Paul Preston - Franco

At the time that Franco’s letter was being written, Mola was complaining about the difficulties of liaison. 95 Telephone contact between Seville and Burgos was established immediately after the capture of Mérida. The two generals spoke on 11 August. Apparently oblivious to any eventual political implications, Mola agreed with Franco that there was no point duplicating his successful international contacts and therefore ceded to him the control of supplies. Mola’s political allies were appalled at his naïvety. José Ignacio Escobar asked him if he had therefore agreed on the telephone that the head of the movement be Franco. Mola replied guilelessly, ‘It is an issue which will be resolved when the time comes. Between Franco and I there are neither conflicts nor personal ambitions. We see entirely eye-to-eye and to leave in his hands this business of the procurement of arms abroad is just a way of avoiding a harmful duplication of effort.’ When Escobar insisted that this made Mola the second-in-command as far as the Germans were concerned, he brushed aside his remarks. The control of arms supplies guaranteed that Franco and not Mola, with all the attendant political implications, would dominate the assault on the capital. 96

After the occupation of Mérida, Yagüe’s troops turned back south-west towards Portugal to capture Badajoz, the principal town of Extremadura, on the banks of the River Guadiana near the Portuguese frontier. Although encircled, the walled city was still in the hands of numerous but ill-armed left-wing militiamen who had flocked there before the advancing Nationalist columns. Many were armed only with scythes and hunting shotguns. Most of the regular troops garrisoned there had been called away to reinforce the Madrid front. 97 If Yagüe had pressed on to Madrid, the Badajoz garrison could not seriously have threatened his column from the rear. It has been suggested that Franco’s decision to turn back to Badajoz was a strategic error, contributing to the delay which allowed the government to organize its defences. Accordingly, Nationalist historians have blamed Yagüe but the decision smacks of Franco’s caution rather than Yagüe’s frenetic impetuousness. Franco made all the major daily decisions merely leaving their implementation to Yagüe. He had personally supervised the operation against Mérida and, on the evening of 10 August, received Yagüe in his headquarters to discuss the capture of Badajoz and the next objectives. 98 He wanted to knock out Badajoz to clinch the unification of the two sections of the Nationalist zone and to cover completely the left flank of the advancing columns.

On 14 August, after heavy artillery and bombing attacks, the walls of Badajoz were breached by suicidal attacks from Yagüe’s Legionarios. Then a savage and indiscriminate slaughter began during which nearly two thousand people were shot, including many innocent civilians who were not political militants. According to Yagüe’s biographer, in ‘the paroxysm of war’, it was impossible to distinguish pacific citizens from leftist militiamen, the implication being that it was perfectly acceptable to shoot prisoners. 99 The Legionarios and Regulares unleashed an orgy of looting and the carnage left streets strewn with corpses, a scene of what one eyewitness called ‘desolation and dread’. After the heat of battle had cooled, two thousand prisoners were rounded up and herded to the bull-ring, and any with the bruise of a rifle recoil on their shoulders were shot. The shootings went on for weeks thereafter. Yagüe told the American journalist John T. Whitaker, who accompanied him for most of the march on Madrid, ‘Of course, we shot them. What do you expect? Was I supposed to take four thousand Reds with me as my column advanced racing against time? Was I expected to turn them loose in my rear and let them make Badajoz Red again?’. 100 In fact, the savagery unleashed on Badajoz reflected both the traditions of the Spanish Moroccan Army and the outrage of the African columns at encountering a solid resistance and, for the first time, suffering serious casualties. In retrospect, it can be seen that the events of Badajoz might have been taken to anticipate what would happen when the columns reached Madrid. The clear lesson was that the easy victories of the Legionarios and Regulares in open country were not replicated in built-up cities. This was not widely perceived in the Nationalist camp but the stiffening of Republican resistance does seem to have dented Franco’s earlier optimism.

The distant cloud of potential difficulties at Madrid could hardly dim Franco’s appreciation of the benefits won at Badajoz. Now, crucially, there was unrestricted access to the frontier of Portugal, the Nationalists’ first international ally. From the beginning, Oliveira Salazar had permitted the rebels to use Portuguese territory to link their northern and southern territories. 101 It was access to Portuguese help which, as much as any other factor, had decided Franco to swing his columns westwards through the province of Badajoz rather than the more direct route along the main road from Seville to Madrid, across the Sierra Morena via Córdoba. * 102

On 14 August, General Miguel Campins, Franco’s one-time friend and second-in-command at the Academia General Militar de Zaragoza, was tried in Seville for the crime of ‘rebellion’. The court martial was presided over by General José López Pinto. Campins was sentenced to death and shot on 16 August. 103 His crime was to have refused to obey Queipo’s demand on 18 July that he declare martial law in Granada and to have delayed two days before joining the rising. Franco was unable to overcome the determination of Queipo de Llano to have Campins shot. According to Franco’s cousin, despite refusing Queipo’s order, Campins had in fact telegraphed Franco putting himself under his orders. Franco wrote a number of letters to Queipo requesting that mercy be shown to Campins. Queipo simply tore them up but Franco did not push the matter further for fear of undermining the unity of the Nationalist camp. 104 According to his sister Pilar, Franco was upset by the death of his friend. 105 Queipo’s determination to execute Campins despite pleas for mercy reflected both his brutal character and his long-standing loathing of Franco. Franco took his revenge in 1937 by ignoring Queipo’s own pleas for mercy for his friend General Domingo Batet, who was condemned to death for opposing the rising in Burgos. 106

While Campins was being tried and shot, Franco made a cunning move which boosted his stock in the eyes of Spanish rightists at the expense of his rivals in the Junta. In Seville on 15 August, flanked by Queipo, he announced the decision to adopt the monarchist red-yellowred flag. Queipo acquiesced cynically, reluctant to draw attention to his own republicanism. Mola, who barely two weeks before had expelled the heir to the throne, was not consulted. Only with acute misgivings did General Cabanellas sign a decree of the Junta de Defensa Nacional two weeks later ratifying the use of the flag. 107 Franco had managed to present himself to conservatives and monarchists as the one certain element among the leading rebel generals. It was a clear indication that while the others thought largely of eventual victory, Franco kept a sharp eye on his own long-term political advantage.

In fact, Mola and Franco were worlds apart in both political preferences and in temperament. In the words of Mola’s secretary José María Iribarren, Mola ‘was neither cold, imperturbable nor hermetic. He was a man whose face transmitted the impressions of each moment, whose stretched nerves reflected disappointments’. 108 Mola himself seemed totally oblivious to security, strolling around Burgos alone and in civilian clothes. His headquarters were chaotic with visitors wandering in at all times. 109 Queipo de Llano was equally casual about visitors. In contrast, Franco had a bodyguard and the tightest security arrangements at his headquarters. Visitors were searched thoroughly and during interviews with Franco, the door was kept ajar and one of the guards kept watch via a strategically placed mirror. 110