Table Of ContentDEADLY EMBRACE
Morocco and the Road
to the Spanish Civil War
S E B A S T I A N B A L F O U R
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We will encircle Africa with our arms, that daughter caressed by the sun,
who is the slave of the Frenchman and should be our wife.
Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-53)
Acknowledgements
During th e five years of research and writing that led to the production of this
book, I have incurred many debts of gratitude. The vast majority of people
whom I approached for advice or whom I came across in the course of my
research shared their knowledge and gave their advice unstintingly.
My warmest thanks go to my colleague Professor Paul Preston, who has
always been the major inspiration for my research. He suggested I should
tackle the theme in the first place and throughout he has given me support
and perceptive advice. It was on the basis of his recommendation that I
was awarded two research grants by the Cañada Blanch Foundation. I
also benefited from the shrewd comments of another colleague, Professor
Dominic Lieven, who generously gave his time to read an earlier version of the
manuscript
Among those people who helped my research in Spain, I am indebted to the
family of José Enrique Varela, the Marqués de Varela de San Fernando, for
making the Varela archive available, and in particular to Casilda Güell who
helped me in the search for material in the archive of her great-uncle. I would
also like to thank Diego Hidalgo for allowing me to look at his father’s archive
in Madrid, Colonel Eduardo Bravo Garrido for granting me the right to con
sult the archives of the Servicio Histórico Militar, and Comandante Ruiz for
giving access to the Fernández Silvestre documents. General Rafael Casas de
la Vega gave me the benefit of his advice and contacts, enabling me to meet
and interview two veterans of the colonial war. Ignacio Ruiz Alcaln, of the
Archivo Central of the Ministerio de la Presidencia, provided me with valuable
documents and communicated his passionate interest in the colonial history of
Morocco, and Antonio González Quintana, Co-ordinator of the military
archives of the Ministry of Defence, gave me advice about the location of mil
itary sources. I was pleased to make contact with the descendants of General
Alberto Castro Girona, in particular his nephew Marcial Castro Sánchez. My
only regret is that our efforts to retrieve the General’s documents proved fruit
less.
I am also indebted to the Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales y
Científicas del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores for a two-month research grant
for foreign Hispanists in 2000 and to the British Academy for a research grant
in the Humanities in the same year. I was also the beneficiary throughout the
period of my research of an annual research grant from the Department of
Government of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
In my search to locate veterans of the colonial war in Spain, I am very grate
ful to the organizers of the Programa LUAR of Galician Television, Maria
Vlll ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Pires Silva and Marina Alexey Laptera, and the people in Galicia who
responded to an appeal for information in LUAR programme. Similarly, I
want to thank the organizers of the radio programmes El Complot dels Oyents
a.nà La Mit dels Ignorants, both broadcast on Catalunya Radio, as well as the Diari
de Tarragona for making appeals for veterans to come forward and for the result
ing contacts in Catalonia. I am deeply grateful to the interviewees and their
families in all parts of Spain (see the Appendix) and to those who contacted me
with information, such as Joan Sardifia Alcoberro, Ricardo Lareo Rodriguez,
Josefina Barreiro Águila, Rosa Maria Alonso Pérez, Antonio Fernández
Gómez, Carmen García, Maria del Rosario Ruiz, Xoan Guitián, Ernesto
López Naveiras, and Fernando Uauradó. I also wish to thank my friends from
the University of Santiago de Compostela, Isaura Varela González and Pilar
Cagaio Vila, and in particular Carmen Fernández Casanova, who kindly
accompanied me on a tour of interviews of veterans in Galicia who responded
to the television appeal.
To all those who received me in their homes or in public spaces in
Catalonia, Galicia, and Madrid and spoke about their personal histories or
those of their fathers, I am immensely indebted and feel privileged to have
known them.
On the theme of toxic gas, I am grateful to Angel Viñas, Morten Heiberg,
and Jean-Marc Delaunay for unreservedly sharing their information with me.
George O. Bizzigotti of Mitretek systems gave useful advice about toxic gas
and Geoffrey Miller from Australia provided me with sources about their car-
cinogenous effects. Peter Eliot, of the Department of Research and
Information Services of the Royal Air Force Museum, kindly provided me with
feedback about bomb-firing mechanisms.
1 want also to thank Colonel Eduardo Alvarez Valera for his expert advice
at the beginning of my research in the Servicio Histórico Militar, José Pettenghi
for giving an interview and providing copies of articles on his experience of the
Civil War, Roberto Muñoz Bolaños for his useful suggestions about Chapter 4,
and Pablo La Porte for his fruitful collaboration over several years as research
assistant and co-author of an article, and for his feedback about some of the
text. Among the many other people who helped my research in Spain, I wish
to mention (in no particular order): Vicente Camarena, Alberto Carrillo, Ana
Cristina Pérez Rodriguez, Sara Lorenzo, Xavier Canalis, Carlos Diez, Pedro
Fusté Salvatella, Lucas María Oriol y Urquijo, Vicente Fernández Riera, Sr
Mascort, José Luis Villanova, Francesc Xavier Puig Rovira, Francisco
Espinosa Maestre, Angeles González Fernández, Enric Olivé, Ama Imet Laid,
Gabriel Riera Barreiro, Enrique Carabaza Bravo, Eloy Martín Corrales,
Pablo Manuel Rosser Limiñana, Diego Camacho (Abel Paz), Miguel Alonso
Baquer, Victor Morales Lezcano, as well as my friends and fellow historians
José Álvarez Junco, Mari a Jesús González Hernández, Enrique Moradiellos,
Josep Benaul Berenguer, and Montserrat Guibernau. In London I benefited
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IX
from the advice of Francisco Romero Salvadô, Gerald Howson, Rosa Balfour,
and Gerry Tannenbaum. I do not need to stress that any errors of fact or inter
pretation are my exclusive responsibility.
In Morocco my thanks go to all those who gave me advice and gave up their
time to help me, in particular Ilyas Elomari, his brother Samir, who drove me
to Anual and Ben Tieb, and to all those in the Association for the Defence of
the Victims of Toxic Gas in Morocco whom I was lucky enough to meet, in
particular Souhaila Riki. I am very grateful to those members of the
Association in Al Hoceima (such as the Vice-President Aziz Benazouz of the
organization in Morocco) who took me to Ajdir and the villages nearby on
which many tons of mustard gas were dropped during the colonial war. I was
privileged to meet some of the survivors of this war as well as the descendants
of the muhayeddin who had fought in it. During an earlier trip to north-west
Morocco I was fortunate to meet many people with personal or historical
knowledge of the colonial war, such as the historian Mohammad Ibn Azzuz
Hakim and the Chauen justice of the peace Ali Rais uni. But I am above all
indebted to Mustapha El Merroun of Tetuan, who worked as a research assis
tant for me and read several chapters of my manuscript. His meticulous and
unconditional research in Tetuan and Ceuta prised open documents that
would have been difficult to obtain otherwise. He also created the opportunity
for numerous interviews with Moroccan veterans of the colonial and Civil War
in which he acted as interpreter. As with the veterans of north-east Morocco,
it was a great honour for me to meet these men and I was particularly moved
by the interview granted to me on his deathbed in Tetuan in 2000 by a veteran
of both wars. I am also grateful to the Ministry of the Interior in Rabat for
granting me permission to carry out research in Morocco. The publisher and
author wish to acknowledge the help of Peninsula in processing many of the
illustrations in this book.
My daughters Rosa and Marianna were a constant source of encourage
ment even though they saw less of me than I and they would have liked because
of the time I had to devote to research. But it was my wife Grainne above all
who had to put up with my physical and emotional absence when I was abroad
doing research or when I was so absorbed in the making of this book that I
must have seemed another being in another time and place. For her love and
support, I am most grateful.
Preface
of twentieth-century Spain was the colonial war in Morocco
T he c e n tr a l epic
and the Civil War. Spain undertook a colonial mission in northern Morocco at
the beginning of the century that appeared to offer some compensation for the
loss of its overseas colonies in 1898 and promised to raise it to the status of other
European powers. But it was sucked into a colonial war from 1909 that led to
a succession of military disasters resulting in dictatorship and the fall of the
monarchy in 1931. The experience of that war politicized many of the Spanish
conscripts who were mobilized to fight for a cause they barely understood. It
also created a brutalized and interventionist officer elite, which rose in revolt
against the Republic in 1936. Without the intervention of the colonial army,
backed by the military force of Hitler and Mussolini, the coup would have
failed. The so-called Army of Africa crossed the Straits of Gibraltar with a mis
sion to destroy the internal enemy and transform a decadent Spain from out
side. The self-appointed agents of Spain’s purification were those officers who
had fought and won a colonial war, and that war inspired their initial strategy
and tactics in the Civil War. The regime installed by Franco also derived its
mythological and ideological underpinning from the colonial experience.
Despite the huge literature both wars have attracted, no serious study has
been made of the links between them. The war in Morocco itself has gener
ated dozens of volumes, from the panegyrical, self-exculpatory accounts of
right-wing military protagonists to the anti-war, autobiographical novels of
middle-class conscripts who fought there against their will. Yet all of them give
at best only glimpses of the war and at worst a complete distortion of the nature
of the encounter between Spaniards and Moroccans. The Civil War, for its
part, has given rise to more volumes than any other event or historical process
in Spain’s history. Yet the influence that the colonial war had on its genesis and
development has received attention only in the broad narratives of twentieth-
century Spanish history. This fracture between the literature of the two wars is
no doubt due partly to traditional demarcations of theme and chronology. The
colonial war ended in 1927 and the Civil War began in 1936 after five eventful
years of the Republic that have absorbed the interest of historians.
This book, therefore, is the first overarching study of the colonial war and
the Army of Africa in the Civil War. It attempts to fill the many gaps in the
existing bibliography and to challenge some of its hypotheses, in particular
with reference to the colonial war. The vast number of texts on the issue deal
only with specific conjunctures and the conclusions they draw are very limited.
Apart from the links between the colonial war, the Civil War, and the
