Пол Престон – The Last Days of the Spanish Republic (страница 9)

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