Franco. Paul Preston
Known by the name of the village Annual, where it began, the defeat was in fact a rout which took place over a period of three weeks and rolled back the Spanish occupation to Melilla itself. As the Spanish troops fled, enthusiastic tribesmen joined the revolt. Garrison after garrison was slaughtered. The fragility and artificiality of the Spanish protectorate was brutally exposed. All of the gains of the last decade, five thousand square kilometres of barren scrub, won at the cost of huge sums of money and thousands of lives, disappeared in a matter of hours. There would be horrific massacres at outposts near Melilla, Dar Drius, Monte Arruit and Nador. Within a few weeks, nine thousand Spanish soldiers died. The tribesmen were on the outskirts of a panic-stricken Melilla yet, too preoccupied with looting, they failed to capture it, unaware that the town was virtually undefended.93
At that point, reinforcements arrived, among them Franco and his men who reached Melilla on 23 July 1921 and were given orders to defend the town at all costs.94 The Legion was used first to mount an immediate holding operation, then to consolidate the outer defences of Melilla to the south. From their defensive position in the hills outside the town, Franco could observe the siege of the last remnants of the garrison at the village of Nador but his request for permission to take a detachment of volunteers to relieve them was denied. Defeat followed defeat, Nador falling on 2 August and Monte Arruit on 9 August.95 The Legion was sent out piecemeal to strengthen other units in the area, to escort supply columns, to hold the most exposed blockhouses. It was an exhausting task, with officers and men on duty round the clock.96 Through the press and his published diary, the role played by Franco in the defence of Melilla contributed to his conversion into a national hero. In particular, he enhanced his reputation in the relief of the advanced position at Casabona, by unexpectedly using his escort column to attack the besieging Moroccans.97 He had learned from fighting the Moorish tribesmen how, contrary to peninsular field regulations, effective use could be made of ground cover.98
By 17 September 1921, Berenguer was able to order a counter-attack to recoup some of the territory lost. The Legion was once more in the vanguard. On the first day of the offensive, near Nador, Millán Astray was seriously wounded in the chest. He fell to the ground shouting ‘they’ve killed me, they’ve killed me’ then sat up to shout ‘¡Viva el Rey! ¡Viva España! ¡Viva la Legión!’. As stretcher-bearers came to carry him away, he handed over command to Franco.
When the young major and his men entered Nador, they found heaps of the unburied, rotting corpses of their comrades killed six weeks earlier. Franco wrote later that Nador, with the bodies lying in the midst of the scattered booty of the attackers, was ‘an enormous cemetery’.99 In the following weeks, he and his men were used in many similar operations, taking part in the recapture of Monte Arruit on 23 October. He saw no contradiction in the fact that, although he approved of the atrocities committed by his own men, he was appalled by the mutilation of the hundreds of corpses of Spanish soldiers found at Monte Arruit. He and his men left Monte Arruit ‘feeling in our hearts a desire for revenge, for the most exemplary punishment ever seen down the generations’.100 Franco himself recounted that, on one occasion during the campaign, a captain ordered his men to cease firing because their targets were women. One old Legionarie muttered ‘but they are factories for baby Moors’. ‘We all laughed’, wrote Franco in his diary, ‘and we remembered that during the disaster [at Melilla], the women were the most cruel, finishing off the wounded and stripping them of their clothes, in this way paying back the welfare that civilization brought them.’101
On 8 January 1922, Dar Drius fell to Berenguer’s column and much of what had been lost at Annual had been recaptured. Franco was indignant about the fate of Spanish soldiers massacred by the Moors at Dar Drius in 1921 and outraged that the Legion was not permitted to enter the village and take its revenge.102 However, they had their chance a few days later. An incident took place which led the press in Galicia to praise ‘the sang froid, the fearlessness and the contempt for life’ of the ‘beloved Paco Franco’. A blockhouse near Dar Drius was attacked by tribesmen and the defending legionãrios were forced to appeal for help. The Commander of the Spanish forces in the village ordered the entire detachment of the Legion there to go to their aid. Franco said that twelve would be enough and asked for volunteers. When the entire unit stepped forward, he chose twelve and they set off. The attack on the blockhouse was driven off. The next morning Franco and his twelve volunteers returned carrying ‘as trophies the bloody heads of twelve harqueños (tribesmen)’.103
When occasional leave permitted, Franco would visit Carmen Polo in Asturias. On these trips to Oviedo, as an ever more celebrated military hero, he was a welcome guest at the dinner parties of the local aristocracy. His presence was entirely compatible with a reverence for the nobility which would remain constant throughout his life.104 Here, as he socialised, he began to make contacts which would be useful in later life and he also began to make an investment in his public image which suggests the scale of his ambition. The press began to seek him out. In interviews, speeches made at banquets given in his honour and in his publications, he began consciously to project the image of the selfless hero. Shortly after he had taken over command of the Legion from Millán Astray, Franco had received a telegram of congratulations from the Alcalde (mayor) of El Ferrol. In the heat of battle, he found time to make a self-deprecatory reply: ‘The Legion is honoured by your greeting. I merely fulfil my duties as a soldier. An affectionate greeting to the town from the legionarios’.105 It was typical of Franco’s perception of himself at the time as the brave but self-effacing officer who is interested only in his duty. It was an image in which he believed implicitly and also one which he made some effort to project publicly. On leaving an audience with the King in early 1922, he told reporters that the King had embraced him and congratulated him on his success commanding the Tercio during Millán Astray’s absence: ‘What he has been said about me is a bit exaggerated. I merely fulfil my duty. The rank-and-file soldiers are truly valiant. You could go anywhere with them’.106 It would be wrong to say that when Franco spoke in such terms he was merely being cynical. There is little doubt that the young major sincerely saw himself in the Beau Geste terms of his own diary. Nonetheless, his behaviour in interviews and the fact that he published the diary in late 1922, freely giving away copies of it, suggest an awareness of the value of a public presence in the longed-for transition from hero to general.
* Francisco in memory of his paternal grandfather, Hermenegilda in memory of his paternal grandmother and in honour of his godmother, Paulino in honour of his godfather and Teódulo because he was christened on the feast of Saint Teódulo.
† There has been much idle speculation that his family was Jewish, on the basis of his appearance and because both Franco and Bahamonde are common Jewish surnames in Spain.
‡ Indeed, after Franco’s death, there were press revelations concerning Nicolás’s relationship in Manila with a fourteen-year-old girl, Concepción Puey, with whom he was said to have had an illegitimate son, Eugenio Franco Puey, who made himself known to Francisco Franco in 1950 – Opinión, 28 February 1977; Interviu, No. 383, 14–20 September 1983.