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FRANCISCO FRANCO BAHAMONDE was born at 12.30 a.m. on 4 December 1892 in the calle Frutos Saavedra 108, known locally as the calle María, in El Ferrol in the remote north-western region of Galicia. He was christened Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo on 17 December in the nearby military parish church of San Francisco.^*

At the time, El Ferrol, an inward-looking and still walled town, was a small naval base with a population of twenty thousand. The Franco family had lived there since the early eighteenth century and had a tradition of work in the intendencia naval (pay corps/administration).^†1 Franco’s grandfather, Francisco Franco Vietti, was Intendente Ordenador de la Marina (naval paymaster) with a rank equivalent to brigadier general in the Army. He had married Hermenegilda Salgado-Araujo, with whom he had two children. The first, Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo, the father of the future Caudillo, was born on 22 November 1855, his sister Hermenegilda on 1 December 1856.

Nicolás followed his father into the administrative branch of the Spanish navy in which, after fifty years service, he rose to be Intendente-General, a rank also equivalent to brigadier general. As a young man, stationed first in Cuba then in the Philippines, Nicolás acquired a reputation for fast living.^‡ On 24 May 1890, when he was nearly thirty-five, Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo married the twenty-four year-old María del Pilar Bahamonde y Pardo de Andrade in the Church of San Francisco in El Ferrol. She was the pious daughter of Ladislao Bahamonde Ortega, commissar of naval equipment at the port. The union of this free-thinking bon viveur with the conservative, moralistic Pilar was not a success. Nevertheless, they had five children, of whom Nicolás was the first, Francisco the second, followed by Paz, Pilar and Ramón.^*2

Franco’s family had been concerned for over a century with the administration of the naval base in El Ferrol. When Franco was born, the town was remote and isolated, separated from La Coruña by a twelve-mile steamer journey to the south across the bay or by forty miles of poor, and in bad weather, often impassable, road. La Coruña was in turn 375 miles, or two days by bone-shaking railway, from Madrid. El Ferrol was hardly a cosmopolitan place. It was a town of rigid social hierarchies in which the privileged caste consisted of naval officers and their families. Naval administrators or merchant navy officers were considered to be of a lower category. Social barriers cut the lower middle-class Franco family off from ‘proper’ naval officers since the administration corps was regarded as inferior to the sea-going Navy, or Cuerpo General. The idea of a heroic family naval tradition, so carefully nurtured by Franco himself in later life, was an aspiration rather than a reality. That can be perceived in Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo’s determination that his sons become ‘real’ naval officers.

Partly because a naval commission was a common ambition among the Ferrolano middle class and because of his father’s job, Francisco developed an interest in things of the sea. As a child he played pirates in the harbour with the gangplanks of the ferries and rowed in the tranquil waters of the virtually enclosed ría (firth or fjord) of El Ferrol.³ As an adolescent, he tried to join the Navy. His two primary schools, the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón and the Colegio de la Marina, both specialised in preparing children for the Navy entrance examinations.⁴ Nicolás Franco Bahamonde did manage to fulfil his father’s expectations, but Francisco’s naval ambitions were to be thwarted. His failure to enter the navy would weigh heavily on him. In Salamanca during the Civil War, it was common knowledge that to please him or deflect his anger it was always worth trying to change the subject to naval matters.⁵ As Caudillo, he spent as much time as he could aboard his yacht Azor, wore an admiral’s uniform at every opportunity and, when visiting coastal cities, liked to arrive from the sea on board a warship.

His childhood was dominated by the efforts of his mother to cope with the overbearing severity and later the constant absences of his father, the shadow of whose infidelities hung over the home. He was brought up by Doña Pilar in an atmosphere of piety and stifling provincial lower middle class gentility. Marriage had only briefly diminished the number and length of Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo’s card games and drinking sessions at the officers’ club. After the birth of his daughter Paz, in 1898, Nicolás had returned to his bachelor habits. The distress that this caused his wife was compounded by the death of Paz in 1903, after an undiagnosed illness lasting four months. Pilar Bahamonde was devastated.⁶ Nicolás Franco was, at home, a bad-tempered authoritarian who easily lost control of himself if contradicted. His daughter Pilar described him as running the house like a general, although she also claimed that he beat his sons no more than was the norm at the time, a double-edged claim which leaves it difficult to evaluate the scale and intensity of his violence. The young Nicolás bore the brunt of his anger and Ramón also carried a deep resentment of his father and his uncontrolled violence all through his life. Until Nicolás Franco left home in 1907, his children and his wife were often the victims of his frequent rages.

Francisco was too well-behaved, too much of a ‘little old man’ (niño mayor), in his sister’s phrase, to arouse his father’s anger with any frequency. Nevertheless, Pilar recounts the deep sulk that came over him whenever he was cuffed unjustly by his father.⁷ Unable to win his father’s acceptance and affection, Francisco seems to have turned in on himself. He was a lonely child, withdrawn to the point of icy detachment. A story is told that when he was aged about eight, Pilar heated a long needle until the tip was red-hot and pressed it onto his wrist. Allegedly, gritting his teeth as his flesh burnt, he said only ‘how shocking the way burnt flesh smells’.⁸ Within the family, Francisco was long overshadowed by his two brothers, Nicolás and Ramón, who were extroverts and took after their father. Nicolás, who became a naval engineer, was the father’s favourite. Interviewed in the press in 1926, Franco père dismissed as unremarkable the achievements of his two younger sons, Francisco as commander of the Foreign Legion and Ramón who had become the first man to fly the south Atlantic.⁹ Even in later life, when Francisco was Head of State, his father, when asked about ‘his son’, would perversely talk about Nicolás or sometimes Ramón. Only when pressed would Don Nicolás talk about the person he called ‘my other son’.

In total contrast to her despotic husband, Pilar Bahamonde was a gentle, kindly and serene woman. She responded to the humiliations suffered at the hands of the gambling and philandering Nicolás by presenting to the world a facade of quiet dignity and religious piety that hid her shame and the economic difficulties she had to face. That is not to say that the family suffered privations, since she received financial help from her father, Ladislao Bahamonde Ortega, who lived with her after the death of his wife, and also from her husband. Nevertheless, once her husband established residence in Madrid from 1907, what Pilar Bahamonde received from him must necessarily have been limited. There was always a maid in the house, but some sacrifices were required to keep up appearances. Sending all four children to private schools put a strain on the family economy. It has been suggested, although strenuously denied by the family, that she had to take in lodgers.¹⁰ Despite these difficulties, her kindness extended to her relations and she helped to bring up the seven younger children of her brother-in-law Hermenegildo Franco.¹¹

Pilar Bahamonde tried to imbue her children with a determination to get on in life and to escape from their situation by study and hard work, a philosophy which seems to have taken root principally with her second son and her daughter Pilar. Nevertheless, all four of her surviving children were to be fearless and powerfully ambitious in one way or another. Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo was a liberal, sympathetic to freemasonry and critical of the Catholic Church. In contrast, Pilar Bahamonde was politically conservative and a deeply pious Catholic. Given the circumstances of his childhood, and the nature and ideas of his father, it is hardly surprising that an enduring and unsubtle Catholicism, sexual prurience and a hatred for liberalism and freemasonry should be part of the legacy which the young Franco was left by his mother.¹² What is more intriguing is the fact that his brothers followed in the footsteps of Don Nicolás rather than those of Doña Pilar. After her husband left, Doña Pilar always wore black. It seems too that, as Francisco witnessed her introspective piety becoming an effective shield against her misfortunes, he suppressed his own emotional vulnerability at the cost of developing a cold inner emptiness.

Doña Pilar’s unhappiness and stoical attempts to put a good face on her plight made it difficult for her to compensate her children for the behaviour of her husband. Each responded differently: Francisco identified with his mother, denying the need for his father’s approval which he longed for and never achieved. His hedonistic elder brother Nicolás grew up to be as pleasure-loving as his father, free with money and with women. His wild younger brother Ramón would be an irresponsible adventurer, famous for his exploits as an air-ace and notorious for his decadent private life in the 1920s and for a superficial involvement with both anarchism and freemasonry. Francisco was much more deeply attached to his mother than were either of his brothers. He regularly accompanied her to communion and was a pious child. He cried when he made his first communion. When on leave in El Ferrol, the adult Francisco would never fail to fulfil any religious duty for fear of upsetting his mother.^*13

It is impossible to say with any precision what effect the separation of his parents and the departure of his father had on Francisco, although there is surely some significance in the fact that one of the few remarks that he ever made on the subject of children was: ‘small children should never be separated from their parents. It is not good to let that happen. The child needs to have the security provided by the support of his parents and they should not forget that their children are their personal responsibility.’¹⁴ As Caudillo, Franco denied vehemently that there was anything abnormal in Don Nicolás’s relationship with his wife or his children. On one occasion, however, when given irrefutable evidence of his father’s pecadillos, his reaction was revealing. He snapped ‘Alright but they never diminished his paternal authority’.¹⁵ The difficulties of Franco’s relationship with his father were later reflected in various efforts to reconstruct it in an idealised way. In his diary of his first year in the Spanish Foreign Legion, he told a clearly apocryphal story in which can be discerned his own longings. A young officer in Morocco is crossing the street when a grizzled veteran soldier salutes him. The officer goes to return the salute, their eyes meet, they look at each other and embrace in tears. It is the officer’s long-lost father.¹⁶ It was a trial run for his autobiographical novel, Raza, in which he created the father he would rather have had as a naval hero of total moral rectitude. When his father died, he had the body seized and implicitly reinvented the second part of his life by having him buried with a pomp which, while in accord with military regulations, was hardly appropriate to the bohemianism of Don Nicolás’s final years. Franco’s own lifelong avoidance of drink, gambling and women bore testimony to a determination to create an existence which was the antithesis of his father’s life.

Franco would implacably reject all the things he associated with his father, from the pleasures of the flesh to the ideas of the Left. Franco’s repudiation of his father was matched by a deep identification with his mother, something which might perhaps be seen in many aspects of his personal style, a gentle manner, a soft voice, a propensity to weep, an enduring sense of deprivation. A tone of self-pitying resentment runs through his speeches as Caudillo, a continual echo of the hard-done-by little boy that he must have been, and was one of the motivating forces of his drive to greatness.

Two great political events of Franco’s early youth were to dominate his later development – the loss of Cuba in 1898 and the involvement of Spain in a costly colonial war in Morocco. Imperial disaster provoked civilian distrust of an incompetent Army and intensified military resentment of the political establishment and of civilian hostility to conscription. Throughout his life, Franco would remark on the profound effect that the 1898 ‘disaster’ had on him. In 1941, when he was near to declaring war on the Axis side, he declared ‘when we began our life, … we saw our childhood dominated by the contemptible incompetence of those men who abandoned half of the fatherland’s territory to foreigners’. He would see his greatest achievement as wiping out the shame of 1898.¹⁷

Francisco was five and a half when the great naval defeat at the hands of the United States occurred in Santiago de Cuba on 3 July 1898. Spain lost the remnants of her empire – Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Although it is highly unlikely that, at such an age, he was aware of what was happening, a disaster of that dimension could not but have a profound effect on a small naval garrison town like El Ferrol. Many of his school-friends lost relatives and wore mourning. Mutilated men were seen around the town for many years. More importantly, when he became a cadet in the Army, he went directly into an atmosphere which had festered since 1898. Defeat was attributed to the treachery of politicians who had sent naval and military forces into battle with inadequate resources. That it took the massively superior US forces three months to defeat the ramshackle Spanish fleet left Franco convinced that bravery was worth hundreds of tons of superior equipment.¹⁸

The defeat of 1898 had an immediate impact on Franco because of the consequent budget cuts. The Escuela de Administración Naval, the usual channel for boys of the Franco family into the Navy, was closed in 1901. It was decided that Nicolás and Francisco would prepare instead for the entrance examinations of the Cuerpo General de la Armada. They went to the local middle-class school, the Escuela del Sagrado Corazón. At this time, before his father abandoned the family home, Francisco was, according to contemporaries who saw him outside the family, a meticulous plodder, ‘good at drawing but otherwise quite average, quite ordinary. He was a nice lad, of a happy disposition, thoughtful; he took his time in answering questions but he was a playful lad.’¹⁹ He was of sickly appearance and so thin that his playmates nicknamed him cerillito (little match-stick). Within the family, his sister was struck by the extent to which Francisco emulated his mother’s quiet seriousness. He was an obedient, well-behaved and affectionate child, although timid, rather sad and uncommunicative. Then, as later, he had little spontaneity. He was very particular about his appearance, a trait that would follow him throughout his life. Even then he seemed older than his years and his obstinacy, astuteness and caution were evident. Among his closest childhood friends was his cousin Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde, who would be executed in Morocco in 1936, with Franco’s acquiescence.²⁰ As an adolescent, Francisco showed a normal interest in girls, favouring slim brunettes, mainly from among his sister’s schoolfriends. He wrote them poems and was mortified when they were shown to his sister.²¹

The loss of Cuba was to have serious domestic consequences. It hastened the rise of a regionalist movement in Catalonia and imbued Army officers with a determination to wipe away the ignominy of defeat through a colonial enterprise in Morocco. Catalan regionalism and the Moroccan adventure were to interract in an explosive manner. The demonstration in 1898 of Spain’s international impotence shook the faith of the Catalan élites in the central government. The Catalan economy had depended on the Cuban market and now the previously latent sense that Madrid was an incompetent and parasitical obstacle to Catalan dynamism found ever more vocal expression, above all in the appearance in early 1901 of the Catalanist party, the Lliga Regionalista.²² In the context of insecurity and humiliation provoked by the loss of Cuba, military anger at what was seen as as political betrayal during the war with the USA was compounded by the emergence of militant Catalanism, which soldiers perceived as an aggressive separatist threat to the unity of the Patria.²³

In November 1905, the Barcelona offices of both the Catalan satirical magazine, Cu-Cut! and of the Lliga Regionalista’s newspaper, La Veu de Catalunya, were ransacked by three hundred fiercely centralist junior officers to the applause of the officer corps throughout Spain. Given widespread military approval of what was happening, the government was unable to impose discipline or to resist military demands for measures to punish offences against the honour of the Army. In 1906, politicians bowed to military readiness to interfere in politics by introducing the Ley de Jurisdicciones which gave the Army jurisdiction over perceived offences against the Patria, the King and the Army itself.²⁴ It was a considerable boost to the Army’s sense of superiority over civilian society.

On reaching the age of twelve, first Nicolás and then Francisco, together with their fourteen year-old cousin, Francisco Franco Salgado Araujo, entered the Naval Preparatory School run by Lieutenant-Commander Saturnino Suanzes. There they became friendly with Camilo Alonso Vega, who was to remain a lifelong comrade. Nicolás, and a friend of the two brothers, Juan Antonio Suanzes, were successful in their efforts to join the Cuerpo General de la Armada. Nicolás chose to go to the Naval Engineering School. Franco and his lanky cousin Pacón^* nurtured hopes of going to the Escuela Naval Flotante, the naval cadet ship. Then a decree was published restricting entry which closed the way to them. There was never any question of seeking a career other than a military one and so the now fourteen year-old Franco was sent to the Academia Militar de Infantería in Toledo. Pacón failed the entrance examination for 1907 but was successful the following year.²⁵

When he accepted a post in Madrid in 1907, Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo went alone and gradually severed his links with his family. Members of his family have suggested that he was obliged to take the post, but having been able to spend nearly twenty years in El Ferrol without threat of being moved away, it seems more likely that he deliberately sought the posting to the capital in order to escape an unhappy marriage.²⁶ Although there was no divorce from Pilar, he later ‘married’ his lover Agustina Aldana in an informal non-religious ceremony in Madrid and lived with her in the calle Fuencarral in Madrid until his death in 1942. A child who lived with them and to whom they were devoted has been variously described as their illegitimate daughter or Agustina’s niece whom they had informally adopted. The scandalized family referred to Agustina as his ‘housekeeper’ (ama de llaves).²⁷

Accordingly, it was an embittered home in El Ferrol which the young Francisco left in July 1907 to take the entrance examinations for the military academy. He was accompanied on the long journey from La Coruña to Toledo by his father. Despite the fascination of the new landscapes through which he passed, the tension between him and his father made it a less than pleasant experience. Don Nicolás was unbending and rigid in the course of a journey during which his son needed encouragement and affection.²⁸ Despite these inauspicious beginnings, Franco passed his examinations and entered the Academy on 29 August 1907 along with 381 other aspirants, including many future comrades-in-arms such as Juan Yagüe and Emilio Esteban Infantes. The Academy occupied the Alcázar built by Carlos V which dominated the hill around which the town was built. Far from the misty green valleys of Galicia and the placid ría in which he used to sail, dusty Toledo in the arid Castilian plain must have constituted a brutal shock. Although there is no evidence of his being sensitive to the wealth of religious art with which Toledo abounded, it appears that he responded to the sense of the past which pulsates in its streets. In his novel Raza, the character representing Franco (the cadet José Churruca) ‘got more from the stones [of Toledo] than from his books’.²⁹ A growing obsession with the greatness of imperial Spain made him receptive to Toledo as a symbol of that greatness. His later identification with the figure of El Cid may also have had its origins in his adolescent ramblings around the historic streets of the town.

Life as an Army cadet would itself have strengthened his interest in Spanish history. Even by his own restrained account in later life, it is clear that he suffered some considerable agonies. Away from the loving care of his mother for the first time, young Franco had to grit his teeth and find inner reserves of determination to get on. In the austere conditions of the Alcázar, he would also have to deal with the problems arising from his anything but imposing physique (1.64 metres/5′4″ tall, and painfully thin). Already vulnerable because of the desertion of his father, the separation from his mother, his central refuge, must inevitably have forced him to cope with acute insecurity. He seems to have dealt with it in two related ways. First, he threw himself into Army life, fulfilling his tasks with the most thorough sense of duty and making a fetish of heroism, bravery and the military virtues. The rigid structures of military hierarchy and the certainties of orders gave him a framework to which he could relate. At the same time, he began to create another identity. The insecure teenager from Galicia would become the tough desert hero and eventually, as Caudillo, the El Cid-like ‘saviour of Spain’.³⁰

On account of his size and high-pitched voice, he was soon called Franquito (little Franco) by his companions and, during his three years in the Academy subjected to various minor humiliations. He was forced to drill with a rifle which had had fifteen centimetres sawn off the barrel. He worked hard, with a particular interest in topography and the uncritical and idealized military history of Spain served up to the cadets. Having no interest in sexual or alcoholic safaris into the more disreputable parts of the town, he became a target for the cruel initiation ceremonies (novatadas) of his fellow students, against which he reacted with some violence. In his own muted version, recollected nearly seventy years later, he spoke of the ‘sad welcome offered to those of us who came full of illusions to join the great military family’ and described the novatadas as a ‘heavy cross to bear’ (un duro calvario).³¹ Other accounts, seeking traces of the later hero in the young cadet, recount his virile reactions. One oft-repeated story tells how his books were hidden and he was punished for not having them in the correct place. They were hidden again. The cadet officer was about to punish him again when Franco threw a candlestick at his head. When taken before the C.O., he refused to name those who had picked on him.³² Such behaviour helped him to make some friends, including Camilo Alonso Vega, Juan Yagüe and Emilio Esteban Infantes, although he was never to be close to any of them.

In Britain and America, the Army cadet at the turn of the century began his military studies only after completing his civilian education. In Toledo, young, relatively uneducated boys began to absorb Army discipline and the conventions of the military view of the world when they were that much more ignorant and impressionable.³³ In professional terms, Franco can have learned little beyond the practical skills of horsemanship, shooting and fencing. The basic text-book was the Reglamento provisional para la instrucción teórica de las tropas de Infantería which was based on the lessons of the Franco-Prussian war and ignored the sweeping changes which had taken place in German military thinking since 1870. The increasing prominence given in both the German and British armies to the artillery and engineers was not replicated in Spain where the infantry remained dominant. The recent experience in Cuba was not used to draw any military conclusions, although they would have been immensely useful for the colonial adventures in North Africa. The stress was rather on discipline, military history and moral virtues – bravery in the face of the enemy, unquestioning faith in military regulations, absolute obedience and loyalty to superior officers.³⁴ Cadets were also imbued with an acute sense of the Army’s moral responsibilities as guardian of the essence of the nation. No slight or insult to the Army, to the flag, to the monarch, to the nation could ever be tolerated. By extension, when a government brought the nation into disrepute by permitting disorder then it was the duty of the patriotic Army officer to rise up against the government in defence of the nation.

The method of training was usually the rote learning of masses of facts, in particular of the details of the great battles of the Spanish past. However, these battles were examined as exemplars of bravery and resistance to the last rather than analysed for their tactical or strategic lessons. Franco’s own central memory of his time at the Academy was of a major on the teaching staff who had been decorated for heroism with the Cruz Laureada de San Fernando (the Spanish equivalent of the Victoria Cross). He had been given the medal for a hand-to-hand knife fight in Morocco from which, Franco recalled with pleasure, ‘he still had the glorious scars on his head’. The impact on Franco’s way of thinking – and, indeed, on his own methods when Director of the Spanish General Military Academy at Zaragoza twenty years later – was revealed in his remark that ‘this alone taught us more than all the other disciplines’.³⁵ When the cadets eventually went into the field, they had to improvise since they had been taught very little of practical application.

While Francisco was studying in Toledo, the events known as the semana trágica broke out in Barcelona in late July 1909. To military eyes, these disturbances were triply disturbing, with their connotations of anti-militarism, anti-clericalism and Catalan separatism. The government of Antonio Maura was under pressure from both Army officers close to Alfonso XIII and Spanish investors in Moroccan mines. Moreover, attacks by tribesmen on the railway leading to the port of Melilla had given rise to French threats to export their ore through Algeria. Maura also feared that France might use the apparent Spanish inability to keep order in her protectorate as an excuse to absorb it. Accordingly, he took advantage of an attack by tribesmen on the railway at Melilla on 9 July to send an expeditionary force to expand Spanish territory as far as the mineral deposits of the nearby mountains. The Minister of War decided to send a brigade of light infantry garrisoned in Barcelona. The brigade’s reservists, mainly married men with children, were called up and, without adequate preparations, embarked from the port of Barcelona over the next few days. Over the next week, there were anti-war protests in Aragón, Valencia and Catalonia in the home towns of the reservists. In Barcelona, on Sunday 18 July 1909, a spontaneous demonstration broke out against the war. On that same day, Rif tribesmen launched an attack on Spanish supply lines in Morocco. On the following day, news began to reach Spain of new military disasters in Melilla. Untrained, ill-equipped and devoid of basic maps, the appallingly ramshackle state of the Spanish Army was revealed again. Throughout the week, the scale of the defeat and of the casualties was inflamed by rumours. There were anti-war demonstrations in Madrid, Barcelona and cities with railway stations from which conscripts were departing for the war.

During the following weekend, anarchists and socialists in Barcelona agreed to call a general strike. On Monday 26 July, the strike spread quickly, although it was not directed against the employers, some of whom supported its anti-war purpose. The Captain-General of the region, Luis de Santiago, decided to treat it as an insurrection, overruling the civil governor, Angel Ossorio y Gallardo, and declared martial law. Barricades were set up in the streets of outlying working class districts and anti-conscription protests debouched into anti-clerical disturbances and church-burnings. General de Santiago could do no more than defend the principal points of the city because he feared that his conscripts would fraternize with the rioters. Reinforcements were delayed by the fact that the attention of the military high command and of the government was distracted by the battle of Barranco del Lobo in Morocco. By 29 July, however, units had arrived and the movement was put down over the next two days with the use of artillery. There were numerous prisoners taken and 1,725 people were subsequently tried, of whom five were sentenced to death. Among them was Francisco Ferrer Guardia, the free-thinking founder of the libertarian school, the Escuela Moderna.³⁶

Particularly spine-chilling accounts of what was happening were given to the cadets in Toledo by their instructors. There was outrage that pacifists and revolutionaries should be on the loose while part of the Army was fighting for survival in Morocco. The many international demonstrations on behalf of Francisco Ferrer were seen by the young Franco as the work of international freemasonry. The circle of cadets in which Franco moved regarded the events in Barcelona, and the defeat at Barranco del Lobo, as evidence that the political establishment was weak and incompetent.³⁷

The gulf between the military and civil society was widening dramatically at this time. It is impossible to comprehend Franco either personally or politically without understanding the extent to which he first assumed and then expressed the attitudes of the typical Army officer of his day. The milestones along the road to the civil-military divorce – the ‘disaster’ of 1898, the Cu-Cut! incident of 1905, the ‘tragic week’ of 1909 – were reached either shortly before Franco joined the Army or during his early, formative, years in the service. These events and their professional and political implications were inevitably the talk of military academies and officers’ messes. For someone as single-mindedly, not to say obsessively, committed to the military career as the young Franco, it was impossible for the resentments arising from these events not to be burnt deep into his consciousness.

Franco completed his studies at the Academy in June 1910. His ambition, like that of most of those who graduated at that time, was to go and fight in Morocco, where rapid promotion was possible and where he could help wipe out the shame of Cuba. On 13 July 1910, Franco was formally incorporated into the officer corps of the Army as a second lieutenant with the mediocre position of no. 251 of the 312 cadets of his year (of the original 381) who survived to graduate. Despite this mediocre start, Franco would be the first of his class to become a general.

It has been claimed that the young Franco applied immediately for a posting in Morocco, and was refused on the grounds of age, tough competition and his low place in the seniority list.³⁸ In fact, there would have been no point making a formal application for a posting in Morocco since, at the time, only first lieutenants and above could be posted to Africa.³⁹ He was posted to the Regimiento de Zamora no. 8, which was stationed in his home town of El Ferrol. There, from 22 August 1910 until February 1912, he was able to be near his mother and to show off his uniform to his contemporaries. He also had to face the crushing boredom of garrison duty in a small provincial town. Mornings were given over to parades and drills, afternoons to riding. Then there were guard duties. He was often able to eat at home. During this time, the continuing influence of his mother was reflected in the fact that he joined the religious confraternity Adoración Nocturna on 11 June 1911.⁴⁰ He also consolidated his friendship with Camilo Alonso Vega and with his cousin Pacón. At the end of 1911, the order prohibiting second lieutenants from being posted to Morocco was lifted and all three began to make frequent transfer requests.

Perhaps suffocated by the gloomy domestic situation, probably driven by patriotism, certainly aware of a second lieutenant’s poor pay and that opportunities for promotion would come easier in Morocco than in a Peninsular garrison, Franco was anxious to be on his way and to overcome his 251st placing. While he was harkening to the siren calls of Africa, the Left was campaigning vigorously against the colonial war in general and against conscription in particular. Like many young soldiers, Franco developed what would be a lifelong contempt for left-wing pacifism. With the situation of the Spanish Army deteriorating in Morocco, the transfer requests of the three young officers were finally accepted on 6 February 1912. They were posted as reserves to Melilla. Franco and his two companions immediately set off on the long and difficult journey. With the road to the nearest railway station flooded by rain storms, and the port for the normal ferry service to La Coruña closed, they decided to go to the Naval Headquarters in El Ferrol in search of a ride. They were allowed to travel on board the merchant ship Paulina, which involved a hair-raising storm-tossed six hour journey standing in a gangway. From La Coruña, they carried on by rail to Málaga where they arrived after two days travel. They reached Morocco on 17 February 1912.⁴¹

The thin, boy soldier with round staring eyes who arrived in Melilla found a filthy, run-down colonial town.⁴² The nineteen year-old Franco reported for duty at the Fort of Tifasor which was part of the outer defences of Melilla. Tifasor was under the command of Colonel José Villalba Riquelme, who had been Director of the Academia de Infantería when Franco was a cadet. Villalba Riquelme’s first order to him was to cover his sword scabbard in mat leather to stop it glinting and providing a target for snipers. Indeed, in the shortest time possible, Franco had to learn this and all the other practicalities of life in combat that he had not been taught in the Academy in Toledo nor learned on garrison duty in El Ferrol. Like most young officers, he can have had little expectation of the difficulties that faced the Spanish Army in the field.

The most obvious problem was the warlike local population’s bitter hatred of the occupying troops. Given the poor technological level of the Spanish armed forces, the Moroccan adventure would be no pushover. The Army was inefficient, weighed down by bureaucracy and inadequately supplied with obsolete equipment: it had more generals and fewer artillery pieces per thousand men than the armies of such countries as Montenegro, Romania and Portugal. Its eighty thousand men were commanded by more than tweny-four thousand officers of whom 471 were generals.⁴³ In the eyes of Army officers, the most damaging source of difficulty was the inability of the Spanish political establishment to provide either the resources or the decisive policy necessary to give the professional soldiers any chance of success. Indeed, the political élite’s awareness of the growing pacificism of much of public opinion merely confirmed many Army officers in their belief that Spain could not be properly ruled by civilians. Moreover, there was Spain’s subordinate position to France in the area. Spain was burdened with indefensible frontiers in Morocco which simply ignored the realities of tribal boundaries. French dominance also inhibited Madrid’s policy-making.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For his bravery in a battle at Beni Salem on the outskirts of Tetuán on 1 February 1914, the twenty-one year-old Franco was promoted to captain ‘por méritos de guerra’, with effect from that date although it was not announced until 15 April 1915. He was building a reputation as a meticulous and well-prepared field officer, concerned about logistics, provisioning his units, map-making, camp security. Twenty years later, Franco told a journalist that to stave off boredom in Morocco, he had devoured military treatises, memoirs of generals and descriptions of battles.⁵⁰ By 1954, he had inflated this to the point of telling the English journalist S.F.A. Coles rather implausibly that, in his off-duty hours in Morocco, he had studied history, the lives of the great military commanders, the ancient Stoics and philosophers and works of political science.⁵¹ This later reconstruction by Franco contrasted curiously with the assertion of his friend and first biographer that he spent every available moment either at the parapet watching for the enemy through his binoculars or else surveying the terrain on horseback in order to improve his unit’s maps.⁵²

Whatever Franco did in his spare time, it was during this period that anecdotes began to be told about his apparent imperturbability under fire. He was said to be cold and serene in his risk-taking rather than recklessly brave. He was already making good his low position in the pass list of his year at the Academy (promoción). This came near to costing him his life during a large-scale clean-up operation against guerrilla tribesmen who were massing in the hills around Ceuta in June 1916. The guerrillas had their main support point about six miles to the west of the town, in the mountain top village of El Biutz, which dominated the road from Ceuta to Tetuán and was protected by a line of trenches manned by machine-gunners and riflemen. Rigidly constrained by their own field regulations, the Spaniards could be expected to make a frontal assault up the slope. As they were advancing, being decimated by fire from the trenches above, other tribesman planned to pour down the back of the hill, sweep around below the Spaniards and trap them in a cross-fire.

In the early hours of the morning of 29 June 1916, with high losses being recorded, Franco was part of the leading company of the Segundo Tabor (second battalion) of Regulares which was heading the advance. When the company commander was badly wounded, Franco assumed command. With men dropping all around him, he broke through the enemy encirclement and played a significant role in the fall of El Biutz. However, he was shot in the stomach. Normally, in Africa, abdominal wounds were fatal. That night’s report referred to Captain Franco’s ‘incomparable bravery, gift for command and energy deployed in combat’. The tone of the report implied that his death was inevitable. He was carried to a first aid post at a place called Cudia Federico. The medical officer staunched the bleeding and refused for two weeks to send him the six miles by stretcher to the casualty clearing station outside Ceuta. He believed that for the wounded man to be moved would kill him and the delay saved Franco’s life. By 15 July, Franco had recovered sufficiently to be transferred to the military hospital in Ceuta. There an X-ray showed that the bullet had not hit any vital organ. A fraction of an inch in any direction and he would have died.⁵³

In a war which, during his time in Africa, claimed the lives of nearly one thousand officers and sixteen thousand soldiers, it was to be Franco’s only serious wound. His luck gave rise to many later anecdotes about his daring. It also led his Moorish troops to believe that he was blessed with baraka, the mystical quality of divine protection which kept him invulnerable. Their belief seems to have infected him with his lifelong conviction that he had enjoyed the benevolent glance of providence. He later said somewhat portentously ‘I have seen death walk by my side many times, but fortunately, she did not know me’.⁵⁴ The location of the wound was also the basis of speculation about Franco’s apparent lack of interest in sexual matters. What little medical evidence is available does not support any such interpretation. Moreover, long before receiving the wound, Franco had refrained from participating in the sexual adventures of his comrades in his time as a cadet in the Academy and in subsequent postings in both mainland Spain and in Africa.⁵⁵ His distaste for his father’s behaviour is sufficient to account for the extreme propriety of his sex life.

The High Commissioner in Morocco, General Francisco Gómez Jordana, father of the future foreign minister, recommended Franco for promotion to major again ‘por méritos de guerra’ and the procedure also began for him to be awarded Spain’s highest award for bravery, the Gran Cruz Laureada de San Fernando. Both proposals were opposed by the Ministry of War. The military advisers of the Ministry cited the twenty-three year-old Franco’s age for denying the promotion. Franco reacted fiercely and appealed against the decision, seeking the support of the High Commissioner for a petition (recurso reglamentario) to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, King Alfonso XIII. In the face of such determination, the King granted the appeal and on 28 February 1917, Franco was promoted to Major with effect from 29 June 1916. He had taken exactly six years to rise from second lieutenant to major. Along the way, he had gained the reputation at the palace of being the officer who with the greatest cheek asked for help or made complaints about his career.⁵⁶ The nomination for the Laureada was turned down on 15 June 1918. It is a reasonable assumption that, having gained his promotion by going above the heads of the Ministerial advisers, Franco’s case was not reviewed with any great sympathy.⁵⁷

There can be little doubt that, at the time, Franco preferred the promotion to the medal.^* The contrast between the natural timidity of the young second lieutenant who had arrived in Africa five years earlier and the determined drive to gain promotion holds an important clue to his psychology. Franco’s petition to Alfonso XIII revealed unfettered ambition. His bravery under fire was a means to the same end. The courage of the young soldier, like the cold authoritarianism of the dictator later on, may be interpreted as different manifestations of public personae which both protected him from any sense of inadequacy and provided ways of fulfilling his ambition. Franco left ample written evidence that he was not satisfied with the reality of his own life, most notably in his novel Raza. It is difficult not to suspect that Franco invented his own persona as the hero of the desert almost as deliberately as he did that of his hero José Churruca in Raza.

Promoted to major, Franco was obliged to return to mainland Spain since there were no vacant positions for officers of that rank in Morocco. He was posted instead to Oviedo in the spring of 1917 in command of a battalion of the Regimiento de Infantería del Príncipe. In Oviedo, he lived in the Hotel Paris where he became friends with a university student, Joaquín Arrarás, who would be his first biographer twenty years later. A year later, he was joined by his two companions Pacón and Camilo Alonso Vega. Despite his rank, his reputation for bravery and his brutal experiences in the Moroccan inferno, Franco’s adolescent appearance and his diminutive size led to him being known locally as ‘el comandantín’ (the little major).⁵⁸ Always reserved and never gregarious, he can hardly have enjoyed the routine of garrison life in Oviedo. The rainy climate and green hills of Asturias may have reminded him of his native Galicia but now the call of Africa was more powerful than that of home. As Arrarás put it, he had ‘the poison of Africa in his veins’.⁵⁹

In the daily colonial skirmishes, Franco had come to be admired and successful yet few of his comrades knew him. He was never to allow himself to become close to anyone, perhaps for fear of revealing his essential insecurity. Nevertheless, he had forged professional and even personal links which would remain a central part of his life. He had become an Africanista, one of those officers who believed that, in their commitment to fighting to conquer Morocco, they alone were concerned with the fate of the Patria. The esprit de corps consequent on shared hardship and daily risk developed into a shared contempt both for professional politicians and the pacifist left-wing masses whom the Africanistas regarded as obstacles to the successful execution of their patriotic duty. Life in a mainland posting also signified a drastic slowing down of the promotion process. Moreover, his high rank relative to his age must have made him the target of some resentment. In Morocco, for all his youth and his lack of social skills, he was recognized as a brave and competent soldier to be trusted under fire. In Oviedo, among officers who were twice his age but still only majors or captains, or generals who saw in him only a dangerous climber, he was not popular and was driven in on himself.⁶⁰

He was put in charge of the instruction of oficiales de complemento (auxiliary officers) which permitted him to establish relations with some important local families in the closed society of Oviedo. In the late summer of 1917, at a village fair (romería), he met an attractive local girl, María del Carmen Polo y Martínez Valdés, the daughter of a rich local family, albeit not as illustrious as it once had been. At the time, the slender dark-eyed Carmen was a fifteen year-old school-girl at the convent of Las Salesas. Franco wanted them ‘to walk out together’ but she refused on the grounds that, being a soldier, he could disappear as quickly as he had appeared. She also thought fifteen was too young for a steady relationship. Nevertheless, when she returned to the convent in the autumn of 1917, he wrote to her, although his letters were intercepted by the nuns and handed over to her family. With the imperturbable optimism and determination which characterized his professional behaviour, he began a dogged siege. Carmen, her school friends, and even the nuns, were thrilled to note that the famous Major now began to be a daily attender at 7 a.m. mass. He could catch a glimpse of her through a wrought-iron grill.⁶¹ The willowy and elegant Carmen Polo carried herself with a certain aristocratic hauteur. The deeply conservative Franco felt a near reverence for the aristocracy and admired his fiancée’s family and their way of life.⁶²

The incipient romance with the young Army officer of modest family, even more modest prospects and a dangerous occupation met with the initial opposition of the bride’s widowed father, Felipe Polo. He declared that to let his daughter marry Franco would be tantamount to letting her marry a bullfighter, a comment which carried with it considerable snobbery as well as a recognition of the risks of service in Africa.⁶³ Even more determined was the opposition of Carmen’s aunt Isabel, Felipe Polo’s sister, who, since the death of his wife had taken responsibility for the upringing of his four children. Like her brother, Isabel Polo hoped for a better match than a soldier for her niece.⁶⁴ However, despite this parental opposition, Franco pursued Carmen Polo tenaciously. He would pass messages to her in the hat-band of a mutual friend or else place them in the pockets of her coat while it hung in a café. They would meet clandestinely.⁶⁵ Ultimately, Carmen’s own determination would overcome the resistance of her family. Thereafter, that determination would be put at the service of her future husband’s career.

The relationship developed in a socially divided city. The inflation and shortages which resulted from the First World War were intensified by the militancy of the local working class. The Socialist Party took the lead in agitation against the deteriorating living standards along with attacks on the ‘criminal war in Morocco’ which deeply offended and infuriated Franco and other soldiers. Outrage that such attacks should be permitted was part of a general disgust with a political system which was blamed for the many disasters faced by the Army. Military discontent now came to the boil because of a simultaneous internal squabble between those who had volunteered to fight in Africa and those who had remained in the Peninsula, Africanistas and peninsulares. For those who had fought in Africa, the risks were enormous but the prizes, in terms of adventure and rapid promotion, high. The mainland signified a more comfortable, but boring, existence and promotion only by strict seniority. When salaries began to be hit, like those of civilians, by inflation, there was resentment among the peninsulares for those like Franco who had gained quick promotion. Some arms, such as the Artillery, had managed to impose a system of totally rigid seniority with an agreement by all members of its officer corps to refuse any promotion by merit. So-called Juntas de Defensa, rather like trade unions, were founded in many garrisons to protect the seniority system and to seek better pay.

What might have been an internal military issue was to contribute to a catastrophic upheaval in national politics. The coming of the First World War had already aroused political passions by giving rise to a bitter debate involving senior generals about whether Spain should intervene. Given the country’s near bankruptcy and the parlous state of the Army, neutrality was inevitable, much to the chagrin of many officers. Massive social upheaval came as a consequence of Spain’s position as a non-belligerent. Her economically privileged position of being able to supply both the Entente and the Central Powers with agricultural and industrial products saw coalmine-owners from Asturias, Basque steel barons and shipbuilders, and Catalan textile magnates experience a spiralling boom which constituted the first dramatic take-off for Spanish industry. The balance of power within the economic elite shifted. Agrarian interests remained pre-eminent but industrialists were no longer prepared to tolerate their subordinate political position. Their dissatisfaction came to a head in June 1916 when the Liberal Minister of Finance, Santiago Alba, attempted to impose a tax on the notorious war profits of northern industry without a corresponding measure to deal with those made by the agrarians. Although the move was blocked, it so underlined the arrogance of the landed elite that it precipitated a bid by the industrial bourgeoisie to carry through political modernisation.

In the kaleidoscopic confusion of rapid economic growth, social dislocation, regionalist agitations and a bourgeois reform movement, the military was to play an active and contradictory role. The discontent of the Basque and Catalan industrialists had already caused them to challenge the Spanish establishment by sponsoring regionalist movements which infuriated the profoundly centralist military mentality. Now the self-interested reforming zeal of industrialists determined to hold on to their war profits coincided with the more desperate bid for change from a proletariat impoverished by the war. Boom industries attracted rural labour to towns where the worst conditions of early capitalism prevailed. This was especially true of Asturias and the Basque Country. At the same time, massive exports created shortages, rocketing inflation and plummeting living standards. The Socialist trade union, the Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers) and the anarcho-syndicalist Confederation Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour) were drawn together in the hope that a joint general strike might bring about free elections and then reform.⁶⁶ While industrialists and workers pushed for change, middle-rank Army officers were protesting at low wages, antiquated promotion structures and political corruption. A bizarre and short-lived alliance was forged in part because of a misunderstanding about the political stance of the Army.

Military complaints were couched in the language of reform which had become fashionable after Spain’s loss of empire in 1898. Known as ‘Regenerationism’, it associated the defeat of 1898 with political corruption. Ultimately, ‘Regenerationism’ was open to exploitation by either the Right or the Left since among its advocates there were those who sought to sweep away the degenerate political system based on the power of local bosses or caciques by democratic reform and those who planned simply to destroy caciquismo by the authoritarian solution of ‘an iron surgeon’. However, in 1917 the officers who mouthed ‘Regenerationist’ cliches were acclaimed as the figureheads of a great national reform movement. For a brief moment, workers, capitalists and the military were united in the name of cleansing Spanish politics of the corruption of caciquismo. As things turned out, the great crisis of 1917 was not resolved by the successful establishment of a political system capable of permitting social adjustment but instead consolidated the power of the entrenched landed oligarchy.

Despite a rhetorical coincidence in their calls for reform, the ultimate interests of workers, industrialists and officers were contradictory and the existing system survived by skilfully exploiting these differences. The Prime Minister, the Conservative Eduardo Dato, conceded the officers’ economic demands. He then provoked a strike of Socialist railway workers in Valencia, forcing the UGT to act before the anarcho-syndicalist CNT was ready. Now at peace with the system, the Army was happy to defend it by crushing with excessive harshness the strike which broke out on 10 August 1917. In Asturias, where the strike was pacific, the military governor General Ricardo Burguete y Lana declared martial law on 13 August. He accused the strike organizers of being the paid agents of foreign powers. Announcing that he would hunt down the strikers ‘like wild beasts’, he sent columns of regular troops and Civil Guards into the mining valleys to cow the population. A curfew was imposed by a campaign of terror. The severity of Burguete’s response, with eighty dead, one hundred and fifty wounded and two thousand arrested of whom many were severely beaten and tortured, guaranteed the failure of the strike.⁶⁷

One of the columns was under the command of the young Major Franco. Consisting of a company of the Regimiento del Rey, a machine-gun section from the Regimiento del Princípe and a detachment of Civil Guards, he played a significant role in re-establishing order after the strike. Indeed, the official historian of the Civil Guard referred to him as ‘the man responsible for restoring order’.⁶⁸ Despite several allegations that his actions at this time established his reliability in the eyes of the local bourgeoisie, Franco himself claimed years later, before a huge audience of Asturian miners, that his column had seen no action.⁶⁹ That seems unlikely but it is impossible to reconstruct now the exact role that he played in the repression. Certainly, his job was to protect the mines from sabotage and, within the terms of martial law, to pass judgement on cases of fighting between individual strikers and Civil Guards since the strike had been declared. Implausibly, in 1963, he told George Hills, then head of the BBC Spanish services, that the appalling conditions which he saw led him to start a huge programme of reading in sociology and economics.⁷⁰ In contrast to Franco’s paternalist recollections, Manuel Llaneza, the moderate leader of the Asturian mineworkers union wrote at the time of the ‘odio africano’ (African hatred) that had been unleashed against the mining villages, in an orgy of rape, looting, beatings and torture.⁷¹

The growing hostility of many Army officers to the existing political system was intensified in the years following 1917 by the major campaign carried out by the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (the Spanish Socialist Workers Party) against the Moroccan war and by the indecision shown by successive governments. Army officers simply wanted to be given the resources and the liberty to elaborate policy without political hindrance. Successive governments, inhibited by ever greater popular hostility to the loss of life in Morocco, reduced material support and imposed an essentially defensive strategy upon the Army. In the eyes of the military high command, the hypocritical politicians were playing a double game, demanding of the soldiers cheap victories while remaining determined not to be seen sinking resources into a colonial war.⁷² Accordingly, instead of proceeding to the full-scale occupation of the Rif which the military regarded as the only proper solution, the Army was obliged to keep to the limited strategy of guarding important towns and the communications between them. Inevitably, the tribal guerrillas were able to attack the supply convoys, involving the military in a seemingly interminable war of attrition which they blamed on the civilian politicians. An effort to change the trend of events was made in August 1919 when, on the death of General Gómez Jordana, the prime minister, the Conde de Romanones, named the forty-six year-old General Dámaso Berenguer as High Commissioner for the Moroccan Protectorate. A brilliant officer with an outstanding record, Berenguer had risen to be Minister of War in November 1918.⁷³

One of the difficulties faced by Berenguer was the ambition and jealousy of the military commander of Ceuta, General Manuel Fernández Silvestre. Although they liked and respected each other, and were both favourites of Alfonso XIII, their working relationship was complicated by the fact that Silvestre was two years older than Berenguer, had once been his commanding officer and outranked him, albeit by only one number, in the seniority list. That seniority, together with Silvestre’s personal friendship with the King, fuelled his tendency towards insubordination. There were major policy differences between them, Silvestre wanting an all-out showdown with the Moroccan tribes; Berenguer inclining towards a peaceful domination of the tribes by the skilful use of indigenous forces.⁷⁴ Berenguer drew up a three year plan for the pacification of the zone. It aimed at the eventual linking of Ceuta and Melilla by land. The first part envisaged the conquest of the tribal territory to the east of Ceuta, known as Anyera, including the town of Alcazarseguir. This was to be followed by the domination of the Jibala with its two major towns, Tazarut and Xauen. With government approval, the plan was initiated with the occupation of Alcazarseguir on 21 March 1919. This led El Raisuni to retaliate with a campaign of attacks on Spanish supply convoys.

At this time, Franco was sufficiently removed from events in Morocco to have joined the Juntas de Defensa despite the fact that they advocated promotion by rigid seniority. It may be supposed that he did so without conviction and in response to the jealousy of junior officers, much older than himself, who had not served in Africa. After all, the Juntas’ policy, if generally applied, would remove the major incentive for officers to volunteer to serve in Morocco. Before Franco could get too involved in the concerns of the Peninsular Army, seeds of dramatic changes in his existence and in his future prospects had been sown on 28 September 1918, when he travelled from his unit in Oviedo to Valdemoro near Madrid. He remained there until 16 November taking part in an obligatory marksmanship course for majors. There he met Major José Millán Astray, a man thirteen years older than himself and about to be promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel. Renowned for his manic bravery and consequent serious injuries, Millán explained to Franco his ideas for creating special units of volunteers for Africa along the lines of the French Foreign Legion. Franco was excited by their discussions and impressed Millán Astray as a possible future collaborator.⁷⁵

Franco returned to garrison duty in Oviedo where he remained throughout 1919 and for most of 1920. During that time, Millán Astray had presented his ideas to the then Minister of War, General Tovar. In his turn, Tovar had passed them on to the General Staff and Millán was sent to Algeria to observe the structure and tactics of the French Foreign Legion. After he returned, a royal order was published approving the principle of a foreign volunteer unit. Tovar was then replaced by General Villalba Riquelme who shelved the idea pending the more thorough-going reorganization of the African Army then being contemplated. In May 1920, Villalba was in turn replaced by the Vizconde de Eza who happened to hear Millán Astray lecture on the subject of the new unit at the Círculo Militar in Madrid. Eza was sufficiently convinced to authorize its recruitment.

In June 1920, Millán met Franco again in Madrid to offer him the job of second-in-command of the Spanish Legion. At first, given his now flourishing relationship with Carmen and the fact that Morocco seemed, for the moment at least, to be as quiet as mainland Spain, he was not particularly excited by the offer.⁷⁶ However, after a brief hesitation, and faced with the prospect of kicking his heels interminably in Oviedo, he accepted. It was to be the beginning of a difficult period for Carmen Polo which was to show that she could match her husband in patience and determination. Speaking about the experience eight years later, she said ‘I had always dreamed that love would be an existence lit up by joy and laughter; but it brought me nothing but sadness and tears. The first tears that I shed as a woman were for him. When we were engaged, he had to leave me to go to Africa to organize the first bandera of the Legion. You can imagine my constant anxiety and unease, terribly intensified on the days that the newspapers talked about operations in Morocco or when his letters were delayed more than usual.’⁷⁷

The Legion was formally established on 31 August 1920 under the name Tercio de Extranjeros (Tercio, or third, was the name used in the sixteenth century for regiments in the Army of Flanders which had been composed of three groups, pikemen, crossbowmen and arquebusiers). At its inception, it also had three banderas, (‘colours’ or ‘flags’) or battalions. Millán Astray disliked the name Tercio and always insisted on calling the new force ‘the Legion’, a name Franco also favoured. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, there had been no problem recruiting volunteers. On 27 September 1920, Franco was named commander of its primera bandera (first battalion). Putting aside his plans for a life with Carmen Polo, he set off on the Algeciras ferry on 10 October 1920, accompanied by the first two hundred mercenaries, a motley band of desperados, misfits and outcasts, some tough and ruthless, others simply pathetic. They were hard cases, ranging from common criminals, via foreign First World War veterans who had been unable to adjust to peacetime, to the gunmen (pistoleros) who fought in the social war then tearing Barcelona apart. This short, slight, pallid twenty-eight year-old major, with his high-pitched voice, seemed poorly fitted to be able to command such a crew.

Millán Astray was obsessed with death and offered his new recruits little more than the chance to fight and die. The romantic notion that the Legion would offer its outcast recruits redemption through sacrifice, discipline, hardship, violence and death was held dear by both Millán and Franco throughout their lives. It underlies Franco’s diary of its first two years, Diario de una bandera, a curious mixture of sentimentalised Beau Geste-style adventure-story romanticism and cold insensitivity in the face of human bestiality. In his speech of welcome to the first recruits, a hysterical Millán told them that, as thieves and murderers, their lives had been at an end before joining the Legion. Inspired by a frenzied and contagious fervour, he offered them a new life but the price to be paid would be their deaths. He called them ‘los novios de la muerte’ (the bridegrooms of death).⁷⁸ They gave the Legion a mentality of brutal ruthlessness which Franco was to share to the full even though he remained outwardly reserved. Discipline was savage. Men could be shot for desertion and for even minor infractions of discipline.⁷⁹ Throughout the time that he was second-in-command to Millán Astray, Franco never wavered in his obedience, discipline and loyalty, although the temptation to contradict his manic commander must have been considerable.⁸⁰

On the night of their arrival in Ceuta, the legionaries terrorised the town. A prostitute and a corporal of the guard were murdered. In the course of chasing the culprits, there were two more deaths.⁸¹ Franco was obliged to take the primera bandera to Dar Riffien, where an old arch was rebuilt with the inscription ‘Legionarios a luchar; legionarios a morir’ (Legionaries onward to fight; Legionaries onward to die’). They had arrived in Africa at a difficult moment. Berenguer had proceeded to the second stage of his grand plan for the occupation of the Spanish zone. On 14 October 1920, El Raisuni’s headquarters, the picturesque mountain town of Xauen, had been occupied by Spanish troops. To the Moors, Xauen was ‘the Sacred City’ or ‘the mysterious’. Tucked into a deep gorge, the historic fortified redoubt of Xauen was theoretically unconquerable. Its capture was an almost bloodless triumph thanks to the military Arabist, Colonel Alberto Castro Girona, who had entered the city disguised as a Moorish charcoal burner and, by a mixture of threats and bribes, persuaded the notables to surrender.⁸² However, since the marauding tribes between Xauen and Tetuán were not subdued, an expensive policing operation had now to be undertaken. Within a week of arriving, Franco’s legionaries were sent to Uad Lau to guard the road to Xauen.

Franco would soon be joined by his eternal cronies, his cousin Pacón, and Camilo Alonso Vega. He charged Alonso Vega with creating a battalion farm to provide funds to permit decent provisioning and the building of better barracks. The farm was a great success, not only providing fresh meat and vegetables for the troops but also making a profit. Similarly, Franco made the arrangements for a permanent fresh water supply from the nearby mountains to Dar-Riffien.⁸³ It was typical of his methodical and thoughtful approach to the practicalities of both camp life and hostilities against the Moors. His concerns were narrowly military. Encased in the shell of his public persona, he apparently shared few of the feelings and appetites of his comrades, becoming known as the man without fear, women or masses, (‘sin miedo, sin mujeres, y sin misa’). With no interests or vices other than his career, his study of terrain, map work and general preparations for action made the units at his command stand out in an Army notorious for indiscipline, inefficiency and low morale.

In addition, in the Legion, Franco was to show a merciless readiness to impose his power over men physically bigger and harder than himself, compensating for his size with an unnerving coldness. Despite fierce discipline in other matters, no limits were put by Millán Astray or by Franco on the atrocities which were committed against the Moorish villages which they attacked. The decapitation of prisoners and the exhibition of severed heads as trophies was not uncommon. The Duquesa de la Victoria, a philanthropist who organized a team of volunteer nurses, would receive in 1922 a tribute from the Legion. She was given a basket of roses in the centre of which lay two severed Moorish heads.⁸⁴ When the Dictator General Primo de Rivera visited Morocco in 1926, he was appalled to find one battalion of the Legion awaiting inspection with heads stuck on their bayonets.⁸⁵ Indeed, Franco and other officers came to feel a fierce pride in the brutal violence of their men, revelling in their grim reputation. That notoriety was itself a useful weapon in keeping down the colonial population and its efficacy taught Franco much about the exemplary function of terror. In his Diario de una bandera, he adopted a tone of benevolent paternalism about the savage antics of his men.⁸⁶ In Africa, as later in the Peninsula during the Civil War, he condoned the killing and mutilation of prisoners. There can be little doubt that the years of early manhood spent amidst the inhuman savagery of the Legion contributed to the dehumanizing of Franco. It is impossible to say whether he arrived in Africa already so cut off from normal emotional responses as to be untouched by the pitiless brutality which surrounded him. When Franco had been in the Regulares, a somewhat older officer, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, was struck with the imperturbability and satisfaction with which he presided over the cruel beatings to which Moorish troops were subjected in punishment for minor misdemeanours.⁸⁷ The ease with which he now became accustomed to the bestiality of his troops certainly suggests a lack of sensitivity bordering on inner emptiness. That would account for the unflinching, indeed insouciant, way he was able to use terror in the Civil War and the subsequent years of repression.

To survive and prosper in the Legion, the officers had to be as hard and ruthless as their men. At one point, preoccupied by a rash of indiscipline and desertions, Franco wrote to Millán Astray requesting permission to resort to the death penalty. Millán consulted with higher authorities and then told Franco that death sentences could be passed only within the strict rules laid down by the code of military justice. A few days later, a legionaire refused to eat his food and then threw it at an officer. Franco quietly ordered the battalion to form ranks, picked a firing squad, had the offending soldier shot, and then made the entire battalion file past the corpse. He informed Millán that he took full responsibility for an action which he regarded as a necessary and exemplary punishment to re-establish discipline.⁸⁸ On another occasion, Franco was informed that two legionaires who had committed a robbery and then deserted had been captured. ‘Shoot them’, he ordered. In reply to a protest from Vicente Guarner, his one-time contemporary at the Toledo military academy who happened to be visiting the unit, Franco snapped ‘Shut up. You don’t realize what kind of people they are. If I didn’t act with an iron hand, this would soon be chaos.’⁸⁹ According to one sergeant of the Legion, both men and officers were frightened of him and of the eery coldness which enabled him to have men shot without batting an eyelid. ‘You can be certain of getting everything that you have a right to, you can be sure that he knows where he’s taking you but as for how he treats you … God help you if there is anything missing from your equipment, or if your rifle is dirty or you are a loafer’.⁹⁰

At the beginning of 1921, General Berenguer’s long-term scheme of slow occupation, fanning out from Ceuta, was prospering. At the same time, General Manuel Fernández Silvestre was engaged in a more ambitious, indeed reckless, campaign to advance from Melilla westwards to the bay of Alhucemas. On 17 February 1921, Silvestre had occupied Monte Arruit and was making plans to cross the Amekran River. Advancing into inaccessible and hostile territory, Silvestre’s success was more apparent than real. Abd-el-Krim, the aggressive new leader who had begun to impose his authority on the Berber tribes of the Rif, warned Silvestre that, if he crossed the Amekran, the tribes would resist in force. Silvestre just laughed.⁹¹ However, Berenguer was satisfied that Silvestre had the situation under control and had decided to squeeze El Raisuni’s territory by capturing the Gomara mountains. The Legion was ordered to join the column of one of the outstanding officers in the Spanish Moroccan Army, Colonel Castro Girona. Their task was to help in the establishment of a continuous defensive line of blockhouses between Xauen and Uad Lau. When that line met the other which joined Xauen to Alcazarquivir, El Raisuni was surrounded. On 29 June 1921, the legionaries were in the vanguard of the force sent to assault El Raisuni’s headquarters.

However, before the attack was mounted, on 22 July 1921, one of the banderas of the Legion was ordered to proceed to Fondak without being given any reason. Lots were drawn and Franco’s bandera was selected. After an exhausting forced march, they arrived to be ordered to carry on to Tetuán and then to Ceuta. When they reached Tetuán, they heard rumours of a military disaster near Melilla. On arrival at Ceuta, the rumours were confirmed and they were put aboard the troop transport Ciudad de Cádiz and sent to Melilla.⁹² What they did not know was the scale of the disaster. General Fernández Silvestre had over-extended his lines across the Amekran towards the Bay of Alhucemas and suffered a monumental defeat at the hands of Abd-el-Krim. Known by the name of the village Annual, where it began, the defeat was in fact a rout which took place over a period of three weeks and rolled back the Spanish occupation to Melilla itself. As the Spanish troops fled, enthusiastic tribesmen joined the revolt. Garrison after garrison was slaughtered. The fragility and artificiality of the Spanish protectorate was brutally exposed. All of the gains of the last decade, five thousand square kilometres of barren scrub, won at the cost of huge sums of money and thousands of lives, disappeared in a matter of hours. There would be horrific massacres at outposts near Melilla, Dar Drius, Monte Arruit and Nador. Within a few weeks, nine thousand Spanish soldiers died. The tribesmen were on the outskirts of a panic-stricken Melilla yet, too preoccupied with looting, they failed to capture it, unaware that the town was virtually undefended.⁹³

At that point, reinforcements arrived, among them Franco and his men who reached Melilla on 23 July 1921 and were given orders to defend the town at all costs.⁹⁴ The Legion was used first to mount an immediate holding operation, then to consolidate the outer defences of Melilla to the south. From their defensive position in the hills outside the town, Franco could observe the siege of the last remnants of the garrison at the village of Nador but his request for permission to take a detachment of volunteers to relieve them was denied. Defeat followed defeat, Nador falling on 2 August and Monte Arruit on 9 August.⁹⁵ The Legion was sent out piecemeal to strengthen other units in the area, to escort supply columns, to hold the most exposed blockhouses. It was an exhausting task, with officers and men on duty round the clock.⁹⁶ Through the press and his published diary, the role played by Franco in the defence of Melilla contributed to his conversion into a national hero. In particular, he enhanced his reputation in the relief of the advanced position at Casabona, by unexpectedly using his escort column to attack the besieging Moroccans.⁹⁷ He had learned from fighting the Moorish tribesmen how, contrary to peninsular field regulations, effective use could be made of ground cover.⁹⁸

By 17 September 1921, Berenguer was able to order a counter-attack to recoup some of the territory lost. The Legion was once more in the vanguard. On the first day of the offensive, near Nador, Millán Astray was seriously wounded in the chest. He fell to the ground shouting ‘they’ve killed me, they’ve killed me’ then sat up to shout ‘¡Viva el Rey! ¡Viva España! ¡Viva la Legión!’. As stretcher-bearers came to carry him away, he handed over command to Franco.

When the young major and his men entered Nador, they found heaps of the unburied, rotting corpses of their comrades killed six weeks earlier. Franco wrote later that Nador, with the bodies lying in the midst of the scattered booty of the attackers, was ‘an enormous cemetery’.⁹⁹ In the following weeks, he and his men were used in many similar operations, taking part in the recapture of Monte Arruit on 23 October. He saw no contradiction in the fact that, although he approved of the atrocities committed by his own men, he was appalled by the mutilation of the hundreds of corpses of Spanish soldiers found at Monte Arruit. He and his men left Monte Arruit ‘feeling in our hearts a desire for revenge, for the most exemplary punishment ever seen down the generations’.¹⁰⁰ Franco himself recounted that, on one occasion during the campaign, a captain ordered his men to cease firing because their targets were women. One old Legionarie muttered ‘but they are factories for baby Moors’. ‘We all laughed’, wrote Franco in his diary, ‘and we remembered that during the disaster [at Melilla], the women were the most cruel, finishing off the wounded and stripping them of their clothes, in this way paying back the welfare that civilization brought them.’¹⁰¹

On 8 January 1922, Dar Drius fell to Berenguer’s column and much of what had been lost at Annual had been recaptured. Franco was indignant about the fate of Spanish soldiers massacred by the Moors at Dar Drius in 1921 and outraged that the Legion was not permitted to enter the village and take its revenge.¹⁰² However, they had their chance a few days later. An incident took place which led the press in Galicia to praise ‘the sang froid, the fearlessness and the contempt for life’ of the ‘beloved Paco Franco’. A blockhouse near Dar Drius was attacked by tribesmen and the defending legionãrios were forced to appeal for help. The Commander of the Spanish forces in the village ordered the entire detachment of the Legion there to go to their aid. Franco said that twelve would be enough and asked for volunteers. When the entire unit stepped forward, he chose twelve and they set off. The attack on the blockhouse was driven off. The next morning Franco and his twelve volunteers returned carrying ‘as trophies the bloody heads of twelve harqueños (tribesmen)’.¹⁰³

When occasional leave permitted, Franco would visit Carmen Polo in Asturias. On these trips to Oviedo, as an ever more celebrated military hero, he was a welcome guest at the dinner parties of the local aristocracy. His presence was entirely compatible with a reverence for the nobility which would remain constant throughout his life.¹⁰⁴ Here, as he socialised, he began to make contacts which would be useful in later life and he also began to make an investment in his public image which suggests the scale of his ambition. The press began to seek him out. In interviews, speeches made at banquets given in his honour and in his publications, he began consciously to project the image of the selfless hero. Shortly after he had taken over command of the Legion from Millán Astray, Franco had received a telegram of congratulations from the Alcalde (mayor) of El Ferrol. In the heat of battle, he found time to make a self-deprecatory reply: ‘The Legion is honoured by your greeting. I merely fulfil my duties as a soldier. An affectionate greeting to the town from the legionarios’.¹⁰⁵ It was typical of Franco’s perception of himself at the time as the brave but self-effacing officer who is interested only in his duty. It was an image in which he believed implicitly and also one which he made some effort to project publicly. On leaving an audience with the King in early 1922, he told reporters that the King had embraced him and congratulated him on his success commanding the Tercio during Millán Astray’s absence: ‘What he has been said about me is a bit exaggerated. I merely fulfil my duty. The rank-and-file soldiers are truly valiant. You could go anywhere with them’.¹⁰⁶ It would be wrong to say that when Franco spoke in such terms he was merely being cynical. There is little doubt that the young major sincerely saw himself in the Beau Geste terms of his own diary. Nonetheless, his behaviour in interviews and the fact that he published the diary in late 1922, freely giving away copies of it, suggest an awareness of the value of a public presence in the longed-for transition from hero to general.

^* Francisco in memory of his paternal grandfather, Hermenegilda in memory of his paternal grandmother and in honour of his godmother, Paulino in honour of his godfather and Teódulo because he was christened on the feast of Saint Teódulo.

^† There has been much idle speculation that his family was Jewish, on the basis of his appearance and because both Franco and Bahamonde are common Jewish surnames in Spain.

^‡ Indeed, after Franco’s death, there were press revelations concerning Nicolás’s relationship in Manila with a fourteen-year-old girl, Concepción Puey, with whom he was said to have had an illegitimate son, Eugenio Franco Puey, who made himself known to Francisco Franco in 1950 – Opinión, 28 February 1977; Interviu, No. 383, 14–20 September 1983.

^* Nicolás was born 1 July 1891, Pilar 27 February 1895 and Ramón 2 February 1896.

^* Often he would join her in the difficult trek up the Pico Douro to the east of El Ferrol to pray to the Virgen de Chamorro in fulfilment of promises she had made in her prayers for his safe return.

^* ‘Pacón’ means ‘big Frank’ which he was always called to distinguish him from Franco, who was known in the family as ‘Paquito’ or ‘little Frank’.

^* In retrospect, he nurtured considerable resentment about his failure to receive the Gran Cruz for what happened at El Biutz. Forty-five years later, when he reconstructed the episode, he said that the wound had been to the liver rather than the lower abdomen, which might suggest some sensitivity about its alleged consequences for his masculinity. He claimed that, despite the gravity of the wound, he had heroically continued directing operations from his stretcher. In this fanciful recollection, he had missed the medal only because the doctor who attended him had reported later that he had been on the verge of collapse, in the mistaken belief that this would strengthen his case for the award. As it was, according to Franco, this led the adjudicators to conclude that his state of health would not have permitted him to continue in command. Ramón Soriano, La mano izquierda de Franco (Barcelona, 1981) pp. 141–2.