Guerra Read online

  Like attracts like, and both Mussolini and Hitler came to Franco’s rescue. Mussolini initially played it cool when Bolín handed over Franco’s first request for aid, but warmed to his cause once it appeared that Britain and France would not respond belligerently if he helped the Spanish rebels. Eventually he despatched a dozen Savoia-Marchetti bombers to help Franco, though only nine arrived after three ran out of fuel and crashed or were forced to land. Meanwhile, Hitler agreed to help Franco as well by sending Junkers Ju52 bombers. Approached by Franco’s representatives after he had seen a performance of Siegfried conducted by Wilhelm Fürtwängler at Bayreuth, he whipped himself up into an anti-communist frenzy during a two-hour rant, eventually agreeing to their request. Still under the influence of Wagner, he decided that the plan was to be called Operation Magic Fire and that Franco was to have twenty bombers rather than the mere ten he’d asked for. The international dimension to the Spanish Civil War, which would convert it into the ideological battleground of the great Left–Right conflict of the 1930s, had been set.

  Hitler later said that Franco should erect a monument to the Junkers planes that subsequently carried his soldiers over from Morocco to Seville, as the saviours of the Nationalist Uprising, as the coup became known. Certainly his intervention gave a failing rebellion the shot in the arm it needed to avoid being snuffed out completely, and the initial supply of bombers was followed by a fairly steady stream of supplies, ammunition and men from both Germany and Italy. Boats were eventually used to carry some of Franco’s men over the Strait, with cover provided against the Republican navy by the new planes, but the airlift of equipment and soldiers was the first operation of its kind on such a large scale in military history – by October some 14,000 men and 44 artillery pieces had been transported over a total of 868 flights.

  On 7 August, Franco – the Caudillo, or ‘chief’ as people were calling him – eventually landed in Seville and took charge of his army’s campaign to conquer the Spanish mainland. From his HQ in Tetuán he had turned the Nationalists’ fortunes round almost single-handedly. Where once the odds had been heavily against them, they were now looking more even and their one major asset, the forces of the Legión and the Moroccan Regulares, was now effective. Three weeks had passed since Franco had left the Canaries in the Dragon Rapide and embarked on his journey to absolute power. The first part was over. Spain’s suffering was only just beginning.

  5

  Ceuta

  The fight had disturbed me deeply, but it had also sparked something off inside, like a fly buzzing angrily at a grimy window. First the mass grave near my house, then discovering an underworld of far-right thugs in Valencia which included someone I had considered a friend. I was used to Spain being a country where people turned away from the past, drawing a veil over anything that was too unpleasant or painful to remember, or which failed to fit in with whatever world-view held sway at the time. Often there was a sense that people skated over the surface of life without asking themselves what they were really doing. Yet I was beginning to confront the country’s darker history, which I myself had brushed over: a cruelty and violence I could no longer ignore. I wanted to understand what those men buried in the valley below my house had been fighting for. What were the passionately held beliefs that had set one countryman against another? And I wanted to know how a party bearing the same name as their killers could still be active almost seventy years later. Once upon a time Spain had been ripped apart by such as these. Could they do it again?

  My growing fascination with the conflict was fuelled by the discovery that my great-grandfather, Jack Warnock, had been a gun-runner during the Civil War. I was already familiar with the stories concerning his Antarctic explorations during the 1930s (there was a group of islets named after him off Kemp Land); but on a brief trip back to England, Jack’s only remaining son, my Great-Uncle Iain, had told me about his father’s Spanish adventures.

  Once he’d returned from the southern seas, Great-Grandpa Warnock, it turned out, had worked for the Stanhope Steamship Company, run by the ship-owner J. A. Billmeir. Billmeir had made his fortune by trading with the Spanish Republican government during the Civil War, at a time when few other people would. Dodging the Nationalist blockades and landmines, his crews often smuggled weapons in the holds of their vessels, thereby breaking the rules of Non-Intervention – an agreement by European powers not to send arms or military assistance to either side in the Spanish conflict. It was a farce, as Germany and Italy did little to hide their support for Franco, and Mussolini had thousands of men on Spanish soil. But the British went along with the pretence on the grounds of appeasement and in an attempt to prevent another pan-European war. Billmeir’s ships, along with a handful of other shipping companies, were one of the main lifelines for the Republic.

  My great-grandfather had been running in and out of Spanish ports in the Mediterranean – Barcelona, Valencia, Cartagena – during the late spring and summer of 1937, almost a year after the conflict had started. Uncle Iain remembered his father telling of how he had almost been killed during a Nationalist air raid on Barcelona. The force from one of the blasts had thrown him to the ground, breaking the blue china plate he was holding in his hands at the time.

  The traditionally Tory-supporting family back in Lancashire had tended to keep quiet about Jack’s smuggling of machine-guns past the international blockade to the under-armed ‘Reds’ of Spain. Jack survived Franco’s bombs only to die in an accident at the outbreak of the Second World War. Great-Uncle Iain, lung cancer gripping his chest, took any more details he might have known with him when he died shortly after my visit, and my own subsequent research had failed to bring up anything more. But the story gave me a personal link to the subject.

  Some weeks after the fascist-sponsored wrestling match, an opportunity came up by chance for me to visit a part of the country I had always wanted to explore. Ceuta was an anomaly – a piece of Spain on the very tip of Africa, a large rock jutting out into the sea connected to the mainland by a tiny isthmus, very much like Gibraltar across the Strait on the northern horizon. A border outpost butting on to Morocco to the south, it was a fascinating little city, geographically cut off from the country to which it belonged, and culturally divided from its immediate neighbour. Here Christians, Muslims and Jews lived in relative peace, in a mirror image of what Spain might have been had its Jewish and Morisco populations not been expelled in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  Ceuta and the area around it had been one of the main starting points for the coup which had led to the Spanish Civil War back in 1936. An invitation to a wedding in nearby Tetuán in northern Morocco gave me a chance to explore. A friend from university had fallen for a local girl – Muna – and was holding the Muslim ceremony for their nuptials in her home town. History books talked about Franco’s secret journey to this part of Morocco at the start of the conflict in order to take control of the Army of Africa. I would pass through Ceuta on my way down to the celebrations and get a flavour of the place. The city was the home of the Spanish Foreign Legion – the Legión – hardened fighting men who, the Spanish asserted, always made their French counterparts look like pussycats. They had played a key role in Franco’s campaign.

  The modern barracks of the Legión were, unsurprisingly, closed to the public, but they had a museum in the centre of town. The place was dark and grotty; the main curator was an affable old Sikh with proud grey whiskers and a pot belly, who talked at length about his former life as a merchant seaman. Rows of guns and bombs sat next to photos of Franco and General Millán Astray, the co-founders of this elite force. Brightly coloured flags drooped sorrowfully from the walls while stiff dusty mannequins were used to display the evolution of the Legión’s uniform, a strangely macho affair where the men’s chests were exposed almost to the navel in true Latin style. Apart from the Sikh, who kindly informed me that he’d written to the colonel three times now complaining about the damp, there was just the man on the desk, who seemed kee
n to strike up a conversation.

  ‘This was the bullet that killed Kennedy,’ he told me.

  I looked carefully at the pointed piece of metal he was holding up, imagining it hurtling through the air one November morning in Dallas. Strange that it should have ended up here in this forgotten corner of Spain. Strange, too, that the man holding it up to me should be the spitting image of Abraham Lincoln, that other assassinated American president. Apart from the military uniform and the tattoos, he might well have been the man himself, complete with fur-lined chin.

  ‘What, you mean the bullet?’

  The soldier laughed contemptuously.

  ‘No. The same type of bullet. Six point five millimetre.’

  A macabre image flashed through my mind of it crashing into JFK’s skull.

  ‘Did they use those in the Spanish Civil War?’

  A munitions expert, Abe was more than happy to talk at length on the huge number of different bullets used during the war. Republican soldiers, he told me, often used to throw away their rifles once they’d finished the cartridges, as it was generally impossible to find the right-sized replacement bullets. With guns coming in from so many disparate sources – some of them brought in illegally by my great-grandfather – a company of men might be using over twenty different calibres at any one time. Grenades were so unreliable that the men refused to use them, preferring instead to stick a piece of dynamite in a tin can and throw it at the enemy.

  It was a wonder many Republicans had guns at all. The government in Madrid had been very reluctant to hand out weapons to the unions and other left-wing groups at the start of the coup. When they finally capitulated and distributed rifles from the Ministry of Defence, the militiamen found that only five thousand out of a total of sixty-five thousand had bolts and so could be fired.

  ‘At least Franco’s forces had proper guns,’ Abe beamed through blackened teeth. I wondered if the state of this once historic fighting force was as bad as their museum. If so, there was little hope for them.

  Fascinating though this all was, the place was a disappointment, and I had given up on finding anything more interesting when Abe pulled me outside to the entrance patio of the museum and pointed out over the sea and the curve of the bay south towards Morocco. In the distance I could make out the border checkpoint dividing Europe from Africa, the First World from the Third World. Beyond, the hillsides were dry scrubland, a few houses and villas dotted along the grey tarmacked road passing down the coast. The sea was surprisingly rough here, I noticed. I wondered if anyone ever tried swimming over the border.

  ‘Can you see?’ Abe said energetically. I looked in the direction he was indicating, not sure what I was supposed to be looking at. ‘There, the building just to the left of the white apartment blocks in the distance.’

  I saw a smudge on a hill, over in Moroccan territory. It was hard to make out, but it appeared to be an old building.

  ‘That was our first headquarters,’ Abe said. ‘Our old home. Where Franco and Millán Astray first set up the Legión.’

  I shook his hand: I knew immediately where I had to go.

  An hour later I was crossing the border and heading in a tin-can taxi down the ancient Barbary Coast. Deep potholes made for wayward driving, the tarmac blending seamlessly with the sand and grit at the sides. Alongside the five-star hotels there for summer holiday-makers up from Casablanca and Rabat, elderly men in overalls and woollen hats stood at the entrance of a mechanic’s oily workshop, scratching their heads over deconstructed cars in pieces on the forecourt. Bars fronting on to the sea served mint teas and iced sherbets, without a sign of a cool beer anywhere in sight. Policemen in light-blue and grey uniforms and bubble-shaped helmets with bug-eyed goggles stood by their magnificent motorbikes and directed the careering traffic, whistles blowing furiously above the sound of the crashing waves on the beach below.

  The taxi-driver knew exactly where I wanted to go, and after four or five miles stopped by the side of the road and pointed to a dirt track leading up a slope away from the coast.

  ‘That’s where it is,’ he said.

  I quickly paid and set off up the hill at speed, not hearing what the taxi-driver shouted to me as he drove off, his words lost in the sound of the sea and the traffic.

  Franco had come to this place as soon as he landed in Tetuan at the start of the coup. Colonel Yagüe, a member of the Falange, had been waiting for him, the troops primed for the coming assault against the government, with the secret rallying cry CAFE, an acronym for Camaradas ¡Arriba la Falange Española! – Comrades, Up with the Spanish Falange! Not all the soldiers were in the know, however. At a banquet just days before the coup, the Spanish High Commissioner in Morocco, a former artillery captain, was confused to hear other officers calling for ‘coffee’ as the fish course was being served. Later he was captured by the rebels when the coup broke out and shot for his loyalty to the government.

  I clambered up the hill away from the road and the hooting of the taxi to where I thought the former Legión headquarters must be. As I reached the crest it came into view – a vast crumbling edifice, the shell of a once proud neo-Classical structure, now covered in weeds. I stood in awe. It was hard to believe that this had once been a military barracks. It reminded me of grand old Spanish tobacco factories, like the building in Seville – today a university – where Mérimée had situated the cigar-rolling women of Carmen. Either that or a palace for some long-forgotten duke. In front of me, a flat square of land that would once have been a parade ground stretched up to the main building – a rectangular construction covering an area of almost two acres. I walked across, stepping over flattened rusty cans among the knee-high dry grass, smudges of fox-brown in a sea of yellow and grey. The place had enormous presence and energy. Some ruins are simply dead – of architectural or historical interest, but little more. These barracks, the Dar Riffien headquarters of the Spanish Foreign Legion, were alive. Perhaps because they had been abandoned for so little time, or perhaps because they hadn’t been touched since. The ghosts that lived here had been left in peace, I felt, undisturbed and free to haunt their old home.

  Large fig trees were growing inside the main building. The roof had fallen in and the remaining walls must have acted as a windbreak against the breezes blowing in from the sea. Great glassless windows eight feet high ran along the outside, delicate masonry curling around their empty frames. Inside, it was difficult to see anything for the mass of foliage that had taken over, trees and flowers claiming the place for themselves as though it were a vast conservatory. Dark-purple morning glories smothered the lower walls, gradually creeping their way into what once had been offices, a canteen, kitchens. Nature had quickly taken over the buildings, but something of the spirit of the place remained.

  It was hard to believe that the Civil War had been launched from a place of such beauty and grandeur. This was a palace more suited to ballroom dancing than to drills and firing practice. Yet as I scrambled around, amazed at the scale of the building, so splendid and yet so decrepit, I began to understand the emotions that a structure like this could invoke, and how it might fuel the energy and drive needed to wage the kind of war that had ripped through Spain. Here I could imagine how you could easily fall into fervent dreams of superiority, order and resistance to change. Like the cloisters of a monastery, or the courtyard of an ancient university, such a building was flattering by association: ‘I belong here: this place is magnificent and therefore so am I.’ The soldiers of the Legión stationed here, with their traditions of strict discipline and hierarchy, would have needed little convincing to fight the church-burning anarchists and revolution-waging Marxists who were trying to take over Spain. It was their natural duty, and inclination, to defend the old ways.

  What puzzled me, though, was why this once great building had been left to fall apart like this. I could appreciate that it no longer stood on Spanish territory – the tiny peninsula of Ceuta was visible from this vantage point back northwards up the coa
st: the place from which Abe had earlier shown me this very spot from outside the Legión museum. But surely the Moroccans could have made use of such a complex, perhaps for their own army. Then again, associations with the former colonial rulers might have left a nasty taste in the mouth. The Spanish had not been the most beneficent of masters in northern Morocco, spending much of the time fighting bloody and brutal campaigns against the locals. Incorporating Moroccans into their own forces – the Regulares – and then using them against their own kind in the Civil War had been one of the methods the Spanish used to channel the rebelliousness and aggression of the native tribes. Even so, to let the buildings fall to ruin like this?

  As I was wondering, I spotted some Arabic lettering on the walls of a separate building set away from the main palace where I was standing. I could make out the words GOD, THE KING AND THE FATHERLAND – the motto, I remembered from somewhere, of the Moroccan Army. Then, among the ruins and the invading plant life, I caught sight of a line of clothes hung out to dry and some cooking utensils on the ground. Clean and rust-free, they must have been used recently.

  As these images registered, two things happened almost simultaneously: a strong sense that I was in trouble came over me, a split second before I felt a hand grab me roughly by the shoulder. I spun round in surprise – two young Moroccan soldiers armed with rifles were staring at me with a combination of curiosity and menace.

  ‘Come with us,’ one of them said. ‘You’re under arrest.’

  Speechless, I turned and walked away between the two of them. One of them held me firmly by the elbow. It was unnecessary: the suddenness of their appearance and the implicit threat of their weaponry left me no choice but to go with them. As they led me away, I began to realize just how blind I’d been to think the place deserted. Signs of life were everywhere – not just the clothes, but I could now hear faint Arabic music from a radio in a room somewhere. There were fresh animal droppings on the ground, chickens roaming among the dry weeds, bits of rubbish thrown about that were only days or weeks old. As I was escorted down the dusty track, everything around me seemed to talk of the present.