Franco. Paul Preston
everything in terms of the fulfilment of their duty … you know how much you are loved and appreciated by your most affectionate friend who embraces you – Alfonso XIII.’43
After entering Xauen, the triumphant Abd el Krim had celebrated his hegemony by capturing El Raisuni. He then made a colossal mistake. At precisely the moment that the French were moving into the noman’s-land between the two protectorates, his long-term ambition of creating a more or less socialist republic led him to try to overthrow the Sultan, who was the instrument of French colonial rule. Taking on the French, initially he defeated them. His advance skirmishers came within twenty miles of Fez. This led to an agreement in June 1925 between Primo de Rivera and the French commander in Africa, Philippe Pétain, for a combined operation. The plan was for a substantial French force of one hundred and sixty thousand colonial troops to attack from the south while seventy-five thousand Spanish soldiers moved down from the north. The Spanish contingent was to land at Alhucemas under the overall command of General Sanjurjo. Franco was in command of the first party of troops to go ashore and had responsibility for establishing a bridgehead.
There was no effort at secrecy either in the planning or on the night of 7 September, when Spanish ships arrived in the bay with lights ablaze and the troops singing. As a result of poor reconnaissance, the landing took place on a beach where the landing craft hit shoals and sand-banks too far out for tanks to be disembarked. Moreover, the water was at a depth of over one and a half metres and many of the Legionaires could not swim. Their attack was awaited by rows of entrenched Moors who immediately began to fire. The naval officer in charge of the landing craft radioed the fleet where the High Command awaited news. In view of his signal, the vessels were ordered to withdraw. Franco decided that a retreat at that point would shatter the morale of his men and boost that of the Moorish defenders. Accordingly, he countermanded the order and told his bugler to sound the attack. His Legionaires jumped overboard, waded to the shore and succeeded in establishing the bridgehead. Franco was later called before his superiors to explain himself which he did by reference to military regulations which granted officers a degree of initiative under fire.44
The entire operation was a condemnation of the appalling organization of the Spanish Army and poor planning by Sanjurjo. After the bridgehead was established there was insufficient food and ammunition to permit an advance. There was extremely poor ship-to-shore communication and very limited artillery support. Two weeks passed before the order was given to move beyond the bridgehead. Then the advance was subject to the mortar batteries placed by Abd el Krim. In part because of the tenacity of Franco himself, the Spanish attack continued. However, with the French moving up from the south, it was only a matter of time before Abd el Krim surrendered. On 26 May 1926, he gave himself up to the French authorities.45 The resistance of the Rif and Jibala tribes collapsed.
Franco produced a vividly, if somewhat romantically, written diary of his participation in the landing, entitled Diario de Albucemas. It was published over four months from September to December 1925 in the Revista de Tropas Coloniales and again in 1970 in a version which he himself censored.46 Referring to an attack on a hill which took place in the first hours after the landing, he wrote in 1925 ‘those defenders who are too tenacious are put to the knife’ changing it in 1970 to ‘those defenders who are too tenacious fell beneath our fire’. Even after editing the text in 1970, Franco left in phrases reminiscent of the adventure stories of his youth. Men were not shot but ‘scythed down by enemy lead’. ‘Fate has snatched away from us the flower of our officers. Our time has come. Tomorrow we will avenge them!’47 Years later, he told his doctor that, during the Alhucemas campaign, a deserter from the Legion was brought in and, with no hesitation other than the time taken to confirm his identity, he ordered a firing squad to be formed and the man shot.48
On 3 February 1926, Franco was promoted to Brigadier General, which made the front page of the newspapers in Galicia.49 At the age of 33, he was the youngest general in Europe, and was finally obliged by his seniority to leave the Legion. On being promoted, Franco’s service record had the following added: ‘He is a positive national asset and surely the country and the Army will derive great benefit from making use of his remarkable aptitudes in higher positions’.50 He was given command of the most important brigade in the Army, the First Brigade of the First Division in Madrid, composed of two aristocratic regiments, the Regimiento del Rey and the Regimiento de León*.
On returning to Spain, Franco brought with him a political baggage acquired in Africa which he would carry through the rest of his life. In Morocco, Franco had come to associate government and administration with the endless intimidation of the ruled. There was an element too of the patronizing superiority which underlay much colonial government, the idea that the colonised were like children who needed a firm paternal hand. He would effortlessly transfer his colonial attitudes to domestic politics. Since the Spanish Left was pacifist and hostile to the great adventure in Morocco, associated in his mind with social disorder and regional separatism, he considered leftists to be as dire an enemy as rebellious tribesmen.51 He regarded the poisonous ideas of the Left as acts of mutiny to be eradicated by iron discipline which, when it came to governing an entire population, meant repression and terror. The paternal element would later be central to his own perception of his rule over Spain as a strong and benevolent father figure.
In Africa, Franco had also learned many of the strategems and devices which were to be his political hallmark after 1936. He had observed that political success came from a cunning game of divide and rule among the tribal chiefs. That is what the Sultan did; it was what the better Spanish High Commissioners aspired to do. At a lower level, local garrison commanders had to do something similar. Astute, greedy, envious and resentful chieftains were played off against one another in a shifting game of alliances, betrayals and lightning strikes. His assimilation of such skills would permit him to run rings around his political enemies, rivals and collaborators inside Spain from 1936 until well into the 1960s. Although he acquired such skills, he had never developed any serious interest in the Moroccans. Like most colonial officers, Franco did not learn more than a smattering of the language of those he fought and ruled. Later in life, he would also fail in his attempts to learn English. Absorbed in military matters, he could never muster much interest in other cultures and languages.52
On the day on which his promotion to general was announced, Franco’s success had been somewhat overshadowed by the spectacular national newspaper coverage given to his brother Ramón. Major Ramón Franco was crossing the South Atlantic with Captain Julio Ruiz de Alda, one of the future founders of the Falange, in the Plus Ultra, a Dornier DoJ Wal flying boat.53 The regime and the press was treating Ramón as a modern Christopher Columbus. A committee was set up in El Ferrol to organize various tributes to the two brothers, including the unveiling of a plaque on the wall of the house in which they had been born. It read ‘In this house were born the brothers Francisco and Ramón Franco Baamonde, valiant soldiers who, at the head of the Tercio of Africa and crossing the Atlantic in the seaplane ‘Plus Ultra’, carried out heroic deeds which constitute glorious pages of the nation’s history. The town of El Ferrol is honoured by such brilliant sons to whom it dedicates this tribute of admiration and affection.’54
Franco took up his important post in Madrid in time to admire the achievements of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. What the officer corps perceived as regional separatism had been suppressed and labour unrest dramatically diminished. Anarchist and Communist unions had been suppressed while the Socialist union, the Unión General de Trabajadores, was given