The man who would make Spain great again was a poor public speaker, with a high-pitched voice. In Morocco, he had come to detest the leftists back in Spain who, in his mind, failed to appreciate the grand colonial enterprise.15 In 1935, Franco was promoted to chief of staff in Madrid, and in February 1936, when elections brought to power the Popular Front, the general told a confidant it was a Trojan horse to smuggle Communism into Spain and offered his assistance to the defeated rightist prime minister, should the latter want to annul the vote.16 The Republic’s civilian president smelled a rat and reassigned Franco to the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast. In fact, Spain’s military was engaged in a plot. But Franco’s participation was not confirmed until the very eve of their putsch, and even then he voiced uncertainty. The prime mover in the coup was the Cuban-born general Emilio Mola. (Cuba had been a province of Spain.) The forty-eight-year-old Mola had recently been reassigned to a backwater with a small garrison to counteract his suspected plotting. His main accomplice was the sixty-four-year-old general José Sanjurjo, who, along with some 15,000 Spaniards (mostly monarchists and conservatives), was living under asylum in Portugal, courtesy of António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship. Salazar ignored the Spanish Republic’s pleas to prevent Sanjurjo’s return, but on July 20, the latter’s small plane crashed en route: it seems the general’s clothes trunk was too heavy.17 Sanjurjo’s unexpected death elevated the forty-three-year-old Franco as Mola’s main partner and rival. “Franco,” Sanjurjo had warned, still bitter that during his 1932 coup the younger man had stood on the sidelines, “will do nothing to commit himself; he will always be in the shadows, because he is crafty [cuco].”18
Franco had flown from the Grand Canary—on a chartered British plane—to Morocco, where he rallied Spain’s best fighting force, the ruthless Army of Africa (5,000 men of the Spanish Foreign Legion, 17,000 Moorish troops, and 17,000 Spanish conscripts).19 On July 17, they rose up in the coordinated coup. But on the mainland, the Nationalists gained the support of only about half of the Territorial Army, some 60,000 soldiers. Garrisons in key industrial cities—Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao—refused to join the rebellion. But the military plotters would not accept defeat. Mola became the rebel Nationalist commander in the north, Franco in the south. Colonial experience could cut in very different ways: Gandhi had gone to South Africa and returned to British India with the idea of a Congress Party and peaceful protest; Franco, from Spanish Morocco, brought back brutal counterinsurgency. He and Mola enacted the savage political cleansing (limpieza) of Franco’s Moroccan colonial war—only this time against fellow Spaniards.20 To induce Republic-held territory to surrender, Nationalist troops engaged in gang rapes of women, marching with panties flying from their bayonets. Women in the tens of thousands had their hair shaved off and their mouths force-fed castor oil, a laxative, so that, when paraded through the streets, they would soil themselves. Men were just shot, especially if found in possession of a trade union card. All the while, Franco obsessed over supposed international conspiracies of Freemasons, Jews, Communists.
Spain had last experienced major armed conflict when resisting Napoleon Bonaparte. Now, Catalonia used the military’s putsch to carry out its own regional coup d’état against rule by Madrid, splitting the resistance. In Barcelona, in what was christened the Catalan Generalitat, a newly formed Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia competed with anarchists to arm workers in resistance, while the Republic government in Madrid reluctantly armed workers. These new militias radicalized domestic politics—the very outcome that the military putsch was supposed to forestall. Worker syndicates seized factories, and farmers formed collectives or redistributed land to individuals.21 In the greatest twist, despite the weakness of Spain’s right-wing party, inspired by fascism, the Falange (Phalanx), and its Communist party—each possessed fewer than 30,000 members in July 1936—Spain became a battleground in the international struggle between fascism and Communism.22
GREAT POWER MACHINATIONS
Spain and the Soviet Union were remote from each other (the USSR accounted for 0.9 percent of Spain’s trade in the first half of 1936).23 The Spanish Republic maintained normal diplomatic relations with just about every country in the world except the Soviet Union, and the putsch had looked unlikely to alter any of that.24 France ought to have been Spain’s natural partner, especially after the June 1936 formation of a Popular Front government in Paris, which included Communists as well as Socialists under Prime Minister Léon Blum. Spain’s Popular Front government had already appealed to France’s Popular Front for military aid by July 18, and got a positive initial response from Blum, but pro-Franco personnel in Spain’s embassy in Paris leaked the request to France’s right-wing press, which launched a vicious campaign against Blum (a Jew as well as a Socialist). On a visit to London, moreover, Blum discovered that Britain opposed helping Spain’s elected government.25 Britain had a great deal at stake: it accounted for 40 percent of total foreign investment in Spain, including the Rio Tinto mining conglomerate. But Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin sought to avoid new government commitments, given the costs of maintaining the empire, or unwittingly facilitating a Communist takeover in Spain.26 His stance was shared by even most of the Labour party and the trade union bosses.27 Many British Catholics, meanwhile, admired General Franco’s stated program; much of British business sided with him as well. And so, on July 25, Blum reversed himself and agreed to join Britain’s policy of “non-intervention.” The hope was that the gambit would also take in Germany and Italy.28
The Spanish putschists, however, themselves had appealed to Hitler and Mussolini. Franco, bereft of an air force, was cut off from the mainland, but his appeal to the German government failed. He had recourse to a second channeclass="underline" German expatriates in Spanish Morocco. A nondescript German sales director at a trading firm (kitchen equipment) who was a member of the Nazi Party Abroad wanted to demonstrate his own importance and that of the fledgling organization, and he flew Franco’s emissaries to Berlin, using Nazi party channels to reach Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess on holiday at his country estate. On July 25, Hess, one of the few people to address Hitler with the familiar du, received the emissaries and phoned Hitler, who was at the summer Wagner Festival. Hess dispatched the Spaniards and Morocco-based Nazis by car to Bayreuth, and, following the conclusion of Siegfried, the group hand-delivered Franco’s request for military aid at the Wagner family residence. Hitler had shown no interest in supporting the coup before the generals had acted, and now seemed unsure—his own rearmament had a ways to go—but he launched a monologue and worked himself into a lather. (“If Spain really goes Communist, France in her present situation will also be Bolshevized in due course, and then Germany is finished.”) That very day, support for Franco against the “international Jewish revolutionary headquarters in Moscow” was assured.29 Hitler consulted only the minions in his company and made the decision against their objections.30 “We’re taking part a bit in Spain,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “Not clear. Who knows what it’s good for.”31