Franco. Paul Preston
He admired him and Franco had specific knowledge of Asturias, its geography, communications and military organization. He had been stationed there, had taken part in the suppression of the general strike of 1917 and had been a regular visitor since marrying Carmen. Nevertheless, the particularly harsh manner in which Franco directed the repression from Madrid gave a stamp to the events in Asturias which they might not have had if control had been left to the permanent staff of the Ministry.
The idea that a soldier should exercise such responsibilities came naturally to Franco. It harked back to the central ideas on the role of the military in politics which he had absorbed during his years as a cadet in the Toledo Academy. It was a step back in the direction of the golden years of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. He took for granted the implicit recognition of his personal capacity and standing. All in all, it was to be a profoundly formative experience for him, deepening his messianic conviction that he was born to rule. He would try unsuccessfully to repeat it after the Popular Front election victory in February 1936 before doing so definitively in the course of the Civil War.
Hidalgo’s decision to use Franco derived also from his distrust, fuelled by Gil Robles, of both General Masquelet and other liberal officers in the Ministry of War who had been close to Azaña.31 At the time, the unusual appointment provoked criticisms from the under-secretary of the Ministry of War, General Luis Castelló.32 Franco’s approach to the events of Asturias was coloured by his conviction, fed by the material he received from the Entente Anticomuniste of Geneva, that the workers’ uprising had been ‘deliberately prepared by the agents of Moscow’ and that the Socialists ‘with technical instructions from the Communists, thought they were going to be able to install a dictatorship’.33 That belief no doubt made it easier to use troops against Spanish civilians as if they were a foreign enemy.
In the telegraph room of the Ministry of War, Franco set up a small command unit consisting of himself, his cousin Pacón and two naval officers, Captain Francisco Moreno Fernández and Lieutenant-Commander Pablo Ruiz Marset. Having no official status, they worked in civilian clothes. For two weeks, they controlled the movement of the troops, ships and trains to be used in the operation of crushing the revolution. Franco even directed the naval artillery bombardments of the coast, using his telephone in Madrid as a link between the cruiser Libertad and the land forces in Gijón.34 Uninhibited by the humanitarian considerations which made some of the more liberal senior officers hesitate to use the full weight of the armed forces against civilians, Franco regarded the problem before him with icy ruthlessness.
The rightist values to which he was devoted had as their central symbol the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. Yet, doubting the readiness of working class conscripts to fire on Spanish workers, and anxious not to encourage the spread of revolution by weakening garrisons elsewhere in the mainland, Franco had no qualms about shipping Moorish mercenaries to fight in Asturias, the only part of Spain where the crescent had never flown. There was no contradiction for him in using the Moors in the simple sense that he regarded left-wing workers with the same racialist contempt with which he had the tribesmen of the Rif. ‘This is a frontier war’, he commented to a journalist, ‘against socialism, Communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism’.35 Two banderas of the Legion and two tabores of Regulares were sent to Asturias with unusual speed and efficiency.
When it became known that one of the officers in charge of the troops coming from Africa, Lieutenant-Colonel López Bravo, had expressed doubts as to whether they would fire on civilians, Franco recommended his immediate replacement. He placed his Academy contemporary and close friend Colonel Juan Yagüe in overall charge of the African troops. He also ordered the removal of the commander of the León Air Force base, his cousin and childhood friend, Major Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde, because he suspected that he sympathized with the miners and was ordering his pilots not to fire on the strikers in Oviedo. Almost immediately, Franco ordered the bombing and shelling of the working class districts of the mining towns. Some of the more liberal generals regarded such orders as excessively brutal.36
The losses among women and children, along with the atrocities committed by Yagüe’s Moroccan units, contributed to the demoralization of the virtually unarmed revolutionaries. Yagüe sent an emissary to Madrid to complain to both Franco and Gil Robles about the humanitarian treatment given by López Ochoa to the miners. López Ochoa’s pact with the miners’ leader Belarmino Tomás permitted an orderly and bloodless surrender and so provoked Franco’s suspicions.37 In contrast, Franco showed total confidence in Yagüe during the active hostilities, in the course of which a savage repression was carried out by the African troops. When Gijón and Oviedo were recaptured by government troops, summary executions of workers were carried out.38
Thereafter, Franco also put his stamp on the political mopping up. After the miners surrendered, Hidalgo and Franco regarded their task as unfinished until all those involved had been arrested and punished. After Hidalgo ‘took advice’, presumably Franco’s, the police operations were entrusted to the notoriously violent Civil Guard Major Lisardo Doval who was appointed on 1 November ‘delegate of the Ministry of War for public order in the provinces of Asturias and León’. Doval was widely considered an expert on left-wing subversion in Asturias. His fame as a crusader against the Left had made him immensely popular among the upper and middle classes of the region. He was given special powers to by-pass any judicial control or other legal obstacles to his activities. As Franco knew he would, Doval carried out his task with a relish for brutality which provoked horror in the international press. It has been suggested that Franco was unaware of either Doval’s methods or his reputation as a torturer.39 This is unlikely given that they had coincided as boys in El Ferrol, in the Infantry Academy at Toledo and in Asturias in 1917.
The right-wing press presented Franco, rather than López Ochoa, as the real victor over the revolutionaries and as the mastermind behind such a rapid success. Diego Hidalgo was unstinting in his praise for Franco’s value, military expertise and loyalty to the Republic and the rightist press began to refer to him as the ‘Saviour of the Republic’.40 In fact, Franco’s handling of the crisis had been decisive and efficient but hardly brilliant. His tactics, however, were interesting in that they prefigured his methods during the Civil War. They had consisted essentially of building up local superiority to suffocate the enemy and, as the use of Yagüe and Doval indicated, sowing terror within the enemy ranks.41
After the victory over the Asturian rebels, Lerroux and Gil Robles agonized over the issue of death penalties for the revolutionaries in Asturias and the officers who had defended the short-lived Catalan Republic. The trials which would make most impact on Franco were those involving charges of military rebellion. On 12 October 1934, the officers who had supported the rebellion in Catalonia had been tried and sentenced to death. Sergeant Diego Vázquez, who had deserted to join the strikers in Asturias, was tried and sentenced to death on 3 January 1935.42 The bulk of the Right howled for vengeance but Alcalá Zamora favoured clemency and Lerroux was inclined to agree. Many on the Right wanted Gil Robles to withdraw CEDA support for the government if the death sentences were not carried out. He refused for fear of Alcalá Zamora giving power to a more liberal cabinet.
Franco, always rigidly in favour of the severest penalties for mutiny and of the strictest application of military justice, believed that Gil Robles was totally mistaken. He told the Italian Chargé d’Affaires, Geisser Celesia, ‘The victory is ours and not to apply exemplary punishments to the rebels, not to castigate energetically those who have encouraged the revolution and have caused so many casualties among the troops, would