The Siege of the Alcazar

Mr McClarey has some thoughts on the post I just shared from Dale Price at Dyspeptic Mutterings. 

From The American Catholic

By Donald R. McClarey

A few thoughts:

1. The Spanish language writings on the siege are immense, with lots of primary accounts.  Little of it has been translated of it into English.

2. Moss was a novelist and a career British Army officer who retired with the rank of Major after World War I.  His account of the siege has held up remarkably well over 84 years.  He made no bones about the fact that he was a partisan of the Nationalists and had no access to Republican sources, but he strove for factual accuracy and usually achieved it.  A prize in my personal library is a 1937 first American edition of his book on the siege.

3. Cecil Eby is still with us at age 94.  He has authored numerous books and articles on a wide range of historical topics.  I heartily recommend his 1969 Between the Bullet and the Lie study of Americans who served in the International Brigades.

4. The last defender of the Alcazar passed away in 2018.  This is all still very much recent Spanish history, with the Socialist Party in Spain practicing a nasty brand of grievance politics with one sided attacks on the Nationalists in a war which ended eight decades ago, but the  hatreds of which the Left in Spain wishes to keep ever green.  One wonders if we ever learn anything from History after all other than how to endlessly repeat old errors.

5. The Alcazar was no fortress but rather a museum piece.  It is amazing that the defenders held it over a seventy day siege.  It might as well have had death trap painted all over it.

6. The garrison was an eclectic mix:  800 men of the Guardia Civil, 6 cadets of the Military Academy, one hundred Army officers and 200 civilian volunteers.  They guarded 670 civilians, mostly women and children of the garrison.

7. During the siege the garrison was under constant artillery bombardment and aerial attack.  Sniping was constant with the combatants often separated only by a few yards.  The garrison beat off eight full scale infantry assaults from the besieging forces that vastly outnumbered them.  The garrison sustained 92 dead and 540 wounded.

8. The garrison was visited under a flag of truce by Major Vicente Rojo Lluch.  He urged them to surrender but made no secret that he hoped they would hold out.  Urged to stay with them, he said that the Republicans would murder his wife and kids before nightfall if he did.  His last words to the garrison was for them to keep digging to detect the Republican mines being planted under the Alcazar.  He would rise to be a Lieutenant General in the Republican Army and Chief of Staff.  He returned to Spain in 1957.  Franco so admired him that his pension as a retired Lieutenant General was paid to him, and he lived peacefully in Spain until his death in 1966.

9. Rojo asked the garrison if there was anything he could do for them.  They told him they needed a priest to baptize the two kids born during the siege and to give all of them communion.  A left wing priest was sent in who had been in hiding.  Initially he attempted to persuade the garrison to surrender.  He was bluntly advised that all they required of him were the sacraments, which he did and which were reverently received.

10. The commander of the garrison, Colonel Moscardo, is an interesting figure.  His world revolved around the trinity of God, Spain and his family.  Up until the Civil War his military career had been a failure in his eyes.  He often told young officers of his first duty as a newly commissioned officer in 1896:  the burial of a white haired elderly Lieutenant, a symbol to him of how badly awry a military career could go.  Although he had reached the rank of Colonel, his career now consisted of dead end assignments.  He was so little thought of, that he was not made a party to the plans for the military rising and had to find out about it over the radio.  Circumstances often bring to the fore unsuspected abilities, and so it was for Moscardo who became the heart and soul of the resistance of the Alcazar.  After he had sacrificed his beloved son in the cause of Spain, none of his officers ever suggested surrender, although the odds against them were staggering.  During the siege, when they could get their radios to operate, Moscardo would issue daily reports consisting of two words:  Sin Novedad, nothing to report.  A calculated insult to the besiegers, the phrase became a rallying cry in Nationalist Spain.  He would repeat the words to Franco when the garrison was relieved.  He was promoted to General, ultimately reaching the top rank of Captain General.  He received permission from Franco to wear a black mourning cape over his uniform for his murdered sons.  During World War II he was noted as being the most anti-Axis and pro-Allied of Franco’s generals.