Kitabı oku: «Franco», sayfa 7

Accordingly, it was a cause of the greatest embarrassment to Franco that his brother Ramón had moved into the orbit of the republican opposition to the regime. From the later part of 1929, their relations became very strained. Franco had been annoyed and embarrassed in July 1924 when Ramón had married Carmen Díaz Guisasola without seeking the King’s permission.¹⁰¹ The breach between his brother and the King had been forgotten in the wake of his Atlantic crossing in 1926. However, Ramón’s ever more frantic efforts to repeat that success had ended in disgrace. The reasons for his fall from grace were complex. In the summer of 1929, to boost the domestic aircraft industry, the Spanish government agreed to sponsor an attempt by Ramón to cross the North Atlantic in a Dornier Super Wal flying boat built under licence in Spain. Because of doubts about the reliability of the Spanish aeroplane, Ramón used a German-built one bought in Italy, fraudulently switching the registration markings. The flight was a disaster: the aircraft was blown off course near the Azores, and it and the crew were lost for days and only found at the end of June after a massive and immensely costly search involving the Spanish, British and Italian navies.¹⁰² When he was found, there was widespread rejoicing and a tearful General Franco was publicly embraced by an equally lacrimose General Primo de Rivera.¹⁰³ Franco led a massive demonstration to the British Embassy in Madrid to express thanks for the role of the Royal Navy.¹⁰⁴ It then emerged that the planes had been switched and rumours began to circulate that Ramón had been promised a fabulous sum of money if he broke the world seaplane distance record flying a German aircraft. Colonel Alfredo Kindelán, the head of Military Aviation, was furious and had Ramón expelled from the Air Force on 31 July 1929. Thereafter, he moved rapidly to the left, became a freemason and got involved in anarcho-syndicalist conspiracies aimed at bringing down the monarchy.¹⁰⁵

After this disgrace, Ramón’s relations with his brother were virtually non-existent and were reduced to letters; patronizing, sententious, though ultimately kindly ones from Franco, mischievously disrespectful ones from Ramón. On 8 April 1930, Franco wrote a long letter to Ramón revealing of his loyalty both to his family and to the established order. In an effort to head off his brother’s demise, Franco warned him that his activities within the Army, inciting garrisons and officers to rebel, were known to the authorities. Regarding the Berenguer regime as entirely legal, Franco was worried that his brother was risking the loss of his prestige and his good name. He appealed to him to think of ‘the great sorrow that such things cause Mamá, a sorrow which the rest of us share’ and ended fondly, ‘Your brother loves and embraces you, Paco’.¹⁰⁶

Its tone of tolerant restraint is remarkable given that, in Francisco’s eyes, Ramón’s behaviour would not only bring dishonour on the family but also possibly impede his own chances of advancement. There is also a typical readiness to attribute the lowest motives to Ramón’s revolutionary friends while assuming that Ramón himself is free of such baseness. The letter also revealed a political naïvety in Franco’s suggestion that the dictatorship of General Berenguer was more legal than that of Primo de Rivera. Ramón was not slow to comment on that in his reply on 12 April. Ramón was shocked by what he called his brother’s ‘healthy advice’ and ‘vain bourgeois counsels’ and invited him to step down from his ‘little general’s throne’. He also took the opportunity to comment that the education being given the cadets in Zaragoza would ensure that they would be bad citizens.¹⁰⁷

Engrossed in his work at the Zaragoza military academy, Franco paid little attention to the rising tide of political agitation in 1930 except in so far as it involved his brother. The anti-monarchical movement was growing with labour unrest intensifying by the day. A broad front of Socialists, middle class Republicans, Basque and Catalan regionalists and renegade monarchists who, repelled by the mistakes of the King, had become conservative republicans, joined together in mid-August 1930. United by the so-called Pact of San Sebastián, they established a provisional government-in-waiting which began to plot the downfall of the monarchy.¹⁰⁸ Ramón Franco was an important element in the republican conspiracies. In late 1930, watched by agents of the Dirección General de Seguridad, he was travelling around Spain liaising with other conspirators, trying to buy arms and organizing the making of bombs.¹⁰⁹ General Emilio Mola, now Director-General de Seguridad, had taken the decision to arrest him but, as an admirer of his heroic exploits and as a friend of Franco, he decided to give Ramón a last chance to avoid the consequences of his activities. Mola asked Franco to try to persuade his brother to desist. Although he agreed to try, Franco showed no optimism that he might succeed but he was immensely faithful to the family and still felt a protective loyalty towards his madcap brother. He visited Madrid and they dined together on 10 October but Ramón remained committed to the planned republican rising. Mola then had Ramón brought in for questioning on the evening of 11 October and detained in military prison on the following morning. Mola again called Franco in and informed him of the charges against his brother which included bomb-making, gun-smuggling and involvement in the attempted murder of a monarchist aviator, the Duque de Esmera. Franco and Mola hoped to use these charges to frighten Ramón into abandoning his revolutionary activities: Franco visited his brother in his cell and recited them to him. This merely provoked him into escaping from prison on 25 November. Thereafter, he took part, with General Queipo de Llano, in the revolutionary movement of mid-December 1930. Both Ramón’s escape and his participation in the events of December would cause Franco intense chagrin both as an officer and as a monarchist.¹¹⁰

Having failed in his efforts to make his brother see sense, Francisco returned hastily to Zaragoza where he had to receive the visit of a French delegation led by André Maginot. On 19 October, Maginot presented Franco with the Légion d’Honneur for his part in the Alhucemas landing. On his return to France, he declared that the Zaragoza Academy was the most modern of its kind in the world.¹¹¹ Maginot’s ideas of modernity had yet to be put to the test by the armies of the Third Reich.

In November, Franco was approached by an emissary from the most prominent figure of the San Sebastián coalition, the grand old man of Spanish republicanism, the wily and cynical Alejandro Lerroux. He was invited to join in the Republican conspiracies along with so many other officers including his brother. According to Lerroux, Franco refused point blank but then insinuated, at a later meeting, that he would rebel against the constituted power but only if the Patria were in danger of being overwhelmed by anarchy.¹¹² Despite warnings from his cousin Pacón and the attitude of his brother, Franco was so far distanced from day-to-day politics that he was convinced that the monarchy was in no danger.¹¹³

The revolutionary plot in which Ramón was implicated aimed to bring the San Sebastián provisional government to power. One of its ramifications was to be a rebellion by the garrison of the tiny Pyrenean mountain town of Jaca in the province of Huesca. Anticipating what was supposed to be a nationally co-ordinated action, the Jaca rebellion was precipitated on 12 December. Its leaders, Captains Fermín Galán, Angel García Hernández and Salvador Sediles, hoped to march south from Jaca and spark off a pro-Republican movement in the garrisons of Huesca, Zaragoza and Lérida.¹¹⁴ Along the road to Huesca, Galán’s column was challenged by a small group of soldiers led by the military governor of Huesca, General Manuel Lasheras, who was wounded in the clash. When the news of the actions of the Jaca rebels reached Madrid in the early hours of the morning of 13 December, the government declared martial law in the entire Aragonese military region. A sporadic general strike broke out in Zaragoza. Franco put the Academy in a state of readiness and armed the cadets. The Captain-General of the Aragonese military region, General Fernández de Heredia, put together a large column and sent them to Huesca, half way between Zaragoza and Jaca. In case the rebels should have left Huesca already and headed south, he ordered Franco to use his cadets to hold the Huesca-Zaragoza road. In the event, it was not necessary. Galán’s cold, wet and hungry column was stopped at Cillas, three kilometres from Huesca, and the Jaca revolt was put down.¹¹⁵

Galán and García Hernández were seen as being the two ringleaders and were shot after summary courts martial on 14 December.¹¹⁶ As far as Franco was concerned, their punishment was entirely appropriate since they were mutineers. He was perhaps fortunate that he did not have to make similar considerations about his brother, who was heavily involved in the central action of the plot in the capital. On 15 December, Ramón had flown over the royal Palacio de Oriente in Madrid, planning to bomb it but, in the event, seeing civilians strolling in the gardens, had merely dropped leaflets calling for a general strike. He had then fled to Portugal and then on to Paris.¹¹⁷ Franco did not vacillate in his condemnation of the revolutionary events of mid-December, but his sense of family solidarity prevented him applying the same standards to his brother. Hours after Ramón’s flight over the Palacio Real, another aircraft flew over Madrid and dropped leaflets directed at the city’s inhabitants denouncing Ramón as a ‘bastard apparently drunk on your blood’. Franco was so incensed on behalf of his mother (if not his brother) that he left Zaragoza for Madrid where he demanded explanations from Berenguer, the Head of the Government, General Federico Berenguer, the Captain-General of Madrid and Mola, the Director-General of Security, all of whom assured him that the flight and the pamphlets had no official status.¹¹⁸

On 21 December, Franco sent another letter to Ramón. Not surprisingly, in the light of the scandal that Ramón’s activities had occasioned, the distress of their mother and the fact that he was in danger of being shot, the letter is deeply sorrowful. Despite the gulf between their political views, Francisco showed compassionate concern for ‘My beloved and unfortunate brother’ and enclosed two thousand pesetas. He ended sanctimoniously ‘May you break away from the vice-ridden ambience in which you have lived for the last two years, in which the hatred and the passion of the people who surround you deceive you in your chimeras. May your forced exile from our Patria calm your spirit and lift you above all passions and egoisms. May you rebuild your life far from these sterile struggles which fill Spain with misfortunes. And may you find well-being and peace in your path. These are the wishes of your brother who embraces you.’ The money which accompanied the letter was a substantial sum at the time. Grateful as Ramón was for his brother’s help, he was repelled by his reactionary notions and surprised by his lack of awareness of the tide of popular feeling.¹¹⁹

If Franco had any doubts about the legitimacy of the executions of Galán and García Hernández, they would have been resolved on 26 December when General Lasheras died from an infection and uraemia which may have been related to the wound that he had received when trying to stop Galán. Franco attended his funeral.¹²⁰ The public outcry about the execution of Galán and García Hernández damaged the monarchy in a way that the Jaca revolt itself had failed to do. As the two executed rebels were being turned into martyrs, to the outrage of many senior military figures including Franco, the Liberals in the government withdrew their support and General Berenguer was obliged to resign on 14 February.¹²¹ After an abortive attempt by the Conservative politician José Sánchez Guerra to form a government with the support of the imprisoned Republican leaders, Berenguer was finally replaced as prime minister on 17 February by Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar. He did, however, continue in the cabinet as Minister for the Army.¹²²

Since the Jaca rebellion of Galán and García Hernández had taken place within the military region of Aragón, Franco was appointed a member of the tribunal which was to court martial Captain Salvador Sediles and other officers and men who had been involved. It took place between 13 and 16 March when the campaign for the municipal elections of 12 April had already begun. There was no more potent subject during that campaign than that of the executions of Galán and García Hernández. Admiral Aznar declared in advance of the verdicts in the supplementary court martial that he was of a mind to ask the King for clemency whatever the sentences. Franco, however, declared: ‘it is necessary that military crimes committed by soldiers be judged by soldiers who are accustomed to command’, within which category he clearly included a readiness to punish indiscipline by death. In the event, there was one more death sentence, for Captain Sediles, five life sentences and other lesser sentences, all of which were commuted.¹²³

In the municipal elections of 12 April 1931, Franco voted for the monarchist candidacy in Zaragoza.¹²⁴ The results would go against Alfonso XIII, provoke his withdrawal from Spain and open the way to the establishment of the Second Republic. For Franco, the deeply conservative monarchist and royal favourite, it would be a severe shock. To the ambitious young general, it would seem to be the end of a meteoric rise. That fact, taken with Franco’s prominence in the military uprising of 1936, has led the Caudillo’s hagiographers to portray him as working towards that glorious denouement from the very first. This was far from being the case. Franco had still to undergo many experiences before he became an implacable enemy of the Republic.

Ironically, in early 1931, there was an event in Franco’s personal life which was to reveal its full significance only in 1936. In 1929, the Director of the Military Academy had met a brilliant lawyer, Ramón Serrano Suñer, who was working in Zaragoza as a member of the élite legal corps of Abogados del Estado (State lawyers) and they had become friends. Serrano Suñer often lunched or dined with the Franco family.¹²⁵ As a result, Serrano Suñer came to know Doña Carmen’s beautiful younger sister, Zita. In February 1931, Serrano Suñer married her, then aged nineteen, in Oviedo. The groom’s witness was José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the Dictator and future founder of the Falange, the bride’s Francisco Franco.¹²⁶ The marriage clinched the close relationship between Serrano Suñer and Franco out of which would be forged the Caudillo’s National-Syndicalist State. The wedding ceremony also provided the occasion for a historic first meeting for the eventual dictator and fascist leader whose names were to be tied together for forty years after 1936. At the time, none of the three could have had any idea of the imminent political cataclysm which would link their fates.

^* Ferragut had written the fictionalised Memorias de un legionario and had been rumoured to have ghost-written Franco’s Diario de una bandera, although the article made a great point of the interview being their first meeting.

^* In later life, particularly after Franco gained power, the relationship seemed more formal than spontaneously affectionate. Pacón commented that Franco seemed morose and inhibited in the company of Doña Carmen.

^* At the time, each military region of Spain had two divisions, each composed of two brigades. However, given the shortage of recruits, in practice only the first brigade of each Captaincy General was at operational strength. (Suárez Fernández, Franco, I, pp. 187, 191.)

^* It would be an abiding obsession. On a visit to the Zaragoza Military Academy in 1942, he told one of the staff that an additional bed should be put in rooms that had two ‘to avoid marriages’ – Baón, La cara humana, p. 117.

III

IN THE COLD

Franco and the Second Republic, 1931–1933

THE MUNICIPAL elections of 12 April 1931 were intended by the government to be the first stage of a controlled return to constitutional normality after the collapse of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. However, on the evening of polling day, as the results began to be known, people started to drift onto the streets of the cities of Spain and, as the crowds grew, Republican slogans were shouted with increasing excitement. In the countryside, the power of the local bosses or caciques was unbroken but in the towns, where the vote was much freer, monarchist candidates had suffered a disaster. With the artillerymen on his staff at the Academy openly rejoicing at the Republican triumph, Franco was deeply worried about the situation.¹ While he mused in his office in Zaragoza, his one-time commanding officer and a man whom he admired, General Sanjurjo, was clinching the fate of the King. Sanjurjo now Director-General of the para-military Civil Guard, the monarchy’s most powerful instrument of repression, had informed several cabinet ministers that he could not guarantee the loyalty of the men under his command in the event of mass demonstrations against the monarchy.² In fact, there was little reason to suspect the loyalty of the Civil Guard, a brutal and conservative force. Sanjurjo’s fear was rather that the defence of the monarchy could be attempted only at the cost of copious bloodshed, given the scale of the popular hostility to the King.

That Sanjurjo was not prepared to risk a bloodbath on behalf of Alfonso XIII reflected the fact that he had personal reasons for feeling resentment towards the King. He felt that he had been snubbed by the King for marrying beneath his rank and he had not forgiven Alfonso XIII for failing to stand by Primo de Rivera in January 1930.³ Sanjurjo’s reluctance to defend his King may also have reflected two conversations that he had with Alejandro Lerroux in February and April 1931, during which the Republican leader had tried to persuade him to ensure the benevolent neutrality of the Civil Guard during a change of regime. Sanjurjo informed the Director-General of Security, General Mola, of the first of these meetings and assured him that he had not agreed to Lerroux’s request.⁴ His subsequent actions during the crisis of 12, 13 and 14 April, together with the favourable treatment which he received afterwards from the new regime, were to lead Franco to suspect that perhaps Sanjurjo had been bought by Lerroux and betrayed the monarchy.

Franco was unaware of what Sanjurjo was saying to the cabinet ministers on 12 April, but he was in telephone contact with Millán Astray and other generals. He considered marching on Madrid with the cadets from the Academia but refrained from doing so after a telephone conversation with Millán Astray at 11.00 a.m. on the morning of 13 April.⁵ Millán Astray asked him if he thought that the King should fight to keep his throne. Franco replied that everything depended on the attitude of the Civil Guard. For the next five and a half years, the stance of the Civil Guard would be Franco’s first concern in thinking about any kind of military intervention in politics. Most of the Spanish Army, apart from its Moroccan contingent, was made up of untried conscripts. Franco was always to be intensely aware of the problems of using them against the hardened professionals of the Civil Guard. Now, Millán Astray told Franco that Sanjurjo had confided in him that the Civil Guard could not be relied upon and that Alfonso XIII therefore had no choice but to leave Spain. Franco commented that, in view of what Sanjurjo said, he too thought that the King should go.⁶

Franco had also been greatly influenced by the telegram that Berenguer sent in the early hours of 13 April to the Captains-General of Spain. The Captains-General in command of the eight military regions into which the country was divided were effectively viceroys. In the telegram, Berenguer instructed them to keep calm, maintain the discipline of the men under their command and ensure that no acts of violence impede ‘the logical course that the supreme national will imposes on the destinies of the Fatherland’.⁷ Berenguer’s attitude derived from his own pessimism about Army morale. He believed that some Army officers were simply blasé about the danger to the monarchy. More seriously, he suspected that many others were indifferent and even hostile to its fate in the wake of the divisions created in the 1920s. Nevertheless, despite his telegram and his own inner misgivings, on the morning of 14 April, out of loyalty to the monarchy, Berenguer told the King that the Army was ready to overturn the result of the elections. Alfonso XIII refused.⁸ Shortly after Berenguer’s interview with the King, Millán Astray told Berenguer about his conversation with the Director of the Zaragoza Academy on the previous day repeating, as ‘an opinion which has to be taken into account’, Franco’s view that the King had no choice but to leave.⁹

The King decided to leave Spain but not to abdicate, in the hope that his followers might be able to engineer a situation in which he would be begged to return. Power was assumed on 14 April 1931 by the Provisional Government whose membership had been agreed in August 1930 by the Republicans and Socialists who had made the Pact of San Sebastián. Although led by Niceto Alcalá Zamora, a conservative Catholic landowner from Córdoba who had once been a Minister under the King, the Provisional Government was dominated by Socialists and centre and left Republicans committed to sweeping reform.

In a number of ways in the first week of the Republic, Franco displayed unmistakably, if guardedly, a repugnance for the new regime and a lingering loyalty to the old. There was nothing unusual in his feeling such loyalty – a majority of Army officers were monarchists and would have been unlikely to change their convictions overnight. Franco was ambitious but took discipline and hierarchy very seriously. On 15 April, he issued an order to the cadets, in which he announced the establishment of the Republic and insisted on rigid discipline: ‘If discipline and total obedience to orders have been the invariable practice in this Centre, they are even more necessary today when the Army is obliged, with serenity and unity, to sacrifice its thoughts and its ideology for the good of the nation and the tranquility of the Patria.’¹⁰ It was not difficult to decipher the hidden meaning: Army officers must grit their teeth and overcome their natural repugnance towards the new regime.

For a week, the red and gold monarchist flag continued to fly over the Academia. The Captain-General of Aragón, Enrique Fernández de Heredia, had been instructed by the Provisional Government to raise the Republican tricolour throughout the region. With the military headquarters in Zaragoza surrounded by hostile crowds demanding that Cacahuete (peanut), as the vegetarian Fernández de Heredia was known, fly the Republican flag, he refused. At midnight on 14 April, the new Minister of War, Manuel Azaña, ordered him to hand over command of the region to the military governor of Zaragoza, Agustín Gómez Morato, who was considered loyal to the Republican cause and who, indeed, was to be imprisoned by the Nationalists in July 1936 for opposing the military rebellion in Morocco. Gómez Morato undertook the substitution and telephoned all units in Aragón to order them to do the same. At the Military Academy, Franco informed his superior that changes of insignia could be ordered only in writing. It was not until after 20 April when the new Captain-General of the region, General Leopoldo Ruiz Trillo, had signed an order to the effect that the Republican flag should be flown, that Franco ordered the monarchist ensign struck.¹¹

In 1962, Franco wrote a partisan and confused interpretation of the fall of the monarchy in his draft memoirs in which he blamed the guardians of the monarchist fortress for opening the gates to the enemy. The enemy consisted of a group of ‘historic republicans, freemasons, separatists and socialists’. The freemasons were ‘atheistic traitors in exile, delinquents, swindlers, men who betrayed their wives’.¹² The narrowness of his interpretation is striking in several ways. Franco’s admiration for the dictatorship is understandable. His assumption that the King had not contravened the constitution in acquiescing in a military coup d’état in 1923 and that the situation in April 1931 was therefore one of constitutional legality was clearly the view of a soldier who never questioned the Army’s right to rule. The clear implication is that the monarchy should, and but for Sanjurjo and the Civil Guard could, have been defended by force in April 1931, which was certainly not his view at the time. Franco conveniently forgot his own ruthless pragmatism. The mistake having been made by others, he had made the best of a bad job and got on with his career.

Nonetheless, the flag incident suggested that Franco was sufficiently affected by the fall of the monarchy to want to establish some distance between himself and the Republic. It was not a question of outright indiscipline nor is it plausible that he was trying well in advance to build up credit with conservative political circles. In keeping the monarchist flag flying, Franco was advertising the fact that, unlike some officers who had been part of, or at least in touch with, the Republican opposition, he could not be considered as in any way tainted by disloyalty to the monarchy. Perhaps even more than from the pro-Republican officers whom he despised anyway, he was marking distance between himself and his brother Ramón who had been one of the most notorious military traitors to the King. Francisco clearly saw his own position as altogether more praiseworthy than that of General Sanjurjo whom he later came to regard, with Berenguer, as responsible for the fall of the monarchy.¹³ However, he would not permit his regret at the fall of the monarchy to stand in the way of his career. As military monarchism went, Franco’s pragmatic stance was a long way from, for instance, that of the founder of the Spanish Air Force, General Kindelán, who went into voluntary exile on 17 April rather than live under the Republic.¹⁴ Nonetheless, Franco felt great repugnance for those officers who had opposed the monarchy and were rewarded by being given important posts under the Republic. On 17 April, General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano became Captain-General of Madrid, General Eduardo López Ochoa of Barcelona and General Miguel Cabanellas of Seville. All three would play crucial roles in Franco’s later career and he never trusted any of them.

It was perhaps with these promotions in mind that, on 18 April, Franco wrote a letter to the Director of ABC, the Marqués de Luca de Tena. The monarchist ABC was the most influential newspaper on the Right in Spain. The issue of that morning had published his photograph alongside a news item that he was about to go to Morocco as High Commissioner, the most coveted post in the Army and one which was, at the time, the peak of Franco’s ambition. The basis of the item was a suggestion by Miguel Maura, the Minister of the Interior, to Manuel Azaña, the Minister of War, that Franco be appointed to the post. It would have been a sensible way of buying his loyalty. In fact, the plum Moroccan job was given to General Sanjurjo, who held it briefly in conjunction with the headship of the Civil Guard – such preferment no doubt feeding Franco’s suspicions that Sanjurjo was being paid off for his treachery. The ostensible objective of Franco’s letter was to request that the newspaper publish a correction but it was another gesture aimed at establishing his distance from Spain’s new rulers. In convoluted and ambiguous language, he denied that he had been offered any appointment and asserted that ‘I could not accept any such post unless I was ordered to do so. To accept such a post might be interpreted in some circles as suggesting that there had been some prior understanding on my part with the regime which has just been installed or else apathy or indifference in the fulfilment of my duties’.¹⁵ That Franco believed that he needed to make his position clear in the leading conservative daily reflects both his ambition and his sense of himself as a public figure. Having clarified his loyalty to the monarchy, he then went on to mend his fences with the Republican authorities by proclaiming his respect for the ‘national sovereignty’, a reflection of his cautious pragmatism and of the flexibility of his ambitions.

The limits of military loyalty were to be severely tried under the Republic. The new Minister of War, Azaña, had studied military politics and was determined to remedy the technical deficiencies of the Spanish Army and to curtail its readiness to intervene in politics. Azaña was an austere and brilliantly penetrating intellectual who, despite laudable intentions, was impatient of Army sensibilities and set about his task without feeling the need to massage the collective military ego. The Army which he found on taking up his post was under-resourced and over-manned, with a grossly disproportionate officer corps. Equipment was obsolete and inadequate and there was neither ammunition nor fuel enough for exercises and manoeuvres. Azaña wished to reduce the Army to a size commensurate with the nation’s economic possibilities to increase its efficiency and to eradicate the threat of militarism from Spanish politics. Even those officers who approved of these aims were uneasy about a decimation of the officer corps. Nevertheless, implemented with discretion, Azaña’s objectives might have found some support within the Army. However, conflict was almost inevitable. Azaña and the government in which he served were determined to eliminate where possible the irregularities of the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. There were those, Franco foremost among them, who admired the Dictatorship and had been promoted by it. They could not view with equanimity any assault on its works. Secondly, Azaña was inclined to be influenced by, and to reward the efforts of, those sections of the Army which were most loyal to the Republic. That necessarily meant military opponents of the Dictatorship, who were junteros and largely artillerymen. That in turn infuriated the Africanistas who had opposed the junteros since 1917.¹⁶