Paul Preston - Franco

On 7 February, after a rapid march, Nationalists and Italians reached Málaga. Its military command had been changed with alarming frequency in the preceding days, morale was abysmally low, and after bombing raids by Italian aircraft and bombardment by Nationalist warships, the city collapsed easily. Italian troops were first to enter Málaga and briefly ruled the city before ostentatiously handing it over to the Spaniards. Roatta claimed the victory for Mussolini and sent a triumphant, and implicitly wounding, telegram to Franco: ‘Troops under my command have the honour to hand over the city of Málaga to Your Excellency’. 94 In fact, given the massive numerical and logistical superiority of the attackers, the triumph was less of an achievement than it seemed at the time. Neglected by the Valencia government, the defending forces were in more or less the same state of readiness as the improvised militiamen who had faced Franco’s Army of Africa six months earlier. 95 Neither the Nationalists nor the Italians showed much mercy. The international outcry was less than that provoked by the massacre of Badajoz, because Franco had ordered all war correspondents to be kept out of Málaga. 96 After the battle, Queipo and Roatta sent a motorised column to pursue refugees escaping along the coast road. Within the city itself nearly four thousand Republicans were shot in the first week alone and the killings continued on a large scale for months. The refugees who blocked the road out of Málaga were shelled from the sea and bombed and machine-gunned from the air. 97

When Roatta’s news of the victory at Málaga reached Salamanca, Franco unsurprisingly showed little interest. His humiliating subordination to Mussolini had been starkly underlined. Millán Astray, who came to congratulate the Generalísimo and found him absorbed gazing at a huge wall map, exclaimed: ‘I expected to find you celebrating the victory in Málaga not here on your own looking at a map.’ Franco diminished the Italian achievement by pointing at the map and saying ‘Just look what remains to be conquered! I can’t afford the luxury of taking time off.’ 98 This gloomy and contrived effect of unceasing military dedication was out of tune with Franco’s normally irrepressible faith in victory. He was certainly preoccupied by the progress of the battle in the Jarama valley which he had launched just as Málaga was about to fall but he could hardly have been immune to the fact that the loss of Málaga was a fierce blow to the Republic in terms of captured territory, prisoners and weaponry. He had gained the food-producing province of Málaga and most of Granada, deprived his enemies of a strategically crucial sea port with a population of one hundred and fifty thousand people and shortened the southern front. The feigned lack of interest revealed his resentment of the disdainful Roatta and the fact that he could take no pleasure in a triumph attributed by the world’s press to Mussolini. 99

The fall of Málaga provoked a major internecine crisis within the Republic. The Communists began to reveal their impatience with Largo Caballero and obliged him to accept the resignation of General Asensio, his under-secretary of war. 100 Ironically, the one negative consequence for Franco of such an easy victory was the totally erroneous notion that both he and Mussolini derived of the efficacy of the Italian contingent. 101 Mussolini was so delighted that he promoted Roatta to Major-General. The Duce and his Chief of Staff at the Ministry of the Army, Alberto Pariani, immediately produced ambitious plans for the Italian troops to sweep on to Almería and then through Murcia and Alicante to Valencia. 102 However, Roatta’s reports to Rome on the eve of the attack on Málaga had presented a bleak picture of Italian disorganization, indiscipline and lack of technical preparation. Now he had to restrain Mussolini’s enthusiasm and persuade him that a long haul along the south coast exposed to constant flank attack would be less decisive than operations envisaged by Franco in the centre. 103

Franco was happy to get Italian help on the Madrid front and quick to deflate the euphoric Queipo who was anxious to use the triumph at Málaga as the basis for a triumphal march through Eastern Andalusia towards Almería. Franco remained obsessed with Madrid and had no reason to want to give away triumphs to Queipo de Llano. Accordingly, he prohibited further advance in Andalusia, to the bitter chagrin of Queipo. 104 It was, however, with some trepidation that Franco viewed the prospect of what seemed at the time like a fearsome Italian army, directed from Rome, allowing Mussolini graciously to hand him victories on a plate. It was a perception which would have disastrous consequences during the battle of Guadalajara.

At this time the nationalist press began to circulate a story which linked Franco’s destiny with the intercession of the saints. Allegedly, in the chaos of defeat, the military commander of Málaga, Colonel José Villalba Rubio, left various items of luggage behind him when he fled. In a suitcase left in his hotel was found the holy relic of the hand of St Teresa of Avila which had been stolen from the Carmelite Convent at Ronda. 105 In fact, the relic was found in police custody. It was sent to Franco who kept it with him for the rest of his life. The recovery of the relic was the excuse for the exaltation of St Teresa as ‘the Saint of the Race’, the champion of Spain and her religion in the Reconquista , during the conquest of America and in the battles of the Counter-Reformation. Catholic and political propagandists alike stressed the Saint’s association with the Caudillo in similar exaltation of his providential role. 106 Franco himself seems to have believed in his special relationship with St Teresa. Cardinal Gomá reported Franco’s reluctance to part with the arm as proof of his intense Catholic faith and his belief that he was leading a religious crusade. The Bishop of Málaga granted permission for the relic to remain in Franco’s possession and never left his side on any trip which obliged him to sleep away from home. * 107

Encouraged by the easy success which he anticipated in the south and by the availability of the Condor Legion, Franco had simultaneously renewed his efforts to take Madrid. On 6 February 1937, an army of nearly sixty thousand well-equipped men, under the direction of General Orgaz, had launched a huge attack through the Jarama valley towards the Madrid-Valencia highway to the east of the capital. Still convinced that he could capture the capital, Franco took a special interest in the campaign. 108 Two days later, his determination to win would be intensified by a desire for a victory to overshadow the Italian triumph at Málaga.

Almost simultaneously, Mussolini had sent a new Ambassador to Nationalist Spain, the emollient Roberto Cantalupo, who arrived shortly after the battle for Málaga. 109 It was a reflection of Franco’s seething resentment at the behaviour of Roatta and Mussolini over the conquest of Málaga that he kept Cantalupo waiting for days before receiving him. Cantalupo got a sense that, although everyone knew that Málaga had been captured by the Italians, no one said so. ‘Here’, he reported to Ciano on 17 February, ‘the coin of gratitude circulates hardly at all.’ When he finally met the Caudillo for an informal meeting, Cantalupo got the impression that Franco believed in ultimate victory but was no longer certain that it was anything other than a long way off. If anything, the Caudillo seemed to prefer the prospect of a long war although he put off explaining why for a future meeting. He did make it clear that he would not contemplate a negotiated peace. 110

The implicit conflict between Mussolini’s urge for the rapid and spectacular defeat of the Republic and Franco’s gradual approach quickly came into the open. Four days after the fall of Málaga, Roatta being wounded, he sent his Chief of Staff, Colonel Emilio Faldella, to visit the Generalísimo in Salamanca and discuss the next operation in which the Corpo di Truppe Volontarie (CTV), as the Italian forces now came to be known, might be used. On the afternoon of 12 February, Faldella found Franco’s staff jubilant about their forces’ early thrust over the Jarama river and what they assumed to be an imminent and decisive victory. Faldella was told by Franco’s chief of operations, Colonel Antonio Barroso, that Alcalá de Henares would be occupied within five days and Madrid cut off from Valencia. Faldella told Barroso that he was going to propose that the next operation for the CTV should be an offensive against both Sagunto, to the north of Valencia, and Valencia itself, one of the options favoured by Mussolini since mid-January and communicated to the Generalísimo by Anfuso on 22 January. Barroso advised him against even mentioning it on the grounds that Franco would never allow the Italians to carry out an autonomous assault on a politically sensitive target like the Republican capital, given his central concern with his own prestige. Accordingly, after consulting Roatta by telephone, Faldella altered the note which he had brought for Franco to suggest instead the remaining option of those contemplated by Mussolini after the meeting with Göring, a major push from Sigüenza to Guadalajara to close the circle around Madrid. 111