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

The uproar of the right was enormous, even though the government itself had obviously had nothing to do with the murder. Those who were soon to call themselves ‘nationalists’ always insisted that the assassination of Calvo Sotelo was the final straw. But this is misleading. By the time the event took place in Madrid, civilian conspirators such as Luca de Tena, Juan de la Cierva and Luis Bolín had hired in London, with Juan March’s money, a de Havilland Dragon Rapide. This aeroplane was already on its way towards las Palmas to collect General Franco to take him to Casablanca and then on to Tetuán to join the Army of Africa. In addition, Mola had sent detailed orders with instructions for a rising to take place between 10 and 20 July. For months Falangists had been coordinating in secret with rebel officers their involvement as soon as they received the codeword ‘Covadonga’–an emotive touch invoking the place where the Reconquista of Spain had started against the Moors. And on 29 June José Antonio had smuggled out the order from his prison cell that the Falange Española must join the rising.

On the other hand, nationalists can argue that even though the government bore no personal responsibility for the assassination of the leader of the opposition by uniformed police, this was hardly relevant. They were not rising so much against the elected government as against the total lack of government, which Calvo Sotelo’s murder so starkly demonstrated. And although the mechanics of the rebellion had indeed been set in motion already, the slaying of Calvo Sotelo made many more people support the rising than would otherwise have been the case.

Despite so much evidence of all these preparations, the republican leaders could not bring themselves to believe the terrible truth. Azaña and Casares Quiroga acted a little like Chamberlain faced with Hitler. The president of the Republic seems to have lost all political sense. He suffered moments of depression combined with outbreaks of euphoria. Both Azaña and Casares Quiroga even dismissed warnings from generals loyal to the Republic or from Prieto, or the communist deputy Dolores Ibárruri, always known as ‘la Pasionaria’, who tried to alert Casares Quiroga to Mola’s preparations in Pamplona. But the head of government insisted that ‘Mola is loyal to the Republic’. The ultimate paradox of the liberal Republic represented by its government was that it did not dare defend itself from its own army by giving weapons to the workers who had elected it.

Although the atmosphere was still very tense during that third week of July, life still tended to go on out of habit. For the middle classes, it was the time to go on holiday. Very few of them, however, imagined that their lives might well depend on their choice of destination or on a decision to stay at home.

PART TWO The War of Two Spains

The Rising of the Generals

The generals had planned a coup d’état with a rising of garrisons in Spanish Morocco and throughout Spain. The success of such an action depended more on the psychological effect of speed and ruthlessness than on numbers. Although the rebel generals did not achieve an outright coup, the Republic failed to crush the rising in the first 48 hours, the most important period of the whole war, when the possession of whole regions was decided.

The hesitancy of the republican government was fatal in a rapidly developing crisis, because the initial uncertainty enforced a defensive mentality. The prime minister did not dare arm the UGT and CNT. He refused to depart from the legal constitution of the state, even though a state attacked by its own ‘spinal column’ has ceased to exist for all practical purposes. The delay in issuing weapons discouraged pre-emptive or counter-offensive moves against the rebel military. ‘The republican authorities were not prepared to give us arms,’ recalled a carpenter from Seville, ‘because they were more afraid of the working class than they were of the army. We communists did not share the government’s confidence that the rising would be suffocated in twenty-four hours.’¹

Republicans made a virtue of necessity. They encouraged the idea that ‘to resist was to win’, as a slogan later put it. Even during the rising the communist deputy La Pasionaria had expressed this dangerously appealing idea with ‘No Pasarán! (They shall not pass!)’, her famous plagiarism of Pétain’s phrase at Verdun.

The military plotters seldom had complete surprise on their side, but doubt and confusion were certainly in their favour. If the workers held back on the advice of a civil governor who was afraid of provoking the local garrison into revolt they were lost. They paid for this hesitation with their lives. But if they demonstrated from the beginning that they were prepared to assault the barracks, then most of the paramilitary forces would join them and the garrison surrender.