Francisco Franco

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Francisco Franco was shot in the abdomen in 1916, aged 23, during an assault on Moroccan positions at El Biutz, in the hills near Ceuta. The wound was so serious that he was not expected to live. His Moroccan troops took his survival as a spiritual event, believing he was blessed with baraka, protected by God. It was the only time he was wounded in ten years of fighting in Africa. This short, bullied cadet, once ranked 251st out of 312 in his class, would rule Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. How did a boy too small for the physical tests become the youngest general in Europe? How did a man who claimed no interest in politics end up the only leader of a faction, appointed generalissimo and head of state? And how does a single reign hold both the killing of tens of thousands and a stretch of growth Spaniards called a miracle? The answers run through a coffin or a general's sash, a chartered British aeroplane, and a sword laid upon an altar.

• 2. A Seafaring Family

  ›

  On the Calle Frutos Saavedra in Ferrol, Galicia, Franco was born on the 4th of December 1892 into a family bound to the sea. For two centuries the Francos produced naval officers across six uninterrupted generations, several of them admirals, down to Franco's own father. He was baptised thirteen days after his birth at the military church of San Francisco, given the names Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo. His mother came from an upper-middle-class Roman Catholic family. Her father, Ladislao Bahamonde Ortega, served as commissar of naval equipment at the Port of El Ferrol. When Franco was fourteen, his father moved to Madrid after a reassignment, abandoned the family, and married another woman. Franco never overcame his antipathy and largely ignored him for the rest of his life. He identified instead with his mother, who wore widow's black once she understood her husband had left, and from her he learned moderation, austerity, self-control and respect for Catholicism. He had two brothers, Nicolás and Ramón, and two sisters, María del Pilar and María de la Paz. Ramón was an internationally known aviator and a Freemason with early leftist leanings, killed in an air accident on a military mission in 1938. Years after taking power, under the pseudonym Jaime de Andrade, Franco wrote a brief novel called Raza, whose protagonist the historian Stanley Payne believed represented the idealised man Franco wished his father had been.

• 3. A Coffin Or A Sash

  ›

  Spanish efforts to occupy a new African protectorate provoked the Second Melillan campaign in 1909, the first of several Riffian rebellions. Officers died in heavy numbers there, and among the soldiers it was said they would receive either la caja o la faja, a coffin or a general's sash. Franco had reached Morocco by way of a closed door. After the Spanish-American War cost Spain much of its navy and most of its colonies, the Naval Academy admitted no new entrants from 1906 to 1913. To his father's chagrin, he turned to the Army and entered the Infantry Academy in Toledo in 1907, one of the youngest in a class of boys mostly aged sixteen to eighteen. In 1913 he joined the newly formed regulares, Moroccan colonial troops with Spanish officers used as elite shock troops. His abdominal wound at El Biutz in 1916 brought a recommendation for promotion to major and for Spain's highest gallantry honour, the Cruz Laureada de San Fernando. Both were denied on grounds of his young age. Franco appealed to the king, who reversed the decision, and at the end of February 1917, aged 24, he became the youngest major in the Spanish army. When José Millán Astray founded the Spanish Foreign Legion in 1920, Franco became its second-in-command and returned to Africa. He led a three-day forced march that relieved Melilla, and in 1923 was made the Legion's commander. He led the first wave ashore at Al Hoceima in 1925, a landing in the heartland of Abd el-Krim's tribe that helped break the Republic of the Rif. On the 3rd of February 1926 he was promoted to brigadier general, said to be the youngest in Europe.

• 4. The Academy And The Republic

  ›

  In 1928 Franco was appointed director of the newly created General Military Academy of Zaragoza, a single college that replaced the separate institutions for infantry, cavalry, artillery and other branches. The post mattered later in ways no one foresaw. When civil war began, the colonels, majors and captains who had attended while he was director showed unconditional loyalty to him as Caudillo. The municipal elections of the 12th of April 1931 worked as a plebiscite on the monarchy, and the Republican-Socialist alliance swept the large cities and provincial capitals. Alfonso XIII left the country, and the Second Spanish Republic took shape. Franco regretted the end of the monarchy but did not object or challenge the Republic's legitimacy. The closing of his academy in June by the provisional War Minister Manuel Azaña proved a major setback and his first clash with the new state. Azaña found Franco's farewell speech to the cadets insulting, entered an official reprimand into his file, and left him for six months without a post and under surveillance. Franco subscribed to the journal of Acción Española, a monarchist organisation, and believed in a supposed Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy, a contubernio aimed at the destruction of Christian Europe with Spain as its principal target. Azaña's military reforms relegated him from first to 24th in the list of brigadiers in January 1933, and the prime minister noted in his diary that it was probably more prudent to keep Franco away from Madrid.

• 5. Asturias And The Coup

  ›

  Thirty-four priests, six young seminarists aged between 18 and 21, and several businessmen and civil guards were summarily executed by revolutionaries in Mieres and Sama during the Asturian rising of October 1934. Local unions in mining towns had gathered small arms, occupying towns and seizing Civil and Assault Guard barracks from the evening of the 4th of October. Over 100 priests were killed in the diocese, and 58 religious buildings, including churches, convents and part of the university at Oviedo, were burned. Franco, already General of Division and aide to the war minister Diego Hidalgo, took command of the suppression. After two weeks of heavy fighting, with a death toll estimated between 1,200 and 2,000, the rebellion was crushed. Franco described it to a journalist in Oviedo as a frontier war whose fronts were socialism, communism and whatever attacks civilisation to replace it with barbarism. The 1936 general election ended on the 16th of February in a virtual draw, with leftist mobs interfering in the balloting that evening; Stanley Payne calls the process blatant electoral fraud. On the 23rd of February Franco was sent to the Canary Islands as military commander, an appointment he saw as a banishment. In June 1936 a secret meeting was held in La Esperanza forest on Tenerife to discuss a military coup. The conspiracy was led by General Emilio Mola, and the rebels were determined to proceed con Paquito o sin Paquito, with or without Paquito, as José Sanjurjo put it. A privately owned De Havilland Dragon Rapide, flown by British pilots Cecil Bebb and Hugh Pollard, was chartered in England on the 11th of July to carry Franco to Africa. On the 17th of July the Army of Africa rebelled a day early, and on the 18th Franco published a manifesto and left to take command.

• 6. Becoming The Only Leader

  ›

  The designated leader of the uprising, General José Sanjurjo, died on the 20th of July 1936 in a plane crash. With him gone, command was split into regions, and a coordinating National Defence Junta was established at Burgos, nominally led by the senior general Miguel Cabanellas. Franco's first task was moving his 30,000 soldiers of the Army of Africa across a strait the Republican navy still controlled. He requested help from Benito Mussolini and from Adolf Hitler, who sent twenty Ju 52 transport aircraft and six Heinkel fighters; from the 20th of July an air bridge carried 1,500 soldiers to Seville. Several factors lifted Franco above his rivals. In late July Hitler decided that all German aid to the Nationalists would go to him. Mola was discredited as the planner of a coup that had become a civil war, and the Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera sat in prison in Alicante, where he would soon be executed. Franco's previous aloofness from politics meant he had few active enemies in any faction. On the 21st of September it was decided he would be commander-in-chief, and on the 1st of October 1936 in Burgos he was publicly proclaimed Generalísimo and Jefe del Estado. When Mola was killed in another air accident on the 2nd of June 1937, no military leader remained from those who had organised the conspiracy. Franco was not a strategic genius, but he excelled at organisation, administration, logistics and diplomacy. On the 19th of April 1937 he forcibly merged the national-syndicalist Falange and the Carlist monarchists into a single party, the FET y de las JONS, the only legal party in the Nationalist zone, and placed old Falangists including the leader Manuel Hedilla under arrest to secure his future.

• 7. The Cost Of Victory

  ›

  Italian aircraft stationed on Mallorca bombed Barcelona thirteen times, dropping forty-four tons of bombs aimed at civilians, while Italian and German planes bombed the Basque town of Guernica at Franco's request. Franco's Nationalists drew on Fascist Italy, which sent the Corpo Truppe Volontarie, and Nazi Germany, which sent the Condor Legion. The Republican side was backed by communists, socialists and anarchists, by the Soviet Union and by volunteers in the International Brigades, who served as shock troops and suffered high casualties. Payne estimates that if civilian fatalities above the norm are added in, deaths attributable to the civil war reach roughly 344,000. Franco's troops captured Barcelona in January 1939, and on the 28th of March Madrid fell to the Nationalists with help from a fifth column inside the city. Victory was proclaimed on the 1st of April 1939, when the last Republican forces surrendered. On the same day Franco laid his sword upon a church altar and vowed never to take it up again unless Spain was threatened with invasion. A period known as the White Terror followed, with mass executions standing in contrast to the wartime Red Terror. Estimates of executions by the regime during this time run between 100,000 and 200,000 dead. Excavations of mass graves by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory estimate that more than 35,000 people killed by the Nationalist side are still missing. The end of the war drove hundreds of thousands into exile, mostly to France but also to Mexico, Chile, Cuba and the United States, with refugees confined in camps such as Camp Gurs and Camp Vernet. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, named special consul for immigration in Paris, called it the noblest mission he had ever undertaken: shipping more than 2,000 Spanish refugees to Chile aboard an old cargo ship, the Winnipeg.

• 8. Neutral, Yet Aligned

  ›

  On the 23rd of October 1940, Hitler and Franco met at Hendaye, France, to discuss Spain entering the war on the Axis side. Franco demanded large supplies of food and fuel, along with Gibraltar and French North Africa, terms Hitler found too steep while he protected his relations with Vichy France. An oft-cited remark attributes to Hitler the wish that he would rather have his own teeth pulled than deal further with Franco. Spain pursued what Franco called non-belligerence, recovering from its own civil war. He allowed Spaniards to volunteer for the German Army against the Soviet Union in the Blue Division, which fought on the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1944, but forbade them to fight in the West against the democracies. Spain depended on oil imports from the United States, almost certain to be cut off if it formally joined the Axis. Allied statesmen later acknowledged that neutrality. In November 1942 President Roosevelt wrote to Franco that their nations were friends in the best sense of the word. In May 1944 Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that Spain's refusal to give Spain's enemies passage had been extremely helpful. Spain interned none of the 1,200 American airmen forced to land in the country, giving them refuge and letting them leave. Franco's record with Jews was contradictory. On the 13th of May 1941 he ordered his provincial governors to compile a list of Jews, and supplied Heinrich Himmler with a list of 6,000 Jews in Spain. Yet Spanish diplomats protected about 4,000 Jews living in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Austria, and at least some 20,000 to 30,000 Jews were allowed to pass through Spain in the first half of the war. Estimates of how many Jews his government saved range from roughly 30,000 to 60,000, with 45,000 a commonly cited figure. After the war the regime tried to destroy evidence of cooperation with the Axis, while allowing former Nazis such as Otto Skorzeny and Léon Degrelle to seek asylum in Spain.