The Last Days of the Spanish Republic
Hernández denounced Miaja’s delays in launching the Extremadura offensive. Modesto declared that the decision to disobey Rojo’s orders and simply not launch the attack on Motril was an act of sabotage by Miaja, Matallana and the commander of the Republican navy, Rear Admiral Miguel Buiza Fernández-Palacios. He also alleged that Miaja deliberately exhausted and demoralized the troops at his disposal by long route marches of 150 kilometres to north and south: ‘The delay of the offensive in Extremadura, the unnecessary troop movements, a dozen days of forced marches from north to south, from south to north and again from north to south, as well as exasperating and exhausting the soldiers, provoked insecurity, doubts, indignation and discontent among the troops and their officers.’ When on the verge of success, Miaja inexplicably called a halt, failed to to seize the opportunity to attack Cordoba and thus allowed the Francoists to regroup.
The third offensive, on the Madrid front at Brunete, was a disaster and Modesto alleged that Casado had allowed his battle plans to be seen by the Francoists. In fact, Burgos had received the plans from more than one source. Casado had assured his staff that the attack would be a walk-over. It was to be a surprise attack, launched against a weak sector of the rebel front, with considerable logistical superiority. In fact, Casado failed to attack at the point that Rojo had chosen. Instead, he launched the Army of the Centre against a well-fortified – and well-informed – sector and thereby guaranteed the failure of the operation. Edmundo Domínguez Aragonés, the recently appointed commissar inspector of the Army of the Centre, who followed the operation from Casado’s headquarters, was appalled when he went ahead even after it became obvious that the enemy was expecting it. Casado knowingly sent hundreds of men to certain death against positions well defended with banks of machine guns. Modesto dubbed the calamitous Brunete offensive ‘the ante-room to the Casado uprising’, an operation that deliberately set out to weaken the best units of the Republic. Franco’s own staff was in any case fully informed of most of the Republic’s military plans in the last six months of the war.28
The accusations made by Modesto, Castro Delgado, Hernández and Perea were seen to have considerable substance when General Matallana was court-martialled after the Civil War. Before the trial took place, Palmiro Togliatti, the Comintern delegate and the effective leader of the PCE, wrote that, in 1937, Matallana ‘had been suspected of contacts with the enemy but nothing concrete was ever proven’.29 In fact, he had many contacts with the Fifth Column, including with the Organización Antonio, confiding in Captain López Palazón his hatred of reds and his distress that the beginning of the war had found him in Republican Madrid. He had also used the funds of the general staff to support pro-Franco officers who were in hiding.30 At his trial, Matallana asserted that he had been serving the rebels since early in the war, passing information to the Fifth Column through his brother Alberto about the strength of the International Brigades, the residences of Russian pilots, the location in Albacete where tanks were assembled and the times of the arrival in Cartagena of ships carrying war matériel. Regarding the latter period of the war, he claimed to have sabotaged numerous operations including the Brunete offensive and facilitated rebel operations by failing to send reinforcements. His advice to Miaja was always to stabilize the fronts and to avoid attacks. At his trial, he said that in the archives of the Republican forces there were many projects that he had managed to get postponed indefinitely on different pretexts. He ensured that the various general staffs to which he had belonged never produced battle plans or directives on their own initiative. During the battle of the Ebro, he had placed obstacles in the way of requests for diversionary attacks in the centre zone.
To this end, he said, with the help of his second-in-command Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Garijo Hernández and the head of his own general staff Lieutenant Colonel Félix Muedra Miñón, he controlled the easily manipulated Miaja. By dint of flattery and by encouraging his desire for the limelight, they gained his confidence. They exploited his festering envy of Rojo and fomented rumblings of discontent. Taking advantage of Miaja’s resentments, they managed to delay the fulfilment of orders from Rojo. Matallana later claimed that, to undermine offensives, he ensured that troops were moved by rail instead of with trucks since the railway was slow and had limited capacity. The consequent delays allowed the Francoists to work out the Republican battle plans. Moreover, the removal of trains from civilian use led to the collapse of the food-distribution network and provoked demonstrations by women protesting about lack of food. Negrín was obliged to intervene to guarantee supplies and to reconcile the needs of the capital with military requirements.31
There was a vast distance between the reputation of Miaja as the heroic saviour of Madrid assiduously fabricated by Republican propaganda to boost popular morale and the reality. Miaja was a fairly mediocre soldier who was always averse to taking risks. According to the Francoists Antonio Bouthelier and José López Mora, he was ‘grotesque, sensual and bloated, always completely oblivious to what was going on around him’. Togliatti wrote later of Miaja that he was ‘totally brutalized by drink and drugs’.32
Having received huge deliveries of German and Italian war matériel, Franco was poised for a major assault on Catalonia. Yet, in order to do so, he had left his southern fronts relatively undefended. Herbert Matthews, the extremely well-informed correspondent of the New York Times, who was close to Negrín, wrote later: ‘Naturally, we thought that the Madrid zone would save the day. Miaja, by that time, was approaching a breakdown, from accounts that I received afterwards. He was drinking too much and had lost what nerve he had once possessed. The picture of the loyal, dogged, courageous defender of the Republic – a picture built up from the first days of the siege of Madrid – was a myth. He was weak, unintelligent, unprincipled, and, in that period, his courage could seriously be questioned.’33 The reasonable hopes of both Negrín and the head of the army general staff, Vicente Rojo, were to be dashed by the failures, if not outright treachery, of the commanders in the centre zone – Miaja, Matallana and Casado.
The issue was not just the treachery of the high command of the armies of the centre-south zone. There was also the issue of ever greater logistical differentials between the two sides. The superiority of the Francoists in tanks, artillery, air cover, machine guns and even functioning rifles was overwhelming. At the end of January 1939, the President of the Cortes, Diego Martínez Barrio, arranged a meeting between Negrín and President Azaña, who since the 22nd of that month had been established in the castle of Perelada near Figueras. Relations between the two had deteriorated significantly over the last months. Martínez Barrio described them as ‘fire and water’. Azaña disliked Negrín’s dynamism and brutal realism; Negrín saw Azaña as an intellectual wallowing in unrealistic ethical conundrums. Azaña complained to Martínez Barrio: ‘he treats me worse than a servant’. Negrín arrived at the meeting utterly exhausted after two days without sleep. He told the others that thousands of tons of war matériel – tanks, artillery, aircraft, machine guns and ammunition – were on their way across France from Le Havre to Port Bou. In fact, the French government had put every possible obstacle in the way of their transport across the country. If the supplies had arrived two weeks earlier, Negrín claimed, the situation in Catalonia could have been saved. When Martínez Barrio asked him if anything could be done, he replied: ‘I’m afraid not.’ It was decided that Azaña should move to La Bajol, a mere 3 kilometres from the French frontier.34 Negrín made a similar point to the standing committee of the Cortes on 31 March 1939 when he claimed that, if this matériel had arrived four months earlier, the Republic could have won the battle of the Ebro and if it had arrived even two months earlier, Catalonia would not have been lost.35
Shortly after his meeting with Azaña on 30 January, Negrín requested from Miaja a report on the military situation in the centre zone. Miaja’s depressing response centred on the collapse of morale and the lack of rations, clothing and usable weaponry, particularly artillery, after the unsuccessful initiatives in Extremadura and Andalusia. In fact, shortly afterwards, Miaja successfully requested the French Consul in Valencia to put a visa on his diplomatic passport that would permit him entry into France or Algiers.36 Barcelona suffered sustained bombing raids on 21, 22 and 23 January. The starving population attacked food warehouses but, according to Colonel Juan Perea, commander of the Army of the East, vast quantities of food and equipment were left in the Catalan capital and fell into the hands of the Francoists when they entered the city in the afternoon of 26 January.37 The military retreat, now swelled by 450,000 civilians, continued to the French frontier and on to the unhealthy internment camps of France’s windswept southern beaches. Among the Republican authorities that fled before the advancing Francoists, only Negrín and his ministers and the Communists had the courage to return to the remaining Republican territory. There too, from the Republic’s eastern frontier in Badajoz to the Mediterranean coast in Valencia and Murcia, there were shortages of basic necessities and weaponry, intense demoralization and dread of what was seen as inevitable defeat. The loss of Catalonia and the consequent isolation of the central zone provoked widespread fear. This was reflected in bitter divisions between the Communists and other parties and within the Socialist Party.38
3
The Power of Exhaustion
As has already been noted, there have been claims that the Communists were plotting to end the war long before the fall of Catalonia.1 In fact, as late as 26 January 1939, the Comintern was urging the Communist leadership in Britain, France and the USA to organize demonstrations to push their respective governments into lifting the blockade on arms for Spain and to make arrangements for the accommodation of refugees. The French party was told to recruit volunteers for Spain and to send a delegation to Catalonia to counteract capitulationism in the Republican and Socialist parties. A message was sent via the French urging the Spanish Communists to hold on. Even after news had reached Moscow of the fall of Barcelona, the head of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov, stood by his instructions to the Spanish Communists to fight on. On 7 February, Dimitrov sent a further message to the PCE: ‘the course of resistance must be maintained … the front in Levante must be activated; capitulation by the Spanish government must be prevented, through replacing adherents of capitulation in the government with staunch adherents of resistance’. On the same day, he ordered Maurice Thorez, leader of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), to organize demonstrations to pressurize the French government into permitting the dispatch of the Army of Catalonia back to the central zone. The PCF was instructed to organize the supply of arms and food to Valencia and to look after the welfare and morale of the Spanish refugees in France.2
Meanwhile, in Madrid, all these efforts were undermined by the activities of an ever more active rebel Fifth Column. Its success derived from the ease with which it was able to feed on the growing anti-communism. This was a reflection of the fact that the PCE was totally identified with government policy and therefore held responsible for the widespread hardship in the beleaguered city. The Fifth Column was also able to exploit the bitter resentment of the victims of PCE security policy since late 1936. In their efforts to impose a centralized war effort, the Communists had been ruthless in their suppression of anarchists and Trotskyists who had wanted to pursue a revolutionary line.3 Defeatism was rife. The intense anti-Communist hostility from the leadership of the CNT was matched within much of the Socialist Party. Relations between career officers and the Communist hierarchy had cooled. In an effort to improve the situation, at some point in October the leader of the Communist youth movement (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas, or JSU), Santiago Carrillo, had lunch at Casado’s headquarters. Casado had a reputation as a thoroughly humourless and sour individual, his constant irritability the consequence of the acute stomach pains he suffered as a result of ulcers. Knowing this and fully apprised of the rumours about Casado’s conspiratorial activities, Carrillo was surprised at the lunch by the effusiveness of Casado’s assertion that he shared Negrín’s determination to maintain resistance. Carrillo had been informed that his father, Wenceslao, a life-long friend of Largo Caballero, was actively engaged in seeking support within the PSOE for an anti-Negrín peace initiative. Shortly afterwards, in an acrimonious meeting, Santiago tried in vain to convince his father that such an action would leave tens of thousands of Republicans at the mercy of Francoist terror.4
The isolation of the central zone signified a logistical nightmare. There was no fuel for domestic heating or cooking, and no hot water. Medicines and surgical dressings were in dangerously short supply. The exiguous scale of rations in Madrid was insufficient, according to a report by the Quaker International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees, to sustain life for more than two or three months. The standard ration consisted of 2 ounces (55 grams) of lentils, beans or rice with occasional additions of sugar or salted cod. It was said that more than 400 people died of inanition each week in Madrid. A growing food crisis intensified a popular sense that Negrín’s government, located in Barcelona, had simply abandoned the centre to its fate. This was unfair, since the food situation in the Catalan capital was little better. In the central zone, Negrín’s rhetoric of resistance was increasingly out of tune with popular feeling.5 In November, when the Francoists bombed Madrid with loaves of fresh white bread, JSU militants denounced this as an insulting gesture and burned the loaves in street bonfires. Álvaro Delgado, a student at the time, told the British historian Ronald Fraser: ‘It came down in sacks with propaganda wrapped round it saying: “This bread is being sent you by your nationalist brothers.” It was beautiful, fine white bread. Some came through a broken skylight at the Fine Arts school, and when no one was around I and other students ate so much we felt sick.’ On the streets, others trampled the bread in a fury. Despite their hunger, people were shouting: ‘Don’t pick it up.’ Even Casado recalled later that women with children launched themselves on to some men who were seen picking up the bread. They then collected the loaves and took them to the Dirección General de Seguridad, the national police headquarters, whence it was transported to the battlefront and handed back to the Francoists.6
Discontent was stoked up by the Fifth Column which talked of the plentiful food in the Francoist-held areas and also of the likely mercy of Franco for those who were not Communists. War-weariness boosted the growth of the Fifth Column. David Jato, a significant Falangist militia leader, told Ronald Fraser: ‘I wouldn’t say we had people inside Casado’s general staff; I’d say the majority of the staff was willing to help us. So many doctors joined that Madrid’s health services were virtually in our hands. The recruiting centres were infiltrated by our men. Even some Communist organizations like Socorro Rojo ended up in fifth column hands.’7 The Socorro Rojo Internacional (International Red Aid) was a social welfare body.
In the wake of the Francoist advance through Aragon, dissident elements of the PSOE and the UGT had met with members of the CNT to discuss their discontent with Communist policy as early as April 1938. In mid-November 1938, anti-Negrinista Socialist officials in Alicante, Elche and Novelda and CNT elements in Madrid and Guadalajara had participated in a rehearsal of their efforts to oust Negrín. These initiatives were nipped in the bud by the SIM.8 The JSU organizations of Valencia, Alicante, Albacete, Murcia, Jaen and Ciudad Real were in favour of breaking Communist domination of the organization and re-establishing the Socialist Youth Federation (Federación de Juventudes Socialistas, or FJS) as it was before the unification with the Communist youth movement in 1936. The knee-jerk, and futile, response of the JSU secretary general, Santiago Carrillo, was to denounce the dissidents as Trotskyists. His alarm was understandable since JSU members made up a high proportion of the Republican armed forces.9
A combination of the Republic’s worsening situation, the consequent divisions within the Socialist Party and his conversations with Luna García convinced Besteiro that he was far from alone in his anti-communism. Aware of his own popularity, he had reached the conclusion that the time had come to emerge from his self-imposed obscurity in Madrid. At the PSOE executive committee meeting held in Barcelona on 15 November, Besteiro’s speech, which at time strayed into rhetoric indistinguishable from that emanating from the Franco zone, discussed the likely consequences of the Communists being removed from power.
The war has been inspired, directed and fomented by the Communists. If they ceased to intervene, it would be virtually impossible to continue the war. The enemy, having other international support, would find itself in a situation of superiority … I see the situation as follows: if the war were to be won, Spain would be Communist. The rest of the democracies would be against us and we would have only Russia with us. And if we are defeated, the future will be terrible.10
It was a virtuoso performance of pessimism, defeatism and irresponsibility. He had recognized the inevitability of cooperation with the Communists yet had remained aloof, determined to keep his hands clean. Now, he denounced collaboration without offering any alternative other than division, defeat and the tender mercies of General Franco.
The underlying naivety of Besteiro’s words reflected his belief that the PCE, ‘the party of war’, was the only obstacle to peace and reconciliation. Indeed Besteiro would seemingly be coming to believe the Francoist propaganda line that, by handing over the PCE, the Republicans could ‘purify’ themselves and establish a basis for post-war reconciliation ‘between Spaniards’ (although obviously not Spaniards who were Communists). In the course of his speech, Besteiro returned to what had become an obsessional theme, declaring that Negrín was a Communist who had entered the Socialist Party as a Trojan horse. The next day, he reported to Negrín himself what he had said: ‘Before they tell you anything, I want you to hear from me what I said in the executive committee. I regard you as an agent of the Communists.’ He told Azaña and others that Negrín was a ‘Karamazov’, ‘a crazed visionary’ – presumably a reference to the violent sensualist Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. He later gave the British Chargé d’Affaires a bitter account of his meetings with Azaña and Negrín.11
Accordingly, while in Barcelona, Besteiro discussed with Azaña the formation of a government whose principal task would be to seek peace. He told Julián Zugazagoitia, the editor of El Socialista, that ‘we Spaniards are murdering one another in a stupid way, for even more stupid and criminal reasons’.12 Deeply concerned about the consequences for the bulk of the population of inevitable Republican defeat, he was ever more hostile to Negrín because he believed him to be unnecessarily prolonging the war. Misplaced rumours about a peace cabinet saw Besteiro subjected to virulent attack by the Communist press.13
Before going to Barcelona, Besteiro had confided his anxieties to Ángel Pedrero García, the head of the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar in the Army of the Centre, and a close collaborator of Colonel Casado. Apparently, Casado had already intimated to Pedrero that he would like to get in touch with Besteiro. Accordingly, in October 1938, when Besteiro had expressed a similar wish, Pedrero arranged a meeting in his own house. Besteiro shared with Casado his conviction that an early peace treaty was necessary and that the military high command should pressure Negrín’s government to negotiate. From this time, there were regular contacts between Casado and General Manuel Matallana Gómez, of the general staff, and Casado’s close collaborator Colonel José López Otero, a general staff officer with anarchist sympathies. They also made tentative efforts to bring Miaja aboard. Their caution was related to Miaja’s membership, formally at least, of the Communist Party. In December, Casado had a meeting with Ralph Stevenson, the British Chargé d’Affaires, in the hope of ascertaining if he could rely on support from London. Casado was also in touch with the diplomats of France and several Latin American countries. Stevenson followed up the meeting by seeking out Besteiro to find out more about the peace plans.14
On his return to Madrid, a deeply disillusioned Besteiro reported his conversations in Barcelona to his acquaintances in the Fifth Column. He was resigned to the fact that Azaña would not be commissioning him to form a peace government and that, even if the President did so, he would be unable to find sufficient political support. However, Antonio Luna García set about persuading him that, if he was unable to fulfil his hopes of forming a peace government with wide political support, he should consider doing so with military backing.
It is astonishing that Besteiro could have been unaware of Franco’s determination to maintain the hatreds of the war long after the end of hostilities. If he was left in doubt after the savage repression unleashed in each of the provinces as they fell, an interview that the Caudillo gave on 7 November 1938 to the vice-president of the United Press, James Miller, should surely have made it clear. Franco declared unequivocally: ‘There will be no mediation. There will be no mediation because the delinquents and their victims cannot live side by side.’ He went on threateningly, ‘We have in our archive more than two million names catalogued with the proofs of their crimes.’15 Having dismissed any possibility of an amnesty for the Republicans, he confirmed his commitment to a policy of institutionalized revenge. The mass of political files and documentation captured as each town had fallen to the Nationalists was being gathered in Salamanca. Carefully sifted, it provided the basis for a massive card index of members of political parties, trade unions and masonic lodges which in turn would provide information for a policy of sweeping reprisals.16
That Besteiro had preoccupations other than the fate of defeated Republicans was revealed to Tomás Bilbao Hospitalet, Minister without Portfolio in Negrín’s government. A member of the minor Basque party Acción Nacionalista Vasca, Tomás Bilbao had joined the cabinet in August 1938 to replace Manuel Irujo, who had resigned in solidarity with Artemi Aiguader i Miró of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, who had himself resigned in protest at the limits imposed on the powers of the Catalan regional government, the Generalitat. Contrary to expectations, Bilbao had shown himself to be a shrewd and loyal member of Negrín’s team.17 In late 1938, he visited first Casado and then Besteiro, whom he found irritated and harshly critical of the government for not having pursued the peace policies that he had recommended. Bilbao informed Negrín of his fear that Besteiro, in conjunction with Casado, might do something dangerous. Negrín was sufficiently confident about Casado not to take the warnings seriously.18
However, as things got worse for the Republican cause, both Casado and Besteiro were readying themselves for action. With the knowledge of Luna García’s group, the two met on 25 January 1939, just as Franco’s forces were on the point of entering Barcelona. The next day, Lieutenant Colonel Centaño sent a message to Burgos: ‘Besteiro is beginning to work with Casado and everything is under our control.’ At the end of January, Ungría’s SIPM had instructed Julio Palacios of the Organización Antonio to inform Casado of the guarantees offered by the Caudillo to those professional army officers who laid down their arms and did not have common crimes on their conscience. The text had been transmitted orally to Palacios and then written up to be passed on to Casado. The wording contrasted starkly with many of Franco’s public declarations, but the concessions seemingly offered to senior officers would have been attractive to Casado personally since he would soon reveal his intention of leaving Spain after the war.