The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [78]
Monzón organized the police very quickly, recruiting from among pelota players, boxers, and other athletes, mostly from Basque Nationalist Party families. Monzón created Spain’s first motorized police force, under the direction of José María Pikazar, an aeronautic and electrical engineer who had studied police forces in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Pikazar recruited 400 men to do a kind of policing never seen before in Spain. Originally, they were to be issued patrol cars, but when the war made this impossible, many were supplied with fast motorcycles instead. Modeled after American police, they communicated by wireless radio. Dressed in brown leather jackets, caps, knee breeches, and high boots, armed with revolvers, they swiftly maintained order even when Vizcaya was on the verge of panic. Finally, their skills were enlisted in the war effort because they could intercept enemy communications on their radios and could rapidly dispatch orders to the front by motorcycle.
OF THE TWENTY-ONE major-generals on active service in the Spanish military, Franco was one of only four who were not loyal to the Republic. A squeaky-voiced, insecure little man, forty-four years old, Franco had an ability to lead and inspire that is hard to explain. Perhaps it was his confidence, his almost naive belief in his ability to prevail. Among his few admirable qualities, he had demonstrated great physical courage as a young officer in the endless Moroccan war. With a keen sense of the power of terror and little knowledge of modern warfare, he loved bayonet charges, because they were frightening. He was both ruthless and heartless, using fear as his favorite weapon. As a field officer, leading charges, mounted on a white horse, he was known for brutality both in Morocco and, in 1917, when he was in command of one of the units putting down a miners’ strike in Asturias.
Franco had cunning rather than analytic intelligence, and an instinct for self-preservation rather than an ideology. He was capable of the most dramatic reversals, if they served his needs, fawning over Hitler when he thought Germany would win and then becoming pro-American to save himself. Acutely sensitive to symbolism, he wore clothes that reflected complex alliances and fantasies. When in the north, he often wore the red beret of Carlism, with the black shirt of fascism, and sometimes added a white admiral’s jacket.
He had never been in the navy but had always wanted to be. Born in a military town in Galicia, he had been prevented by navy cutbacks caused by the “Disaster of 1898” from pursuing a naval career. His obsession with 1898 was typical of his generation of military. He talked about El Desastre regularly throughout his long life. It was for him a source of deep anti-American sentiments, as well as hatred for Basque and Catalan nationalists. In his 1960s school primer, the loss of Cuba and the Philippines is presented as an American plot. In the question section that follows this discussion, the student is asked: “What country caused the defeat in Cuba?” The United States, the student was supposed to answer.
In the winter of 1937, the campaign was going badly for the rebels, and the Vatican urged Franco to seek a negotiated peace. It was suggested that at the least, he might be able to make peace with the Basques, since they were such devout Catholics. Given the Basque history of negotiating, this might have worked. Many Basque nationalists saw the Republic as simply another government in Madrid. Luis Arana, Sabino’s now aging brother, saw the conflict as the problem of foreigners, of Spaniards. Still sounding like the Carlist general Muñagorri, he asked, “What do we owe to this fight which is not ours, that is not about our race, that is not about our ideology?”
But Franco told the Vatican that he would not negotiate, since such an agreement would simply defer the problem. The only possible