The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 полностью

On the night of 16 April 1937, Hedilla’s followers attempted to seize the Falange headquarters in Salamanca in a move to oust the rightists led by Sancho Dávila. A gun battle broke out around the Plaza Mayor during which two Falangists were killed. The Civil Guard had to be sent in to restore order and arrests were made. Hedilla was fortunate to have stayed clear of the disturbance. On 18 April he arranged a meeting of the Falange council at which he was elected leader. He thought his triumph was complete when he went round to the bishop’s palace, where Franco resided, to announce his election and state that he was at his orders. Franco congratulated him, but the wily Caudillo, who had allowed the Falange’s internal strife to continue without interference, made his well-prepared move the next evening.³

The Falange, the Carlists, the Alfonsine monarchist Renovacíon Española and the remnants of other right-wing groups, like the CEDA’s Popular Action, were amalgamated by decree into one party under his direct orders.⁴ The party was to be called the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS (Traditionalist Spanish Falange and the National Syndicalist Offensive Juntas). As the choice of name indicated, the Carlists came off worst in this forced union, with a programme based on 26 out of José Antonio’s 27 points.⁵ But, as Franco had calculated, the Carlists were more obedient and less politically minded. The new uniform consisted of the Falangist blue shirt and the Carlist red beret. The fascist salute was officially adopted and the movement’s slogan was to be ‘Por el Imperio hacia Dios’ (For the Empire towards God). The Caudillo was proclaimed chief of the new party and his brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Súñer, was appointed executive head. (This produced a new Spanish word, cuñadismo, meaning ‘brother-in-lawism’, as a variant on nepotism.) Serrano Súñer, an intelligent and ambitious lawyer who had been a friend of José Antonio, had become a vice-president of the CEDA, then moved towards the Falange in the spring of 1936. He was captured in Madrid after the rising and held in the Model Prison, where he witnessed the killings in revenge for the news of Badajoz. This experience and the death of his two brothers made him one of the most intransigent advocates of the limpieza after he escaped from hospital (in circumstances which have never been satisfactorily explained) and reached nationalist territory in February 1937.⁶

The suddenness of Franco’s coup increased its effect. By the time the announcement had been fully appreciated, anyone who wanted to object only exposed himself to the charge of treachery towards the nationalist movement. Hedilla, somewhat unimaginatively, believed that he could maintain a position of power as the head of the Falange and guarantee its independence. He refused to join the council of the new party and tried to mobilize his supporters. He was arrested on 25 April, and condemned to death a month later for ‘a manifest act of indiscipline and subversion against the single command of nationalist Spain’.⁷ On ˜er’s advice, however, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In fact, he served only four years, but it was enough to remove him from any position of influence during a critical period. The new puppet council appointed by Franco was no longer challenged, after the rest of the Falange was rapidly brought into line by dismissals and about 80 prison sentences.

As commander of the most important formation in the nationalist army, the Army of Africa, Franco had started his climb to leadership from an advanced position. He had no effective rival and the very nature of the nationalist movement begged a single, disciplined command. As a result he had achieved supreme power in two well-timed stages: September 1936 and April 1937. With the first he became de jure leader; with the second, suppressing all potential opposition, de facto dictator. Now he was in position to tackle a long war and to construct his idea of what Spain should be.

A power struggle had also begun in republican territory during the winter of 1936 and the spring of 1937, although the winners, the communists, were never to achieve the same degree of power as Franco. They started from a very restricted base and their policies to centralize power were resisted by one of the major components of the republican alliance, the anarchists. At the same time the Valencia government was exasperated at its lack of control over independent regions, especially Catalonia and Aragón.