Casado's Ghosts: Demythologizing the End of the Spanish Republic

Abstract

The article analyses the war-induced circumstances that permitted the success of the March 1939 Casado rebellion inside an exhausted and fragmented Republican zone. In displacing Prime Minister Juan Negrín, it destroyed all possibility of realizing his plans for an orderly evacuation of those most at risk from Francoist reprisals. The article examines the attitudes to the rebellion of Spanish socialists and communists, whose organizations articulated the mass social support that had sustained the near three-year-long Republican war effort in ever more gruelling and psychologically erosive conditions. It concludes by considering the corrosive effects of the rebellion on the political culture and collective memory of the left—especially the Spanish Communist Party—both in the immediate postwar period and, more speculatively, over the longer term.

Notes

¹‘Negrín fue entonces derrotado desde dentro de la República, pero no porque existiera otra política sino porque había sonado el fin de toda política’, Santos Juliá, ‘La doble derrota de Juan Negrín’, El País, 26 February 1992 (the centenary of Negrín's birth), p. 11.

²‘No hay más que aguantar hasta que esto se haga cachos. O hasta que nos demos de trastazos unos con otros, que es como yo he creído siempre que concluiría esto’, Indalecio Prieto, in Manuel Azaña, Obras completas, 4 vols (Madrid: Ediciones Giner, 1990 [1^st ed. 1966–68]), IV, 638, diary entry 29 June 1937 (hereafter Azaña, Obras completas).

³On this connection see Ángel Viñas, ‘Playing with History and Hiding Treason: Colonel Casado's Untrustworthy “Memoirs” and the End of the Spanish Civil War’, in Essays on the Spanish Civil War, ed. Susana Bayó Belenguer et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming). MI6 itself is exempt from Freedom of Information requests, but the possibility remains that, with the usual documentary filtration to other government departments, a FOI application might still yield results, as material is subject to continuous declassification.

⁴Enrique Moradiellos, La perfidia de Albión. El gobierno británico y la Guerra Civil española (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1996), 40–72. For its immediate effects on the Republic, see Ángel Viñas, La soledad de la República. El abandono de las democracias y el viraje hacia la Unión Soviética (Barcelona: Crítica, 2006), 45–78, and Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain (London: John Murray, 1998), 33–39, 114–19. For its long-term and integral effects, see Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2002), 124–26, 153–58, 351–59, 368–69, 388–89 and a summary in Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2005), 37–39, 87–114.

⁵ Cf. Enrique Moradiellos, ‘Una misión casi imposible: la embajada de Pablo de Azcárate en Londres durante la Guerra Civil (1936–1939)’, Historia Contemporánea, 15 (1996), 125–45 and ‘La embajada en Gran Bretaña durante la Guerra Civil’, in Al servicio de la República. Diplomáticos y guerra civil, ed. Ángel Viñas (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores/Marcial Pons, 2010), 89–119. Also Pablo de Azcárate's posthumously published memoirs, Mi embajada en Londres durante la Guerra Civil española (Barcelona: Ariel, 1976).

⁶The historiographical mainstream still interprets British ‘deafness’ towards the wartime Republic as a purely collateral effect of its strategic commitment to the appeasement of Germany and Italy, this stemming in turn from Britain's imperial dilemma—how to ward off a simultaneous military confrontation with its three main competitors, Germany, Italy and Japan. Hence Britain vainly sought throughout the Civil War to detach Italy from Germany in the hope of forging a new Anglo-Italian agreement. Britain's political class still also laboured under the misapprehension that Germany would eventually be susceptible to the old politics of diplomatic agreement—and if its imperial aggression could be deflected solely eastward then that was considered an acceptable outcome. But this imperial explanation ‘forgets’ that British hostility to the Spanish Republic already existed prior to the civil war, indeed had done so right from the Republic's birth in 1931. Moreover, in the period after the military coup of 18 July 1936 but before the escalation to full-scale war, the British government had done everything in its power to ensure the rapid success of the military rebels: see Enrique Moradiellos, Neutralidad benévola. El gobierno británico y la insurrección militar española de 1936 (Oviedo: Pentalfa, 1990), 147–88. The British preference, then, was a priori for Franco—irrespective of the issues subsequently raised by appeasement—and that remained the case for the duration of the war. But Negrín never ceased to conceive of Britain's support as the key to Republican salvation. In La perfidia de Albión, 18–39, 87–101, Moradiellos stresses the continuities from 1931 more than does Tom Buchanan in his work, Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1997), 14–17 and The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain. War, Loss and Memory (Brighton/Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2007), 1–22. The full meaning of official British hostility requires further elucidation in the context of what Spanish Republican democracy signified for a British establishment fearful of social and political change at home. For example here, note the striking difference in official British assessments of political violence depending on whether they occurred in the rebel or Republican zones (the former viewed—at least in 1936—as a prophylactic, and the latter seen as evidence of barbarism).

⁷This was of course still part of a diplomatic strategy. In appointing Negrín prime minister in May 1937 Republican President, Manuel Azaña, certainly hoped that his new multi-lingual and cosmopolitan premier, with an excellent network of European contacts, would mobilize through international diplomatic channels to broker a negotiated peace (Azaña, Obras completas, IV, 602). If Negrín himself ever entertained the idea that a military victory was possible against an enemy backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it is unlikely to have outlived the loss of the North, and its industrial capacity, in autumn 1937. But Negrín carefully projected the public profile of a war leader throughout the conflict—given military resistance remained the sine qua non of his secret diplomatic strategy.

⁸The German annexation of Austria produced a re-opening of the frontier with Spain by a reconstituted Popular Front cabinet under Léon Blum. But this fairly soon gave way again to an ascendancy of social conservatives and appeasers hostile to the Spanish Republic; see Ricardo Miralles, ‘El duro forcejeo de la diplomacia republicana en París. Francia y la Guerra Civil española’, in Al servicio de la República, ed. Viñas, 121–54 (pp. 139–54); Ángel Viñas, ‘Las relaciones hispano-franceses, el gobierno Daladier y la crisis de Munich’, in Españoles y franceses en la primera mitad del siglo XX (Madrid: CSIC, 1986), 161–201 and Ángel Viñas, El honor de la República (Barcelona: Crítica, 2010); David Wingeate Pike, France Divided: The French and the Civil War in Spain (Brighton/Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2011), 182–207.

⁹Juan Negrín in Epistolario Prieto y Negrín (Paris: Imprimerie Nouvelle, 1939), 25 and his ‘Discurso en el Palacio de Bellas Artes, México, 1 de agosto de 1945’, copy in Marcelino Pascua archive, Caja 14 (12) (Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid); Cf. Azaña, Obras completas, IV, 819–20, diary entry 13 October 1937.

¹⁰The term ‘desamparo’ (‘exposure’ in the sense of lacking in shelter or assistance), was frequently used in this regard in the press, including in the PSOE press where its usage blended into issues related to internal factional disputes; see an allusion to both in Juan-Simeón Vidarte, Todos fuimos culpables, 2 vols (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1978), II, 858; Indalecio Prieto in Epistolario Prieto y Negrín, 92. Former interior minister and now under-secretary, Julián Zugazagoitia, commented on this to Marcelino Pascua, observing that Negrín's speeches urging resistance did not connect with the public mood (letter of 20 June 1938, Marcelino Pascua archive, Caja 2 [2] 16 [AHN]). The growing subsistence crisis is very clear from Quaker relief work sources, see Miscellaneous field reports for 1938 in FSC/R/Sp/1 (file 4); FSC/R/Sp/2 (files 3 and 4); FSC/R/Sp/4 (Friends House Library and Archive, London).

¹¹Helen Graham, Socialism and War. The Spanish Socialist Party in Power and Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1991) offers a close empirical reading of this process.

¹²The Greek communist experience is an exception here, with striking parallels to the development of the wartime PCE: see Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler's Greece. The Experience of Occupation 1941–44 (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 1993). But in Spain a much more heterogeneous communist movement was absolutely integral to a mainstream process of state and nation making, albeit still in exceptional conditions generated by war. The important differences do not of course invalidate comparison, which can still be instructive—not least the way in which it highlights the degree to which the emergency of war (broadly construed) has always produced the radical restructuring of communist parties/movements, beginning with the Bolsheviks themselves in the crucible of their own civil war.

¹³The memoirs of two young women activists also draw attention to this ‘breath of fresh air’, where the PCE is seen as an extension of the Republic's ‘new broom’, and more as a medium for change than as a doctrinal instrument: see Carmen Parga, Antes que sea tarde (Madrid: Compañía Literaria, 1996), 50, and Aurora Arnaiz, Retrato hablado de Luisa Julián (Madrid: Compañía Literaria, 1996), 26. This social history of communism in 1920s and '30s Spain is yet to be seriously tackled, but see Rafael Cruz, ‘¡Luzbel vuelve al mundo! Las imágenes de la Rusia Soviética y la acción colectiva en España’, in Cultura y movilización en la España contemporánea, ed. Rafael Cruz and Manuel Pérez Ledesma (Madrid: Alianza, 1997), 273–303. For the appeal of the wartime PCE to a mass audience, especially within the socialist and communist youth movement, newly unified in March 1936 and which rapidly became massified in the early months of the war, see Fernando Claudín, The Communist Movement. From Comintern to Cominform (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 230–31.

¹⁴On Ascanio, some occasional references in Michael Alpert, El ejército republicano en la Guerra Civil, 2^nd ed. (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1989), 356, 361. There are also now some online commemorative biographies, for example: <http://www.alternativasisepuede.org/si-se-puede/opinion/item/1190-guillermo-ascanio-moreno-un-gomero-revolucionario-rubens-ascanio> and <http://quieneseran.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/guillermo-ascanio-moreno-03-07-1941.html> (consulted 22 August 2012). For Ascanio's opposition to Casado, see the discussion later in this article.

¹⁵American journalist Vincent Sheean reported on how these tensions could be glimpsed in reactions to a May 1938 Central Committee speech by the Spanish communist leader Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) (Vincent Sheean, Not Peace But a Sword [New York: Doubleday Doran, 1939], 185–87). How such tensions would erupt under pressure of the Casado rebellion is discussed later.

¹⁶Palmiro Togliatti, in his long confidential report of 21 May 1939 on the end of the war, in Escritos sobre la guerra de España (Barcelona: Crítica, 1980), 269–70; on the circumstances of this report's preparation, see Ángel Viñas and Fernando Hernández-Sánchez, El desplome de la República (Barcelona: Crítica, 2009), 48; Manuel Tagüena Lacorte, Testimonio de dos guerras (México D.F.: Ediciones Oasis, 1974), 321; Ángel Bahamonde Magro and Javier Cervera Gil, Así terminó la guerra de España (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 1999), 377–78, 386–89, 416–18.

¹⁷Complaints from the PSOE's local organizations abounded, for example, in a report from Almería in March 1938, PSOE historical archive (Madrid), AH-13-63, p. 80. Conversely, on the eve of the Casado rebellion, the PSOE national executive committee was concerned by the potential reflux of anti-communist populism into the PSOE: Antonio Huerta, minutes of meeting of 11 November 1938, AH-20-4 [n. p.].

¹⁸See the recent TV3 documentary, Emboscats. Memòria d'una geografia secreta (July 2012), <http://www.tv3.cat/videos/3921230> (accessed 10 August 2012); Pedro Corral, Desertores. La guerra civil que nadie quiere contar (Barcelona: Debate, 2006), 285–340; Cartes des del front, ed. Eloi Vila (Badalona: Ara Llibres, 2012).

¹⁹For a fuller analysis see Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 373–79.

²⁰ Cf. Negrín's comment, via foreign minister Julio Alvárez del Vayo, that ‘no hay política francobritánica, no hay más que política británica con asentimiento francés’ (‘there is no joint Franco-British policy now, just British policy with French acquiescence’), PSOE national executive meeting, 15 November 1938, AH-20-5 [n. p.].

²¹Rudolf Michaelis in a letter from Paris to Rudolf, Millie and Fermín Rocker, 16 March 1939 (Rudolf Rocker papers, International Institute of Social History [IISG], Amsterdam).

²²Javier Cervera, Madrid en guerra. La ciudad clandestina 1936–1939, 3^rd ed. (Madrid: Alianza, 2006), 241–67, 289–95, 381–412.

²³PSOE antagonists, the former ambassador to Paris, Luis Araquistain and Ramón Lamoneda, party general secretary, agreed entirely on this assessment of the underlying support for Casado: Araquistain to Ramón González Peña, 15 July 1939, Araquistáin archive, legajo 29, no. G 181 (Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid); Lamoneda, ‘Manifiesto de la CE del PSOE’, Mexico, 15 November 1945, El Socialista (México), 10 (January 1946), reproduced in Ramón Lamoneda, Posiciones políticas-documentos-correspondencia (México D.F.: Roca, 1976), 205–17 (p. 215).

²⁴Paul Preston, ‘A Pacifist in War: The Tragedy of Julián Besteiro’, in Comrades. Portraits from the Spanish Civil War (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 167–92; for the earlier political disputes see Paul Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War, 2^nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), 14–34.

²⁵For Besteiro's contacts with Madrid's fifth column and the capitulationist ‘underground’, see Bahamonde Magro and Cervera Gil, Así terminó la guerra de España, 256–57 and Preston, Comrades, 180–83.

²⁶Archivo Histórico del PCE (AHPCE, Madrid), ‘Informe sobre unos hechos acaecidos en la zona centro-sur’, Film XVII, Apdo., 214. There are shades here too of score-settling between the CNT-FAI and the PCE which goes back to their confrontation in the Madrid defence council of 1936–37: Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 194–97; Julio Aróstegui and Jesús A. Martínez, La junta de defensa de Madrid (Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 1982).

²⁷AHPCE, Informes, June–July 1938 covering political and union matters in various centre-south locations, including Villanueva de Córdoba (20 June), Almería (26 June), Murcia (10 July) Film XVII, Apdo. 214. Also global PCE report August 1938, Film XVIII, Apdo. 217. The sheer intensity and vitriol of the divisions under the material pressures of the war are captured in ‘Muy Reservado. Informe Sindical’, 6 August 1938, Film XVIII, Apdo. 217. A handwritten annotation indicates it was presented to the PCE's Buro Político by Amaro del Rosal. This goes right to the heart of the PSOE-PCE organizational conflict, as he was ostensibly still a leading socialist, but here acting as a PCE informant.

²⁸The perceptive comments of PSOE journalist and former minister, Julián Zugazagoitia, recorded in his contemporary account, Guerra y vicisitudes de los españoles, ed. Santos Juliá (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2001 [1^st ed. 1940]), 558–59.

²⁹On 30 January Casado received a detailed communication written by the Madrid fifth column, in accordance with Franco HQ instructions, which gave the conditions for rendition and encouraged professional army officers to comply in order to improve their chances of rehabilitation: Bahamonde Magro and Cervera Gil, Así terminó la guerra de España, 265–66; Cervera, Madrid en guerra, 393; the key extract is reproduced in Viñas and Hernández-Sánchez, El desplome, 91.

³⁰Azaña's own diary for 1937 records instances of social cleansing in the Francoist zone, for example, of Republican school-teachers (Azaña, Obras completas, IV, 685–86, diary entry 19 July 1937). Yet in late February 1939 he refused to assist the Negrín government in its bid to block the Francoist seizure of funds abroad destined to subsidize the evacuation of Republicans. This suggests that at some level Azaña persisted in seeing the end of war in terms of a normalized military victory (Viñas and Hernández-Sánchez, El desplome, 136–37).

³¹‘Los hombres que tenemos una responsabilidad, sobre todo en la organización sindical, no podemos abandonar ésta. Tengo la seguridad de que casi nada va a ocurrir. Esperemos los acontecimientos y quizá podamos reconstruir una UGT de carácter más moderado; algo así como las Trade Unions inglesas’ (‘Those of us who have responsibilities, especially in the Union [UGT], have to stay. I'm sure that nothing much will happen. We'll have to see how things turn out, and maybe we'll be able to reconstruct a more moderate UGT—along the lines of the British trade unions’): Besteiro's comments on 11 March 1939 to the civil governor of Murcia, Eustaquio Cañas, in the latter's (unpublished) memoir, ‘Marzo de 1939. El último mes’ (1948), p. 30. Copy in the Archivo de Ramón Lamoneda (ARLF-172-30), PSOE historical archive (Madrid). Compare a contemporary's view of Casado as ‘a wishful thinker with grandiose sentiments and exalted ideas about himself’, in The New Statesman and Nation, 23 December 1939, p. 930.

³² Cf. Negrín's speech of 12 February 1939: ‘o todos nos salvamos, o todos nos hundimos en la exterminación y el oprobio’ (‘either we shall all save ourselves or we shall all descend into extermination and opprobium’), published in El Socialista (Madrid), 14 February 1939, p. 1. The speech was intended to send the message that the Republic still had the capacity to continue a limited strategic resistance, but Negrín also believed he had a debt of honour to the communist movement for its contribution to the war effort, although for the PCE his sudden departure from the centre-south zone, as Casado's forces closed in on his HQ, still seemed a betrayal: Togliatti, Escritos sobre la guerra de España, 288–91; Irene Falcón, Asaltar a los cielos. Mi vida junto a Pasionaria (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1996), 171–72.

³³Consular officer, Denys Cowan in Madrid was in contact with both Casado and Besteiro, his report for 16–28 February 1939, in FO 425/416 XXXIX W 5827/35/36; Viñas, ‘Playing with History’. For Cowan, see also Peter Anderson, ‘The Chetwode Commission and British Diplomatic Responses to Violence Behind the Lines in the Spanish Civil War’, European History Quarterly, 42:2 (2012), 235–60 (pp. 247, 248 for Cowan's involvement in the Chetwode Commission on prisoner exchange, and pp. 251, 252 for his role at the end of the war in Madrid). As Anderson's evidence demonstrates, although the authorial commentary does not make it explicit, the Munich agreement also virtually capsized the Chetwode initiative because Franco, always uncooperative, afterwards saw no real reason even for pretence, since Munich delivered a clear signal that he was on the home strait.

³⁴An account of the embarking of Casado's group at Gandia is in the report by the International Delegation for Spanish Evacuation and Relief to Sir George Young, 27 March–1 April 1939, pp. 5–7 (Young Family Archive, courtesy of Sir George and Lady Aurelia Young). I would like to thank Linda Palfreeman for bringing this document to my attention. The Young report also indicates the obstructiveness of both the British and French authorities to general refugee evacuation (pp. 1, 5–7). It is ironic, especially in view of official British views on political violence behind the Republican lines, that the arrangement with Casado seems to have allowed the embarcation among his retinue of ultras, associated with the FAI, who had been involved in extrajudicial killing in Madrid. Casado himself would spend most of the 1940s in London, working sometimes for the BBC, with what was probably financial support from the British authorities (Vinas, ‘Playing with History’, see note 3).

³⁵Already by 8 February the British cabinet had taken the decision to recognize Franco as soon as possible, ideally once Republican resistance had ended; see Bahamonde Magro and Cervera Gil, Así terminó la guerra de España, 222–23; Moradiellos, La perfidia de Albión, 350 and cf. Anderson, ‘The Chetwode Commission and British Diplomatic Responses’, 251.

³⁶On the importance of Cartagena here, see Bahamonde Magro and Cervera Gil, Así terminó la guerra de España, 421–22; on Negrín's preparation of funds in France for this and evacuation estimates of at least ten thousand people, Viñas and Hernández-Sánchez, El desplome, 106. More on evacuation requirements in the International Delegation for Spanish Evacuation and Relief report to Sir George Young, pp. 1, 3, 6 (Young Family Archive) which puts the order of need at sixty thousand (p. 1).

³⁷A critical account of Azaña's behaviour during his residence at this time in the Spanish Embassy in Paris, is given by Republican ambassador, Marcelino Pascua, in an unpublished text in the Archivo Marcelino Pascua, caja 1 (9) (AHN).

³⁸Casado's military staff had been riddled with fifth columnists (including key ones) since 1938, and they brokered his meeting with Besteiro: Preston, Comrades, 184; Bahamonde Magro and Cervera Gil, Así terminó la guerra de España, 265, 266, 268.

³⁹Bahamonde Magro and Cervera Gil, Así terminó la guerra de España, 366–71.

⁴⁰At a PCE provincial conference in Madrid, 9–11 February, Dolores Ibárruri, and others even more vehemently, called for a ‘united front’ of workers to guarantee resistance: Togliatti, Escritos sobre la guerra de España, 275; Antonio Elorza and Marta Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas. La Internacional Comunista en España 1919–1939 (Barcelona: Planeta, 1999), 428–32. Cf. the contrast between Ibárruri's speech here and her more ‘on message’ speech backing a broad social alliance to sustain the war effort, recorded by Vincent Sheean in May 1938 (see note 15).

⁴¹Elorza and Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas, 434.

⁴²Viñas and Hernández-Sánchez, El desplome, 116, 134, 252–54.

⁴³Bahamonde Magro and Cervera Gil, Así terminó la guerra de España, 377–78, 386–89, uses an indispensable contemporary report by Jacinto Barrios, one of several by local communists in Madrid especially, but also centre-south zone-wide, which were incorporated along with many others (by higher ranking cadres, party-connected military leaders and the party leadership itself) into a lengthy secret report to Stalin on the events which ended the war: local reports from Alicante, Murcia and Almería in AHPCE, Film XIX, Apdo. 241. On the making of the report to Stalin, see Viñas and Hernández-Sánchez, El desplome, 30, 47–63 and for the report itself, 471–626. The sheer violence of the clash in Madrid is evident especially in the local party report by Manuel Fernández Cortinas, in Viñas and Hernández-Sánchez, El desplome, 59, even though Casado likely inflated his estimate of the death toll when he put it at 15,000 (Bahamonde Magro and Cervera Gil, Así terminó la guerra de España, 402).

⁴⁴By resisting, time was also gained to prepare the party for clandestinity, AHPCE, Film XX, Apdo. 238; Togliatti, Escritos sobre la guerra de España, 210–11, 295–97; Edmundo Domínguez, Los vencedores de Negrín (México D.F.: Nuestro Pueblo, 1940), 227. Domingo Girón was executed by Franco: see Juana Doña, Querido Eugenio, (Barcelona: Lumen, 2003), unpaginated plates.

⁴⁵Bahamonde Magro and Cervera Gil, Así terminó la guerra de España, 387.

⁴⁶ Cf. Tagüeña Lacorte, Testimonio de dos guerras, 319, on Madrid's exceptionality. We get a fleeting sense of Ascanio's resolve recorded in Dolores Ibárruri, El único camino (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1992), 610; also Santiago Carrillo, Memorias (Barcelona: Planeta, 1993), 301–02; Dolores Ibárruri, et al., Guerra y revolución en España 1936–39, 4 vols (Moscow: Editorial Progreso, 1966–1977), IV, 305–06, 309–17. Cf. also José García Pradas, Cómo terminó la guerra de España (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Imán, 1940), 81–91, 100–05.

⁴⁷For Ascanio's arrest see La Libertad, 22 March 1939, p. 2, quoted by Luis Español Bouché, Madrid 1939. Del golpe de Casado al final de la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Almena Ediciones, 2004), 57, 261. Ascanio's imprisonment and pending execution in a letter of 3 July 1941 from Eugenio Mesón (executed with Ascanio) to Mesón's wife Juana Doña: Doña, Querido Eugenio, 73, 82 (and a photograph of Ascanio, with biographical details, is among the unpaginated plates).

⁴⁸On Casado's social origins, see Ángel Viñas, ‘Segismundo Casado López. Coronel’, in 25 Militares de la República, ed. Javier García Fernández (Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa, 2011), 215–17.

⁴⁹Reports from Alicante, Murcia and Almería in AHPCE, Film XIX, Apdo. 241.

⁵⁰Casado's game plan is also implied in the fact that he had retained communist prisoners in gaol until the very end of March 1939: International Delegation for Spanish Evacuation and Relief, report to Sir George Young, entries for 28 and 29 March, p. 4 (Young Family Archive).

⁵¹Casado's imbibing of Francoist views on the ‘exoticism’ of communists is evident in his comments to an international delegation that, at the end of March 1939, was attempting (largely in vain) to organize Republican evacuation from the ports of the east coast: letter from a delegation member in The New Statesman and Nation, 23 December 1939, p. 929.

⁵²For the socialist movement's own ‘frenzy of reformation’, see Graham, Socialism and War, 240–43. Cf. the bitter, lapidary comments by Valencian PSOE leader, Manuel Molina Conejero: ‘Lo que se pide es la desaparición del PC como tal, para acabar la guerra. Si este sacrificio se pidiera al PS lo haría sin vacilaciones. ¿Qué os importa desaparecer hoy o dentro de ocho días cuando entre el fascismo?’ (‘We are being asked to liquidate the PCE as a political party in order to end the war. If the PS[OE] were asked to make this sacrifice it would willingly comply. What difference can it make whether you're wiped out now or in a week or so when the fascists take control?’), AHPCE, Film XX, Apdo. 238, frame 136—comments recorded by his PCE interlocutors and subsequently incorporated into a secret party report. Molina himself was detained immediately by the Francoists (Viñas and Hernández-Sánchez, El desplome, 377). He was executed at Paterna in November 1939.

⁵³On 18 and 27 February: see Viñas and Hernández-Sánchez, El desplome, 116, 134, 252–54.

⁵⁴The magnitude of what Casado's rebellion meant, in terms of the impossibility of any serious evacuation attempt, is evident in the International Delegation for Spanish Evacuation and Relief report to Sir George Young, pp. 1–7 (Young Family Archive). This report gives a sense of the tension and scarcely-concealed panic that gripped people in those final days, and of Casado's own looming awareness of his responsibility (pp. 3–4, 5) faced with Franco's refusal to treat with him, and the fact that across the ports of the east coast (Valencia, Alicante, Gandía), the Falange was already off the leash.

⁵⁵For the naval base revolt and prior circumstances, see Bahamonde Magro and Cervera Gil, Así terminó la guerra de España, 421–36. Franco, too, understood its key strategic value for the Republic, and a strong fifth column had been active there since April 1938—the base was fertile territory as many naval officers, while remaining geographically/institutionally loyal, were ideologically pro-Francoist.

⁵⁶Admiral Buiza was outspoken in his hostility to Negrín, but the latter opted for a softly-softly approach, given the similar disaffection of so many naval officers. After the internment of the Republican navy by the French in Bizerta, where Buiza had taken it, he would spend most of the rest of his life in North Africa. But it is noteworthy, not to say psychologically suggestive, that in 1947 Buiza offered his services to pilot Jewish refugees to Palestine for which endeavour he was for a time interned by the British in Haifa. Thereafter he lived in Oran until departing for France with the pied noir exodus. He died in Marseilles in 1963, aged sixty-one. On Buiza see Pedro María Egea Bruno, ‘Miguel Buiza Fernández-Palacios. Almirante habilitado’, in 25 Militares de la República, ed. García Fernández, 155–92.

⁵⁷ Cf. Francisco-Félix Montiel, Un coronel llamado Segismundo. Mentiras y misterio de la guerra de Stalin en España (Madrid: Criterio Libros, 1998), 42–43, 78, 87–93. Montiel, a professor of Administrative Law who had been a PSOE deputy (Murcia), was one of two high profile tránsfugas from the PSOE to the PCE in late 1936–early 1937 (the other being Margarita Nelken). During the war Montiel worked for government press relations. In 1939 he was with the PCE in Madrid—for a time in charge of radio communications (García Pradas, Como terminó la guerra de España, 31). Montiel left the PCE because of the Nazi-Soviet pact, although he later returned when the USSR joined the Allies in the war. He left the PCE again in 1950: see Beatriz Ansón, ‘The Limits of Destalinization: The Spanish Communist Party 1956–1965’, unpublished PhD thesis, London University, 2002, 92.

⁵⁸PCE manifesto of November 1940, ‘La guerra imperialista’, supporting the Soviet line, AHPCE, Film XX, Apdo. 243.

⁵⁹The result was the second, significantly reformulated version of Casado's account, Así cayó Madrid. Último episodio de la Guerra Civil española, published in Spain in 1968 (Madrid: Guadiana; repr. Madrid: Ediciones 99, 1977). See the ‘backstory’ to both the 1939 and 1968 versions of Casado in Viñas, ‘Playing with History’ in note 3.