Franco. Paul PrestonЧитать онлайн книгу.
opinions to an inordinate degree. While on holiday in Gijón in 1929, he bumped into General Primo de Rivera on the beach. The ministers of Primo’s government were spending a few days together away from Madrid and the Dictator invited Franco to lunch with them – a mark of considerable favour by Primo towards the young general. His self-esteem duly inflated, Franco found himself seated next to José Calvo Sotelo, the brilliant Finance Minister, who was in the midst of trying to defend the value of the peseta against the consequences of a massive balance of payments deficit, a bad harvest and the first signs of the great Depression. Franco assured an intensely irritated Calvo Sotelo that there was no point in using Spain’s gold and foreign currency reserves to support the value of the peseta and that the money so used would be better spent on industrial investment. The reasoning by which Franco reached the interpretation he put before the Minister revealed a simple cunning: he based his argument on the belief that there need be no link between the exchange rate of a currency and the nation’s gold and foreign reserves provided their value were kept secret.69
The economic difficulties discussed at this lunch were not the only problems besetting the Dictatorship. The military was deeply divided and some sections of the Army were turning against the regime. Franco was paradoxically to be the beneficiary of one of the most serious errors made by the Dictator in this regard. Primo de Rivera was anxious to reform the antiquated structures of the Spanish Army and in particular to slim down the inflated officer corps. His ideal was a small professional Army but, as a result of the reversal of his original policy of abandonismo in Morocco, it had grown significantly in size and cost in the mid-1920s. By 1930, the officer corps would be reduced in size by only about 10 per cent and the Army as a whole by more than 25 per cent, at an inordinately high price in terms of internal military discontent. Large sums were spent on efforts at modernization although the final increase in the number of mechanized units was immensely disappointing.70
The relative failure of Primo’s technical reforms was overshadowed by the legacy of one bitterly divisive issue. Most publicity was generated, and most damage caused in terms of morale, by the Dictator’s efforts to eradicate the divisions between the artillery and the infantry over promotions. To a large extent, this was the question which had given birth to the Juntas de Defensa in 1917. Divisions between the infantry, and particularly the Africanistas, on the one hand, and the artillery and the engineers on the other arose from the fact that it was much more difficult for an engineer or the commander of an artillery battery to gain promotion by merit than for an infantry officer leading charges against the Moors. To underline their discontent with a promotion system which favoured the colonial infantry, the Artillery corps had sworn in 1901 to accept no promotions which were not granted on grounds of strict seniority and to seek instead other rewards or decorations.
Although on coming to power Primo de Rivera had been thought within the Army to be more sympathetic to the artillery position, he seems to have changed his mind as a result of his contacts with the infantry officer corps in Morocco before and during the Alhucemas operation.71 By decrees of 21 October 1925 and 30 January 1926, he introduced greater flexibility into the promotion system. This gave him the freedom to promote brave or capable officers but it was also perceived as opening a Pandora’s box of favouritism. There was already tension when, in a typically precipitate manner, on 9 June 1926, the Dictator issued a decree specifically obliging the artillery to accept the principle of promotions by merit. Those who had accepted medals instead of promotions were now deemed retrospectively to have been promoted. Hostility within the mainland officer corps to a whole range of tactless encroachments on military sensibilities by the Dictator was already leading to contacts between some officers and the liberal opposition to the regime. It came to a head in a feeble attempt at a coup known as the Sanjuanada on 24 June 1926.72 In August, the imposition of promotions upon the artillery provoked a near mutiny by artillery officers who confined themselves to their barracks. In Pamplona, shots were fired by infantrymen sent to put an end to one such ‘strike’ of artillerymen. The Director of the Artillery Academy of Segovia was sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment, for refusing to hand over the Academy.73 Throughout the issue, Franco was careful not to get involved. He, more than anyone in the entire armed forces, had reason to be grateful to the system of promotions by merit.
Primo de Rivera won, but at the cost of dividing the Army and of undermining its loyalty to the King. His policy on promotions was to provide much of the cause for the grievances which lay behind some officers moving in the direction of the Republican movement. Thus, when the time came, some sectors of the Army would be ready to stand aside and permit first Primo’s own demise and then the coming of the Second Republic in April 1931.74 Broadly speaking, the Africanistas remained committed to the Dictatorship and thereafter were to be bitterly hostile to the democratic Republic which followed it in 1931.75 Indeed, the fault lines of the divisions created in the 1920s would run right through to the Civil War in 1936. Many of those who moved into opposition against Primo would be favoured by the subsequent Republican regime. In contrast, the Africanistas, including Franco, would see their previously privileged position dismantled.
The artillery/infantry, juntero/Africanista, issue had an immediate and direct impact on Franco’s life. In 1926, the Dictator was convinced that part of the promotions problem derived from the fact that there were separate academies for the officers of the four major corps, the infantry in Toledo, the artillery in Segovia, the cavalry in Valladolid and the engineers in Guadalajara. He concluded that Spain needed a single General Military Academy and decided to revive the Academia General Militar which had existed briefly during its so-called ‘first epoch’ between 1882 and 1893.76 By this time, and particularly after Alhucemas, Primo had developed a great liking for Franco. He told Calvo Sotelo that Franco was ‘a formidable chap, and he has an enormous future not only because of his purely military abilities but also because of his intellectual ones’.77 The Dictator was clearly grooming Franco for an important post. He sent him to the École Militaire de St Cyr, then directed by Philippe Pétain, in order to examine its structure. On 20 February 1927, Alfonso XIII approved a plan for a similar Spanish academy, and on 14 March 1927 Franco was made a member of a commission to prepare the way for it. By Royal Decree of 4 January 1928, he was appointed its first director. He expressed a preference for it to be sited at El Escorial but the Dictator insisted that it be in Zaragoza. Years later, Franco was alleged to have said that, if the Academy had been located at El Escorial instead of 350 kilometres from the capital, the fall of the monarchy in 1931 could have been avoided.78
In moving to the Academia General Militar, Franco was leaving behind him the kind of soldiering in which he made his reputation. Never again would he lead units of assault troops in the field. It was a major change, which taken with his marriage in 1923 and the birth of his daughter in 1926, would affect him profoundly. Until 1926, Franco was an heroic field soldier, an outstanding column commander, fearless if not reckless. Henceforth, as befitted his changing sense of his public persona, he would take ever fewer risks. In Morocco, he had been a ruthless disciplinarian, an abstemious and isolated individual with few friends.79 After his return to the Peninsula, he seems to have relaxed slightly, although he was always to remain obsessed with the primacy of unquestioning obedience and discipline. He became readier to turn a blind eye to laziness or incompetence in his subordinates, getting the best out of willing collaborators by manipulation and rewards. He became a relatively convivial frequenter of clubs and cafés where he would take an aperitif and give rein to his inclination to chat, recounting anecdotes and reminiscences among a group of military friends.80
Until the late 1920s, he showed few