The Last Days of the Spanish Republic

2

Resist to Survive

While Negrín continued desperately trying to maintain a war effort in the hope, not of victory, but of an honourable peace settlement, Casado worked to consolidate his links with both the Francoist espionage networks and the Fifth Column in Madrid. Without them, it would have been much more difficult for him to pull together the various elements of his coup. He was also seconded in what he did by the distinguished Socialist intellectual Julián Besteiro, Professor of Logic in the University of Madrid. On the night of 5 March, the two, together with disillusioned anarchist leaders such as Cipriano Mera and the Socialist trade union leader Wenceslao Carrillo, announced an anti-Negrín National Defence Junta (Consejo Nacional de Defensa) under the presidency of General José Miaja. The enterprise was driven by the hope that Casado’s contacts with the Francoist secret service and Besteiro’s links with the Fifth Column in Madrid would facilitate negotiation with Franco in Burgos. They may also have hoped that, by inspiring a military uprising ‘to save Spain from Communism’, they would somehow endear themselves to Franco.

Casado justified his action on the grounds that he was preventing a Moscow-inspired Communist take-over. Although such intentions on the part of the Communists were demonstrably non-existent, the fiction was believed by those in the Republican zone desperate for an end to the war, many of whom had already acquired a deep hostility to the Communists.1 Casado’s later justification was founded on his outrage that Negrín and the Communists had talked of resistance to the bitter end when shortages of food and equipment made that impossible. In denouncing Juan Negrín’s commitment to continued resistance, he was ignoring the Prime Minister’s Herculean efforts to secure by diplomacy a negotiated peace with adequate guarantees against a justifiably feared Francoist repression. According to Prieto, Negrín’s efforts had even extended to the Third Reich. It should be noted that Negrín’s diplomacy remained secret lest it trigger defeatism.2 Similarly, Casado seemed unaware of the extent to which Negrín’s rhetoric of resistance was a necessary bargaining chip to be used to secure a reasonable peace settlement with Franco.

Although Casado had never joined the Communist Party, as had many other career officers on the Republican side, his ferocious anti-communism was of recent vintage. He was a freemason with a pedigree as a Republican. When the military coup took place in July 1936, he was still commander of Manuel Azaña’s presidential guard. He took part in the defence of Madrid from the attacks through the sierra to the north of the capital. According to his own account, in October 1936 he was dismissed as head of operations of the general staff for his criticism of the way in which priority was being given to the Communist Fifth Regiment (Quinto Regimiento) in the distribution of Soviet weaponry. In fact, the decision had been made by Vicente Rojo, who thought him incompetent. Antonio Cordón, the under-secretary of the Ministry of Defence, had a higher opinion of Casado than Rojo had, regarding him as intelligent and professional. However, Cordón believed that Casado’s positive qualities were neutralized by his ‘overweening pride and uncontrolled ambition’. Believing himself to be the man who could win the war, Casado was eaten up with resentment that he had not been promoted to positions commensurate with his own estimates of his worth. His bitterness was focused on Rojo. Nevertheless, over the following months, he was given important postings. Indalecio Prieto made him commander of the Army of Andalusia and, in May 1938, Negrín appointed him commander of the Army of the Centre.3 This last appointment was interpreted by the ex-Communist Francisco-Félix Montiel in terms of a bizarre conspiracy theory that Casado had been chosen by the Russians for his incompetence as part of a long-term plan to bring the war to an end without blame for the Communist Party.4 It is more plausibly an indication that the Communists were not as committed, as Casado later claimed that they were, to total domination of the Republic’s armed forces.

The reasons for Besteiro’s involvement went back much further. His experiences during the repression which followed the Socialist-led general strike of 1917 intensified his repugnance for violence. He became aware of the futility of Spain’s weak Socialist movement undertaking a frontal assault on the state. He opposed the PSOE’s affiliation to the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern), and a period in England on a scholarship to do research on the Workers’ Educational Association in 1924 confirmed his reformism. He had argued from his position as president of both the PSOE and the UGT that, in order to build up working-class strength, the Socialist movement should accept the offer that it collaborate with the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera. Yet, in mid-1930, he argued against Socialist collaboration in the broad opposition front established by the Pact of San Sebastián and eventually in the future government of the Republic. Finding himself in a minority, in February 1931, he felt obliged to resign as president of both the party and the union.5 Thus began a process of marginalization from his erstwhile comrades. Moreover, his theoretical abstractions about the nature of the historical process through which Spain was passing seem to have given him a sense of knowing better than they did. Indeed, as President of the Cortes between 1931 and 1933, he had manifested some hostility towards the deputies of his own party.

With the bulk of the PSOE and the UGT eager to use the apparatus of the state to introduce basic social reforms, Besteiro’s abstentionist views fell on deaf ears. In fact, the rank and file of the Socialist movement was moving rapidly away from the positions advocated by Besteiro. Right-wing intransigence radicalized the grass-roots militants. The conclusion drawn by an influential section of the leadership led by Largo Caballero was that the Socialists should meet the needs of the rank and file by seeking more rather than less responsibility in the government. Besteiro’s belief that socialism would come if only socialists were well behaved underlay a disturbing complacency regarding fascism. He opposed the growing radicalization of the Socialist movement.6 Thus he had opposed its participation in the revolutionary insurrection of October 1934 which had followed the inclusion of the right-wing CEDA in the government.7 His failure to understand the real threat of fascism prefigured some of his misplaced optimism about Franco at the end of the Spanish Civil War.8

In the course of that Civil War, Besteiro had behaved in a way which confirmed the suspicion of many within the PSOE that he did not fully understand the great political struggles of the day. Outside of political circles, he reinforced his popularity by refusing numerous opportunities to seek a safe exile.9 He continued to work in the university, being elected Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in October 1936. At the same time, he assiduously fulfilled his duties as a parliamentary deputy, as councillor of the Ayuntamiento de Madrid, to which he had been elected on 12 April 1931, and as president of the Committee for the Reconstruction of the Capital. His friends tried frantically to persuade him to leave Madrid. Yet, despite, indeed because of, his view that the war would end disastrously for the Republic, he steadfastly refused. From the beginning, Besteiro made no secret of his, at the time, inopportune commitment to a peace settlement. As Spain’s representative at the coronation of George VI in London on 12 May 1937, he had tried to seek mediation by the British government, but it was a bad moment for such an initiative. The rebels were in the ascendant – in the north, the fall of Bilbao was expected from one day to the next. At the same time, the Republican government was facing significant internal difficulties. In Barcelona, from 3 to 10 May, the forces of the government and the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, or CNT) were locked in a bloody struggle for control of the city. Besteiro’s mission was doomed to failure. In his absence, the Largo Caballero cabinet fell. The resolution of the crisis with the appointment of Juan Negrín as Prime Minister of the so-called ‘Government of Victory’ on 17 May seemed to bring to an end the political infighting that had characterized the previous history of the Republic at war. Negrín, with the remarkable organizational ability that he had demonstrated in the Ministry of Finance, was regarded as the man who could create a centralized war effort.

This seemed possible because May 1937 had seen the defeat of the revolutionary elements within the Republic – the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica), the extremist wing of the anarchist movement, and the anti-Stalinist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) – and the marginalization of the rhetorically revolutionary wing of the PSOE under Largo Caballero. However, that did not mean that any of these groups accepted their fate with docility. As military defeats mounted – the loss of the north, and of Teruel, and the division of the Republic in two – their resentments would grow and be focused increasingly on Negrín and the Communists. As far as Besteiro was concerned, his desire to be the man who brought peace was shattered on the rock of Negrín’s determination to fight on to victory. Since Negrín believed, rightly, that only a major military triumph by the Republic would bring Franco to the negotiating table, he had no interest in fostering Besteiro’s ambitions. The highly touchy Besteiro, however, perceived an insult in Negrín’s understandable failure to follow up on his London trip.10 Disappointed that his inflated sense of the importance of his own mission was not matched by Negrín, Besteiro began to harbour a fierce grudge against the new Prime Minister. The fall of the Largo Caballero government in mid-May 1937 opened up the post of ambassador in France. Besteiro aspired to the Spanish Embassy in Paris in order to seek French mediation in the war, but Negrín’s commitment to resistance to the last against Franco made such an appointment impossible.

In the wake of the failure of his peace mission, Besteiro returned to his university post and his position in the Madrid Ayuntamiento. As a city councillor, he worked hard on the problems of the besieged capital to the detriment of his health. He was tortured by the idea that mistakes made in the early 1930s, particularly Socialist participation in government, had been responsible for the war. He was also appalled by the violence of the conflict and especially by the sound of firing squads and gunshots in the night – which he took to be the sounds of political assassinations.11 In contrast, in the last months of the war, he seemed oblivious to reports of the Francoist repression in captured areas.12

Initially, Besteiro’s stance as a silent but critical spectator of the Republican government had puzzled many rank-and-file Socialists, although as the war progressed, his stock began to rise again. The departure from government of Largo Caballero in May 1937 had provoked considerable anti-Communist sentiment within the PSOE in Madrid and much of the UGT. Similarly, the removal in April 1938 of the ever pessimistic Prieto from his post as Minister of Defence had intensified anti-Communism within Socialist ranks. This was unfair. The Communists had certainly wanted to see a more positive and dynamic person as Minister of Defence, but they had been keen to see Prieto kept in the government. They feared, as actually was to happen, that his spleen would quickly be directed against them. As it turned out, it was Prieto who refused a different ministry in the cabinet formed on 5 April. Fomented even further by Prieto’s embittered and tendentious interpretations of what had happened, the growing resentment of the Communists would undermine the principal bulwark of the Republican war effort.13

Besteiro, like Prieto, conveniently ignored the immense contribution of the Communist Party to the survival of the Republic. A key component of the People’s Army, the party had lost thousands of militants either killed, seriously wounded or captured as territory fell to the Francoists. By the end of 1937, some 60 per cent of the PCE’s militants were in the People’s Army. It was calculated that around 50,000 had been captured by the rebels after the fall of Málaga, Santander and the Asturias. Another 20,000 had been lost in the course of the battle of the Ebro and the last-ditch defence of Catalonia.14 On 18 February 1939, General Rojo sent Negrín an analysis of the possibilities of maintaining resistance in the centre-south zone. In his covering letter, he wrote of the PCE:

I don’t need to tell you that of all the political parties, it has been and remains the only one with which I sympathize. I believe that they are making a big mistake, even in assuming the general responsibility for the field commanders and the overall leadership of this phase of the struggle, because they are going to ensure that the efforts of the enemy and from all countries will be concentrated on them even further. They will end up ensuring the definitive destruction of their party, the only one that is relatively healthy within our political organization.15

In general, the anarchists resented the Communist pre-eminence in the armed forces. This was largely to do with the fact that, in endeavouring to create a centralized and effective war effort, the revolutionary ambitions of the anarchists had been reined in, sometimes brutally. This was perceived by all sectors of the libertarian movement as simply a desire on the part of the Communists to attain a monopoly of power, and the underlying military necessity was utterly ignored. On the other hand, there were numerous complaints of anarchists being murdered. It was certainly the case that there was considerable hostility between Communists and anarchists within the army, in part because of the harsh discipline imposed by Communist commanders. Summary executions of deserters and of commanders deemed to be ineffective were not uncommon. The anarchists alleged that a Communist terror was carried out in front-line units, complaining that there were ‘thousands and thousands of comrades who confess that they feel more fear of being assassinated by the adversary alongside them than of being killed in battle by the enemies opposite’. In a spirit of revenge, in the Levante, lists were drawn up of the names of Communists within military units. Those listed would become targets after the Casado coup. In fact, Communist influence within the armed forces was considerably less than that alleged by the anarchists.16

Forgetting or perhaps unconcerned by the need for the Republic to be defended militarily, after his return from London Besteiro had become even more anti-Communist and commensurately less hostile to the Francoists. The main target of his obsession was Negrín, whom he frequently accused of being a Communist. This view was increasingly shared by many within the Socialist Party. Largo Caballero, for instance, was outraged when Julián Zugazagoitia, then Negrín’s Minister of the Interior, had prohibited a meeting in Alicante at which, it was feared, he planned to denounce the Prime Minister and thereby undermine the war effort.17 Thus the followers of Largo Caballero, Prieto and Besteiro were converging in their anti-Communism and could count on the growing sympathy of the President, Manuel Azaña. Negrín, overwhelmed by his efforts, as premier, to improve the international situation of the Republic and, as Minister of Defence, to run the war effort, did not have the time to combat the corrosive effect of the growing anti-Communism which, in some cases, overcame the higher priority of the defence of the Republic and thus contributed to division, despair and defeatism.18

Besteiro’s hostility to the Communists masked his more generalized lack of enthusiasm for the Republican cause. At his later trial at the hands of the Francoists, it was revealed by his defence lawyer that in the course of 1937 he had used his position as Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters to protect several Falangists in the university. Through some of these colleagues, Professors Julio Palacios (the Vice-Rector), Antonio Luna García, Luis de Sosa y Pérez and Julio Martínez Santa Olalla, he had established contact with the clandestine Fifth Column in Madrid. In fact, since September 1937, Luna García had run an important section of the Fifth Column in Madrid, known as the ‘Organización Antonio’, which had been created at the end of the previous year by Captain José López Palazón.19 In his statement on Besteiro’s behalf to the military tribunal, Luna García spoke of his surprise at the vehemence with which Besteiro had criticized the Republican government.

His report at the time to Burgos identified Besteiro as a potential target for the Fifth Column. In April 1938, Luna was instructed by the clandestine organization of the Falange to try to persuade Besteiro to move beyond refusal to work with the government and to try actively to bring the war to an end. This initiative coincided with the division of Republican territory by the successful Francoist offensive through Aragon to the Mediterranean coast. With the Republic’s central zone cut off from the government in Valencia, Besteiro agreed. From the summer of 1938, he started to lobby energetically to be permitted to form a cabinet as a preliminary step to peace negotiations.20

Besteiro’s position was converging with that of Segismundo Casado. Already in the summer of 1938, shortly after Casado’s promotion to the command of the Army of the Centre, a prominent member of the Madrid Fifth Column, the Falangist Antonio Bouthelier España, had approached him. Bouthelier was able to get near to Casado because he was secretary to the prominent CNT member Manuel Salgado, who worked in the security services of the Army of the Centre. He had used this position to help Francoists cross the lines. Bouthelier also had a short-wave radio with which he passed information to rebel headquarters. For various reasons, the Francoist espionage service was aware of Casado’s anti-communism. His brother Lieutenant Colonel César Casado was a member of the Fifth Column, and Segismundo Casado was doing everything in this power to protect him. Given Bouthelier’s closeness to Casado, he was instructed to propose to him that he act as a spy for the rebels. He was emboldened to do so because he knew of the sympathies for the rebel cause of both Casado’s wife María Condado y Condado and his brother César. Casado did not immediately accept the proposal but, significantly, did not report the contact to the Republic’s security service, the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, in order to open an investigation into Bouthelier. César Casado was only one of several pro-Francoist officers that Segismundo was protecting by giving them posts within his general staff. In fact, aware of these contacts, the SIM was already carrying out surveillance of Casado and his family. However, since the Socialist Ángel Pedrero García, the head of the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar in the Army of the Centre, sympathized with Casado, no action seems to have been taken against him.21

One of the members of the Organización Antonio was a major in the army medical corps, Casado’s doctor Diego Medina Garijo. Another was a retired major of the medical corps, Dr Ricardo Bertoloty Ramírez. He was one of the team that had saved Franco’s life in 1916 when he was seriously wounded at El Biutz in Morocco. In 1931, Dr Bertoloty had taken advantage of Azaña’s reforms to leave the army, but he remained a close friend of Franco.22 Contacts with pro-rebel sympathizers in the Republican Army were monitored through the Servicio de Información y Policia Militar (SIPM), run within Franco’s general staff by Colonel José Ungría Jiménez. A key figure in the SIPM in close contact with the Organización Antonio was Lieutenant Colonel José Centaño de la Paz, Casado’s adjutant, who belonged to another fifth-column organization called ‘La Ciudad Clandestina’. Centaño was in constant radio contact with Franco’s headquarters in Burgos. In late January 1939, Antonio Luna’s group brought Besteiro and Casado together in order to discuss plans to overthrow Negrín. However, Ángel Pedrero García had already brokered a prior meeting with Besteiro at the end of October 1938, though it is unlikely that they discussed anything as dramatic as an anti-Negrín coup d’état. Not until 5 February did Centaño reveal to Casado his role in the SIPM.23

That the SIPM regarded Casado as potentially useful was hardly surprising. They were aware that, on 8 December 1938, Casado had met the British Chargé d’Affaires Ralph Stevenson in Madrid and discussed with him London’s desire to end the Spanish conflict.24 That together with the way in which Casado had run the Army of the Centre must have delighted them. He had imposed rigidly traditional military discipline and completely emasculated the corps of political commissars, which had been created shortly after the conflict began in response to the fact that war had been triggered by a rebellion of professional officers against the constitutional authority of the Republic. The commissariat existed in parallel with the traditional military structure. Commissars were essentially evangelists of the Republican cause. They worked to maintain morale and to explain the political purpose of the war effort, and provided a link between the rank and file, the officers and the Republican government. They held the same rank as the commander of the unit in which they served, even where that unit was the army as a whole. Inevitably, most career officers resented the authority enjoyed by commissars to question major military decisions. By early 1939, as the commissars worked to maintain the spirit of resistance, this resentment intensified in proportion to the growing defeatism of the professional officers, especially so in the case of Casado.25

The consequence was that new conscripts were left with little idea of what they fighting for. This fostered the spread of demoralization and desertions. At the same time, Casado showed no inclination to use his forces in battle, something for which Vicente Rojo would never forgive him. Casado was far from being the only or indeed the most senior defeatist in the Republican ranks. In late November, to take pressure off the retreating Army of the Ebro, Rojo had ordered three diversionary attacks by the armies of the centre-south zone under General Miaja, the commander of the Republican armies of the south and centre. With his chief of staff, General Manuel Matallana Gómez, Miaja was supposed to organize a major offensive westwards into Extremadura and a landing at Motril in Granada. Colonel Casado, commander of the Army of the Centre, was to carry out an advance on the Madrid front at Brunete. All three simply failed to carry out their orders. Many of the officers in the Army of Catalonia were committed Communists like Colonel Antonio Cordón, or had risen through the ranks of the militia like Juan Modesto and Enrique Líster. In contrast, the senior officers of the Army of the Centre were professional officers who had made their careers in Africa. If, like Miaja, they had sought membership of the Communist Party, it was out of convenience rather than conviction.

The various offensives should have begun on 11 December 1938 but were inexplicably delayed until 5 January 1939, by which time the Francoist drive into Catalonia was virtually unstoppable. The lack of commitment by the southern army commanders was seen in Negrín’s immediate circle as the result of ‘treachery, sabotage and defeatism’.26 The failure to launch the operations owed much to the fact that the chief of operations of the Army of the Centre, Lieutenant Colonel Francisco García Viñals, was a close collaborator of the SIPM. He did everything possible to ensure that the Republican forces in the centre zone remained inactive.27 The landing at Motril never took place. Several commanders, the Communists Enrique Castro Delgado and Juan Modesto Guilloto, the moderate Republican (and anti-Communist) Juan Perea Capulino and the commissar general of the Group of Armies of the Centre (Grupo de Ejércitos Republicanos del Centro), the Communist Jesús Hernández, bitterly criticized Miaja in their respective memoirs. They alleged that Miaja had failed to use the troops at his disposal for the attack in Extremadura, preferring to keep them in defensive positions when he could have exploited the local numerical superiority occasioned by Franco’s concentration on the Catalan campaign.