Пол Престон – A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (страница 2)

27. Nationalist Safe-conduct issued to a German pilot of the Condor Legion.

28. An ambulance bought by black Americans.

29. The glorification of Franco, stressing the links with the imperial past and the links with contemporary fascism.

30. Franco, his wife, the Archbishop of Santiago and other Church dignitaries giving the fascist salute.

31. A priest saying mass for Nationalist troops in the village square of Posada (Santander).

32. Manuel Hedilla.

33. Dolores Ibárruri, ‘La Pasionaria’, with Santiago Alvarez.

34. Colonel Enrique Líster consulting with Juan Modesto.

35. Franco, Serrano Suñer and Mola in Burgos, May 1937.

36. Belchite, near Zaragoza, the site of a Republican counter-offensive in August and September 1937.

37. Italian troops entering Santander on 26 August 1937.

38. The Fascist press claiming the capture of Santander for Mussolini and reporting Franco’s praise for the Italian troops.

39. Republican troops during the street-fighting in Teruel in January 1938.

40. Nationalist troops singing the fascist anthem on reaching the Mediterranean.

41. A boat being trundled to the banks of the Ebro for the crossing on 24 July 1938.

42. The farewell parade in Barcelona for the departing International Brigades on 29 October 1938.

43. General Juan Yagüe leading his occupying troops into Barcelona on 26 January 1939.

44. Republican refugees being herded into camps in France.

45. Dr Juan Negrín with General Vicente Rojo.

46. Julián Besteiro reading the manifesto of the Junta created by Colonel Casado.

47. Middle class women rejoicing at Franco’s capture of Madrid in March 1939.

48. Bill Alexander, Commander of the British Battalion of the International Brigades in 1938.

49. Bill Alexander at the unveiling in London of the monument to the Brigades on 5 October 1985.

50. The banner presented by the women of Barcelona to the British Battalion at the farewell parade.

51. The medal awarded to all International Brigaders by the Spanish Republican Government.

Preface

There have been several thousand books on the Spanish Civil War and many of them are extremely long. The present volume aims to provide the new reader with a manageable guide to the labyrinth. It is interpretative rather than descriptive although ample use has been made of quotation to give a flavour of the period. It is not a book which sets out to find a perfect balance between both sides. I lived for several years under Franco’s dictatorship. It was impossible not to be aware of the repression of workers and students, the censorship and the prisons. As late as 1975 political prisoners were still being executed. Despite what Franco supporters claim, I do not believe that Spain derived any benefit from the military rising of 1936 and the Nationalist victory of 1939. Many years devoted to the study of Spain before and during the 1930s have convinced me that, while many mistakes were made, the Spanish Republic was an attempt to provide a better way of life for the humbler members of a repressive society. Accordingly, there is little sympathy here for the Spanish right, but I hope there is some understanding. This new edition takes into account the very considerable body of research which had been published since its first appearance in 1986. It also draws on my own ongoing research on Franco and on Mussolini’s role in the Spanish Civil War.

My early interest in Spain was stimulated by the postgraduate seminar run at the University of Reading by Hugh Thomas. I have learned an enormous amount during my friendship with Herbert Southworth who has always been prodigal with his hospitality and his knowledge. I also derived a lot from conversations over many years with Raymond Carr, Norman Cooper, Denis Smyth, Angel Viñas, Julian Casanova, Manuel González García, Jerónimo Gonzalo and Martin Blinkhorn. More recently, the historiography of the Spanish Civil War has been profoundly changed by the research of Angela Cenarro, Helen Graham, Gerald Howson, Enrique Moradiellos, Alberto Reig Tapia and Ismael Saz. I have gained greatly from reading their work and many hours of conversation.

My friends Paul Heywood and Sheelagh Ellwood gave me marvellous support during the writing of the first edition. Their role in this second version has been assumed by Helen Graham. I remain grateful to Juliet Gardiner who initially encouraged me to undertake this book and then saw it through the press with common sense and sparkling good humour. In that regard, the book has been more fortunate than it deserves, for this second edition has also found a model editor, patient, sensitive and generous, in Philip Gwyn Jones of HarperCollins. My wife Gabrielle is, as ever, my shrewdest critic. With such a team of friends to help, it seems astonishing that any book could still have shortcomings. Unfortunately, it does and they are mine.

INTRODUCTION

The Civil War Sixty Years On

In geographical and human scale, let alone technological horrors, the Spanish Civil War has been dwarfed by later conflicts. Nonetheless, it has generated over fifteen thousand books, a literary epitaph which puts it on a par with the Second World War. In part, that reflects the extent to which even after 1939 the war continued to be fought between Franco’s victorious Nationalists and the defeated and exiled Republicans. Even more, certainly as far as foreigners were concerned, the survival of interest in the Spanish tragedy was closely connected with the sheer longevity of its victor. General Franco’s uninterrupted enjoyment of a dictatorial power seized with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini was an infuriating affront to opponents of fascism the world over. Moreover, the destruction of democracy in Spain was not allowed to become just another fading remnant of the humiliations of the period of appeasement. Far from trying to heal the wounds of civil strife, Franco worked harder than anyone to keep the war a live and burning issue both inside and outside Spain.

Reminders of Francoism’s victory over international communism were frequently used to curry favour with the outside world. This was most dramatically the case immediately after the Second World War when frantic efforts were made to dissociate Franco from his erstwhile Axis allies. This was done by stressing his enmity to communism and playing down his equally vehement opposition to liberal democracy and socialism. Throughout the Cold War, the irrefutable anti-communism of the Nationalist side in the Civil War was used to build a picture of Franco as the bulwark of the Western system, the ‘Sentinel of the West’ in the phrase coined by his propagandists. Within Spain itself, memories of the war and of the bloody repression which followed it were carefully nurtured in order to maintain what has been called ‘the pact of blood’. The dictator was supported by an uneasy coalition of the highly privileged, landowners, industrialists and bankers, of what might be called the ‘service classes’ of Francoism, those members of the middle and working classes who, for whatever reasons, opportunism, conviction or wartime geographical loyalty, threw in their lot with the regime, and finally of those ordinary Spanish Catholics who supported the Nationalists as the defenders of religion and law and order. Reminders of the war were useful to rally the wavering loyalty of any or all of of these groups.

The privileged usually remained aloof from the dictatorship and disdainful of its propaganda. However, those who were implicated in the regime’s networks of corruption and repression, the beneficiaries of the killings and the pillage, were especially susceptible to hints that only Franco stood between them and the revenge of their victims. In any case, for many who worked for the dictator, as policemen, Civil Guards, as humble serenos (night-watchmen) or porteros (doormen), in the giant bureaucracy of Franco’s single party, the Movimiento, in its trade union organization, or in its huge press network, the Civil War was a crucial part of their curriculum vitae and of their value system. They were to make up what in the 1970s came to be known as the bunker, the die-hard Francoists who were prepared to fight for the values of the Civil War from the rubble of the Chancellery. A similar, and more dangerous, commitment came from the praetorian defenders of the legacy of what Spanish rightists refer to broadly as el 18 de julio (from the date of the military rising of 1936). Army officers had been educated since 1939 in Academies where they were taught that the military existed to defend Spain from communism, anarchism, socialism, parliamentary democracy and regionalists who wanted to destroy Spain’s unity. Accordingly, after Franco’s death the bunker and its military supporters were to attempt once more to destroy democracy in Spain in the name of the Nationalist victory in the Civil War.

For these ultra-rightists, Nationalist propaganda efforts to maintain the hatreds of the Civil War were perhaps gratuitous. However, the regime clearly thought it essential for the less partisan Spaniards who rendered Franco a passive support ranging from the grudging to the enthusiastic. The Catholics and members of the middle classes who had been appalled by the view of Republican disorder and anti-clericalism generated by the rightist press were induced to turn a blind eye to the more distasteful aspects of a bloody dictatorship by constant and exaggerated reminders of the war. Within months of the end of hostilities, a massive ‘History of the Crusade’ was being published in weekly parts, glorifying the heroism of the victors and portraying the vanquished as the dupes of Moscow, as either squalidly self-interested or the blood-crazed perpetrators of sadistic atrocities. Until well into the 1960s, a stream of publications, many aimed at children, presented the war as a religious crusade against Communist barbarism.