Franco. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ at the Italians’ humiliation. Italian fascist songs were sung in the Nationalist trenches with their words changed to ridicule the retreat. Nationalist officers at the headquarters of General Monasterio’s cavalry in Valdemoro, including Monasterio himself and Franco’s friend, the artillery officer Luis Alarcón de la Lastra, had toasted ‘Spanish heroism of whatever colour it might be’. Yagüe made no secret of the fact that he was delighted to see the arrogant Italians brought down a peg or two.³¹ Cantalupo advised Farinacci, who was still in Spain, that he ought not to risk returning to Salamanca.³²

      Roatta maintained thereafter that the ultimate defeat was fundamentally the consequence of Franco’s failure to keep his word.³³ That view underestimates the ferocity of Republican resistance, the role played by the weather, the poor fitness, discipline, training and morale of the Italian troops and his own mistakes. Nonetheless, if the promised attack had materialised, the Republic would have been hard pressed to mount a defence and the outcome might have been very different. Significantly, Franco was anything but abashed by the defeat. On 23 March, talking to Colonel Fernando Gelich Conte, one of the Italian staff officers attached to his headquarters, he brushed it off as militarily irrelevant.³⁴ In fact, there is every reason to suppose that he was not displeased by the huge cost to the Republic of its victory in such a crippling confrontation in which the corresponding cost to the Nationalists had been borne by the Italians.

      It has been suggested that Franco connived at the humiliation of the Italians.³⁵ That is an over-simplification since he was too cautious to risk a defeat whose consequences could not be foreseen. It is more likely that, in his desire to let the CTV confront and wear down the Republican forces around Madrid, he miscalculated the risks of not throwing his promised forces into battle. He had little desire to see the Italians win a sweeping and rapid victory when his own plans focused on a war sufficiently slow to permit thorough-going political purges.³⁶ It is significant that, a month before the defeat, Cantalupo reported to Rome that Mola and Queipo had insinuated to Franco that his prestige diminished in inverse proportion to the success of Italian arms.³⁷

      Franco clearly felt that he was obliged to justify himself to the Duce. Accordingly, he wrote to Mussolini on 19 March a letter of self-exoneration containing a number of feeble and contradictory arguments. These ranged from alleging confusion over the dates for the launching of the Guadalajara offensive to an effort to diminish the gravity of the missing Jarama push by claiming that the Republican forces which had faced the CTV were dramatically smaller than, in reality, they had been.³⁸ He also sent a messenger to Cantalupo with an equally mendacious claim that, in fulfilment of the agreement reached with Roatta, he had ordered advances by Orgaz on 25 February and 1 March. According to this emissary, by the time of the 8 March advance on Guadalara, Orgaz had allegedly lost more than one third of his men and was unable to attack further. That had indeed been true two weeks earlier which is why Franco had importuned Faldella on 21 February to begin the Guadalajara offensive prematurely. If Orgaz’s troops were so depleted, it would imply at best an irresponsible lack of co-ordination between Franco and Roatta and at worst culpable military incompetence on Franco’s part in permitting the Guadalajara advance to take place in such circumstances. To make matters worse, in an interview with Cantalupo on 23 March, in an even more crass exercise of self-justification, Franco blamed everything on Orgaz for not speaking up about the weakness of his forces. But it was precisely because Franco had told Roatta about that weakness that the Italian commander had sent the second mixed brigade to reinforce Orgaz’s troops on 4 March.³⁹

      The inescapable conclusion is that Franco sought to let the Italians bear the brunt of the fighting at Guadalajara while Orgaz’s forces regrouped after the battering they had received during the battle of Jarama. The only possible mitigation is that he did so in the post-Málaga misapprehension that the Black Shirts were near-invincible. Whatever Franco’s thoughts, Mussolini could see that he had been used but he had little choice but to continue supporting Franco. Guadalajara had smashed the myth of fascist invincibility and Mussolini found himself committed to Franco until the myth was rebuilt. Equally, however galling, it was now clear that it made more sense to work with Franco for a Nationalist victory than independently.⁴⁰ Shortly after his letter of exculpation, Franco had requested help for a huge assault on Bilbao. Ignoring remarks made by Roatta about the miraculous appearance of the necessary forces for Bilbao which had never materialized during the battle of Guadalajara, Mussolini ordered his commander henceforth to obey the instructions and directives of Franco. Italian forces would henceforth be distributed in Spanish units and subject to the command of Franco’s generals. When Cantalupo informed him of this on 28 March, Franco was delighted. The Italian Ambassador found him as if ‘freed of a nightmare’. Franco asked him to inform the Duce of his ‘joy at being understood and appreciated’.^*

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