Paul Preston - Franco

Particularly spine-chilling accounts of what was happening were given to the cadets in Toledo by their instructors. There was outrage that pacifists and revolutionaries should be on the loose while part of the Army was fighting for survival in Morocco. The many international demonstrations on behalf of Francisco Ferrer were seen by the young Franco as the work of international freemasonry. The circle of cadets in which Franco moved regarded the events in Barcelona, and the defeat at Barranco del Lobo, as evidence that the political establishment was weak and incompetent. 37

The gulf between the military and civil society was widening dramatically at this time. It is impossible to comprehend Franco either personally or politically without understanding the extent to which he first assumed and then expressed the attitudes of the typical Army officer of his day. The milestones along the road to the civil-military divorce – the ‘disaster’ of 1898, the Cu-Cut! incident of 1905, the ‘tragic week’ of 1909 – were reached either shortly before Franco joined the Army or during his early, formative, years in the service. These events and their professional and political implications were inevitably the talk of military academies and officers’ messes. For someone as single-mindedly, not to say obsessively, committed to the military career as the young Franco, it was impossible for the resentments arising from these events not to be burnt deep into his consciousness.

Franco completed his studies at the Academy in June 1910. His ambition, like that of most of those who graduated at that time, was to go and fight in Morocco, where rapid promotion was possible and where he could help wipe out the shame of Cuba. On 13 July 1910, Franco was formally incorporated into the officer corps of the Army as a second lieutenant with the mediocre position of no. 251 of the 312 cadets of his year (of the original 381) who survived to graduate. Despite this mediocre start, Franco would be the first of his class to become a general.

It has been claimed that the young Franco applied immediately for a posting in Morocco, and was refused on the grounds of age, tough competition and his low place in the seniority list. 38 In fact, there would have been no point making a formal application for a posting in Morocco since, at the time, only first lieutenants and above could be posted to Africa. 39 He was posted to the Regimiento de Zamora no. 8 , which was stationed in his home town of El Ferrol. There, from 22 August 1910 until February 1912, he was able to be near his mother and to show off his uniform to his contemporaries. He also had to face the crushing boredom of garrison duty in a small provincial town. Mornings were given over to parades and drills, afternoons to riding. Then there were guard duties. He was often able to eat at home. During this time, the continuing influence of his mother was reflected in the fact that he joined the religious confraternity Adoración Nocturna on 11 June 1911. 40 He also consolidated his friendship with Camilo Alonso Vega and with his cousin Pacón. At the end of 1911, the order prohibiting second lieutenants from being posted to Morocco was lifted and all three began to make frequent transfer requests.

Perhaps suffocated by the gloomy domestic situation, probably driven by patriotism, certainly aware of a second lieutenant’s poor pay and that opportunities for promotion would come easier in Morocco than in a Peninsular garrison, Franco was anxious to be on his way and to overcome his 251st placing. While he was harkening to the siren calls of Africa, the Left was campaigning vigorously against the colonial war in general and against conscription in particular. Like many young soldiers, Franco developed what would be a lifelong contempt for left-wing pacifism. With the situation of the Spanish Army deteriorating in Morocco, the transfer requests of the three young officers were finally accepted on 6 February 1912. They were posted as reserves to Melilla. Franco and his two companions immediately set off on the long and difficult journey. With the road to the nearest railway station flooded by rain storms, and the port for the normal ferry service to La Coruña closed, they decided to go to the Naval Headquarters in El Ferrol in search of a ride. They were allowed to travel on board the merchant ship Paulina , which involved a hair-raising storm-tossed six hour journey standing in a gangway. From La Coruña, they carried on by rail to Málaga where they arrived after two days travel. They reached Morocco on 17 February 1912. 41

The thin, boy soldier with round staring eyes who arrived in Melilla found a filthy, run-down colonial town. 42 The nineteen year-old Franco reported for duty at the Fort of Tifasor which was part of the outer defences of Melilla. Tifasor was under the command of Colonel José Villalba Riquelme, who had been Director of the Academia de Infantería when Franco was a cadet. Villalba Riquelme’s first order to him was to cover his sword scabbard in mat leather to stop it glinting and providing a target for snipers. Indeed, in the shortest time possible, Franco had to learn this and all the other practicalities of life in combat that he had not been taught in the Academy in Toledo nor learned on garrison duty in El Ferrol. Like most young officers, he can have had little expectation of the difficulties that faced the Spanish Army in the field.

The most obvious problem was the warlike local population’s bitter hatred of the occupying troops. Given the poor technological level of the Spanish armed forces, the Moroccan adventure would be no pushover. The Army was inefficient, weighed down by bureaucracy and inadequately supplied with obsolete equipment: it had more generals and fewer artillery pieces per thousand men than the armies of such countries as Montenegro, Romania and Portugal. Its eighty thousand men were commanded by more than tweny-four thousand officers of whom 471 were generals. 43 In the eyes of Army officers, the most damaging source of difficulty was the inability of the Spanish political establishment to provide either the resources or the decisive policy necessary to give the professional soldiers any chance of success. Indeed, the political élite’s awareness of the growing pacificism of much of public opinion merely confirmed many Army officers in their belief that Spain could not be properly ruled by civilians. Moreover, there was Spain’s subordinate position to France in the area. Spain was burdened with indefensible frontiers in Morocco which simply ignored the realities of tribal boundaries. French dominance also inhibited Madrid’s policy-making.

How this came to be so is almost inextricably complicated. Morocco was ruled by a Sultan who had to impose by terror his authority and his tax-collection system on the other tribal leaders. In the early years of the century, tribal leaders rebelled against the dissolute Sultan Abd el Aziz. In the general upheaval, two major revolts took place. The first was that of Bu Hamara in the lands between Fez and the Algerian border. The more important was that of El Raisuni, a vicious cattle rustler and tribal leader, in the Jibala mountains of the north-west. In the context of the still incomplete scramble for Africa, it was a situation that attracted the great powers.

For many years, Britain had maintained influence in Morocco to guarantee safe passage through the Straits of Gibraltar. However, since the humiliating debacle of the Fashoda incident in 1898 which had blocked their Egyptian ambitions, the French had been seeking to consolidate their empire to the west. They were anxious to find a way to take over the Moroccan Sultanate which was the obvious gap in an imperial chain from Equatorial Africa to Tunisia. By 1903, Britain, weakened by the Boer War, was apprehensive of the rise of Germany and open to a French Alliance. Unable in any case to prevent a French take-over, the British wanted above all to safeguard Gibraltar. In April 1904, in the Anglo-French Agreement, Britain consented to French ambitions in Morocco provided that the area opposite Gibraltar be in weaker, Spanish, hands. 44