Пол Престон – Franco (страница 23)

As soon as the decree was made public, the most alarmist rumours were spread about unemployment and even exile for officers who were not enthusiastic Republicans.²¹ A large number accepted, rather more than one third of the total, and as many as two thirds among those colonels who had no hope of ever being promoted to general.²² Franco of course did not. He was visited by a group of officers from the Academy who asked his advice on how to respond to the new law. His reply gave a revealing insight into his notion that the Army was the ultimate arbiter of Spain’s political destinies. He said that a soldier served Spain and not a particular regime and that, now more than ever, Spain needed the Army to have officers who were real patriots.²³ At the very least, Franco was keeping his options open.

Like many officers, Franco found his relationship with the new regime subject to constant frictions. Before April was out, he became embroiled in the so-called ‘responsibilities’ issue. General Berenguer had been arrested on 17 April, for alleged offences committed in Africa, as Prime Minister and later as Minister of War during the summary trial and execution of Galán and García Hernández.²⁴ General Mola was arrested on 21 April for his work as Director-General of Security under Berenguer.²⁵ These arrests were part of a symbolic purge of significant figures of the monarchy which did the nascent Republic far more harm than good. The issue of ‘responsibilities’ harked back to the Annual disaster and the role played in it by royal interference, military incompetence and the deference of politicians towards the Army. It was popularly believed that the military coup of 1923 had been carried out in order to protect the King from the findings of the ‘Responsibilities Commission’ set up in 1921. Accordingly, the issue was still festering. To the ‘responsibilities’ contracted by Army officers and monarchist politicians before 1923 the Republican movement had added the acts of political and fiscal abuse and corruption carried out during the Dictatorship and after. The greatest of these was considered to be the execution of Galán and García Hernández. With the Dictator dead and the King in exile, it was inevitable that Berenguer would be an early target of Republican wrath.

The campaign ‘for responsibilities’ helped keep popular Republican fervour at boiling point in the early months of the Regime but at a high price in the long term. In fact, relatively few individuals were imprisoned or fled into exile but the ‘responsibilities’ issue created a myth of a vindictive and implacable Republic, and increased the fears and resentments of powerful figures of the old regime, inducing them to see the threat posed by the Republic as greater than it really was.²⁶ In the eyes of officers like Franco, Berenguer was being tried unjustly for his part in a war to which they had devoted their lives, and for following military regulations in court-martialling Galán and García Hernández. Far from being heroes and martyrs, they were simply mutineers. Mola was a hero of the African war who, as Director-General of Security, had merely been doing his job of controlling subversion. What enraged Franco and many other Africanistas was that officers whom they considered courageous and competent were being persecuted while those who had plotted against the Dictator were being rewarded with the favour of the new regime. The ‘responsibilities’ trials were to provide the Africanistas with a further excuse for their instinctive hostility to the Republic. Franco would move more circumspectly along this road than many others like Luis Orgaz, Manuel Goded, Fanjul and Mola, but he would make the journey all the same. Like them, he came to see the officers who received the preferment of the Republic as lackeys of freemasonry and Communism, weaklings who pandered to the mob.

In this context, Franco had an ambiguous attitude towards Berenguer. Although he approved of his actions in connection with the Jaca rising, he would soon come to question his failure to fight for the monarchy in April 1931. Moreover, he harboured considerable personal resentment towards Berenguer. Having informed Franco in 1930 that he was going to promote him to General de División (Major-General), Berenguer had then realised that his friend General León was about to reach the age at which he should have passed into the reserve. To avoid this, and on the grounds that Franco had plenty of time before him, Berenguer gave the promotion instead to León.²⁷ It is thus slightly surprising that, at the end of April, Franco agreed to act as defender in Berenguer’s court martial. Along with Pacón Franco Salgado-Araujo, his ADC, he visited Madrid on 1 May and interviewed Berenguer in his cell on the following day. On 3 May, Franco was informed that the Minister of War refused authorization for him to act on behalf of Berenguer on the grounds that he was resident outside the military region in which the trial was taking place.²⁸ It was the beginning of the mutual distrust which would characterize the momentous relationship between Franco and Azaña. It was during the trip to Madrid that Franco’s attitude to Sanjurjo began to sour. His friend Natalio Rivas told him about Sanjurjo’s interview with Lerroux on 13 April. Franco concluded that some offer of future preferment had been made which accounted for Sanjurjo’s failure to mobilize the Civil Guard in defence of the King.²⁹

Franco’s latent hostility to the Republic was brought nearer to the surface with Azaña’s military reforms. In particular, he was appalled by the abolition of the eight historic military regions which were no longer to be called Capitanías Generales but were converted into ‘organic divisions’ under the command of a Major-General who would have no legal powers over civilians. The viceregal jurisdictional powers held by the old Captains-General were eliminated and the rank of Lieutenant-General was deemed unnecessary and was also suppressed.³⁰ These measures were a break with historic tradition: they removed the Army’s jurisdiction over public order. They also wiped out the possibility for Franco of reaching the pinnacles of the rank of Lieutenant-General and the post of Captain-General. He would reverse both measures in 1939. However, he was hardly less taken aback by Azaña’s decree of 3 June 1931 for the so-called revisión de ascensos (review of promotions) whereby some of the promotions on merit given during the Moroccan wars were to be re-examined. It reflected the government’s determination to wipe away the legacy of the Dictatorship – in this case to reverse some of the arbitrary promotions made by Primo de Rivera. The announcement raised the spectre that, if all of those promoted during the Dictadura were to be affected, Goded, Orgaz and Franco would go back to being colonels, and many other senior Africanistas would be demoted. Since the commission carrying out the revision would not report for more than eighteen months, it was to be at best an irritation, at worst a gnawing anxiety for those affected. Nearly one thousand officers expected to be involved, although in the event only half that number had their cases examined.³¹

The right-wing press and specialist military newspapers mounted a ferocious campaign alleging that Azaña’s declared intention was to ‘triturar el Ejército’ (crush the Army).³² Azaña never made any such remark, although it has become a commonplace that he did. He made a speech in Valencia on 7 June in which he praised the Army warmly and declared his determination to triturar the power of the corrupt bosses who dominated local politics, the caciques in the same way as he had dismantled ‘other lesser threats to the Republic’. This was twisted into the notorious phrase.³³ To the fury of the Africanistas, it was rumoured that Azaña was being advised by a group of Republican officers known among his rightist opponents as the ‘black cabinet’. The abolition of promotion by merit reflected the commitment of the artillery to promotion only by strict seniority. Azaña’s informal military advisers included artillery officers, such as Majors Juan Hernández Saravia and Arturo Menéndez López, and consisted largely of junteros who had taken part in the movement against the Dictatorship and the Monarchy. Franco regarded these officers as contemptible. There was ill feeling elsewhere in the officer corps that, instead of using the most senior Major-Generals, Azaña should listen to such relatively junior men.³⁴

However, Hernández Saravia complained to a comrade that Azaña was too proud to listen to advice from anyone. Moreover, far from setting out to persecute monarchist officers, Azaña seems rather to have cultivated many of them, such as Sanjurjo or the monarchist General Enrique Ruiz Fornells whom he kept on as his under-secretary. Indeed, there were even some leftist officers who took retirement out of frustration at what they saw as Azaña’s complaisance with the old guard and the offensive and threatening language which Azaña was accused of using against the Army is difficult to find. Azaña, although firm in his dealings with officers, spoke of the Army in public in controlled and respectful terms.³⁵