José
Castillo
was
a lieutenant in the Assault Guards. He
was also an active member of the Socialist
Party . On 12th July 1936 a Falangist
gang shot and killed Castillo as he left his home in Madrid.
The following day a group
of Castillo's friends took revenge by murdering José
Calvo Sotelo. This event resulted in a military uprising led by
Emilio
Mola,
Francisco
Franco
and José
Sanjurjo
and heralded the
start of the Spanish Civil War.
(1)
Claude
Cockburn, Reporter
in Spain (1936)
On 12th July 1936 gunmen
in a touring car nosed slowly through sparse traffic under the arc
lamps of a Madrid street, opened fire with a sub-machine-gun at the
defenceless back of a man standing chatting on his doorstep, and roared
off among the tram-lines, leaving him dying in a puddle of his young
blood on the pavement.
That in a manner of speaking
was the Sarajevo of the Spanish war. The young man they killed was
Jose Castillo, Lieutenant of Assault Guards. I never saw Castillo,
but afterwards I heard all sorts of people speak of him with a kind
of urgency and heartbreak, as though it were impossible that you too
should not have known, and therefore loved, so fine a young man.
In a corps which in the
five years of its existence had already acquired a high military reputation,
Castillo was already
distinguished, and already loved, by men who are not very easy pleased
nor easy fooled.
In the working-class districts
of Madrid he was equally well known and liked. He was declared a gallant
and patriotic young officer, as dauntless a defender of the Republic
as you could wish to see, and a man - as a Madrid workman said to
me afterwards - "who made the culture and the progress we were
after seem more real to us".
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
