| Hello
and welcome to the final episode of our overview. In last week’s instalment
we reviewed the ‘official’ line followed by either side of Spain’s
dangerously polarized government during the months prior to the outbreak of war.
This week we will re-examine the same period, turning our attention now to the
dark underworld in which Franco and his inner circle of generals incubated their
plan to overthrow the Second Republic. The idea of staging
a military coup hatched in Franco’s mind on the very day the results of the
February elections were announced. The soon-to-be superlative general, who at
this point still held his influential post as Commander in Chief of the Spanish
army, angled to get the Minister of War, General Molero, to declare a state of
war in prevision of the disturbances that were bound to occur. By this measure,
Franco hoped to effect a situation in which the army was in the driver’s
seat, so to speak, and would thus be able to seize power. Molero, however, argued
that a state of alert was entirely sufficient to allay any potential agitation. Like
Minds Machinate Only weeks later, Franco and two of
his top generals, Goded and Mola, were transferred out of Madrid to peripheral
postings in the islands (Tenerife and Majorca) and Pamplona. But before the dispatched
generals left for the provinces, they held a secret meeting on 9th March at the
home of a politically Catholic businessman. In addition to Franco, Goded and Mola,
several other likeminded generals attended the tryst, all of whom would participate
actively in the coup four months later. A number of these
generals belonged to the ‘Unión Militar Española’ (UME),
a rightist military organization formed in 1933 - the same year that the political
right spawned the reactionary parties of CEDA, the Falangists and Calvo Sotelo’s
monarchical Renovación Española. Significantly, UME was countered
in 1934 by an equal and opposite military organization known as the ‘Unión
Militar Republicana Anitfascista’ (UMRA), of marked liberal tendencies. The
existence of these two diametrically opposed groups shows that, like government
and society, the Spanish army had also polarized into to antagonistic blocks. Initial
Blunders and Parallel Plots What transpired at the
9th March meeting was the hasty preparation of a coup that was to be executed
by the generals who remained in the capital. The uprising however, staged on 17th
April, failed, thus signalling to the conspirators the need to marshal a wider
support base for their cause. Meanwhile in a separate
endeavour, two strains of monarchists (the Carlists and the Alfonsinos) had joined
forces and were conspiring, independently of the generals, to overthrow the Republic
themselves. Not surprisingly, Calvo Sotelo was one of the prime movers of the
monarchical line of insurrection, whose strategy consisted of securing military
aid from Mussolini via secret agents. The negotiations, initiated on 31st March,
proved amenable to both parties, and the backup in troops and weaponry promised
by the Italians was duly delivered when war broke out. It was, in fact, an Italian
air fleet that would bomb Ibiza in September of 1936, driving out the Republican
forces that had occupied the island during the previous five weeks. Mola
Rallies Support From Diverse Quarters: The Military After
the failure of the April coup, the organization of a second coup was entrusted
to General Mola, henceforth known as ‘el director’. From his post in
Pamplona, Mola launched a complex and systematic campaign aimed at conjoining
as many anti-republican factions as possible under a single banner. He began by
sending a series of coded circulars to the top-ranking generals in command of
the army’s sixteen main divisions. In cases where a given general was esteemed
to be unsympathetic to the overthrow, a lesser official would be approached, generally
a colonel. Once allegiance had been pledged to the scheme, the ‘inside man’
would in turn induct the most trustworthy of his personnel into the circle of
knowledge. In this way, minute information about the conspiracy filtered down
through the military hierarchy, giving the Nationals a distinct strategic advantage
over the Republicans in the subsequent conduct of war. The
Monarchists On the political front, Mola initiated
personal negotiations with the Carlists whose traditional hub had always centred
on Pamplona. However, due to the internal dissention within this monarchical faction,
Mola’s dealings with them proved entangled and inconclusive up until the
final hour when, on 15th July, following Calvo Sotelo’s assassination, the
Carlist volunteer military corps committed itself fully to the conspiracy. Mola
also managed to enlist the support of Calvo Sotelo and his separate band of conspirators,
whereby various currents of anti-republicanism ended up converging into a river
of insurrection. The Falangists One
of the most difficult challenges faced by Mola was that of persuading José
Antonio (incarcerated as a result of his paramilitary activities) to join forces
with the ever-growing plot. It must be remembered that, like his father, José
Antonio advocated ‘national-syndicalism’, a brand of social welfare
along the lines of Mussolini, with labour corporations as the basis of economy
and the family as the basis of society. The capitalistic leanings of the oligarchy
(which the conspiracy favoured) were as inimical to José Antonio’s
ideology as the socialistic leanings of the Popular Front. Ergo his reluctance
to pledge his support. In his authoritative work, The
Spanish Civil War, (vol. I), Hugh Thomas describes the tortured process by
which the falangist leader finally acquiesced to Mola’s petitions: José
Antonio Primo de Rivera’s adhesion to the uprising came about after a long
interchange of opinions with the conspirators. Contacts were initiated from the
‘Modelo’ prison in Madrid, where [José Antonio] had been interned
since 15th March, and carried on through 5th June, the date on which he was transferred
to the prison of Alicante; the leader of the Falange maintained correspondence
with Mola, the missives being delivered in hand by intermediaries. José
Antonio wavered, worried because he thought (events would prove him right) that
the Falangist activists would be used as buffer troops for the purposes of the
military, the grandees and the capitalists, [an eventuality] that would invalidate
his organization’s own objectives of national-syndicalism. “We will
not be used as the vanguard, or the buffer troops, or the irreplaceable ally of
any confused reactionary movement.” However,
as the time of the uprising drew nearer and for fear that the Falange would be
excluded, he stated that: “In the end, Spengler (author of a key book on
anti-revolutionary thought, The Decadence of the West) has said that
‘it has always been a squad of soldiers that has saved civilization’.
The Falange would participate actively in the overthrow with its paramilitary
bands as well as the intervention of Falangist officials who seconded the movement:
Colonel Seguí in Melilla, Colonel Yagüe in Ceuta (…) Objectives The
primary objective common to all of the coup’s participating factions was
the eradication of the Popular Front. The idea was to temporarily replace the
Republic with a military dictatorship which would abolish the reforms proposed
by Azaña’s administration. It had still not been determined (at least
not overtly) what the definitive form of government would be: the return of Alfonso
XIII, the resuscitation of the Carlist line, a rightist republic, etc. This lack
of clearly defined policy turned out to be the very factor that brought together
such ideologically disparate groups in a common cause: the destruction of democracy. Closing Join
us next week when we will finally return our focus to Ibiza and the effects of
the Civil War on the island. Until then have a very good week.
Emily
Kaufman
emilykaufman@ibizahistoryculture.com
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