People :
Author : Diego Abad De Santillán
Text :
Without the victory of July in the streets of Barcelona, the military revolt would have been victorious without having to use much ammunition in almost all of Spain, because the victory in Madrid would have been too isolated, and Madrid could not rely on the defensive advantages of Catalonia. Although their job was made more difficult by the July movement, the commanders of the garrisons whose soldiers remained in their barracks were waiting, in a hostile environment, to see which way the wind would blow in the rest of the country.
That was when we took advantage of this hiatus in the fighting to force the surrender of the garrison of Levante, which was still sitting on the fence, perhaps encouraged by the attempts made by Martínez Barrio to form a government that was supposed to serve as a bridge between the Republic and the revolt. In other parts of Spain the movement fought energetically, but not always successfully. The leaders of the pro-Azaña Popular Front refused to make the arms they possessed available to the working class organizations, and thus gave the enemy forces enough opportunities to concentrate their forces and go on the offensive, which was conducted without showing any respect even for these republican leaders who made their victories possible. The absurd confidence of the Asturian socialists in the loyalty of colonel Aranda was the reason for the loss of Oviedo, and with the loss of Oviedo, Asturias as a whole was immobilized with respect to its opportunities for serving as a springboard for a military offensive and seizing territories from the enemy. And if the entire region did not fall into the hands of the tiny garrison of Oviedo, it was because our comrades took the barracks of Gijón by assault, and it was due to the initiative of the people themselves that most of the heroic mining district was purged of enemy forces.
The battle in the streets of Seville lasted several days, but the people were defeated.
The fighting was very bitter in Madrid, where the socialists managed to convince the Minister of War to issue an order to hand over 1,000 rifles, an order that was later revoked, but the counter-order was disobeyed. The storming of the Montaña barracks is one of the glorious moments in the history of the people of Madrid, along with May 2, 1808, and the overthrow of the dictatorship of general Fernández Córdoba.
But it is not our intention to paint a picture of July 19 as it looked in every part of Spain. What we think should be emphasized is the fact that without the example of Barcelona, and that of all of Catalonia, the rebels would have taken over the whole country and would have imposed their planned dictatorship on all of Spain, since they would have possessed the most powerful garrisons, almost all the gunpowder and cartridge factories, and the stockpiles of munitions in Morocco, which must have contained at least sixty million cartridges at the outbreak of the revolt.
Not only did we lead the way from the point of view of the armed struggle, but we were also in the forefront of the economic and social content of the anti-fascist movement. Although they had to overcome a lot of resistance and many obstacles, the workers and peasants in the rest of loyalist Spain did the same thing we had done in Catalonia: they took possession of large landed estates, factories, means of transport, hospitals, schools, etc.
We understood from the very first moments that it was not the anti-fascist alliance as a whole that was being expressed in these popular movements, and that a large number of those who publicly displayed their satisfaction with our victory were actually quite worried, and were more alarmed by the revolutionary danger implied by a popular war against fascism than they were by the threat posed to civil liberties by the military revolt. If the satisfaction of the people defied description, the satisfaction expressed outwardly by the professional politicians was only so much lip service, performed reluctantly, and the victory of the masses was considered to be a necessary and unavoidable evil amid the complete collapse of all the institutions with which the State might have defended itself.
We constantly observed this very same attitude in the conduct of the Madrid Government. Various Cabinets of diverse political hues succeeded one another, but the attitude of all of them was the same: an undisguised hostility towards everything associated with Catalonia, the region that had led the way both in the merciless war against fascism as well as in the profound transformation of economic and social conditions.
In response to the incomprehension and the systematic sabotage that confronted our efforts, such as the evident intention, from the very first moment, to fight any advances towards social justice on the part of the masses of the producers more energetically than the enemy on the other side of the trenches, we could have declared the independence of Catalonia, so we could move forward at the pace set by the July events.
The idea was more or less proposed by certain sectors and, on a few occasions, it was even brandished openly as a threat, but the fact that the country’s gold was under the control of the Madrid Government and the circumstance that Catalonia was an industrial zone that had to be supplied with foreign raw materials, combined with increasing difficulties with regard to foreign exchange, made it clear that political independence under these conditions was in fact impossible, except as a hollow gesture or else as part of a plan to turn Catalonia into a protectorate of France, without whose support the Catalonian economy, and therefore the war, would have been unsustainable.
Despite everything we had sacrificed and and all our efforts to prioritize certain kinds of production, we still suffered from a severe shortage of certain raw materials, such as cotton, coal, metals, heavy oils and light petroleum distillates. We could not expand our war industry without foreign steel, which had to be purchased with foreign currency, and without imported copper, zinc, etc.; and the central government was the exclusive possessor of the gold in the Bank of Spain that was needed for these transactions.
Basque steel also required foreign currency, and in both Euzkadi and Asturias we encountered nothing but difficulties and obstacles in our attempts to obtain the raw materials that these regions possessed in abundance. We resorted to unusual commercial operations. For example, we made a deal with a major English firm that sold aluminum and zinc to acquire these metals in exchange for oranges, and for this purpose we contracted the entire orange harvest of Almería and Murcía, and we loaded our first ship.
We would pay for the oranges of the Levante farmers and in exchange we would receive aluminum from England. The central government intervened and, since the oranges had to be shipped from ports under its control, prevented the operation, detained the ship for weeks and, when it decided to sell the shipment directly on the open market, the oranges were already spoiled. On other occasions we obtained olive oil, sold it in France and imported machines in exchange; but these operations were possible only because we controlled the border and the Catalonian ports, where we could disregard the decrees of the central government intended to prevent us from obtaining even these meager supplies for our factories. These procedures, however, were not capable of meeting the needs of the Catalonian economy during wartime.
We needed foreign exchange, we needed to draw on the gold of the Bank of Spain.
A bold financial policy successfully overcame the obstacles of the first months by confiscations from the banks of Catalonia; but these confiscations were themselves limited by scarce supplies, and the time came when, in order to confront extremely urgent needs, we had to resort to printing currency without the authorization of the national treasury.
We therefore had to face the following dilemma: we either had to reach some kind of agreement with the central government in order to defray the costs of the war, or else we would have to decide to establish a politically independent regime that would most likely have been unviable during the conflict and, after the war, would have been a source of misfortune for Spain and for Catalonia.
There was another solution, involving an equitable federative agreement, as the history and the geography of the Peninsula have always indicated as advisable, but republican Spain, too, was the continuation of the Spain of the Austrian Dynasty [the Habsburgs] and the Bourbons and, instead of a federation, the Madrid Government only wanted to talk about subjection, of the surrender of all initiative to the centralist bureaucracy, of the surrender to the General Staff of all control over a war that we had launched when this General Staff did not even exist. “One king and one law”—that is what Philip V said, and the second republic also proclaimed “one law”, and, although it had been forced to confer some semblance of autonomy on Catalonia and Euzkadi, it was nonetheless still mired in the centralist tradition of an anti-Spanish past.
Did we make the right choice? We chose to accept a sacrifice for the sake of the war and we yielded, even though we were right, and we had a weapon that the central government lacked: the active support of the people. But was it possible to win the war without the support of the people? And would the people knuckle under, embittered and resigned, as we did?
During the last days of the Giral Cabinet, which followed that of the unspeakable Casares Quiroga, whose myopia was responsible for the military uprising, we went to Madrid with Díaz Sandino, and not for the first time, to explain the situation of Catalonia, its needs and its possibilities, to the Madrid Government. From the very first moment the central government categorically refused any support for our military initiatives in Aragon and the Balearic Islands. But we had to leave no stone unturned in our attempts to make the politicians in Madrid understand that Catalonia held the key to victory in its hands and that it was a crime against Spain and against culture, threatened by the military jackboot, not to place at the disposal of Catalonia the resources that it lacked, in order to bring the conflict to a successful conclusion within a few months.
More than 100,000 men had volunteered and joined our militias to fight at the front against an enemy that had not yet organized its own defenses. We lacked weapons, we lacked munitions and we lacked the raw materials needed to create a nascent war industry that would have to be the most stalwart guarantee of the future possibilities for the prospects of the anti-fascist cause on the Peninsula.
We spent a whole night talking with the Prime Minister, a man who was very misinformed and very badly advised, but who seemed to be sincere.
We put all our cards on the table: we told him about the powerful weapon that Catalonia possessed, its people’s capacity for heroism, and emphasized that in a modern war, victory is impossible without a strong industrial base and, in this case, only the industry of Catalonia, with its first-class technology, was in any position to make a major contribution.
We explained our military opportunities, we highlighted the importance of the Aragon Front for the purpose of connecting the Catalonian region with the heavy industry of Euzkadi and with the coal-mining zone of Asturias. We recall having told him that our war would be won on the day that the forces of the Aragon Front link up with the industrial and mining regions of northern Spain. We explained that all we needed was his help with the financial resources that we lacked in order to crush the enemy, and deplored the fact that the central government, because of a senseless hatred of Catalonia and because of its fear of the people’s revolution, which was the representative of the real Spain, should put obstacles in our path, which was the way to victory and salvation for all.
We requested a small advance of foreign currency to buy parts for our air force and to acquire some arms that someone had offered to sell to us. Giral seemed to be persuaded that we were right and issued an order to give us the money we needed. The orders of the central government, however, had a very limited jurisdiction. Only those orders were obeyed that did not contradict the plans of those for whom the values of the Republic were a joke, and who only considered something to be “Republican” if it profited them or their party.
We also spoke at length about the gold of the Bank of Spain, which was in danger, and we strongly advised its immediate relocation. We mentioned the precedent set by other countries during the World War and we made him understand that Madrid was not safe and that the historic responsibility of the Government of the Republic, if it were to allow the gold of the Bank of Spain to fall into the hands of the enemy, would be incalculable. Giral summoned his financial advisers to discuss this point with us. These advisers were old civil servants who may have possessed some technical knowledge of finance, but it was obvious that the first thing on their minds was keeping their jobs.
One of the most outspoken of Giral’s advisers finally accepted our proposal to transfer the national treasury to a safer location, but only on the condition that the employes of the Bank of Spain would also be transferred so that they would not lose their jobs.
We left that meeting with the Prime Minister, convinced that we had touched a sensitive chord and that, in the future, relations between Madrid and Catalonia would not be so adversarial, and that we would be spared the systematic sabotage that we had suffered up to that point.
Shortly thereafter, the Giral Government fell and nothing remained of all the things we talked about and agreed upon except the memory of them we preserve for posterity. Largo Caballero succeeded Giral; however, he pursued the same of policy of mistrust towards Catalonia, refusing the most basic necessities to the Aragon Front, which was in fact the front that could potentially be the springboard to bring about the end of the war.[18]
It did not matter what orders the Ministers issued, if the execution of their orders depended on career military officers or civil servants who would enforce their superior’s orders only if they wanted to do so. We had four Ministers in Largo Caballero’s Cabinet, three of whom were from Catalonia and who understood the situation we had to face, but the situation remain unchanged. The real Government was not coterminous with the ostensible constituted authorities.
We also attended an interview, with Díaz Sandino, with the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, at the old royal palace in Madrid. Our interview took place during those days of panic following the disaster at Talavera. We met Azaña at 10:00 p.m. The bodyguards of the President stood out with their immaculate uniforms, in contrast to our drab militia garb.
We explained our situation in Catalonia and our pressing needs and we told him about our conversations with Giral and conveyed our impression that he welcomed our proposals. We asked Azaña to personally intervene in order to prevent the promises that had been made to us from being frustrated. Azaña told us that he was like a prisoner, that the Constitution did not allow him to intervene in anything and that his function was to keep quiet and let those who were legally vested with the role of governing to do all the talking, with the help of the parties or the legislature. We pleaded with him to use the prestige that he enjoyed, and not just in Spain. His silence and passivity, under the egis of the Constitution or for other reasons, amounted to a crime, and his attitude of just shrugging his shoulders when faced by such a tragedy does not admit of any generous interpretations.
During the course of our conversation we received the impression that this man did not sympathize with fascism, but that he was even less disposed to sympathize with the revolution and with the direct intervention of the people in public life without any respect for the barriers established by the republican rules that were born with the Republic.
At one point in the conversation, Díaz Sandino had the frankness to tell Azaña that his policy was responsible for the military revolt and that the indecisiveness of the democracy and of the alleged republicans who never measured up to the republicanism they professed had led us to the results with which we were then so familiar. Our fellow delegate had his reasons for speaking this way. He had been one of the most important figures in the conspiracy against the monarchy, and shortly before the military revolt he went to Madrid in a vain attempt to provide indisputable evidence that the revolt was imminent, and no one listened to him. Azaña, who seemed to lack the nerve to face the tragedy that had engulfed us, acted as if he was deeply offended at being reminded of the truth in his own castle. This prisoner of the Constitution became so angry that we thought we should get up and depart without asking the leave of the Head of State. Azaña paused to reflect for a moment, then he softened the tone of his fake indignation, and we stopped talking about the conditions on our Aragon Front.
For men like Azaña, the fascist conspiracy and the loss of the war were fatal.
Our journey through loyalist Spain between Madrid and Catalonia was truly moving. The people’s militias, following our example, had organized to fight, where the terrain allowed, a war in which they were outmatched because of the quality of their weapons; but their will to triumph was so great that, if they had been granted even a small amount of aid before the international complications that were to shortly ensue, our victory would have been overwhelming.
Numerous delegations from these improvised military detachments met with the Madrid Government to appeal for military equipment; and after their return from Madrid, discouraged and bitter, they came to Barcelona to tell us how desperate they were, and to explain to us their ideas about how to fight the war, and to relate their experiences and disappointments with the Government of the Republic.
We, an integral part of the people from whom we have arisen and from whom we have never separated, understood the immense pain of those who had to return to their comrades on every front with empty hands, and tell them that the Government of the Republic had refused to help them.
We commiserated with them, but our highly-developed spirit of solidarity caused the combatants of the other regions to perceive at the very least that we had a sincere desire to assist them. We sent weapons and munitions to every front: to Córdoba, Málaga, the Center, Levante, Irún, etc.; we provided some artillery pieces to the Southern Fronts at the same time that we were conducting operations at Mallorca as well as pursuing our campaign to reconquer Aragon. Not counting medical equipment, ambulances, trucks, food, clothing, and artillery shells of every caliber, which we had begun to manufacture on a large scale.
We were truly grief-stricken that we did not have enough war materiel to share it in common with a heroic people that was ready to stake their lives in defense of their liberty and their future. No matter how dire our situation was, however, those who came to us in search of help never left with empty hands.
We contributed about 10,000 armed men to the defense of Madrid itself, and we promised that, at a moment’s notice, if the central government would agree to give us the necessary weapons, our assistance in terms of men would be unlimited.
Everyone knows about the fall of Málaga and the surrender of Bilbao to the Italian divisions, and everyone has vehemently expressed their criticism of the circumstances that led up to these disasters. In the first case, Largo Caballero was the Minister of War, and this event, followed by the bloody conflict in Barcelona, were capitalized upon in order to get rid of one government and replace it with other governments that were more amenable to Moscow’s strategy for victory.
A few high-level military commanders were imprisoned, including general Asensio, but after ten months of investigation they were released without facing trial, because even the Party that had originally accused them of wrongdoing finally had to admit that they had been hung out to dry. As for the loss of Bilbao and of all of Northern Spain, which in this case was the result of the brilliant role played in our war by the Russian advisers, there was no lack of culpable parties, yet those who were officially responsible for the conduct of the war did not go to jail, because this time they were only following orders from the Kremlin. The first step in the loss of Northern Spain, however, was the loss of Irún, a magnificent strategic position for the enemy’s relations with France.
Unlike Bilbao, whose surrender was planned in advance, because it was not defended and because the central government, then in Valencia, had failed to provide the air support that was available and without which the defense of the city was thought to be impossible, Irún’s defenders fought heroically to the last bullet and the last hand grenade. The armed workers of that county performed feats of extraordinary bravery. If Irún were to have received some aid it would not have surrendered without claiming a large proportion of Franco’s troops.
Irún did not ask for airplanes, or artillery; it only requested rifles, a few machine guns, some ammunition. It dispatched some delegations to Catalonia to explain the desperate situation of the combatants of their region due to a shortage of weapons and ammunition. They assured us that Irún would not fall if they could obtain means to defend it. All their appeals to the Madrid Government for weapons were in vain, and the emissaries then turned towards Catalonia to ask for help.
We remained in contact with them via telephone and they pleaded so insistently and so sincerely that we could not remain indifferent. We could not supply the militias in Aragon that were crying out for ammunition to no avail. The problem of Irún was addressed on several occasions at meetings of the Committee of Militias; but our stockpiles were completely exhausted.
We understood that Madrid had abandoned that brave Northern city and that we, regardless of how many sacrifices we might make, could not save it. But the telephone calls imploring our assistance would not be entirely in vain. There were no weapons left in the Armory and therefore, as on other occasions, we called upon the Defense Committees of the CNT and FAI. They handed over several hundred rifles and some machine guns and we immediately loaded this cargo on some trucks and sent them towards Irún, via France.
The trucks ran into a few obstacles en route, but they did arrive in time, and were met by representatives of the Local Federation of Unitary Trade Unions of Irún, which notified us of their arrival. While the trucks were racing towards their destination with their precious cargo, we were able, with some difficulty, to obtain 30,000 cartridges, with which, the combatants of Irún assured us, they would be able to repulse the fascist offensive that threatened to annihilate them and were awaiting other war materiel that was supposed to arrive at any moment. It all depended on whether the ammunition would arrive in time. We needed a means to transport several tons of cartridges.
Our airfield had nothing that could carry that kind of cargo. We appealed to the Madrid Government, to the Minister of the Navy and the Air Force, to the commanders of the Air Force. We contacted all the ports, explaining the how urgent it was to send this ammunition that we had obtained with such difficulty, and even by depriving our own combatants of its use.
No one wanted to take responsibility for anything. We had prepared everything, the people’s forces of Irún were still waiting at their airport anxiously expecting the arrival of the desperately needed ammunition that would save them. The Minister of the Navy and Air Force promised to send us a Douglas and we shipped the cargo of ammunition to the airfield at Prat in order not to lose any precious time.
The telephone calls from Irún were becoming increasingly more urgent and the Douglas had not arrived. We shouted, we rained every kind of insult down upon those who, from their Ministerial easy chairs in Madrid would tranquilly consent to abandon a population in which several thousand men and women were ready to sacrifice everything to keep that precious stronghold in our power.
All our efforts were in vain. Madrid did not provide us with the necessary means of transport it promised, perhaps reluctantly, nor did it want to help the combatants in the North by sending them any of its own stores of ammunition. Irún fell into the hands of the enemy after a desperate and exemplary struggle.
When we think of the sacrifice of the militias of Irún we can only clench our fists in rage at the attitude, which was decisive, of the highest levels of the central government.
All the commanders on the Aragon Front were driving us to distraction with their constant demands for weapons and ammunition, and no one was more tenacious and insistent in this respect than Durruti, who had established his general headquarters in Bujaraloz. He bombarded us with daily tirades enumerating all the things he needed to fight and win the war.
We could not give him, or anyone else, anything, because we had nothing. Once, under the pressure of the urgency of his demands, and not knowing any way to pacify him, we told him that all his pleading was futile, because the position that he occupied on the Front was the least suitable for an offensive against Zaragoza, and that he was condemned, after having been the first to go to the Front, to be the last to enter the city he had set his sights on taking, where so many of our friends had been massacred and whose deaths he had sworn to avenge. We can still hear him screaming at the other end of the telephone connection. That was the most insulting and provocative thing we could have said to him. But it was also the truth; the bridges over the Ebro had been destroyed, and Durruti could not cross the river unless the columns of the Southern Ebro or the columns sent towards Huesca were already at the gates of Zaragoza.
When he returned to Barcelona, we told him about all our adventures and misadventures with the Madrid Government; we told him that we thought that Madrid had absolutely abandoned us, and that we could not count on getting any help at all from the central government as long as we were in control of the Aragon Front and Catalonia. We made him see how little we had to work with and just how helpless we were with respect to supplying our militia units with weapons and ammunition.
We had disarmed many of our own comrades in Barcelona and the surrounding counties to give him some rifles, but all of them were just a drop in the ocean, if we could not enforce a real disarmament of the rearguard; a short time later, we would also face a severe shortage of cartridges.
Convinced of our failure in our negotiations with the Central Government—negotiations in which all the members of the Committee of Militias had at one time or another participated—we suggested that he should try his luck at seeking an appointment as the commander of an important sector of the Front. So Durruti left Barcelona to meet with Largo Caballero. We do not know exactly what words were exchanged by Durruti and the chief of state, but we are sure that he defended our cause with all the energy of which he was capable.
He told Caballero about some of the proposals to sell us weapons that had been made by foreign arms dealers. He left Madrid with generous promises of support and returned in a good mood to Catalonia to rejoin his unit, awaiting the fulfillment of the promises made by Caballero. We enthusiastically shared his jubilation and for a brief moment we felt a sense of hope. But the weeks and months passed and the promises made to Durruti, just like the promises that had been previously made to us, were to remain unfulfilled.
A few months later we sent Durruti to serve in the defense of Madrid, when the situation there was more serious and there was a very real danger that the city might be occupied by the enemy. Instead of getting the arms we were promised for the Aragon Front, we even had to give up several dozen machine guns and several thousand rifles, with three or four artillery batteries, to contribute to the defense of Madrid, whose fall would have meant, because of its moral and international repercussions, the end of the war, and there he died, after having provided some magnificent examples of heroism.
Some military hardware had been purchased through the mediation of the Russians, who had begun to arrive in Spain, and through a Purchasing Commission of the central government. Orders had been issued forbidding any of these shipments from being unloaded at Catalonian ports.
This was what made us really angry. Even when this or that cargo was earmarked for us, nothing arrived. We had been offered supplies, but we would have to pay for them, and we always came up against the dead end of not having any foreign currency. It may very well be the case that, out of every 100 offers, 99 were fake, but the truth is that we never had the opportunity to see whether or not this was true, because we could never even put down a deposit on any deals. We even received offers from Germany, for which we would have to pay in advance, for cargo to be shipped to Barcelona. What should we have done? And there was more: we had received offers, via Paris, to sell us Italian warplanes. Would this be the first war that was ever lost due to a lack of weapons when the national treasury was full of money to buy them?
In the meantime the enemy, after the disaster of Talavera, staged a very dangerous advance on Madrid. There was some talk of taking what we needed. The Treasury of the Bank of Spain should not be left in the hands of a Government that did not do anything right and was losing the war. Even if we took this money, however, would we still fail to obtain the weapons we needed? We were sure of at least one thing: we would not fail to acquire the raw materials and machinery for our war industry, and we would be able to make the weapons we needed ourselves.
Within a very restricted circle of confidants, we discussed the idea of transferring to Catalonia at least some of the gold in the Bank of Spain. We knew that we would have to resort to force, and we had about 3,000 reliable men in Madrid who were fully informed of all the details concerning the plan to transport the gold in special trains. If the plan were to be successfully carried out, it would not take much time, and before the Government could take counter-measures, we would be on our way to Catalonia with a share of the nation’s gold supply, the best guarantee that the war would take a new course. The only problem was that, when it came right down to it, no one wanted to bear the responsibility for an action that would have such major historical repercussions. Our proposals were conveyed to the National Committee of the CNT and to some of the most well known comrades.
The plan scared the wits out of our friends; the main argument that was offered against taking the gold, an argument that was repeatedly made, was that if we did this it would only exacerbate the prevailing animosity towards Catalonia. What should we have done?
It was impossible to go against our own organizations, so we had to abort the plan. The gold, a few weeks later, was shipped out of Madrid, not to Catalonia, but to Russia; more than 500 tons fell into the hands of Stalin and were used to lose our war and to reinforce the front of the worldwide fascist counterrevolution. And it was shipped to Russia without the Government’s knowledge, by the decision of a couple of Ministers who were taking their orders from the Kremlin, including the famous Dr. Negrín. Would the outcome of the Spanish tragedy have been different if at least part of the national treasure had been sent to the region where the opportunities, the conditions and the will existed that could have led the war to a victorious conclusion?
Our shortage of ammunition was tragic. Thirty thousand men were constantly asking us for ammunition and we could not satisfy this legitimate demand.
The Central Government refused to give us any help and when it did give us a small shipment, we had to give it back with men and all their equipment. Or we were given materiel that was not wanted on the other Fronts, like the famous 600 Colt machine guns, discarded by the American Army before 1914, and which could not be used on the other Fronts because they were obsolete and ineffective.
During one of these periods of extreme shortages, one of our columns that was posted on the Center Front plundered a convoy of the Central Government, and thus obtained seventy or eighty thousand cartridges for us, which arrived just in the nick of time.
We had been informed that, at the fortress of Mahón, loyal to the Madrid Government, there were several thousand percussion caps for which the garrison there had no use at all. We kindly requested that they send them to us on dozens of occasions and we were always rebuffed. We asked the Minister of the Navy and Air Force, and thus made him aware of the existence of this cache of percussion caps. It was not a very large amount; they could be shipped to Barcelona and we might thus solve our problems for a couple of weeks. Refusal or indifference were always the only responses we received.
One day, Catalonia was urgently requested to ship gasoline to Mahón; we took advantage of this opportunity to once again ask for the unused percussion caps. There was no way to convince the authorities on the island and the Madrid Government that it was a crime to refuse to give us this materiel.
We issued the order to load the gasoline, but we told the authorities at Mahón that the ship would not leave port until the percussion caps were received in Barcelona.
The Central Government intervened, and the leaders of CAMPSA intervened, but we refused to authorize the departure of the ship until our conditions were met.
Mahón’s need for gasoline must have been very urgent, but its commanders did not want to yield to our request. Because the Central Government did not possess any means of coercion that could have forced us to send the gasoline to Mahón, we finally won and, after fifteen days of wrangling, the percussion caps arrived in Barcelona and the tanker carrying gasoline that had been embargoed in our port finally departed for Mahón.
Whenever we wrested something, always on a small scale, from the Madrid Government, it was at the cost of similar struggles, or we took what we wanted without asking anyone.
Centralism was leading us to defeat.
Having encountered the systematic sabotage practiced by the Central Government against all our proposals, and also firmly convinced that political centralism was leading us to disaster in the war and to the demise of the people’s revolution, whose only possible basis was solidarity in a federation, from the very first weeks we had explained to several authorized representatives of Levante and Aragon the need to form a kind of defensive and offensive federation with these regions to force the Government of the Republic to effectively confront the new situation. Later, the Council of Defense of Aragon was formed, but it never amounted to anything more than a delegation to the Central Government, and Levante remained completely under the authority of Madrid, since Valencia had been the capital of the Republic since November 1936.
The best, most effective political solution would have been a federal Spain, in which each region would have the most complete autonomy to freely express its sense of national solidarity, as they did during all the really crucial moments in the history of Spain. This idea made no headway, or else it was not understood during those feverish days of constant activity. There was no preexisting preparation for this idea and this confirmed our hypothesis that a revolution actually bears no more fruit than that which the people already have inside them, in relation to the degree of their culture.
If we had formed, with the liberated part of Aragon and all of Levante, along with Catalonia, a kind of commonwealth of solidarity, it would not have been so easy for the fascistic bureaucrats of the Central Government to undermine the war effort and hinder the consolidation of the revolution. And the political, military and police rule of the Russians would never have been capable of attaining the scale that it did, to our misfortune.
After several months of disputes and futile negotiations with the Central Government, and after reflecting on the pros and cons of declaring the independence of Catalonia, and committed, more than anyone else, to winning the war that we had begun with such zeal and such confidence, after having been told repeatedly that we would get no help as long as the Committee of Militias, the organ of the people’s revolution, held power in Catalonia, regardless of how much we loved this institution that was created to respond to the exigencies of a new social and political situation, and having no other choice than to yield or to exacerbate our position in the conflict, since we did not want to resort to violence to get what we needed, either, we, even though we were right, had to yield.
We expressed our willingness to dissolve the Committee of Militias, that is, to abandon a revolutionary position such as the Spanish people had never before occupied. We would do anything to get weapons and financial assistance to successfully fight our war.
We knew that it was not possible for the revolution to be victorious without first winning the war, and we were willing to sacrifice everything for the war. We were willing to sacrifice the revolution itself, not realizing that this sacrifice also implied the sacrifice of the goals of the war.
The Committee of Militias guaranteed the supremacy of the people in arms, it guaranteed the autonomy of Catalonia, it guaranteed the noble aims and the legitimacy of the war, it guaranteed the resurrection of the Spanish soul and way of life; we were repeatedly told, however, that as long as this institution continued to exist, that is, as long as we continued to consolidate the power of the people, no weapons would be sent to Catalonia, nor would we obtain the foreign currency we needed to buy them on the foreign market, nor would we be provided with raw materials for our industry. And since the loss of the war also implied the total defeat of the revolution, and the return of Spain to a state like the one that tormented the country during the rule of Ferdinand VII, and because we were convinced that the initiatives introduced by us and by our people would not entirely disappear from the militarized armed units that were favored by the Central Government and from the new economic order, we left the Committee of Militias to join the Government of the Generalitat in the Ministry of Defense and other vital departments of the autonomous government.
For the first time in the history of the modern social movement, anarchists participated in Government offices with all the responsibility entailed. But not because we had forgotten our own doctrines or forgotten the essence of the governmental apparatus. Overriding circumstances beyond our control led us to situations and to procedures that we found distasteful, but which we could not avoid.
A people’s revolution is not conducted from within the State or by the State. At most, and this might have been the most positive aspect of our participation in the government, the State may refrain from putting too many obstacles in the way of the new creations of the people; but to entrust the revolution to the State, even if we were the only organization in it, would amount to renouncing the revolution. We did not have any faith in revolution by decree.
Great economic and social transformations are always the work of the direct action of the people, of the working class masses of the city and the countryside. They are the ones who have to carry out the revolution, they are the ones who have to create the institutions of the new way of life, and it is only with their support that any revolutionary policy can be implemented.
There can be no doubt that, even in the middle of the war, major social advances were made. But these advances, this transformation, and this progress were obtained outside of or against the State, as always. What can be done from within the government—and this is not always easy, but it is possible as long as the masses remain alert and retain their sense of initiative—is to facilitate the legalization, the recognition and the official sanction of the revolution that was carried out elsewhere, in the factories, in the fields, and in the domain of customs.
The power of the revolution was not, nor will it ever be, in government Ministries; it is down below, in the working people, in the constructive capacity which the people are capable of displaying.
Even though we were represented in it, we cannot attribute any useful revolutionary functions to the State.
If it were only a matter of the revolution, the very existence of the Government would have been an obstacle to destroy, rather than a favorable factor; but we found ourselves facing the demands of a large-scale, bloody war, and international complications that were necessarily connected with the world market, with our relations with the surrounding States, and for the organization and leadership of this war, under the conditions we confronted, we had no instrument that we could have substituted for the old governmental apparatus.
A modern war cannot be waged the way the old civil wars or even international wars of the past were fought. It requires the existence of a major industrial base that is kept running twenty-four hours a day, and this industry presupposes, in those countries that do not enjoy complete economic self-reliance, political, industrial and commercial relations with the centers of world capitalism that possess a monopoly on raw materials.
All the countries of Europe were already suspicious of us, when they did not send men and weapons to help our enemies. Our enemies on the other side of the trenches and our false friends on this side circulated horrifying legends about our activities. It was said that we had constructed guillotines in the Plaza de Cataluña and that these guillotines were working day and night.
While we were working assiduously without a minute’s rest, organizing the militias for the war, increasing productivity in the factories, and marshaling all available resources, we were described by the foreign press as bloodthirsty monsters who thought of nothing but vengeance and terror: the cold-blooded massacres ordered by the military rebels were depicted as military necessities, since their military operations could not tolerate the existence of unreliable or lukewarm elements in their rearguard; the sanctions imposed by the Republic were bestial murders. In this environment, international capitalism, which was responsible for these stories, barred us from any successful development merely by denying us the raw materials that were essential for our industry.
We did not dissolve the Committee of Militias without first taking all these matters into consideration; but we did not see any other solution because, along with the hostility of foreign countries, we had to face the no less implacable and dangerous hostility of the military and civilian bureaucracy and the centralizing fanaticism of the Government of the Republic.
The dissolution of the Committee of Militias to demonstrate our good will and our overwhelming desire to win the war was not the last sacrifice we would make. The more we yielded to the benefit of the common interest, however, the more abuse we had to endure from the counterrevolution embodied in the central power. And for what results? Certainly not for the benefit of our war aims; or at least not for the benefit of victory over the enemy.
Almost all the factories producing military hardware were in the zone controlled by the rebels. Among the few arms factories that we did possess, the most important were the cartridge factories in Toledo, under the control of the Government of the Republic, which ignominiously allowed them to be lost.
Catalonia was a major industrial region, but not with respect to war industries. We lacked steel, copper, zinc and coal. The only explosives produced in Catalonia were small amounts of gunpowder for hunting rifles. We nonetheless undertook, from the very first days after July 19, the task of building our own military industry, relying on nothing but the determination of the workers in the factories. Technicians can testify to the implications of this effort at a time when the most indispensable raw materials, as well as the money to acquire them from other countries, were lacking.
In addition to the utter absence of any industrial facilities suited for this kind of production, we must also mention the circumstance that we had no experienced managerial personnel, and no workers who had ever worked in such industries. All the metal factories were converted to war production, each one producing what it could: armored vehicles, hand grenades, ambulances, etc.
At the beginning of August the War Industries Commission was formed to coordinate these first spontaneous efforts and to oversee the creation of a powerful arms and munitions industry in Catalonia. Its members included technicians like Giménez de la Beraza, enterprising spirits like José Tarradellas, a member of the Committee of Militias, outstanding workers like the metal worker, Eugenio Vallejo, and Marti, from the chemical industry, one of the people’s army’s first artillerymen on the morning of July 19 in Barcelona.
Hundreds of metal and chemical factories were assigned to manufacture to order the most urgent materiel, artillery shells, bombs, cartridges, gas masks, ambulances, armored cars, etc.
As a result of unfounded political hatreds and rivalries, virulent propaganda campaigns were waged against the Catalonian war industries, in which 150,000 men worked. Proposals were submitted to bring all of them under the power of the Central Government, and when these industries needed aid from the latter, it did nothing but put obstacles in their path, refusing their requests for foreign currency, raw materials, etc.
Even so, by the beginning of December 1937 more than 60,000 ammunition belts had been produced for Mauser cartridges, and up until September of the same year more than 76,000,000 bullets had been produced in the factories of Catalonia. Many difficulties had to be overcome before cartridges could be manufactured, difficulties that were exacerbated by the refusal of the Government of the Republic to provide any help; but Catalonian cartridges were the only ones that finally allowed the war to continue. The production of artillery shells began in September 1936, at first at the rate of 4,000 per month, reaching 900,000 per month in April 1937. And up until September of 1937, 718,000 high-caliber artillery shells were produced.
Around 600,000 fuzes were manufactured in Catalonia prior to September 1937, which means a lot to those who know what a fuze is good for. A gunpowder factory with a capacity of one thousand kilos per day was built, and thanks to the metal industry of Catalonia the production of gunpowder in Murcia, which was previously the only source of this materiel in the Republic, could be considerably augmented. In September 1936, trinitrotoluene, pyronite, dinitronaphthalene and picric acid were already being manufactured in Catalonia. Within one year, 752,972 kilos of pyronite were produced. At the end of August 1936, one month after the defeat of the military revolt, bombs containing pyronite manufactured in our own factories were loaded onto our warplanes. We witnessed the birth and development of Catalonia’s war industries and we can say that one will rarely encounter such an example of improvization, because one seldom encounters such a perfect degree of accord and such a unanimous passion among the political authorities, the technical authorities and the workers of all the trades of a country. Foreign military advisers who had first-hand experience with this project assured us that we had accomplished in a few months more than what was achieved, with much greater means at their disposal, by more prepared countries, like France, in the first two years of the war of 1914–1918.
In August 1936 we began the construction of a factory to produce octanol, which would also produce methyl chloride and pure tetraethyl lead, the first such factory in Spain and one of the few in Europe.
We not only manufactured war materiel, however, but also the machines needed for its manufacture. Beginning in July 1936, 119 hydraulic presses (112 30-ton presses, 2 250-ton presses, one eccentric 250-ton press, etc.), 214 lathes (178 parallel lathes, 6 revolving lathes, 30 special lathes for boring and rifling gun barrels), 28 drills, 18 hole-punching machines, 6 buffing machines, 4 filing machines, 7 special machines to straighten cannons, 16 special machines to cut and make slots in ammunition belts, etc.
To prevent discord and to satisfy ambitions for command and administration, Catalonia surrendered its control over its war industry, with the exception of the new facilities constructed by the Generalitat, but not all of it, because some factories were transferred to the Undersecretariat of Military Procurement, an institution created by Prieto to show how it is possible to sabotage the war by means of lavishing excessive financial resources and facilities for every kind of managerial task on ambitious, but incompetent or treasonous, bureaucrats.
The Commission of War Industries of Catalonia had a few factories under construction when it had to surrender to the Central Government a machine for producing military hardware that normally would have taken many years to manufacture. One of the factories under construction was a factory with a projected productive capacity of 20 tons of cellulose per day, which it produced from esparto grass. It was in operation right up until the final catastrophe, with large quantities of raw material in storage. Another factory under construction was a large explosives plant in Gualba, which was alone capable of supplying all the needs of the Peninsula even in wartime. Yet the history of the new factories also has its comical, and also immensely tragic, episodes. So many obstacles were placed in the way of these projects by the officials of the Government of the Republic, that it was necessary to steal the cement we needed to build them with the connivance of the workers committees of the factories, painstakingly collect old pieces of scrap iron and melt them down, and employ a thousand tricks to smuggle all kinds of goods to prevent these projects from being aborted.
And all of these factories are still there, just as Spain still hosts modern poison gas factories, built in anticipation of gas warfare. There will be a shortage of personnel for most of these high technology and chemical factories, built during the years of revolution and war; otherwise these industrial facilities could have been major suppliers for a Europe armed to the teeth.[19]
During one of our many meetings with the central government, our delegates proposed that the government should give us one of the cartridge factories in Toledo, which was in danger of being destroyed by continuous bombing. The State controlled three cartridge factories in that city. Two of them were operational; the third had been idled for several years because of its antiquated machinery and its unprofitability.
Toledo’s situation was critical; enemy forces were still entrenched in the Alcázar and they also knew that the city was vulnerable, because that front was still extremely disorganized, and enemy forces were moving forward with strong contingents.
We did not ask for either of the operating factories, even though we knew they were in danger and that they would have been much safer and more productive if they were transferred, along with their specialists and technical personnel, to a zone like Catalonia; we only asked for the one that was shut down and was not producing anything.
The hatred and the mistrust of Catalonia were so great that we were categorically denied the use of the shuttered factory and, a few weeks later Queipo del Llano could boast that the factories that the Central Government had not wanted to move to Catalonia were producing cartridges for the rebels.
We could provide numerous testimonials concerning similar incidents. If the itinerant Madrid-Valencia-Barcelona government had intended to lose the war from the very beginning, it could not have done anything more effective than what it in fact did.
From a strictly economic perspective, we made this summary observation in a confidential report drafted in September 1938:
But all the details are superfluous, because the most telling fact is the following: even though the entire industrial apparatus of loyalist Spain is insufficient to supply our fronts, we can state that not even 50% of the motors, machines, etc., are being used, and those that are being used do not yield 50% of their potential production, due to the demoralization of the personnel who work in these factories without decent food, due to the incompetence that has taken the reins of military affairs, due to the interference of foreign interests and due to considerations relating to despicable partisan politics.
This situation cannot continue. And if we persist in our silence and our passivity, there is no way that we will ever be able to deny our complicity in the loss of the war and in the epic schemes of those who are trafficking in the blood of our people.[20]
In our report we made the following proposals, in the name of the Peninsular Committee of the FAI:
Urgently do whatever is necessary to transform the Undersecretariat of Military Production into a Ministry of Military Production.
Vest this Ministry with the responsibility to acquire arms and munitions, machinery and raw materials, and for the manufacture in loyalist Spain of every conceivable type of military product.
The Ministry of Military Production should be controlled and advised by two mixed bodies, composed as follows:
Control of commercial operations. This institution will be formed on the basis of one member from each party that is a member of the Popular Front. Without the approval of this department, the Ministry will not be able to make any acquisitions of weapons or other war materiel.
A Superior Council of Military Industry. With respect to everything relating to military production in loyalist Spain, this institution will be the adviser and the decisive voice; this Council will be composed of representatives of the following Federations of Industry: Light, Power and Fuels, Chemicals, Steel and other Metals, Transport and Construction, from the CNT and from the UGT.The parties and organizations will be held responsible and will be sanctioned for the conduct of their delegates in the above institutions and in cases of bribery, embezzlement or sabotage of war production.
The activities of the currently existing Purchasing Commissions and the Undersecretariat of Military Production must be investigated and referred to the Justice Tribunals.
The above proposals for reorganization are most revealing with respect to the unsavory aspects of the matter.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
January 04, 2021 : Chapter 7 -- Added.
January 16, 2022 : Chapter 7 -- Updated.
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