Пол Престон – Franco (страница 10)

Franco would soon be joined by his eternal cronies, his cousin Pacón, and Camilo Alonso Vega. He charged Alonso Vega with creating a battalion farm to provide funds to permit decent provisioning and the building of better barracks. The farm was a great success, not only providing fresh meat and vegetables for the troops but also making a profit. Similarly, Franco made the arrangements for a permanent fresh water supply from the nearby mountains to Dar-Riffien.⁸³ It was typical of his methodical and thoughtful approach to the practicalities of both camp life and hostilities against the Moors. His concerns were narrowly military. Encased in the shell of his public persona, he apparently shared few of the feelings and appetites of his comrades, becoming known as the man without fear, women or masses, (‘sin miedo, sin mujeres, y sin misa’). With no interests or vices other than his career, his study of terrain, map work and general preparations for action made the units at his command stand out in an Army notorious for indiscipline, inefficiency and low morale.

In addition, in the Legion, Franco was to show a merciless readiness to impose his power over men physically bigger and harder than himself, compensating for his size with an unnerving coldness. Despite fierce discipline in other matters, no limits were put by Millán Astray or by Franco on the atrocities which were committed against the Moorish villages which they attacked. The decapitation of prisoners and the exhibition of severed heads as trophies was not uncommon. The Duquesa de la Victoria, a philanthropist who organized a team of volunteer nurses, would receive in 1922 a tribute from the Legion. She was given a basket of roses in the centre of which lay two severed Moorish heads.⁸⁴ When the Dictator General Primo de Rivera visited Morocco in 1926, he was appalled to find one battalion of the Legion awaiting inspection with heads stuck on their bayonets.⁸⁵ Indeed, Franco and other officers came to feel a fierce pride in the brutal violence of their men, revelling in their grim reputation. That notoriety was itself a useful weapon in keeping down the colonial population and its efficacy taught Franco much about the exemplary function of terror. In his Diario de una bandera, he adopted a tone of benevolent paternalism about the savage antics of his men.⁸⁶ In Africa, as later in the Peninsula during the Civil War, he condoned the killing and mutilation of prisoners. There can be little doubt that the years of early manhood spent amidst the inhuman savagery of the Legion contributed to the dehumanizing of Franco. It is impossible to say whether he arrived in Africa already so cut off from normal emotional responses as to be untouched by the pitiless brutality which surrounded him. When Franco had been in the Regulares, a somewhat older officer, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, was struck with the imperturbability and satisfaction with which he presided over the cruel beatings to which Moorish troops were subjected in punishment for minor misdemeanours.⁸⁷ The ease with which he now became accustomed to the bestiality of his troops certainly suggests a lack of sensitivity bordering on inner emptiness. That would account for the unflinching, indeed insouciant, way he was able to use terror in the Civil War and the subsequent years of repression.

To survive and prosper in the Legion, the officers had to be as hard and ruthless as their men. At one point, preoccupied by a rash of indiscipline and desertions, Franco wrote to Millán Astray requesting permission to resort to the death penalty. Millán consulted with higher authorities and then told Franco that death sentences could be passed only within the strict rules laid down by the code of military justice. A few days later, a legionaire refused to eat his food and then threw it at an officer. Franco quietly ordered the battalion to form ranks, picked a firing squad, had the offending soldier shot, and then made the entire battalion file past the corpse. He informed Millán that he took full responsibility for an action which he regarded as a necessary and exemplary punishment to re-establish discipline.⁸⁸ On another occasion, Franco was informed that two legionaires who had committed a robbery and then deserted had been captured. ‘Shoot them’, he ordered. In reply to a protest from Vicente Guarner, his one-time contemporary at the Toledo military academy who happened to be visiting the unit, Franco snapped ‘Shut up. You don’t realize what kind of people they are. If I didn’t act with an iron hand, this would soon be chaos.’⁸⁹ According to one sergeant of the Legion, both men and officers were frightened of him and of the eery coldness which enabled him to have men shot without batting an eyelid. ‘You can be certain of getting everything that you have a right to, you can be sure that he knows where he’s taking you but as for how he treats you … God help you if there is anything missing from your equipment, or if your rifle is dirty or you are a loafer’.⁹⁰

At the beginning of 1921, General Berenguer’s long-term scheme of slow occupation, fanning out from Ceuta, was prospering. At the same time, General Manuel Fernández Silvestre was engaged in a more ambitious, indeed reckless, campaign to advance from Melilla westwards to the bay of Alhucemas. On 17 February 1921, Silvestre had occupied Monte Arruit and was making plans to cross the Amekran River. Advancing into inaccessible and hostile territory, Silvestre’s success was more apparent than real. Abd-el-Krim, the aggressive new leader who had begun to impose his authority on the Berber tribes of the Rif, warned Silvestre that, if he crossed the Amekran, the tribes would resist in force. Silvestre just laughed.⁹¹ However, Berenguer was satisfied that Silvestre had the situation under control and had decided to squeeze El Raisuni’s territory by capturing the Gomara mountains. The Legion was ordered to join the column of one of the outstanding officers in the Spanish Moroccan Army, Colonel Castro Girona. Their task was to help in the establishment of a continuous defensive line of blockhouses between Xauen and Uad Lau. When that line met the other which joined Xauen to Alcazarquivir, El Raisuni was surrounded. On 29 June 1921, the legionaries were in the vanguard of the force sent to assault El Raisuni’s headquarters.

However, before the attack was mounted, on 22 July 1921, one of the banderas of the Legion was ordered to proceed to Fondak without being given any reason. Lots were drawn and Franco’s bandera was selected. After an exhausting forced march, they arrived to be ordered to carry on to Tetuán and then to Ceuta. When they reached Tetuán, they heard rumours of a military disaster near Melilla. On arrival at Ceuta, the rumours were confirmed and they were put aboard the troop transport Ciudad de Cádiz and sent to Melilla.⁹² What they did not know was the scale of the disaster. General Fernández Silvestre had over-extended his lines across the Amekran towards the Bay of Alhucemas and suffered a monumental defeat at the hands of Abd-el-Krim. Known by the name of the village Annual, where it began, the defeat was in fact a rout which took place over a period of three weeks and rolled back the Spanish occupation to Melilla itself. As the Spanish troops fled, enthusiastic tribesmen joined the revolt. Garrison after garrison was slaughtered. The fragility and artificiality of the Spanish protectorate was brutally exposed. All of the gains of the last decade, five thousand square kilometres of barren scrub, won at the cost of huge sums of money and thousands of lives, disappeared in a matter of hours. There would be horrific massacres at outposts near Melilla, Dar Drius, Monte Arruit and Nador. Within a few weeks, nine thousand Spanish soldiers died. The tribesmen were on the outskirts of a panic-stricken Melilla yet, too preoccupied with looting, they failed to capture it, unaware that the town was virtually undefended.⁹³

At that point, reinforcements arrived, among them Franco and his men who reached Melilla on 23 July 1921 and were given orders to defend the town at all costs.⁹⁴ The Legion was used first to mount an immediate holding operation, then to consolidate the outer defences of Melilla to the south. From their defensive position in the hills outside the town, Franco could observe the siege of the last remnants of the garrison at the village of Nador but his request for permission to take a detachment of volunteers to relieve them was denied. Defeat followed defeat, Nador falling on 2 August and Monte Arruit on 9 August.⁹⁵ The Legion was sent out piecemeal to strengthen other units in the area, to escort supply columns, to hold the most exposed blockhouses. It was an exhausting task, with officers and men on duty round the clock.⁹⁶ Through the press and his published diary, the role played by Franco in the defence of Melilla contributed to his conversion into a national hero. In particular, he enhanced his reputation in the relief of the advanced position at Casabona, by unexpectedly using his escort column to attack the besieging Moroccans.⁹⁷ He had learned from fighting the Moorish tribesmen how, contrary to peninsular field regulations, effective use could be made of ground cover.⁹⁸