Franco. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ this came to be so is almost inextricably complicated. Morocco was ruled by a Sultan who had to impose by terror his authority and his tax-collection system on the other tribal leaders. In the early years of the century, tribal leaders rebelled against the dissolute Sultan Abd el Aziz. In the general upheaval, two major revolts took place. The first was that of Bu Hamara in the lands between Fez and the Algerian border. The more important was that of El Raisuni, a vicious cattle rustler and tribal leader, in the Jibala mountains of the north-west. In the context of the still incomplete scramble for Africa, it was a situation that attracted the great powers.

      For many years, Britain had maintained influence in Morocco to guarantee safe passage through the Straits of Gibraltar. However, since the humiliating debacle of the Fashoda incident in 1898 which had blocked their Egyptian ambitions, the French had been seeking to consolidate their empire to the west. They were anxious to find a way to take over the Moroccan Sultanate which was the obvious gap in an imperial chain from Equatorial Africa to Tunisia. By 1903, Britain, weakened by the Boer War, was apprehensive of the rise of Germany and open to a French Alliance. Unable in any case to prevent a French take-over, the British wanted above all to safeguard Gibraltar. In April 1904, in the Anglo-French Agreement, Britain consented to French ambitions in Morocco provided that the area opposite Gibraltar be in weaker, Spanish, hands.⁴⁴

      It was left to the French to square things with the Spanish. In October 1904, the French granted northern Morocco to Spain. Tangier was given international status. Using the pretext of tribal disorders, the French then took over Morocco by instalments. By 1912, a formal French Protectorate was established. In November 1912, France signed an entente with Spain giving her a similar protectorate in the north. Subsequent political arrangements meant that the Sultan maintained nominal political control of all of Morocco under French tutelage. However, in the Spanish zone, local authority was vested in the Sultan’s representative, known as the Khalifa, who was selected by the Sultan from a short-list of two names drawn up by Madrid.

      It was a situation fraught with difficulties. The Moroccans never accepted the arrangement, which they found deeply humiliating, and they fought it until they regained their independence in 1956. Spain’s long-standing military enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, had to communicate by sea. The recently acquired Protectorate of the interior was a roadless, infertile mountain wilderness. Moreover, because it ignored crucial tribal boundaries, the French gift to Spain was almost impossible to police. Thus, the Spaniards were to be involved in a ruinously expensive and virtually pointless war.⁴⁵ They did not enjoy the technological and logistical superiority which characterised other imperial adventures of the time. Curiously, Spain’s officers in general, and Franco in particular, nurtured two myths. The first was that Moroccans loved them; the second that the French had stood in the way of a Spanish Moroccan empire.

      At the time of Franco’s arrival on African soil, the initiative in Spain’s Moroccan war lay with the Berber tribesmen who inhabited the two barren mountain regions of the Jibala to the west and the Rif. Battle-hardened, ruthless in the defence of their lands, familiar with the terrain, they were the opposite of the poorly trained and totally unmotivated Spanish conscripts who faced them. Franco claimed years later that he spent his first night in the field sleepless, with a pistol in his hand, out of distrust of his own men.⁴⁶ The recently arrived Franco was a small part of a series of military operations aimed at building a defensive chain of blockhouses and forts between the larger towns. That this was the Spanish tactic showed that nothing had been learned from the Cuban War where similar procedures had been adopted. Officers felt considerable resentment at the contradictory orders to advance or retreat emanating from the Madrid government.

      After the insecurities of his childhood, the great formative experience of Franco’s life was his time as a colonial officer in Africa. The Army provided him with a framework of certainties based on hierarchy and command. He revelled in the discipline and happily lost himself in a military machine built on obedience and a shared rhetoric of patriotism and honour. Having arrived in Morocco in 1912, he spent ten and a half of the next fourteen years there. As he told the journalist Manuel Aznar in 1938, ‘My years in Africa live within me with indescribable force. There was born the possibility of rescuing a great Spain. There was founded the idea which today redeems us. Without Africa, I can scarcely explain myself to myself, nor can I explain myself properly to my comrades in arms.’⁴⁷ In Africa, he acquired the central beliefs of his political life: the Army’s role as the arbiter of Spain’s political destiny and, most importantly of all, his own right to command. He was always to see political authority in terms of military hierarchy, obedience and discipline, referring to it always as el mando.

      As a young second lieutenant, Franco immediately threw himself into his duties, soon demonstrating the cold-blooded bravery born of his ambition. On 13 June 1912 he was confirmed as first lieutenant. It was his first and only promotion solely for reasons of seniority. On 28 August, Franco was sent to command the position of Uixan, which protected the mines of Banu Ifrur. The Moroccan war was intensifying but Franco was paying assiduous court to Sofía Subirán, the beautiful niece of the High Commissioner, General Luis Aizpuru. Bored by his elaborate formality and inability to dance, she successfully resisted a determined postal assault which lasted for nearly a year.⁴⁸ In the spring of 1913, stoical about his disappointment in love, he applied for a transfer to the recently formed native police, the Regulares Indígenas, aware that they were always in the vanguard of attacks and presented endless opportunities for displays of courage and rapid promotion. On 15 April 1913, Franco’s posting to the Regulares came through. At this time, El Raisuni began a major mobilization of his men. The Spanish base of Ceuta was reinforced by, among others, Franco and the Regulares. On 21 June 1913, he arrived at the camp of Laucien and was then posted to the garrison of Tetuán. Between 14 August and 27 September, he took part in several operations and began to make a name for himself. On 22 September, with his fierce Moorish mercenaries, he gained a small local victory for which, 12 October 1913, he was rewarded with the Military Merit Cross first class. In their relatively short existence, the Regulares had developed a tradition of exaggerated machismo scorning protection when under enemy fire. When Franco eventually reached the point at which he had the right to lead his men on horseback, he favoured a white horse, out of a mixture of romanticism and bravado.

      For a brief period, the situation was stabilized in the Spanish Protectorate: the towns of Ceuta, Larache and Alcazarquivir were under control but communications in the harsh territory in between were threatened by El Raisuni’s guerrillas and snipers. Attempting to hold this area was ruinously expensive in men and money. The lines of communication were dotted with wooden blockhouses, six metres long by four metres wide, protected up to a height of one and a half metres by sandbags and surrounded by barbed wire. Building them under Moorish sniper fire was immensely dangerous. They were garrisoned by platoons of twenty-one men who lived in the most appallingly isolated conditions and had to be provisioned every few days with water, food and firewood. Provisioning required escorts who were vulnerable to sniper fire. Very occasionally, the chains of blockhouses communicated by heliograph and signal lamps.⁴⁹

      For his bravery in a battle at Beni Salem on the outskirts of Tetuán on 1 February 1914, the twenty-one year-old Franco was promoted to captain ‘por méritos de guerra’, with effect from that date although it was not announced until 15 April 1915. He was building a reputation as a meticulous and well-prepared field officer, concerned about logistics, provisioning his units, map-making, camp security. Twenty years later, Franco told a journalist that to stave off boredom in Morocco, he had devoured military treatises, memoirs of generals and descriptions of battles.⁵⁰ By 1954, he had inflated this to the point of telling the English journalist S.F.A. Coles rather implausibly that, in his off-duty hours in Morocco, he had studied СКАЧАТЬ