The Last Days of the Spanish Republic

The belief that the anarchist movement was infested with Fifth Columnists was not confined to the Communists. Largo Caballero told PSOE executive committee member Juan-Simeón Vidarte that ‘the FAI has been infiltrated by so many agents provocateurs and police informers that it is impossible to have dealings with them’. That view was shared by the Socialist Director General de Seguridad, Largo Caballero’s friend Wenceslao Carrillo. One of José García Pradas’s collaborators in the CNT–FAI newspaper Frente Libertario was the prominent Fifth Columnist Antonio Bouthelier España, who also held the position of secretary to Manuel Salgado.9 The easy acquisition of CNT membership cards provided the Fifth Column with access to information, an instrument for acts of provocation and relative ease of movement. Once equipped with CNT accreditation, Fifth Columnists could also get identity cards for the Republican security services.10

While Negrín was still in Catalonia, the anarchist movement initiated contacts with the generals who were also being sounded out by Casado. On 1 February 1939 the secretaries of the three principal anarchist organizations, the CNT, the FAI and the anarchist youth movement, the Federación de Juventudes Libertarias, jointly sent an obsequious letter to General Miaja. They suggested that they create for him an organization uniting all anti-fascist forces in the centre-south zone, insinuating that it exclude the Communists. Over the next three days, the anarchists held meetings with Miaja, Matallana and Menéndez. Since all three generals were already conspiring with Casado, it is reasonable to suppose that areas of mutual interest were sketched out. According to the anarchist chronicler José Peirats, in the meeting with the anarchists Miaja declared that the Communists intended to impose a one-party government led by Vicente Uribe. There was no truth in the claim – it merely reflected what Casado had told Miaja earlier on the same day.11

In the wake of these anarchist initiatives, three senior figures of the libertarian movement of the centre-south zone were sent on a mission to try to secure a coordinated response of the CNT and FAI to the deteriorating military situation. Juan López Sánchez, who had been Minister of Commerce in the government of Largo Caballero, Manuel Amil, secretary of the CNT’s Federación Nacional del Transporte, and Eduardo Val Bescós, seen as the most powerful figure in the anarchist movement in Madrid, had left for Catalonia in the early morning of Sunday 5 February, ten days after the Francoist capture of Barcelona. Their purpose was to make contact with the CNT’s National Committee to discuss the situation after the expected loss of Catalonia. Their aircraft, unable to land in Catalonia, where Figueras was about to fall, took them to Toulouse. In contrast to the silent Val, the tall and brawny Manuel Amil was a loquacious raconteur. They were trapped in France for several days, visiting the consulates in Toulouse and Perpignan in search of the CNT’s National Committee before finding the CNT headquarters set up in Paris. What they learned and their subsequent reports would play a significant part in the anarchists’ participation in the Casado coup. Throughout the delegation’s sojourn in France, Val’s main contribution had been to mutter imprecations against Negrín.12

On 8 February, they took part in a meeting in Paris with senior members of the CNT, including Juan García Oliver, the head of the National Committee Mariano Vázquez and the minister Segundo Blanco. García Oliver said that it was necessary to remove Negrín and form a government to bring the war to an end. Val then shocked the group by declaring that he had proof that Negrín was not planning resistance but meant to end the war. He then persuaded them that it was not the moment to think in terms of surrendering. His optimistic view of the possibilities of lengthy resistance did not prevail. However, since the main objection to Negrín was, bizarrely, that he was defeatist, the group finally agreed that it was necessary to remove him and form a government capable of resisting long enough to achieve an acceptable peace settlement. The general consensus was that ‘the more resistance we are capable of mounting, the better the peace conditions we can secure’. Ignoring the military reality, Mariano Vázquez declared simplistically, ‘Whoever can strike hard is in a position to make themselves feared.’ They then had immense problems getting back to the centre-south zone, which they finally managed to do in the early hours of the morning of Monday 20 February.13

Underlying the anarchist initiatives was both a visceral anti-communism and a belief that Negrín was incapable of continuing the war effort. In fact, Negrín harboured vain hopes that, after the collapse of the Catalan front, it would be possible to secure the return to Spain both of the evacuated army and of the equipment that they had taken over the border. He had also believed that the supplies from friendly nations, especially the Soviet Union, that had accumulated in France could be delivered to the central-southern zone. Given his commitment to holding out until a peace settlement could be made that would secure the evacuation of those at risk, these hopes sustained his rhetorical commitment to the possibility of continuing the war. While the anarchists simply did not want to believe him, his rhetoric also exposed him to the criticism of many, most notably Azaña and Rojo.14

Just before the fall of Catalonia, the internationally famous journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt,

I find myself thinking about Negrín all the time. I suppose he will fly to Madrid when it is ended in Catalonia and carry on there. Negrín is a really great man, I believe (and he can’t stop being now), and it’s so strange and moving to think of that man who surely never wanted to be prime minister of anything being pushed by events and history into a position which he has heroically filled, doing better all the time, all the time being finer against greater odds. He used to be a brilliant gay lazy man with strong beliefs and perhaps too much sense of humour. He was it seems never afraid and loved his friends and his ideas about Spain and drinking and eating and just being alive. Now he has grown all the time until you get an impression he’s made of some special indestructible kind of stone: he has a twenty hour working day and in Spain you get the idea that he manages alone, that with his two hands every mornng he puts every single thing into place and brings order. Of course, he cannot hold a front. I hope he gets to Madrid. If they are going to be defeated, I still hope they don’t surrender.15

In contrast, some months after the end of the war, Rojo produced a devastating criticism of Negrín:

It would appear that the view that we should continue a policy of resistance was imposed in the hope that it might provoke a change in the international situation. The same hope that had sustained our sacrifices but now without any basis. What do sacrifices matter! Resistance! A sublime formula for heroism when it is nurtured by hope and sustained by an ideal; but when the will that flies the banner of that ideal collapses and hope becomes a denial of reality, then resistance is no longer an heroic military battle-cry but an absurdity. What were we to resist with? Why were we going to resist? Two questions for which no one had a positive answer.

Rojo’s diatribe reflected the distress caused him by the plight of the exiles, but, safe in France, he failed to take into consideration the appalling consequences of a swift unconditional surrender. He followed up his comments on the futility of continued resistance with a disturbing rhetorical question:

Should I have embarked on an undertaking proposed in such a confusing manner? If it was true that the war in the central zone was going to be continued seriously, why were the stocks of food, raw materials and armaments accumulated in France sold off? This was too obvious and significant not to be disconcerting: on the one hand, the conflict was being wound up economically by the sale of these stocks; on the other hand the order to resist was given without the means to carry it out, even in terms of food. It was clear to me that I should not take part in or support from my technical post what was an incomprehensible action.16

It was certainly the case that Francisco Méndez Aspe had been ordered to shore up the Republic’s financial resources by selling material that was either in France or had been ordered but not yet delivered. This was part of Negrín’s plans to pay for the exiles in France and for the evacuation of Republicans. Clearly, it would have been difficult to do both that and mount a full-scale resistance. Effectively, Negrín seems to have been concentrating on the former while maintaining the fiction of resistance both to gain time and in the hope of securing concessions from Franco.17

Only with the greatest reluctance had Azaña agreed to take up residence in the Spanish Embassy in Paris, preferring to be further from the influence of Negrín’s Ambassador in France, Marcelino Pascua. He had arrived on 9 February and wasted little time in publicly expressing his support for British and French proposals for mediation, which effectively meant early surrender. His presence in France and its implication that there was no proper government in Spain were necessarily damaging to Negrín’s efforts to secure guarantees from Franco. As Negrín later repeated to Marcelino Pascua, he had expected Azaña to return to Spain once the members of the government were back in Madrid. To this end, after the first cabinet meeting on 13 February, the Foreign Minister Julio Álvarez del Vayo sent a telegram to Pascua instructing him to inform Azaña that the government required his presence in Spain. Azaña did not reply and, the next day, Álvarez del Vayo arrived in Paris to underline personally the urgency of the President’s return. Azaña merely listened and said that he would inform Negrín of his views. This he did the following day, disingenuously asking Negrín to give reasons why there should be any change to what had been agreed before he left Spain.18 Negrín was taken aback by Azaña’s continued prevarication and claimed that, at their meeting on 30 January in the presence of Martínez Barrio, it had been agreed that he would reside in Paris only until the cabinet needed him. In fact, at that meeting, the issue had not been resolved. Although Azaña had insisted that he would not return, Negrín had been confident that the overwhelming needs of the Republic would oblige him to relent. Negrín now reiterated the obvious reasons why the President’s absence was undermining the work of the government. Despite frequent prompts from Pascua, Azaña did not reply to Negrín’s message. He did, however, ask for financial help and was given 150,000 francs (the equivalent today of US$85,000 ).19

The situation faced by the refugees was appalling. Within days of Negrín leaving, the Consul in Perpignan, Antonio Zorita, was replaced. He had shown virtually no readiness to help the refugees. Indeed, his wife had tried to prevent Colonel Tagüeña and other senior military personnel from staying in the Consulate on the grounds that they upset the routine of the household. Both Tagüeña and Rafael Méndez were helped immensely by the feminist Margarita Nelken, who acted as Méndez’s liaison with the French authorities and gave Tagüeña and his comrades French currency with which to buy food. Álvarez del Vayo told Méndez that Negrín wanted him to replace Zorita as Consul.20 Many prominent officers, including General Sebastián Pozas, once commander of the Army of the East and most recently the military governor of Figueras, and Colonel Eleuterio Díaz Tendero Merchán, the head of personnel classification in the Ministry of Defence, chose to remain in France.21

There has been some controversy regarding the decision of General Rojo not to return to Spain. According to both Julián Zugazagoitia, now secretary of the Ministry of Defence, and Mariano Ansó, a Republican friend of Negrín who had been Minister of Justice in the first months of 1938, General Vicente Rojo and Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Jurado, the commander of the Army of Catalonia, refused to obey the instruction sent by Negrín on 14 February that they should return to the centre-south zone. When Pascua handed them the telegram, the two generals argued that the war was effectively over and that their duty was to look after the soldiers who were now refugees in France. They were not alone in their decision. The bulk of the officers of the command structure of the Armies of the East and of Catalonia, including Generals Pozas, Masquelet, Riquelme, Asensio, Gámir, Hernández Saravia and Perea, also decided that the war was lost and that they were under no obligation to continue the fight.22 It is probable that their decision was influenced both by the palpable defeatism of the high command of the navy and by events in the Balearic Islands. On the same day that the Republican Army had crossed the frontier into France, Menorca was also lost.

On 22 January, four days before leaving Barcelona, Negrín had faced the almost insuperable problem of finding a replacement for the head of the fleet, Luis González Ubieta. In general, most naval officers were right-wing, in most cases defeatist and, in some, actively sympathetic to the Francoist cause. The chosen successor, acting Rear Admiral Miguel Buiza Fernández-Palacios, was an exception to the general tendencies of the aristocratic officer corps. He was the black sheep of a rich right-wing family in Seville and a Republican who was popular with his men. His family and his fellow officers shunned him because of his marriage to Maravilla, a woman whose brother was a stoker and so considered to be of unacceptably inferior social class. The laconic and diffident Buiza was hardly a sea-going warrior and was far from fulfilling the needs of the Republican war effort, but Negrín had little choice. In January 1936, Buiza had been head of the personnel section within the naval general staff. His loyalty to the Republic was no more than geographic, having been based in Cartagena when the war started. Throughout the war, his role had been at best passive and at worst advantageous for the Francoist fleet, commanded as it was by many of his friends. He had protected Fifth Columnists among his officers and had long been suspected of defeatism. Despite Negrín’s doubts, Buiza was appointed three days before his forty-first birthday. In addition to being profoundly defeatist, he was deeply affected by a personal tragedy. On 26 January, as Franco’s forces entered Barcelona, his wife, suffering from post-natal depression, and convinced that her husband had been captured, committed suicide. Perhaps to help keep his mind off these circumstances, he accepted the new post, saying that he owed it to the rank-and-file crewmen.23 Given that so much depended on the loyalty and efficacy of the fleet, Buiza was hardly suitable as overall commander.

González Ubieta was transferred to take command of Menorca. In the days following, aircraft from Francoist-held Mallorca bombed the base at Mahón and dropped thousands of leaflets demanding surrender. This was the first part of a plan to seize Menorca hatched by Captain Fernando Sartorius, Conde de San Luís. Sartorius, the liaison officer between the Francoist air force and navy in Mallorca, arranged with Alan Hillgarth, London’s Consul in Palma de Mallorca, for a British cruiser, HMS Devonshire, to take him to Mahón. The ship would then provide a neutral base for a negotiation between Sartorius and González Ubieta. The ship’s captain Gerald Muirhead-Gould, like Hillgarth, had a pedigree in the Naval Intelligence Department, was a protégé of Winston Churchill and a Franco sympathizer. Arriving on 7 February, Muirhead-Gould persuaded González Ubieta to meet Sartorius, who threatened González Ubieta that, if he did not surrender, there would be a full-scale aerial bombardment of Mahón. González Ubieta refused and a full-scale pro-Franco rebellion broke out in Ciudadela on the night of 7 February.

Francoist reinforcements arrived from Palma, González Ubieta’s pleas for help from Miaja went unanswered and Muirhead-Gould pressed him to discuss surrender with San Luís. While awaiting a resolution, HMS Devonshire, anchored in the harbour of Mahón, was attacked by Italian aircraft. A deal was finally reached. On 9 February, around 300 Republican loyalists under the command of González Ubieta, 100 women and 50 children, and what Sartorius described as ‘some really repugnant types’, were taken to Marseilles. Menorca was of secondary importance in the war but the significance of what Sartorius and Muirhead-Gould achieved was that it sent a misleading message to the Republican officer corps that a bloodless surrender would be possible.24

The decision of Rojo not to return to Spain was deeply damaging to Negrín’s hopes of securing the full backing of the forces of the centre-south zone for his plan to use the threat of last-ditch resistance to help secure reasonable peace terms from Franco. In fact, Rojo’s stance was more disastrous even than it seemed at the time given that his most likely replacement, Manuel Matallana, was already working in favour of the rebel cause. According to Zugazagoitia, Rojo refused to return to Spain with the words, ‘The only reason for obeying the order to return is the duty of obedience but you surely realize that just because a superior officer orders us to jump out of a window we do not have to do so.’ He told Zugazagoitia and the Consul in Perpignan, Rafael Méndez Martínez, that ‘he was not prepared to preside over an even bigger disaster than the one in Catalonia’. When he was informed of this, Negrín had Méndez draw up a document, witnessed by Zugazagoitia, registering both his instructions to Rojo and Jurado and their reasons for disobeying them. Zugazagoitia was deeply shocked by Rojo’s comments. Although he could not believe that they reflected cowardice on his part, he later wondered if Rojo knew what was being planned by Casado and was passively complicit. For Togliatti, Rojo was simply a deserter.25

After the retreat into France, Uribe was commissioned by the PCE leadership to speak to Rojo and:

try to show him that his views were mistaken and to convince him of the need to continue the war, explaining the possibilities that we still had. I was also instructed to make him see his responsibilities which he should fulfil before going to the central zone with the Government. Our conversation lasted three hours. I could get nothing out of him. He was unshakeable in his judgement that, from a military point of view, the Republic could do nothing, the war was over and the best that could be done was to seek a way of ending it on the best possible terms. As far as he was concerned personally, he had made his decision on the basis of the military situation and nothing would make him change his mind. None of the arguments used in the conversation, including discipline and honour, had the slightest effect. Rojo had decided not to go the central zone and he did not go.26

The Republican Ambassador in Paris, Marcelino Pascua, sent telegrams to Negrín that were highly critical of Rojo. Even more critical comments were passed between Zugazagoitia and Pascua in their private correspondence. Recalling Rojo’s remarks about the limits of obedience, Zugazagoitia wrote: ‘the fact is the General’s statements were among the most shocking that I heard in the entire war’. He questioned Rojo’s role in the fall of Barcelona, asking why he had sacked General Hernández Saravia, who had arrived in the city with the intention of organizing a last-ditch resistance such as that which had saved Madrid in 1936. Above all, both Zugazagoitia and Pascua were outraged by the way in which, in his book ¡Alerta los pueblos! written immediately after the war, Rojo fudged the issue of his personal responsibility. In it, he denied that he had received orders to return to Spain. In fact, Negrín sent a telegram to Marcelino Pascua on 16 February instructing him to tell General Rojo and Colonel Jurado again that they must return to Spain. Pascua gave the telegram to Rojo. Similar telegrams were sent to the Republican consuls in Toulouse and Perpignan for delivery to him.27

Juan López, who was in France as part of the stranded CNT–FAI delegation, was in the Republican Consulate in Toulouse when he overheard a telephone conversation between the Consul and Rojo, who was in Perpignan. He heard the Consul say: ‘I have received a telegram from the prime minister instructing me to let you know that you must come here to Toulouse to arrange your return to Spain.’28 The publication of Zugazagoitia’s book with its account of Negrín’s call for Méndez to notarize the refusal of Rojo and Jurado to return to Spain ensured for him Rojo’s enduring resentment.29

In ¡Alerta los pueblos!, Rojo claimed that he and Negrín had parted amicably and that he had remained in France ‘to finish my task’. His vain hope had been to see the French implement promises to allow the refugee troops and their equipment to return to Spain. He went on to describe the calamitous situation of the thousands of Republican soldiers now in improvised, overcrowded and insanitary concentration camps on the beaches of southern France. The Republicans herded there lacked adequate shelter, food, clean water and basic medical provision. His distress at what he saw impelled him to write to Negrín on 12 February a bitter letter of complaint and protest. In it, he expressed his disgust that, while plans had been made for the evacuation of President Azaña, the President of the Cortes, the Basque and Catalan governments, parliamentary deputies and large numbers of functionaries, nothing had been done to plan for the evacuation of ordinary citizens. He was appalled by the camps, ‘where today hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees and tens of thousands of soldiers, including middle- and high-ranking officers, are perishing’. He was outraged by evidence that Republican functionaries were simply not doing their job – a point reiterated in many of the memoirs of the period.30

Rojo’s letter of 12 February reflected his obsession with the plight of the refugees in the camps and the way the French authorities pursued and humiliated those who had managed to avoid internment. He reproached Negrín for not having accepted his advice to surrender in Catalonia before the present situation arose. The letter underlined his refusal to return to Spain and his determination to continue working on behalf of the exiled troops: ‘I have not returned because I have no wish to be part of the second disaster to which the Government will almost certainly condemn our army and our people. I have stayed here believing that it is necessary that someone look out for the fate of our men. I was right to fear that we would be abandoned.’ He went on to make several demands of the Prime Minister. He began by asking that Negrín accept ‘the total and absolute renunciation of my post’. He went on to make suggestions that he believed would avoid a humanitarian catastrophe: that a government minister be sent to take charge of the refugee situation; that, in the interim, the Ambassador Marcelino Pascua be required to come to Perpignan; and that more funds be made available. Finally, he threatened that, if these demands were not met, he would deal directly with Franco to arrange the repatriation of the refugees and would publicize the situation, threatening to take ‘serious decisions if something was not done to improve the state of affairs’. He did not implement his threat, he said in the book, so as not to make things worse. The letter bore an olive branch for Negrín: ‘Perhaps among those whom I accuse of being responsible for this dereliction of duty, you are not the only exception because I am aware of your constant preoccupation, your sleepless nights, your integrity and I know how you have had to fight, along with a handful of ministers, against the insuperable fear that had invaded every level of the higher reaches of the State.’31

General Rojo wrote with some pride of the retreat: the army ‘had carried out a methodical withdrawal … it had held off the enemy, continuing to fight throughout, without letting the weakening of morale open the way to collective indiscipline or panic, without the demoralization spreading through its rearguard, and crossing into the neighbouring country in good order led by its officers’. The Minister of Culture in the Catalan Generalitat, Carles Pi Sunyer, wrote: ‘It is only fair to underline in honour of both Negrín and the army that it retreated in good order and with strict discipline without the epic grandeur of the withdrawal being stained by any explosion of vengeful violence.’32