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Franco’s period at the Academy was viewed in retrospect as a triumph by Africanistas and other right-wing Army officers and a disaster by liberal and left-wing officers. His brother Ramón wrote to him to complain of the ‘troglodytic education’ imparted there. For the distinguished Africanista, General Emilio Mola, in contrast, it was the peak of excellence.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Academy’s regulations demanded that the teaching staff be chosen on the basis of méritos de guerra, irrespective of the subject being taught. Accordingly, the teaching staff was dominated by Africanista friends of Franco, most of whom had been brutalized by their experiences in a pitiless colonial war and were noted more for their ideological rigidity than for their intellectual attainments. Of 79 teachers, 34 were infantrymen and 11 from the Legion. The assistant director of the Academy was Colonel Miguel Campins, a good friend and comrade in arms from Africa who had been with him at the battle of Alhucemas. A highly competent professional, Campins elaborated the training programme at the Academy.
(#litres_trial_promo) The other senior members of staff included Emilio Esteban-Infantes, later to be involved in the attempted Sanjurjo coup of 1932; Bartolomé Barba-Hernández, who was to be, on the eve of the Civil War, leader of the conspiratorial organization Unión Militar Española; and Franco’s lifelong close friend Camilo Alonso Vega, later to be a dour Minister of the Interior. Virtually without exception, the Academy’s teachers were to play prominent roles in the military uprising of 1936. With such men on the staff, the Academy concentrated on inculcating the ruthless arrogance of the Foreign Legion, the idea that the Army was the supreme arbiter of the nation’s political destiny and a sense of discipline and blind obedience. A high proportion of the officers who passed through the Academy were later to be involved in the Falange. An even higher proportion fought on the Nationalist side during the Civil War.
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During his period at the head of the Military Academy, Franco developed the dejar hacer (turning a blind eye) style of delegation which was to be taken to extremes when he was Head of State. Those of the teaching staff who did not pull their weight were not punished but nor were they favoured. Those who had an enthusiasm or a speciality were allowed full initiative in that area – the instructor who liked football delegated to coach the team, the one who liked gardening given control of the Academy gardens, the amateur photographer put in charge of the dark room. Of the lazy or incompetent, Franco would simply comment ‘A Fulano, no le veo la gracia’ (I don’t see what So-and-So has going for him) but would never reprimand those who did not pull their weight (arrimar el hombro – a favourite phrase of Franco’s).
Franco’s arrival in Zaragoza provoked considerable popular attention. The Academy, the Director and his senior staff became a major focus of local social life and Franco indulged his penchant for socializing and for interminable late-night after-dinner tertulias with military friends and minor aristocrats. Encouraged by Doña Carmen, he began to mix with the dominant families of the local establishment. It perhaps reflected Franco’s own small-town and lower middle class origins that he always preferred provincial social life, in Oviedo, Ceuta or Zaragoza, to that of Madrid.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even so, contemporary photographs of Franco in evening dress or lounge suit show him significantly less at ease than when in uniform. He was happier hunting. Far from his African exertions, he turned increasingly to hunting for exercise, pleasure and, it may be supposed, as an outlet for his aggression.
It was during his period in Zaragoza that Franco began to intensify his anti-Communist and authoritarian ideas. Shortly before leaving Madrid for Zaragoza, he had been given, along with several other young officers, a subscription to a journal of anti-Comintern affairs from Geneva, the Bulletin de L’Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale. The Entente, founded by the Swiss rightist Théodore Aubert and the White Russian emigré Georges Lodygensky, was vehemently anti-Bolshevik and praised the achievements of fascism and military dictatorships as bulwarks against Communism. An emissary from the Entente, Colonel Odier, visited Madrid and arranged with General Primo de Rivera for several subscriptions to be purchased by the Ministry of War and to be distributed to a few key officers.
(#litres_trial_promo) It clinched what was to be a lifelong obsession with anti-Communism. It also played its part in the transition of Franco from the adventurous soldier of the 1920s to the suspicious and conservative general of the 1930s. Receiving the bulletin uninterruptedly until 1936, he came to see the Communist threat everywhere and to believe that the entire Spanish Left was wittingly or unwittingly working in the interests of the Comintern. In 1965, Franco revealed to both Brian Crozier and George Hills the influence that the Entente had had over him. He told Hills that the Entente had alerted him to the need to be ready for the flank attack from the invisible (Communist) enemy. Indeed, he left Crozier with the impression that his acquaintance with its work was an event in his life equal in importance in its impact on him to the birth of Nenuca.
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Another influence in Franco’s life was initiated as a result of an invitation in the spring of 1929 to the German Army’s General Infantry Academy in Dresden. He was thrilled by the organization and discipline of the German Army. On his return, he made it clear to his cousin Pacón that he had been especially impressed by the Academy’s cult of reverence for the regiments which had achieved the great German military triumphs of the recent past. He was particularly sympathetic to German efforts to break free of the shackles of the Versailles Treaty.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was the beginning of a love affair which would intensify during the Civil War, reach its peak in 1940, and not begin to die until 1945.
The Dictatorship fell on 30 January 1930. The bluff Primo de Rivera had ruled by a form of personal improvisation which had ensured that he would bear the blame for the regime’s failures. By 1930, there was barely a section of Spanish society which he had not estranged. He had offended Catalan industrialists both by his anti-Catalanism and because of the rise in raw material prices in the wake of the collapse in value of the peseta. He had outraged landowners by trying to introduce paternalist labour legislation for land-workers. The Socialist Unión General Trabajadores had supported him as long as public works projects had kept up levels of employment. With the coming of the slump, many Socialists had allied with the banned anarcho-syndicalist union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, in opposition. Most damagingly, the divisions in the Army provoked by Primo’s promotions policy were instrumental in the Captains-General and the King withdrawing support for the regime. Unlike most twentieth century dictators, Primo withdrew quietly once he had recognised that his support had disappeared. He went into exile in Paris where he died on 16 March 1930. A return to the pre-1923 constitutional system was impossible, not least because the King could no longer count on the loyalty of the old monarchist political élite which he had so irresponsibly abandoned in favour of Primo. Alfonso XIII was forced to seek another general. His choice of General Dámaso Berenguer, irrevocably associated with the disaster of Annual, infuriated the Left. For nearly a year, Berenguer’s mild dictatorship, the so-called Dictablanda, would flounder along in search of formula for a return to the constitutional monarchy. A combination of working class agitation fuelled by the economic depression, military sedition provoked by Primo’s policies, and republican conspiracy ensured Berenguer’s eventual failure.
The fall of the Dictator disappointed Franco but little more: he was oblivious to the implicit threat to the monarchy itself. Among Franco’s staff, the artillerymen and engineers were understandably pleased by Primo’s demise. However, Franco ensured that the demise of Primo would provoke no public clashes in the Academy between junteros and Africanistas by imposing an iron ban on speaking about politics.
(#litres_trial_promo) By withdrawing his confidence from Primo, the King also lost the loyalty of General Sanjurjo, now Director-General of the Civil Guard. Franco did not blame the King for the fall of the Dictatorship. In any case, he was the object of special attention, not to say flattery, from Alfonso XIII. On 4 June 1929, in a solemn ceremony in the Madrid Retiro, the King had personally presented him with the Medalla Militar which he had won in 1925.
(#litres_trial_promo) On 5 June 1930, Alfonso XIII visited the Academy and three days later Franco took the entire body of cadets to the capital to take part in the swearing of the flag by the Madrid garrison. Led by Franco on a prancing horse, they headed the parade, to the wild applause of those present. On the following day, the cadets took the guard at the Royal Palace and Franco appeared on the balcony with the King. The crowd on that day included several hundred members of the Juventud Monárquica (monarchist youth), who would soon form the élite of the conservative extreme right during the Republic.
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Accordingly, it was a cause of the greatest embarrassment to Franco that his brother Ramón had moved into the orbit of the republican opposition to the regime. From the later part of 1929, their relations became very strained. Franco had been annoyed and embarrassed in July 1924 when Ramón had married Carmen Díaz Guisasola without seeking the King’s permission.
(#litres_trial_promo) The breach between his brother and the King had been forgotten in the wake of his Atlantic crossing in 1926. However, Ramón’s ever more frantic efforts to repeat that success had ended in disgrace. The reasons for his fall from grace were complex. In the summer of 1929, to boost the domestic aircraft industry, the Spanish government agreed to sponsor an attempt by Ramón to cross the North Atlantic in a Dornier Super Wal flying boat built under licence in Spain. Because of doubts about the reliability of the Spanish aeroplane, Ramón used a German-built one bought in Italy, fraudulently switching the registration markings. The flight was a disaster: the aircraft was blown off course near the Azores, and it and the crew were lost for days and only found at the end of June after a massive and immensely costly search involving the Spanish, British and Italian navies.
(#litres_trial_promo) When he was found, there was widespread rejoicing and a tearful General Franco was publicly embraced by an equally lacrimose General Primo de Rivera.
(#litres_trial_promo) Franco led a massive demonstration to the British Embassy in Madrid to express thanks for the role of the Royal Navy.
(#litres_trial_promo) It then emerged that the planes had been switched and rumours began to circulate that Ramón had been promised a fabulous sum of money if he broke the world seaplane distance record flying a German aircraft. Colonel Alfredo Kindelán, the head of Military Aviation, was furious and had Ramón expelled from the Air Force on 31 July 1929. Thereafter, he moved rapidly to the left, became a freemason and got involved in anarcho-syndicalist conspiracies aimed at bringing down the monarchy.
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After this disgrace, Ramón’s relations with his brother were virtually non-existent and were reduced to letters; patronizing, sententious, though ultimately kindly ones from Franco, mischievously disrespectful ones from Ramón. On 8 April 1930, Franco wrote a long letter to Ramón revealing of his loyalty both to his family and to the established order. In an effort to head off his brother’s demise, Franco warned him that his activities within the Army, inciting garrisons and officers to rebel, were known to the authorities. Regarding the Berenguer regime as entirely legal, Franco was worried that his brother was risking the loss of his prestige and his good name. He appealed to him to think of ‘the great sorrow that such things cause Mamá, a sorrow which the rest of us share’ and ended fondly, ‘Your brother loves and embraces you, Paco’.
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Its tone of tolerant restraint is remarkable given that, in Francisco’s eyes, Ramón’s behaviour would not only bring dishonour on the family but also possibly impede his own chances of advancement. There is also a typical readiness to attribute the lowest motives to Ramón’s revolutionary friends while assuming that Ramón himself is free of such baseness. The letter also revealed a political naïvety in Franco’s suggestion that the dictatorship of General Berenguer was more legal than that of Primo de Rivera. Ramón was not slow to comment on that in his reply on 12 April. Ramón was shocked by what he called his brother’s ‘healthy advice’ and ‘vain bourgeois counsels’ and invited him to step down from his ‘little general’s throne’. He also took the opportunity to comment that the education being given the cadets in Zaragoza would ensure that they would be bad citizens.
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Engrossed in his work at the Zaragoza military academy, Franco paid little attention to the rising tide of political agitation in 1930 except in so far as it involved his brother. The anti-monarchical movement was growing with labour unrest intensifying by the day. A broad front of Socialists, middle class Republicans, Basque and Catalan regionalists and renegade monarchists who, repelled by the mistakes of the King, had become conservative republicans, joined together in mid-August 1930. United by the so-called Pact of San Sebastián, they established a provisional government-in-waiting which began to plot the downfall of the monarchy.
(#litres_trial_promo) Ramón Franco was an important element in the republican conspiracies. In late 1930, watched by agents of the Dirección General de Seguridad, he was travelling around Spain liaising with other conspirators, trying to buy arms and organizing the making of bombs.
(#litres_trial_promo) General Emilio Mola, now Director-General de Seguridad, had taken the decision to arrest him but, as an admirer of his heroic exploits and as a friend of Franco, he decided to give Ramón a last chance to avoid the consequences of his activities. Mola asked Franco to try to persuade his brother to desist. Although he agreed to try, Franco showed no optimism that he might succeed but he was immensely faithful to the family and still felt a protective loyalty towards his madcap brother. He visited Madrid and they dined together on 10 October but Ramón remained committed to the planned republican rising. Mola then had Ramón brought in for questioning on the evening of 11 October and detained in military prison on the following morning. Mola again called Franco in and informed him of the charges against his brother which included bomb-making, gun-smuggling and involvement in the attempted murder of a monarchist aviator, the Duque de Esmera. Franco and Mola hoped to use these charges to frighten Ramón into abandoning his revolutionary activities: Franco visited his brother in his cell and recited them to him. This merely provoked him into escaping from prison on 25 November. Thereafter, he took part, with General Queipo de Llano, in the revolutionary movement of mid-December 1930. Both Ramón’s escape and his participation in the events of December would cause Franco intense chagrin both as an officer and as a monarchist.
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Having failed in his efforts to make his brother see sense, Francisco returned hastily to Zaragoza where he had to receive the visit of a French delegation led by André Maginot. On 19 October, Maginot presented Franco with the Légion d’Honneur for his part in the Alhucemas landing. On his return to France, he declared that the Zaragoza Academy was the most modern of its kind in the world.
(#litres_trial_promo) Maginot’s ideas of modernity had yet to be put to the test by the armies of the Third Reich.
In November, Franco was approached by an emissary from the most prominent figure of the San Sebastián coalition, the grand old man of Spanish republicanism, the wily and cynical Alejandro Lerroux. He was invited to join in the Republican conspiracies along with so many other officers including his brother. According to Lerroux, Franco refused point blank but then insinuated, at a later meeting, that he would rebel against the constituted power but only if the Patria were in danger of being overwhelmed by anarchy.
(#litres_trial_promo) Despite warnings from his cousin Pacón and the attitude of his brother, Franco was so far distanced from day-to-day politics that he was convinced that the monarchy was in no danger.
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The revolutionary plot in which Ramón was implicated aimed to bring the San Sebastián provisional government to power. One of its ramifications was to be a rebellion by the garrison of the tiny Pyrenean mountain town of Jaca in the province of Huesca. Anticipating what was supposed to be a nationally co-ordinated action, the Jaca rebellion was precipitated on 12 December. Its leaders, Captains Fermín Galán, Angel García Hernández and Salvador Sediles, hoped to march south from Jaca and spark off a pro-Republican movement in the garrisons of Huesca, Zaragoza and Lérida.
(#litres_trial_promo) Along the road to Huesca, Galán’s column was challenged by a small group of soldiers led by the military governor of Huesca, General Manuel Lasheras, who was wounded in the clash. When the news of the actions of the Jaca rebels reached Madrid in the early hours of the morning of 13 December, the government declared martial law in the entire Aragonese military region. A sporadic general strike broke out in Zaragoza. Franco put the Academy in a state of readiness and armed the cadets. The Captain-General of the Aragonese military region, General Fernández de Heredia, put together a large column and sent them to Huesca, half way between Zaragoza and Jaca. In case the rebels should have left Huesca already and headed south, he ordered Franco to use his cadets to hold the Huesca-Zaragoza road. In the event, it was not necessary. Galán’s cold, wet and hungry column was stopped at Cillas, three kilometres from Huesca, and the Jaca revolt was put down.
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Galán and García Hernández were seen as being the two ringleaders and were shot after summary courts martial on 14 December.
(#litres_trial_promo) As far as Franco was concerned, their punishment was entirely appropriate since they were mutineers. He was perhaps fortunate that he did not have to make similar considerations about his brother, who was heavily involved in the central action of the plot in the capital. On 15 December, Ramón had flown over the royal Palacio de Oriente in Madrid, planning to bomb it but, in the event, seeing civilians strolling in the gardens, had merely dropped leaflets calling for a general strike. He had then fled to Portugal and then on to Paris.
(#litres_trial_promo) Franco did not vacillate in his condemnation of the revolutionary events of mid-December, but his sense of family solidarity prevented him applying the same standards to his brother. Hours after Ramón’s flight over the Palacio Real, another aircraft flew over Madrid and dropped leaflets directed at the city’s inhabitants denouncing Ramón as a ‘bastard apparently drunk on your blood’. Franco was so incensed on behalf of his mother (if not his brother) that he left Zaragoza for Madrid where he demanded explanations from Berenguer, the Head of the Government, General Federico Berenguer, the Captain-General of Madrid and Mola, the Director-General of Security, all of whom assured him that the flight and the pamphlets had no official status.
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On 21 December, Franco sent another letter to Ramón. Not surprisingly, in the light of the scandal that Ramón’s activities had occasioned, the distress of their mother and the fact that he was in danger of being shot, the letter is deeply sorrowful. Despite the gulf between their political views, Francisco showed compassionate concern for ‘My beloved and unfortunate brother’ and enclosed two thousand pesetas. He ended sanctimoniously ‘May you break away from the vice-ridden ambience in which you have lived for the last two years, in which the hatred and the passion of the people who surround you deceive you in your chimeras. May your forced exile from our Patria calm your spirit and lift you above all passions and egoisms. May you rebuild your life far from these sterile struggles which fill Spain with misfortunes. And may you find well-being and peace in your path. These are the wishes of your brother who embraces you.’ The money which accompanied the letter was a substantial sum at the time. Grateful as Ramón was for his brother’s help, he was repelled by his reactionary notions and surprised by his lack of awareness of the tide of popular feeling.
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If Franco had any doubts about the legitimacy of the executions of Galán and García Hernández, they would have been resolved on 26 December when General Lasheras died from an infection and uraemia which may have been related to the wound that he had received when trying to stop Galán. Franco attended his funeral.
(#litres_trial_promo) The public outcry about the execution of Galán and García Hernández damaged the monarchy in a way that the Jaca revolt itself had failed to do. As the two executed rebels were being turned into martyrs, to the outrage of many senior military figures including Franco, the Liberals in the government withdrew their support and General Berenguer was obliged to resign on 14 February.
(#litres_trial_promo) After an abortive attempt by the Conservative politician José Sánchez Guerra to form a government with the support of the imprisoned Republican leaders, Berenguer was finally replaced as prime minister on 17 February by Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar. He did, however, continue in the cabinet as Minister for the Army.
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Since the Jaca rebellion of Galán and García Hernández had taken place within the military region of Aragón, Franco was appointed a member of the tribunal which was to court martial Captain Salvador Sediles and other officers and men who had been involved. It took place between 13 and 16 March when the campaign for the municipal elections of 12 April had already begun. There was no more potent subject during that campaign than that of the executions of Galán and García Hernández. Admiral Aznar declared in advance of the verdicts in the supplementary court martial that he was of a mind to ask the King for clemency whatever the sentences. Franco, however, declared: ‘it is necessary that military crimes committed by soldiers be judged by soldiers who are accustomed to command’, within which category he clearly included a readiness to punish indiscipline by death. In the event, there was one more death sentence, for Captain Sediles, five life sentences and other lesser sentences, all of which were commuted.
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In the municipal elections of 12 April 1931, Franco voted for the monarchist candidacy in Zaragoza.
(#litres_trial_promo) The results would go against Alfonso XIII, provoke his withdrawal from Spain and open the way to the establishment of the Second Republic. For Franco, the deeply conservative monarchist and royal favourite, it would be a severe shock. To the ambitious young general, it would seem to be the end of a meteoric rise. That fact, taken with Franco’s prominence in the military uprising of 1936, has led the Caudillo’s hagiographers to portray him as working towards that glorious denouement from the very first. This was far from being the case. Franco had still to undergo many experiences before he became an implacable enemy of the Republic.
Ironically, in early 1931, there was an event in Franco’s personal life which was to reveal its full significance only in 1936. In 1929, the Director of the Military Academy had met a brilliant lawyer, Ramón Serrano Suñer, who was working in Zaragoza as a member of the élite legal corps of Abogados del Estado (State lawyers) and they had become friends. Serrano Suñer often lunched or dined with the Franco family.
(#litres_trial_promo) As a result, Serrano Suñer came to know Doña Carmen’s beautiful younger sister, Zita. In February 1931, Serrano Suñer married her, then aged nineteen, in Oviedo. The groom’s witness was José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the Dictator and future founder of the Falange, the bride’s Francisco Franco.
(#litres_trial_promo) The marriage clinched the close relationship between Serrano Suñer and Franco out of which would be forged the Caudillo’s National-Syndicalist State. The wedding ceremony also provided the occasion for a historic first meeting for the eventual dictator and fascist leader whose names were to be tied together for forty years after 1936. At the time, none of the three could have had any idea of the imminent political cataclysm which would link their fates.
(#ulink_ad42ab04-9969-5a02-8b88-0d9e75d0d825) Ferragut had written the fictionalised Memorias de un legionario and had been rumoured to have ghost-written Franco’s Diario de una bandera, although the article made a great point of the interview being their first meeting.
(#ulink_2ac0760b-0290-570a-bd94-c275e681acfd) In later life, particularly after Franco gained power, the relationship seemed more formal than spontaneously affectionate. Pacón commented that Franco seemed morose and inhibited in the company of Doña Carmen.
(#ulink_99f1bb94-2c3f-581b-8041-e2464faf7d86) At the time, each military region of Spain had two divisions, each composed of two brigades. However, given the shortage of recruits, in practice only the first brigade of each Captaincy General was at operational strength. (Suárez Fernández, Franco, I, pp. 187, 191.)
(#ulink_b3e8b1b6-816d-5654-aa33-0e21494d181b) It would be an abiding obsession. On a visit to the Zaragoza Military Academy in 1942, he told one of the staff that an additional bed should be put in rooms that had two ‘to avoid marriages’ – Baón, La cara humana, p. 117.
III
IN THE COLD
Franco and the Second Republic, 1931–1933
THE MUNICIPAL elections of 12 April 1931 were intended by the government to be the first stage of a controlled return to constitutional normality after the collapse of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. However, on the evening of polling day, as the results began to be known, people started to drift onto the streets of the cities of Spain and, as the crowds grew, Republican slogans were shouted with increasing excitement. In the countryside, the power of the local bosses or caciques was unbroken but in the towns, where the vote was much freer, monarchist candidates had suffered a disaster. With the artillerymen on his staff at the Academy openly rejoicing at the Republican triumph, Franco was deeply worried about the situation.
(#litres_trial_promo) While he mused in his office in Zaragoza, his one-time commanding officer and a man whom he admired, General Sanjurjo, was clinching the fate of the King. Sanjurjo now Director-General of the para-military Civil Guard, the monarchy’s most powerful instrument of repression, had informed several cabinet ministers that he could not guarantee the loyalty of the men under his command in the event of mass demonstrations against the monarchy.
(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, there was little reason to suspect the loyalty of the Civil Guard, a brutal and conservative force. Sanjurjo’s fear was rather that the defence of the monarchy could be attempted only at the cost of copious bloodshed, given the scale of the popular hostility to the King.
That Sanjurjo was not prepared to risk a bloodbath on behalf of Alfonso XIII reflected the fact that he had personal reasons for feeling resentment towards the King. He felt that he had been snubbed by the King for marrying beneath his rank and he had not forgiven Alfonso XIII for failing to stand by Primo de Rivera in January 1930.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sanjurjo’s reluctance to defend his King may also have reflected two conversations that he had with Alejandro Lerroux in February and April 1931, during which the Republican leader had tried to persuade him to ensure the benevolent neutrality of the Civil Guard during a change of regime. Sanjurjo informed the Director-General of Security, General Mola, of the first of these meetings and assured him that he had not agreed to Lerroux’s request.
(#litres_trial_promo) His subsequent actions during the crisis of 12, 13 and 14 April, together with the favourable treatment which he received afterwards from the new regime, were to lead Franco to suspect that perhaps Sanjurjo had been bought by Lerroux and betrayed the monarchy.
Franco was unaware of what Sanjurjo was saying to the cabinet ministers on 12 April, but he was in telephone contact with Millán Astray and other generals. He considered marching on Madrid with the cadets from the Academia but refrained from doing so after a telephone conversation with Millán Astray at 11.00 a.m. on the morning of 13 April.
(#litres_trial_promo) Millán Astray asked him if he thought that the King should fight to keep his throne. Franco replied that everything depended on the attitude of the Civil Guard. For the next five and a half years, the stance of the Civil Guard would be Franco’s first concern in thinking about any kind of military intervention in politics. Most of the Spanish Army, apart from its Moroccan contingent, was made up of untried conscripts. Franco was always to be intensely aware of the problems of using them against the hardened professionals of the Civil Guard. Now, Millán Astray told Franco that Sanjurjo had confided in him that the Civil Guard could not be relied upon and that Alfonso XIII therefore had no choice but to leave Spain. Franco commented that, in view of what Sanjurjo said, he too thought that the King should go.
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Franco had also been greatly influenced by the telegram that Berenguer sent in the early hours of 13 April to the Captains-General of Spain. The Captains-General in command of the eight military regions into which the country was divided were effectively viceroys. In the telegram, Berenguer instructed them to keep calm, maintain the discipline of the men under their command and ensure that no acts of violence impede ‘the logical course that the supreme national will imposes on the destinies of the Fatherland’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Berenguer’s attitude derived from his own pessimism about Army morale. He believed that some Army officers were simply blasé about the danger to the monarchy. More seriously, he suspected that many others were indifferent and even hostile to its fate in the wake of the divisions created in the 1920s. Nevertheless, despite his telegram and his own inner misgivings, on the morning of 14 April, out of loyalty to the monarchy, Berenguer told the King that the Army was ready to overturn the result of the elections. Alfonso XIII refused.
(#litres_trial_promo) Shortly after Berenguer’s interview with the King, Millán Astray told Berenguer about his conversation with the Director of the Zaragoza Academy on the previous day repeating, as ‘an opinion which has to be taken into account’, Franco’s view that the King had no choice but to leave.
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The King decided to leave Spain but not to abdicate, in the hope that his followers might be able to engineer a situation in which he would be begged to return. Power was assumed on 14 April 1931 by the Provisional Government whose membership had been agreed in August 1930 by the Republicans and Socialists who had made the Pact of San Sebastián. Although led by Niceto Alcalá Zamora, a conservative Catholic landowner from Córdoba who had once been a Minister under the King, the Provisional Government was dominated by Socialists and centre and left Republicans committed to sweeping reform.
In a number of ways in the first week of the Republic, Franco displayed unmistakably, if guardedly, a repugnance for the new regime and a lingering loyalty to the old. There was nothing unusual in his feeling such loyalty – a majority of Army officers were monarchists and would have been unlikely to change their convictions overnight. Franco was ambitious but took discipline and hierarchy very seriously. On 15 April, he issued an order to the cadets, in which he announced the establishment of the Republic and insisted on rigid discipline: ‘If discipline and total obedience to orders have been the invariable practice in this Centre, they are even more necessary today when the Army is obliged, with serenity and unity, to sacrifice its thoughts and its ideology for the good of the nation and the tranquility of the Patria.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was not difficult to decipher the hidden meaning: Army officers must grit their teeth and overcome their natural repugnance towards the new regime.
For a week, the red and gold monarchist flag continued to fly over the Academia. The Captain-General of Aragón, Enrique Fernández de Heredia, had been instructed by the Provisional Government to raise the Republican tricolour throughout the region. With the military headquarters in Zaragoza surrounded by hostile crowds demanding that Cacahuete (peanut), as the vegetarian Fernández de Heredia was known, fly the Republican flag, he refused. At midnight on 14 April, the new Minister of War, Manuel Azaña, ordered him to hand over command of the region to the military governor of Zaragoza, Agustín Gómez Morato, who was considered loyal to the Republican cause and who, indeed, was to be imprisoned by the Nationalists in July 1936 for opposing the military rebellion in Morocco. Gómez Morato undertook the substitution and telephoned all units in Aragón to order them to do the same. At the Military Academy, Franco informed his superior that changes of insignia could be ordered only in writing. It was not until after 20 April when the new Captain-General of the region, General Leopoldo Ruiz Trillo, had signed an order to the effect that the Republican flag should be flown, that Franco ordered the monarchist ensign struck.
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In 1962, Franco wrote a partisan and confused interpretation of the fall of the monarchy in his draft memoirs in which he blamed the guardians of the monarchist fortress for opening the gates to the enemy. The enemy consisted of a group of ‘historic republicans, freemasons, separatists and socialists’. The freemasons were ‘atheistic traitors in exile, delinquents, swindlers, men who betrayed their wives’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The narrowness of his interpretation is striking in several ways. Franco’s admiration for the dictatorship is understandable. His assumption that the King had not contravened the constitution in acquiescing in a military coup d’état in 1923 and that the situation in April 1931 was therefore one of constitutional legality was clearly the view of a soldier who never questioned the Army’s right to rule. The clear implication is that the monarchy should, and but for Sanjurjo and the Civil Guard could, have been defended by force in April 1931, which was certainly not his view at the time. Franco conveniently forgot his own ruthless pragmatism. The mistake having been made by others, he had made the best of a bad job and got on with his career.
Nonetheless, the flag incident suggested that Franco was sufficiently affected by the fall of the monarchy to want to establish some distance between himself and the Republic. It was not a question of outright indiscipline nor is it plausible that he was trying well in advance to build up credit with conservative political circles. In keeping the monarchist flag flying, Franco was advertising the fact that, unlike some officers who had been part of, or at least in touch with, the Republican opposition, he could not be considered as in any way tainted by disloyalty to the monarchy. Perhaps even more than from the pro-Republican officers whom he despised anyway, he was marking distance between himself and his brother Ramón who had been one of the most notorious military traitors to the King. Francisco clearly saw his own position as altogether more praiseworthy than that of General Sanjurjo whom he later came to regard, with Berenguer, as responsible for the fall of the monarchy.
(#litres_trial_promo) However, he would not permit his regret at the fall of the monarchy to stand in the way of his career. As military monarchism went, Franco’s pragmatic stance was a long way from, for instance, that of the founder of the Spanish Air Force, General Kindelán, who went into voluntary exile on 17 April rather than live under the Republic.
(#litres_trial_promo) Nonetheless, Franco felt great repugnance for those officers who had opposed the monarchy and were rewarded by being given important posts under the Republic. On 17 April, General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano became Captain-General of Madrid, General Eduardo López Ochoa of Barcelona and General Miguel Cabanellas of Seville. All three would play crucial roles in Franco’s later career and he never trusted any of them.
It was perhaps with these promotions in mind that, on 18 April, Franco wrote a letter to the Director of ABC, the Marqués de Luca de Tena. The monarchist ABC was the most influential newspaper on the Right in Spain. The issue of that morning had published his photograph alongside a news item that he was about to go to Morocco as High Commissioner, the most coveted post in the Army and one which was, at the time, the peak of Franco’s ambition. The basis of the item was a suggestion by Miguel Maura, the Minister of the Interior, to Manuel Azaña, the Minister of War, that Franco be appointed to the post. It would have been a sensible way of buying his loyalty. In fact, the plum Moroccan job was given to General Sanjurjo, who held it briefly in conjunction with the headship of the Civil Guard – such preferment no doubt feeding Franco’s suspicions that Sanjurjo was being paid off for his treachery. The ostensible objective of Franco’s letter was to request that the newspaper publish a correction but it was another gesture aimed at establishing his distance from Spain’s new rulers. In convoluted and ambiguous language, he denied that he had been offered any appointment and asserted that ‘I could not accept any such post unless I was ordered to do so. To accept such a post might be interpreted in some circles as suggesting that there had been some prior understanding on my part with the regime which has just been installed or else apathy or indifference in the fulfilment of my duties’.
(#litres_trial_promo) That Franco believed that he needed to make his position clear in the leading conservative daily reflects both his ambition and his sense of himself as a public figure. Having clarified his loyalty to the monarchy, he then went on to mend his fences with the Republican authorities by proclaiming his respect for the ‘national sovereignty’, a reflection of his cautious pragmatism and of the flexibility of his ambitions.
The limits of military loyalty were to be severely tried under the Republic. The new Minister of War, Azaña, had studied military politics and was determined to remedy the technical deficiencies of the Spanish Army and to curtail its readiness to intervene in politics. Azaña was an austere and brilliantly penetrating intellectual who, despite laudable intentions, was impatient of Army sensibilities and set about his task without feeling the need to massage the collective military ego. The Army which he found on taking up his post was under-resourced and over-manned, with a grossly disproportionate officer corps. Equipment was obsolete and inadequate and there was neither ammunition nor fuel enough for exercises and manoeuvres. Azaña wished to reduce the Army to a size commensurate with the nation’s economic possibilities to increase its efficiency and to eradicate the threat of militarism from Spanish politics. Even those officers who approved of these aims were uneasy about a decimation of the officer corps. Nevertheless, implemented with discretion, Azaña’s objectives might have found some support within the Army. However, conflict was almost inevitable. Azaña and the government in which he served were determined to eliminate where possible the irregularities of the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. There were those, Franco foremost among them, who admired the Dictatorship and had been promoted by it. They could not view with equanimity any assault on its works. Secondly, Azaña was inclined to be influenced by, and to reward the efforts of, those sections of the Army which were most loyal to the Republic. That necessarily meant military opponents of the Dictatorship, who were junteros and largely artillerymen. That in turn infuriated the Africanistas who had opposed the junteros since 1917.
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The many measures which Azaña promulgated in the first months of the Republic divided the Army and were seized upon by the rightist press in order to generate the idea that the military, along with the Church, was being singled out for persecution by the new regime. That was a distortion of Azaña’s intentions. By a decree of 22 April 1931, Army officers were required to take an oath of loyalty (promesa de fidelidad) to the Republic just as previously they had to the monarchy. It did not matter what an officer’s inner convictions were and no mechanism was set up to purge or investigate those who were monarchists. According to the decree, to stay in the ranks, an officer simply had to make the promise ‘to serve the Republic well and faithfully, obey its laws and defend it by arms’. In the case of those who refused to give the promise, it was to be assumed that they wished to leave the service. Most officers had no difficulty about making the promise. For many, it was probably a routine formula without special significance and was made by many whose real convictions were anti-Republican.
(#litres_trial_promo) After all, few had felt bound by their oath of loyalty to the monarchy to spring to its defence on 14 April. On the other hand, although a reasonable demand on the part of the new Minister and the new regime, the oath could easily be perceived by the more partisan officers as an outrageous imposition. Adept at manipulating the military mentality, the right-wing press generated the impression that those whose convictions prevented them swearing the oath were being hounded penniless out of the Army.
(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, those who opted not to swear were considered members of the reserve and were to receive their pay accordingly.
A prominent right-wing general, Joaquín Fanjul, retrospectively summed up the feelings of many officers: ‘When the Republic came into being, it placed many officers in a dilemma: respect it and undertake formally to defend it or else leave the service. The formula was rather humiliating, offspring as it was of the person who conceived it. I thought about it for four days, and finally I offered up my humiliation to my Patria and I signed as did most of my comrades.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In so far as Franco was forced to decide between his profession and his convictions in April 1931, he opted, understandably and without any apparent difficulty, for his profession. Franco was a more sinuous and pragmatic individual than Fanjul as was shown by a conversation which he had in 1931 with an artilleryman of his acquaintance, General Reguera, who had retired under the terms of the Azaña law. ‘I believe that you have committed a mistake,’ said Franco. ‘The Army cannot lose its senior officers just for the sake of it at times as difficult as these.’ When Reguera explained the disgust he felt at ‘serving those people and their dishcloth of a flag’, Franco replied ‘It’s a pity that you and others like you are leaving the service precisely when you could be of most use to Spain and are leaving the way clear to those whom we all know who would do anything to climb a few rungs of the ladder. Those of us who have stayed on will have a bad time, but I believe that by staying we can do much more to avoid what neither you nor I want to happen than if we had just packed up and gone home’.
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On 25 April, the announcement was made of the decree which came to be known as the Ley Azaña. It offered voluntary retirement on full pay to all members of the officer corps, a generous and expensive way of trying to reduce its size. However, the decree stated that after thirty days, any officer who was surplus to requirements but had not opted for the scheme would lose his commission without compensation. This caused massive resentment and further encouragement of the belief, again fomented by the rightist press, that the Army was being persecuted by the Republic. Since the threat was never carried out, its announcement was a gratuitously damaging error on the part of Azaña or his ministerial advisers.
As soon as the decree was made public, the most alarmist rumours were spread about unemployment and even exile for officers who were not enthusiastic Republicans.
(#litres_trial_promo) A large number accepted, rather more than one third of the total, and as many as two thirds among those colonels who had no hope of ever being promoted to general.
(#litres_trial_promo) Franco of course did not. He was visited by a group of officers from the Academy who asked his advice on how to respond to the new law. His reply gave a revealing insight into his notion that the Army was the ultimate arbiter of Spain’s political destinies. He said that a soldier served Spain and not a particular regime and that, now more than ever, Spain needed the Army to have officers who were real patriots.
