July 19th, 1936 - The Battle for the Telefonica Building, Plaça de Catalunya, Barcelona.
In the early hours of July 19, 1936, factory sirens called workers out to the streets of Barcelona. Spain's largest union, the anarchist CNT, had learned from sympathizers in the army about a fascist military coup against the Spanish Republic. With the officers' plans in hand, the anarchists cooked up their own plan: to wait until the soldiers left their barracks, and ambush them in the streets. As the sirens rang out, workers' defense committees headed to their positions. The throngs of militants sang “A Las Barricadas,” their union’s anthem-turned self-fulfilling prophecy. At strategic intersections across the city, workers built barricades, distributed what few weapons they had, and gathered to demand more from the authorities.
The Telefonica company building in Plaça de Catalunya, with its local and long-range telephone switchboards, was Barcelona’s communications center, and a primary target for the army’s coup. Before sunrise, Comandante Major Lopez-Amor Jiménez distributed alcohol to the 500 men under his command in the 13th Regiment of the 7th Infantry Brigade. The soldiers arrived at 6 A.M. in the Plaça shouting "Long Live the Republic,” confusing the workers already gathering to defend the area. The soldiers also encountered Assault Guards (urban police).
First, the soldiers and Assault Guards fired at each other, but soon they were fraternizing and hugging. Workers swarmed and separated the two forces. The soldiers detained the civilians to check their identifications, until it became clear that almost all held CNT union cards. Unable to arrest everyone, Lopez-Amor Jiménez had his men clear the square and place machine guns in four corners of Plaça: the roofs of the Maison Dorée restaurant, Cataluña Theater, Hotel Colón, and the Casino Militar.
Two army platoons marched into the Telefonica to cut the phone lines to the Catalan Regional Government, the Generalitat. CNT workers, and Assault Guards under Lieutenant Perales, head of the 4th Security Company, were already barricading the floors above. Perales’ officers fired warning shots. The soldiers retreated back into the Plaça, and fired three volleys from their two 75mm cannons at the Telefonica. It was now 6:30 A.M. Waves of soldiers charged the building. The Assault Guards and workers resisted, but were pushed back. Soldiers captured the ground floors, but the workers and loyal officers held the rest of the building.
The heroic resistance inside the Telefonica stopped the army from establishing communications with the rest of Spain. The CNT workers at the switchboards disconnected the lines linking the fascist generals at the Capitanía building with army barracks around the city, making coordination impossible. Stranded and confused, the dispersed military units of the coup succumbed in the streets to the swarming revolutionary workers. After defeating the army throughout most of Barcelona, crowds flooded into Plaça de Catalunya. Workers barricaded the side streets, including Fontanella and Puertal de Àngel on either side of the Telefonica. In the Plaça de Catalunya, officers and workers fired relentlessly at the soldiers from rooftops, windows, doorways, stairwells, and from behind the barricades. Lopez-Amor was hit in the leg, and sought treatment in the Casino Military.
At 8 A.M., the Assault Guards of the 5th Security Company that had been hanging around the Infantrymen suddenly turned on the soldiers. When Lopez-Amor came out of the Casino Militar, Assault Guards and anarchist militants descended on him, and dragged into a car. Next, the Assault Guards tried to arrest Captain Pedro Mercader Boil, who resisted. Officers gunned the captain down. By this point, machine gun bullets poured into the Plaça from all directions. The next highest-ranking rebel in the Plaça, Captain Don Luis Oller Gil, himself badly wounded, ordered the soldiers to disperse into resistance groups. The army took refuge in the Hotel Colón, the Maison Dorée, the Casino Militar, and the lower floors of the Telefonica. The soldiers were trapped, and no reinforcements were coming.
At 11 A.M., the Generalitat ordered Assault Guard units to support the workers in the streets. Assault Guards entered the subway tunnels toward Plaça de Catalunya. By 1 P.M., two companies of the 12th group of Assault Guards emerged from the tunnels. They occupied the Grand Metro station and all of the subway entrances in the Plaça itself. Captain Gil pulled the remaining soldiers in the Plaça back into the Hotel Colón, defending it with machine guns. The anti-fascists continued to advance. At 1:50 P.M., workers reached the artillery pieces the soldiers left in the Plaça and fired on the Hotel Colón. Workers and loyal officers, charging from the subway entrances and side streets, stormed the Casino Militar and the Maison Dorée.
With the afternoon arrived Buenaventura Durruti, true son of the people, CNT leader, and experienced guerrilla, and Enrique Obregón Blanco, Mexican-born Secretary of the Local Federation of Anarchist Groups of Barcelona, with a force of veteran CNT militants. They had spent the morning defeating the army at other points along the Ramblas. In Plaça de Catalunya they found an apocalyptic scene. Dead bodies lay everywhere, cars smoked and burned, and soldiers and the horses who transported the cannons gathered in piles toward the center of the square.
At 3:20 P.M., Colonel Escobar led a large force of the Civil Guard (rural police), of uncertain loyalty and therefore blanketed by vigilant union militants, into the Plaça. Crowds now teemed on the edges of safety, in the subway stations and entrances, alleys and stairwells, just out of reach of the machine guns. Among them, a retired artillery soldier-turned longshoreman, Manuel Lecha, had gathered a crew of workers at the site of the ambush on an artillery battery, to roll a captured cannon by hand. Lecha now positioned it in the Plaça de Catalunya and opened fire on the fascists.
The workers stormed the Telefonica at 3:30. Durruti and Obregón led hundreds of workers in a charge from the mouth of the Ramblas, across the Plaça, and through the torrent of machine gun bullets. The anarchists threw open the front doors and poured into the building, unleashing a bloody battle for the ground floors. Many militants perished in the battle, Enrique Obregón included. The soldiers soon surrendered, and the workers’ committee controlled the building and its strategic switchboards for the following year. Across the square, POUMistas, joined by Civil Guards, stormed the Hotel Colon. By 4 P.M., the last rebel soldiers in Plaça de Catalunya surrendered. Civil Guards arrested the army officers, while many rank and file soldiers defected and joined in the revolutionary celebrations sweeping across Barcelona.
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