Пол Престон – Franco (страница 49)

Mola was gradually being forced towards the same view. On 20 August, he sent a message to Franco pointing out his own troops were having difficulties on the Madrid front and asking to be informed of Franco’s plans for his advance on the capital. In the event of Franco’s advance being delayed Mola would make arrangements to concentrate his activities on another front.¹²¹ The text of his telegram suggested less a deferential subordination to Franco’s greater authority than a rational desire to co-ordinate their efforts in the interests of the war effort. Mola was not thinking in terms of a power struggle but three days later he was brutally made aware of the extent to which Franco was consolidating his own position. On 21 August, Mola received a visit from Johannes Bernhardt in Valladolid. Bernhardt came with the good news that an anxiously awaited German shipment of machine-guns and ammunition was on its way by train from Lisbon. Mola’s delight was severely diminished when Bernhardt said to him ‘I have received orders to tell you that you are receiving all these arms not from Germany but from the hands of General Franco’. Mola went white but quickly accepted the inevitable. It had already been agreed with General Helmuth Wilberg, head of the inter-service commission sent by Hitler to co-ordinate Unternehmen Feuerzauber, that German supplies would be sent only on Franco’s request and to the ports indicated by him.¹²²

After the capture of Badajoz, Yagüe’s three columns had begun to advance rapidly up the roads to the north-east in the direction of the capital. Tella’s column had moved to Trujillo on the road towards Madrid while Castejón’s column had raced towards Guadalupe on Tella’s southern flank. By 17 August, Tella had reached the bridge across the Tagus at Almaraz and shortly afterwards arrived at Navalmoral de la Mata on the borders of the province of Toledo. Castejón’s column would capture Guadalupe on 21 August. Castejón, Tella and Asensio would join together on 27 August before the last town of importance on the way to Madrid, Talavera de la Reina. In two weeks, they had advanced three hundred kilometres.¹²³

Despite these heady successes, Franco’s telegram in reply to Mola suggested that his unflappable optimism was beginning to be eroded by Republican resistance. He made it clear that, on the advance to Talavera de la Reina, he feared strong Republican flank attacks at Villanueva de la Serena and Oropesa. ‘A well-defended town can hold up the advance. I’m down to six thousand men and have to guard long lines of communication. Flank attacks limit my capacity for movement.’ He outlined to Mola the next stages of the push, on to the important road junction at Maqueda in Toledo, then from Maqueda diagonally north-east to Navalcarnero on the road to Madrid.^*124 Within a month, the bold and direct strategy outlined to Mola would be abandoned in the interests of ensuring that Franco would be the undisputed Generalísimo.

^* Antonio Goicoechea, the head of Renovación Española, the intellectual Pedro Sáinz Rodríguez, the Conde de Vallellano, José Ignacio Escobar, owner of the monarchist newspaper La Época, the lawyer José María de Yanguas y Messía and Luis María Zunzunegui.

^* German equipment would be imported to Spain by the Compañía Hispano-Marroquí de Transportes (HISMA) set up on 31 July by Franco and Berhardt and Spanish raw materials imported into Germany by the Rohstoffe-und-Waren-Einkaufsgesellschaft (ROWAK) created on 7 October 1936 at the initiative of Marshal Göring.

^* Alfonso XIII’s eldest son, Alfonso, was afflicted by haemophilia and had formally accepted the loss of his right to the throne in June 1933 when he contracted a morganatic marriage with Edelmira Sampedro, the daughter of a rich Cuban landowner. The King’s second son, Jaime, immediately renounced his own rights on the grounds of a disablement (he was deaf and dumb). Jaime would, in any case, have lost his rights when, in 1935, he also married morganatically an Italian, Emmanuela Dampierre Ruspoli, who although an aristocrat was not of royal blood. Alfonso died in September 1938 after a car crash in Miami.

^* Assuming that Franco would attack through Cordoba, and believing the Yagüe columns to be engaged only in local operations, the Republican General Miaja had concentrated his exiguous defensive forces on the Córdoba-Madrid line.

^* The Francoist military historian, Colonel José Manuel Martínez Bande, has seen this message as the first sign of Franco’s decision to relieve the Alcázar de Toledo. His view is based entirely on the presence in the message of the words: ‘Maqueda-Toledo’, which he arbitrarily takes to mean ‘relief of the Alcázar’. However, the rest of Franco’s text shows rather that after Maqueda the column would make a continued thrust to Madrid in a direct line to Navalcarnero rather than make any diversion to Toledo.

VII

THE MAKING OF A CAUDILLO

August – November 1936

THE SUCCESSES of the African columns and the imminent attack on Talavera led, on 26 August, to Franco transferring his headquarters from Seville to the elegant sixteenth century Palacio de los Golfines de Arriba in Cáceres. He was anxious to move on from Seville in order to establish his total autonomy, free from the interference or disdain of Queipo de Llano in whose presence he always felt uncomfortable.¹ Like his earlier choice of the Palacio de Yanduri in Seville, it indicated a jealous concern for his public status. Franco was beginning to build a political apparatus capable of daily dealings with the Germans and Italians. Already he had a diplomatic office, headed by José Antonio de Sangróniz. Lieutenant-Colonel Lorenzo Martínez Fuset acted as legal adviser and political secretary. Franco was also accompanied from time to time by his brother Nicolás, who travelled between Cáceres and Lisbón where he was working for the Nationalist cause. Nicolás would soon be acting as a kind of political factotum. Millán Astray was in charge of propaganda. Even at this early stage, the tone of Franco’s entourage was sycophantic.²

The sheer volume of work facing Franco, effectively co-ordinating Nationalist ‘foreign policy’ and logistical organization, as well as maintaining close overall supervision of the advance of the African columns, obliged him to work immensely long hours. His resistance to discomfort and the powers of endurance which he had displayed as a young officer in Africa were undiminished but he began to age noticeably. The manic Millán Astray boasted to Ciano that ‘our Caudillo spends fourteen hours at his desk and doesn’t get up even to piss’.³ When his wife and daughter returned to Spain after their two-month exile in France – on 23 September – he responded to the announcement of their arrival by sending them a message that he had important visitors waiting. They were obliged to wait for more than an hour. He had little time for family life.⁴ Such concentration and strain perhaps contributed to the quenching of his early optimism but the re-emergence of a cautious Franco after the brief reincarnation of the impetuous African hero denoted both the prospect of power and the growing strength of Republican resistance.

The difficulties that were now slowing down the advance of the African columns impelled Franco’s Italian and German allies to step up their assistance. On 27 August, accompanied by Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Warlimont of the War Ministry staff, Canaris met Roatta in Rome to co-ordinate their views on the scale and nature of future assistance from Italy and Germany to the Nationalists. At a further meeting on the following day, they were joined by Ciano. Canaris again insisted that assistance be provided ‘only to General Franco, because he holds the supreme command of operations’. Joint Italo-German planning required a recognizable overall Nationalist commander with whom to communicate.⁵

Talavera was encircled by the three columns. The propaganda value for the Nationalists of the massacre at Badajoz was revealed when large numbers of militiamen fled in buses ‘like a crowd after a football match’. The town fell on 3 September. Another savage and systematic massacre ensued.⁶ While Franco’s forces had been moving through Extremadura and into New Castile, Mola had begun an attack on the Basque province of Guipúzcoa to cut the province off from France. Irún and San Sebastián were attacked daily by Italian bombers and bombarded by the Nationalist fleet. Irún’s poorly armed and untrained militia defenders fought bravely but were overwhelmed on 3 September. San Sebastián fell on 12 September. It was a key victory for the Nationalists. Guipúzcoa was a rich agrarian province which also contained important heavy industries. The Nationalist zone was now united in a single block from the Pyrenees through Castille and western Spain to the far south. The Republican provinces of Vizcaya, Santander and Asturias were isolated, able to communicate with the rest of the Republic only by sea or air.⁷