Observer, 28 November 1943
The titles of both of these books are symptomatic of the fact that we know very little of what has been happening in Spain since the end of the Civil War. There have been hunger and pestilence, great numbers of people are in gaol, and the régime has been markedly friendly to the Axis – that is about as far as common knowledge extends. Opinions on anything else are likely to be coloured by the political sympathies of the writer, and one must keep it in mind that Mr. Dundas is vigorously pro-Republic, while Professor Peers should rather be described as mildly and regretfully pro-Franco.
Professor Peers devotes part of his book to the Civil War, but his best chapters are those dealing with the last four years. He considers that the Franco regime for a while enjoyed majority support, that its political persecutions have probably been exaggerated, and that it has not in fact given much solid aid to the Nazis. He does not, however, believe that it will last much longer, and though he himself hopes for some kind of Liberal monarchist régime, he thinks that a swing to the extreme Left is not impossible.
It is noticeable that Professor Peers seems surprised as well as pained that the ‘non-belligerent’ Spanish Government has been so consistently unfriendly to ourselves. He lists the endless provocations, and the inspired campaigns of libel in the Spanish Press, as though these in some way contradicted Franco’s earlier record. But, in fact, there was never very much doubt as to where the sympathies of Franco and his more influential followers lay, and the time when it might have been useful to point out that Franco was the friend of our enemies was in 1936. At that time Professor Peers did nothing of the kind. No one would accuse him of falsifying facts, but the tone of the books he was then writing did, there is little doubt, tend to make the Nationalist cause more respectable in British eyes. In so far as books influence events, Professor Peers must be held to have done something towards establishing Franco’s régime, and he ought not now to be astonished because Franco has behaved in very much the manner that every supporter of the Republic foretold at the time.1
Mr. Dundas’s book is written round the speculative but interesting thesis that a quite different kind of rebellion – a Conservative but not Fascist rebellion – had been planned in the beginning, and that events only took the course they did because of Sanjurjo’s2 death and because the Nationalists, having failed in their first coup, had to apply for help to the Germans and Italians, who imposed their own terms. The importance of this is that the régime which has actually been set up is, as Mr. Dundas says, ‘not Spanish’. It is a régime modelled on foreign lines and intolerable from the point of view of an ordinary Spaniard, even an aristocrat; it might therefore turn out to be brittle in a moment of emergency. The book contains some interesting details about Civil War events in Majorca. But Mr. Dundas is surely wrong in suggesting that Franco will fight for the Axis if the Allies invade Europe. Fidelity is not the strong point of the minor dictators.
1. Also in 1943, under the name of Bruce Truscot, Professor Peers published Redbrick University. This included ‘The Nature and Aims of a Modern University’, which proved influential in post-war British university development. A more modest publication, under the name E. Allison Peers, was A Skeleton Spanish Grammar (1917). See also p. 259, n. 4.
2. General José Sanjurjo Sacanell (1872–1936), a Nationalist (as was Franco), led a coup against the government of the Second Spanish Republic in August 1932. This failed; he was captured, tried, sentenced, then, in 1934, reprieved. He was killed when a plane sent to bring him from Lisbon to Burgos crashed on take-off. Sabotage was suspected, but the cause was more mundane. The plane, a small Puss Moth, was overloaded because Sanjurjo ‘insisted on taking with him a heavy suitcase, which contained a full-dress uniform for his use as head of the new Spanish State’. The plane, which had been diverted by the Portuguese authorities to a small outlying airfield, failed to clear the surrounding pine trees. The pilot was injured but thrown clear; Sanjurjo was burned to death, a ‘victim of conformity rather than sabotage’ (Thomas, 254).