COPYRIGHT

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © Paul Preston 2016

Paul Preston asserts his moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

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available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008163419

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Version: 2017-03-03

DEDICATION

For Lala Isla

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

1 An Avoidable Tragedy

2 Resist to Survive

3 The Power of Exhaustion

4 The Quest for an Honourable Peace

5 Casado Sows the Wind

6 Negrín Abandoned

7 In the Kingdom of the Blind

8 On the Eve of Catastrophe

9 The Desertion of the Fleet

10 The Coup – the Stab in the Back

11 Casado’s Civil War

12 Casado Reaps the Whirlwind

Epilogue: Repent at Leisure?

Picture Section

Abbreviations

Notes

Illustration Credits

Bibliography

Index

By the Same Author

About the Author

About the Publisher

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the course of preparing this book, I have had the good fortune to rely on the advice on various issues of the following friends and colleagues. Michael Alpert, Javier Cervera, Robert Coale, Alfonso Domingo, Luis Español Bouché, Xulio García Bilbao, Carmen Gonzalez Martinez, Fernando Hernández Sánchez, Eladi Mainar Cabanas, Ricardo Miralles, Enrique Moradiellos, Óscar Rodríguez Barreiro, Cristina Rodríguez Gutiérrez, Sandra Souto and Julián Vadillo.

I am extremely grateful to the following friends for their help in the location of archival material. Laura Díaz Herrera for her invaluable help in Madrid and Ávila; Ángeles Egido León, José Manuel Vidal Zapater and Luis Vidal Zapater for permitting access to the unpublished memoirs of José Manuel Vidal Zapater; María Jesús González Hernández for help with the Causa General. Aurelio Martín Nájera as so often in the past was immensely generous in helping me with documents held in the Archivo Histórico of the Fundación Pablo Iglesias. Sir George Young and Lady Young kindly granted permission for the use of the papers of Sir George Young. My greatest debt is to Carmen Negrín and Sergio Millares Cantero for their unstinting assistance with both the papers and the photographs held in the Fundación Juan Negrín of Las Palmas.

I also want to put on record my thanks to Jesús Navarro, Juan Carlos Escandell and José Ramón Valero Escandell for an unforgettable day spent exploring ‘Posición Yuste’ (El Poblet), the houses at ‘Posición Dakar’ and the airfield (now a vineyard) of El Fondò in Monòver. Professor Valero Escandell also generously provided maps and photographs of the area of the Val de Vinalopó.

The gestation of this book, as with others in the past, was made especially rewarding thanks to my good fortune in being able to discuss many points of fact and of interpretation with my friends Helen Graham, Linda Palfreeman and Ángel Viñas.

1
An Avoidable Tragedy

This is the story of an avoidable humanitarian tragedy that cost many thousands of lives and ruined tens of thousands more. It has many protagonists but centres on three individuals. One, Dr Juan Negrín, the victim of what might be termed a conspiracy of dunces, tried to prevent it. Two bore responsibility for what transpired. One of those, Julián Besteiro, behaved with culpable naivety. The other, Segismundo Casado, behaved with a remarkable combination of cynicism, arrogance and selfishness.

On 5 March 1939, the eternally malcontent Colonel Casado, since May the previous year commander of the Republican Army of the Centre, launched a military coup against the government of Juan Negrín. Ironically, he thereby ensured that the end of the Spanish Civil War was almost identical to its beginning. As General Emilio Mola, the organizer of the military coup of 1936, its future leader General Francisco Franco and the other conspirators had done, Casado led a part of the Republican Army in revolt against the Republican government. He claimed, as they had done, and equally without foundation, that Negrín’s government was the puppet of the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España, or PCE) and that a coup was imminent to establish a Communist dictatorship. The same accusation was made by the anarchist José García Pradas, who talked of Negrín personally leading a Communist coup.1 In that regard, it is worth recalling the judgement of the great American war correspondent Herbert Matthews, who knew Negrín well:

Negrín was neither a Communist nor a revolutionary … I do not believe that Negrín gave the idea of a social revolution any thought before the Civil War … Negrín retained all his life a certain indifference and blindness to social issues. Paradoxically, this put him in agreement with the Communists in the Civil War. He was equally blind in an ideological sense. He was a prewar Socialist in name only. Russia was the only nation that helped Republican Spain; the Spanish Communists were among the best and most disciplined soldiers; the International Brigade, with its Communist leadership, was invaluable. Therefore, Premier Negrín worked with the Russians, but never succumbed to or took orders from them.2

A not unsimilar view was expressed by Negrín’s lifelong friend Dr Marcelina Pascua:

Was Negrín a Communist? How ridiculous! Not by a thousand miles. He was congenitally individualistic, utterly disinclined to follow a collective discipline or to put up with tight rules and regulations imposed by a political party or to follow the personal requirements that the instruments of marxism impose on their adherents. As far as any hero worship was concerned, the person that he admired most was Clemenceau (and not his contemporary Lenin) despite being fully aware of his repressive and reactionary policies against the trade unions and his persistent hostility to the French Socialists. I always interpreted Negrín’s veneration for ‘the Tiger’ in terms of his being seduced by the energy and efficacy that he demonstrated during the First World War. This explains the contradiction because what Negrín admired in Clemenceau was exactly the pragmatic determination to win the war that was what he aspired to do in the Spanish conflict.

According to Pascua, Negrín adopted as a private slogan Clemenceau’s remark that ‘Dans la guerre comme dans la paix le dernier mot est à ceux que ne se rendent jamais.’3

Casado claimed that he launched his coup because he was sure that he could put a stop to what was increasingly senseless slaughter and that he could secure the clemency of Franco for all but the Communists. Even if this was genuinely his selfless motive, and there is ample evidence to the contrary, he went about it in the worst way imaginable. In his dealings with Franco, he behaved as if he had nothing to bargain with. He seemed to be oblivious of the fact that Franco was obsessed with capturing Madrid, the very symbol of resistance. The Caudillo had failed to do so in November 1936 and had also been thwarted at the battles of Jarama and Brunete in February and July 1937. Unlike Negrín, who could threaten continued resistance when Franco was being pushed by his German and Italian allies for an early end to the war, Casado took the position that the war was already lost. His only hope therefore was the naive, and rather arrogant, belief that Franco would be susceptible to a vague rhetoric of shared patriotism and the fraternal spirit of the wider military family, as if somehow they were equals.4 In consequence, his action would actually cause massive loss of life.

It is certainly the case that the defeat of the Spanish Republic was already in sight. What remained possible, however, was to ensure that the war ended in such a way as to secure the evacuation of the most at-risk politicians and soldiers and guarantees for the civilian population to be left behind. As Negrín had commented to Juan-Simeón Vidarte of the executive committee of the Spanish Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, or PSOE): ‘A negotiated peace, always; unconditional surrender to let them shoot half a million Spaniards, never.’5 Ernest Hemingway summed up Negrín’s position as follows: ‘In a war you can never admit, even to yourself, that it is lost. Because when you will admit it is lost you are beaten. The one who being beaten refuses to admit and fights on the longest wins in all finish fights; unless of course he is killed, starved out, deprived of weapons or betrayed. All of these things happened to the Spanish people. They were killed in vast numbers, starved out, deprived of weapons and betrayed.’6 With the Spanish Republic exhausted and internationally isolated, Casado’s fateful initiative merely precipitated its defeat in the worst imaginable conditions. His revolt against the Republican government sparked off a mini-civil war in Madrid, ensuring the deaths of 2,000 people, mainly Communists, and undermined the evacuation plans for hundreds of thousands of other Republicans.7

It has been suggested that what happened was the consequence of the ‘fact’ that Casado was a British agent. It is unlikely that he was an ‘agent’ or even in receipt of payment, but he was certainly in touch with British representatives – the Chargé d’Affaires Ralph Skrine Stevenson and Howard Denys Russell Cowan of the Chetwode Commission, which was trying to arrange prisoner exchanges. Given that the British government had long assumed that the Republic would be defeated, and wished to be free of what was seen as an unnecessary problem, there can be little doubt that Stevenson and Cowan at the very least encouraged Casado in his efforts to end the war. The ex-Communist Francisco-Félix Montiel claimed that ‘London was behind Casado.’8 At the end of February 1939, Casado met some Communist officers at his headquarters on the eastern outskirts of Madrid, given the military codename ‘Posición Jaca’. Completely out of context, he assured them that ‘the rumours that he was an agent of British intelligence were not true and it was not at his initiative that members of the British Embassy visited him and showered him with attention’.9 Within Negrín’s entourage there was a belief in British involvement in the coup. In 1962, the American journalist Jay Allen wrote to another newspaperman Louis Fischer, both friends of Negrín, ‘Who, besides Rafael Méndez, whose address I don’t have, could fill me in on the role of the British Intelligence agent who helped pull off the Casado coup?’10

Casado was born on 10 October 1893 in Nava de la Asunción in the province of Segovia. He was brought up under the strict discipline imposed by his father, an infantry captain, and became an officer cadet himself at the age of fifteen. He graduated as a first lieutenant in 1920 and made his career as a desk officer, albeit a very competent one. Apart from a brief and relatively tranquil eight-month period in Morocco, he had no battlefield experience. He had no political links, although in January 1935 he was appointed head of the presidential escort of Niceto Alcalá Zamora, whom he admired. After Alcalá had been replaced by Manuel Azaña in May 1936, Casado, who had reached the rank of major, found the post much less agreeable. In August 1936, he resigned from the presidential guard on the grounds that working with Azaña was ‘a horrible torture’. Promoted to lieutenant colonel, he then became chief of operations of the general staff when Francisco Largo Caballero became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. When Vicente Rojo was made chief of staff, a promotion that Casado never forgave since he aspired to the post himself, he became inspector general of the cavalry but deeply resented Rojo and the Communists. His battlefield experiences at Brunete in July and Zaragoza in October 1937 were not crowned with success. Nevertheless, in 1938, by now promoted to full colonel, he was given two important posts, as head of the Army of Andalusia and shortly afterwards as head of the Army of the Centre.11 He seems to have held an extremely cordial meeting with the PCE top brass in Madrid on 25 July 1938. One of the topics discussed was how, in the event of Republican defeat, a staged evacuation might be mounted. Francisco-Félix Montiel claimed later that the purpose of this meeting was for the PCE to ensure that an incompetent traitor was in place to bring the war to an end in such a way as to absolve the party of responsibility. In fact, it is much more likely that the purpose of the meeting was to ensure the loyalty of Casado and the Army of the Centre just as the Republican army was crossing the Ebro, in the last great push for victory. If the Communists doubted Casado’s loyalty, Rojo doubted his competence.12

Casado was an irascible officer noted for his rectitude and austerity. In fact, his evil temper and his ascetic way of life were to some extent explained by the painful stomach ulcers from which he suffered. When the vice-president of the Socialist General Union of Workers (Unión General de Trabajadores, or UGT), Edmundo Domínguez Aragonés, was appointed commissar inspector of the Army of the Centre at the end of December 1938, he went to introduce himself to Casado. He found him prostrate on his bed. Casado’s unprovoked and gratuitous assertions of loyalty rang alarm bells: ‘I am a soldier whose only duty is to respect and obey the Government. You can see just how committed I am to this duty because anyone else in my situation, with an ulcer tearing through his guts, would have ample excuse to abandon it all and look after his health. Not me. Madrid has been entrusted to me and I will defend it or die trying. If I left, they would say that I am a coward.’ Domínguez was struck by the way in which, ‘emanating self-satisfaction’, Casado vehemently asserted that his principal concern was to alleviate the suffering of the women and children of the capital. Far from being convinced, Domínguez’s suspicions were aroused that Casado was insincere and trying to hide something.13

Fernando Rodríguez Miaja, the nephew and private secretary of General José Miaja, the erstwhile hero of the defence of Madrid, had similar doubts about Casado: ‘Intelligent and a technically a good soldier, Casado was ambitious, self-obsessed and histrionic with a bitter and unpleasant character … He had an uncontrollable desire to be always pre-eminent, in the limelight and centre-stage. He lived and behaved only in the first person singular. These characteristics of his personality had a great bearing on the way the Spanish war ended.’14

It is certainly the case that his behaviour during the last months of the Spanish Civil War suggest a self-serving arrogance which fed the ambition to go down in history as the man who ended the war. This was brazenly revealed in the dedication (to M.O.) of the memoir written shortly after his arrival in London in 1939. He wrote sarcastically: ‘I left my country because I committed the grave fault of ending a fratricidal struggle, sparing my people much sterile bloodshed.’ He went on to comment on the historical transcendence of his actions.15 While still in Spain he had told Dr Diego Medina Garijo, his personal physician and a member of the Francoist Fifth Column, that it was his intention to astound the world.16 This rather sustains the judgement of Vicente Rojo that Casado was a vacuous and sinister megalomaniac: ‘Casado is all talk. Casado does not serve the people and he never has. He is the most political and most crooked and fainthearted of the career officers in the Republican ranks.’17 Even more caustic was the opinion of Dolores Ibárruri, the Communist orator famed as ‘Pasionaria’: ‘It is difficult to conceive of more slippery and cowardly vermin than Colonel Segismundo Casado.’18

The bitterness of Pasionaria is comprehensible, given that the Communists would be among the most immediate victims of Casado’s coup. Less partisan perhaps is the view of his collaborator, General Miaja, who referred to him in private as ‘four-faced’ on the grounds that to call him ‘two-faced’ would barely reflect the reality.19 More intriguing is the contemptuous judgement of Antonio Bouthelier España, a member of the fascist party Falange Española and one of Casado’s contacts with the Fifth Column. He described Casado as ‘a soldier who did not feel pride in his profession, who did not understand the word “service”, restless and ambitious, envious of politicians in top hat and frock coat, author of long-winded and solemn speeches … an eternal malcontent who acted only in his own interests’.20

In a real sense, there was an inevitability about the eventual defeat of the Republic. The initial military rising took place on the evening of 17 July 1936 in Spain’s Moroccan colony and in the peninsula itself the next morning. The plotters were confident that it would all be over in a few days. Their coup was successful in the Catholic smallholding areas which voted for the right – the provincial capitals of rural León and Old Castile, cathedral market towns like Avila, Burgos, Salamanca and Valladolid. However, in the left-wing strongholds of industrial Spain and the great estates of the deep south, the uprising was defeated by the spontaneous action of the working-class organizations. Nevertheless, in major southern towns like Cadiz, Cordoba, Granada and Seville, left-wing resistance was soon savagely crushed.

Within days, the country was split into two war zones. The rebels controlled one-third of Spain in a northern block of Galicia, León, Old Castile, Aragon and part of Extremadura and an Andalusian triangle from Huelva to Seville to Cordoba. They had the great wheat-growing areas, but the main industrial – and food-consuming – centres remained in Republican hands. After vain efforts to reach a compromise with the rebels, a cabinet of moderate Republicans was formed under the chemistry professor José Giral. There was some reason to suppose that the Republic would be able to crush the rising. Giral’s moderate Republican cabinet had control of the nation’s gold and currency reserves and virtually all of Spain’s industrial capacity. However, it lacked a loyal functioning bureaucratic machinery, especially in the fields of public order and the economy.

There were three major advantages enjoyed by the military rebels that would eventually decide the conflict – the African Army, massive assistance from the fascist powers and the tacit support of the Western democracies. Republican warships were able for only three weeks to prevent the transportation from Morocco to Spain of the rebels’ strongest card, the ferocious colonial army under Franco. Moreover, the fact that power in the streets of Spain’s major cities lay with the unions and their militia organizations undermined the efforts of Giral’s government to secure aid from the Western democracies. Inhibited by internal political divisions and sharing the British fear of revolution and of provoking a general war, the French premier Léon Blum quickly drew back from early promises of aid. In contrast, Franco in North Africa was able to persuade the local representatives of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy that he was the man to back. By the end of July, Junkers 52 and Savoia-Marchetti 81 transport aircraft were starting to airlift the principal components of the Army of Africa, the bloodthirsty Foreign Legion and the Moroccan mercenaries of the so-called Native Regulars, across the Strait of Gibraltar to Seville. Fifteen thousand men crossed in ten days and a failed coup d’état became a long and bloody civil war. That crucial early aid was soon followed by a regular stream of high-technology assistance. In contrast to the state-of-the-art equipment arriving from Germany and Italy, complete with technicians, spare parts and the correct workshop manuals, the Republic, shunned by the democracies, had to make do with over-priced and obsolete equipment from private arms dealers.

The rebels swiftly undertook two campaigns that dramatically improved their situation. Mola attacked the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, cutting it off from France. Meanwhile, Franco’s Army of Africa advanced rapidly northwards to Madrid, leaving an horrific trail of slaughter in their wake, including the massacre at Badajoz where 2,000 prisoners were shot. By 10 August, they had united the two halves of rebel Spain. The rebels consolidated their position throughout August and September as General José Enrique Varela connected Seville, Cordoba, Granada and Cadiz. For the Republicans, there were no spectacular advances, only retreats and two frustrating operations – the siege of the rebel garrison of Toledo in the fortress of the Alcázar and the futile attempt of anarchist militia columns from Barcelona to recapture Zaragoza, which had fallen quickly to the rebels.

The Spanish Republic was fighting not only Franco and his armies but increasingly also the military and economic might of Hitler and Mussolini. Snubbed by France and Britain, the Republican premier, Giral, turned to Moscow. The initial reaction of the Soviet Union was one of deep embarrassment. The Kremlin did not want the events in Spain to undermine its delicately laid plans for an alliance with France. However, by mid-August, the flow of help to the rebels from Hitler and Mussolini threatened an even greater disaster if the Spanish Republic fell. That would severely alter the European balance of power, leaving France with three hostile fascist states on its borders. Stalin’s reluctant decision to aid Spain was thus based on raison d’état. Distance and organizational chaos meant that it was mid-September before the transportation of any equipment to Spain. The first shipment of ancient rifles and machine guns arrived on 4 October. Only at the end of September, after the Republic had agreed to send its gold reserves to Russia, was the decision taken to send modern aircraft and tanks – which had to be paid for at inflated prices.

In the meantime, the all-Republican cabinet of Professor Giral had given way to a more representative government of Republicans, Socialists and Communists under the premiership of the veteran trade unionist Francisco Largo Caballero. Although popular among workers, Largo Caballero lacked the energy, determination and vision to direct a successful war effort. He failed to see that an effective war effort required a centralized state apparatus.21 While the Republic floundered in search of foreign assistance and its disorganized militias fell back on the capital, the rebels tightened up their command structure. On 21 September at an airfield near Salamanca, the leading rebel generals met to choose a commander-in-chief both for obvious military reasons and to facilitate relations with Hitler and Mussolini. Already enjoying good communication with the Führer and the Duce, Franco was their choice. On the same day, Franco decided to divert his columns, now at the gates of Madrid, to the south-east to Toledo. He thus lost an unrepeatable chance to sweep on to the capital before its defences were ready. However, by relieving the Alcázar, he clinched his own power with an emotional victory and a great media coup. He was also able to slow down the pace of the war in order to carry out a thorough political purge of captured territory. On 28 September, he was confirmed as head of the rebel state. Thereafter, he ruled over a tightly centralized zone. In contrast, the Republic was already severely hampered by intense divisions between the Communists, the middle-class Republicans and moderate Socialists on the one hand, who were rebuilding the state apparatus to make a priority of the war effort, and the anarchists, Trotskyists and left Socialists on the other, who wanted to put the emphasis on social revolution.

On 7 October the Army of Africa resumed its march on a Madrid inundated with refugees and beset by major supply problems. In an effort to rally the population, on 4 November, Largo Caballero added two anarcho-syndicalist ministers to his cabinet in the hope of widening popular support for the beleaguered Republic. Franco’s delay permitted the morale of the defenders of Madrid to be boosted by the arrival in early November of aircraft and tanks from the Soviet Union together with the columns of volunteers known as the International Brigades. The siege of Madrid saw heroic efforts by the entire population. On 6 November, expecting the capital to fall quickly, the government fled to Valencia. The city was left in the hands of General José Miaja. Backed by the Communist-dominated Junta de Defensa, the unkempt Miaja rallied the population while his brilliant chief of staff, Colonel Vicente Rojo, organized the city’s forces. The first units of the International Brigades reached Madrid on 8 November, and consisted of German and Italian anti-fascists, plus some British, French and Polish left-wingers. Sprinkled among the Spanish defenders at the rate of one to four, the brigadiers both boosted their morale and trained them in the use of machine guns, in the conservation of ammunition and in the methods of using cover. They successfully resisted Franco’s African columns and, by late November, he had to acknowledge his failure. The besieged capital would hold out for another two and a half years until the fateful sequence of events triggered by Colonel Casado.

The arrival of Russian equipment and international volunteers in the autumn helped save Madrid. However, their presence was also to be used by Franco’s sympathizers to justify the intervention of Hitler and Mussolini and inhibit the Western powers. The motivation of both Germany and Italy was principally to undermine the Anglo-French hegemony in international relations, yet both dictators received a sympathetic ear in London when they claimed to be in Spain to combat bolshevism. Besieged, the Republic also had complex internal problems unknown in Franco’s brutally militarized zone. The collapse of the bourgeois state in the first days of the war had seen the rapid emergence of revolutionary organs of parallel power – the committees and militias linked to the left-wing unions and parties. A massive popular collectivization of agriculture and industry took place. Exhilarating to participants and foreign observers like George Orwell, the great collectivist experiments of the autumn of 1936 were an obstacle to the creation of a war machine. Opposing beliefs about whether to give priority to war or revolution would lie at the heart of the internal conflict that raged within the Republican zone until mid-1937. The Republican President, Manuel Azaña, and moderate Socialist leaders like the Minister of the Navy and Air Force, Indalecio Prieto, and the Minister of Finance, Juan Negrín, were convinced that a conventional state apparatus, with central control of the economy and the institutional instruments of mass mobilization, was essential for an efficacious war effort. The Communists and the Soviet advisers agreed – it made sense and they hoped that halting the revolutionary activities of Trotskyists and anarchists would reassure the bourgeois democracies being courted by the Soviet Union.

Preoccupied by internal dissensions, and still without a conventional army, the Republic was unable to capitalize on its victory at Madrid. Franco’s immediate response was a series of attempts to encircle the capital. At the battles of Boadilla (December 1936), Jarama (February 1937) and Guadalajara (March 1937), his forces were beaten back, but at enormous cost to the Republic. Concentration on the defence of Madrid meant the neglect of other fronts. Málaga in the south fell to newly arrived Italian troops at the beginning of February. The war in central Spain saw no easy victories. At Jarama, the rebel front advanced a few kilometres, but made no strategic gain. The Republicans lost 25,000 men, including some of the best British and American members of the Brigades, and the rebels about 20,000. In March, the rebels made further efforts to encircle Madrid by attacking near Guadalajara, 60 kilometres north-east of Madrid. An army of 50,000, the best-equipped and most heavily armed force yet seen in the war, broke through, but was defeated by a Republican counter-attack. Thereafter, as the Republic organized its People’s Army (Ejército Popular de la República), the conflict turned into a more conventional war of large-scale manoeuvre.

Even after being defeated at the battle of Guadalajara, in which a large contingent of Italian troops was involved, the rebels still held the initiative because each reverse for Franco saw the Axis dictators increase their support. This was demonstrated during the rebel campaign in northern Spain in the spring and summer of 1937. In March, Mola led 40,000 troops in an assault on the Basque Country backed by the terror-bombing expertise of the German Condor Legion. In a rehearsal for the Blitzkrieg eventually unleashed on Poland and France, Guernica was annihilated on 26 April 1937 to shatter Basque morale and undermine the defence of the capital, Bilbao, which fell on 19 June. Thereafter, the rebel army, amply supplied with Italian troops and equipment, was able to capture Santander on 26 August. Asturias was quickly overrun during September and October. Northern industry was now at the service of the rebels. This gave them a decisive advantage to add to their numerical superiority in terms of men, tanks and aeroplanes.

The defeats suffered by the Republic during early 1937 would lead eventually on 17 May to the establishment under the premiership of Juan Negrín of a strong government from which the anarcho-syndicalists were dropped. Already, as Minister of Finance and with the help of his under-secretary Francisco Méndez Aspe, Negrín had systematized the Republic’s exports of raw materials and its imports of weaponry and food. He had reorganized the Corps of Carabineros (border guards) to put a stop to smuggling and illegal exports. His contribution to the war effort cannot be exaggerated.22 Now, as Prime Minister, Negrín put his faith in the brilliant strategist Colonel Vicente Rojo, who tried to halt the rebels’ inexorable process by a series of diversionary offensives. At the village of Brunete, west of Madrid, on 6 July, 50,000 troops smashed through enemy lines, but the rebels had enough reinforcements to plug the gap. For ten days, in one of the bloodiest encounters of the war, the Republicans were pounded by air and artillery attacks. At enormous cost, the Republic slightly delayed the eventual collapse of the north. Brunete was razed to the ground. Then, in August, Rojo launched a bold pincer movement against Zaragoza. At the small town of Belchite in mid-September, the offensive ground to a halt. As at Brunete, the Republicans gained an initial advantage, but lacked sufficient force for the killer blow. In December, Rojo launched a further pre-emptive attack against Teruel, in the hope of diverting Franco’s latest assault on Madrid. The plan worked. In the most intense cold, the Republicans captured Teruel on 8 January 1938 – the only time that they managed to capture a provincial capital that had been in rebel hands. However, the triumph was short-lived. The Republican forces were dislodged after six weeks of heavy battering by artillery and bombers. After another costly defence of a small advance, the Republicans had to retreat on 21 February, when Teruel was on the point of being encircled. The casualties on both sides had been alarmingly high.

The Republicans were exhausted, short of guns and ammunition and demoralized after the defeat at Teruel. Franco now seized the initiative with a well-resourced offensive through Aragon and Castellon towards the sea. A total of 100,000 troops, 200 tanks and nearly 1,000 German and Italian aircraft began their advance on 7 March 1938. By early April, the rebels had reached Lérida and then moved down the Ebro valley, cutting off Catalonia from the rest of the Republic. By 15 April, they had reached the Mediterranean. In consequence, there was no shortage of senior figures on the Republican side who considered that the war could not now be won. Among them could be found both the chief of staff, Colonel Rojo, the head of the air force, Colonel Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, and that eternal pessimist Indalecio Prieto. Negrín, however, refused to acknowledge the possibility because he was aware of the dangers of defeatism.23 He remained confident in continued Russian logistical support. However, Russian deliveries were few after June 1938. Already, by the late summer of 1937, attacks on neutral shipping by rebel warships and Italian submarines had closed the Mediterranean as a supply route for the Republic. Russian supplies now came from Murmansk or the Baltic ports and were unloaded in Le Havre or Cherbourg and then transported to the French–Spanish border.24 To get them across France, Negrín had to spend valuable foreign currency bribing local officials. As the the Minister of Agriculture, the senior Communist Vicente Uribe, later commented: ‘To get the necessary mechanisms working in France, it was necessary to grease them copiously, according to Negrín, with the funds of the Republic.’25 In June 1938, the frontier was closed by the French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier and remained closed until late January 1939. The situation was most desperate in Catalonia, where the difficulties of supply of weaponry and food grew ever more acute. Daladier opened the frontier reluctantly only after Negrín told the recently appointed French Ambassador Jules Henry that Republican defeat in Catalonia and the arrival of German and Italian forces at the Pyrenees would constitute a threat to the security of France.26

That being the case, Franco could have been tempted to adopt a more attacking strategy. However, he was more interested in the total destruction of the Republican forces than in a quick victory, and he ignored the opportunity to turn against a poorly defended Barcelona. Instead, in July 1938, he launched a major attack on Valencia. The Republicans’ determination in defence ensured that progress was slow and exhausting but, by 23 July, Valencia was under direct threat, with the rebels less than 40 kilometres away. In response, Vicente Rojo now launched another spectacular diversion in the form of a daring push across the River Ebro to restore contact between Catalonia and the central zone, separated since the Francoists had reached the Mediterranean in April. In the most hard-fought battle of the entire war, the Republican army of 80,000 men crossed the river and broke through the rebel lines, although at great cost to the International Brigades.

For some time, Negrín had pinned his hopes on an escalation of European tension that would alert the Western democracies to the dangers facing them from the Axis. The outbreak of a general European war would, he hoped, see the Republic aligned with France, Britain and Russia against Germany and Italy. Any such hopes were dashed when the Republic was virtually sentenced to death by the British reaction to the Czechoslovakian crisis. British foreign policy had long been orientated in favour of a Francoist victory. Rather than risk war with Hitler, Chamberlain effectively surrendered Czechoslovakia to the Nazis when he signed the Munich Agreement of 29 September 1938. It was a devastating blow to the Spanish Republic which, since July, had been engaged in its last great battle, at the Ebro. Even before the betrayal by the Western powers, Stalin had ordered the withdrawal of the International Brigades from Spain.27

The more immediate military objective for which the huge Army of the Ebro was created had been to divert the rebel attack on Valencia. Given the Republic’s lack of armaments, it was an immensely risky venture. By 1 August, the Republicans had reached Gandesa 40 kilometres from their starting point, but there they were bogged down when Franco ordered massive reinforcements, including the Condor Legion, to be rushed in to check the advance. With inadequate artillery and air cover, the Republicans were subjected to three months of fierce artillery bombardment and sweltering heat.28 Despite its strategic irrelevance, Franco was determined to recover the lost ground irrespective of the cost and relished the opportunity to catch the Republicans in a trap, encircle and destroy them. He could simply have contained the Republican advance and driven forward against a near-helpless Barcelona. Instead, he preferred, irrespective of the human cost, to turn Gandesa into the graveyard of the Republican army. With nearly 900,000 men now under arms, he could afford to be careless of their lives. At stake in this desperate and ultimately meaningless battle was the international credibility of the Republic. Munich had undermined the already dwindling faith in the possibility of victory among both the civilian population and the officer corps. Overwhelming logistical superiority in terms of air cover, artillery and troop numbers would see Franco score a decisive victory. In a sense, the Ebro operation, initially a tactical success, was a strategic disaster for the Republic since it used up vast quantities of equipment and left the way open for the rebel conquest of Catalonia.29

Ten days before the signing of the Munich Agreement, Vicente Rojo had drawn up a detailed report on the Republic’s military situation in the context of the Czechoslovak crisis. It was his hope that the democracies would resist Hitler’s demands and provoke a general war in which the Spanish Republic would be allied with Britain and France.30 Neverthless, he also analysed the likely consequences should the democracies give in to Hitler. Rojo’s conclusion was that such a capitulation would give Italy and Germany an even freer hand to help Franco than hitherto: ‘our war would enter, in such a case, a period of acute crisis because of the greater difficulties that we would have to overcome in order to sustain the struggle against an ever more powerful enemy’. Nevertheless, Rojo was still optimistic that ‘a favourable resolution of our conflict’ could be achieved. For this to happen, supplies of food and war matériel would have to be secured and the army’s morale kept high and its organization improved. These two conditions he described as ‘doable. They are problems for the Government.’ To this end, he called for an effort to obtain greater foreign help and for a centrally controlled war effort such as that enjoyed by Franco – more efficient rationing, measures to be taken against those who evaded conscription, a single command for all the armed forces, central control of transport facilities and of industry, and an end to the proliferation of political parties and of competing newspapers.31

What Rojo was suggesting was as necessary as it was impossible. To achieve the fully centralized war effort to which Negrín and the Communist Party had aspired since the beginning of the conflict had already provoked opposition from anarchists, Trotskyists and sections of the Socialist Party. To go further, as Rojo now suggested, would generate even greater resentment. In any case, given the scale of the myriad problems faced by Negrín, the enormous reorganization required was simply out of the question. What Negrín did manage to do, along with his secret peace initiatives, was to intensify his efforts to secure military supplies from Russia. He successfully negotiated the supply of aircraft, tanks, artillery and machine guns. While what was agreed was less than he had hoped for, these armaments could have made a huge difference if, after their arrival in France in mid-January, they had been transported to the Catalan border. However, the continuing obstacles placed in the way by the French government ensured that they did not arrive in time.32 Another aspect of Rojo’s report would also have disappointing results. He added an appendix on military plans in which he talked of the relief that could be given to the Republican forces on the Ebro by the launching of offensives in the centre-south zone.33 The four armies that made up what was called the Group of Armies of the Centre (Grupo de Ejércitos Republicanos del Centro) – Extremadura, Andalusia, the Levante and the Centre – were under the overall command of General Miaja, with General Manuel Matallana Gómez as his chief of staff. The Army of the Centre was commanded by Colonel Casado. Since all three were reluctant to continue the fight, Rojo’s orders to this effect were never properly implemented.

The decisive Nationalist counter-offensive on the Ebro was launched on 30 October 1938. Concentrated air and artillery attacks on selected areas followed by infantry attacks gradually smashed the Republican forces.34 By mid-November, at horrendous cost in casualties, the Francoists had pushed the Republicans out of the territory captured in July. The remnants of the Republican army abandoned the right bank of the Ebro at Flix late at night on 15 November. As they retreated back across the river, they left behind them many dead and much precious matériel. It had taken Franco four months to recover the territory gained by the Republic in one week in July. As we have seen, he had in July rejected the more adventurous strategy of holding the Republicans near Gandesa and pushing on to Barcelona from Lérida. By so doing, Franco demonstrated his preference for attrition and for the physical annihilation of the Republican army. He thereby ensured that there would be no armistice, no negotiation of peace conditions.

It was Munich that turned the battle into a resounding defeat, especially for the Communist Party which had invested energy, resources and prestige in the Ebro initiative.35 Before, during and after the battle, this last throw of the dice contributed massively to civilian and military demoralization. After the defeat at Teruel in February and during the great Francoist advance through Aragon to the coast, the Republic had already suffered massive losses. In order to create the Army of the Ebro, the government had been obliged to call up a further nine years’ worth of conscripts (the reemplazos of 1923 to 1929, and of 1940 and 1941). The need to train, and rely on, both older and younger men had a negative impact on the Catalan economy and society at large. Labour was in short supply and families were outraged that, during the battle of the Ebro, many Republican soldiers were seventeen-year-old adolescents. During the battle itself, army requisitioning, effectively the troops scavenging off the land, exacerbated the growing discontent. Further tension was caused by the Republican military intelligence service (Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, or SIM) which was pursuing those who had evaded conscription and those who had deserted.36 Approximately 13,250 Spaniards and foreigners were killed, 6,100 (46 per cent) of them Francoists and 7,150 (54 per cent) Republicans. In roughly similar proportions, about 110,000 suffered wounds or mutilation. The richly fertile Terra Alta became a vast cemetery – tens of thousands of men were buried quickly, many were left where they lay and others drowned in the river. To the dismay of the local peasantry, and to the detriment of the Republican war effort, the fighting ruined the harvest of wheat and barley in July, of almonds in August, of grapes in September and of olives in November.

Negrín was fully aware of the significance of Munich. He knew that Republican victory was impossible. In late September 1938, the deputy secretary of the PSOE executive, Juan-Simeón Vidarte, told him that the committee’s members remained convinced that the unconditional surrender demanded by Franco was out of the question. Commenting that no one forgot what had happened in Andalusia, Extremadura, the Basque Country and Asturias, he remarked: ‘We can’t hand over half of Spain and an army of a million men so that they can exterminate them as they like.’ Negrín replied with resigned realism: ‘Guarantees for an honourable peace is all that I want.’37 To this effect, he consulted the Republic’s legal adviser Felipe Sánchez Román, who drafted the minimal conditions which Negrín accepted as the basis for negotiations with Franco, including a promise not to take reprisals against the supporters of the Republican government and a guarantee to maintain public order.38

Another close friend of Negrín, the cardiologist Dr Rafael Méndez Martínez, at the time Director General of the border guards, the Carabineros, wrote later of how the spirit of victory had been tranformed into the spirit of resistance that would last until such time as it was possible to achieve ‘the second of his aims, a satisfactory peace’. In this regard, he believed that only an effective and well-ordered resistance that prolonged the war might persuade the democracies to help negotiate such a settlement. ‘Once Negrín had accepted that victory was impossible, the nub of his policy was resistance to the end and the mobilization of international support to achieve a peace settlement that would prevent the extermination of thousands and thousands of Republicans.’ His peace initiatives included a secret meeting with the German Ambassador in Paris.39

Over the next two months, their success at the Ebro would see Franco’s forces sweep through Catalonia. Confident that, after Munich, the Republic would not find salvation in a European war, Franco gathered over 30,000 fresh troops. He granted substantial mining concessions to the Third Reich in return for sizeable deliveries of German equipment.40 With the French frontier closed and help from the Soviet Union reduced to a trickle, Franco had every possible advantage for his final push. Months of Italian bombing raids had taken their toll on morale. An immense army was gathered along a line surrounding Catalonia from the Mediterranean in the east to the Ebro in the west and to the Pyrenees to the north. Originally planned for 10 December, the offensive was postponed until the 15th. Further delays were caused by a period of torrential rain and it was eventually launched on 23 December.41 The scale of war-weariness, resentment of the conflict’s human and economic costs and defeatism in the wake of Munich made a successful defence seem the remotest possibility. Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming superiority of the attacking forces in terms of air cover, artillery and sheer numbers, the Republican retreat never turned into a rout. Franco could rotate his troops every forty-eight hours while the Republicans had had no leave for seven weeks.

The forces of Enrique Líster managed to hold up the Nationalist advance for nearly two weeks at Borjas Blancas on the road from Lérida to Tarragona. Nevertheless, the advance was inexorable. On New Year’s Eve, a ferocious Italian bombing raid on Barcelona brought to the city what Negrín, in a broadcast to the United States, called ‘sorrow and mourning’. His Minister of Foreign Affairs, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, commented: ‘Perhaps this is “Happy New Year” in the Italian language.’ Herbert Matthews, who had helped Negrín polish his English for the broadcast, wrote later: ‘I had never seen him so moved.’ On 4 January 1939, the Francoists broke through at Borjas Blancas and the end was nigh for Catalonia. Without adequate armaments and with the troops drained after their superhuman efforts, the road was open to Tarragona and then on to Barcelona. The bespectacled Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Tagüeña, a tall, thin mathematician who had risen through the ranks of the militias to command an army corps, mounted a determined defence but had only a fraction of the necessary weaponry.42

In the wake of the Munich Agreement and the consequent conviction in Moscow that Russia had been betrayed by the democracies, a concern for security saw Stalin start to make tentative overtures to Nazi Germany. Engaged in a war with Japan in China, with serious preocupations in Eastern Europe, and with obstacles in the way of transport to Spain, Russia had to cut back on aid in the last six months of the Civil War just as Germany and Italy significantly increased their assistance to Franco. The consequence was, in the words of Herbert Matthews, that:

the last year of fighting was a miracle of dogged, hopeless courage, made possible solely by the tenacity and indomitable spirit of Negrín. However, this astonishing display of leadership was the most bitterly criticized feature among Spaniards of Dr Negrín’s career. The fight was hopeless, his critics said, and all that ‘unnecessary’ destruction, all those extra lives lost, all the intensified hatred of Spaniard for Spaniard, could have been avoided. It is certain, on the other hand, that the Loyalists could have held out longer had it not been for treachery, and that World War II could have saved Republican Spain … Don Juan’s aims were consistent, patriotic and honorable. He stood for a fight to the finish, first to save the Second Republic and – when that became impossible – to get the best terms for those who had remained loyal. In the process, he had to rely heavily on Stalinist Russia and then almost exclusively on the Spanish Communists.43

2
Resist to Survive

While Negrín continued desperately trying to maintain a war effort in the hope, not of victory, but of an honourable peace settlement, Casado worked to consolidate his links with both the Francoist espionage networks and the Fifth Column in Madrid. Without them, it would have been much more difficult for him to pull together the various elements of his coup. He was also seconded in what he did by the distinguished Socialist intellectual Julián Besteiro, Professor of Logic in the University of Madrid. On the night of 5 March, the two, together with disillusioned anarchist leaders such as Cipriano Mera and the Socialist trade union leader Wenceslao Carrillo, announced an anti-Negrín National Defence Junta (Consejo Nacional de Defensa) under the presidency of General José Miaja. The enterprise was driven by the hope that Casado’s contacts with the Francoist secret service and Besteiro’s links with the Fifth Column in Madrid would facilitate negotiation with Franco in Burgos. They may also have hoped that, by inspiring a military uprising ‘to save Spain from Communism’, they would somehow endear themselves to Franco.

Casado justified his action on the grounds that he was preventing a Moscow-inspired Communist take-over. Although such intentions on the part of the Communists were demonstrably non-existent, the fiction was believed by those in the Republican zone desperate for an end to the war, many of whom had already acquired a deep hostility to the Communists.1 Casado’s later justification was founded on his outrage that Negrín and the Communists had talked of resistance to the bitter end when shortages of food and equipment made that impossible. In denouncing Juan Negrín’s commitment to continued resistance, he was ignoring the Prime Minister’s Herculean efforts to secure by diplomacy a negotiated peace with adequate guarantees against a justifiably feared Francoist repression. According to Prieto, Negrín’s efforts had even extended to the Third Reich. It should be noted that Negrín’s diplomacy remained secret lest it trigger defeatism.2 Similarly, Casado seemed unaware of the extent to which Negrín’s rhetoric of resistance was a necessary bargaining chip to be used to secure a reasonable peace settlement with Franco.

Although Casado had never joined the Communist Party, as had many other career officers on the Republican side, his ferocious anti-communism was of recent vintage. He was a freemason with a pedigree as a Republican. When the military coup took place in July 1936, he was still commander of Manuel Azaña’s presidential guard. He took part in the defence of Madrid from the attacks through the sierra to the north of the capital. According to his own account, in October 1936 he was dismissed as head of operations of the general staff for his criticism of the way in which priority was being given to the Communist Fifth Regiment (Quinto Regimiento) in the distribution of Soviet weaponry. In fact, the decision had been made by Vicente Rojo, who thought him incompetent. Antonio Cordón, the under-secretary of the Ministry of Defence, had a higher opinion of Casado than Rojo had, regarding him as intelligent and professional. However, Cordón believed that Casado’s positive qualities were neutralized by his ‘overweening pride and uncontrolled ambition’. Believing himself to be the man who could win the war, Casado was eaten up with resentment that he had not been promoted to positions commensurate with his own estimates of his worth. His bitterness was focused on Rojo. Nevertheless, over the following months, he was given important postings. Indalecio Prieto made him commander of the Army of Andalusia and, in May 1938, Negrín appointed him commander of the Army of the Centre.3 This last appointment was interpreted by the ex-Communist Francisco-Félix Montiel in terms of a bizarre conspiracy theory that Casado had been chosen by the Russians for his incompetence as part of a long-term plan to bring the war to an end without blame for the Communist Party.4 It is more plausibly an indication that the Communists were not as committed, as Casado later claimed that they were, to total domination of the Republic’s armed forces.

The reasons for Besteiro’s involvement went back much further. His experiences during the repression which followed the Socialist-led general strike of 1917 intensified his repugnance for violence. He became aware of the futility of Spain’s weak Socialist movement undertaking a frontal assault on the state. He opposed the PSOE’s affiliation to the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern), and a period in England on a scholarship to do research on the Workers’ Educational Association in 1924 confirmed his reformism. He had argued from his position as president of both the PSOE and the UGT that, in order to build up working-class strength, the Socialist movement should accept the offer that it collaborate with the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera. Yet, in mid-1930, he argued against Socialist collaboration in the broad opposition front established by the Pact of San Sebastián and eventually in the future government of the Republic. Finding himself in a minority, in February 1931, he felt obliged to resign as president of both the party and the union.5 Thus began a process of marginalization from his erstwhile comrades. Moreover, his theoretical abstractions about the nature of the historical process through which Spain was passing seem to have given him a sense of knowing better than they did. Indeed, as President of the Cortes between 1931 and 1933, he had manifested some hostility towards the deputies of his own party.

With the bulk of the PSOE and the UGT eager to use the apparatus of the state to introduce basic social reforms, Besteiro’s abstentionist views fell on deaf ears. In fact, the rank and file of the Socialist movement was moving rapidly away from the positions advocated by Besteiro. Right-wing intransigence radicalized the grass-roots militants. The conclusion drawn by an influential section of the leadership led by Largo Caballero was that the Socialists should meet the needs of the rank and file by seeking more rather than less responsibility in the government. Besteiro’s belief that socialism would come if only socialists were well behaved underlay a disturbing complacency regarding fascism. He opposed the growing radicalization of the Socialist movement.6 Thus he had opposed its participation in the revolutionary insurrection of October 1934 which had followed the inclusion of the right-wing CEDA in the government.7 His failure to understand the real threat of fascism prefigured some of his misplaced optimism about Franco at the end of the Spanish Civil War.8

In the course of that Civil War, Besteiro had behaved in a way which confirmed the suspicion of many within the PSOE that he did not fully understand the great political struggles of the day. Outside of political circles, he reinforced his popularity by refusing numerous opportunities to seek a safe exile.9 He continued to work in the university, being elected Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in October 1936. At the same time, he assiduously fulfilled his duties as a parliamentary deputy, as councillor of the Ayuntamiento de Madrid, to which he had been elected on 12 April 1931, and as president of the Committee for the Reconstruction of the Capital. His friends tried frantically to persuade him to leave Madrid. Yet, despite, indeed because of, his view that the war would end disastrously for the Republic, he steadfastly refused. From the beginning, Besteiro made no secret of his, at the time, inopportune commitment to a peace settlement. As Spain’s representative at the coronation of George VI in London on 12 May 1937, he had tried to seek mediation by the British government, but it was a bad moment for such an initiative. The rebels were in the ascendant – in the north, the fall of Bilbao was expected from one day to the next. At the same time, the Republican government was facing significant internal difficulties. In Barcelona, from 3 to 10 May, the forces of the government and the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, or CNT) were locked in a bloody struggle for control of the city. Besteiro’s mission was doomed to failure. In his absence, the Largo Caballero cabinet fell. The resolution of the crisis with the appointment of Juan Negrín as Prime Minister of the so-called ‘Government of Victory’ on 17 May seemed to bring to an end the political infighting that had characterized the previous history of the Republic at war. Negrín, with the remarkable organizational ability that he had demonstrated in the Ministry of Finance, was regarded as the man who could create a centralized war effort.

This seemed possible because May 1937 had seen the defeat of the revolutionary elements within the Republic – the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica), the extremist wing of the anarchist movement, and the anti-Stalinist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) – and the marginalization of the rhetorically revolutionary wing of the PSOE under Largo Caballero. However, that did not mean that any of these groups accepted their fate with docility. As military defeats mounted – the loss of the north, and of Teruel, and the division of the Republic in two – their resentments would grow and be focused increasingly on Negrín and the Communists. As far as Besteiro was concerned, his desire to be the man who brought peace was shattered on the rock of Negrín’s determination to fight on to victory. Since Negrín believed, rightly, that only a major military triumph by the Republic would bring Franco to the negotiating table, he had no interest in fostering Besteiro’s ambitions. The highly touchy Besteiro, however, perceived an insult in Negrín’s understandable failure to follow up on his London trip.10 Disappointed that his inflated sense of the importance of his own mission was not matched by Negrín, Besteiro began to harbour a fierce grudge against the new Prime Minister. The fall of the Largo Caballero government in mid-May 1937 opened up the post of ambassador in France. Besteiro aspired to the Spanish Embassy in Paris in order to seek French mediation in the war, but Negrín’s commitment to resistance to the last against Franco made such an appointment impossible.

In the wake of the failure of his peace mission, Besteiro returned to his university post and his position in the Madrid Ayuntamiento. As a city councillor, he worked hard on the problems of the besieged capital to the detriment of his health. He was tortured by the idea that mistakes made in the early 1930s, particularly Socialist participation in government, had been responsible for the war. He was also appalled by the violence of the conflict and especially by the sound of firing squads and gunshots in the night – which he took to be the sounds of political assassinations.11 In contrast, in the last months of the war, he seemed oblivious to reports of the Francoist repression in captured areas.12

Initially, Besteiro’s stance as a silent but critical spectator of the Republican government had puzzled many rank-and-file Socialists, although as the war progressed, his stock began to rise again. The departure from government of Largo Caballero in May 1937 had provoked considerable anti-Communist sentiment within the PSOE in Madrid and much of the UGT. Similarly, the removal in April 1938 of the ever pessimistic Prieto from his post as Minister of Defence had intensified anti-Communism within Socialist ranks. This was unfair. The Communists had certainly wanted to see a more positive and dynamic person as Minister of Defence, but they had been keen to see Prieto kept in the government. They feared, as actually was to happen, that his spleen would quickly be directed against them. As it turned out, it was Prieto who refused a different ministry in the cabinet formed on 5 April. Fomented even further by Prieto’s embittered and tendentious interpretations of what had happened, the growing resentment of the Communists would undermine the principal bulwark of the Republican war effort.13

Besteiro, like Prieto, conveniently ignored the immense contribution of the Communist Party to the survival of the Republic. A key component of the People’s Army, the party had lost thousands of militants either killed, seriously wounded or captured as territory fell to the Francoists. By the end of 1937, some 60 per cent of the PCE’s militants were in the People’s Army. It was calculated that around 50,000 had been captured by the rebels after the fall of Málaga, Santander and the Asturias. Another 20,000 had been lost in the course of the battle of the Ebro and the last-ditch defence of Catalonia.14 On 18 February 1939, General Rojo sent Negrín an analysis of the possibilities of maintaining resistance in the centre-south zone. In his covering letter, he wrote of the PCE:

I don’t need to tell you that of all the political parties, it has been and remains the only one with which I sympathize. I believe that they are making a big mistake, even in assuming the general responsibility for the field commanders and the overall leadership of this phase of the struggle, because they are going to ensure that the efforts of the enemy and from all countries will be concentrated on them even further. They will end up ensuring the definitive destruction of their party, the only one that is relatively healthy within our political organization.15

In general, the anarchists resented the Communist pre-eminence in the armed forces. This was largely to do with the fact that, in endeavouring to create a centralized and effective war effort, the revolutionary ambitions of the anarchists had been reined in, sometimes brutally. This was perceived by all sectors of the libertarian movement as simply a desire on the part of the Communists to attain a monopoly of power, and the underlying military necessity was utterly ignored. On the other hand, there were numerous complaints of anarchists being murdered. It was certainly the case that there was considerable hostility between Communists and anarchists within the army, in part because of the harsh discipline imposed by Communist commanders. Summary executions of deserters and of commanders deemed to be ineffective were not uncommon. The anarchists alleged that a Communist terror was carried out in front-line units, complaining that there were ‘thousands and thousands of comrades who confess that they feel more fear of being assassinated by the adversary alongside them than of being killed in battle by the enemies opposite’. In a spirit of revenge, in the Levante, lists were drawn up of the names of Communists within military units. Those listed would become targets after the Casado coup. In fact, Communist influence within the armed forces was considerably less than that alleged by the anarchists.16

Forgetting or perhaps unconcerned by the need for the Republic to be defended militarily, after his return from London Besteiro had become even more anti-Communist and commensurately less hostile to the Francoists. The main target of his obsession was Negrín, whom he frequently accused of being a Communist. This view was increasingly shared by many within the Socialist Party. Largo Caballero, for instance, was outraged when Julián Zugazagoitia, then Negrín’s Minister of the Interior, had prohibited a meeting in Alicante at which, it was feared, he planned to denounce the Prime Minister and thereby undermine the war effort.17 Thus the followers of Largo Caballero, Prieto and Besteiro were converging in their anti-Communism and could count on the growing sympathy of the President, Manuel Azaña. Negrín, overwhelmed by his efforts, as premier, to improve the international situation of the Republic and, as Minister of Defence, to run the war effort, did not have the time to combat the corrosive effect of the growing anti-Communism which, in some cases, overcame the higher priority of the defence of the Republic and thus contributed to division, despair and defeatism.18

Besteiro’s hostility to the Communists masked his more generalized lack of enthusiasm for the Republican cause. At his later trial at the hands of the Francoists, it was revealed by his defence lawyer that in the course of 1937 he had used his position as Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters to protect several Falangists in the university. Through some of these colleagues, Professors Julio Palacios (the Vice-Rector), Antonio Luna García, Luis de Sosa y Pérez and Julio Martínez Santa Olalla, he had established contact with the clandestine Fifth Column in Madrid. In fact, since September 1937, Luna García had run an important section of the Fifth Column in Madrid, known as the ‘Organización Antonio’, which had been created at the end of the previous year by Captain José López Palazón.19 In his statement on Besteiro’s behalf to the military tribunal, Luna García spoke of his surprise at the vehemence with which Besteiro had criticized the Republican government.

His report at the time to Burgos identified Besteiro as a potential target for the Fifth Column. In April 1938, Luna was instructed by the clandestine organization of the Falange to try to persuade Besteiro to move beyond refusal to work with the government and to try actively to bring the war to an end. This initiative coincided with the division of Republican territory by the successful Francoist offensive through Aragon to the Mediterranean coast. With the Republic’s central zone cut off from the government in Valencia, Besteiro agreed. From the summer of 1938, he started to lobby energetically to be permitted to form a cabinet as a preliminary step to peace negotiations.20

Besteiro’s position was converging with that of Segismundo Casado. Already in the summer of 1938, shortly after Casado’s promotion to the command of the Army of the Centre, a prominent member of the Madrid Fifth Column, the Falangist Antonio Bouthelier España, had approached him. Bouthelier was able to get near to Casado because he was secretary to the prominent CNT member Manuel Salgado, who worked in the security services of the Army of the Centre. He had used this position to help Francoists cross the lines. Bouthelier also had a short-wave radio with which he passed information to rebel headquarters. For various reasons, the Francoist espionage service was aware of Casado’s anti-communism. His brother Lieutenant Colonel César Casado was a member of the Fifth Column, and Segismundo Casado was doing everything in this power to protect him. Given Bouthelier’s closeness to Casado, he was instructed to propose to him that he act as a spy for the rebels. He was emboldened to do so because he knew of the sympathies for the rebel cause of both Casado’s wife María Condado y Condado and his brother César. Casado did not immediately accept the proposal but, significantly, did not report the contact to the Republic’s security service, the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, in order to open an investigation into Bouthelier. César Casado was only one of several pro-Francoist officers that Segismundo was protecting by giving them posts within his general staff. In fact, aware of these contacts, the SIM was already carrying out surveillance of Casado and his family. However, since the Socialist Ángel Pedrero García, the head of the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar in the Army of the Centre, sympathized with Casado, no action seems to have been taken against him.21

One of the members of the Organización Antonio was a major in the army medical corps, Casado’s doctor Diego Medina Garijo. Another was a retired major of the medical corps, Dr Ricardo Bertoloty Ramírez. He was one of the team that had saved Franco’s life in 1916 when he was seriously wounded at El Biutz in Morocco. In 1931, Dr Bertoloty had taken advantage of Azaña’s reforms to leave the army, but he remained a close friend of Franco.22 Contacts with pro-rebel sympathizers in the Republican Army were monitored through the Servicio de Información y Policia Militar (SIPM), run within Franco’s general staff by Colonel José Ungría Jiménez. A key figure in the SIPM in close contact with the Organización Antonio was Lieutenant Colonel José Centaño de la Paz, Casado’s adjutant, who belonged to another fifth-column organization called ‘La Ciudad Clandestina’. Centaño was in constant radio contact with Franco’s headquarters in Burgos. In late January 1939, Antonio Luna’s group brought Besteiro and Casado together in order to discuss plans to overthrow Negrín. However, Ángel Pedrero García had already brokered a prior meeting with Besteiro at the end of October 1938, though it is unlikely that they discussed anything as dramatic as an anti-Negrín coup d’état. Not until 5 February did Centaño reveal to Casado his role in the SIPM.23

That the SIPM regarded Casado as potentially useful was hardly surprising. They were aware that, on 8 December 1938, Casado had met the British Chargé d’Affaires Ralph Stevenson in Madrid and discussed with him London’s desire to end the Spanish conflict.24 That together with the way in which Casado had run the Army of the Centre must have delighted them. He had imposed rigidly traditional military discipline and completely emasculated the corps of political commissars, which had been created shortly after the conflict began in response to the fact that war had been triggered by a rebellion of professional officers against the constitutional authority of the Republic. The commissariat existed in parallel with the traditional military structure. Commissars were essentially evangelists of the Republican cause. They worked to maintain morale and to explain the political purpose of the war effort, and provided a link between the rank and file, the officers and the Republican government. They held the same rank as the commander of the unit in which they served, even where that unit was the army as a whole. Inevitably, most career officers resented the authority enjoyed by commissars to question major military decisions. By early 1939, as the commissars worked to maintain the spirit of resistance, this resentment intensified in proportion to the growing defeatism of the professional officers, especially so in the case of Casado.25

The consequence was that new conscripts were left with little idea of what they fighting for. This fostered the spread of demoralization and desertions. At the same time, Casado showed no inclination to use his forces in battle, something for which Vicente Rojo would never forgive him. Casado was far from being the only or indeed the most senior defeatist in the Republican ranks. In late November, to take pressure off the retreating Army of the Ebro, Rojo had ordered three diversionary attacks by the armies of the centre-south zone under General Miaja, the commander of the Republican armies of the south and centre. With his chief of staff, General Manuel Matallana Gómez, Miaja was supposed to organize a major offensive westwards into Extremadura and a landing at Motril in Granada. Colonel Casado, commander of the Army of the Centre, was to carry out an advance on the Madrid front at Brunete. All three simply failed to carry out their orders. Many of the officers in the Army of Catalonia were committed Communists like Colonel Antonio Cordón, or had risen through the ranks of the militia like Juan Modesto and Enrique Líster. In contrast, the senior officers of the Army of the Centre were professional officers who had made their careers in Africa. If, like Miaja, they had sought membership of the Communist Party, it was out of convenience rather than conviction.

The various offensives should have begun on 11 December 1938 but were inexplicably delayed until 5 January 1939, by which time the Francoist drive into Catalonia was virtually unstoppable. The lack of commitment by the southern army commanders was seen in Negrín’s immediate circle as the result of ‘treachery, sabotage and defeatism’.26 The failure to launch the operations owed much to the fact that the chief of operations of the Army of the Centre, Lieutenant Colonel Francisco García Viñals, was a close collaborator of the SIPM. He did everything possible to ensure that the Republican forces in the centre zone remained inactive.27 The landing at Motril never took place. Several commanders, the Communists Enrique Castro Delgado and Juan Modesto Guilloto, the moderate Republican (and anti-Communist) Juan Perea Capulino and the commissar general of the Group of Armies of the Centre (Grupo de Ejércitos Republicanos del Centro), the Communist Jesús Hernández, bitterly criticized Miaja in their respective memoirs. They alleged that Miaja had failed to use the troops at his disposal for the attack in Extremadura, preferring to keep them in defensive positions when he could have exploited the local numerical superiority occasioned by Franco’s concentration on the Catalan campaign.

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.

For senior and other officers who voluntarily lay down their arms, without having been responsible for the deaths of comrades or guilty of other crimes, in addition to their lives being spared, there will be greater benevolence according to how important or effective are the services that they render to the Cause of Spain in these last moments or how insignificant and without malice has been their role in the war. Those who surrender their weapons and thereby prevent pointless sacrifices and are not guilty of murders or other serious crimes will be able to obtain a safe-conduct that will enable them to leave our territory and, in the meanwhile, enjoy total personal safety. Simply having served on the red side or having been active in political groups opposed to the National Movement will not be considered reason for criminal charges.

The message was passed from Palacios to Ricardo Bertoloty, who in turn passed it to Casado’s personal physician and close friend, Diego Medina. When Casado expressed doubts that these ‘guarantees’ really came from Franco, it was arranged that Radio Nacional would broadcast a coded message drafted by Casado himself. Not entirely convinced, Casado replied on 1 February, ‘Understood, agreed and the sooner it is broadcast the better.’ He demanded a further guarantee in the form of a letter from his friend Fernando Barrón y Ortiz, one of Franco’s most trusted generals. Casado also told Medina that it was his fervent hope ‘to end the war with a magnificent deed that would astound the world, without the loss of a single life or the firing of a single bullet’. The requested letter from Barrón would eventually reach Casado on 15 February.19

Unaware of the extent of Casado’s contacts with Burgos, on 2 February, encouraged by the clandestine organization of the Falange, Besteiro had again used his acquaintance with Ángel Pedrero to request an urgent interview with Casado. When they met at Besteiro’s house, Casado told him about his by now much more advanced plans for peace which were moving towards the idea of a coup d’état. According to reports received in Burgos from the Fifth Column, the two remained in close contact throughout February.20

An inadvertent but crucial step towards the Casado coup had been Negrín’s declaration of martial law on 23 January 1939 as Franco’s forces approached Barcelona. No previous Republican government had wished to take this step both because it would put an end to democratic liberties and because of lingering suspicion of military loyalties.21 It was a desperate, perhaps inevitable and certainly fatal initiative, aimed at forcibly uniting all forces within the centre-south zone under military authority. The decree handed power to the military – and specifically to General Miaja, chief of the centre-south army group, and to General Matallana, chief of his general staff, both of whom hoped for an early end to the war. It downgraded the authority of civil governors, handing their authority over censorship and the holding of public meetings to the military governors in each province.

According to Vicente Uribe, ‘the majority of [the military governors] were real fossils who had demonstrated their inability to command and to make war. The upshot was that a measure introduced to strengthen the fight against the enemy and reinforce discipline among civilians was used by these fossils against the Communists in particular, by putting obstacles in the way of our activities and our work.’22 It thus facilitated Casado’s conspiracy. There were many other features of the situation which encouraged Casado. After the fall of Barcelona, the Republic’s senior authorities had joined the exodus to the French frontier. Neither President Azaña nor General Vicente Rojo, chief of staff and effectively commander-in-chief of the Republican armed forces, returned to Spanish territory. Indeed, after the fall of Barcelona, the Communists had noted a change in the attitude of General Rojo. In a manuscript written as a contribution to the official Communist Party history of the war, Vicente Uribe asserted: ‘in the last days of the campaign in Catalonia, he no longer showed any confidence in the cause of the Republic nor any desire to continue the fight’.23 Negrín, on the other hand, would do both.

In the wake of the Francoist promises, Casado had lunch in Valencia with Generals Matallana, Miaja and Leopoldo Menéndez (commander of the Army of the Levante). The exact date is not known but it was probably on 2 or 3 February, certainly before Negrín returned from France. Nor is it known if it was before or after Casado’s meeting with Besteiro. In his later account, Casado claimed that he and the three generals had agreed that, in the event of Negrín returning to the central zone, they would create a National Defence Junta (Consejo Nacional de Defensa) to overthrow the Prime Minister. ‘The three generals, without argument, regarded themselves as committed to this course of action, with all its consequences.’ However, Miaja’s secretary, his nephew Lieutenant Fernando Rodríguez Miaja, who was present at the lunch at his uncle’s residence, gives a very different account. The four main protagonists were accompanied by their adjutants and there were twelve people around the table.

What became obvious during the meal was Colonel Casado’s profound discontent with Dr Negrín, against whom he let loose a stream of insults. He ate nothing and drank only milk because the gastric ulcer which exacerbated his evil temper, already bitter and disagreeable by nature, had worsened in recent weeks. Obviously, in front of that audience, even though it was quite small, he did not reveal any intention of organizing a coup against the government … The other guests also expressed their dissatisfaction with the way the war was being run but not in the extremely violent terms used by Casado.24

In Negrín’s continued absence at the French–Catalan border, Casado was increasingly indiscreet about his determination to bring an end to the war. This was revealed at a meeting held in the afternoon and evening of either 7 or 8 February at Los Llanos in Albacete, the headquarters of the air force in the centre-south zone. The property of the Marqués de Larios, Los Llanos was a country house previously used as a hunting lodge but converted into a hospital for wounded airmen. The estate surrounding the house was used as an aerodrome.25 The proceedings of this gathering can be reconstructed thanks to a memoir by José Manuel Vidal Zapater, at the time a young airman who was charged with taking the minutes. The meeting was convened by Jesús Hernández in his capacity as commissar general of the Group of Armies of the Centre and was an attempt to get the top brass in the central zone to commit to continued resistance. Among the approximately ten senior officers present were Casado, Matallana, Miaja, Colonels Domingo Moriones Larraga and Antonio Escobar Huertas (respectively commanders of the armies of Andalusia and of Extremadura), Colonel Antonio Camacho Benítez, commander of the air force in the centre-south zone, and the commander of the fleet, Admiral Buiza.

With the Army of Catalonia in the process of crossing into France, Hernández was effectively the senior civilian authority in the army (after Negrín as Minister of Defence and Prime Minister). The officers present (mainly career officers whose service pre-dated 1936) intensely resented commissars in general and Hernández in particular. The first item of business was the launch by Hernández of a dramatic manifesto to the nation, calling for last-ditch resistance and the mobilization of the remaining drafts of conscripts. His presentation was repeatedly and rudely interrupted by Casado, whose hostile reaction effectively revealed what he was up to. Rather more politely, the other officers present supported Casado’s remarks about the impossibility of continuing the war. Buiza stressed the precarious situation of the Republican navy and Colonel Camacho spoke in deeply pessimistic terms of the massive superiority of the Francoist air force, with nearly 1,500 aircraft opposed to the Republic’s barely 100 usable machines. The only officer who did not oppose Hernández was Miaja who, after a heavy lunch, gave the impression of being asleep. He woke once, pointing at Vidal Zapater and asking Matallana who he was. When Matallana replied that he was a stenographer, Miaja, being rather deaf, asked again, and Matallana shouted, ‘A stenographer!’ Miaja then returned to his siesta. Vidal Zapater suspected that this was a pantomime on Miaja’s part to save him from having to take sides openly. In contrast, Casado’s recklessness may well have been part of his efforts to secure allies within the high command.26

That Casado should have proceeded with his anti-Negrín plans after the ratification a few days later, on 9 February, of Franco’s Law of Political Responsibilities was a measure of the vehement anti-communism that he shared with the Caudillo. Retroactive to October 1934 and published on 13 February, the law aimed to ‘punish the guilt of those who contributed by acts or omissions to foment red subversion, to keep it alive for more than two years and thereby undermine the providential and historically inevitable triumph of the National Movement’. The law deemed all Republicans to be guilty of the crime of military rebellion.27 The arrogance and egoism that underlay Casado’s actions persuaded him that the law could not possibly be applied to him. Even before he got the requested letter from Barrón, on 10 February, Colonel Ungría had received a message from one of his agents which read: ‘Casado in agreement with Besteiro, he requests that the lives of decent officers be respected.’ This extremely limited, not to say selfish, request suggests that Casado and his closest collaborators believed that some sort of esprit de corps united professional officers on both sides of the lines and exempted them from Franco’s vengeful plans. It is clear that he was happy to pay for Franco’s mercy in Communist blood. As he later revealed to his contacts in the Fifth Column, Casado’s intention was to escape. At the same time, his rhetoric was about astounding the world with an historic achievement, the bloodless end to the Civil War. Presumably, he could have escaped at any time but to have done so would have covered him in shame, whereas, he believed, his plan would allow him to escape covered in glory.

Whether he realized it or not, Casado was about to sacrifice thousands of civilian lives. Even if Franco’s promises of immunity for professional soldiers were to be believed, his entire conduct of the war, his recent declarations and the publication of the Law of Political Responsibilities should have shown Casado that the surrender that he was contemplating would have bloody consequences for the Republican population. Franco had turned away from several opportunities to end the conflict quickly, preferring instead a slow war of attrition aimed at annihilating the Republic’s mass support. As his declarations to the United Press in early November 1938 had made clear, there would be no amnesty for the Republicans.

Negrín, in contrast, had long since been tortured by a sense of responsibility towards the Republican population. In July 1938, when a senior Republican figure, almost certainly Azaña, suggested that an agreement with the rebels was an inevitable necessity, he responded: ‘Make a pact? And what about the poor soldier of Medellín?’ At the time, Medellín, near Don Benito, was the furthermost point on the Extremadura front and about to fall. Since Franco demanded total surrender, Negrín knew that, at best, a mediated peace might secure the escape of several hundred, maybe some thousands, of political figures but that the army and the great majority of ordinary Republicans would be at the mercy of the Francoists, who would be pitiless.28 Knowing that Franco would not consider an armistice, Negrín refused to contemplate unconditional surrender. On 7 August, he had said to his friend Juan Simeón Vidarte: ‘I will not hand over hundreds of defenceless Spaniards who are fighting heroically for the Republic so that Franco can have the pleasure of shooting them as he has done in his own Galicia, in Andalusia, in the Basque country and all those places where the hoofs of Attila’s horse have left their mark.’29

In his determination to see the war end with the least suffering for the Republican population, Negrín was unable to rely on the support of the President Manuel Azaña. At their meeting on 30 January, he had tried to persuade Azaña that, after he had crossed into France, he should return to Madrid immediately, but Azaña refused on the grounds that to do so would constitute support for Negrín’s plans for resistance. The scale of Azaña’s panic was such that Negrín had him placed under surveillance lest he head for France without warning. When it was apparent that he could not be persuaded to stay, Negrín offered to put an aircraft at his disposal to fly to Paris, but Azaña refused for fear that he would be taken back to the centre-south zone in Spain against his will. Martínez Barrio told Álvarez del Vayo that before going into the meeting Azaña had said: ‘Negrín can tie me up, he can gag me and put me on an aeroplane. That’s the only way he’s going to get me to the centre-south zone, but as soon as I get off the plane and they remove the gag, I will scream until they either kill me or let me go.’30

In the meeting, he declared that, once he had crossed the frontier into France, he would not return under any circumstances and would devote himself only to seeking a peace treaty. Negrín was finally obliged to accept that the President could not be persuaded to return immediately. When Azaña said that he planned to go to the house of his brother-in-law, Cipriano Rivas Cherif, in Collonges-sous-Salève, Negrín told him that he must take up residence in the Spanish Embassy in Paris. Azaña agreed to go to the Embassy but insisted that he would not return to Spain. Accordingly, Negrín told Azaña that this meant he should therefore withdraw his confidence from his Prime Minister and name a substitute who could negotiate surrender with Franco. Azaña did not respond. This left Negrín with the option only of resignation. And to resign, knowing as he did what could be expected of Franco’s ‘justice’, would have seemed to him a betrayal of the Republican masses. To mitigate the damaging consequences of Azaña’s cowardice, Negrín said that the government would announce that the circumstances obliged the President to take up temporary residence in the Spanish Embassy in Paris. Azaña replied that, if such an announcement was made, he would not contradict it but that he still had no intention of returning. After the meeting, Negrín told Julio Álvarez del Vayo that he was sure that Azaña was reacting emotionally and that he would eventually see that he had to return to Spain.31 In consequence, both Negrín and Azaña would have different recollections of what had been agreed at the meeting. In a letter to his friend Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo, Azaña wrote five months later that he had told Negrín that, irrespective of any such announcement, he would not return to Spain. However, when Negrín reached Paris on 7 March 1939 after the Casado coup, he told Marcelino Pascua, the Spanish Ambassador to France, that the agreement had been for Azaña to reside in France merely provisionally until the government had re-established itself in Madrid. This accounts for the cold tone of Negrín’s subsequent telegrams to Azaña requesting his return to Spain.32

When Pascua received the news of the President’s imminent arrival, he was appalled. He thought, and told Azaña, that his presence in Paris would cause immense damage to the Republic, effectively announcing to the British and French authorities that he considered the war lost and thereby undermining the basis of Negrín’s policy of using the rhetoric of resistance as a negotiating card. Pascua was soon irritated by what he described as Azaña’s carefree routine of ‘la dolce far niente’. It consisted largely of a daily touristic excursion around Paris in an Embassy car accompanied by his inseparable friend and brother-in-law Cipriano Rivas Cherif followed by an evening gathering (tertulia) with his friends in the French capital. Resentful of what they believed to be a betrayal of the Republic, the domestic staff of the Paris Embassy even refused to serve him.33 In fact, Azaña was more concerned with the preservation of the artistic treasures of the Prado than with the impact of his decision to flee. He had said to Álvarez del Vayo: ‘A hundred years from now, few people will know who Franco or I were but everyone will always know who Velázquez and Goya are.’34 He was also concerned to go on collecting his salary.35

The tensions deriving from Azaña’s presence in Paris were exacerbated by the closeness of his relationship with Cipriano Rivas Cherif. Rivas Cherif was regarded as a frivolous lightweight by Pascua, by Álvarez del Vayo and by Negrín. He had made damaging mistakes as Consul in Geneva and, merely to please Azaña, he had been given the virtually meaningless title of Introductor de Embajadores, effectively head of protocol for the President. However, in Paris, he was Azaña’s liaison with the Quai d’Orsay and behaved as if he was at the service of the French government rather than the Spanish Republic. To the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet he parroted Azaña’s view that the Republic was finished and that the rhetoric of resistance by Negrín and Álvarez del Vayo was merely a device to gain time. His conversations with Bonnet convinced the French that the Spanish government was adrift and in conflict with the exiled head of state who, unlike Negrín and Del Vayo, had the good sense to see that the only answer was an immediate peace settlement.36

Negrín knew that the war was effectively lost, but he was not prepared simply to walk away. As he told the standing committee of the Cortes on 31 March 1939: ‘The Government, in the first few days after reaching Figueras, after leaving Barcelona, realized that we were facing a real catastrophe, a catastrophe infinitely bigger than the catastrophe that we have suffered with the retreat of the civilian population and the army. It was fully aware that there was very little chance of saving the situation, but the Government knew that it was its duty to look for a way, if there was one.’37 When Negrín said ‘the Government’, he was referring to himself.

On the morning of Sunday 5 February, Azaña achieved the exile he had longed for. He described the pathetic manner of his entry into France some months later in a letter to his friend Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo. He and his entourage left at dawn in a small convoy of police cars. As a courtesy, Negrín accompanied them across the frontier. The President of the Cortes, Diego Martínez Barrio, travelled ahead in a separate car. This vehicle broke down. Negrín and others in the party tried unsuccessfully to push it out of the way. The party was obliged to cross the hazardously icy border on foot, thereby fulfilling a gloomy prophecy made by Azaña at the beginning of the Civil War. He had said to his wife, Dolores Rivas Cherif: ‘We will end up leaving Spain on foot.’38 When taking his leave, before walking back into Spain, Negrín kissed the hand of Dolores Rivas and said: ‘Until we meet again soon in Madrid.’39

As Julián Zugazagoitia commented, Negrín and Azaña were incompatible, the one energetic, dynamic and fearless; the other sedentary and timorous. By this stage ‘They felt mutual contempt. At that moment, they hated each other.’ On his return to Spain, Negrín remarked to Zugazagoitia: ‘You have to feel sorry for poor Azaña! He is fearfulness incarnate. His fear gives him a greenish-yellow colour and makes him look like a decomposing corpse.’ As he was approaching the frontier, Negrín encountered Lluís Companys, the Catalan President, José Antonio Aguire, the Basque President, and Manuel Irujo, who had been Minister of Justice in his own government. They had proposed accompanying Azaña into France, but he had refused their offer because to have crossed together would have implied that they were on the same level. They now offered to go back into Spain with Negrín, but he politely declined, allegedly muttering to himself, ‘That’s one less thing to worry about.’40

The cabinet had been installed in the castle of Figueras on a hill overlooking the town. With a drawbridge, thick outer and inner walls, it seemed impregnable but was an entirely inappropriate location for a government. According to the British Chargé d’Affaires, Ralph Stevenson, it was:

a large fortress-like barracks on the outskirts of the town. At the best of times, it must have been an uncomfortable place, cold, dank and dirty. But with the débris of the Spanish Government heaped into it pell-mell it was an unforgettable sight. Luckily the weather was bad and there was no great likelihood of aerial bombardment for the place was a veritable death-trap, with only one narrow road, serving for both ingress and egress, along certain stretches of which only one vehicle could pass at a time.41

When the weather permitted, the town was subject to frequent rebel bombing raids. Around the courtyard, various ministries were installed in rooms with the words ‘foreign ministry’, ‘ministry of the interior’, ‘cabinet office’ and so on roughly chalked on the wall next to the door. The town square, where the office of press and propaganda had been installed in a requisitioned house, was heaving with refugees. There was little by way of furniture and even less food for the staff. In the words of Herbert Matthews, ‘It was a madhouse of bewildered officials and soldiers, struggling desperately, not only with their own work, but with those thousands of swarming refugees who filled every house and doorway and covered almost every inch of the streets where men, women and children slept through the bitterly cold nights with almost no food and certainly no place to go.’42 Negrín worked ceaselessly to try to limit the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the defeat in Catalonia and to keep alive the idea of resistance as the best way to achieve a peace settlement that would prevent a vengeful mass slaughter at the hands of the Francoists. To this end, he maintained ‘the mask of resistance come what may’. With a colossal weight on his shoulders, he tried to conceal his exhaustion and despair from his ministerial colleagues. Zugazagoitia related that ‘one evening, he appeared in the castle, exhausted, almost unable to breathe. He asked if we had anything to eat, sat down at the table and, on the verge of tears, was plunged into a crisis of melancholy.’43

Negrín spoke to the last meeting of the Republican Cortes held in the stables of the castle at midnight on 1 February. It was so cold that many of the deputies sat in overcoats. According to the correspondent of the London Daily Herald who was present:

Empty chairs were stacked along the walls. Over 106 failed to answer the toll call: many of them were in France, others were holding the dispirited troops together, others had already fallen into Franco’s hands. Four times during the session the unshaded swaying lights registered the bombardment which was hitting the town. Negrín, immaculate in a brown suit, was so calm he might have been addressing his students in the quiet prewar days of Madrid.

In his exhaustion, he had to pause frequently to gather breath.44

In the dark, echoing stone chamber, the proceedings appeared to Zugazagoitia like ‘an intimate religious ceremony celebrated by a persecuted sect’. Negrín was, in many senses, virtually alone, deserted by many, supported by a small group of faithful friends. Yet he assumed the responsibility of fighting on, of doing the best for the Republican population that faced defeat and the ‘mercy’ of Franco. Bone-tired, he delivered his speech with what Zugazagoitia termed ‘unutterable anguish’. The main burden of his words was the need for international mediation to secure guarantees that there would be no reprisals at the end of the war. He presented a plan to bring the war to an end in return for Franco observing certain conditions, the principal one being that there should be no bloodbath. He suggested that the exodus of 450,000 refugees after the fall of Barcelona constituted a plebiscite against the Francoist invaders.45 The assembled deputies gave Negrín a unanimous vote of confidence, although, as they left, there were embittered mutterings against the Communists. All the deputies went into France, some to seek ways of returning to the central zone, others to stay and secure their own safety. Among those who stayed in France, especially the anarchists and the Socialist supporters of Largo Caballero, there were absurd accusations that Negrín and the Communists were responsible for the defeat of the Republic. As Zugazagoitia commented, they reflected a desire to avoid recognizing the real causes of Republican defeat.46

According to Herbert Matthews, ‘No one could call it an oratorical masterpiece: it was disjointed, and badly delivered, by a man so exhausted that he could hardly stand, yet it should take its place with the great documents of Spanish history.’47 In contrast, for Stevenson, Negrín’s speech ‘did not carry as much conviction as was usual with his pronouncements. He spoke valiantly about continued resistance and ultimate triumph, but his words came from his lips and not from his heart.’ The following day, Stevenson and his military attaché had an hour-long meeting with Negrín and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, ‘in a dark, meagrely furnished room’. Stevenson reported to London that ‘Dr Negrín appeared to be as combative as ever. He showed at times flashes of humour, when his face would light up. At other times, it would set in savage determination. He was obviously very tired. He reiterated to me his fixed intention to resist as long as possible in Catalonia and thereafter, if necessary.’ Negrín stated that a victory for Franco would be disastrous for the democratic powers, which Stevenson countered by saying this had been duly considered in both London and Paris. They then moved on to discussion of the three points that Negrín regarded as the sine qua non of any peace treaty – that Spain would be independent, that the Spanish people would be free to choose their own form of government and that there would be no reprisals. Negrín said that if these were guaranteed the Republican forces would lay down their arms. In his view, the request for these guarantees had to come jointly from the British, French and United States governments, since to request them himself would be disastrous for the Republic. Stevenson merely asked permission to forward this point to London.48

On the same morning, the French Ambassador, Jules Henry, had also gone to Figueras and urged surrender on Negrín, who refused categorically. Henry described the encounter in Figueras to Georges Bonnet: ‘it is there that Negrín hides like a tiger trapped in the last refuge of the jungle, and it is from there that he hopes to direct what could be the last act of the Spanish tragedy … Negrín with a smile on his lips has assured me once more of his confidence in the final success of the cause that he defends … This time I am not convinced.’49 In fact, with Franco about to gain control of the entire frontier between Spain and France, it was absolutely essential for Paris to have some sort of diplomatic relations with him. To this end, the government had already sent the Senator Léon Bérard to Burgos to negotiate arrangements for the return to Spain of the refugees already on French territory and of those expected to arrive, as well as for formal representation at Franco’s headquarters. Although the French government was anxious to send an ambassador to Franco, it could not do so as long as Negrín remained in power since it could not have two Spanish ambassadors in Paris. In the meantime, until formal diplomatic relations were established, Paris hoped to establish some sort of representation at Franco’s headquarters similar to that constituted by the British diplomatic agent Sir Robert Hodgson. The fear was that Franco under Italian pressure would refuse and insist on having a fully fledged ambassador.50 This being the case, it was hardly likely that Negrín could expect much support from Paris. Indeed, when Bérard met Franco’s Foreign Minister, the Conde de Jordana, he broached the subject of a guarantee of no reprisals as a prerequisite of recognition of Franco’s government. Jordana told him brusquely: ‘The Generalísimo has amply demonstrated his humanitarian feelings but at this moment the only possibility is the unconditional surrender of the enemy which must trust in his generosity and that of his Government.’51

Two days after his meeting with Negrín, Ralph Stevenson received ‘a secret and personal message’ from President Azaña stating that ‘he was at complete variance with Dr Negrín’s policy of continued resistance. He claimed that his efforts to contact the French Ambassador had been blocked by Negrín. Stevenson immediately informed Jules Henry, who visited Azaña later the same afternoon. The President’s message to both diplomats was that their two countries should press Negrín’s government to seek an immediate cessation of hostilities. If Negrín did not accede to pressure from the two governments, Azaña told both ambassadors, it was his intention to resign as President.52

The British and French governments meanwhile decided to press Negrín to agree to the cessation of hostilities ‘on the understanding that General Franco would guarantee the peaceful occupation of the remainder of the country with no political reprisals and the removal of foreign troops from Spain’. In the afternoon of 6 February, Stevenson and Henry met Álvarez del Vayo at Le Perthus. They informed him that the British and French governments were seeking guarantees from Franco and asked if the Republican government would agree to a cessation of hostilities if they were forthcoming. Since there was no response from Franco, Álvarez del Vayo could undertake only to discuss the matter with Negrín. The next day, Negrín received the British and French representatives at the house in the village of La Vajol where he was staying. He conceded that defeat in Catalonia could not be avoided but expressed his view that a European war was inevitable and that resistance could be sustained in the centre-south zone of the Republic. In this regard, he hoped that the equipment being taken into France by the retreating Republican forces could be repatriated. In fact, Georges Bonnet had already informed Franco’s envoy in Paris, José María Quiñones de León, that his government would not permit the return of Spanish Republican troops and equipment to the centre-south zone.53 Unaware of this, Negrín repeated to the British and French diplomats that he would agree to a cessation of hostilities if Franco made a declaration accepting his three conditions of Spanish independence, free elections and no reprisals. To this third point, he added that he wanted an undertaking that at-risk Republican political and military leaders could be evacuated from the centre-south zone under international supervision. It was agreed that this message would be passed on to London and Paris.

After the meeting, Stevenson met with the US Counsellor, Walter Thurston, who commented that Franco would almost certainly reject the demand for Spaniards to be able to choose their own destiny and probably the other two conditions as well. Stevenson replied that the key point was that Negrín had offered capitulation and since the offer had been made, ‘the working out of terms will be a mere formality’. This suggested that the British, like the French, were not likely to be overly concerned about ensuring that Franco would not carry out reprisals. The American Ambassador Claude Bowers believed that ‘Negrin’s purpose is to force a formal official rejection of the terms for the sake of the record or their acceptance’. Bonnet discussed Henry’s report with the US Ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, on 8 February and said that the British were transmitting Negrín’s terms to Franco, adding that he thought Franco would reject them and propose unconditional surrender.54

The British and French response, Negrín reported later, was that ‘it was impossible to reach a satisfactory agreement with the so-called Burgos government because totalitarian governments do not understand humanitarian sentiments nor are they interested in pacification or magnanimity and, what is more, the rebels had claimed that they would only punish common crimes’. To this, Negrín’s understandable reaction was: ‘In a war like ours, a pitiless and savage civil war, either all crimes are common crimes or none are.’ Accordingly, he offered himself as an expiatory victim, letting it be known through the British and French representatives that he would hand himself over if Franco would accept his symbolic execution in exchange for the lives of the mass of innocent Republican civilians. He did not reveal this offer to the majority of his own cabinet. Zugazagoitia knew about it, but Negrín did not make it public until after the Second World War.55

Negrín commented to Vidarte after the session: ‘People want peace! Me too. But wanting peace is not the same as facilitating defeat. As long as I am prime minister, I will not accept the unconditional surrender of our glorious army, nor a deal that might save several hundred of the most at-risk individuals but allow them to shoot half a million Spaniards. Rather than that, I would shoot myself.’56 Negrín’s offer to hand himself over as the sacrificial scapegoat was ignored by Franco. The government remained in Spain at the Castillo de Figueras until the last units of the Republican army had crossed the frontier on 9 February.

The situation was summed up succinctly by the correspondent of The Times of London, Lawrence Fernsworth. A conservative and Roman Catholic, he sympathized with the plight of the defeated Republicans. He wrote: ‘At all points where the Pyrenees here slanted away toward the sea, fleeing hordes of Spaniards, each one the embodiment of an individual tragedy, spilled over the mountainous borders, immense avalanches of human debris.’ Negrín planned to hold out, as Fernsworth put it, to ‘protect the escape from Madrid of thousands who would otherwise fall victims of Franco’s reprisals’. Casado opposed Negrín by launching the falsehood that resistance was merely a cover for the establishment of a Communist dictatorship.57 This notion obviously was already axiomatic for the Francoists, but it also appealed to the anarchists and Socialists who had resented the arrogance and harshness of Communist policies during the war. Assuming, as Casado and the anarchists did, that the PCE was a puppet of the Kremlin, a Communist dictatorship in Spain would have made little sense. Nothing could have been less in accord with the USSR’s needs throughout both 1938 and 1939. In 1938, Soviet priorities were for collective security via alliance with France and Britain against Nazi Germany. After the Munich Agreement, the USSR – now moving towards the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 – was not prepared to alienate Hitler.58

On the night of 8 February, one of the few colleagues who remained in Spain with Negrín, his friend Dr Rafael Méndez, said to Álvarez del Vayo: ‘I have no idea what we are doing here. I rather fear that tonight we’ll be awakened by the rifle-butts of the Carlist requetés [militia].’ Hearing this, Negrín called Méndez aside and said: ‘We won’t leave here until the last soldier has crossed the frontier.’59 Yet again at the forefront of his mind was the determination to see these Republicans safe from the reprisals of Franco. The Carlists, an extreme right-wing monarchist faction, had shown elsewhere that they were all too ready to carry out mass executions. As Negrín wrote later to Prieto: ‘From the last house on the Spanish side of the frontier which the rebels occupied an hour later, I stood for eighteen hours watching the file of the last forces that were retreating into France. I managed not to lose my head, and simply by dint of doing my duty, it was possible to save those half a million Spaniards who are now awaiting our help.’60

Only after General Rojo had arrived to announce that the final Republican troops in Catalonia had crossed the frontier on the morning of 9 February did Negrín enter France. His most loyal ministers wept. At the Spanish Consulate in Perpignan, an improvised cabinet meeting was held. Negrín announced that he would travel on to Toulouse and from there fly to Spain. Some ministers thought that he was mad, but as he himself later explained: ‘If I hadn’t done that then, today I would die of shame; I probably would not have been able to survive my disgust with myself. Was the Government going to leave those still fighting in the Central zone without leadership or support? Was it the Government of Resistance that would flee and surrender them?’61

Shortly after Negrín had reached Perpignan on Thursday 9 February, an emissary from General Miaja reached the Spanish Consulate. Captain Antonio López Fernández, Miaja’s fiercely anti-Communist secretary, came with the mission of persuading Negrín to remain in France and for President Azaña to grant Miaja permission to negotiate peace with the rebels. Prior to leaving Alicante on the plane for Toulouse, he had telephoned General Rojo, who had asked him to come to the Spanish Embassy in Paris to meet both himself and Azaña on 10 February. On reaching the Consulate in Perpignan late on Thursday evening, Captain López was received by Negrín, Álvarez del Vayo and the Minister of Finance, Francisco Méndez Aspe. He gave them a detailed report on the situation in the central zone, the thrust of which was that there was no possibility of further resistance and that the only possible solution was to entrust Miaja with the task of negotiating surrender on the best terms possible. Negrín listened in silence until López concluded with the words: ‘Prime Minister, at this moment, the Centre-South zone is like an aircraft in flight whose engines have stopped. The salvation of those on board depends on the skill of the pilot. In the view of all the senior officers in the zone, that pilot is General Miaja.’ When Negrín asked what was needed for resistance to continue, López replied: ‘There is no possibility of resisting; there are no weapons, no food, no fuel and our armament is so worn out, with no possibility of replacement or repair, that to oblige the Army to resist is self-evidently senseless and criminal.’ When Álvarez del Vayo pressed him further, López replied that resistance would be possible only if huge deliveries of arms and aircraft could arrive immediately. Negrín told López that he would consider his report and that, the next morning, he and Vayo would go to the central zone and discuss future prospects with Miaja.62

López then went to Paris and had a meeting with Azaña and Generals Rojo and Hernández Saravia and Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Jurado. There he found a more receptive audience for his pessimistic report. He asked Azaña to return to the central zone to oblige Negrín to resign and to give constitutional legitimacy to negotiations with the Francoists. López’s message from Miaja was as hopelessly naive as the beliefs of Casado. It echoed the conclusions of the lunch shared by Miaja a week before with Casado, Matallana and Menéndez in Valencia. He told the President that it was necessary to form a government of professional soldiers who would be able to secure a reasonable peace treaty with Franco. Azaña allegedly replied: ‘I have decided to wash my hands of the problems of Spain. Whisper to General Miaja that he should do whatever he thinks best and what he considers to be his duty as a soldier and a Spaniard.’ Rojo then gave López letters for Miaja, Matallana and Negrín. López later claimed implausibly that the letter to Negrín urged him to resign and leave Spain while those to Miaja and Matalla instructed them to execute Negrín if he refused to leave. No such letters have been found subsequently.63

According to Vicente Uribe, ‘The majority of the Ministers had no desire to go to Madrid, morale was extremely low. No one dared say no and preparations to leave were made in accordance with Negrín’s orders.’ Negrín issued instructions to the soldiers and civilians who had accompanied him, some to return to the centre-south zone and others to remain in France to deal with the refugees and other issues regarding the evacuation. From Toulouse, he flew that night to Alicante, arriving on the morning of the next day. He was accompanied by Julio Álvarez del Vayo, his Foreign Minister, and Santiago Garcés Arroyo, the head of the Republic’s security apparatus, the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar. They flew under assumed names, paying their passage on a scheduled Air France flight.64

Before leaving, Negrín and Méndez Aspe had a meeting with Trifón Gómez, the quartermaster general of the Republican army. Gómez claimed later that they had discussed the question of food supplies for the centre zone. Negrín allegedly told him to continue sending food but to be careful not to build up stocks. Méndez Aspe allegedly went even further, saying that the war would probably last only another couple of weeks, and that, if there were enough supplies for that time, he was opposed to Gómez sending more. General Rojo made a similar point in his memoir of the period: ‘The supply services in the other zone were being dismantled: nothing could be sent, neither men, nor arms, nor matériel, nor munitions, nor raw materials; on the other hand, the political authorities were concentrating on bringing things to an end.’65

Assuming this to be true, it shows two things: first, that Negrín was returning to make peace and thus using the rhetoric of resistance as a bargaining chip and, second, that he and Méndez Aspe wanted to conserve resources for the inevitable exodus and subsequent exile. After overseeing the passage of the last Republican troops over the French frontier, Zugazagoitia remembered Negrín saying: ‘Let’s see if we can do the second part. That’s going to be more difficult.’ Zugazagoitia went on: ‘We were bringing things to an end and when he contemplated returning to the Centre-South zone, Negrín had only one thing on his mind, the end, with as little damage as possible, of a war that was lost.’ This coincides with the testimony of Negrín’s secretary Benigno Rodríguez, to whom he said that he was returning to Spain ‘to save as much as we can’.66

4
The Quest for an Honourable Peace

It was assumed by many of the politicians, army officers and functionaries who had crossed into France in early February 1939 that the government would not be returning to Spain. Even some cabinet ministers had their doubts. In cafés where exiles gathered and even in a meeting of senior members of the CNT, there was much venomous gossip about Negrín ranging from blaming him for the fall of Catalonia to accusing him of abandoning the Republic.1 Of course, Negrín did no such thing but went back in the hope of being able to negotiate a reasonable settlement. He arrived totally exhausted and drained emotionally and physically. Since becoming Prime Minister nearly two years earlier, the stress that he endured had increased exponentially. As well as exercising the basic duties of president of the council of ministers, he had continued to work hard to build on his achievements as Minister of Finance in ensuring the Republic’s economic survival. In April 1938, he had also become Minister of Defence with an intensely active involvement in the role. Throughout, he had carried out a notable diplomatic effort in a vain quest for international mediation to bring the war to an end without reprisals on the part of the Francoists. In addition, he had to deal with the petty squabbles and more than petty jealousies both within the wider coalition of Republican entities, the Popular Front, and within the Socialist Party. Inevitably, all of this took its toll. Just before midnight on Saturday 28 January, Azaña met Rojo and Negrín to discuss the situation in the wake of the loss of Barcelona. Azaña was shocked to see the ‘utter dejection’ of a Negrín who was ‘beaten and on his knees’. After the fall of Catalonia, and the Prime Minister’s long vigil at the frontier, his closest collaborators were alarmed at the visible deterioration in a man of once boundless energies.2

The full horror of the defeat in Catalonia, the subsequent exodus and the suffering of those condemned to the makeshift camps in southern France was never fully reported in the centre-south zone. Nevertheless, there was no shortage of rumours, together with some reliable information and considerable exaggeration. It all fed the fears of the already exhausted, starving and demoralized population. The sense that a similar fate awaited them led to a widespread hope that someone in authority would appeal to the other side for a negotiated peace. For some at least, in the eloquent phrase of Ángel Bahamonde, ‘The psychology of defeat led to an acceptance of blame, the confession of sin and the payment of repentance, sieved through the imagined forgiveness of our brothers on the other side.’3 In fact, many hundreds of thousands of Republicans expected nothing of ‘brothers on the other side’. They knew only too well what Franco’s clemency and justice meant. They were those who would flee en masse to the coast at the end of March 1939 in the vain hope of evacuation. Yet they too longed for an end to the war. In fact, for two reasons, there would be virtually no more fighting in the centre zone. On the one hand, Franco needed time to reorganize his forces after the titanic effort involved in the Catalan campaign. On the other, he had confidence that the treachery of Casado, Matallana and other pro-rebel officers would bring down the Republic without further military effort on his part.

Palmiro Togliatti, the senior Comintern representative in Spain, later reported to Moscow on the situation after the loss of Catalonia: ‘The great majority of political and military leaders had lost all confidence in the possibility of continued resistance. There was a general conviction that the army of the central zone could not repel an enemy attack because of their overwhelming numerical superiority and because of our lack of weaponry, aircraft and transport, and its organic weakness.’ Many professional officers, including the Communist ones, with the sole exception of Francisco Ciutat, believed that prolonged resistance was impossible. Colonel Antonio Cordón, the under-secretary of the Ministry of Defence, the recently promoted General Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, the chief of the air force, and Colonel Carlos Núñez Maza, the under-secretary of air, all career officers but also members of the Communist Party, told Togliatti ‘openly’ that they did not believe resistance was possible in the centre zone unless the men and weapons taken into France could be returned to Spain. In his report to Moscow, Togliatti wrote: ‘I also believe that the conviction that further resistance was impossible was also quite widespread among the officers who had risen from the ranks of the militia. The same belief was also unanimous among the cadres of the Anarchists and of the Republican and Socialist parties, and in the police and state apparatus. Accordingly, the problem was no longer how to organize resistance, but how to end the war “with honour and dignity”.’ There were divergent opinions on how to do this. However, the one point on which there was widespread agreement was that the Communists were the ‘sole obstacle’ to ending the war. By smearing the Communists as ‘the enemies of peace’, the defeatists had found a way of channelling the war-weariness and fear of the masses. Togliatti saw this slogan as the ‘cement’ that united the disparate elements of the non-Communist left. At least retrospectively, he believed that Negrín himself had ‘no faith in the possibility of further resistance’.4

The most visceral hostility to the Republican government was to be found in the anarchist movement. This derived in part from the bitter resentment of many anarchists about the way in which the libertarian desire for a revolutionary war had been crushed in the first half of 1937 in the interests of a more realistic centralized war effort. However, the anarchists had also been on the receiving end of extremely harsh treatment by the Communist-dominated security services because of the ease with which the CNT–FAI could be infiltrated by the Fifth Column. The Republican press, Communist, Socialist and Left Republican, frequently published accusations about Fifth Column networks that functioned on the basis of using CNT membership cards.5 The crack security units known as the Brigadas Especiales were focused on the detention, interrogation and, sometimes, elimination of suspicious elements. This meant not only Francoists but also members of the Madrid CNT. The Communist José Cazorla, who in December 1936 succeeded Santiago Carrillo as the Counsellor for Public Order in the Junta de Defensa de Madrid, believed the CNT to be out of control and infiltrated by agents provocateurs of the Fifth Column.6 The Communist press demanded strong measures against these uncontrolled elements and those who protected them, calling for the annihilation of the agents provocateurs who were described as ‘new dynamiters’, a term intended to invoke echoes of anarchist terrorists of earlier times.7 The presence of Fifth Columnists was perhaps to be expected in an officer corps of the armed forces largely made up of career officers who sympathized with their erstwhile comrades of the other side. However, infiltration of one-time militia units could also be found. Cazorla investigated Fifth Columnist infiltration of the ineffective secret services (Servicios Secretos de Guerra) run in the Ministry of Defence by the CNT’s Manuel Salgado Moreira. Shortly before the dissolution of the Junta de Defensa by Largo Caballero, on 14 April 1937, José Cazorla announced that an important spy-ring in the Republican Army had been dismantled. Among those arrested was Alfonso López de Letona, a Fifth Columnist who had reached a high rank in the general staff of the 14th Division of the People’s Army, commanded by the anarchist Cipriano Mera. López de Letona had become a senior member of Manuel Salgado’s staff on the basis of a recommendation by Mera’s chief of staff, Antonio Verardini Díez de Ferreti.8

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

Just before he entered France on 9 February, Negrín had said to the faithful group that accompanied him: ‘Let us hope that we achieve the same success with the second part of the task.’ The ‘first part’ was the evacuation of Catalonia; the ‘second part’ would be the evacuation of the centre-south zone. As Zugazagoitia commented, although Negrín’s public declarations spoke of resistance, ‘nobody knew better than he did how meaningless the slogan was’.33 In this regard, his arrangements to transfer the financial resources of the Republic to France were a crucial part of his plans for evacuation. Rojo’s accusation that no plans had been made was unjust, although it was certainly true that the scale and speed of the final debacle had not been, indeed could hardly have been, anticipated. After the defeat at the Ebro, Negrín had already begun to prepare for the likely Francoist triumph and the need to organize the evacuation, and subsequent support, of many thousands of Republicans. He had instructed the Minister of Finance, Francisco Méndez Aspe, and the most trusted officials of his Ministry, Jerónimo Bugeda, José Prat and Rafael Méndez, to draw up lists of the assets still in the hands of the government. He instructed Méndez Aspe to recover where possible the assets that the Republic had deposited in its offices in Czechoslovakia, the USA, Mexico, France and Britain to pay for arms, munitions, food, medical supplies and raw materials. His task included arranging for goods that had been bought but still not delivered to be converted into cash. Most of the jewels, gold and silver plate, stock and bond holdings of wealthy persons who had left Spain during the war, together with many art works belonging to the Church, had been confiscated by the Caja de Reparaciones and used to buy arms and supplies for the Republic. Since the autumn of 1938, truckloads of the remaining valuables had been brought to Figueras and nearby frontier towns.34

While still in Figueras, Negrín ordered that what remained should be packed and transported to France. He arranged with the French authorities that two sealed trucks laden with 110 boxes of these valuables be permitted to cross the frontier without examination by customs. The trucks went first to the Republican Embassy in Paris and then on to Le Havre where they would be loaded on to a vessel. This was a yacht, originally named Giralda, that had been bought by the Republican government via intermediaries from the former king Alfonso XIII and renamed Vita. In March, with the permission of the French Minister of the Interior Albert Sarrault, the Servicio de Evacuación de los Refugiados Españoles (SERE) was created in Paris, under the protection of the Mexican Embassy and the chairmanship of Pablo Azcárate. The valuables which were intended to constitute its funds were embarked for Mexico on the Vita on or about 10 March. There, in complicated circumstances, they fell into the hands of Indalecio Prieto. The subsequent fate of these funds would be a toxic issue within exile politics.35

Enrique Castro Delgado recounted a meeting with Rojo at this time. Allegedly, Rojo told him that Negrín had ordered him to return to Spain. When Castro asked him if he would go, Rojo replied: ‘No, there are hundreds of thousands of men here needing our help.’ When a shocked Castro asked if there were not also hundreds of thousands inside Spain who needed help, Rojo replied, ‘There’s nothing to be done there … it’s the inevitable death agony that will be followed by the terrible death of an era, the death of a regime, the death of the hope of millions of people.’36 So committed was Rojo to remaining in France that, in his book, he revealed his indignation that Tagüeña, Líster and the chief of his general staff, López Iglesias, the under-secretary of the Ministry of Defence, Colonel Antonio Cordón, the chief of the Republican air force Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros and other Communist officers and commissars had returned to Spain without seeking his permission.37

The armies defeated in Catalonia had a strong element of Communists and officers and men who had come through the militias. In contrast, the armies of the centre-south zone had a far higher proportion of career officers, a significant minority of whom were of doubtful loyalty to the Republic. Themselves often under surveillance, they had sought desk jobs behind the lines in training schools and the general staff. They had often provided money, safe-conducts and other documentation and protection for Francoist comrades who had refused to serve the Republic and were in hiding. Franco’s espionage services were especially interested in the beliefs of members of the Republican officer corps in order to ascertain whom among them they could use. As defeat followed defeat, the nostalgia of career officers for the pre-war army provided fertile soil for the recruiters of the Francoist Servicio de Información y Policia Militar (SIPM). These disgruntled professionals had long since felt a certain mistrust of, if not contempt for, the officers who had come through the militias. They harboured the vain hope that there could be a peace settlement arranged with Francoist officers with whom they had been educated in military academies and with whom they had served before 1936. Among the most typical of such officers, and one of the most powerful, was Segismundo Casado.38

Accordingly, such officers in the centre-south zone had no desire to see the return of Líster, Modesto and other Communist commanders who were committed to continuing the fight. These commanders, after doing what they could to improve the conditions of their men, returned to Spain over the next few days. Tagüeña states that he, Líster, Francisco Romero Marín and several other officers from the Army of the Ebro returned on 19 February. There is some confusion over the date of this flight – in two books of memoirs, Líster dated it both five and six days earlier on 13 and 14 February. However, they coincide in lamenting that numerous leading figures of the Communist Party, including Antonio Mije, Francisco Antón, Santiago Álvarez and Santiago Carrillo, did not return on the grounds that the PCE did not want them exposed to danger. Líster recalled that the thirty-three-seat aircraft in which he had travelled had twenty empty seats. Hidalgo de Cisneros told Burnett Bolloten, a United Press correspondent who, by his own account, was a Communist sympathizer at the time, that the last six aircraft that flew from France to Republican Spain were ‘nearly empty’.39 That Negrín had his doubts about those who would or wouldn’t return was reported later by Francisco Romero Marín, who had returned with Hidalgo de Cisneros. When they entered Negrín’s office in the Presidencia building in the Castellana, the Prime Minister exclaimed: ‘Here come another group of lunatics.’40

Cordón met Rojo on 18 February in Perpignan. The new Spanish Consul Rafael Méndez informed them that he had received a cable from Negrín ordering all senior officers and officials of the Ministry of Defence to return to the central zone. A visibly annoyed Rojo said: ‘Well, I will not regard myself as having received that order until the Minister of Defence gives it to me personally.’ Méndez told him to do what he liked and remarked that he thought that soldiers did not need to receive orders to rejoin the army in time of war. Rojo replied that he knew better than anyone where his duty lay and that he was fully occupied in attending to those who were arriving in France and in trying to organize the matériel brought by the army into France. When Méndez replied that there were people doing that already, Rojo walked away without a word. Three days later, Cordón had dinner at the Toulouse railway station with Rojo and Jurado. Equipped with splendid new leather luggage, the two men were on their way to Paris to seek more money at the Embassy for their work with the exiled officers. They had already spent the 4.5 million francs originally given them for this purpose. When Cordón asked if they planned to return to Spain, Rojo again stated that he had not received a direct order to do so and that, in any case, he would go only if he could do something concrete by way of negotiating peace. Cordón reminded them that orders had been issued for their return and that, if they didn’t obey, measures would be taken against them. Jurado replied threateningly that, in such a case, they might make damaging revelations – presumably a reference to the failures of the Republican authorities to prepare for the evacuation and subsequent care of the refugees. Rojo would later make the implausible claim in his book that he had been preparing to return when the Casado coup intervened and made it impossible.41

In fact, Rojo’s absence from Negrín’s side was to contribute substantially to the success of the Casado coup. As Vicente Uribe, wrote in his memoir of the period:

It saw the Government lose a valuable collaborator who would have been immensely useful because of his reputation, and the influence that he wielded over the career officers and the subversives who were already plotting received a major boost from Rojo’s desertion. They knew all about his views and his refusal. Rojo himself had made sure to let them know. In any case, it was evident that he had not accompanied the Government back to Spain. In contrast, the Communist officers had returned to what remained of Republican territory to do their duty.42

Hidalgo de Cisneros stayed on for several days vainly negotiating with the French authorities for his men to fly back to Spain in their own aircraft. At the Paris Embassy, he met both Rojo and Enrique Jurado. Azaña asked for all three to meet him and explain the military situation in the wake of the fall of Catalonia. All three gave bleak reports, of which the most pessimistic was that by Jurado. When Azaña asked them to put their thoughts in writing, Hidalgo suspected that the President was simply looking for a justification for his resignation. After consulting with the Ambassador, Marcelino Pascua, Hidalgo refused, stating that such a report should come from the Minister of Defence, that is to say Negrín. Rojo and Jurado used the same excuse. Azaña was greatly displeased. When Hidalgo returned to Madrid, he recounted this to a furious Negrín, who immediately sent a telegram to Azaña saying that he would hold him responsible for the consequences of behaviour that he regarded as tantamount to treachery. In fact, Rojo had already given Azaña a deeply gloomy oral assessment of the situation which almost certainly reinforced the President’s already firm determination not to return to Spain. Indeed, Azaña would later claim that this was the case.43 Negrín was understandably annoyed and so Rojo wrote a letter to him explaining that he had been virtually ambushed by Azaña during what he had assumed would be merely a formal visit in accordance with protocol. Along with his letter, Rojo enclosed a detailed report on the economic, human and military reasons why continued resistance in the centre-south zone was futile. It seems that he was unaware of the extent to which the rhetoric of resistance was a ploy by Negrín to enhance his diplomacy. Before receiving the letter, Negrín sent, via Marcelino Pascua, a firm instruction to Rojo to make reports to Azaña only via the Minister of Defence, that is to say, Negrín himself. Rojo then wrote another letter reiterating that he had fallen into a trap set by Azaña. The letter also contained a detailed report on the condition of the refugees. Rojo sent copies of these various reports to Matallana, which meant that their gloomy conclusions were known both to other members of Casado’s conspiracy and, of course, to the Francoist SIPM.44

Rojo subsequently claimed that he had stayed on in France because his orders were to remain and do everything possible to ameliorate the situation of the thousands of Republican soldiers now in exile. It is true that he distributed funds to officers for them to buy food, but he also ignored the multiple orders from Negrín to return.45 Rojo declared later that ‘there was no shortage of heavy hints that I should also return’. This was an utterly disingenuous reference to explicit instructions issued by Negrín, not to mention the conversations recounted in their memoirs by Cordón, Tagüeña and Zugazagoitia.46

According to Martínez Barrio, the President of the Cortes, who saw Azaña every day in the Paris Embassy, the text of the telegram sent to the President by Negrín in mid-February was cold, formal and rather threatening. Azaña, who regarded the war as effectively over, had reacted furiously: ‘A fine programme he’s offering me! To enter Madrid, accompanied by Negrín and Uribe, with Pasionaria and Pepe Díaz on the running board of the car.’ (José Díaz was secretary-general of the PCE.) Martínez Barrio pointed out to Azaña that, if he refused to accept Negrín’s insistence that he return to Spain, it was his constitutional duty either to resign as President or else to appoint a new prime minister. Had Azaña resigned then, Martínez Barrio felt that, as his automatic successor, he could have helped Negrín seek a reasonable peace. As it was, Azaña was sunk in lethargy and did not respond. Some days later, Negrín sent another ‘even ruder and more humiliating’ telegram ‘in the name of the Spanish people’ accusing the President of failing in his constitutional duty and demanding his immediate return. Azaña replied on 25 February denying that his absence from Spain had in any way weakened the government or encouraged any of the Great Powers to hasten their recognition of Franco. Before Negrín could reply, Azaña had left the Embassy. He attended a concert at the Opéra Comique with Cipriano Rivas; returning to the Embassy merely to collect their luggage, the two men left together for the Gare de Lyon. Their departure eagerly recorded by an army of journalists and photographers, they took the night train to Collonges-sous-Salève near the Swiss border. As Azaña had done on previous occasions in his political career, he fled from the pressures besetting him, and his flight would be severely damaging to the Republic.47 The Minister of Justice, Ramón González Peña, declared that Azaña’s behaviour was high treason. Negrín even toyed with the unrealistic idea of having Azaña put on trial.48

5
Casado Sows the Wind

Meanwhile, the hostility between the Communists and Casado was becoming ever more public. In fact, Casado had long been attempting to foment dissent between the Communists and the other component groups of the Popular Front. A fruitful opportunity had arisen when the PCE harshly criticized Largo Caballero, who after crossing into France on 29 January 1939 had decided to remain in Paris. As he had abandoned Madrid once before, on 6 November 1936, claims that he had sent his papers and household linen and silver in an ambulance two days before crossing the frontier with his family fuelled accusations of cowardice.1 On 2 February, the PCE issued a manifesto severely censuring his absence at a time when his presence in Madrid might have contributed to raising morale:

The Politburo denounced before the working class and the Spanish people the shameful flight from our national territory of Sr Largo Caballero who, aided by a small group of enemies of the unity of the Spanish people and its organizations, has done everything in his power to sabotage the work of the Government and break the unity and resistance of our people and now crowns his previous criminal activity with this desertion.

In addition to banning the distribution of the manifesto, Casado held a meeting of the Madrid Popular Front at which he deliberately fuelled Socialist hostility towards the Communists by making a theatrical show of stressing his indignation at the way in which Largo Caballero had been depicted. He claimed, falsely, that the manifesto had called the veteran leader ‘a thief and a murderer’.2

With the more realistic and prudent Palmiro Togliatti still in France – after the loss of Catalonia – PCE leaders in Madrid made unrestrained and belligerent declarations about last-ditch resistance. The Comintern adviser present, the Bulgarian Stoyan Minev, alias ‘Boris Stepanov’, was also talking in terms of sidelining Negrín and establishing a revolutionary war council to put an end to capitulationism. Stepanov was doing no more than articulating the party leadership’s visceral resentment of the way they were being blamed for the course of the war. This was made clear in the course of a meeting of the PCE provincial committee held in Madrid between 9 and 11 February. In an unrestrained speech, Dolores Ibárruri attacked Largo Caballero, Casado and Miaja. She referred to the two officers as ‘distinguished mummies’. Vicente Uribe went further, denouncing the cowardice of those who were doing the job of the enemy by spreading the notion that peace without reprisals was possible. His proposal that the Communist Party take power to purge such defeatists and strengthen the war effort was a symptom of impotence, an empty threat designed to inhibit the conspirators. The inevitable effect of its threatening tone was further to isolate the PCE and make Casado readier to act. His initial response was to attempt to censor Mundo Obrero’s report on the the speeches, but his orders were ignored.3

The proceedings of this meeting further intensified Casado’s hostility towards the Communists. He had tried to prevent it taking place, which was a dictatorial abuse of the powers associated with the state of martial law decreed in late January. Deeply irritated by the Communist leadership’s references to the failure of the Brunete offensive and the strong possibility of disloyalty within the military, Casado was all the more furious because Dolores Ibárruri had called him a ‘mummy’. He shouted: ‘I should have no hesitation!… They had better look out! I have foreseen all the consequences. In case anything happens to me, I have a list of all my enemies and at least thirty of them will die!’ Edmundo Domínguez was convinced that Casado’s bluster reflected fear of his machinations being discovered.4

On his return from France on 10 February, Negrín was furious. He viewed the PCE’s calls for an exclusively Communist-led resistance as disloyalty. On the 15th, Líster reported to Negrín in Madrid. The Prime Minister received him in his bathroom where he was shaving. There was nothing unusual in that. On a regular basis, while shaving and or even while soaking in the bath, Negrín would conduct business. He was not bothered by the niceties of protocol and, with so many responsibilities and so little time, he would listen to reports or take advice where he thought it was useful, and one such place was in his bathroom. The American journalist Louis Fischer, who advised him on the foreign press, described how Negrín would invite him to his quarters to talk and he would often find him in the bathroom shaving, clad only in his pyjama bottoms. He would then take a bath while Fischer sat on a stool or leaned against the wall chatting with him: ‘Occasionally a secretary would come in with a telegram, bend over the bath-tub and hold it while Negrín read it. Negrín was very natural and simple about all this.’5

Now, on 15 February, after expressing his appreciation that Líster had returned to the central zone, they talked about the prospects of further resistance. Saying that the pair of them were likely to end up being shot, Negrín gave Líster a gloomy outline of situation. ‘He told me that a whole series of senior military commanders and political and trade union leaders – anarchists, Socialists and Republicans – were ready to capitulate. Wherever they looked, all they saw were difficulties and, instead of working to strengthen the discipline and morale of the troops and of the civilian population, they spent their time spreading defeatism and conspiring.’ Negrín confided in Líster that Rojo had written him a letter presenting his resignation and threatening to make a public statement if he (Negrín) did not put an end to the war and provide more money for the troops exiled in France. Significantly, Negrín added that Rojo had sent a copy of his letter to Matallana. Regarding the situation within the government, Negrín ‘bitterly criticized some of his ministers, saying that they were cowards and did little but squabble among themselves about petty issues. He added that those who continued to behave with dignity were Uribe, José Moix Regàs, the Minister of Labour, and Vayo.’6

The following day, 16 February, according to a report by Togliatti, Negrín spoke on the telephone to Uribe saying, ‘I am told that the Communists in the Popular Front have declared that whether they respect or not the orders of the government depends what the Party decides.’ He said angrily: ‘I will shoot all the Communists.’ According to a similar account of this confrontation given by Stepanov, Negrín rang Uribe and asked him if it was true that the PCE politburo had decided that government measures would be accepted only with its approval. Before Uribe could reply, Negrín said that, if it was true, he would have the entire politburo arrested and put on trial. Shortly after this conversation with Uribe had taken place, Togliatti returned from France and he was able to smooth things over with Negrín.7

During the three and a half weeks that Negrín spent in Spain after his return to the centre-south zone, he seemed to be afflicted with a degree of uncertainty. The man appointed on 24 February to be head of the corps of political commissars, Bibiano Fernández Osorio Tafall, although a member of Azaña’s Left Republican party Izquierda Republicana, was a supporter of the policy of resistance.8 He confided in Cordón his concern that Negrín was wasting time reorganizing government departments instead of creating a general staff of loyal officers. Cordón saw this as the Prime Minister suffering one of his occasional bouts of indecision. Indeed, he concluded that Negrín had returned to Spain ‘not with a sense of being a resolute leader firmly determined to take the reins and steer events, but with the rather heroic attitude of a decent man who accepts a sacrifice, even though he is sure of its futility, in the more or less vague hope that it will not be rendered pointless at the last minute’. In an earlier version of his memoirs, Cordón speculated that Negrín had returned to ease his conscience. Cordón’s concern about what he saw as Negrín’s indecision derived from a conviction that, although the situation was desperate, resistance was still possible and indeed the only way to save thousands of lives.9 After the end of the war, the senior PCE politburo member, the organization secretary Pedro Checa, told Burnett Bolloten (then engaged in writing a pro-Communist history of the Spanish Civil War) that Negrín did not really believe in the possibility of resistance.10 Checa was probably right, but, as Zugazagoitia pointed out, Negrín did believe that a rhetoric of resistance could help bring about a better peace settlement.

A letter from Negrín to Prieto dated 23 June 1939 substantiates the comments of both Ossorio Tafall and Cordón. ‘Once I reached the centre-south zone I endeavoured to raise morale, reorganize services so as to meet the new circumstances, gather the elements necessary for an effective resistance. The measures adopted … would have allowed us to keep fighting until now. Keep fighting, I say, because, even if we could not win, there was no other way to save what we could or at least save our self-respect.’11 This had been confirmed even before that. Álvarez del Vayo had written to Marcelino Pascua on 25 February stressing the importance of giving the British government the sense that the Republic had the capacity for a lengthy resistance in the centre-south zone so that London would put pressure on Franco to agree to no reprisals as the basis of a peace settlement.12 When, after Casado’s coup, Fernando de los Ríos, the Republican Ambassador in Washington, recognized his Consejo Nacional de Defensa as a legitimate authority, Negrín sent him an angry telegram in which he reminded him that the whole point of the rhetoric of resistance was to gain time for a coordinated evacuation and some guarantees against reprisals.13

Prieto’s reply to Negrín’s letter on 3 July quoted a report written after Casado’s 5 March coup by a close collaborator of Besteiro, Trifón Gómez, quartermaster general of the Republican army and president of the Railwaymen’s Union. He supported the coup but had taken little part other than to try to negotiate refuge in Mexico for the Republicans who had to flee. His efforts in Paris to this end were rendered futile by Besteiro’s refusal to allow any government resources to be used to pay for the passage of those who had to flee. Besteiro believed that the national wealth was needed in Spain for post-war reconstruction and that Franco would treat those who stayed behind in Spain all the better for having thus safeguarded resources. That short-sightedness seemed not to diminish the loyalty to Besteiro of Trifón Gómez. Through the visceral anti-communism of his report can be discerned the impotence of Negrín’s government after his return from Catalonia.

Only men blinded by vanity and arrogance could fail to see that everyone was against them when they returned to the centre-south zone; everyone except the gang of Communists who continued to manipulate Negrín, driving a wedge between him and the Socialists and forcing him to oppose the will of the rest of the Spaniards … Negrín’s government was a phantom. Not one Ministry worked; none of the Ministers had the slightest desire to establish themselves; their one obsession was to secure for themselves a way of getting out of Spain … The government had no will to lead and, what is worse, no one thought that they had to obey it.14

Unlike Trifón Gómez, the Communist Jesús Hernández believed that resistance was possible, yet he described Negrín’s government in similar terms as ‘a kind of mute paralytic phantom that neither governed nor spoke and that lacked both an apparatus of state and a fixed seat of government’.15

On 8 February, while still in France, Negrín had made three appointments that he would soon regret. The unreliable General José Miaja was promoted from commander of the group of armies of the Centre to supreme commander of the Republican army, navy and air force, which was really only a promotion in name. The pro-Francoist General Manuel Matallana Gómez was promoted from chief of the general staff of the armies of the Centre to commander thereof. Matallana’s previous post went to the equally pro-Francoist Colonel Félix Muedra Miñón. Already, there were rumours, which Miaja hastened to deny, that his general staff was in contact with Franco’s headquarters. He called it ‘an absurd fabrication’ (una patraña absurda) but it was in fact the case.16

These postings were, in part, Negrín’s considered response to a series of suggestions made to him on 2 February, almost certainly by Colonel Cordón. The doubt arises because the document containing the recommendations is unsigned. However, the overall drift suggests the thinking of the Communists and, therefore, in the context of Figueras on 2 February, of Cordón. The first suggestion, which was acted on, was the most intriguing. It was that, given the accumulation of tasks falling to Miaja since the declaration of martial law, operational responsibility for the Army Group of the Centre should be passed to General Matallana. If, as the other recommendations imply, the document’s author was Cordón, it would show that, at this stage, neither the Communists nor Negrín had any substantial suspicion of Matallana’s loyalty.

The next two proposals, however, point to a degree of suspicion and therefore to Cordón’s authorship of the document. They called for the Communist ex-minister Jesús Hernández to be left as commissar to Miaja and that another Communist hard-liner, Luis Cabo Giorla, be appointed as commissar to Matallana. The next suggestion was that Casado be relieved of command of the Army of the Centre and be appointed Director of the Higher War College, where he had been a professor before the war. The idea was that Casado would be replaced by Colonel Juan Modesto. Equally interesting were the following recommendations which called for José Cazorla, the coldly efficient Civil Governor of Guadalajara, to be made overall chief of the Republican security service, the Servicio de Investigación Militar (SIM), in the centre-south zone and for Ángel Pedrero to be replaced as head of the SIM in Madrid by a Republican, Juan Hervás Soler. Apart from a series of proposals for improving the efficiency of the Army of Catalonia, the most significant of the other suggestions was that the highly talented Communist Civil Governor of Cuenca, Jesús Monzón Reparaz, be made Director General de Seguridad.17

Dolores Ibárruri recalled in her memoirs that the PCE leadership had informed Negrín of its belief that Miaja and Casado should be replaced. This reinforces the likelihood of the document having been drawn up by Cordón. She claimed that Negrín had refused to dismiss either man ‘lest it provoke acts of indiscpline that could undermine resistance’.18 Had Casado been replaced by Modesto and Pedrero by Hervás, the planned coup would probably have been dismantled before it could be implemented. Of course, the Francoist high command had other sympathizers to whom it could turn – above all Matallana, but also numerous key elements in the general staff, notably Colonel José López Otero, the head of Casado’s general staff. Nonetheless, the SIPM had focused its plans on Casado. There remained the existence of the anarchists’ fierce opposition to Negrín and the Communists. The IV Army Corps led by Cipriano Mera was to be an essential element of Casado’s project. However, it might be speculated that without Casado and with Cazorla, Monzón and Hervás in control of the security services, anarchist subversion might have been forestalled. Shortly after his return to Spain, on 11 February, Negrín had ordered that Pedrero be dimissed. When Santiago Garcés, the overall head of the SIM, asked him to resign, Pedrero replied that he could do so only if ordered by the Minister of the Interior. He added that, if he was sacked, Casado would resign as commander of the Army of the Centre. When Negrín met Casado the next day, he confirmed that he would indeed resign if Pedrero was removed.19 In the event, the only elements of the suggested reorganization of military and security forces that were implemented were those relating to Miaja and Matallana.

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