Franco. Paul Preston
Franco remained intensely private. He was abundantly imbued with the inscrutable pragmatism or retranca of the gallego peasant. Whether that was because of his origins as a native of Galicia, or the fruit of his Moroccan experiences is impossible to say. Whatever its roots in Franco, retranca may be defined as an evasion of commitment and a taste for the imprecise. It is said that if you meet a gallego on a staircase, it is impossible to deduce if he is going up or down. Franco perhaps embodied that characteristic more than most gallegos. When those close to him tried to get hints about forthcoming ministerial changes, they were rebuffed with skill: ‘People are saying that in the next reshuffle of civil governors so-and-so will go to Province X’, tries the friend; ‘Really?’ replies the sinuous Franco, ‘I’ve heard nothing’. ‘It’s being said that Y and Z are going to be ministers’, ventures his sister. ‘Well’, replies her brother, ‘I haven’t met either of them’.8
The monarchist aviator Juan Antonio Ansaldo wrote of him ‘Franco is a man who says things and unsays them, who draws near and slips away, he vanishes and trickles away; always vague and never clear or categoric’.9 John Whitaker met him during the Civil War: ‘He was effusively flattering, but he did not give a frank answer to any question I put to him. A less straightforward man I never met.’10
Mussolini’s Ambassador Roberto Cantalupo met him some months later and found Franco to be ‘icy, feminine and elusive [sfuggente]’.11 The day after first meeting Franco in 1930, the poet and noted wit José María Pemán was introduced by a friend as ‘the man who speaks best in all Spain’ and remarked ‘I think I’ve just met the man who keeps quiet best in all Spain’ (‘Tengo la sospecha de baber conocido al bombre que mejor se calla en España’).12
In his detailed chronicles of their almost daily contact during more than seventy years of friendship, his devoted cousin and aide-de-camp, Francisco Franco Salgado-Araujo, ‘Pacón’, presents a Franco who issued instructions, recounted his version of events or explained how the world was threatened by freemasonry and Communism. Pacón never saw a Franco open to fruitful dialogue or to creative self-doubt. Another lifelong friend, Admiral Pedro Nieto Antúnez, presented a similar picture. Born, like Franco, in El Ferrol, ‘Pedrolo’ was to be successively ADC to the Caudillo in 1946, Assistant Head of the Casa Civil in 1950, and Minister for the Navy in 1962. He was one of Franco’s constant companions on the frequent and lengthy fishing trips on his yacht, the Azor. When asked what they talked about during the long days together, ‘Pedrolo’ said ‘I have never had a dialogue with the General. I have heard very long monologues from him, but he wasn’t speaking to me but to himself’.13
The Caudillo remains an enigma. Because of the distance that Franco so assiduously built around himself through deliberate obfuscations and silences, we can be sure only of his actions, and, provided they are judiciously evaluated, of the opinions and accounts of those who worked with him. This book is an attempt to observe him more accurately and in more detail than ever before. Unlike many books on Franco, it is not a history of twentieth-century Spain nor an analysis of every aspect of the dictatorship, but rather a close study of the man. Through memoirs and interviews, his collaborators have provided ample material and there are copious despatches by foreign diplomats who dealt with him face-to-face and reported on his activities. Franco’s own writings, his speeches – in which he often held a kind of dialogue with himself – and his recently published papers also constitute a rich, if not easy, source for the biographer. They are the instrument of his own obfuscations but they also provide remarkable insight into his own self-perception.
By use of these sources, it is possible to follow Franco closely as he became successively a conspirator, Generalísimo of the military rebels of 1936 and Caudillo of the victorious Nationalists. Several myths do not survive a comprehensive investigation of his survival of the Second World War and the Cold War and of his devious dealings with Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower. Equally striking is the picture which emerges of his passage from the active dictator of the 1950s to the somnolent figurehead of his last days. By following him step by step and day by day, a more accurate and convincing picture can emerge than has hitherto been current. Indeed, only by such an exhaustive examination can the enigma of the elusive Franco begin to be resolved.
I
THE MAKING OF A HERO
1892–1922
FRANCISCO FRANCO BAHAMONDE was born at 12.30 a.m. on 4 December 1892 in the calle Frutos Saavedra 108, known locally as the calle María, in El Ferrol in the remote north-western region of Galicia. He was christened Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo on 17 December in the nearby military parish church of San Francisco.*
At the time, El Ferrol, an inward-looking and still walled town, was a small naval base with a population of twenty thousand. The Franco family had lived there since the early eighteenth century and had a tradition of work in the intendencia naval (pay corps/administration).†1 Franco’s grandfather, Francisco Franco Vietti, was Intendente Ordenador de la Marina (naval paymaster) with a rank equivalent to brigadier general in the Army. He had married Hermenegilda Salgado-Araujo, with whom he had two children. The first, Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo, the father of the future Caudillo, was born on 22 November 1855, his sister Hermenegilda on 1 December 1856.
Nicolás followed his father into the administrative branch of the Spanish navy in which, after fifty years service, he rose to be Intendente-General, a rank also equivalent to brigadier general. As a young man, stationed first in Cuba then in the Philippines, Nicolás acquired a reputation for fast living.‡ On 24 May 1890, when he was nearly thirty-five, Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo married the twenty-four year-old María del Pilar Bahamonde y Pardo de Andrade in the Church of San Francisco in El Ferrol. She was the pious daughter of Ladislao Bahamonde Ortega, commissar of naval equipment at the port. The union of this free-thinking bon viveur with the conservative, moralistic Pilar was not a success. Nevertheless, they had five children, of whom Nicolás was the first, Francisco the second, followed by Paz, Pilar and Ramón.*2
Franco’s family had been concerned for over a century with the administration of the naval base in El Ferrol. When Franco was born, the town was remote and isolated, separated from La Coruña by a twelve-mile steamer journey to the south across the bay or by forty miles of poor, and in bad weather, often impassable, road. La Coruña was in turn 375 miles, or two days by bone-shaking railway, from Madrid. El Ferrol was hardly a cosmopolitan place. It was a town of rigid social hierarchies in which the privileged caste consisted of naval officers and their families. Naval administrators or merchant navy officers were considered to be of a lower category. Social barriers cut the lower middle-class Franco family off from ‘proper’ naval officers since the administration corps was regarded as inferior to the sea-going Navy, or Cuerpo General. The idea of a heroic family naval tradition, so carefully nurtured by Franco himself in later life, was an aspiration rather than a reality. That can be perceived in Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo’s determination that his sons become ‘real’ naval officers.
Partly because a naval commission was a common ambition among the Ferrolano middle class and because of his father’s job, Francisco developed an interest in things of the sea. As a child he played pirates in the harbour with the gangplanks of the ferries and rowed in the tranquil waters of the virtually