On July 19, 1936, just two days after the outbreak of the coup d’état against the Republic, The first soldiers of the African Army landed in Cadiz And, in the days that followed, more legionary and regular troops, the elite of the Spanish army, began to arrive in Seville and the southwest of the peninsula from across the strait, becoming the fundamental asset in the first stages of the civil war that broke out in parallel with the military rebellion.
At the beginning of 1936, the Spanish Army was clearly divided into two parts: the replacement troops, made up of conscripts called up for military service, generally with very little motivation and in a situation that remained unfair despite the attempts at reform promoted by Manuel Azaña during the first Republican cabinet; and the African Army, made up of well-trained soldiers whose job was to fight and whose future prospects were in the camps. These combatants, based in the protectorate of Morocco, were the only professional army available to the country, which meant that the African Army was the only one that could be called into service. made them much more valuable, militarily speaking, than the civilians called up for service. who populated the barracks on the peninsula. However, except for those who had participated in the repression of the Asturian Rebellion of October 1934 and some veterans of the protectorate wars, which had ended nine years earlier, few of them had real combat experience.
The European component –fundamentally Spanish despite its international vocation– of these forces was the Tercio de Extranjeros, founded by Millán Astray in 1920. It was a shock unit founded with its own mystique embodied in the so-called “Legionary Creed”, based on twelve spirits that contained principles such as “never abandon a man in the field”, “will not complain of fatigue, nor of pain, nor of hunger“or “from a single man to the entire Legion, he will always go where he hears fire (…) even if he has no order to do so.” On July 17, 1936, this body, which during the war would adopt its definitive name of The Legion, consisted of some four thousand two hundred troops equipped with the best weapons available at that time in the Spanish armed forces.
Alongside this elite were other units of excellent quality such as the Regulares or the Mehalas Jalifianas. The former were native and Spanish troops commanded by peninsular officers and part of the Spanish Army. Their original mission had been to ensure “the tranquillity of the territory and the development, under its protection, of trade and other sources of wealth in the country”, and since their foundation they had been the spearhead of all the battles held in Morocco, thus avoiding the losses of replacement soldiers that were so expensive for the Government in power. When the rebellion broke out, this force totalled 8,990 combatants, of which 2,160 were Spanish. On the contrary, in the Mehalas Jalifianas all the troops were native and, although they were commanded by Spanish officers, Organically they depended on the Sultan of Morocco and not on the Government of Madrid. Founded following the Algeciras Conference of 1906 with the aim of creating a body of European-trained troops that would serve as the seedbed of a future Moroccan Army, this was never formed and ended up halfway between a police force and a purely military one, which in July 1936 had only 4,632 troops.
Predatory instinct
These two contingents, together with the Ifni riflemen – a specific force organised in the Atlantic territory of Sidi-Ifni, south of Morocco, which numbered 1,235 soldiers – were given the generic name of “Moors” during the Civil War and were characterised by the Republican media, not always without reason, as thieves, murderers and rapists, inflamed by the “instinct of plunder” and as anti-Spanish, which makes some sense since some of them, or their parents, had actively fought against the peninsular forces during the Moroccan wars. The truth is that these fighters, together with those of the Tercio de Extranjeros, often spread terror among the Republican ranks, their mere presence being enough to abort an attack or abandon a position, an advantage that was magnified when, after operating as a whole during the march on Madrid in the second half of 1936, the units of the Army of Africa were distributed among the divisions in formation of the Francoist Army in order to provide them with a reliable shock force to complement the units of militia or recruit origin.
- To find out more: «The Army of Africa». DESPERTA FERRO SPECIALS. 84 pages. 8.50 euros