Francisco Franco

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Francisco Franco : biography

4 December 1892 – 20 November 1975

In 1916, age 23 and already a captain, he was badly wounded in a skirmish at El Biutz and possibly lost a testicle. His survival marked him permanently in the eyes of the native troops as a man of baraka (good luck). He was recommended for Spain’s highest honor for gallantry, the coveted Cruz Laureada de San Fernando, but was instead promoted to major in the Spanish Army. From 1917 to 1920, he served in Spain. In 1920, Lieutenant Colonel José Millán Astray, a histrionic but charismatic officer, founded the Spanish Foreign Legion, on similar lines to the French Foreign Legion. Franco became the Legion’s second-in-command and returned to Africa. On 24 July 1921, the poorly commanded and overextended Spanish Army suffered a crushing defeat at Annual from Rif tribesmen led by the Abd el-Krim brothers. The Legion and supporting units relieved the Spanish enclave of Melilla after a three-day forced march led by Franco. In 1923, by now a lieutenant colonel, he was made commander of the Legion.

That year, he married María del Carmen Polo y Martínez-Valdès. Three years later the couple had a daughter, María del Carmen. on thePeerage.com. Retrieved 8 August 2006. Following his honeymoon Franco was summoned to Madrid to be presented to King Alfonso XIII. This and other occasions of royal attention would mark him during the Republic as a monarchical officer. Promoted to colonel, Franco led the first wave of troops ashore at Al Hoceima in 1925. This landing in the heartland of Abd el-Krim’s tribe, combined with the French invasion from the south, spelled the beginning of the end for the short-lived Republic of the Rif. Becoming the youngest general in Spain in 1926, Franco was appointed in 1928 director of the newly created General Military Academy of Zaragoza, a new college for all Army cadets, replacing the former separate institutions for young men seeking to become officers in infantry, cavalry, artillery, and other branches of the army.

During the Second Spanish Republic

With the fall of the monarchy in 1931, Franco did not take any notable stand. But the closing of the Academy, in June, by War Minister Manuel Azaña, provoked his first clash with the Spanish Republic. Azaña found Franco’s farewell speech to the cadets insulting. For six months, Franco was without a post and under surveillance.

Franco was a subscriber to Acción Española, an ultra-right wing monarchist theoretical journal, and a firm believer in the Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy – or contubernio, (filthy cohabitation), ‘one of Franco’s favourite words’; a conspiracy in which Jews, Freemasons and leftists allegedly sought the destruction of Christian Europe, with Spain the principal target.Paul Preston, The Theorists of Extermination, essay in Unearthing Franco’s Legacy, p.42,45, University of Notre Dame Press, ISBN 0-268-03268-8

On 5 February 1932, he was given a command in A Coruña. Franco avoided involvement in José Sanjurjo’s attempted coup that year, and even wrote a hostile letter to Sanjurjo expressing his anger over the attempt. As a side result of Azaña’s military reform, in January 1933, Franco was relegated from the first to the 24th in the list of Brigadiers; conversely, the same year (17 February), he was given the military command of the Balearic Islands: a post above his rank.

New elections held in October 1933 resulted in a center-right majority. In opposition to this government, a revolutionary movement broke out 5 October 1934. This uprising was rapidly quelled in most of the country, but gained a stronghold in Asturias, with the support of the miners’ unions. Franco, already General of Division and aide to the war minister, Diego Hidalgo, was put in command of the operations directed to suppress the insurgency. Troops of the Spanish Army of Africa carried this out, with General Eduardo López Ochoa as commander in the field. After two weeks of heavy fighting (and a death toll estimated between 1,200 and 2,000), the rebellion was suppressed.

The insurgency in Asturias sharpened the antagonism between Left and Right. Franco and López Ochoa—who, prior to the campaign in Asturias, had been seen as a left-leaning officer—emerged as officers prepared to use ‘troops against Spanish civilians as if they were a foreign enemy’.Unearthing Franco’s Legacy, University of Notre Dame Press, p.61 Franco described the rebellion to a journalist in Oviedo as, ‘a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism.’ Though the colonial units sent to the north by the government at Franco’s recommendation consisted of the Spanish Foreign Legion and the Moroccan Regulares Indigenas, the right wing press portrayed the Asturian rebels in xenophobic terms as lackeys of a foreign Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy.Sebastian Balfour, Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War, OUP 2002 252-254 At the start of the Civil War, López Ochoa was assassinated. Some time after these events, Franco was briefly commander-in-chief of the Army of Africa (from 15 February onwards), and from 19 May 1935 on, Chief of the General Staff.