The Rest Is History - 282: Morocco: The Rif War

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

Morocco: The Rif War In today's episode, Tom and Dominic discuss the Rif War, predecessor to the Spanish Civil War, set in 1920s Morocco, featuring Franco, Petain, Islamic tribesmen, American airmen and much more... Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. hello welcome to the rest is history we are continuing with our world cup marathon and today dominic is morocco or mauritania as i prefer to think of it you don't you don't call morocco mauritania do you well when talking to romans okay, fair enough. So Morocco, Tom, how up with Moroccan history are you? Sort of post-Roman Moroccan history. Well, obviously it's from Morocco that the Moors invade Spain. Yep.

So I know about that. Yep. And I know about the way in which once the Reconquista in Spain has been pushed back, Spanish and Portuguese forces are endlessly dipping their toes into Moroccan affairs. They are indeed. And then the French pile in, don't they? They do.

And there's all kinds of shenanigans in Tangier with various louche behaviour from the early 20th century. Kenneth Williams used to go to Morocco onco on holiday with joe wharton yeah we will not be we will not be discussing any of that that's more insalubrious end of the moroccan history spectrum um i'm happy to say so what have you what have you chosen so i have chosen an enormously important and interesting war that I think very few people know anything about, certainly in the English-speaking world. And it's called the Riff War. And it took place, Tom, this sort of high point of the Riff War was the 1920s, but it had kind of been bubbling away

since the beginning of the 20th century. It is an amazing story. And I know I've got a sort of dog in the fight here, but it's got Franco is in it. Marshall Pater is in it. There are American airmen launching bombing raids on civilians. There are chemical weapons. There are Americans. There are chemical weapons. There are sort of Islamic tribesmen. There's all kinds of stuff going on in this incredibly sort of Baroque story

that most people know nothing at all about. So from what you're saying, it sounds like a dummy run for quite a lot of… The 20th century. Yeah. Yeah, it absolutely is. It's both Americans launching chemical attacks and air raids and things from vietnam uh hints of the algerian war yes that's the colonial wars so in some ways it's that you could say it's the last it's the last victorian colonial war but it's also the ancestor of the spanish civil war there

are hints of the second world war and of vietnam as you say, and of the war in Afghanistan and 21st century wars. So there's loads going on. So Morocco. Morocco, as I'm sure you know, Tom, is the only North African country that was not part of the Ottoman Empire, which I actually didn't know until about an hour ago. So Morocco had and has a very long established dynasty of kind of sultans and kings. So that's the Alawi dynasty that was established in the 1630s, would you believe? However, basically what happened in the course of the 19th century

is that Morocco was sort of nibbled away. I mean, you were saying earlier on about the Spanish and the Portuguese. Morocco had always kind of really been prey to the sort of predators from across the straits. By the end of the 19th century, the French are established there. They have a protectorate. Also, the Spanish have two enclaves in Ceuta and Melilla, which they still have to this day on the coast,

on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco facing Spain. But now, between those two enclaves, Tom, of Ceuta and Melilla, there's a great range of mountains called the Riff. And as you will no doubt know, the people who live in those mountains, and indeed in Morocco generally, although many of them do speak Arabic, they are not Arabs. They are, of course, Berbers. They are Berbers. Yeah, they're Berbers. Exactly. So presumably they have been Berbers. I mean, they must have been Berbers forever. Yes. They've always been Berbers. They've always been Berbers. Or Numidians. In the days of the Roman Empire. So what would you call them? Numidians. Maybe Numidians. Range of name mauritanians for lots of lots of potential names so they're berbers and um so they're in these sort of very inaccessible

mountains called the rift mountains and very few europeans at this point at the end of the 19th century had ever been into the into these mountains that's very odd isn't it considering how close they are to europe well, they're very inaccessible. They're forested. The tribes are extremely inhospitable. So a correspondent for The Times who writes about the Rift War, so we'll come to the war in due course, he tells his readers, he says very few Europeans have ever been.

The Berbers are as inhospitable to the arab as they are to the foreigner and basically if you pitch up in their country they will kill you that's basically the famous berber hospitality the famous the famed hospitality of berbers exactly so that's extraordinarily beautiful so an american correspondent called vincent sheehan who covered the war for the new york, obviously a much-loved newspaper in these quarters, Thomas, the rest is history, listeners will know. He said it reminded him of Colorado. The kind of red soil.

Well, Colorado is beautiful. Colorado is a famously beautiful state. Yeah, it's got dinosaur fossils as well. There you go. I don't know if they have dinosaur fossils in Morocco. They do. Do they? Yeah.

Well, I've never been to Morocco. So this, in researching this, I have developed a passionate desire to go into the, and sample this Berber hospitality for myself. So anyway, now the Spanish have their eyes at the turn of the 20th century on these mountains. The Spanish, of course, had an empire, but have largely lost it. So when King Alfonso XIII became King of Spain in 1886, they had Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and so on. But they've lost all of those, largely thanks to the Spanish-American War at the end of the 1890s. So the Spanish are sort of feeling very bruised. And King Alfonso and the people around him form what's called the Africanist lobby. So they basically say, all the other European powers have now got these massive empires.

And we, the Spanish, the great, the prototypical empire builders, we've kind of been shut out. And our destiny lies in North Africa. So the Italians are actually saying the same thing, aren't they, about Abyssinia, Ethiopia at the same time. And also the Catholic Church in Spain is also very much, you know, it's embattled by anti-clerical forces. And the Catholic Church is saying we need a new crusade.

So they are catching it in those terms, are they? Absolutely. So they see it as a continuation of the Reconquista. It's not finished. Because Morocco had originally been Christian. Right. We need to carry it across the seas and take back Morocco, effectively. So the Spanish have their eyes very much on these mountains

in the north of Morocco. Are there any natural resources there? How do you tell me? Have you seen my notes? No. How do you know this? When Europeans are after remote mountainous regions, there's often an ulterior motive.

It's almost as if you've been swatting up secretly on your own in order to outflank me in my own choice of subject so yes in the rift mountains there was loads of iron there was loads of high grade iron and they can you with open pit mining techniques they can excavate it and the spanish very beautiful very beautiful but it won't be if the spanish conquer it well i gave the comparison with Colorado. Yeah. Colorado was also a huge mining place.

So the Spanish crown, they grant mining concessions to kind of rich businessmen who are close to the royal family, and they're very keen to start sort of pushing this. However, it almost from the outset goes wrong. So 1909 spanish workers who are building a big bridge which is going to bring a railway bridge which is going to open up access from the sea to these iron mines they're attacked by local berbers and the spanish mobilize their army they raise 40 000 troops and they send them in to moroc So that's the equivalent of your origins of the Vietnam War sort of moment. From that point onwards, they are kind of implicated and they're going to start throwing in more and more men

in an attempt to defend these mines and railways and spread as they see it, I mean, literally, the gospel of the kind of Spanish Africanism. So there's a slight sense that the spanish have been bullied by the americans and so now they're going to go and bully the burbers somebody else yeah exactly i think there's a i think there's that's a fair that's actually a pretty fair description now right from the beginning in spain itself a lot of people are very very uneasy about this and they can see that it's going to it's going to end in disaster

basically so when they're in 1909 when when the Spanish government starts to call up reserves, there are strikes and there are riots in places like Barcelona. In Barcelona, there's a sort of localized uprising, which becomes known as the Tragic Week, where the Catalan trade unions basically say, you know, we have no business interfering in Morocco. What's all this about? But the Spanish nevertheless are determined, the government and the king are absolutely determined to do it. And they feel, as you said, this sort of burning sense of humiliation, which they feel that they have to redress. But also in 1912 um the the french basically formally grant them a protectorate

along the northern coast of morocco so this is partly because the british were very keen to have a buffer between gibraltar and the french so it's it's good for so the british are keen on this that's very reasonable isn't it yeah but it's also well i think it's obviously completely reasonable tom but it's also because they're keen that the germans don't get in in um there have been a series of sort of um little bust-ups and crises about this and there's this sort of anxiety in the run-ups of the first world war you know we need to iron out all anomalies we need to every little last bit of the patchwork needs to be allocated to a different european power so they're not going to squabble and fall out about it so everyone knows where they stand so the spanish are now very keen to kind of formalize their protectorate and that brings them into greater problems and that raises

the specter as it were of their great antagonist who is a really really colorful and interesting man who is a man called muhammad abdel krim now again somebody who's not really known uh now in sort of 21st century um sort of the english-speaking world but a colossally interesting figure actually tom who anticipates people like i don't know ho chi minh or or any of these kind of post-colonial or anti-colonial kind of freedom fighters but also has a slight element i suppose you could say of the mardi about him for people who remember our podcasts about general gordon so abdel krim he comes from the rift Mountains. But his father, unusually, can read and write. He's very educated, sort of intelligent.

Read and write Arabic. Arabic. And he had been officially named by the sultan as a, I don't know how to say this, Tom, you'll have to explain. Is it a Qadi? A Qadi? A Qadi. Islamic judge. Yeah.

Is it a Qadi? Yeah. You sure? Yeah. You're not bluffing? Qadi. Qadi. Akadi? An Islamic judge. Akadi. Yeah. You sure? Yeah. You're not bluffing? Kadhi. Kadhi. And this guy, he had been named as an Islamic judge as Akadi by the That was beautiful Arabic pronunciation. So, Abdelkarim Sr. is a man of letters and a man of learning in his community, but he's also quite close to the Spanish. So, the Spanish have designated him what they call a moro amigo, a friendly moor. So, they rely on him as a local bigwig that they can do deals with. Thanks to his father's patronage, Mohammed Abdel Karim, he goes off to the madrasa to the university in Fez, where he studies Islamic law and he studies classical Arabic.

But he also has these links to the Spanish. So because of that, his father was able to get him a job teaching at a primary school in Melilla in the Spanish enclave. So he's got links to the Spanish and he obviously, you know, presumably can speak a little bit of Spanish and has contacts with the Spanish authorities and so on. They hire him to write articles in Arabic for a newspaper in the enclave in Melilla. And there he pours out all these articles saying European civilization is great. spanish are our friends they are bringing technology and sort of civilization that will elevate the people of morocco and all this kind of business and he indeed ends up working very closely with a an organization called the native affairs office

so he's working with the army he's working with a kind of civil bureaucracy he's absolutely implicated and in fact muham-Karim, so this is Abdul-Karim Jr., he is designated eventually, in I think 1913, the chief Islamic judge in Melilla. So he's basically the person that the Spanish have identified as a really promising collaborator in their colonial enterprise. And then it's really hard to sort of work out exactly what it is, but something goes wrong. And this is actually, what's so interesting about this is that this is not really unusual. Quite often, people who end up becoming anti-colonial freedom fighters have originally been collaborators who have since fallen out

with their allies and who feel let down and cheated but because of their previous collaboration they have the the contacts the articulacy yeah the kind of resources if you like that will enable them to become the standard bearers of the rebellion and that's exactly what happens with Abdel Krim. He and his father, it seems, had got close to the Germans. Now, Spain was very neutral in World War I. And I think what clearly had happened is that they had some kind of links with the Germans. The Spanish authorities found out about it and punished them much more severely than they were expecting. So they thought they were bending the rules, but the Spanish thought they had kind of broken them. So the Spanish actually jail Abdelkrim very briefly. This is the junior.

The junior. And although he then gets his judgeship back after he comes out of prison, he's been completely humiliated in the eyes of kind of his community and stuff. And the Spanish are sort of you know the spanish i think don't realize how much they have offended him and humiliated him so that's quite odd isn't it because the spanish are all about honor as well yes but i don't think i think as you'll find in this podcast the spanish handle the affairs of morocco in an unbelievably incompetent and insensitive way. And that's clearly what they did with the Abdelkrim family. I think what was also happening was that clearly as they were expanding the mines into the mountains and things,

they were putting his father and the rest of the family in a kind of position where they were increasingly going to have to choose between continuing to back the Spanish. And, you know, if they did that, they would alienate a lot of the local community or they would have to side with the local community and therefore lose the Spanish. And probably they choose the only option that's really open to them, which is they have to go with the people

who live around them, i.e. the local community. So what is very clear is that by about 1920, the Abdelkrim family, who are a big family in these mountains, so a lot of people kind of owe them a kind of tribal loyalty, they have severed their connections with the Spanish authorities. And Mohammed Abdelkrim sort of steps forward protect the sort of the villages of the mountains against what he sees as the the cruel and sensitive intrusions of spanish modernity is there an element of defending islam as well because that's a theme isn't it of the the merging of nationalist and islamic exactly. Exactly, yes. I think that's a really, really astute observation. I mean, that Reconquista element, that kind of Catholic Crusader man,

that's clearly not going to go down well with lots of people in Morocco. But the Berber tribes had famously been very disputatious and had been sort of renowned for their feuds among one another and really the only way in a pre-nationalist age an age when a lot of people can't read and write so they're not susceptible to the kind of what you might say the classic kind of forms of nationalism islam is the obvious glue i mean you see that everywhere in the 20th century don't you in the anti-colonial world and so as you say i mean

there's there's discussions of the mardi for instance yeah are very interested in that question exactly exactly so so that's what makes abdul krim such an interesting figure because in some ways he looks back to the mardi but in other ways he obviously looks further forward you know to the to later 20th and 21st century century kind of Islamic insurgencies. Because he starts to use, I think increasingly, Islam as the glue to bind together what would otherwise be a kind of feuding, very sort of quarrelsome Berber confederation. So he recruits Berber riflemen, they basically they're very good riflemen you know that sort of stereotype of the sort of the tribesmen who can shoot a I don't know what do they shoot him

or what would you shoot him uh the tip of a cheroot a tip of yeah the tip of a colonel's cheroot exactly from a distance of 10 miles or whatever exactly I think this is I mean this is top historical analysis but I think that's exactly what the Berbers are able to do. Now, by contrast, the Spanish army in North Africa, and I should apologize at this point to any Spanish, I don't think we really have any Spanish listeners, do we? Do we have Spanish listeners? Yeah, I think we do.

Well, they should probably avert their, can you avert your ears? They should close their ears at this point. Lock their ears. Because their army is in absolute shambles it's a it's a terrible shambles so their army is is incompetent there are tens of thousands of them but they're incredibly corruptly led most of them they too are illiterate actually they're illiterate conscripts they're from the very poorest part of spanish society they're given rifles that don't work or rifles that are sort of 50 years old they are given they're incredibly badly treated by their officers so they sort of are given coffee and beans to to sort of live on and in fact they end up a lot of them end up actually bartering

their rifles in berber villages in exchange for fresh vegetables which obviously isn't ideal is it um they don't have toilets in their barracks it's all sort of it's just all inept and sort of shambolic they're also accompanied by this giant, I don't really know how to put it in a... Well, the mind's boggling. Caterpillar? No. It's a giant horde of prostitutes, Tom. Okay. Okay.

I think that reflects very well on my imagination that that wasn't what I... Yeah, I suppose people would now object to the word horde and prostitutes, so they'd say, I don't know, sex workers. Yeah. Anyway, there's a load of them. Put us. There's a small army of them yeah of court of top spanish courtesans who who accompany the army through the mountains so venereal disease in the army is rampant so basically one in every two men

or whatever is crippled by venereal disease proud record so the the the officers are are universally agreed by foreign war correspondents to be atrocious uh as one do they have anything going for them well one american journalist said of the spanish officers he spent he said they spent their time gambling and whoring and molesting the native moorish women so that doesn't suggest no you know that's not a proud record. And their chief officer is a man called General Manuel Fernandez Silvestre. And he's the commander in Ceuta and Melilla in the two enclaves. Now he is a veteran of the Spanish-American war in Cuba. So he knows the sting of humiliation. He's determined to put it right. I mean, you'll be pleased to hear Tom, because you're looking for positives. He is a tremendous womanizer.

Well, I would expect nothing less. I read in a biography of him online that he, quote, fathered scores of illegitimate children by the various women he seduced. So he's very fecund, I think it's fair to say. Okay, yeah. And he's a very flamboyant figure, sort of mustaches and all this kind of thing. But he has distinctly, I don't know, how would I put this? He has non-guardian-friendly approach to interactions with the locals. So the Minister of War says to him at one point, have you got all the equipment you know do you have everything you need you need anything else and he says yeah i do the only way to succeed in

morocco he says is to cut off the heads of all the moors so so that's a very traditional approach yeah it's not hearts and minds no it's not hearts and minds so he's he's very much harking back basically to the 10th century there definitely he is and in fact at some stage abdel krim who is holed up in the mountains sends him a message and says don't come out of your enclaves into the mountain with your army into the mountains don't cross this particular river if you do you will die and general fernandez silvestre says to the spanish press say well what, what do you think of this? And he says, this man, Abdelkrim, is crazy. I'm not going to take seriously the threats of a little Berber judge whom I had at my mercy a short time ago.

His insolence merits a new punishment. Now, you can probably guess at this stage where the story of these two men is heading. I can. This is not going to, in fact in fact end i'll tell you now as a massive spoiler alert general fernandez silvestro is not going to cut off the head of abdel krim quite the reverse right so he sent out his army into the mountains i shouldn't laugh actually it's a terrible story he sends his army into the mountains they spit up and they start

going to all these little forts and these things called block hours which are these sort of mini forts that they've established in the mountains quite quickly they all get cut off from each other their communications are terrible they start to send relief expeditions to some of these forts but they're all absolutely they're destroyed by the sharpshooting yesbers. Yes, the cheroots are hanging all over the rift mountains. And the men who are in the forts, they've got no supplies, so they drink, first of all, ink, and then they're drinking their own urine. Right.

Which is, you know, that's always a bad sign. Never a good position to be in. General Fernando Silvestro, after a deal of sort of marching about he ends up in a fort in a place called annual so it's literally spelt like the word annual and um at this stage he's conscious that something has gone wrong they've got cut off from the coast the the mountains are kind of crawling with berbers uh he's lost communication with some of these other forts this is all a bit of a disaster. So he's walking around on the sort of parapet of this fort, and he can see movement out in the

hills. He's chewing his moustache the whole time, and supposedly is just sort of muttering gibberish to himself. So his officers don't really know what to do. So this is very apocalypse now then isn't it it's very apocalypse now and then in july 1921 general um fernandez silvestre decides okay i've had enough we're going to march out of this fort and we're just going to make a break for it and head to the coast and he says to his men and and the colossal legion of prostitutes that are with them that have come with them ludicrously he says we're out you know we're on our way off you go throw open the gates of the fort and off you go so they they march out and they basically march out and what happens is that the rift tribesmen just shoot them

all like from the hills as though they're in people describe it they say it's like this shooting gallery people are just sort of trudging along, being shot down. Including the prostitutes. Including the prostitutes. So they're all shot down. I think 13,000 people. Quite like the first Afghan war, that kind of situation. It's absolutely like that. When the British try to leave Kabul and get wiped out.

But with, I think, an extra sort of degree of Baroque flamboyance. A magical realist spin yeah exactly exactly because they all turn into butterflies or because the general you see tom he has not marched out this is the thing they've marched out but he's there on the parapet and he and the last sighting of him people say they stood he was standing there on the power back, chewing his moustache and shouting at his men down below, run, run, the bogeyman is coming. Which is not a detail that you would expect. And he stands there shouting that while they're all being shot down.

They're all killed. And then he goes inside and back down into his tent, shoots himself in the head. And that's the end of General Fernandez Silvestvestre so the bogeyman has come the bogeyman has come would that be a good moment to take a break it would i think it's fair to say for the spanish this has not been a good 20 minutes tom okay well uh let's see if it improves for the spanish uh after the break i i have no idea what's going to happen dominic i don't know what's going to happen. Although you have mentioned that chemicals appear. Yes.

I'm suspecting that things are going to get worse in all kinds of ways. We will see you in a few minutes. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news,

reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com hello welcome back to our world cup special on morocco we are looking at the riff wars and dominic before the break you were making this sound increasingly like a particularly bloody

magical realist novel the spanish general has just shot himself the bogeyman has come yeah are more terrible things in the offing they are yes, yes. So this is the greatest defeat. Spain has not had a great run in recent years, it's fair to say. Obviously, the defeat in Cuba, the loss of the Philippines and so on. So the Spanish are feeling sore anyway, but this is undoubtedly the most humiliating defeat in Spanish history. So they've lost 13,000 men and indeed that sort of small battalion of ladies of the night have also been lost. There is a tremendous amount of sort of soul searching and sort of angst ridden breast beating in Spanish politics. Now the king, Alfonso XIII, who was a huge sort of mover, as I said in the first half in the sort of campaign in morocco he is pretty unrepentant so he has told the news in in very spanish monarchy fashion he has told the news

while playing golf in the south of france and someone comes up to him and says your majesty we've lost the entire army 13 000 men are dead dead and the king says, do you know what he says Tom? There is time to beat the Berbers yet and win the game, something like that No he says I shouldn't laugh actually he says

chicken meat is cheap Oh God Wow, that's terrible what a thing to say, so he's saying that of his own army yeah i mean anyway chicken meat is cheap very very unlike very unlike the behavior of our own late queen very very she wouldn't say things like that would she she definitely would not if we lost an army in similar circumstances so um i don't think i don't think the king would say that now would he tom no he wouldn't i don't think the king of spain now, would he, Tom? No, he wouldn't. I don't think the king of Spain would say that now, to be fair.

No. Maybe his predecessor. Well, his dad might. Playing golf in Saudi Arabia. Anyway, listen, we're spiralling off into abuse of the Spanish royal vermin. This is not what we're about. We haven't been true to our values there, Tom. So, yes, the Spanish then start to raise a new army.

There are lots more sort of strikes and there are mutinies people don't want to go in barcelona crowds burn spanish flags and in fact wave the flag of the of the riff because you know they they identify with the the moroccans more than they do with their own monarchy i mean it's an absolute sort of shambles, really. All of that is the prelude to a coup in Spain. So a general, Miguel Primo de Rivera, so if any of our listeners know about the Spanish Civil War, they will know that the name Primo de Rivera, particularly his son,

plays a big part in the lead-up to the Spanish Civil War. And this is the point in which General Primo de Rivera seizes power. And one reason for doing that is actually because parliamentary parties wanted to launch an investigation to what had gone wrong in the Battle of Anuel. And people were worried that it would implicate the king, as well as the army high command. So the king is still in power despite this coup? Yes, he is still in power, Tom. So it's a little bit like the situation in Italy, where you have Mussolini becoming dictator, but the king is still there. So in Spain,

Primo de Rivera is dictator, but with the acquiescence of the king. And how much power does the king have? Not much power, really. I mean, in truth, particularly once power has passed to the army. He's there as a figurehead, but he pretty much agrees with everything the army is doing, to be completely honest with you so at first the new spanish strongman prima de rivera he says well we need to pull back a bit so they pull back you know let's stop throwing sort of men away without working out a proper strategy so they pull back to their enclaves of suita and melilla and that basically leaves abdel krim as the master of the of the mountains as the of the unchallenged master of the rift so he sets up then something called it's an unrecognized state

called the republic of the rift and they do things like they they start building roads he has a little bureaucracy and he institutes an islamic legal code so you were saying in the first half about islam yeah islam is obviously what you go to if you are trying to nation build because that's the way of bringing all the different tribes and the different clans and things together that's all you have work because the berbers are a proud independent people i think it does work actually who resent the yoke of authority it does work because it because they have an an external enemy against whom they can unite in fact they have two france and spain so you know a nation building is always most successful i would say when you have an enemy you know when you have an antagonist and they have knuckled down and they

they become loyal loyal members of the republic of the rift well i think we're perhaps exaggerating that a bit because the republic of the rift doesn't really last that long so it's not like these structures have time to sort of to embed themselves because the Spanish are planning the whole time to sort of get it back they have they have various ways of doing it so so I said at the beginning that this would anticipate the Spanish civil war which it absolutely does because the forces on which the Spanish come to rely completely anticipate the Spanish civil war so the first thing is that they start to raise, basically, a Moroccan army. So this is what becomes the Army of Africa that Franco famously commands in the 1930s.

So they're called the regulares, regular units, and they have Spanish officers, but they're kind of Moroccan infantrymen, I guess. And the other thing is they start to create their own foreign legion you know the french foreign legion the spanish have a foreign legion too and still do and is it organized on the same format that anyone can join and yeah i think pretty much although a lot of the people who join it actually are Spanish rather than sort of charismatic. Old Herovians. Yeah, old Herovians. Pelford things from Nanny.

Exactly. Who've been wrongly accused of cheating at school. Yes. Or something. Have to win their honor back. Yeah, exactly. I don't think there's as much of that in the Spanish Foreign Legion, to be honest. So the bloke who leads the Spanish Foreign Legion, to be honest. So the bloke who leads the Spanish Foreign Legion

is an interesting character. He's a guy called Lieutenant Colonel José Milian Astray. And he is a very entertaining man. He's completely demented. You astonish me. So he had been wounded in Morocco in the arm and also in the eye, so very Nelsonian. So he wears an eye patch, of course by law the leader of the spanish foreign legion really needs to do yeah so he and his and his um

he wears eye patch and white gloves uh to hide his sort of his um his injuries and he's known as Glorioso Mutilado, the Glorious Mutilated One. Which I think is, again, exactly what you would, what you want, isn't it? I mean, from... Yeah, and as you said, I mean, you could apply that

to Nelson, couldn't you? You could, although Nelson didn't. So, you know, his motto that he says, that is still, I think, the motto of the Spanish Foreign Legion.

Viva la muerte. Long live death. Yes. I mean, that's very Rider the Reheren, isn't it Viva la muerte. Long live death. Yes. I mean, that's very Ride of the Reheren, isn't it? Actually, when you think about it. So, and you see, to go back to what you were talking about in the first half, the Spanish Foreign Legion is absolutely founded on Reconquista principles. So when people are sort of inaugurated into the Legion in the 1920s,

they are kind of steeped in a world of kind of Christian crusading. Templars, the Knights Templar, that kind of thing. Yeah, all the imagery is we are kind of crusaders who are carrying the gospel against these sort of these Muslim hordes and all this kind of thing. So Mian Astray is the head of the Spanish Foreign Legion with his eyepatch, and he needs a number two who does not wear an eyepatch, but is a bit more sort of like a bureaucrat who will sort of be his organizer and stuff. And this man is a young captain, well, originally a captain, who ends up being promoted to major and so on and so forth,

whose name is Francisco Franco. I was wondering. So this is where Franco enters the story. Now, Franco also has an interesting... So Franco is from Galicia in the north of Spain. He had been fighting in Morocco for years, as had Mier Estre. And Franco, with his sort of Moroccan troops, had been attacked and shot in the hills near Ceuta.

And there, he'd been hit by bullets in the abdomen. And his Moroccan troops thought he was going to die, but he didn't. And so they said he must be blessed. He must be protected by God. And that sort of sense of Franco as this kind of, you know, he's the chosen one. I mean, this is obviously going to be part of Franco's personal mythology because Franco is, I think it's fair to say, an absolutely terrible man and not in any way a sort of a friend of the rest is history. But this sort of idea of him being chosen by God

as a crusaderader all of that stuff that plays an enormous part in the ideology of the nationalists and that must help win hearts and minds in morocco what he's been chosen by god yeah and he's leading a band of crusaders they must love that in the republic of the rift well his no i'm sure they don't love it at all but his but that's sort of that his troops definitely think that he has something, a special quality. You know, they, well, actually, do they? Or is that, how much is that Franco myth-making? I don't know enough of the details of this to know how much this is a product of Franco's later propaganda.

But it'd be interesting if listeners do know if they can tell us. So the Spanish have got new troops. They also have new weapons. And I mentioned this at the beginning that there were going to be chemical weapons. So obviously people have used chemical weapons in World War I, but they have been outlawed. So they're outlawed in 1925 in the Geneva Protocol. But the Spanish are completely shameless. So even though they signed the Geneva Protocol, they have every intention of using them. Their war minister says,

Until now, I have been obstinately resistant to the use of suffocating gases against indigenous peoples. But after what they have done, and after their treacherous and deceptive conduct, I will use them with true joy. Lovely thing to say. Lovely, lovely, lovely chat. So they use phosgene, dip diphosgene nitrochloroform

mustard gas and are they dropping this from planes i think most of it's from shells rather like in um in world war one yeah yeah i mean as you know tom science is not really my strong point and i would never claim to be an expert on munitions but but basically they're applying the lessons of the first world war exactly to the colonial the colonial dimension they're getting help from french intelligence so french intelligence helps them to to to get this sort of weapons systems and german companies so basically it's a European effort. So is this because the humiliation of the Spanish by the Republic of the Rift is seen as a humiliation not just for Spain, but for European empires generally? Yeah, I think that's right. I think the French have

their protectorate in Morocco. The French are very alarmed by all this sort of the spanish shambles um and crucially i think the big the big turning point actually i think and abdel krim's big mistake is that he sends his troops into across the border into the french bit so the french are much more organized than the spanish um he has been getting supplies and things from across the border anyway from the cities you know in the french protectorate the french are sort of beginning to to stamp on that a little bit and to shut it down and at that point he sends some of his sort of um his raiding parties in to attack the french. They actually overcome, they storm some French forts and things. They actually kill about, or wound about 6,000 French soldiers.

And this is, to him, I suppose he thinks he has no choice. But once he's poked the French, they're not going to take that lightly. So once the French are involved, he really is up against it. And the French, they bring in their top man, actually.

Marshal Petain, is it? hero of verdun he is the absolute you know saintly heroic crusader of france who had who had seen off the germans in the french imagination so they bring in um peter the french and the spanish meet in the summer of 1925 and they say okay we you know let's crush this guy once and for all so you've got peter you've got franco you've got the glorious, glorioso mutilado, they're all involved. But what you also have, you have two other innovations which point to World War II. So number one is you have aerial bombings. So you have, I think this is an extraordinary thing. A guy called Charles Sweeney, who was an American World War I pilot, he gets in touch with the French and he says, I would love to raise a squadron of American volunteers to come and fight for you.

And this is a very common 1920s thing. People who, I mean, you could, it's sort of Bulldog Drummond or it's the Black and Tans or it's the Fry Corps. Or Donatio. Sorry? Or Donatio. sorry exactly people who basically won't let the great war go and charles sweeney is one of those people he misses the adventure and the excitement and you know killing people and he says let's come and you know let's come and do some air raids for you so they he does raise a squadron of several i think a couple of dozen um american pilots they have seven bombers and they fly off these bombers. And the most famous bombing they do is of a town called Sheffshowan,

which I think is now a very popular tourist destination, a kind of blue city or something in the mountains. And they bomb it. One of the first aerial bombardments of a civilian town. So it's often said in the First World War that it's a process of colonial wars being brought back to the imperial metropoles. Yeah. And could you say that the Rift War

has that relationship to the Second World War, perhaps? Oh, yeah. I like that, Tom. I thought you were going to turn it around and say that this is the Great War being applied to the colonial periphery. I suppose it kind of is. Which it kind of is. But you're right. They are, well, they are experimenting with techniques.

Yeah. Yes. What happens in the Riff is going to happen, say, to Guernica. And then it's a new course to Coventry and to Hamburg. Exactly. to hamburgers exactly what happens in the riff is going to happen to spain in the 1930s and then as you say um to all europe in the 1940s interestingly one thing about um the colonial dimension charles sweeney is completely open about the racial element to this so he says he's asked why they're volunteering to help the french and the sp. And he says, in our view,

France in fighting Abdelkrim is fighting the cause of the white man's civilization. And all of us who have formed this squadron know enough of the world to appreciate what the white man's civilization means. Right, so not Christian civilization. This is a racialized... Yes, I suppose he would say there was no, I mean, of course, I'm sure Charles Sweeney would say there was no contradiction between those two things, but you're absolutely right that there were different dimensions to this. One is racial, one is the sort of the Christian thing. I mean, he's not going to be stirred by talk of the Reconquista, is he? I suppose.

So that's one, the aerial bombing. I can't tell you, by the way, some listeners were wondering how many people were killed. And the truth is, I don't tell you, by the way, some listeners are wondering how many people were killed. And the truth is, I don't know, because so little is written about this. It's so little known. I mean, I'd love for people who do know to tell us. But also, we should put our hands up and say the British are doing the same in Iraq at this time, aren't they? Well, tear gas.

But they're doing aerial bombings. They are doing aerial bombings. They're doing aerial bombings i mean they're kind of doing aerial bombings they're using aerial bombings to control colonial populations so it's yeah it's not just this is yet more evidence of your unsavory but i i think you know i i i think it's important for our occasional sallies into patriotism that we yeah we acknowledge the worse so then we can enjoy this podcast is over we need to urgently call a podcast strategy meeting to discuss your um your answer anyway listen the other thing i think we need to say is that um the other big innovation this is the first d-day the first sort of amphibious landing your brother would get very excited by this tom he

loves an amphibious so the french and the Spanish, they have a big meeting and they say, we're going to do an amphibious landing. Why? Just for the fun of it. I don't actually know why they did it. Why are they doing it? I mean, they've got these ports. I think because they need to, there's a particular point they can only get to

from the sea maybe. Okay. A place called Al-Hussemas Bay. And if they can do this landing at al-hussemas bay they don't need to trudge through the mountains and they have so that basically on september the 8th 1925 a landmark in military history tom the french they the sort of two things happen at once one 20 000 french troops march north out of their protectorate into the mountains. And secondly, the Spanish land 18,000 men by sea so that it's absolutely D-Day scenes.

The operation has been postponed because of bad weather, just like D-Day was, and then they do it. They have thousands of men in landing craft. They land artillery. They land tanks. They have air support from more than 100 planes, they have cruisers offshore kind of bombing the Berbers, they have an aircraft carrier from which they're launching all these kind of sorties. The supreme commander of the operation is the dictator himself,

Primo de Rivera. But the commander on the ground is a man who will, I'll come back to right at the end. He's called Jose Sanjurjo. And he's going to be a big figure in the Spanish Civil War. But the man who leads the first wave of troops ashore at Al-Husayna. Do you know who that is, Tom? Pablo Picasso. Salvador Dali. Brilliant. I'm working my way through. Yeah, yeah. Famousali. Brilliant.

I'm working my way through. Yeah, yeah. Favourite Spaniards. I'm afraid it's Franco. It's Franco again. Disappointing. Somebody we've already encountered. I've really let you down there.

I over-egged it, and it would have been better if it was Picasso. Improbable. As your father makes it. Implausible. Picasso had a colourful life, though. So anyway, when all these landings have taken place, Abdelkrim eventually knows the game is up. There's no way that he can beat the Spanish and the French simultaneously.

His home is occupied, his home village. The Spanish and the French sort of, they basically carve their way through the mountains. And he knows he's doomed. So he surrenders, tellingly, not to the spanish but to the french and they basically promise him that they will allow him and his family they will protect take him and his family into custody but protect them as long as he surrenders unconditionally and he does this the french actually don't treat him terribly badly so So he surrenders in 1926.

He's taken off to Réunion, which is in the Indian Ocean. Sort of very bone apart. It could be worse. It could be Devil's Island. Right. He's taken off there. He's actually treated pretty well. He and his family lived there in a kind of gilded exile for about 20 years.

So this is like the British removing the king of Ashanti. Exactly. Ashanti. Exactly. exactly yeah to the seychelles and he stays there for about 20 years and then in 1947 uh he says he wants to go to to france for health reasons he needs health care because he's quite an old man by this point and the french say fine yeah you can go to france and they go off by by ship but um when they get to egypt they stop in egypt and the ship is is raided by moroccan nationalists who um take them off and hide them in cairo and this is apparently against abdelkrim's wishes because the french kind of lined him up a nice house in the south of france yeah yeah but but he's told no no no no you have to stay in cairo become an icon of the rebellion but now the the moroccans wanted him to come back to morocco but he refused he said he would never go back to morocco while there were still french and spanish enclaves in morocco and

he never did so he died in cairo in 1963 gosh goodness so he got taken in 1947 and he died in Cairo in 1963. Gosh, goodness. So he got taken in 1947 and he died in 1963. Yeah, so 16 years he had to live in Cairo against his will. Well, why couldn't he go on to France? He might have been under guard. I don't know. Chained to a radiator. I don't think he was chained to a radiator. I think maybe he thought that if he went to France,

I mean, he couldn't have gone to France once he'd been rescued. No, I suppose not. That would look like a terrible... Yeah. If he sort of put out a public statement saying, I was looking forward to the golf courses of the river. Fair enough. But anyway, so that's the end of the Rift Walkers.

Obviously, the Spanish and the French won. They divided up Morocco between them. The Spanish lost about 43,000 troops killed, missing, and wounded. The French lost about 18,000. The Berbers, it's impossible to say, maybe 10,000, maybe 20,000, hard to tell. Historians now look back at that war and they say, is it the last colonial war? Is it the first anti-colonial war? Is it an ancestor of the Spanish Civil War, of world war ii um well the one thing that is very clear is that where where it definitely prefigures the span the horrors of the spanish civil war is it's incredibly savage and violent so it's full of massacres and tortures and beheadings the the

spanish army i think sort of motivated in part by their sense of humiliation, behave pretty badly throughout. kind of reactionary sort of mindset, where they're always conscious, thinking that they're being betrayed by politicians, and where they think only extreme violence. You know, that sort of, we must cut the heads off all the moors. That sort of attitude becomes very, very widespread among the officers. Exterminate all the brutes. Exactly that, exactly that. So if you look at the people, Tom,

who were the key figures in planning the rebellion in 1936 that launched the Spanish Civil War, the overall head of the whole thing, Emilio Mola, he had been wounded in the Rift War himself. The guy who I told you planned the amphibious operation at Al-Husayn, so that's Jose Sanjujo, he was called the Lion of the Rift and he was made Marquess of the Riff. He's going to be one of the chief Spanish commanders in the Spanish Civil War. He dies in a plane crash. Mola, the other big Gs, he died in a car crash. And that meant that the number three man ended up becoming the face of the Nationalist Rebellion. And that's Franco, who was then commander of the Army of Africa. So in many ways, you can trace the whole of the nationalist rebellion and that's Franco who was then commander of the army of

Africa so in many ways you can trace the whole of the Spanish civil war back to what happened in Morocco in the 1910s and 1920s this extraordinary chapter of history blood-soaked chapter which anticipated so many of the the horrors to come brilliant Dominic very a very cheery story well we're all about yeah we're all about we're all about cheer um yeah that's that's quite a grim story um and actually serves as a good introduction to the episodes on the spanish civil war that i'm sure we will be doing we'll definitely do a series on the spanish war tom if only because we've had so many kind remarks for our Iberian accents that we did in our series about Portugal. My Spanish accent is better than my Portuguese.

Is it? Oh, I cannot wait. That is a positive. Let's do the whole thing in Spanish. I think people would love that. But actually, you know what we should do? I think we should do something about Marrakesh or Fez or some of these great sort of Moroccan cities at some point. You know what we should do something about Marrakesh or Fez or some of these great sort of Moroccan cities at some point.

Yeah, we should do one of your walking tours of the soups of Marrakesh. We should go to Tangiers. Go to Tangiers. What's so great about Tangiers? Because it's such an interesting place, isn't it? Because it was a League of Nations protectorate. So it's kind of neutral city. And so it's got of neutral city and so it's it's got that slight west berlin feel it's got

that it's it's a place where full of um you know it's we talked at the beginning kind of great writers um it's a kind of great center for gay culture uh it's it's a really really interesting okay really interesting place and it's and it's very beautiful and it appeared in uh the living daylights timothy dalton's first well there you. Well, there you go, John. It's something for everyone. So I think I'd love to do that. Yeah. And we will definitely be back. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community,

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