Paul Preston - The Last Days of the Spanish Republic

One of the members of the Organización Antonio was a major in the army medical corps, Casado’s doctor Diego Medina Garijo. Another was a retired major of the medical corps, Dr Ricardo Bertoloty Ramírez. He was one of the team that had saved Franco’s life in 1916 when he was seriously wounded at El Biutz in Morocco. In 1931, Dr Bertoloty had taken advantage of Azaña’s reforms to leave the army, but he remained a close friend of Franco. 22Contacts with pro-rebel sympathizers in the Republican Army were monitored through the Servicio de Información y Policia Militar (SIPM), run within Franco’s general staff by Colonel José Ungría Jiménez. A key figure in the SIPM in close contact with the Organización Antonio was Lieutenant Colonel José Centaño de la Paz, Casado’s adjutant, who belonged to another fifth-column organization called ‘La Ciudad Clandestina’. Centaño was in constant radio contact with Franco’s headquarters in Burgos. In late January 1939, Antonio Luna’s group brought Besteiro and Casado together in order to discuss plans to overthrow Negrín. However, Ángel Pedrero García had already brokered a prior meeting with Besteiro at the end of October 1938, though it is unlikely that they discussed anything as dramatic as an anti-Negrín coup d’état. Not until 5 February did Centaño reveal to Casado his role in the SIPM. 23

That the SIPM regarded Casado as potentially useful was hardly surprising. They were aware that, on 8 December 1938, Casado had met the British Chargé d’Affaires Ralph Stevenson in Madrid and discussed with him London’s desire to end the Spanish conflict. 24That together with the way in which Casado had run the Army of the Centre must have delighted them. He had imposed rigidly traditional military discipline and completely emasculated the corps of political commissars, which had been created shortly after the conflict began in response to the fact that war had been triggered by a rebellion of professional officers against the constitutional authority of the Republic. The commissariat existed in parallel with the traditional military structure. Commissars were essentially evangelists of the Republican cause. They worked to maintain morale and to explain the political purpose of the war effort, and provided a link between the rank and file, the officers and the Republican government. They held the same rank as the commander of the unit in which they served, even where that unit was the army as a whole. Inevitably, most career officers resented the authority enjoyed by commissars to question major military decisions. By early 1939, as the commissars worked to maintain the spirit of resistance, this resentment intensified in proportion to the growing defeatism of the professional officers, especially so in the case of Casado. 25

The consequence was that new conscripts were left with little idea of what they fighting for. This fostered the spread of demoralization and desertions. At the same time, Casado showed no inclination to use his forces in battle, something for which Vicente Rojo would never forgive him. Casado was far from being the only or indeed the most senior defeatist in the Republican ranks. In late November, to take pressure off the retreating Army of the Ebro, Rojo had ordered three diversionary attacks by the armies of the centre-south zone under General Miaja, the commander of the Republican armies of the south and centre. With his chief of staff, General Manuel Matallana Gómez, Miaja was supposed to organize a major offensive westwards into Extremadura and a landing at Motril in Granada. Colonel Casado, commander of the Army of the Centre, was to carry out an advance on the Madrid front at Brunete. All three simply failed to carry out their orders. Many of the officers in the Army of Catalonia were committed Communists like Colonel Antonio Cordón, or had risen through the ranks of the militia like Juan Modesto and Enrique Líster. In contrast, the senior officers of the Army of the Centre were professional officers who had made their careers in Africa. If, like Miaja, they had sought membership of the Communist Party, it was out of convenience rather than conviction.

The various offensives should have begun on 11 December 1938 but were inexplicably delayed until 5 January 1939, by which time the Francoist drive into Catalonia was virtually unstoppable. The lack of commitment by the southern army commanders was seen in Negrín’s immediate circle as the result of ‘treachery, sabotage and defeatism’. 26The failure to launch the operations owed much to the fact that the chief of operations of the Army of the Centre, Lieutenant Colonel Francisco García Viñals, was a close collaborator of the SIPM. He did everything possible to ensure that the Republican forces in the centre zone remained inactive. 27The landing at Motril never took place. Several commanders, the Communists Enrique Castro Delgado and Juan Modesto Guilloto, the moderate Republican (and anti-Communist) Juan Perea Capulino and the commissar general of the Group of Armies of the Centre (Grupo de Ejércitos Republicanos del Centro), the Communist Jesús Hernández, bitterly criticized Miaja in their respective memoirs. They alleged that Miaja had failed to use the troops at his disposal for the attack in Extremadura, preferring to keep them in defensive positions when he could have exploited the local numerical superiority occasioned by Franco’s concentration on the Catalan campaign.

Hernández denounced Miaja’s delays in launching the Extremadura offensive. Modesto declared that the decision to disobey Rojo’s orders and simply not launch the attack on Motril was an act of sabotage by Miaja, Matallana and the commander of the Republican navy, Rear Admiral Miguel Buiza Fernández-Palacios. He also alleged that Miaja deliberately exhausted and demoralized the troops at his disposal by long route marches of 150 kilometres to north and south: ‘The delay of the offensive in Extremadura, the unnecessary troop movements, a dozen days of forced marches from north to south, from south to north and again from north to south, as well as exasperating and exhausting the soldiers, provoked insecurity, doubts, indignation and discontent among the troops and their officers.’ When on the verge of success, Miaja inexplicably called a halt, failed to to seize the opportunity to attack Cordoba and thus allowed the Francoists to regroup.

The third offensive, on the Madrid front at Brunete, was a disaster and Modesto alleged that Casado had allowed his battle plans to be seen by the Francoists. In fact, Burgos had received the plans from more than one source. Casado had assured his staff that the attack would be a walk-over. It was to be a surprise attack, launched against a weak sector of the rebel front, with considerable logistical superiority. In fact, Casado failed to attack at the point that Rojo had chosen. Instead, he launched the Army of the Centre against a well-fortified – and well-informed – sector and thereby guaranteed the failure of the operation. Edmundo Domínguez Aragonés, the recently appointed commissar inspector of the Army of the Centre, who followed the operation from Casado’s headquarters, was appalled when he went ahead even after it became obvious that the enemy was expecting it. Casado knowingly sent hundreds of men to certain death against positions well defended with banks of machine guns. Modesto dubbed the calamitous Brunete offensive ‘the ante-room to the Casado uprising’, an operation that deliberately set out to weaken the best units of the Republic. Franco’s own staff was in any case fully informed of most of the Republic’s military plans in the last six months of the war. 28

The accusations made by Modesto, Castro Delgado, Hernández and Perea were seen to have considerable substance when General Matallana was court-martialled after the Civil War. Before the trial took place, Palmiro Togliatti, the Comintern delegate and the effective leader of the PCE, wrote that, in 1937, Matallana ‘had been suspected of contacts with the enemy but nothing concrete was ever proven’. 29In fact, he had many contacts with the Fifth Column, including with the Organización Antonio, confiding in Captain López Palazón his hatred of reds and his distress that the beginning of the war had found him in Republican Madrid. He had also used the funds of the general staff to support pro-Franco officers who were in hiding. 30At his trial, Matallana asserted that he had been serving the rebels since early in the war, passing information to the Fifth Column through his brother Alberto about the strength of the International Brigades, the residences of Russian pilots, the location in Albacete where tanks were assembled and the times of the arrival in Cartagena of ships carrying war matériel. Regarding the latter period of the war, he claimed to have sabotaged numerous operations including the Brunete offensive and facilitated rebel operations by failing to send reinforcements. His advice to Miaja was always to stabilize the fronts and to avoid attacks. At his trial, he said that in the archives of the Republican forces there were many projects that he had managed to get postponed indefinitely on different pretexts. He ensured that the various general staffs to which he had belonged never produced battle plans or directives on their own initiative. During the battle of the Ebro, he had placed obstacles in the way of requests for diversionary attacks in the centre zone.