The war memorial in this small village in southern Spain
bears the names of 95 civilians and local police.
It was built in General Franco's time.
It recalls the victims killed here behind the lines
on just one side of Spain's civil war.
Many died on the other side too,
but their memorial had to wait until Franco was dead,
40 years after the war.
Only then was it safe to admit you had opposed him.
This mass grave of anonymous civilians
who died in the terror that followed Franco's uprising,
was organised by one of the survivors.
They are working men and women that are buried here,
that were shot here.
While the war lasted there was no memorial, it was a rubbish dump.
We can't be sure exactly how many died,
but from their relatives we reckon there are about 500 bodies.
The civil war became the battlefield for international ideologies.
Before then, it was Spain's own revolution,
and counter revolution.
Justice was swept away by random brutality.
Historians say the war's dead could be as many as half a million.
Half of them died in battle,
the rest died by assassination,
summary execution, ... or massacre.
In 1936, Spain was a republic.
But in July that year, a group of right-wing generals,
tried to overthrow the government.
Much of Spain was still deeply conservative
and welcomed the army revolt.
It was only five years since the Spanish monarchy had fallen.
Democracy to Spain was new, and desperately fragile.
There had been several attempts to undermine it,
but so far democracy had survived.
The inspiration for this new army plot was General Mola.
He had planned a swift coup d'état, but it didn't come off.
Around the country, some sections of the army
stayed loyal to the republic.
So did half the Spanish people.
The pattern for the division of Spain was set.
At the centre of the plot in Pamplona,
traditional monarchist and fascists joined the army rebels.
So did the Civil Guard.
But conservative Pamplona was very different from other parts of Spain.
In Barcelona and Valencia, the rising
was uncertain and disorganised, and workers took to the streets
to help the loyal republican police put down the rebellion.
In conservative towns like Burgos, Valladolid and Salamanca,
the rising succeeded.
But in Valladolid only after local fascists had helped the army
overcome workers' resistance.
In those days Spain's best troops were the Colonial Army of Africa,
commanded by General Francisco Franco in Morocco.
The rebel Franco needed transport for his Moorish troops,
and a base on the mainland.
It was provided when General Queipo seized Seville.
and secured the vital bridgehead.
The troops were taken there by German planes.
In the capital, Madrid, the army rebels
stayed in their barracks awaiting reinforcements.
There was much civilian resistance to the revolt,
but the republican government hesitated.
They feared the consequences of arming the people.
The coup had missed the swift victory it had expected.
The workers fought back.
The coup became a civil war.
and the resistance became a revolution.
Lora del Río, 30 miles from Seville,
was typical of hundreds of villages in southern Spain.
The uprising took it by surprise.
All we knew was that the train from Seville did not arrive.
There were rumours that there was trouble in Seville,
but nobody knew for sure.
I remember that on the morning of the 19th,
everybody, ... well not everybody,
but the workers asked: "What's happening?",
and there was a lot going on in the streets.
People were wearing their party badges,
some with shotguns on their shoulders.
I was working in the harvest when one of my brothers came and said:
"Listen Manuelita, the revolution has broken out."
"What revolution is this?" "It was on the 18th of July", he said.
So everybody left the harvest and came to town.
This is the man, Manuel Vazquez Guillen,
who a generation later organised the village war memorial.
He was a socialist. So were most of
the labourers and peasants of Lora del Río.
This wasn't especially meaningful. The villages all around
were political one way or another.
But at the army rebellion, they all responded the same way.
They set up revolutionary committees in the town hall
to defend their villages against the soldiers setting out from Seville.
They also seized the goods of the well-to-do,
and shared them out.
A truck went out to all the shops requisitioning all the merchandise.
Everything was put together in a store,
and all the people had to go there
Everybody was treated alike by the committee.
Everybody got the same quantities per person.
So many grams of rice, chickpeas or meat.
The meat ... instead of killing animals,
which we might later need for our work in the fields,
we took the fighting bulls.
We took the bulls because we didn't need entertainment.
We only wanted food for the villagers,
and we didn't want to use the cattle which we needed for working the land.
Some people had never seen the colour of cooked meat.
They'd seen it at the butchers, but never cooked.
Very soon people became tired of eating meat.
Lora del Río's revolution had its more unpleasant aspects.
Right-wingers and landlords were locked up in the village jail.
They were accused of rebellion.
Some of the people taken were good people who gave work to everybody,
others were very bad,
but they all ended up the same way.
All the right-wingers were put in jail.
All whom they believed to be on the right were also put in jail.
There was a lot of hatred. Through many years of struggle
between workers and masters, a lot of hatred had accumulated.
For generations, Spain had been a land of injustice, hunger and hate.
This hate was not only in the countryside.
In Barcelona, the rising gave the authorities a double problem.
The city was the centre of a popular anarchist movement,
... unique in Europe, that denied the principle
of government authority of any kind.
The anarchists had more than half a million supporters all over the country.
To them, the army represented all the forces of reactionary Spain.
So they took to the streets against the rebels,
and thus by coincidence, found themselves in common cause
with the loyal forces of law and order, for the first time.
It was a combination bound to have dramatic consequences.
Anarchists led crowds of people to urge the loyal police force
to attack army divisional headquarters
where the local rebel leader, General Goded, was holding out.
When he finally gave in, his surrender was broadcast throughout Spain
It encouraged resistance everywhere to the army coup.
The anarchists stormed the artillery depot.
The government tried to contain the situation by sending
loyal civil guards, but crowds of people
seized substantial quantities of weapons.
For the first time in Barcelona, the people armed themselves.
This was a serious dilemma for the authorities of Catalonia.
The region was governed by liberal politicians, the voice of the middle-class.
But the rebellion had been put down by anarchists,
with other working-class support, and the police force.
The politicians had kept their heads down.
Catalonia's president, Lluís Companys,
faced the situation, virtually alone,
apart from his police chief, Federico Escofet.
I went to see the president, and I said: "The rebellion has been put down.
"There's only the odd patch of local fighting of minor importance."
And he said: "All right Escofet, that's fine.
But the CNT-FAI now rule the streets.
The CNT-FAI, armed anarchist organisations,
dominant in the streets, made the government powerless.
This was the awful dilemma.
If the legitimate administration wanted to restore its normal authority,
Escofet's men would have had to turn on the very comrades in arms
who had helped save the republic.
I told the president: "How can you hope to fight these people?
You'd have a fight as fierce as the one we've just had,
and we've got so many dead and wounded.
Besides, they have fought side by side with those people.
How can you ask me to order them to fight against them?
I'm quite sure that even if I did, they would not obey me.
What happened in Barcelona
was critical for the development of the war.
The right-wing army rebellion had created
a revolutionary fervour of resistance.
The army's surrender in Barcelona released forces
that the ordinary democratic republic could not contain.
While the rebellion's defeat in Barcelona
was the republic's first victory of the war,
Madrid, the capital was in suspense.
On the morning of the 19th of July,
the new prime minister, Giral had at last
given the order to arm the people.
The socialist and anarchist trade unions
were issued with 65,000 rifles.
But only 5,000 rifles had bolts,
and you cannot fire a gun without its bolt.
The missing parts were in the Montaña barracks,
in a dominant, threatening position near the centre of Madrid.
The commander refused to hand them over,
so the barracks were stormed.
Very soon a white flag appeared.
One section of the barracks seemed to want to give up,
but firing continued from another section.
People were pissed off about the way the rebels
had used a white flag and deceived them.
Many people had been killed because of that.
So when they finally entered the barracks and saw an officer surrender,
... they shot him. A logical reaction, wasn't it?
In the courtyards, I saw a number of corpses, of course.
Some of the soldiers had resisted, and they were executed, just like that.
There's no double about it.
Unrestrained vengeance.
Spontaneous execution of the enemy.
This in the early months was the way of the civil war.
Many defenders of the republic set themselves outside its law.
and sought a revolutionary justice out of the barrel of a gun.
The uprising was defeated in 5 out of Spain's 7 largest cities.
They stayed loyal to the republic.
It was different with the conservative, catholic peasantry.
They supported the army coup.
There were two Spains now.
Republicans have the north and a vast area southeast of Madrid.
The rebels have the area north of the capital, and the southwest.
From both zones, columns of troops and armed civilians
rushed to confront the opposition.
The tactics of both sides were crude and formed only by passion.
From Madrid and Barcelona to defend the republic,
from the conservative hinterland to crush it.
Once they'd more or less cleared Madrid of resistance,
they decided to go out to the mountain passes
to hold the advance of the column heading our way.
And it was all still very festive.
The first days it was like a great party.
A party in honour of the revolution, you might say.
And I remember how people called each other
Early in the morning you would hear voices.
Manolo, Paco, Antonio, and the windows would open.
"I'm coming"... and he'd do up his overalls,
put on his cap, takes his cartridge belt,
climb into the lorry, and head off to the hills to fight the war.
Then come back for the night; they returned home to sleep.
And the women would say: "Paco's gone off to the front today.
"I made him a potato tortilla, and he's taken a few bottles of wine."
People went off to the front as though it was a picnic.
The casual gaiety of republican volunteers from Madrid,
was matched by the enthusiasm with which
civilians who supported the rebels set off to try to capture the city.
Among them was Juan Crespo.
We bought overalls for our uniform.
We went to the barracks where they gave us ammunition belts and rifles.
We thought it was going to be such a walkover that we joked
we were going for a coffee in Madrid.
Like someone going to a dance, because that's what it was for us.
As well as being a bit of a trip, it was going to a dance.
It was as if there was a competition between the columns
setting out from different points.
From Burgos, Pamplona, Valladolid, from Salamanca.
We all headed for Madrid, and the race was to see who got there first,
as if there were only 300 cups of coffee waiting.
We came back from the front whenever we liked.
Then we'd hand in our rifles and calmly go home.
Nobody stopped us because we weren't dressed as soldiers.
We weren't soldiers. We weren't formally enlisted.
Of course that soon ended. General Mola turned us into soldiers.
Put us under military authority.
Put in the beginning it didn't exist.
As the man said, General Mola had to turn his insurgent irregulars
into some kind of disciplined body.
They became one force and called themselves "Nationalist".
On the other side the republicans too, had to become a proper fighting force,
but that was more difficult.
Each political party or trade union recruited
its own volunteers into the militia units.
Anarchist columns under leaders like Durruti,
fiercely defended their independence.
By definition, anarchists had to oppose organised militarism.
They would defend the republic against the fascists,
but not at the expense of surrendering to any sort of authority.
Otherwise they could hardly be anarchists.
In any case, defending the republic was not enough.
After successfully resisting the army's coup in the cities,
they now took the offensive.
The war provided the opportunity to achieve
a freedom and justice that they argued
was impossible under bourgeois democracy.
They claimed that war and revolution were inseparable.
War had been imposed on us because we were being attacked,
and the revolution was to rebuild society according to our ideals.
We weren't going to give our lives for capitalism
We were giving them for the revolution.
This is how I felt about it, and most of the others.
200 miles from the front,
Barcelona was now anarchy itself.
Governmental authority had gone.
The anarchists were the only power,
but since they opposed all authority,
they logically refused to take power themselves.
Instead their leaders chose to share control of Catalonia
in a committee of anti-fascist militias,
while the rank and file made their revolution
at the roots of society.
The whole of the wood industry, for instance factories or forests,
were taken over by the union.
Those bosses who hadn't fled to France, stayed in their homes
because there had been 17 or 18 murders among the bosses.
The union said: "Let's collectivise it all"
Then there was a kind of takeover,
and they created what was called: "Socialised Wood Industry."
The first thing that was done was something rather strange,
but it was something the workers had never managed to get.
That was healthy working conditions in the workshops.
Small workshops were closed because
they didn't have enough lighting or ventilation.
or the machinery was unsafe.
Big production units were created instead.
Industry was collectivised.
Women were liberated, abortion was legalised.
Barcelona celebrated its freedom.
This was the revolution.
It had a dark side too.
The revolution found its enemies within.
First, the church. The symbol of authority.
The enemy of individuality.
In Spain, a dreaded hierarchy.
Thirteen bishops died in the revolution,
and nearly 6,000 priests, nuns and monks.
This appalled the religious in what was still nominally a catholic country.
It fueled nationalist propaganda against the godless republic.
The tombs of nuns were sacked.
But atrocity was common to both sides.
The general's coup had let loose an orgy of reciprocal vengeance.
For the nationalists, General Mola had set the tone from the beginning.
He said: "It is necessary to spread an atmosphere of terror."
We have to create an impression of mastery.
Anyone who is overtly or secretly a supporter of the popular front
... must be shot.
The Spanish war had barely begun,
when the London Daily Express correspondent in republican Madrid
was told by his colleague from The Times
that victims of the terror could be found
in the grounds of the university.
Just outside the Faculty of Philosophy,
I saw the first bodies.
They were lying, some in pairs, some singly,
scattered all over the wide expanse of the field.
I counted altogether eighteen.
All lying with their face to the sun
and shot through the head.
As a journalist, I naturally wanted to find out what was going on.
So I went to see the head of the communist commission of investigation.
In the vacuum of authority left by the uprising of revolution,
the political parties had set up their own so-called "investigation committees".
In the absence of official bodies of law and order,
their function was not just investigation,
but the brutal administration of justice.
Madrid, Barcelona and the other cities, were left
virtually without any police whatsoever.
At the same time, during the first riotous days of the revolution,
the prisons had been thrown open, the wardens had walked out,
and hundreds if not thousands of criminals
had gained their liberty.
You had political factions,
out to kill as many fascists as possible
even the communists, rivaling with the anarchists
to see who could get the biggest score.
You had also these common criminals
out to, in many cases, to avenge old grievances.
For example, there were cases of
criminals who had been sentenced by a judge,
seeking out the judge, and shooting him.
And you had other people who owed money to a tradesman,
couldn't pay it, and they knew full well
that they only had to shoot that tradesman during the night
and they would not be called to account.
The random terror of republican Spain
was matched in the nationalist zone.
But here the methods were systematic
and justified as a crusade to purify Spain.
A lawyer called Francisco Poyatos Lopez
escaped from republican Madrid to the nationalist zone.
He saw the crimes of both.
Nothing happened in one zone that didn't in the other.
Nobody committed a crime which the other side didn't also perpetrate.
The big difference was that in the red zone, it was popular fervour
which spilled over and killed people.
On the other side it was those in authority
who coldly condemned people to injustice.
The moral difference is striking because it's one thing
for an ignorant populace to do something spontaneous,
another thing for people in authority to carry something out coldly, bloodily
talking about a holy crusade in God's name
which is blasphemy, because God cannot condone anything like that.
As far as anyone knows, God was not consulted.
Nobody seemed to mind.
At the beginning outside Valladolid,
40 republican prisoners were shot every dawn.
It became spectator sport.
An opportunist vendor set up a snack bar.
The nationalist authorities rationalised their brutalities
by the obligation to purge the motherland of alien ideologies.
Atheistic, Masonic, Marxist, or for that matter, Liberal.
"Jama's" ... Never, shrieked the propaganda.
Nor was this modern inquisition concerned only with politics.
Federico García Lorca was the avant-garde of an artistic renaissance.
Conservatives thought that his themes,
sexual freedom, justice and compassion,
undermined the moral fabric of Spain.
Lorca died in his hometown, Granada,
where, out of a population of 150,000
there were more than four and a half thousand deaths.
Dozens of the towns leading intellectuals
were shot at the cemetery wall.
Lorca was not a revolutionary, or even a politician.
His death, like so many of them, was meaningless.
Three days after the uprising, Lorca had fled his family home
for the supposed safety of a nationalist friends house.
Two weeks later, he was arrested
and without trial or sentence, sent by the authorities to his death.
The last sight of Lorca, was with a truckload of other victims,
on the road to their anonymous execution.
in the hills outside Granada.
No-one knows who pulled the trigger.
It is believed that Lorca now lies beneath this olive tree,
in an unmarked grave.
The nationalist terror was ferocious,
and from their point of view, necessary.
There was stalemate across the mountains, north of Madrid.
So the nationalist strategy to capture it
now involved the Army of Africa sweeping from the south
across vast areas of republican Spain.
The working class population was hostile.
They had to be cowed.
From his base in Seville, General Queipo de Llano
roared nightly threats to what, over the radio, he called:
"the republican rabble".
On the 25th of July, he announced:
"Let it be known, for every right-wing person
killed in the villages, I shall kill ten.
And perhaps exceed this proportion.
This was to prove no idle threat.
In Lora del Río, the Andalucían village
where the revolution had brought the people meat for the first time,
and local right-wingers had been arrested,
time was catching up.
The civil war's justice of vengeance was underway.
Further down the valley, nationalist troops were advancing.
In village to village, anyone who resisted was summarily shot.
The nationalist troops had left Seville for the villages,
and wherever they went, they just cleaned the place up.
They dealt with anybody they wanted to.
This one, boom, dead. I know about you Paco, bang.
No procedures were followed. A simple accusation was enough.
The threatening advance created panic in Lora del Río.
The village prison records show that as the nationalist troops advanced,
all the right-wingers, who had been locked up, were taken out
and handed over to the revolutionary committee.
"Entregado el Comité"
The same names on the graveyard memorials
show what those words meant.
Anyone delivered to the committee for justice, was shot.
When the nationalists took the village, the killing began again.
The prison records for the following weeks
tell the other side of the war's history,
... of reciprocal revenge.
I didn't see anything. No ... I heard it.
It was such a scandal.
I heard the trucks pass, and the shots.
and more trucks, more shots. They struck them all away.
I live on that street, along by the railway line.
You can see that the cemetery is very near.
It's there, where those trees are.
So we could hear, especially in the silence of the night.
When we heard the trucks passing at 3 a.m., we knew what it was.
Rojo means red.
To the nationalists, all opponents were red,
and if captured ... shot.
Local landowners in Andalucía joined the nationalist columns
We had risen against something we considered disastrous for the country,
because they were killing our relatives, attacking our farms.
For me it meant the liberation of our country.
For me it was the war against communism.
In my heart I was anti-communist.
You see, it wasn't against the republic, as such.
It was a question of communism, or not.
In this country there was a red revolution.
As an individual a worker may be good, bad or indifferent.
same as a boss, same as a businessman, same as anybody.
And yet collectively, they're terrible.
The workers as an entity will always be selfish.
They have never considered the country's well-being as a whole.
That sort of hatred is past reason, or compromise.
Moreno de la Cova and other landowners
joined the columns making their way to Andalucía
to avenge their murdered families,
reclaim their lands snatched by the revolution,
to execute the red resistance.
While the nationalist columns were wiping up opposition in the rear,
The Army of Africa, Franco's Moors,
marched along the road to Madrid.
They took Merida in the first proper battle of the war.
This linked them with the nationalists in the north.
Ahead lay Madrid.
But the frontier town of Badajoz with a garrison loyal to the republic
was cut off.
The battle for Badajoz was ferocious.
The Army of Africa, the Moors and the Foreign Legion,
won a bloody victory at great cost of life.
First on the scene after the battle was Portuguese journalist, Mário Neves.
It was terrible, the Moors were capable of anything.
I suppose they were excited since they'd come all the way from Morocco,
had flown over the strait to Seville, and had fought
violent battles on the way to Badajoz.
An officer warned us not to speak to the legionnaires
because they were so violent.
A column of some 120 men in a state of total madness,
arrived at these walls, and advanced only to be crushed by gunfire.
Once the legionaries had breached the defenses,
... they went berserk.
Neves followed their rampage.
45 years later, he returned for the first time.
People were trying to escape, and they usually
tied a white handkerchief round their left arm.
But the rebels who were looking for fighters,
pulled their shirts, or rather tore them away violently,
to find the mark left by the gun.
As they'd been fighting a lot, the gun left a black mark.
and this was enough for them to be immediately arrested,
and to endure the fate we all can guess.
They herded them into the bullring.
No trials, of course. No enquiry, no questions,
Just the swift bullet.
I wanted to go to the bullring where people had told me
there were several prisoners, and piles of bodies.
On my way there I saw a brook where heaps of bodies lay.
There were heaps of them in several dramatic postures,
which caused an extraordinary impression.
I tried to get into the bullring, and I succeeded.
I talked to the guards and learned there were now
just two bodies left in the middle of the ring.
But I realised then there were still several prisoners in the bull pens,
but I was so disturbed I did not want to talk to them.
They were obviously awaiting their final moment.
It was said that more than 2,000 people
were summarily shot by firing squad.
Mário Neves got over his nausea, and became a reporter again.
I immediately tried to find out who were the authorities in the town,
... who was in charge.
It turned out to be Colonel Yagüe, and I told him
that everybody was talking about the shootings with horror
He expressed a certain indifference, and I asked him
whether shootings were taking place, and if so, how many.
I added that I'd heard that 2,000 people had been shot.
He looked at me, hesitated, and replied:
"Probably not that many."
But something in the way he said it left no doubles about
the truth of the stories, which had already spread all over town.
Three days later, Yagüe was interviewed by an American reporter.
Yagüe had his own estimate of the killings.
"Do you think I was going to take 4,000 red prisoners," he said,
"while my column marched against the clock?"
"Of course we shot them."
"Should I have left them free behind me to let Badajoz
"become a red town again?"
No-one knows, even now, how many died in the Badajoz massacre.
The nationalists allowed them no memorial.
They took the prisoners from the bullring to the cemetery,
and disposed of the bodies.
I could see a cloud of smoke hanging over this corner of the cemetery,
and the following day I came straight to the cemetery
to find out what was happening.
It was then that I had the most Dantesque vision
of my life as a journalist.
There were bodies of people who had been shot
piling up in one of the wings of the cemetery.
They had been set on fire with petrol to be destroyed.
I recall as if it were today, the day I came here,
and left utterly distressed.
I was so distressed that a priest looked at me,
and realising I was so hurt and so sad,
asked me what was wrong with me.
I sighed, and he shrugged.
They deserved it, he said.
This was my last sight of Badajoz, in those first days
after the town had been taken over.
And I swore I would never come back here.
Here I am to give my testimony, since I feel that
I can no longer hide the sad memories I have of that time.
The terror did not end with the battle
A month later, prisoners were still being executed in the bullring.
To be a republican in Badajoz was to ask for death.
Such as one was the husband of Teresa Villalobos.
He was the town photographer.
I don't mind saying it, he was a republican.
When the republic was declared, he was the first to put out the flag.
He said: "Lets go back to Badajoz"
He said: "I don't think they'll detain me, even though I'm left-wing.
"I certainly don't think they'll kill me, or anything."
So we came back and they caught him.
Of course they jailed him, and I went to look for him.
I said: "What's up, he didn't do anything, he wasn't with the fighters."
That was wasted effort. They took him to the bullring.
My father-in-law and I went to the bullring to see him.
I went in and there was a window, but I couldn't go near him.
He stretched out his hand, and I kissed it, and he kissed mine,
but I couldn't go near him to kiss his face.
His face was like yellow wax.
He had big blue eyes.
His eyes were glued on me and his father.
It was pitiful to see him.
He said: "Father, these are the worst moments of my life.
"Do what you can, because they'll kill me."
We went away because the guard said we couldn't talk any more,
and had to wait till the morning.
Then we went to the cemetery.
It took several days for the terrible truth of the Badajoz massacre
to reach the rest of Spain.
In Madrid, the news coincided with the first air raids on the capital.
Together they provoked a new wave of spontaneous vengeance
against anyone suspected of nationalist sympathy.
Prime targets were right-wing political prisoners
in the city's Modelo jail.
A fire broke out in the prison.
either started by political prisoners trying to escape,
or by common criminals, egged on by the anarchist militias
who had taken charge of one wing of the jail.
However that may be, the consequence was tragic.
A crowd gathered and herded the prisoners out of their cells
Socialist protested, but shootings began.
They picked people out, took them outside,
and we could hear shots.
It was like a scene from the French revolution.
There was a table with some candles tucked in bottles,
and they had a tribunal of men and women there,
dressed in overalls, and wearing strange hats.
Raimundo Fernandez Cuesta was a member of the fascist party
Another prisoner was Ramón Serrano Suñer,
General Franco's brother-in-law.
Another was Don Melquíades Álvarez,
a former speaker of the Spanish parliament.
They grabbed him, and he turned round to us and said:
"To spend all my life defending the people,
"to end up in this way, to finish like this."
And he said "Goodbye".
A very short while afterwards, we heard shots
from one of the cellars under the gallery itself.
That's where they killed him, and the others.
In outrage at the atrocity, some European ambassadors
threatened to recognise the army rebel government.
Socialist leader Prieto said that night could lose them the war.
Prime Minister Giral wept.
President Azaña wished himself dead.
The revolution had swept away former courts
but the Modelo tragedy made some system of justice imperative.
New courts were set up.
The rebels were allowed lawyers in what were called popular tribunals.
They began to curb the worst excesses of revolutionary justice.
The absence of clear authority had also meant
setbacks for the republic at the front.
Franco's army took Talavera, a step nearer Madrid.
In the north, General Mola cut that branch of the republic off,
from any chance of supply from France, by capturing Irun.
On the Aragon front, the republican columns
failed to take Zaragoza
The revolution was underway in the rear-guard
but at the front, the republican militias were getting beaten.
Enrique Lister, a commander of the 5th regiment
was trained in Moscow.
Militias were not effective because they didn't really obey the General Staff.
They took their lead from unions, from political parties.
They were not effective militarily from the point of view
of fighting a regular organised army,
such as we were facing at the front.
The other side had brought forces from Africa.
They had some of the best military units at their disposal
and regular units of foreign armies were starting to arrive.
Later there were Italian troops and the German Condor Legion.
We couldn't face up to them at the front
with party or union militias which didn't obey orders.
Who whenever they received an order held a general assembly
to decide whether or not they will obey it.
As the republic's war effort flagged and failed,
The prime minister Giral, resigned.
Largo Caballero a socialist trade union leader, replaced him
with a government which included communists for the first time.
As prime minister and war minister, Largo tried to bring
the fragmentary and fragmented revolution under control,
and to centralise the war effort.
In one instance, at least, it was too late.
At Toledo, the republican militias had besieged the local army rebels,
who had occupied the old Arab fort ... the Alcázar.
The siege was a shambles.
There was absolutely no discipline whatsoever in their attack.
People would come out on Sundays for example,
and they were allowed to. Ordinary people from Madrid,
out for the weekend, would drive in lorries or cars if they had them,
and they took a potshot at the Alcázar.
They were very proud of being able to go back to Madrid
and say they'd done so.
Prime Minister Largo Caballero was getting desperate.
He tried to end the siege by having miners dynamite
the rock on which the Alcázar stood.
It didn't work. Within ten days
the garrison was relieved by Franco's efficient troops,
and the republicans retreated.
Franco made a meal of the Alcázar.
It had delayed his attack on Madrid.
But Toledo made him a hero.
Within days he became Generalissimo ... commander in chief,
and then head of state in the nationalist zone.
With Franco poised for a final offensive,
refugees fled Madrid.
Less than four months after the start of the war
the government itself evacuated to Valencia.
That left the usual vacuum of authority,
and a familiar pattern of atrocity.
The militias in charge of the jails,
feared that prisoners would escape in the nationalist assault.
They began to move them out in lorries along the road to Valencia,
but the prisoners never arrived.
The militias controlling the convoy made them stop at Paracuellos
fifteen miles outside Madrid.
There more than 1,000 men, mainly captured rebel officers,
were shot, and dumped in mass graves.
The executions continued for days.
It cannot be doubted the authorities knew.
Even the anarchist director of prisons protested.
But nothing could stop the killing.
The Spanish Civil War, like any other,
unleashed the passions of centuries of hatred.
There were humane protests,
and profound individual acts of mercy.
But until a vacuum of authority in the republican zone was filled,
and a systematic nationalist purge exhausted,
the killing was unrestrained.
And still the war was only four months old;
and still the international brigades were on their way to Madrid;
and that city's resistance would continue the war
another two and half years.