On the morning of 11 July 1936, a silver twin-engine biplane took off from Croydon airport in south London, bound for Casablanca. In the cockpit was Captain William Bebb, formerly of the RAF. The passengers, officially off on a hunting expedition in the High Atlas mountains, were a former army officer Major Hugh Pollard, Pollard’s daughter Diana, her friend Dorothy Watson and a Spaniard, Luis Bolín, of the ABC newspaper. The weather was bad on that summer morning in Britain, but the plane, a de Havilland Dragon Rapide, managed to take off nonetheless and within a few hours had landed in Bordeaux to refuel before continuing its lengthy journey. The Dragon Rapide was one of the best civilian planes around at the time for such a trip. With seating for nine people, a range of over 550 miles and a cruising speed of 130 mph, it would require only three or four stops en route and would be able to reach Morocco in about two days. Captain Bebb was an experienced pilot.
What most people at Croydon didn’t know, however, was that the story about hunting in the High Atlas was actually a cover for a far riskier venture. Pollard, a Catholic who had previously fought in Morocco, was a British intelligence agent,2 and the plane in fact was not ultimately bound for Casablanca, but for a rendezvous in the Canaries with a figure who would be crucial in the plot to bring down the democratic government in Madrid. Bebb and Pollard were to bring him to join his fellow plotters in northern Morocco, one of the launch pads of the coup. It was to be the beginning of a long journey that would eventually see him become dictator of all Spain.
Franco had spent the spring and early summer of 1936 in the Canaries in a kind of semi-exile, following the victory of the leftwing Popular Front in the February elections. It was a step down for the former chief of staff, a man widely suspected of plotting against the new government. Franco had taken it in his stride, however, adjusting to the slower pace of life on the edge of the tropics by attending private English lessons and taking up golf. With little to do but revise the coastal defences, he could but look on from afar as tensions increased in the capital, while perhaps reminiscing on a glorious military career to date. In other circumstances he might well have been entering the twilight of his soldiering days. In fact, the most important part of his life was just about to begin.
Franco was born in 1892 in the small naval town of El Ferrol in the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia. It is often said that to understand Franco you need to understand the Galician character, marked by an evasiveness and caution known as retranca. Galicians are famed for being hard to nail down – a trait often remarked on by those who knew Franco. It was a quality that was to serve him well as he rose from middle-class military cadet to head of state. Franco’s mother was a devout Catholic and a very conservative woman, while his father, a paymaster in the navy, was a passionate man who liked drinking, gambling and chasing women, and who often beat his children – Franco was the second of five: three sons and two daughters. When Franco was fourteen, his father left the family home and set up with his mistress in Madrid. Franco, however, was always closer to his mother, both emotionally and in temperament. He was later to write that the Spanish Republic had been set up by men who cheated on their wives.3 His hatred towards it, you sense, was fuelled by an association in his own mind between the liberal government and the father who had abandoned his family when he was a boy.
As a child, Franco had wanted to join the navy, but government restrictions on entry meant he ended up training at the artillery academy in Toledo. Never brilliant, but meticulous and with a strong nerve, he rose quickly through the officer ranks, his big break coming in 1920 when, as a major, he was offered the post of second in command of the newly formed Spanish Foreign Legion. Based on its French namesake, the force was an elite unit in the Spanish Army, being made up largely of criminals and fugitives, and was headed by Colonel José Millán Astray, a man close to King Alfonso XIII and with certain dubious ideas about soldiering that were supposedly based on the samurai code. The main function of the Legión, as it was called, was to help police Spain’s territories in northern Morocco.
In 1898 Spain, once the greatest empire in the world, had finally lost the last of its colonial possessions – Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines – to the United States in a war that became known as the Disaster. It was a wake-up call that, after centuries of decline and decadence, the country was no longer a player on the international stage. So when the opportunity arose in 1906 to take over northern Morocco, the government in Madrid took little convincing. France was busy extending its north-African territories westwards from Algeria into Morocco, but the Germans were unhappy about this. So in a compromise deal reached with Britain and the USA at the Conference of Algeciras, Spain was invited to set up her own ‘Protectorate’, stretching east–west from Larache to the Algerian border along Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, while the French took the bulk of the country to the south. The city of Tangier, meanwhile, would be controlled by an international committee.
Spain’s Moroccan possessions, however, became something of a poisoned chalice. The terrain in the area was largely mountainous, and the people were Berber tribesmen with a long tradition of scant respect for the authorities – whoever they were. Over the years the area was brought under control only at great expense, at the cost of many Spanish and Moroccan lives, and sometimes, humiliatingly, only with the military cooperation of the French from the south. Nonetheless, the Spanish occupation of northern Morocco tapped deeply into the national psyche with its echoes of the ancient struggles to clear the Iberian peninsula of the Moors. Although the Reconquest had ended in 1492 with the capture of Granada, the conflict still resonated deeply both culturally and psychologically. Fourteen ninety-two was not only the year the Reconquest concluded, it was also the date of Columbus’s famous journey and of the publication of the first Spanish grammar – the first such work in any modern Western language. It was the year in which ‘Spain’ as a concept was truly born. ‘Moor-slaying’ was part of the glue that held the fragmented nation together.
The period of the Reconquest was also the age of chivalry in Spain. Young men like Franco seeking adventure were naturally drawn to the new Protectorate, with the opportunities it gave for glory, exoticism, a life away from the humdrum and the chance to live out childhood fantasies about knights in armour beating up Moros. Franco was to draw on this romantic imagery when he referred to his later campaign against the Republic as a ‘crusade’, shamelessly using the language of Spain’s medieval past.
Franco’s years in Morocco made him as a soldier, as he readily admitted. It was there that he famously led his troops from the front against Moroccan rebels in the attack on the coastal rebel-held town of Alhucemas, only one of several actions which earned him the respect of his men and saw him rise even faster through the ranks. He was seriously wounded once – a bullet in the abdomen which, some said, made him impotent – but his career was set on an upward trajectory. Mentored by his superior, Millán Astray, who seems to have hero-worshipped his brave young second-in-command, Franco was also brutalized by his Moroccan experiences. Committing atrocities against the men, women and children of rebel villages was the norm, while punishments within the Legión itself were extremely harsh. Franco even shot dead one of his own men after he refused to eat his ration of beans. All this was done with a coldness and apparent lack of regard for human suffering which would remain with him for life. Even when close to death in 1975, he insisted on the execution of two ETA members and three Maoist activists, despite calls from world leaders and even the Pope for the sentences to be commuted.
Thanks to his Moroccan successes, in 1926, at the age of thirty-three, Franco was promoted to general. He was the youngest man of that rank in Europe at the time – an honour which Napoleon had enjoyed in his day. At the same time, Franco’s brother Ramón was in the public eye after successfully flying across the South Atlantic to Buenos Aires – the first ever such journey. The two brothers were national heroes, although Ramón, far more of a playboy than his serious and austere sibling, dominated the headlines. People associated the name ‘Franco’ in those days more with the airman than with the soldier. Ironically, one would end up an authoritarian dictator, the other an anarchist revolutionary, although the two were eventually reconciled once the Civil War broke out in 1936.
Promotion took Franco away from Morocco and brought him back to the Spanish mainland. A favourite of the king and well liked in government, he was made head of the new military academy at Saragossa, a position he relished. Yet the abdication of Alfonso XIII and the establishment of the Spanish Republic in 1931, headed by a centre-left government, saw the first serious setback in his career. Manuel Azaña, the minister of war, closed the Saragossa academy and removed Franco from his post as part of his project to reform the top-heavy and inefficient armed forces. Franco was to hold a grudge against Azaña for this for life – the two would later become adversaries when Azaña became president of the Spanish Republic and Franco’s opposite number during the Civil War.
In 1933, however, the left-wing government was voted out of office and a series of right and centre-right governments held power until February 1936. Franco was back in favour. Militarily, the most important event of these years, both for Franco and for Spain, was the crushing of the left-wing revolution in the northern region of Asturias. Franco was put in charge of the operation and took the innovative step of bringing in troops from Spanish Morocco to combat the Asturian miners. The troops, known as Regulares, were made up mostly of Moroccan Muslims who had joined the Spanish Army in their policing of the Protectorate. Brutalized, like the Spanish legionaries, by the harsh conditions in Morocco, they were highly effective and thoroughly ruthless against the Spanish revolutionaries, who were killed in their thousands. People were shocked that Moros should be used against Christian-born civilians, but their effectiveness had been proven. More importantly, a precedent had been set which would be followed on a much greater scale once the Civil War itself began – Franco, nicknamed the ‘hyena of Asturias’, once again sending Moorish troops to fight against his fellow countrymen.
Franco did well under the right-wing governments of the Republic. He was promoted to chief of staff, while his success in Asturias hardened his belief in a role for the military in politics, preferably with himself in charge. The event, however, further polarized the left and right wings of Spanish society, both of which were trying to push the shaky new Republic to its limits. One half was calling for violent revolution to undo social injustices, the other half demanding violent authoritarian measures to maintain the status quo. Mutual hatred was growing by the day, and the country was very quickly falling apart, yet the role, if any, for Franco in the coming conflagration was still uncertain.
Then, with the fall of the right-wing governments and the victory of the Popular Front in February 1936, Franco once again found himself in the cold. This time his enemy, Azaña, was prime minister. The close-won election had, if anything, heightened political tensions, and on the night the results came in Franco, still as chief of staff, had come close to backing calls for a coup d’état. Many on the Right were convinced that revolution was around the corner if the centre-left got back in.
Once in power, Azaña had lost little time in sidelining Franco again, on this occasion giving him the post of military governor of the Canary Islands. It got him out of the way, while making contact between him and other potential conspirators that much more difficult.
Franco, however, for all the suspicions surrounding him, did not spend his time in Tenerife plotting the downfall of Azaña’s government, although he did manage to communicate with those who were. He had learned from the mistakes of other coup attempts over the decades that had failed. His Galician caution made him hesitant about making such a move, while his evasiveness meant no one was ever sure quite what he was thinking.
Franco may have been biding his time, but others quickly got down to the business of plotting the overthrow of the government. And they desperately wanted Franco, as one of the most able soldiers of his generation, to join them. General Mola, based in Pamplona, was setting out plans for a take-over of power by the military.
As the plans for the coup progressed, Franco refused to say definitely whether he was with Mola and the others or not, while always making enough positive noises for them to think he was on the brink of throwing in his lot with them. Mola, however, was absolutely relying on him and was already working out how to get Franco from the Canaries to Spanish Morocco, where, as a highly respected founder member of the Legión, he would secure the Protectorate for the uprising and command the army there. Through various contacts and financial backing from wealthy Spaniards abroad, a plane was arranged to fly from England to the Canaries to pick Franco up. This plane was the Dragon Rapide, chartered by Hugh Pollard on the instructions of Luis Bolín, the ABC correspondent in London. It was decided that an English plane would be faster and an English pilot more reliable than their Spanish counterparts.
Pollard decided to take his daughter and her friend along to give more credence to their cover story about the plane being used for nothing more sinister than a hunting jaunt in Morocco. But as they made their way down through France to Portugal and then on to Morocco, Franco, in the Canaries, was having more and more doubts about joining the uprising. On 12 July, the day the Dragon Rapide reached Casablanca, he sent a coded message to Mola reading ‘geografía poco extensa’ – the circumstances for a coup, in Franco’s mind at least, were still not right. But over the next few hours, events were to take place in Madrid that would change his mind.
The news of Calvo Sotelo’s murder by police officers shocked the whole country, not least of all Franco. The event seemed to confirm to the Popular Front’s enemies that the government was unable to control the cycle of violence into which the country had fallen. It was one thing for the authorities to stand by while anarchists burned down churches; quite another for the very forces of law and order to murder a member of parliament in cold blood. It was the trigger Franco needed. ‘We can wait no longer,’ he said on hearing the news. ‘This is the signal.’ All doubts were cast aside and he immediately sent another telegram informing Mola he was on board. It was a momentous decision which would have huge repercussions both for him personally and millions of Spaniards over the course of the next forty years.
But first he had to get from the Canaries to Morocco. On 14 July the Dragon Rapide left Casablanca to begin the secret part of its mission. Leaving Luis Bolín behind, Bebb and Pollard flew southwest, not to Tenerife, but to the island of Gran Canaria, where they landed that afternoon. Franco was being watched and to land on Tenerife would have aroused suspicions. Bebb stayed behind with the plane while Pollard and the two girls caught the ferry to Tenerife, where they were to make contact with Franco via a clinic on the island with the code phrase ‘Galicia saluda a Francia’. This done, Franco had to deal with the difficult question of how to get to Gran Canaria. In order to travel there he would need special permission from the ministry in Madrid. A trip to examine the coastal defences was out of the question as he had done precisely this only a couple of weeks beforehand; a repeat request would only have raised eyebrows and all efforts had to be made to avoid attracting attention. The government had wind of a potential coup, although as yet it was doing precious little to prevent it. On 16 July, however, the perfect excuse presented itself. That morning, the military commander of Gran Canaria, General Balmes, shot himself while out at target practice. It was a bizarre death, as Balmes was regarded as an excellent marksman, but meant that Franco was able to travel to Gran Canaria on the pretext of having to attend the general’s funeral the next day. The coup was due to begin on the eighteenth. There was no time to lose.
No one has yet clarified the mystery surrounding Balmes’s timely demise. Was it really an accident? Did the general commit suicide because he knew what was coming and, as a loyal Republican, felt he could do nothing about it? Or did Franco have him bumped off? The fact is that this was just one of a series of ‘fortunate deaths’ which eased Franco’s rise to power throughout the course of the Civil War. The man seemed to have some sort of evil lucky star supporting him along the way, mercilessly removing people at just the right moment. None of the subsequent convenient deaths (Generals Sanjurjo, Goded and Mola, or the founder of the Falangist party José-Antonio Primo de Rivera, among others) were demonstrably of his doing, despite suspicions to the contrary. So perhaps Balmes’s accident should be seen in the same light, despite the temptation to suspect foul play.
Whatever the reasons for Balmes’s death, Franco was granted permission to attend the funeral and that night, leaving instructions for his supporters about the uprising in Tenerife, he caught the midnight mail-boat over to Puerto de la Luz, Gran Canaria, along with his wife Carmen and their daughter. Pollard was also on the same boat. After spending the next morning presiding over the funeral ceremony, Franco spent the rest of the day in Las Palmas preparing for the coup and drawing up his manifesto. In it he made no mention of the other conspirators, claiming that he was rebelling in order to save the patria, the fatherland, from anarchy. Nothing in the document could pin him down to being either a monarchist or a Republican, while the ambiguous and rather out-of-place French Revolution rallying cry with which he signed off was changed in order from ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ to place ‘fraternity’ first. There was to be little room for ‘liberty’ in the future Spain that Franco had in mind.
Everything was set for 18 July, but on the afternoon of the seventeenth rebel officers in the Spanish Moroccan town of Melilla anticipated the uprising by several hours when the plot was in danger of being discovered. Franco was woken with the news in the middle of the night, and by five o’clock in the morning on the eighteenth he had declared martial law on the island of Gran Canaria. Falangists and right-wing officers quickly joined him and Las Palmas was eventually secured for the rebellion. The rest of the island remained in government hands for some time, but Franco was itching to get to Morocco, where the main action would be. Securing his wife and daughter a passage on a German ship to France, he sailed around the island to where Captain Bebb was waiting for him with the Dragon Rapide at Gando airstrip. Lifted ashore on the shoulders of his men, he took off for Morocco, flying first to Agadir before heading north to Casablanca. Carrying a forged diplomatic passport in one pocket and, it is said, a letter addressed to the prime minister in the other explaining that he was travelling to Madrid to help defend the Republic, Franco changed into civilian clothes during the flight and threw his military identification papers out of the window, anxious in these delicate first hours of the uprising lest he be found out. Disorganized as the rebellion was, not all the garrisons across Spain had come out on the same day, some waiting to see how things developed before committing themselves. In the end the declarations were staggered over the next few days.
At Agadir they had difficulty finding fuel to continue their journey, while at Casablanca, as they were coming in for a night landing, the landing lights suddenly went out. Were the French authorities on to them? Had the coup failed and the Spanish authorities requested Franco’s arrest, or, worse, were they trying to kill him? Bebb managed to land the plane anyway, and discovered that the blackout had been caused by a simple blown fuse.
Franco and Bolín, who had joined him by this point, slept for a few hours in a Casablanca hotel that night. Here Franco famously shaved off his moustache to disguise himself further. A fellow conspirator, General Queipo de Llano, who despised Franco despite being on the same side, later quipped that this was the only sacrifice the future Generalísimo ever made for the rebellion.
The following morning the Dragon Rapide set off again, this time for Tetuán, the capital of the Spanish Protectorate in the north. As soon as they crossed into Spanish airspace Franco put his military uniform back on. Arriving at Tetuán’s Samia Ramel airport, they circled around for a few moments, uncertain as to whether they were about to be greeted by friends or enemies. Finally Franco caught sight of one of his old comrades, whom he knew was with the rebellion, and he called out to Bebb that it was safe to land.4 He had good reason to be cautious. Until a few hours previously, his own cousin, Major Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde, had been trying to secure the airport for the Republic. Outnumbered by the rebels, he had had to surrender, but not before sabotaging the planes at the airfield. He was to pay for it with his life, Franco facilitating the execution of a man who, as a child, had been like a brother to him.
Back on the ground, Franco immediately took charge of the uprising. But the Dragon Rapide’s mission was not over yet. Realizing he was short of military supplies, Franco instructed Bolín to leave immediately to secure more aircraft and bombs from abroad. Bolín set off with Bebb in the Dragon Rapide for Rome, where he would seek an audience with Mussolini.
Meanwhile, in Tetuán, once he’d ensured the support of the local Muslim leaders and visited the barracks of the Legión, where the commander, Colonel Yagüe, gave him a hero’s welcome, Franco began to inform himself about how the rebellion was progressing across the rest of Spain. There had been some important successes: General Mola and his supporters had secured Pamplona and much of the north of the country, apart from a strip running along the coast including the Basque Country. Saragossa and Teruel were also captured. Meanwhile, in the south General Queipo de Llano had given the rebels a foothold in Andalusia by taking Seville. The coup had suffered some major setbacks, though, having failed or at that moment being crushed in the major cities of Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao and Málaga. In Madrid, the rebels had delayed in making their move and were soon to be massacred at their barracks by armed worker militias – fighting forces linked to leftwing parties and trade unions.
As information about how the rebellion was faring came in to Franco, now based at Tetuán, his understanding of the importance of the Spanish Army in Morocco for its future success grew by the minute. The coup had essentially failed to deliver a knockout blow – a civil conflict of some sort was becoming virtually inevitable. Yet the rebel-held territory on the mainland was split in two – with Mola in the north and Queipo with his pocket in the south. The conspirators controlled none of the big industrial areas in Catalonia or the Basque Country, while Spain’s biggest foreign export earner at the time – the rich fruit-and vegetable-growing area around Valencia – was in government hands. The titular head of the rebellion, General Sanjurjo, had been killed when the plane carrying him from Portugal back to Spain crashed on take-off, while the man leading the uprising in Barcelona, General Goded, one of the more able rebel generals, was about to be shot. In the circumstances, the only real asset in the rebels’ hands was Spanish Morocco, home to the best fighters in the armed forces. And with Franco in charge, they were being led by a man with watertight self-belief. ‘Stand firm,’ he telegraphed Mola in those difficult early days, ‘victory certain.’ This latecomer to the uprising was about to take over the whole operation.
The main question, though, was how to get his soldiers across the Strait of Gibraltar to mainland Spain. The navy was largely in government hands, as on most ships the lower decks had mutinied against their largely pro-rebellion superiors once they’d heard about the uprising. These warships were now cruising around the Mediterranean watching for any sign of movement from Morocco. The only solution would be to fly the troops over to Seville. But there were virtually no planes available in the Protectorate. Franco would have to look for help from outside.
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.