franco believed that he was rebelling to save the Patria , or rather his version of it, from Communist infiltration, and any means to do so were licit. He did not view liberal and working class voters for the Popular Front as part of the Patria. In that sense, as the Asturian campaign of 1934 had suggested, Franco would regard the working class militiamen who were about to oppose his advance on Madrid in the same way as he had regarded the Moorish tribesmen whom it had been his job to pacify between 1912 and 1925. He would conduct the early stages of his war effort as if it were a colonial war against a racially contemptible enemy. The Moors would spread terror wherever they went, loot the villages they captured, rape the women they found, kill their prisoners and sexually mutilate the corpses. 5 Franco knew that such would be the case and had written a book in which his approval of such methods was clear. 6 If he had any qualms, they were no doubt dispelled by an awareness of the enormity of the task facing himself and his fellow rebels. Franco knew that, if they failed, they would be shot. In such a context, the Army of Africa was a priceless asset, a force of shock troops capable of absorbing losses without there being political repercussions. 7 The use of terror, both immediate and as a long-term investment, was something which Franco understood instinctively. During, and long after the Civil War, those of his enemies not physically eliminated would be broken by fear, terrorised out of opposition and forced to seek survival in apathy.

Because of his cool resolve and his infectious optimism, the decision of Franco to join the rising and to take over the Spanish forces in Morocco was a considerable boost to the morale of the rebels everywhere. Described as ‘brother of the well-known airman’ and ‘a turncoat general’ by The Times , he was stripped of his rank by the Republic on 19 July. 8 He was one of only four of the twenty-one Major-Generals on active service to declare against the government, the others being Goded, Queipo and Cabanellas. 9 There were officers whose decision to join the rising was clinched by hearing about Franco. 10 More than one rebel officer in mainland Spain reacted to the news with a spontaneous shout of ‘ ¡Franquito está con nosotros! ¡Hemos ganado! ’ (Franco’s with us. We’ve won). 11 They were wrong in the sense that the plotters, with the partial exception of Franco, who expected the struggle to last a couple of months, had not foreseen that the attempted coup would turn into a long civil war. Their plans had been for a rapid alzamiento , or rising, to be followed by a military directory like that established by Primo de Rivera in 1923, and they had not counted on the strength of working class resistance.