Paul Preston - Franco

Nevertheless, the plotters were fortunate that their two most able generals, Franco and Mola, had been successful in the early hours of the coup. While Franco to the far south of Spanish territory could rely on the brutal military forces of the Moroccan protectorate, Mola, in the north enjoyed the almost uniformly committed support of the local civilian Carlists of Navarre. In Pamplona, the Carlist population had turned the coup into a popular festival, thronging the streets and shouting ¡Viva Cristo Rey! (long live Christ the King). These two successes permitted the implementation of the rebel plan of simultaneous marches on Madrid.

On 18 July, that broad strategy was still in the future. The rising had been successful only in the north and north-west of Spain, and in isolated pockets of the south. With a few exceptions, rebel triumphs followed the electoral geography of the Republic. In Galicia and the deeply Catholic rural regions of Old Castile and León, where the Right had enjoyed mass support, the coup met little opposition. The conservative ecclesiastical market towns – Burgos, Salamanca, Zamora, Segovia and Avila, fell almost without struggle. In contrast, in Valladolid, after Generals Andrés Saliquet and Miguel Ponte had arrested the head of the VII Military Region, General Nicolás Molero, it took their men, aided by local Falangist militia, nearly twenty-four hours to crush the Socialist railway workers of Valladolid. 12 Elsewhere, in most of the Andalusian countryside, where the landless labourers formed the mass of the population, the left took power. In the southern cities, it was a different story. A general strike in Cádiz seemed to have won the town for the workers but after the arrival of reinforcements from Morocco, the rebels under Generals José López Pinto and José Enrique Varela, gained control. Córdoba, Huelva, Seville and Granada all fell after the savage liquidation of working class resistance. Seville, the Andalusian capital and the most revolutionary southern city, fell to the lanky eccentric Queipo de Llano and a handful of fellow-conspirators who seized the divisional military headquarters by bluff and bravado. Related to Alcalá Zamora by marriage, Queipo had been considered a republican until the demise of the President inspired a seething hatred of the regime. Perhaps in expiation of his republican past, he would soon be notorious for the implacable ferocity first demonstrated by the bloody repression of working class districts during his take-over of Seville. 13

In most major urban and industrial centres – Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao – the popular forces by-passed the dithering Republican government and seized power, defeating the military rebels in the process. In Madrid, the general in charge of the rising, Rafael Villegas, was in hiding and sent his second-in-command, General Fanjul, to take command of the one post they held, the Montaña barracks. Besieged by local working class forces, Fanjul was captured and subsequently tried and executed. 14 After defeating the rebels at the Montaña barracks, left-wing militiamen from the capital headed south to reverse the success of the rising in Toledo. With loyal regular troops, they captured the town. However, the rebels under Colonel José Moscardó, the town’s military commander, retreated into the Alcázar, the impregnable fortress which dominates both Toledo and the river Tagus which curls around it on the southern, eastern and western sides.

The defeat of the rising in Barcelona deprived the conspirators of one of their most able generals, Manuel Goded, a potential rival to Franco both militarily and politically. In Barcelona, Companys refused to issue arms but depots were seized by the CNT. In the early hours of 19 July, rebel troops began to march on the city centre. They were met by anarchists and the local Civil Guard which, decisively, had stayed loyal. The CNT stormed the Atarazanas barracks, where the rebels had set up headquarters. When Goded arrived by seaplane from the Balearic Islands to join them, the rising was already defeated. Captured, he was forced to broadcast an appeal to his followers to lay down their arms. The defeat of the rebellion in Barcelona was vital for the government, since it ensured that all of Catalonia would remain loyal. 15

In the Basque Country, divided between its Catholic peasantry and its urban Socialists, the Republic’s support for local national regionalist aspirations tipped the balance against the rebels. As Franco had foreseen, the role of the Civil Guard and the Assault Guards was to be crucial. Where the two police forces remained loyal to the government, as they did in most large cities, the conspirators were defeated. In Zaragoza, the stronghold of the CNT, where they did not, the decisive united action of the police and the military garrison had taken over the city before the anarcho-syndicalist masses could react. In Oviedo, the audacious military commander, Colonel Antonio Aranda, seized power by trickery and bravery. He persuaded both Madrid and the local Asturian left-wing forces that he was true to the Republic. Several thousand miners confidently left the city to assist in the defence of Madrid only for many of them to be massacred in a Civil Guard ambush in Ponferrada. Aranda, after speaking with Mola on the telephone, declared for the rebels. By the following day, Oviedo was under siege from enraged miners. 16 The insurgent triumphs in Oviedo, Zaragoza and the provincial capitals of Andalusia had faced sufficient popular hostility to suggest that a full-scale war of conquest would have to be fought before the rebels would control of all of Spain.

After three days, the conspirators held about one third of Spain in a huge block including Galicia, León, Old Castile, Aragón and part of Extremadura, together with isolated enclaves like Oviedo, Seville and Córdoba. Galicia was crucial for its ports, agricultural products and as a base for attacks on Asturias. The rebels also had the great wheat-growing areas, but the main centres of both heavy and light industry in Spain remained in Republican hands. They faced the legitimate government and much of the Army, although its loyalty was sufficiently questionable for the Republican authorities to make less than full use of it. The government was unstable and indecisive. Indeed, the rebels received a promising indication of the real balance of power when Casares Quiroga resigned to be replaced briefly by a cabinet bent on some form of compromise with the rebels. When Casares withdrew, President Azaña held consultations with the moderate Republican, Diego Martínez Barrio, with the Socialists Largo Caballero and Prieto and with his friend, the conservative Republican, Felipe Sánchez Román. As the basis of a compromise, Sánchez Román suggested a package of measures including the prohibition of strikes and a total crack-down on left-wing militias. The outcome was a cabinet of the centre under Martínez Barrio. Convinced that this was a cabinet ready to capitulate to military demands, the rebels were in no mood for compromise. 17

It was now too late. Neither Mola nor the Republican forces to the left of Martínez Barrio were prepared to accept any deal. When Martínez Barrio made his fateful telephone call to Mola at 2 a.m. on 19 July, the conversation was polite but sterile. Offered a post in the government, Mola refused on the grounds that it was too late and an accommodation would mean the betrayal of the rank-and-file of both sides. 18 On the following day, Martínez Barrio was replaced by José Giral, a follower of Azaña. After his Minister of War, General José Miaja, also tried unsuccessfully to negotiate Mola’s surrender, Giral quickly grasped the nature of the situation and took the crucial step of authorizing the arming of the workers. Thereafter, the defence of the Republic fell to the left-wing militias. In consequence, the revolution which Franco believed himself to have been forestalling was itself precipitated by the military rebellion. In taking up arms to fight the rebels, the Left picked up the power abandoned by the bourgeois political establishment which had crumbled. The middle class Republican Left, the moderate Socialists and the Communist Party then combined to play down the revolution and restore power to the bourgeois Republic. By May 1937, they would be successful, suffocating the revolutionary élan of the working class along the way.