This was the town of Belchite, in Spain.
When the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939
It was left in its ruins to serve as a memorial to the devastation of Spain
in one of the most savage civil conflicts Europe has ever seen.
The civil war lasted from 1936 to 1939.
It cost perhaps half a million lives.
It ruined cities, towns and villages
For some, the victors, it was a crusade against godless revolution.
For others, the defeated, it was a struggle against the force of reaction
that had oppressed Spain for generations.
The Spanish Civil War still haunts the world's imagination.
Many came to see it as the prelude to the Second World War.
The first battle between democracy and fascism.
Thousands of volunteers came to fight and die in a foreign land
for ideals they believed to be their own.
But the Spanish knew that the war had Spanish causes.
It was after all their country that was ruined.
Their history that exploded.
Forty years on, the dictatorship is dissolved,
and the survivors can speak more freely.
They can question some of the myths.
They can evoke something of what they saw and understood during
the Spanish Civil War.
On July 17th, 1936, a group of army officers
rebelled against the government of the Spanish republic.
Workers took up arms to fight the rising.
and what began as a military coup,
led to almost three years of civil war.
For both sides, political opponents became enemies
to be hunted down and killed.
A Republic, El niño bonita
The beautiful girl.
Five years before the civil war, joyful demonstrations throughout Spain
had greeted the proclamation of the republic.
The monarchy had fallen without violence
To the crowds the republic meant Spain had broken through
to the 20th century, ... to progress.
To a long delayed victory for social and economic change.
It was an April day, spring-like. A mild day with sunshine.
So we walked, and there were huge throngs of people in lorries,
the few cars there were in those days, and trams.
Then unexpectedly and surprisingly republican flags appeared everywhere.
Nobody knew where so many had come from.
While the crowds rejoiced, King Alfonso was spending
his final hours in the Royal Palace.
Only weeks before, he had led the solemn Palm Sunday ceremonies,
unaware that the monarchy was doomed.
Over the years, one part of Spanish society after another
had lost faith in the monarchy.
The middle class despised Alfonso XIII
for tolerating a seven year military dictatorship.
The ruling classes now feared the king could no longer protect them,
and for the workers out on the streets that day,
the monarchy was the clamp holding an oppressive system together.
Two days before, on April 12th,
royalist parties were heavily defeated in local elections.
Suddenly the king understood his own isolation.
While Spain rejoiced, he went unresisting into exile.
The king was replaced by a government of mostly middle-class liberals.
but their plans for an advanced democracy were out of step with history.
Elsewhere in Europe, liberalism was weakened
by economic depression; poisoned by dictatorship.
The government was releasing huge forces
in this tightly repressed society.
The class hatreds of the agrarian poor,
and of the rapidly growing working class.
Yet, these republican optimists, and their socialist allies
thought that orderly reforms would soon transform the nation.
Justino de Azcarate was a member of that
first republican government of 1931.
There was this feeling of freedom.
For many years publications had been subject to censorship
and academic freedom had been restricted.
Now there was a general trend towards freedom
and also new laws to create a social and economic order
that would be more just and egalitarian.
The farm labourers and the industrial workers,
underpaid, almost unprotected, and frequently unemployed,
hoped that the republic would immediately end exploitation.
and break the power of the old ruling classes.
Narciso Julian was a young socialist at the time.
The birth of the republic brought great hope among the working class
that their aspirations would be satisfied.
That was the main feeling among industrial workers and peasants.
For centuries, peasants have longed to own land,
industrial workers wanted their union rights recognised,
The right to strike, a fair salary, social benefits they didn't have.
Social security, and so on.
So here were all these social and economic problems to be solved.
The arrival of a democratic regime, the republic,
meant so much for a vast majority of workers.
The hope that all these aspirations would come true.
For many, the republic seemed already the revolution.
But the republics leader's knew that under the new political surface,
the pillars of the old society remained untouched.
A powerful and deeply conservative church
hostile to change.
An army accustomed to having the last word in politics.
A possessing class determined to defend its privileges.
Southern Spain above all, was an area of big estates,
rich landowners.
Many were hated by the landless farm labourers,
nearly three quarters of a million of them, for whom
daily survival was a struggle.
On one side there was a huge number of impoverished labourers,
and on the other a few landowners.
And this meant tremendous humiliation,
to the point where labourers were hired like cattle in the market.
It was virtual slavery because there were no fixed wages.
They paid what they wanted to pay.
In many families children went to bed hungry
because you didn't get paid enough for subsistence.
The republic knew that democracy might collapse
if land was not divided more justly.
But its complicated cautious reforms
disappointed farm workers while alarming landlords.
The main reason was that the republic, right from the very start,
was totally opposed to rural property.
It campaigned against rural property.
Under the republic more and more people believed in the slogan
"Neither property, nor God, nor bosses."
And that's nearly revolutionary language.
That's how it really was at the time, so it's quite natural that
landowners would resist us ... quite understandable.
The landless have an inborn desire to own land.
So the republican propaganda about land reform
raised a lot of interest and immediate support.
They felt very frustrated when reform didn't take place.
So much so, that they then tried to grab land.
They not only tried, they did occupy land.
The landless poor were impatient to take over the fields
that the republic hesitated to give them.
Was there a chance for gradual change without violence?
One land reform official, Jose Vergara, was soon disillusioned.
I believe it is impossible to carry out an agrarian reform
without a revolution which dismantles existing political and social structures.
In a country where the land is owned by a small group of people,
who constitute an influential social sector
you have to fight for the land.
You will not be given it voluntarily.
In the same way that those who do not have land fight for it,
those who possess it fight to preserve it.
The turmoil in the countryside challenged the fabric of society,
... and the church.
Farm workers, like the urban poor
often saw the priest as the ally of the landowner,
... or the factory owner.
But the church still held the respect of the rich and powerful,
and of many humble Spaniards, as well.
There was as much reverence as there was hatred.
It was said that Spaniards always follow their priests
with a candle, or with a club.
But anti-clericalism, a fanatical determination
to break the hold of the Catholic Church over society
united liberal republicans and socialists alike.
It was a principle on which the republic refused to compromise.
Less than a month after the proclamation of the republic,
this resentment against the church erupted in violence.
Following a riot outside a royalist club
mobs set fire to half a dozen convents in Madrid.
Those were the churches where we had gone to mass,
had our first communion, and been baptised.
Yes, the day the convents were burnt was terrible,
full of sadness and anguish.
Our feelings were aggravated by the knowledge that it was being condoned.
Nothing was done to stop it.
The mobs were burning churches and convents and nobody intervened.
It was a terribly sad day.
As the convents were burned and looted,
the police stood by and watched.
Manuel Azaña then Minister of War said that day
that all the churches in Spain were not worth one republican life.
Words like these were never forgotten ... or forgiven.
Nearly half the population was illiterate.
The republican government set about putting a non-religious state education system.
The church's hold over minds was to be broken.
In the first years of the republic nearly 10,000 schools were opened.
Soon the republic was taking art and culture to every corner of Spain.
La Baracca was part of this offensive.
The Spanish intellectuals were eager to act
as the republic's missionaries of enlightenment.
Federico García Lorca, poet and playwright,
took the theatre to remote villages
In Calderón's classic, "Life is a Dream"
Lorca played the part of the shadow.
He was to be one of the civil war's first victims.
This cultural upsurge also gave fresh energy to regions
which felt themselves distinct from the rest of Spain.
Catalonia and the Basque country above all
retained a proud awareness of their own histories.
Since the turn of the century, their demand for self-government
had grown louder and angrier.
As a student, Marcel Giro,
supported the Catalan autonomous movement.
In the past, Catalonia had been an independent nation.
We have a tradition of language, customs and culture,
very distinct from the rest of Spain
It's different at many levels.
Added to this there's the fact that we'd been dominated
by outsiders who had shown no respect for our freedoms.
Since the proclamation of the republic on April 14th, 1931,
we'd been longing for these freedoms to be restored to Catalonia.
Like the Basques, the Catalans were more
industrialised and prosperous than the rest of the country.
Yet they had been stifling under the backward over-centralised rule in Madrid.
Barcelona, the Catalan capital,
was the centre of a thriving textile industry,
... and a huge port.
The republic soon granted Catalonia home rule.
The Catalans were encouraged to assert their national identity
... even more strongly.
An army officer, Manuel Diez Alegria
was among those who feared that home rule
would lead to the breakup of the Spanish state.
The Catalans made silly mistakes,
such as bothering people who went to Catalonia,
telling visitors they had to speak Catalan ... things like that.
All this created the impression they might destroy the unity of the nation,
given that they didn't hesitate to proclaim their separatist motives.
National unity obsessed army officers.
Spain had already lost most of its world empire.
In the Moroccan wars of the twenties it nearly lost
one of its last foreign possessions.
Francisco Franco helped to turn defeat into victory,
and became a general at the age of only 33.
The republic planned to reform the army
which was so archaic and top-heavy
that there was one officer to every eleven soldiers.
The army regarded these changes with heavy suspicion.
But it was the grant of self-government to Catalonia
which conservative officers saw as the most immediate threat
to the unity of the nation.
August 10th, 1932.
General Sanjurjo led an unsuccessful rising against the government.
Sixteen months earlier, as commander of the police,
he had decided not to resist the coming of the republic.
Now his action was a warning that the loyalty of the armed forces
was coming under strain.
General Sanjurjo was imprisoned,
but the government allowed him to entertain his family and supporters.
In Madrid the government's victory over the rising
was celebrated with parades and demonstrations
in support of the republic.
The Sanjurjo rising was premature.
The right-wing, and the traditional powers in Spanish society,
were not yet ready to overthrow the republic.
But they detested the reforms, and their alarm was growing.
On the left too, disillusion was spreading.
The hungry, the landless, the unemployed and the underpaid,
were beginning to confront the state openly.
One source of this left-wing opposition was anarchism.
gathered round its trade union ... the C.N.T.
Born during the bloody social conflicts of Barcelona
in the early years of the century.
The C.N.T.'s creed was Anarcho-syndicalism.
The belief that revolution would lead to total worker self-management.
Although the anarchist movement had weakened in the rest of Europe,
in Spain it had prospered.
By 1932 the C.N.T. claimed over one million members.
Federica Montseny was a young anarchist leader.
I believe there is something different ... special, about Spaniards,
created by the mixture of so many different races
by their history, and by constant oppression.
They were oppressed first by feudalism,
then by an all-powerful bourgeoisie.
By an army that has always cast its long shadow over Spain.
By the pressure of the church.
And all of this has created a constant spirit of rebellion among Spaniards.
It has driven them towards ideas of emancipation
Towards revolutionary concepts of society
... and of life.
When the republic was proclaimed in 1931
the anarchists declared: "We remain in open war with the state".
They rejected all governments, monarchies or republics.
They fought for a society of equal, cooperating human beings
freed from the curses of private property, God, and bosses.
In Spain, extremes of poverty created a climate
ripe for revolutionary violence.
In January 1933, anarchists led futile risings
in several Andalucian villages.
One of them was Casas Viejas.
The police showed the villagers no mercy.
Prisoners were shot.
One house defended by anarchists was set alight,
and the occupants died.
The blame for these tragedies was put on the republican leaders.
The socialists decided to pull out of the government,
disgusted at scandals like Casas Viejas,
delaying the reforms and mounting unemployment.
New elections were called in 1933
The socialist left was now losing faith in the whole parliamentary system.
The anarchists had never believed in it anyway.
Most of the right had not yet rejected parliamentary democracy.
They hoped that by winning the elections
they could still halt, and reverse, the whole tide of events.
An new party emerged on the right.
It was called the CEDA.
This was Spain's first mass Catholic party.
It's leader was the ambitious young José María Gil-Robles
who had learned from the campaign style of the Nazis.
The right wing made a supreme effort to bring out its voters.
It was helped by women who were voting for the first time.
Ironically, it was a liberal republic that had given them the franchise.
The elections of Nov 1933 made CEDA the largest party in parliament.
Gil-Robles became the hero of conservative Spain.
The government shifted right.
The reform program slowed down, or went into reverse.
The left was appalled.
Behind Gil-Robles they suspected the shadow of fascism was waiting.
By 1934, fascism was reaching out across Europe.
In Germany, the Nazis were crushing what opposition remained.
The Spanish socialists were determined not to go down without a struggle.
They imaged there would soon be jackboots on the streets of Madrid.
if CEDA and Gil-Robles took power.
When CEDA did join the government in October 1934,
The Spanish socialists decided to strike back.
Sócrates Gómez was a member of the socialist youth.
We felt there had been a serious regression in Spanish politics.
We were well aware that even without a civil war,
fascism could come to power in Spain,
perhaps camouflaged behind politicians such as Gil-Robles.
And this is what led us to strike.
You must realise that this wasn't just another strike
for things like wages or better working conditions.
This was a revolutionary strike,
and our aim was to overthrow the government and take power.
The socialists summoned the workers to rise against the elected government.
But the insurrection was easily defeated everywhere.
except in the northern mining district of Asturias.
Now the whole left, for once, united in rebellion.
Socialists and anarchists, communists and Trotskyists
seized control and declared the revolution.
The coal miners shut down their pits
and marched out eagerly to fight for "Red Asturias".
We felt this tremendous excitement.
We had dynamite ready to blow everything up,
and everybody was behind us.
The whole village was ready to go, even the kids.
Men, women, children, everybody.
It was open war against the Madrid government.
The miners drove back local army units
and murdered some of their political enemies.
But the government now sent Moroccan troops
and the Spanish Foreign Legion into the battle.
A fortnight after it had begun,
the Asturias rising had been broken.
The fighting had ravaged towns and villages.
General Franco helped to plan the government campaign.
As the army fought its way along the Asturian valleys,
the defeated miners were shown no mercy.
The Civil Guard did it, and the army troops
and some local bosses who went with them pointing out suspects.
They said: "This one, that one".
That's what happened. They killed all sorts of people.
Nearly 2,000 people were killed in the Asturias revolution.
Some of them slaughtered in cold blood.
Tens of thousands were marched off to prison.
In Spain as a whole, the socialist-led rising
had failed to get off the ground because the left could not act together.
But the lesson of Asturian unity sank home.
Over the next two years, the left drew closer together
to the government imprisoned opposition leaders
and demolished their reforms.
In 1936, with elections approaching once more
most of the left united in a Popular Front.
The anarchists did not join, but supported the Popular Front
in order to rescue their own imprisoned supporters.
On the right, Gil-Robles launched a noisy, confident campaign.
He claimed that he alone stood between Spain
and a murderous Bolshevik revolution.
February 16th, polling day
was a turning point in the history of Spain.
As the results came in it became clear that
the Popular Front had won the largest block of seats.
The release of political prisoners began.
Dolores Ibárruri, known as "La Pasionaria"
had been elected as a Communist MP for Asturias.
So then I went to the prison.
The governor had run away but his deputy was there.
He said: "I haven't received any orders".
I replied: "I'm the MP for Asturias.
I was beginning to sound very grand.
I said: "Please give me the keys.
"The prisoners are coming out today".
He finally said: "Here they are".
So I ran along the corridors of the jail
shouting: "Comrades, all out".
It was very moving.
All Barcelona turned out for the return from prison
of Lluís Companys, Catalonia's president.
The working class parties refused to join the government
and left republicans were now trapped between
the panic of conservative Spaniards
and the excited hopes of the workers.
Strikes and land seizures broke out as workers tried to win back
what had been lost in the last two years.
As the prisoners marched out into the fresh air,
the right concluded that Gil-Robles parliamentary politics
had let them down.
Conservative hopes now followed a new star,
José Calvo Sotelo. But for some, the time for
parliamentary compromise had already passed.
Tomas Garicano Goñi was a young conservative officer.
I was not a member of any political party,
but we felt there was no way out.
As Gil-Robles wrote later: "Peace was not possible".
For me this was only too true.
And there's something else, perhaps too embarrassing to recall,
but that one has to admit, at that time
we couldn't stand each other.
Divisions and tensions had reached such a point
that even seeing a socialist, not to mention a communist,
was the same as seeing the devil.
Some 15,000 members of Gil-Robles youth movement
defected and went over to the Falange,
Spain's own fascist party, which had been founded by
José Antonio Primo de Rivera
... in 1933.
José Antonio insisted, even to audiences outside Spain,
that he was not just copying fascism elsewhere.
The movement we are initiating in Spain
is not a copy of any foreign movement.
It has learned from fascism
what fascism has of the ideal unity, authority,
and substitution of the struggles among classes,
by the ideal of cooperation.
A climate of violence allowed the Falange to flourish.
José Antonio was arrested, but the Falange was banned.
But he had helped to ensure that rioting and political murder
became predictable when left and right collided.
While men were using fists, stones, bullets
to settle political arguments,
they were also using direct action to escape from poverty.
On the dry hills of Estremadura,
the patience of the farm labourers now snapped.
They surged out to occupy the land they had yearned for.
On a single day, March 25th, 1936,
some 60,000 landless workers took over 3,000 farms.
Revenge was in the air.
The landowners feared they could lose, not only their estates,
... but their lives.
And there was trouble brewing in Navarre, in the north of Spain.
But this time from the right.
The Carlists were traditional monarchists,
whose catechism was "God, Fatherland and King",
... their own Carlist king.
Fanatically religious, they were locked into
a medieval view of the world.
The Carlists had rebelled against a liberal monarchy
in the 19th century.
Now they were eager to overthrow this godless, red republic.
Amid the growing breakdown in law and order,
some army officers resolved that they must act.
The government had sensed the danger
and posted some of the most disaffected generals
away from the mainland.
General Franco was sent to the Canary Isles.
But General Mola was unwisely posted
to Pamplona in the Carlist country.
From here Mola, "El Director",
began the secret organisation of the plot.
At first Mola encountered reluctance among some key figures.
He'd assigned to General Franco the job of launching the rising
in Spanish Morocco.
Franco would take command of the Moors,
and Foreign Legionaries he had led in the 1920s.
But Franco hesitated to commit himself.
Ramón Serrano Suñer was Franco's brother in law.
Franco was obsessed with the danger of communism.
He was convinced that communism had to be stopped,
but he was in no hurry.
He thought the danger wasn't so imminent,
and he was quite happy staying in the Canary Isles.
May 1st, 1936.
A parade was intended to show the republic's enemies
that the left had overwhelming strength.
Largo Caballero, who some call the Spanish Lenin,
was the most extreme socialist leader.
He was now calling for a revolution that would impose
the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The right was terrified.
A mere spark could detonate the tension.
During the parade, the cry went up that
nuns had given poisoned sweets to the children.
Crowds broke away and set fire to a convent.
The government of the republic was fighting desperately
to stave off the collapse of the state itself.
But the socialists still refused to join the coalition.
The leadership of the republic was now increasingly isolated.
On June 16th, José Calvo Sotelo
the opposition leader, proclaimed himself
in favour of a strong, integrated state,
which would end strikes, lockouts, starvation wages,
and anarchic liberty.
He ended by saying: "Many call this a fascist state.
If it is, then I who share that idea of the state,
and believe in it, declare myself fascist.
In Pamplona, July 7th, 1936,
brought the annual running of the bulls.
The Festival of San Fermín.
The crowds of visitors were good cover for Mola's emissaries.
I received a message from a friend
saying that they were all there, having a good time
and that I should join them as I had done in previous years.
This was the coded message I was expecting.
As the bulls plunged about the ring,
Mola and his plotters were solving their last problems.
The rising had been postponed, as the Carlists
squabbled about which flag they should march under.
And some army officers still refused to betray the republic.
But José Antonio, after complaining that Mola's movement
was too conservative for his radical fascism,
had finally promised support.
At last, Mola felt that he could go ahead.
I met Mola and he told me everything was ready,
and the names of the officers who were assigned to each region.
Franco, still in the Canary Isles got a message to Mola.
In the first days of July, July the 6th or 7th,
Franco had sent a message to Mola,
written on a piece of paper carried by a woman in her belt,
saying: "Geography Tetuán, insufficient."
Franco, devious and prudent, was still calculating his own chances.
This really upset Mola, the "Director" ... he was very irritated.
He said: "Franco will never get here in time.
"It will all be delayed, and the government will break it all up."
But the plan to ferry Franco to Morocco went ahead.
The search for the right ferryman, ended in the home counties,
... at Croydon airport. Captain Bebb, a freelance pilot,
was introduced to a gentleman from Spain.
And he asked me if I was prepared to go to the Canary Islands
to get a Riff leader to start an insurrection in Spanish Morocco.
I thought: "What a delightful idea. What a great adventure."
On July 11th, Captain Bebb took off from Croydon.
By the night of the 12th he had got as far as Casablanca,
on his way to the Canary Isles.
But it was what happened in Madrid that night that unlocked
the last gate to disaster.
It began here, at the home of Lieutenant José Castillo.
He was a left-wing officer in the assault guards,
the republic's own police force.
His life had several times been threatened by right-wing extremists.
It was nearly 9:30 at night.
Castillo was leaving home to go on duty at the police station,
no more than a ten minute walk.
He got no further than the corner.
News that Castillo had been murdered soon reached the police station.
Outraged his comrades demanded that all right-wing extremists
should be rounded up.
Headquarters sent them a list.
It was Lieutenant Leon Lupion
who gave out the names to the arrest squads.
I handed out 2 or 3 names to each of the other officers,
and they went off in police vans with several guards.
Finally there was just one van left in the corner there,
... van number 17.
Van 17 was the last to set out ... at three in the morning.
Nobody knows who was on its list for arrest.
All that is clear is that a van arrived at the home of
the leader of the opposition, the right-winger José Calvo Sotelo.
They asked him to step down to the station for questioning.
He promised to telephone soon to his family.
"Unless," he added, "these gentlemen blow my brains out."
His dead body was dumped at the gate of the East Cemetery.
It was not the authorities who had ordered his arrest,
but there was no way the government could escape the blame.
The leader of the opposition had been assassinated in the custody
of the government's own special police.
The Calvo Sotelo murder brought the fury of conservative Spaniards to its peak.
Its timing, a malign coincidence, offered the army plot
mass support at a crucial moment.
It was then that all the doubts and hesitation
about whether to call the uprising immediately,
or to wait for the disintegration to spread
so that we would be more justified,
... all those doubts disappeared.
Within hours of the murder, Mola dispatched a coded telegram
It read: "On the 15th last, at 4 a.m.,
"Helen gave birth to a beautiful child
Hidden here were the date, time and place of the uprising.
July 18th, at 5 a.m., in Morocco.
The republican government knew that Spain was close to explosion,
but it failed to take seriously the approaching spark,
... the military uprising.
The left knew all too well what was coming,
and workers were already garrisoning party and trade union offices.
At midnight, the socialist leader, Indalecio Prieto
with some of his colleagues met the prime minister, Casares Quiroga.
They begged him to arm the people, but Casares thought
this would fling away the last hopes of law and order.
He refused.
At dawn, on July 14th,
Captain Bebb took off from Casablanca.
Destination ... the Canary Isles.
That same morning, the funerals of Castillo and Calvo Sotelo took place.
Clenched fists for Castillo's coffin,
the straight armed fascist salute for Calvo Sotelo.
What remained of political middle ground in Spain was crumbling.
Disaster now seemed inevitable.
Juan Molina was an anarchist militant in Barcelona.
We hadn't slept at home for several nights.
We were grabbing what sleep we could on floors at the union
and at our newspaper offices.
We were waiting for the inevitable.
In our newspapers we were telling our members to be prepared.
Everybody was ready because we knew the coup was bound to come.
Josep Tarradellas the Catalan leader,
called on the prime minister, but Casares Quiroga
still refused to see what was about to happen.
While we were chatting, news arrived of army unrest in Morocco.
There were reports that some generals were about to rise,
although General Franco's name still wasn't being mentioned.
So then I told him: "My friend Casares, I'm convinced
"that the army is going to rise against Spanish democracy."
He said: "I'm sure it won't".
Casares Quiroga could not believe the generals would go so far.
But on July 17th, a day before it was planned,
the rising erupted here in Melilla.
Next day it spread to other towns in Morocco.
even before General Franco had arrived to lead the Army of Africa.
The military plotters assumed their coup d'etat
would succeed swiftly.
The government of the republic, in turn, thought it was strong enough
to stamp out this erratic rising.
Both were terribly wrong.
The rising spread to the mainland, and the rebel generals
soon controlled great tracts of the countryside.
But the workers were now at last given arms,
and with loyal police units, they defeated the military
in most of Spain's industrial cities.
There could be no rapid victory either way.
The rising swelled into full-blown counter-revolution.
On the other side, the workers, now pouring out to the barricades
were using their rifles for a Spain, which was to become
not just republican, but revolutionary.
There was no way left to prevent the conflict
which was to rage across Spain for almost three years.
There could be no more negotiation,
... no compromise.
It could only be civil war.