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

18 Miguel González, ‘La conjura del ‘36 contada por Franco’, El País, Madrid, 9 September 2001.

19 Manuel Azaña, Diarios completos, Barcelona, 2000, p. 933.

20 Teodoro Rodríguez, quoted in Callahan, op. cit., p. 259.

21 Ahora, Madrid, 21 February 1936.

22 Pedro C. González Cuevas, Acción española. Teología política y nacionalismo autoritario en España, 1913–1936, Madrid, 1998, pp. 172–4.

23 Ismael Saz, Mussolini contra la Sunda República, pp. 139ff.

24 Sheelagh Ellwood, Historia de Falange Española, Barcelona, 2001, pp. 65ff.

25 Martin Blinkhorn, Carlismo y contrarrevolución en España, 1931–1939, Barcelona, 1979, p. 288.

26 Ibid.

CHAPTER 5: The Fatal Paradox

1 Francisco Comín, Mauro Hernández and Enrique Llopis, op. cit., p. 285.

2 See M. Requena Gallego, Los sucesos de Yeste, Albacete, 1983.

3 Edward Malefakis, Reforma agraria y revolución campesina en la España del siglo XX, Barcelona, 1971, p. 434.

4 Unemployment in Spain at this time was around 17 per cent, but it was closer to 30 per cent in Andalucia. In the summer of 1936 out of a total population of 24 million, 796,341 were unemployed and of those 522,079 (65 per cent) were agricultural workers, (Ibid., p. 331).

5 ‘Cuando querrá el Dios del cielo que la justicia se vuelva/y los pobres coman pan y los ricos coman mierda’.

6 ‘¿No habéis oído gritar las muchachas españolas estos días “¡Hijos, sí; maridos, no!”?’ Jose´ Antonio Primo de Rivera, ‘Carta a los militares de España’ in Obras completas, pp. 669–74.

7 Indalecio Prieto, Discursos fundamentales, Madrid, 1976, pp. 272–3.

8 There was an unusually high turnout of 70 per cent, with nearly a million votes in favour and little more than 6,000 against.

9 Pedro Gómez Aparicio, Historia del periodismo español, Madrid, 1981, vol. iv, p. 467. Gabriel Jackson argues that the figure given for burned churches, considering that they were buildings made of stone, is highly improbable. In some cases people had merely lit a pile of newspapers on the steps as a gesture (Gabriel Jackson, La República española y la guerra civil, Barcelona, 1976, pp. 202–3).

10 José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Obras completas, pp. 645–53. These parallels seem bizarre, since if followed through, they suggest that General Franco would have fared little better than General Kornilov, whose failed coup d’état helped trigger the bolshevik revolution.

11 Gabriel Cardona, ‘Las operaciónes militares’ in M. Tuñón (ed.), La guerra civil española 50 años después, Barcelona, 1985, p. 205.

12 The majority of the plots were being organized by members of the Unión Militar Española (UME), founded in 1933 by Captain Barba Hernández (the one who had accused Azaña over the Casas Viejas affair) and by a Falangist, Lieutenant-Colonel Rodríguez Tarduchy. The UME consisted of serving and retired officers. They did not represent more than 10 per cent of the officer corps, but maintained excellent relations with the Carlists, with Renovación Española, with the Juventudes de Acción Popular, with the Falange and with plotting generals. The UME held aloof from the ridiculous plot which Colonel Varela had planned for 19 April. Varela ended up in prison in Cádiz and General Orgaz who supported him was confined in Las Palmas (Carlos Blanco Escolá, Falacias de la guerra civil. Un homenaje a la causa republicana, Barcelona, 2005, p. 72).

13 Sanjurjo was to be known as the chief–‘el Jefe’–and Valentín Galarza as the‘Técnico’.

14 ‘Instrucciónes y directivas para el arranque de la conspiración, primero, y de un posible alzamiento, después’, Felix Maiz, Mola, aquel hombre, Barcelona, 1976, pp. 62–4.

15 For details on Franco’s military career, see Paul Preston’s Franco, caudillo de España, Barcelona, 1994 and the highly critical Carlos Blanco Escolá, La incompetencia militar de Franco, Madrid, 2000, p. 21.

16 See also Juan Pablo Fusi, Franco, Madrid, 1985, p. 26, and Herbert R. Southworth, El lavado de cerebro de Francisco Franco, Barcelona, 2000, pp. 187ff.

17 The organization was created at the end of 1935 and its leading spirit was Captain Díaz Tendero, who was to die later in the concentration camp of Mauthausen.

18 Julio Busquets and Juan Carlos Losada, op. cit., pp. 63ff.

Chapter 6: The Rising of the Generals