There has been some controversy regarding the decision of General Rojo not to return to Spain. According to both Julián Zugazagoitia, now secretary of the Ministry of Defence, and Mariano Ansó, a Republican friend of Negrín who had been Minister of Justice in the first months of 1938, General Vicente Rojo and Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Jurado, the commander of the Army of Catalonia, refused to obey the instruction sent by Negrín on 14 February that they should return to the centre-south zone. When Pascua handed them the telegram, the two generals argued that the war was effectively over and that their duty was to look after the soldiers who were now refugees in France. They were not alone in their decision. The bulk of the officers of the command structure of the Armies of the East and of Catalonia, including Generals Pozas, Masquelet, Riquelme, Asensio, Gámir, Hernández Saravia and Perea, also decided that the war was lost and that they were under no obligation to continue the fight.22 It is probable that their decision was influenced both by the palpable defeatism of the high command of the navy and by events in the Balearic Islands. On the same day that the Republican Army had crossed the frontier into France, Menorca was also lost.
On 22 January, four days before leaving Barcelona, Negrín had faced the almost insuperable problem of finding a replacement for the head of the fleet, Luis González Ubieta. In general, most naval officers were right-wing, in most cases defeatist and, in some, actively sympathetic to the Francoist cause. The chosen successor, acting Rear Admiral Miguel Buiza Fernández-Palacios, was an exception to the general tendencies of the aristocratic officer corps. He was the black sheep of a rich right-wing family in Seville and a Republican who was popular with his men. His family and his fellow officers shunned him because of his marriage to Maravilla, a woman whose brother was a stoker and so considered to be of unacceptably inferior social class. The laconic and diffident Buiza was hardly a sea-going warrior and was far from fulfilling the needs of the Republican war effort, but Negrín had little choice. In January 1936, Buiza had been head of the personnel section within the naval general staff. His loyalty to the Republic was no more than geographic, having been based in Cartagena when the war started. Throughout the war, his role had been at best passive and at worst advantageous for the Francoist fleet, commanded as it was by many of his friends. He had protected Fifth Columnists among his officers and had long been suspected of defeatism. Despite Negrín’s doubts, Buiza was appointed three days before his forty-first birthday. In addition to being profoundly defeatist, he was deeply affected by a personal tragedy. On 26 January, as Franco’s forces entered Barcelona, his wife, suffering from post-natal depression, and convinced that her husband had been captured, committed suicide. Perhaps to help keep his mind off these circumstances, he accepted the new post, saying that he owed it to the rank-and-file crewmen.23 Given that so much depended on the loyalty and efficacy of the fleet, Buiza was hardly suitable as overall commander.
González Ubieta was transferred to take command of Menorca. In the days following, aircraft from Francoist-held Mallorca bombed the base at Mahón and dropped thousands of leaflets demanding surrender. This was the first part of a plan to seize Menorca hatched by Captain Fernando Sartorius, Conde de San Luís. Sartorius, the liaison officer between the Francoist air force and navy in Mallorca, arranged with Alan Hillgarth, London’s Consul in Palma de Mallorca, for a British cruiser, HMS Devonshire, to take him to Mahón. The ship would then provide a neutral base for a negotiation between Sartorius and González Ubieta. The ship’s captain Gerald Muirhead-Gould, like Hillgarth, had a pedigree in the Naval Intelligence Department, was a protégé of Winston Churchill and a Franco sympathizer. Arriving on 7 February, Muirhead-Gould persuaded González Ubieta to meet Sartorius, who threatened González Ubieta that, if he did not surrender, there would be a full-scale aerial bombardment of Mahón. González Ubieta refused and a full-scale pro-Franco rebellion broke out in Ciudadela on the night of 7 February.
Francoist reinforcements arrived from Palma, González Ubieta’s pleas for help from Miaja went unanswered and Muirhead-Gould pressed him to discuss surrender with San Luís. While awaiting a resolution, HMS Devonshire, anchored in the harbour of Mahón, was attacked by Italian aircraft. A deal was finally reached. On 9 February, around 300 Republican loyalists under the command of González Ubieta, 100 women and 50 children, and what Sartorius described as ‘some really repugnant types’, were taken to Marseilles. Menorca was of secondary importance in the war but the significance of what Sartorius and Muirhead-Gould achieved was that it sent a misleading message to the Republican officer corps that a bloodless surrender would be possible.24
The decision of Rojo not to return to Spain was deeply damaging to Negrín’s hopes of securing the full backing of the forces of the centre-south zone for his plan to use the threat of last-ditch resistance to help secure reasonable peace terms from Franco. In fact, Rojo’s stance was more disastrous even than it seemed at the time given that his most likely replacement, Manuel Matallana, was already working in favour of the rebel cause. According to Zugazagoitia, Rojo refused to return to Spain with the words, ‘The only reason for obeying the order to return is the duty of obedience but you surely realize that just because a superior officer orders us to jump out of a window we do not have to do so.’ He told Zugazagoitia and the Consul in Perpignan, Rafael Méndez Martínez, that ‘he was not prepared to preside over an even bigger disaster than the one in Catalonia’. When he was informed of this, Negrín had Méndez draw up a document, witnessed by Zugazagoitia, registering both his instructions to Rojo and Jurado and their reasons for disobeying them. Zugazagoitia was deeply shocked by Rojo’s comments. Although he could not believe that they reflected cowardice on his part, he later wondered if Rojo knew what was being planned by Casado and was passively complicit. For Togliatti, Rojo was simply a deserter.25
After the retreat into France, Uribe was commissioned by the PCE leadership to speak to Rojo and:
try to show him that his views were mistaken and to convince him of the need to continue the war, explaining the possibilities that we still had. I was also instructed to make him see his responsibilities which he should fulfil before going to the central zone with the Government. Our conversation lasted three hours. I could get nothing out of him. He was unshakeable in his judgement that, from a military point of view, the Republic could do nothing, the war was over and the best that could be done was to seek a way of ending it on the best possible terms. As far as he was concerned personally, he had made his decision on the basis of the military situation and nothing would make him change his mind. None of the arguments used in the conversation, including discipline and honour, had the slightest effect. Rojo had decided not to go the central zone and he did not go.26
The Republican Ambassador in Paris, Marcelino Pascua, sent telegrams to Negrín that were highly critical of Rojo. Even more critical comments were passed between Zugazagoitia and Pascua in their private correspondence. Recalling Rojo’s remarks about the limits of obedience, Zugazagoitia wrote: ‘the fact is the General’s statements were among the most shocking that I heard in the entire war’. He questioned Rojo’s role in the fall of Barcelona, asking why he had sacked General Hernández Saravia, who had arrived in the city with the intention of organizing a last-ditch resistance such as that which had saved Madrid in 1936. Above all, both Zugazagoitia and Pascua were outraged by the way in which, in his book ¡Alerta los pueblos! written immediately after the war, Rojo fudged the issue of his personal responsibility. In it, he denied that he had received orders to return to Spain. In fact, Negrín sent a telegram to Marcelino Pascua on 16 February instructing him to tell General Rojo and Colonel Jurado again that they must return to Spain. Pascua gave the telegram to Rojo. Similar telegrams were sent to the Republican consuls in Toulouse and Perpignan for delivery to him.27
Juan López, who was in France as part of the stranded CNT–FAI delegation, was in the Republican Consulate in Toulouse when he overheard a telephone conversation between the Consul