The Last Days of the Spanish Republic. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ zone under General Miaja, the commander of the Republican armies of the south and centre. With his chief of staff, General Manuel Matallana Gómez, Miaja was supposed to organize a major offensive westwards into Extremadura and a landing at Motril in Granada. Colonel Casado, commander of the Army of the Centre, was to carry out an advance on the Madrid front at Brunete. All three simply failed to carry out their orders. Many of the officers in the Army of Catalonia were committed Communists like Colonel Antonio Cordón, or had risen through the ranks of the militia like Juan Modesto and Enrique Líster. In contrast, the senior officers of the Army of the Centre were professional officers who had made their careers in Africa. If, like Miaja, they had sought membership of the Communist Party, it was out of convenience rather than conviction.

      The various offensives should have begun on 11 December 1938 but were inexplicably delayed until 5 January 1939, by which time the Francoist drive into Catalonia was virtually unstoppable. The lack of commitment by the southern army commanders was seen in Negrín’s immediate circle as the result of ‘treachery, sabotage and defeatism’.26 The failure to launch the operations owed much to the fact that the chief of operations of the Army of the Centre, Lieutenant Colonel Francisco García Viñals, was a close collaborator of the SIPM. He did everything possible to ensure that the Republican forces in the centre zone remained inactive.27 The landing at Motril never took place. Several commanders, the Communists Enrique Castro Delgado and Juan Modesto Guilloto, the moderate Republican (and anti-Communist) Juan Perea Capulino and the commissar general of the Group of Armies of the Centre (Grupo de Ejércitos Republicanos del Centro), the Communist Jesús Hernández, bitterly criticized Miaja in their respective memoirs. They alleged that Miaja had failed to use the troops at his disposal for the attack in Extremadura, preferring to keep them in defensive positions when he could have exploited the local numerical superiority occasioned by Franco’s concentration on the Catalan campaign.

      Hernández denounced Miaja’s delays in launching the Extremadura offensive. Modesto declared that the decision to disobey Rojo’s orders and simply not launch the attack on Motril was an act of sabotage by Miaja, Matallana and the commander of the Republican navy, Rear Admiral Miguel Buiza Fernández-Palacios. He also alleged that Miaja deliberately exhausted and demoralized the troops at his disposal by long route marches of 150 kilometres to north and south: ‘The delay of the offensive in Extremadura, the unnecessary troop movements, a dozen days of forced marches from north to south, from south to north and again from north to south, as well as exasperating and exhausting the soldiers, provoked insecurity, doubts, indignation and discontent among the troops and their officers.’ When on the verge of success, Miaja inexplicably called a halt, failed to to seize the opportunity to attack Cordoba and thus allowed the Francoists to regroup.

      The third offensive, on the Madrid front at Brunete, was a disaster and Modesto alleged that Casado had allowed his battle plans to be seen by the Francoists. In fact, Burgos had received the plans from more than one source. Casado had assured his staff that the attack would be a walk-over. It was to be a surprise attack, launched against a weak sector of the rebel front, with considerable logistical superiority. In fact, Casado failed to attack at the point that Rojo had chosen. Instead, he launched the Army of the Centre against a well-fortified – and well-informed – sector and thereby guaranteed the failure of the operation. Edmundo Domínguez Aragonés, the recently appointed commissar inspector of the Army of the Centre, who followed the operation from Casado’s headquarters, was appalled when he went ahead even after it became obvious that the enemy was expecting it. Casado knowingly sent hundreds of men to certain death against positions well defended with banks of machine guns. Modesto dubbed the calamitous Brunete offensive ‘the ante-room to the Casado uprising’, an operation that deliberately set out to weaken the best units of the Republic. Franco’s own staff was in any case fully informed of most of the Republic’s military plans in the last six months of the war.28

      The accusations made by Modesto, Castro Delgado, Hernández and Perea were seen to have considerable substance when General Matallana was court-martialled after the Civil War. Before the trial took place, Palmiro Togliatti, the Comintern delegate and the effective leader of the PCE, wrote that, in 1937, Matallana ‘had been suspected of contacts with the enemy but nothing concrete was ever proven’.29 In fact, he had many contacts with the Fifth Column, including with the Organización Antonio, confiding in Captain López Palazón his hatred of reds and his distress that the beginning of the war had found him in Republican Madrid. He had also used the funds of the general staff to support pro-Franco officers who were in hiding.30 At his trial, Matallana asserted that he had been serving the rebels since early in the war, passing information to the Fifth Column through his brother Alberto about the strength of the International Brigades, the residences of Russian pilots, the location in Albacete where tanks were assembled and the times of the arrival in Cartagena of ships carrying war matériel. Regarding the latter period of the war, he claimed to have sabotaged numerous operations including the Brunete offensive and facilitated rebel operations by failing to send reinforcements. His advice to Miaja was always to stabilize the fronts and to avoid attacks. At his trial, he said that in the archives of the Republican forces there were many projects that he had managed to get postponed indefinitely on different pretexts. He ensured that the various general staffs to which he had belonged never produced battle plans or directives on their own initiative. During the battle of the Ebro, he had placed obstacles in the way of requests for diversionary attacks in the centre zone.

      To this end, he said, with the help of his second-in-command Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Garijo Hernández and the head of his own general staff Lieutenant Colonel Félix Muedra Miñón, he controlled the easily manipulated Miaja. By dint of flattery and by encouraging his desire for the limelight, they gained his confidence. They exploited his festering envy of Rojo and fomented rumblings of discontent. Taking advantage of Miaja’s resentments, they managed to delay the fulfilment of orders from Rojo. Matallana later claimed that, to undermine offensives, he ensured that troops were moved by rail instead of with trucks since the railway was slow and had limited capacity. The consequent delays allowed the Francoists to work out the Republican battle plans. Moreover, the removal of trains from civilian use led to the collapse of the food-distribution network and provoked demonstrations by women protesting about lack of food. Negrín was obliged to intervene to guarantee supplies and to reconcile the needs of the capital with military requirements.31

      There was a vast distance between the reputation of Miaja as the heroic saviour of Madrid assiduously fabricated by Republican propaganda to boost popular morale and the reality. Miaja was a fairly mediocre soldier who was always averse to taking risks. According to the Francoists Antonio Bouthelier and José López Mora, he was ‘grotesque, sensual and bloated, always completely oblivious to what was going on around him’. Togliatti wrote later of Miaja that he was ‘totally brutalized by drink and drugs’.32

      Having received huge deliveries of German and Italian war matériel, Franco was poised for a major assault on Catalonia. Yet, in order to do so, he had left his southern fronts relatively undefended. Herbert Matthews, the extremely well-informed correspondent of the New York Times, who was close to Negrín, wrote later: ‘Naturally, we thought that the Madrid zone would save the day. Miaja, by that time, was approaching a breakdown, from accounts that I received afterwards. He was drinking too much and had lost what nerve he had once possessed. The picture of the loyal, dogged, courageous defender of the Republic – a picture built up from the first days of the siege of Madrid – was a myth. He was weak, unintelligent, unprincipled, and, in that period, his courage could seriously be questioned.’33 The reasonable hopes of both Negrín and the head of the army general staff, Vicente Rojo, were to be dashed by the failures, if not outright treachery, of the commanders in the centre zone – Miaja, Matallana and Casado.

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