Franco

The thin, boy soldier with round staring eyes who arrived in Melilla found a filthy, run-down colonial town.42 The nineteen year-old Franco reported for duty at the Fort of Tifasor which was part of the outer defences of Melilla. Tifasor was under the command of Colonel José Villalba Riquelme, who had been Director of the Academia de Infantería when Franco was a cadet. Villalba Riquelme’s first order to him was to cover his sword scabbard in mat leather to stop it glinting and providing a target for snipers. Indeed, in the shortest time possible, Franco had to learn this and all the other practicalities of life in combat that he had not been taught in the Academy in Toledo nor learned on garrison duty in El Ferrol. Like most young officers, he can have had little expectation of the difficulties that faced the Spanish Army in the field.

The most obvious problem was the warlike local population’s bitter hatred of the occupying troops. Given the poor technological level of the Spanish armed forces, the Moroccan adventure would be no pushover. The Army was inefficient, weighed down by bureaucracy and inadequately supplied with obsolete equipment: it had more generals and fewer artillery pieces per thousand men than the armies of such countries as Montenegro, Romania and Portugal. Its eighty thousand men were commanded by more than tweny-four thousand officers of whom 471 were generals.43 In the eyes of Army officers, the most damaging source of difficulty was the inability of the Spanish political establishment to provide either the resources or the decisive policy necessary to give the professional soldiers any chance of success. Indeed, the political élite’s awareness of the growing pacificism of much of public opinion merely confirmed many Army officers in their belief that Spain could not be properly ruled by civilians. Moreover, there was Spain’s subordinate position to France in the area. Spain was burdened with indefensible frontiers in Morocco which simply ignored the realities of tribal boundaries. French dominance also inhibited Madrid’s policy-making.

How this came to be so is almost inextricably complicated. Morocco was ruled by a Sultan who had to impose by terror his authority and his tax-collection system on the other tribal leaders. In the early years of the century, tribal leaders rebelled against the dissolute Sultan Abd el Aziz. In the general upheaval, two major revolts took place. The first was that of Bu Hamara in the lands between Fez and the Algerian border. The more important was that of El Raisuni, a vicious cattle rustler and tribal leader, in the Jibala mountains of the north-west. In the context of the still incomplete scramble for Africa, it was a situation that attracted the great powers.

For many years, Britain had maintained influence in Morocco to guarantee safe passage through the Straits of Gibraltar. However, since the humiliating debacle of the Fashoda incident in 1898 which had blocked their Egyptian ambitions, the French had been seeking to consolidate their empire to the west. They were anxious to find a way to take over the Moroccan Sultanate which was the obvious gap in an imperial chain from Equatorial Africa to Tunisia. By 1903, Britain, weakened by the Boer War, was apprehensive of the rise of Germany and open to a French Alliance. Unable in any case to prevent a French take-over, the British wanted above all to safeguard Gibraltar. In April 1904, in the Anglo-French Agreement, Britain consented to French ambitions in Morocco provided that the area opposite Gibraltar be in weaker, Spanish, hands.44

It was left to the French to square things with the Spanish. In October 1904, the French granted northern Morocco to Spain. Tangier was given international status. Using the pretext of tribal disorders, the French then took over Morocco by instalments. By 1912, a formal French Protectorate was established. In November 1912, France signed an entente with Spain giving her a similar protectorate in the north. Subsequent political arrangements meant that the Sultan maintained nominal political control of all of Morocco under French tutelage. However, in the Spanish zone, local authority was vested in the Sultan’s representative, known as the Khalifa, who was selected by the Sultan from a short-list of two names drawn up by Madrid.

It was a situation fraught with difficulties. The Moroccans never accepted the arrangement, which they found deeply humiliating, and they fought it until they regained their independence in 1956. Spain’s long-standing military enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, had to communicate by sea. The recently acquired Protectorate of the interior was a roadless, infertile mountain wilderness. Moreover, because it ignored crucial tribal boundaries, the French gift to Spain was almost impossible to police. Thus, the Spaniards were to be involved in a ruinously expensive and virtually pointless war.45 They did not enjoy the technological and logistical superiority which characterised other imperial adventures of the time. Curiously, Spain’s officers in general, and Franco in particular, nurtured two myths. The first was that Moroccans loved them; the second that the French had stood in the way of a Spanish Moroccan empire.

At the time of Franco’s arrival on African soil, the initiative in Spain’s Moroccan war lay with the Berber tribesmen who inhabited the two barren mountain regions of the Jibala to the west and the Rif. Battle-hardened, ruthless in the defence of their lands, familiar with the terrain, they were the opposite of the poorly trained and totally unmotivated Spanish conscripts who faced them. Franco claimed years later that he spent his first night in the field sleepless, with a pistol in his hand, out of distrust of his own men.46 The recently arrived Franco was a small part of a series of military operations aimed at building a defensive chain of blockhouses and forts between the larger towns. That this was the Spanish tactic showed that nothing had been learned from the Cuban War where similar procedures had been adopted. Officers felt considerable resentment at the contradictory orders to advance or retreat emanating from the Madrid government.

After the insecurities of his childhood, the great formative experience of Franco’s life was his time as a colonial officer in Africa. The Army provided him with a framework of certainties based on hierarchy and command. He revelled in the discipline and happily lost himself in a military machine built on obedience and a shared rhetoric of patriotism and honour. Having arrived in Morocco in 1912, he spent ten and a half of the next fourteen years there. As he told the journalist Manuel Aznar in 1938, ‘My years in Africa live within me with indescribable force. There was born the possibility of rescuing a great Spain. There was founded the idea which today redeems us. Without Africa, I can scarcely explain myself to myself, nor can I explain myself properly to my comrades in arms.’47 In Africa, he acquired the central beliefs of his political life: the Army’s role as the arbiter of Spain’s political destiny and, most importantly of all, his own right to command. He was always to see political authority in terms of military hierarchy, obedience and discipline, referring to it always as el mando.

As a young second lieutenant, Franco immediately threw himself into his duties, soon demonstrating the cold-blooded bravery born of his ambition. On 13 June 1912 he was confirmed as first lieutenant. It was his first and only promotion solely for reasons of seniority. On 28 August, Franco was sent to command the position of Uixan, which protected the mines of Banu Ifrur. The Moroccan war was intensifying but Franco was paying assiduous court to Sofía Subirán, the beautiful niece of the High Commissioner, General Luis Aizpuru. Bored by his elaborate formality and inability to dance, she successfully resisted a determined postal assault which lasted for nearly a year.48 In the spring of 1913, stoical about his disappointment in love, he applied for a transfer to the recently formed native police, the Regulares Indígenas, aware that they were always in the vanguard of attacks and presented endless opportunities for displays of courage and rapid promotion. On 15 April 1913, Franco’s posting to the Regulares came through. At this time, El Raisuni began a major mobilization of his men. The Spanish base of Ceuta was reinforced by, among others, Franco and the Regulares. On 21 June 1913, he arrived at the camp of Laucien and was then posted to the garrison of Tetuán. Between 14 August and 27 September, he took part in several operations and began to make a name for himself. On 22 September, with his fierce Moorish mercenaries, he gained a small local victory for which, 12 October 1913, he was rewarded with the Military Merit Cross first class. In their relatively short existence, the Regulares had developed a tradition of exaggerated machismo scorning protection when under enemy fire. When Franco eventually reached the point at which he had the right to lead his men on horseback, he favoured a white horse, out of a mixture of romanticism and bravado.

For a brief period, the situation was stabilized in the Spanish Protectorate: the towns of Ceuta, Larache and Alcazarquivir were under control but communications in the harsh territory in between were threatened by El Raisuni’s guerrillas and snipers. Attempting to hold this area was ruinously expensive in men and money. The lines of communication were dotted with wooden blockhouses, six metres long by four metres wide, protected up to a height of one and a half metres by sandbags and surrounded by barbed wire. Building them under Moorish sniper fire was immensely dangerous. They were garrisoned by platoons of twenty-one men who lived in the most appallingly isolated conditions and had to be provisioned every few days with water, food and firewood. Provisioning required escorts who were vulnerable to sniper fire. Very occasionally, the chains of blockhouses communicated by heliograph and signal lamps.49

For his bravery in a battle at Beni Salem on the outskirts of Tetuán on 1 February 1914, the twenty-one year-old Franco was promoted to captain ‘por méritos de guerra’, with effect from that date although it was not announced until 15 April 1915. He was building a reputation as a meticulous and well-prepared field officer, concerned about logistics, provisioning his units, map-making, camp security. Twenty years later, Franco told a journalist that to stave off boredom in Morocco, he had devoured military treatises, memoirs of generals and descriptions of battles.50 By 1954, he had inflated this to the point of telling the English journalist S.F.A. Coles rather implausibly that, in his off-duty hours in Morocco, he had studied history, the lives of the great military commanders, the ancient Stoics and philosophers and works of political science.51 This later reconstruction by Franco contrasted curiously with the assertion of his friend and first biographer that he spent every available moment either at the parapet watching for the enemy through his binoculars or else surveying the terrain on horseback in order to improve his unit’s maps.52

Whatever Franco did in his spare time, it was during this period that anecdotes began to be told about his apparent imperturbability under fire. He was said to be cold and serene in his risk-taking rather than recklessly brave. He was already making good his low position in the pass list of his year at the Academy (promoción). This came near to costing him his life during a large-scale clean-up operation against guerrilla tribesmen who were massing in the hills around Ceuta in June 1916. The guerrillas had their main support point about six miles to the west of the town, in the mountain top village of El Biutz, which dominated the road from Ceuta to Tetuán and was protected by a line of trenches manned by machine-gunners and riflemen. Rigidly constrained by their own field regulations, the Spaniards could be expected to make a frontal assault up the slope. As they were advancing, being decimated by fire from the trenches above, other tribesman planned to pour down the back of the hill, sweep around below the Spaniards and trap them in a cross-fire.

In the early hours of the morning of 29 June 1916, with high losses being recorded, Franco was part of the leading company of the Segundo Tabor (second battalion) of Regulares which was heading the advance. When the company commander was badly wounded, Franco assumed command. With men dropping all around him, he broke through the enemy encirclement and played a significant role in the fall of El Biutz. However, he was shot in the stomach. Normally, in Africa, abdominal wounds were fatal. That night’s report referred to Captain Franco’s ‘incomparable bravery, gift for command and energy deployed in combat’. The tone of the report implied that his death was inevitable. He was carried to a first aid post at a place called Cudia Federico. The medical officer staunched the bleeding and refused for two weeks to send him the six miles by stretcher to the casualty clearing station outside Ceuta. He believed that for the wounded man to be moved would kill him and the delay saved Franco’s life. By 15 July, Franco had recovered sufficiently to be transferred to the military hospital in Ceuta. There an X-ray showed that the bullet had not hit any vital organ. A fraction of an inch in any direction and he would have died.53

In a war which, during his time in Africa, claimed the lives of nearly one thousand officers and sixteen thousand soldiers, it was to be Franco’s only serious wound. His luck gave rise to many later anecdotes about his daring. It also led his Moorish troops to believe that he was blessed with baraka, the mystical quality of divine protection which kept him invulnerable. Their belief seems to have infected him with his lifelong conviction that he had enjoyed the benevolent glance of providence. He later said somewhat portentously ‘I have seen death walk by my side many times, but fortunately, she did not know me’.54 The location of the wound was also the basis of speculation about Franco’s apparent lack of interest in sexual matters. What little medical evidence is available does not support any such interpretation. Moreover, long before receiving the wound, Franco had refrained from participating in the sexual adventures of his comrades in his time as a cadet in the Academy and in subsequent postings in both mainland Spain and in Africa.55 His distaste for his father’s behaviour is sufficient to account for the extreme propriety of his sex life.

The High Commissioner in Morocco, General Francisco Gómez Jordana, father of the future foreign minister, recommended Franco for promotion to major again ‘por méritos de guerra’ and the procedure also began for him to be awarded Spain’s highest award for bravery, the Gran Cruz Laureada de San Fernando. Both proposals were opposed by the Ministry of War. The military advisers of the Ministry cited the twenty-three year-old Franco’s age for denying the promotion. Franco reacted fiercely and appealed against the decision, seeking the support of the High Commissioner for a petition (recurso reglamentario) to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, King Alfonso XIII. In the face of such determination, the King granted the appeal and on 28 February 1917, Franco was promoted to Major with effect from 29 June 1916. He had taken exactly six years to rise from second lieutenant to major. Along the way, he had gained the reputation at the palace of being the officer who with the greatest cheek asked for help or made complaints about his career.56 The nomination for the Laureada was turned down on 15 June 1918. It is a reasonable assumption that, having gained his promotion by going above the heads of the Ministerial advisers, Franco’s case was not reviewed with any great sympathy.57

There can be little doubt that, at the time, Franco preferred the promotion to the medal.* The contrast between the natural timidity of the young second lieutenant who had arrived in Africa five years earlier and the determined drive to gain promotion holds an important clue to his psychology. Franco’s petition to Alfonso XIII revealed unfettered ambition. His bravery under fire was a means to the same end. The courage of the young soldier, like the cold authoritarianism of the dictator later on, may be interpreted as different manifestations of public personae which both protected him from any sense of inadequacy and provided ways of fulfilling his ambition. Franco left ample written evidence that he was not satisfied with the reality of his own life, most notably in his novel Raza. It is difficult not to suspect that Franco invented his own persona as the hero of the desert almost as deliberately as he did that of his hero José Churruca in Raza.

Promoted to major, Franco was obliged to return to mainland Spain since there were no vacant positions for officers of that rank in Morocco. He was posted instead to Oviedo in the spring of 1917 in command of a battalion of the Regimiento de Infantería del Príncipe. In Oviedo, he lived in the Hotel Paris where he became friends with a university student, Joaquín Arrarás, who would be his first biographer twenty years later. A year later, he was joined by his two companions Pacón and Camilo Alonso Vega. Despite his rank, his reputation for bravery and his brutal experiences in the Moroccan inferno, Franco’s adolescent appearance and his diminutive size led to him being known locally as ‘el comandantín’ (the little major).58 Always reserved and never gregarious, he can hardly have enjoyed the routine of garrison life in Oviedo. The rainy climate and green hills of Asturias may have reminded him of his native Galicia but now the call of Africa was more powerful than that of home. As Arrarás put it, he had ‘the poison of Africa in his veins’.59

In the daily colonial skirmishes, Franco had come to be admired and successful yet few of his comrades knew him. He was never to allow himself to become close to anyone, perhaps for fear of revealing his essential insecurity. Nevertheless, he had forged professional and even personal links which would remain a central part of his life. He had become an Africanista, one of those officers who believed that, in their commitment to fighting to conquer Morocco, they alone were concerned with the fate of the Patria. The esprit de corps consequent on shared hardship and daily risk developed into a shared contempt both for professional politicians and the pacifist left-wing masses whom the Africanistas regarded as obstacles to the successful execution of their patriotic duty. Life in a mainland posting also signified a drastic slowing down of the promotion process. Moreover, his high rank relative to his age must have made him the target of some resentment. In Morocco, for all his youth and his lack of social skills, he was recognized as a brave and competent soldier to be trusted under fire. In Oviedo, among officers who were twice his age but still only majors or captains, or generals who saw in him only a dangerous climber, he was not popular and was driven in on himself.60

He was put in charge of the instruction of oficiales de complemento (auxiliary officers) which permitted him to establish relations with some important local families in the closed society of Oviedo. In the late summer of 1917, at a village fair (romería), he met an attractive local girl, María del Carmen Polo y Martínez Valdés, the daughter of a rich local family, albeit not as illustrious as it once had been. At the time, the slender dark-eyed Carmen was a fifteen year-old school-girl at the convent of Las Salesas. Franco wanted them ‘to walk out together’ but she refused on the grounds that, being a soldier, he could disappear as quickly as he had appeared. She also thought fifteen was too young for a steady relationship. Nevertheless, when she returned to the convent in the autumn of 1917, he wrote to her, although his letters were intercepted by the nuns and handed over to her family. With the imperturbable optimism and determination which characterized his professional behaviour, he began a dogged siege. Carmen, her school friends, and even the nuns, were thrilled to note that the famous Major now began to be a daily attender at 7 a.m. mass. He could catch a glimpse of her through a wrought-iron grill.61 The willowy and elegant Carmen Polo carried herself with a certain aristocratic hauteur. The deeply conservative Franco felt a near reverence for the aristocracy and admired his fiancée’s family and their way of life.62

The incipient romance with the young Army officer of modest family, even more modest prospects and a dangerous occupation met with the initial opposition of the bride’s widowed father, Felipe Polo. He declared that to let his daughter marry Franco would be tantamount to letting her marry a bullfighter, a comment which carried with it considerable snobbery as well as a recognition of the risks of service in Africa.63 Even more determined was the opposition of Carmen’s aunt Isabel, Felipe Polo’s sister, who, since the death of his wife had taken responsibility for the upringing of his four children. Like her brother, Isabel Polo hoped for a better match than a soldier for her niece.64 However, despite this parental opposition, Franco pursued Carmen Polo tenaciously. He would pass messages to her in the hat-band of a mutual friend or else place them in the pockets of her coat while it hung in a café. They would meet clandestinely.65 Ultimately, Carmen’s own determination would overcome the resistance of her family. Thereafter, that determination would be put at the service of her future husband’s career.

The relationship developed in a socially divided city. The inflation and shortages which resulted from the First World War were intensified by the militancy of the local working class. The Socialist Party took the lead in agitation against the deteriorating living standards along with attacks on the ‘criminal war in Morocco’ which deeply offended and infuriated Franco and other soldiers. Outrage that such attacks should be permitted was part of a general disgust with a political system which was blamed for the many disasters faced by the Army. Military discontent now came to the boil because of a simultaneous internal squabble between those who had volunteered to fight in Africa and those who had remained in the Peninsula, Africanistas and peninsulares. For those who had fought in Africa, the risks were enormous but the prizes, in terms of adventure and rapid promotion, high. The mainland signified a more comfortable, but boring, existence and promotion only by strict seniority. When salaries began to be hit, like those of civilians, by inflation, there was resentment among the peninsulares for those like Franco who had gained quick promotion. Some arms, such as the Artillery, had managed to impose a system of totally rigid seniority with an agreement by all members of its officer corps to refuse any promotion by merit. So-called Juntas de Defensa, rather like trade unions, were founded in many garrisons to protect the seniority system and to seek better pay.

What might have been an internal military issue was to contribute to a catastrophic upheaval in national politics. The coming of the First World War had already aroused political passions by giving rise to a bitter debate involving senior generals about whether Spain should intervene. Given the country’s near bankruptcy and the parlous state of the Army, neutrality was inevitable, much to the chagrin of many officers. Massive social upheaval came as a consequence of Spain’s position as a non-belligerent. Her economically privileged position of being able to supply both the Entente and the Central Powers with agricultural and industrial products saw coalmine-owners from Asturias, Basque steel barons and shipbuilders, and Catalan textile magnates experience a spiralling boom which constituted the first dramatic take-off for Spanish industry. The balance of power within the economic elite shifted. Agrarian interests remained pre-eminent but industrialists were no longer prepared to tolerate their subordinate political position. Their dissatisfaction came to a head in June 1916 when the Liberal Minister of Finance, Santiago Alba, attempted to impose a tax on the notorious war profits of northern industry without a corresponding measure to deal with those made by the agrarians. Although the move was blocked, it so underlined the arrogance of the landed elite that it precipitated a bid by the industrial bourgeoisie to carry through political modernisation.