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

Even in areas where they were strong, however, the ‘killing machine’ was also used as a conspicuous message. In Valladolid the Falangist ‘dawn patrols’ shot 914 people, but the main reservoir of victims was once again the mass of prisoners seized just after the rising. They were locked into tram coaches and most days the Falangists would take out a dozen to execute them in public.²⁷ ‘It wasn’t just a crowd of illiterates who came to watch the spectacle,’ recounted Jesús Álvarez, a chemist in the town. ‘They were people of standing, sons of distinguished families, educated people, people who called themselves religious…they went so regularly to see the executions that stalls selling coffee and churros were set up so that they could eat and drink while they watched.’²⁸ On 24 September the office of the civil governor of Valladolid published a statement that it had been noticed recently that although ‘military justice’ satisfied the need for punishment, large crowds were gathering at the place of execution. The civil governor appealed to pious people that they ‘should not come to watch such things, and even less bring their wives and children’.²⁹

In the rear areas the Falange had rapidly developed into the nationalists’ paramilitary force, assuming the task of ‘cleaning up’. The young señoritos, often aided by their sisters and girlfriends, organized themselves into mobile squads, using their parents’ touring cars. Their leader, José Antonio, had declaimed that ‘the Spanish Falange, aflame with love, secure in its faith, will conquer Spain for Spain to the sound of military music’. The real militants were obsessed with their task of cutting out ‘the gangrenous parts of the nation’ and destroying the foreign, ‘red’ contagion. The rest simply seemed to find sanctified gangsterism appealing. The Carlists, on the other hand, were fired by religious fanaticism to avenge the Church by wiping out such modern evils as Freemasonry, atheism and socialism. They also had a far higher proportion of their able-bodied men at the front than the Falange and, despite their violent excesses on many occasions, were reputed to have treated their prisoners of war the most correctly.

Nationalist killings reached their peak in September and continued for a long time after the war was over. Not surprisingly, people wondered if Franco wanted to repeat the deathbed answer of the nineteenth-century General Narváez when asked if he forgave his enemies: ‘I have none. I have had them all shot.’

In the course of the last ten years, detailed work has been carried out region by region in Spain to establish the number, the identity and the fate of the victims. Accurate statistics have now been compiled on 25 provinces and provisional figures on another four. For just over half of Spain, this comes to a total of over 80,000 victims of the nationalists.³⁰ If one takes into account the deaths which were never registered and allows for the provinces not yet studied, we are probably faced with a total figure for killings and executions by the nationalists during the war and afterwards of around 200,000 people. This figure is not so very far from the threat made by General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano to republicans when he promised ‘on my word of honour as a gentleman that for every person that you kill, we will kill at least ten’.³¹

The Nationalist Zone

A coup d’état does not need a positive creed, just an enemy. A civil war, on the other hand, demands a cause, a banner and some form of manifesto. During the preparation for the coup, the military plotters had not concerned themselves greatly over the exact form of government which their pronunciamiento would herald. The urgency of the conspiracy did not allow them to waste time discussing hypothetical constitutions. They would discuss the finer points and formulate a detailed justification for their actions after the country was secured. The substance was clear to all: centralized authoritarian rule. The form, however, was not clear, although the possibilities included Falangism, Carlism, a restoration of the Alfonsine monarchy and a republican dictatorship.¹

Until this problem could be resolved the nominal direction of nationalist Spain was constituted in Burgos on 24 July in the Junta de Defensa Nacional. General Cabanellas, the divisional commander at Saragossa, assumed the presidency supported by nine generals and two colonels. This figurehead establishment was organized by Mola, who commanded the Army of the North. It appears to have been an attempt to reduce the power of Franco, who commanded the most important military formation. Before the rising, General Hidalgo de Cisneros, the loyal commander of the republican air force, had said that ‘General Goded was more intelligent. General Mola a better soldier; but Franco was the most ambitious.’² (His verdict on Mola was to prove highly inaccurate.)