Пол Престон – The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (страница 27)

Gil Robles demanded the harshest policy possible against the rebels. On 9 October, he rose in the Cortes to express his support for the government and to make the helpful suggestion that parliament be closed until the repression was over. Thus the anticipated crushing of the revolution would take place in silence. No questions could be asked in the Cortes and censorship was total for the left-wing press, although the right-wing newspapers were full of gruesome tales – never substantiated – of leftist barbarism. The new Minister of Agriculture, Manuel Giménez Fernández, one of the few sincere social Catholics within the CEDA, struck a dissident note when he told the staff of his Ministry on 12 October, ‘the disturbances which have taken place against the state have not started on the rebels’ side of the street but on ours, because the state itself has created many enemies by consistently neglecting its duties to all citizens’.⁹⁴ The violence on both sides during the events of October and the brutal persecution unleashed in the wake of the left-wing defeat would deepen existing social hatreds beyond anything previously imagined.

Initially, because of Franco’s reputation as a ferocious Africanista, President Alcalá Zamora rejected the proposal to put him formally in command of troops in Asturias. Nevertheless, the Minister of War, the Radical Diego Hidalgo, insisted and gave Franco informal control of operations, naming him his ‘personal technical adviser’, marginalizing his own General Staff and slavishly signing the orders drawn up by him.⁹⁵ The Minister’s decision was highly irregular but understandable. Franco had detailed knowledge of Asturias, its geography, communications and military organization. He had been stationed there, had taken part in the suppression of the general strike of 1917 and had been a regular visitor since his marriage to an Asturian woman, Carmen Polo. To the delight of the Spanish right, and as Alcalá Zamora had feared, Franco responded to the miners in Asturias as if he were dealing with the recalcitrant tribesmen of Morocco.

Franco’s approach to the events of Asturias was coloured by his conviction, fed by the regular bulletins he received from the Entente Anticommuniste of Geneva, that the workers’ uprising had been ‘carefully prepared by the agents of Moscow’ and that the Socialists, ‘with technical instructions from the Communists, thought they were going to be able to install a dictatorship’.⁹⁶ That belief justified for Franco and for many on the extreme right the use of troops against Spanish civilians as if they were a foreign enemy.

With a small command unit set up in the telegraph room of the Ministry of War in Madrid, Franco controlled the movement of the troops, ships and trains to be used in the suppression of the revolution.⁹⁷ Uninhibited by the humanitarian considerations which made some of the more liberal senior officers hesitate to use the full weight of the armed forces against civilians, Franco regarded the problem with the same icy ruthlessness that had underpinned his successes in the colonial wars. One of his first decisions was to order the bombing and artillery shelling of the working-class districts of the mining towns. Unmoved by the fact that the central symbol of rightist values was the reconquest of Spain from the Moors, he shipped Moroccan mercenaries to Asturias, the only part of Spain where the crescent had never flown. He saw no contradiction about using them because he regarded left-wing workers with the same racist contempt which had underlain his use of locally recruited mercenary troops, the Regulares Indígenas, against the Rif tribesmen. Visiting Oviedo after the rebellion had been defeated, he spoke to a journalist in terms that echoed the sentiments of Onésimo Redondo: ‘This war is a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism.’⁹⁸ Without apparent irony, despite Franco’s use in the north of colonial forces, the right-wing press portrayed the Asturian miners as puppets of a foreign, Jewish–Bolshevik conspiracy.⁹⁹

The methods used by the colonial army, just as in Morocco, were aimed at paralysing the civilian enemy by terror. The African Army unleashed a wave of brutality that had more to do with their normal practice when entering Moroccan villages than any threat from the defeated Asturian rebels. The troops used left-wing prisoners as human shields to cover their advances. Innocent men, women and children were shot at random by the Moroccan units under the command of Franco’s crony, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe Blanco. This contributed to the demoralization of the poorly armed revolutionaries. More than fifty male and female prisoners, many of them wounded, were interrogated and immediately shot in the yard of Oviedo’s main hospital and their bodies burned in the crematorium oven. Several more were executed without trial in the Pelayo barracks. Other prisoners were tortured and women raped. In the mining village of Carbayín, twenty bodies were buried to hide evidence of torture. Houses and shops were looted of watches, jewellery and clothing, while anything not portable was smashed.¹⁰⁰

The behaviour of the colonial units provoked serious friction between General López Ochoa, on the one hand, and Franco and Yagüe, on the other. The austere López Ochoa had been placed in operational command of the forces in Asturias. He believed, rightly, that for Franco (below him in seniority) to have been placed in overall charge of the suppression of the rebellions of 1934 was improper, since its only basis was his friendship with Diego Hidalgo. Franco, Yagüe and many on the right were concerned that López Ochoa, as a Republican and a Freemason, would try to put down the rising with as little bloodshed as possible. Their suspicions were justified. Although he condoned the use of trucks of prisoners as a cover for his advances, López Ochoa did, in the main, conduct his operations with moderation. Yagüe sent an emissary to Madrid to complain to both Franco and Gil Robles about his humanitarian treatment of the miners. All three were infuriated by López Ochoa’s pact with the miners’ leader Belarmino Tomás, holding back the Legionarios and Regulares to permit an orderly and bloodless surrender.¹⁰¹ Franco’s mistrust of López Ochoa was matched by his confidence in Yagüe and his approval for the summary executions following the captures of Gijón and Oviedo.¹⁰²

On one occasion, Yagüe threatened López Ochoa with a pistol.¹⁰³ Some months later, López Ochoa spoke with Juan-Simeón Vidarte, the deputy secretary general of the PSOE, about his problems in restraining the murderous activities of the Foreign Legion:

One night, the legionarios took twenty-seven workers from the jail at Sama. They shot only three or four because, as the shots echoed in the mountains, they were afraid that guerrillas would appear. So, to avoid the danger, they acted even more cruelly, decapitating or hanging the prisoners. They cut off their feet, their hands, their ears, their tongues, even their genitals! A few days later, one of my most trusted officers told me that there were legionarios wearing wire necklaces from which dangled human ears from the victims of Carbayín. I immediately ordered their detention and execution. That was the basis of my conflict with Yagüe. I ordered him to take his men from the mining valleys and confine them in Oviedo. And I held him responsible for any deaths that might take place. To judge the rebels, there were the courts of justice. I also had to deal with the deeds of the Regulares of the tabor [battalion] from Ceuta: rapes, murders, looting. I ordered the execution of six Moors. It caused me problems. The Minister of War, all excited, demanded explanations: ‘How can you dare order anyone to be shot without a court martial?’ I answered: ‘I have subjected them to the same procedures to which they subjected their victims.’¹⁰⁴

The events of October 1934 escalated the hostility between the left and the forces of order, particularly the Civil Guard and parts of the army. The Asturian rebels knew that, to control the mining valleys, they had to overcome the Civil Guard. Accordingly, they assaulted various local barracks to neutralize them prior to an attack on the capital city of the province, Oviedo. These episodes were violent and protracted. The bloodiest took place in Sama de Langreo, seventeen miles east of Oviedo, and in Campomanes, fifty miles to the south. In Sama, the battle raged for thirty-six hours and thirty-eight Civil Guards were killed. In the battle at Campomanes, twelve Civil Guards were killed and seven wounded.¹⁰⁵ In total, the casualties of the Civil Guard in Asturias were eighty-six dead and seventy-seven wounded. The Assault Guards lost fifty-eight dead and fifty-four wounded. The army lost eighty-eight dead and 475 wounded. Other security forces lost twenty-four dead and thirty-three wounded. These figures may be compared with the nearly two thousand civilian dead, the large majority of them working class.¹⁰⁶