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The French who cooperated with Colonel Franco in the final stages of the Moroccan campaigns against the Riffs in 1925-26 thought highly of his soldiery. In his authorized biography* he is credited with having planned and carried out the final battle which defeated Abd el Krim's army. Nobody remembered him as a particularly brilliant student when he attended L'Ecole Militaire in Paris in 1926. He had no particular political pull and no great wealth, both of which would get a young officer advancement in the old Spanish army, and still he became a captain at 20, a major at 23, a general at 32. The Spaniards, at least, thought he was good.
Never hesitating to pick quarrels, Franco once had a serious one with Primo de Rivera over the strategy to be used against the Riffs. (Young Franco insisted on ruthless suppression; Primo de Rivera urged gentler methods.) General Franco will be remembered as the Spanish Chief of Staff who, in 1934, brought Moorish troops into Spain for the first time in modern times to put down a socialist rebellion in Asturias. He has of course used Moors widely in the present civil war, much to the distress of many a Spaniard on both sides. Both in Asturias and in the present war the General earned a reputation for stern, ruthless treatments of conquered civilian populations.
"Exile." Although he was happy under the monarchy, the Republic, with its constantly changing governments and with its numerous encroachments on the privileges of the Army, angered him almost from the start. The Spanish Army has been called a "loaded pistol held at the head of the nation." With its 13,500 officers and several hundred active and reserve generals, the Army had long existed, not to fight foreign wars, but 1) to put down popular rebellions; 2) provide jobs for a military caste. If the Republic were to succeed, the Army had to be tamed.
One of the first acts of Manuel Azana, the Republic's first War Minister, was to close down the military school at Zaragoza, of which Francisco Franco was the head. Switched to the Balearics temporarily in 1933, and to Morocco in 1934, he was brought back to the mainland in 1935 when a Rightist Government came into power and his old friend, Jose Maria Gil Robles, Minister of War, appointed him Chief of Staff. When the pendulum swung back the other way in February 1936, General Franco was "exiled" to the Canary Islands. From there he flew to Morocco to begin the revolt in July 1936.
From all that is known about General Franco's attitude at the war's start the last thing he had in mind was a long-drawn-out civil war. The conspiring generals had planned a military coup d'etat along a pattern long familiar in Spain and Latin-American countries. Their chief object was to restore the privileges which the huge officer class had long enjoyed under the monarchy. None of the officers dreamed of setting up a Fascist state on Nazi or Fascist models. General Franco became the revolt's leader because Generals Sanjurjo and Coded were killed in its early days. Crown? Nor was General Franco particularly fond of the monarchy. When