Paul Preston - The Last Days of the Spanish Republic

Negrín was fully aware of the significance of Munich. He knew that Republican victory was impossible. In late September 1938, the deputy secretary of the PSOE executive, Juan-Simeón Vidarte, told him that the committee’s members remained convinced that the unconditional surrender demanded by Franco was out of the question. Commenting that no one forgot what had happened in Andalusia, Extremadura, the Basque Country and Asturias, he remarked: ‘We can’t hand over half of Spain and an army of a million men so that they can exterminate them as they like.’ Negrín replied with resigned realism: ‘Guarantees for an honourable peace is all that I want.’ 37To this effect, he consulted the Republic’s legal adviser Felipe Sánchez Román, who drafted the minimal conditions which Negrín accepted as the basis for negotiations with Franco, including a promise not to take reprisals against the supporters of the Republican government and a guarantee to maintain public order. 38

Another close friend of Negrín, the cardiologist Dr Rafael Méndez Martínez, at the time Director General of the border guards, the Carabineros, wrote later of how the spirit of victory had been tranformed into the spirit of resistance that would last until such time as it was possible to achieve ‘the second of his aims, a satisfactory peace’. In this regard, he believed that only an effective and well-ordered resistance that prolonged the war might persuade the democracies to help negotiate such a settlement. ‘Once Negrín had accepted that victory was impossible, the nub of his policy was resistance to the end and the mobilization of international support to achieve a peace settlement that would prevent the extermination of thousands and thousands of Republicans.’ His peace initiatives included a secret meeting with the German Ambassador in Paris. 39

Over the next two months, their success at the Ebro would see Franco’s forces sweep through Catalonia. Confident that, after Munich, the Republic would not find salvation in a European war, Franco gathered over 30,000 fresh troops. He granted substantial mining concessions to the Third Reich in return for sizeable deliveries of German equipment. 40With the French frontier closed and help from the Soviet Union reduced to a trickle, Franco had every possible advantage for his final push. Months of Italian bombing raids had taken their toll on morale. An immense army was gathered along a line surrounding Catalonia from the Mediterranean in the east to the Ebro in the west and to the Pyrenees to the north. Originally planned for 10 December, the offensive was postponed until the 15th. Further delays were caused by a period of torrential rain and it was eventually launched on 23 December. 41The scale of war-weariness, resentment of the conflict’s human and economic costs and defeatism in the wake of Munich made a successful defence seem the remotest possibility. Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming superiority of the attacking forces in terms of air cover, artillery and sheer numbers, the Republican retreat never turned into a rout. Franco could rotate his troops every forty-eight hours while the Republicans had had no leave for seven weeks.

The forces of Enrique Líster managed to hold up the Nationalist advance for nearly two weeks at Borjas Blancas on the road from Lérida to Tarragona. Nevertheless, the advance was inexorable. On New Year’s Eve, a ferocious Italian bombing raid on Barcelona brought to the city what Negrín, in a broadcast to the United States, called ‘sorrow and mourning’. His Minister of Foreign Affairs, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, commented: ‘Perhaps this is “Happy New Year” in the Italian language.’ Herbert Matthews, who had helped Negrín polish his English for the broadcast, wrote later: ‘I had never seen him so moved.’ On 4 January 1939, the Francoists broke through at Borjas Blancas and the end was nigh for Catalonia. Without adequate armaments and with the troops drained after their superhuman efforts, the road was open to Tarragona and then on to Barcelona. The bespectacled Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Tagüeña, a tall, thin mathematician who had risen through the ranks of the militias to command an army corps, mounted a determined defence but had only a fraction of the necessary weaponry. 42

In the wake of the Munich Agreement and the consequent conviction in Moscow that Russia had been betrayed by the democracies, a concern for security saw Stalin start to make tentative overtures to Nazi Germany. Engaged in a war with Japan in China, with serious preocupations in Eastern Europe, and with obstacles in the way of transport to Spain, Russia had to cut back on aid in the last six months of the Civil War just as Germany and Italy significantly increased their assistance to Franco. The consequence was, in the words of Herbert Matthews, that:

the last year of fighting was a miracle of dogged, hopeless courage, made possible solely by the tenacity and indomitable spirit of Negrín. However, this astonishing display of leadership was the most bitterly criticized feature among Spaniards of Dr Negrín’s career. The fight was hopeless, his critics said, and all that ‘unnecessary’ destruction, all those extra lives lost, all the intensified hatred of Spaniard for Spaniard, could have been avoided. It is certain, on the other hand, that the Loyalists could have held out longer had it not been for treachery, and that World War II could have saved Republican Spain … Don Juan’s aims were consistent, patriotic and honorable. He stood for a fight to the finish, first to save the Second Republic and – when that became impossible – to get the best terms for those who had remained loyal. In the process, he had to rely heavily on Stalinist Russia and then almost exclusively on the Spanish Communists. 43

While Negrín continued desperately trying to maintain a war effort in the hope, not of victory, but of an honourable peace settlement, Casado worked to consolidate his links with both the Francoist espionage networks and the Fifth Column in Madrid. Without them, it would have been much more difficult for him to pull together the various elements of his coup. He was also seconded in what he did by the distinguished Socialist intellectual Julián Besteiro, Professor of Logic in the University of Madrid. On the night of 5 March, the two, together with disillusioned anarchist leaders such as Cipriano Mera and the Socialist trade union leader Wenceslao Carrillo, announced an anti-Negrín National Defence Junta (Consejo Nacional de Defensa) under the presidency of General José Miaja. The enterprise was driven by the hope that Casado’s contacts with the Francoist secret service and Besteiro’s links with the Fifth Column in Madrid would facilitate negotiation with Franco in Burgos. They may also have hoped that, by inspiring a military uprising ‘to save Spain from Communism’, they would somehow endear themselves to Franco.

Casado justified his action on the grounds that he was preventing a Moscow-inspired Communist take-over. Although such intentions on the part of the Communists were demonstrably non-existent, the fiction was believed by those in the Republican zone desperate for an end to the war, many of whom had already acquired a deep hostility to the Communists. 1Casado’s later justification was founded on his outrage that Negrín and the Communists had talked of resistance to the bitter end when shortages of food and equipment made that impossible. In denouncing Juan Negrín’s commitment to continued resistance, he was ignoring the Prime Minister’s Herculean efforts to secure by diplomacy a negotiated peace with adequate guarantees against a justifiably feared Francoist repression. According to Prieto, Negrín’s efforts had even extended to the Third Reich. It should be noted that Negrín’s diplomacy remained secret lest it trigger defeatism. 2Similarly, Casado seemed unaware of the extent to which Negrín’s rhetoric of resistance was a necessary bargaining chip to be used to secure a reasonable peace settlement with Franco.