Paul Preston - Franco

Only on 3 August, after his first units had crossed the Straits would Franco be added to the Junta de Burgos along with Queipo de Llano and Orgaz. The functions of the Junta were extremely vague. Indeed, the powers of Cabanellas were no more than symbolic. Queipo quickly established de facto a kind of vice-royal fief in Seville from which he would eventually govern most of the south. 45 There was potential friction between Queipo and Franco. Queipo loathed Franco personally and Franco distrusted Queipo as one of the generals who had betrayed the monarchy in 1931. In addition, there was a more immediate source of tension. Queipo wanted to use the troops being sent from Africa for a major campaign to spread out from the Seville-Huelva-Cádiz triangle which he controlled. He was eager to conquer all of Andalusia, the central and eastern hinterland of which was experiencing a process of revolutionary collectivisation. 46 Franco simply ignored Queipo’s aspirations.

In order to resolve the immediate difficulties over transporting the Moroccan Army across the Straits, Franco had turned to fellow rightists abroad for help. On 19 July, the Dragon Rapide had set off for Lisbon and then Marseille, en route back to London. Aboard the aircraft, Luis Bolín carried the paper scribbled by Franco authorizing him to negotiate the purchase of aircraft and other supplies. Bolín left the Dragon Rapide at Marseille and continued on to Rome by train. 47 Franco’s early efforts to gain foreign assistance were ultimately successful but they involved several days of frantic effort and frustration. Moreover, it was to be his own efforts, rather than those of Bolín or the monarchist emissaries sent by Mola, which would secure Italian aid since Mussolini was highly suspicious of Spanish rightists eternally announcing that their revolution was about to start. 48

While Bolín was still travelling, Franco spoke on 20 July to the Italian military attaché in Tangier, Major Giuseppe Luccardi and asked for his help in obtaining transport aircraft. Luccardi telegraphed military intelligence in Rome, where there was grave doubt about the wisdom of helping the Spanish rebels, doubts shared to the full by Mussolini. 49 On 21 July, Franco spoke again to Major Luccardi, stressing the desperate difficulties that he faced in getting his troops across the Straits. Luccardi was sufficiently impressed to put Franco in touch with the Italian Minister Plenipotentiary in Tangier, Pier Filippo de Rossi del Lion Nero. Franco convinced him on 22 July to send a telegram to Rome requesting twelve bombers or civilian transport aircraft. Mussolini simply scribbled ‘NO’ in blue pencil at the bottom of the telegram. On a desperate follow-up telegram, the Duce wrote only ‘FILE’. 50 Meanwhile, Bolín had arrived in Rome on 21 July. At first, he and the Marqués de Viana, armed with a letter of presentation from the exiled Alfonso XIII, were received enthusiastically by the new Italian foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano. Fresh from his long conversation with Franco in Casablanca in the early hours of 19 July, Bolín assured Ciano that, with Sanjurjo dead, Franco would be undisputed leader of the rising. Despite Ciano’s initial sympathy, after consulting Mussolini, he turned Bolín away. 51 However, Ciano had been sufficiently intrigued by De Rossi’s telegram to request further assessments from Tangier of the seriousness of Franco’s bid for power. 52

While he was still evaluating the information coming in from Tangier, Ciano received on 25 July a more prestigious delegation sent by General Mola. Unaware of Franco’s efforts to secure Italian assistance, Mola had called a meeting in Burgos on 22 July with six important monarchists. * Mola outlined the need for foreign help and it was decided that José Ignacio Escobar, the aristocratic owner of La Época , would go to Berlin and Antonio Goicoechea, who had signed a pact with Mussolini in March 1934, would lead a delegation to Rome. When Goicoechea’s group spoke to Ciano they revealed that Mola was more concerned with rifle cartridges than with aeroplanes. 53 Mola’s plea for ammunition seemed small-scale in comparison with Franco’s ambitious appeal. Mussolini was by this time beginning to get interested in the Spanish situation as a consequence of the news that the French were about to aid the Republic. 54 Accordingly, in response more to Franco’s personal efforts with the Italian authorities in Tangier than to the efforts of monarchists in Rome, Ciano finally responded to Franco’s request for aircraft on 28 July with twelve Savoia-Marchetti S.81 Pipistrello bombers. 55

The bombers were despatched from the Sardinian capital Cagliari in the early hours of the morning of 30 July. As a result of unexpectedly strong headwinds, three ran out of fuel, one crashing into the sea, one crashing while attempting an emergency landing at Oujda near the Algerian border and a third landing safely in the French zone of Morocco where it was impounded. 56 On 30 July, Franco was informed that the remaining nine had landed at the aerodrome of Nador. However, they were grounded for the next five days until a tanker of high-octane fuel for their Alfa Romeo engines was sent from Cagliari. Since there were insufficient Spaniards able to fly them, the Italian pilots enrolled in the Spanish Foreign Legion. 57 German aircraft also soon began to arrive and the operation for getting the troops of the Moroccan Army across the Straits intensified.

The history of the negotiations for Italian aid shows Franco seizing the initiative and pursuing it with dogged determination. It also shows that Mussolini and Ciano unequivocally placed their bets on Franco rather than on Mola. The exchange of telegrams between Ciano and De Rossi refers to the ‘Francoist’ rebellion and to ‘Franco’s movement’. 58 In Germany too, Franco’s contacts prospered more. In fact, Mola had substantial prior connections but his various emissaries got entangled in the web of low level bureaucracy in Berlin. In contrast, Franco had the good fortune to secure the backing of energetic Nazis resident in Morocco who had good party contacts through the Auslandorganisation. Moreover, as it had with the Italians, his command of the most powerful section of the Spanish Army weighed heavily with the Germans. 59

Franco’s first efforts to get German help were unambitious. Among his staff in Tetuán, the person with the best German contacts was Beigbeder. Accordingly, on 22 July, Franco and Beigbeder asked the German consulate at Tetuán to send a telegram to General Erich Kühlental, the German military attaché to both France and Spain, an admirer of Franco who was based in Paris. The telegram requested that he arrange for ten troop-transport planes with German crews to be sent to Spanish Morocco and ended ‘The contract will be signed afterwards. Very urgent! On the word of General Franco and Spain’. This modest telegram was incapable of instigating the sort of official help that Franco needed. It received a cool reception when it reached Berlin in the early hours of the morning of 23 July. 60 However, almost immediately after its despatch, Franco had decided to make a direct appeal to Hitler.

On 21 July, the day before sending the telegram to Kühlental, Franco had been approached by a German businessman resident in Morocco, Johannes Eberhard Franz Bernhardt, who was an active Nazi Party member and friend of Mola, Yagüe, Beigbeder and other Africanistas. Bernhardt was to be the key to decisive German assistance. Uneasy about the telegram to Kühlental, Franco decided later in the day on 22 July to use Bernhardt to make a formal approach to the Third Reich for transport aircraft. Bernhardt informed the Ortsgruppenleiter of the Nazi Party in Morocco, another resident Nazi businessman, Adolf Langenheim. 61 Langenheim reluctantly agreed to go to Germany with Bernhardt, and Captain Francisco Arranz, staff chief of Franco’s minuscule Air Forces. 62 The plan was facilitated by the arrival in Tetuán on 23 July of a Lufthansa Junkers Ju-52/3m mail plane which, on Franco’s orders, Orgaz had requisitioned in Las Palmas on 20 July. The Bernhardt mission was a bold initiative by Franco which would make him the beneficiary of German assistance and constitute a giant step on his path to absolute power.