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

On 1 October 1936 Franco was invested with his powers in the throne room of the captain-generalcy in Burgos, in front of the diplomatic representatives of Portugal, Germany and Italy. General Cabanellas had been forced to accept total defeat. ‘Señor Chief of the Spanish State,’ he proclaimed. ‘In the name of the Council of National Defence, I hand over to you the absolute powers of the state.’ Franco went out on to the balcony to receive the cheers of the crowds. In his speech to them he promised ‘no home without a hearth, nor a Spaniard without bread’. The anniversary of this day was to be celebrated for almost forty years as ‘The Day of the Caudillo’.⁵ The military junta, which had been led by Cabanellas, was immediately replaced by a ‘Junta Técnica del Estado’ with General Dávila at its head.⁶

Once Franco became the Caudillo, he never allowed opposition to develop. His speeches skilfully selected compatible aspects of the rival nationalist ideologies. He affected an intensity of religious feeling to woo the Carlists and the Church. The Falangist slogan, ‘Una Patria, Un Estado. Un Caudillo’, was converted to ‘Una Patria: España. Un Caudillo: Franco’. But it was not long before the chant of ‘Franco! Franco! Franco!’ was heard.

Historical parallels were drawn by nationalist writers with the first Reconquista. This safely inspired the appropriate image in the appropriate mind. For the Falangists, it was the birth of the nation. For Carlist and Alphonsine monarchists it represented the establishment of a royal Catholic dictatorship; for the Church the age of ecclesiastical supremacy, and for landowners the foundation of their wealth and power. Franco was very different from Mussolini and Hitler. He was a cunning opportunist who, despite his rhetoric, did not suffer from overly dangerous visions of destiny.

Franco’s new position was reinforced with good news. The recently completed nationalist cruiser Canarias had sailed round the Portuguese coast from El Ferrol, the Caudillo’s birthplace, to attack republican warships off Gibraltar. She managed to sink the destroyer Almirante Fernández and force the others to seek shelter in Cartagena harbour. The blockade of the straits was now finished and Moroccan reinforcements could be brought across without diverting aircraft from bombing raids.

In the republican zone, Giral’s government had resigned on 4 September. It had never been able to reflect the reality of the situation, let alone win enough support to influence it. All the political parties recognized that there was only one man able to gain the trust of the revolutionary committees. Largo Caballero was enjoying a great wave of popularity after his visits to the militia positions in the Guadarrama mountains. ‘Largo Caballero’, wrote his fellow socialist Zugazagoitia, ‘retained in the eyes of the masses his mythical qualities and his pathos had started to work the miracle of a difficult rebirth of collective enthusiasm.’⁷

Even Prieto, the middle-class social democrat, recognized that his great rival, the obstinate, often blinkered proletarian, was the only suitable successor to Giral.⁸ Both Prieto and the communists tried to maintain the liberal façade as far as possible, but Largo Caballero wanted a coalition which was preponderantly socialist. He felt strongly that he had been exploited by the liberals in the first republican government, undermining his work as minister of labour.

The new government was presented as symbolizing unity against the common enemy since it brought together the liberal centre and the revolutionary left into one administration. This administration called itself ‘the government of Victory’ and was the first in Western Europe to contain communists. It marked also an important move towards the progressive recuperation of power from local committees. Faced with the nationalist successes (Talavera and Irún were about to fall), even the anarchists found it difficult to challenge its development. Nevertheless, the Republic was still far from that middle-class state which communist propaganda attempted to portray to the world outside. La Pasionaria and Jesús Hernández insisted that Spain was experiencing a ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ and that they were ‘motivated exclusively by the desire to defend the democratic Republic established on 14 April 1931’.