The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

In the north of the country the revolutionary general strike spread immediately in the mining areas of León, in Santander and in Vizcaya. In Bilbao there were clashes over five or six days with the security forces and in Eibar and Mondragón 40 people were killed. But the arrival of troops and the Spanish air force dropping bombs on the mining areas put an end to the revolt.

In Asturias things were very different. One month before there had been a strike to protest against the CEDA gathering in Covadonga, a sacred spot for the Spanish right for it was regarded as the starting point of the Reconquista of Spain from the Moors. Asturias was also the only place in Spain where the CNT had joined the revolutionary coalition, Alianza Obrera. and where the communists had a noticeable following. The revolutionary committee was led by the socialist Ramón González Peña, yet the communists later boasted that they had directed the uprising. This confirmed the worst fears of the centre and right, and later gave Franco an excuse for talking of a ‘red conspiracy’.³³

Estimates of the numbers of armed workers who took part in the uprising range between 15,000 and 30,000. Most of their rifles came from a shipment of arms supplied by Indalecio Prieto, supposedly one of the most moderate members of the parliamentary socialist party. These rifles had been landed by the yacht Turquesa at Pravia, north-east of Oviedo.³⁴ Prieto had promptly fled to France to avoid arrest. Other weapons came from arms factories in the region which were seized. The miners also had their dynamite blasting charges, which were known as ‘la artillería de la revolución’.

On 5 October the first move of the rebels was to attack the Civil Guard posts and public buildings at dawn. They occupied Mieres, Gijón, Avilés and some small towns in the mining region. They also sent columns to seize Trubia, La Felguera and Sama de Langreo. The next day they moved on Oviedo, defended by a garrison 1,000 strong, and took it, fighting street by street and house by house. The revolutionaries set up a commune, replacing money with coupons signed by the committee. They requisitioned trains and transport vehicles, and took over buildings. Some 40 people were murdered, mainly the rich and a number of priests. It was full-scale civil war, although limited to one region.

With the country under martial law the minister of war ordered General Franco to suppress the rebellion. On 7 October General López Ochoa left Lugo with an expeditionary force. The same day the cruiser Libertad accompanied by two gunboats reached Gijón, where they fired at the miners on shore. Aircraft also bombed the coalfields and Oviedo. On 8 October Franco sent two banderas of the Spanish Foreign Legion and two tabors of Moroccan regulares under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Yagüe.³⁵ López Ochoa took Avilés later that day.

By 11 October the situation of the revolutionaries in Oviedo was desperate. They had run out of ammunition and knew that the rising had failed in the rest of Spain. At dusk on 12 October General López Ochoa’s troops were in control of almost the whole town. Six days later the new head of the revolutionary committee, Belarmino Tomás, offered to surrender providing the Moorish troops were kept out of the towns and villages. Yet from 10 October legionnaires and regulares had invaded the mining villages and treated them as enemy territory, with looting, rape and the execution of prisoners on the spot. The security forces unleashed a savage repression on the area as a whole. The man most notorious for his cruelty was the Civil Guard commander, Major Lisardo Doval.

The Asturias revolution had lasted no more than two weeks, but it cost around 1,000 lives and created enormous damage. Thousands of workers were sacked for having taken part in the rising and several thousand were imprisoned, of whom many were liberated in January 1935 when the state of war was suspended. Altogether twenty people were condemned to death, but only two sentences were carried out, which was extremely lenient for the age, when one considers how Stalin’s or Hitler’s regime would have reacted to a revolutionary rising. Responsibility for the appalling brutality of the security forces lay more with their commanders, especially Yagüe and Franco, than with the politicians in Madrid. Azaña had been unfairly blamed for Castilblanco, but this was on a different level. The Asturias rising inevitably demanded stronger measures, which meant even less possibility of control from Madrid over the actions of the army and Civil Guard.