The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [79]
Franco had courted the Germans, and they had sent troops, planes, and weapons. But German officers, including Sperrle, were not pleased with the way these resources were being used. Investigating Franco’s failure to take Madrid in the fall of 1936, they found that he had little understanding of how to deploy ground forces in coordination with the air force that, thanks to the Germans and the Italians, he had at his disposal. Franco was a tactician for the nineteenth century, but there were to be no more calvary charges or officers on white horses.
As a condition for continued support, the Germans insisted on a consolidation of all German forces, known as the Condor Legion, under Sperrle’s command. Once Franco agreed to this, a war machine of which he had little understanding arrived in Spain. It included the newest German bombers and fighter planes, tanks and motorized artillery, and an additional 12,000 troops, including armored, artillery, and air force upits. A twentieth-century force arrived to fight a nineteenth-century civil war.
On March 24-26, 1937, the campaign was plotted by Francoist air force and ground troop commanders, Mola’s chief of staff, and the Condor Legion’s chief of staff, Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, cousin of the World War I ace known as “the Red Baron.” Richthofen explained to the Spanish how aircraft could be used to destroy the morale of the enemy before a ground assault. The commanders arranged for close coordination between ground and air forces and agreed that no attempt was to be made to spare civilians. Italian troops as well as Requetés, Navarrese units, were included in the battle plan. Once again, Basques would fight Basques.
How were the Basques preparing for the first full-scale assault by a mechanized, ground and air, twentieth-century army?
In Guipúzcoa the militia that was formed clearly confused warfare with Hollywood romanticism. They armed themselves with revolvers—an almost useless weapon in combat—holstered to their hips, and many sported checked wool shirts and red bandanas. They were Basque cowboys going to war. When the rebels showed off the fire-power of their Italian airplanes and the heavy artillery from ships at sea and threatened to destroy the beautiful resort of San Sebastián unless the population surrendered immediately, the loyal locals raided the better hotels and took vacationing fascist sympathizers hostage, creating a standoff that saved the city. As warfare spread along the Bidasoa in view of the French side, the French Basques along the border rented telescopes, binoculars, and rooms on upper floors with a view.
But warfare does not stay picturesque for long and within weeks these same towns were crammed with refugees. In Hendaye, anxious parents went from hotel to crowded hotel looking for scraps of news from the besieged towns where their sons were fighting.
As the twentieth century came to a close, Juan José Rementeria, a tall, fit-looking Basque who wore a dark blue beret, was living in Guernica. Though he appeared to be no more than sixty-five years old, he was born in 1910, in the nearby town of Muxica. Coming from a Basque Nationalist Party family, he was one of the many who heard Aguirre’s call to defend Vizcaya. He was given a single-shot, bolt-action rifle and five cartridges for ammunition. He never did learn the make of the weapon. He had no military training. “We should have had some training,” he said, “but there was no time.”
The Basque arms industry made small arms, grenades, and munitions, but no bombs. The Basques avenged one of the first air attacks by dropping rocks on enemy troops.
“IF SUBMISSION IS NOT immediate, I will raze Vizcaya to the ground, beginning with the industries of war. I have the means to do so,” declared Mola in a March 31 broadcast, the text of which was dropped in leaflets from airplanes. But he