While anarchist leaders were trying to calm the situation, La Batalla, the POUM’s newspaper, argued that the best method of defence was attack and called for the immediate establishment of committees for the defence of the revolution. On Wednesday, 5 May, the anarchist leaders had another meeting with Companys and agreed a compromise solution of a new Catalan government which excluded Aiguader. But the tension in the streets did not lessen. That day, at 1 p.m., the secretary general of the UGT in Catalonia, Antonio Sesé, was shot in his car on the way to the Generalitat to take up his new appointment as councillor of defence. Later, the corpses of the Italian anarchists Camillo Berneri, who had been professor of philosophy at Florence University, and Franco Barbieri were discovered, as well as that of Francisco Ferrer, nephew of the pedagogue executed at Montjuich after the Semana Trágica, and Domingo Ascaso, brother of the anarchist hero who had been killed the year before in the assault on the Atarazanas barracks.7
The middle classes in Barcelona, exasperated by the disturbance and shooting in the streets, wanted governmental authority to be re-established. The central government asked Federica Montseny to go to Barcelona to make an appeal over the radio to beg her fellow anarchists to lay down their arms. She had no success and was forced to accept that order could be reimposed only by force. ‘They were the most terrible and bitter days of my life,’ she was to say many years later.8
Largo Caballero found himself in a difficult position. He needed the CNT, yet events in Barcelona were giving ammunition to the communists. He felt there was no alternative but to agree to the transfer of Assault Guard reinforcements from the Jarama front. In addition Prieto despatched two destroyers packed with paramilitary forces from Valencia. Meanwhile, in other parts of Catalonia and Aragón the communists had taken advantage of events to broaden their offensive by seizing the telephone buildings in Tarragona, Tolosa and several smaller towns. All these attempts were resisted and developed into street fighting, causing the Assault Guard column, which was heading for Barcelona from the Jarama, to stop in Tarragona and crush resistance there.
The same day a group of over 1,500 men from the Red and Black column, the 127th Brigade of the 28th Division and the Lenin Division of the POUM, left the front for Barcelona, but were halted at Binéfar by republican aircraft. They were finally persuaded to return to the front, but only after venting their fury on Barbastro and other Aragonese villages.9
Hidalgo de Cisneros flew to the airfield of Reus with two squadrons of fighters and two of bombers ‘to undertake operations against the region in the event that the insurgents won’.10 The reinforcements which had meanwhile arrived in Barcelona on board the destroyers Lepanto and Sa
´nchez Barcáiztegui increased the government’s forces towards the level of the rebel troops the previous July, but they had even less hope of taking the city. The anarchists had an overwhelming numerical superiority, holding almost 90 per cent of Barcelona and its suburbs, as well as the heavy guns of Montjuich. These overwhelming advantages were not used because the CNT-FAI knew that further fighting would lead to a full civil war within the civil war, in which they would be cast as traitors, even if the nationalists were unable to take advantage of the situation.
During the day the famous pamphlet of the Friends of Durruti was distributed on the barricades and published the next morning in La Batalla. It had been drafted with the POUM on the evening of 4 May and was addressed to the workers, demanding ‘A revolutionary Junta–execution of those responsible–the disarming of the paramilitary police–the socialization of the economy–the dissolution of the political parties which had attacked the working class’ and declared, ‘We do not give up the streets!–The revolution before everything!–Long live the social revolution!–Down with the counter-revolution!’ That afternoon, the CNT and the FAI disowned the pamphlet.
