MANHATTAN MUSINGS: A Last Father-Son Conversation

90 Years Ago at the Alcázar of Toledo

By Stephen MacDonald

Sometimes I try recalling historical topics in a conscious effort to learn from them; sometimes I have to acknowledge that I have carried some history lessons with me for almost my entire life. In that latter category I would include the memory of a brief telephone conversation in 1936 between a Spanish Army Colonel and one of his sons—with the son being held hostage and threatened with execution.

I realized recently that this week will mark the 90th anniversary of that phone call. It was during the first days of what became the years-long Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). I first heard the conversation recounted to my elementary school class about 65 years ago by a Catholic nun in New York City. The right-wing forces in Spain—who triumphed after four years of civil war and were led by the dictator General Francisco Franco—were called the “Nationalists,” while the forces of the Left—who, over time, were increasingly controlled by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin—were typically called “Republicans” or “Loyalists.”

On July 23, 1936, Nationalist Colonel José Moscardó was in control of a 10th-century fortress then being used primarily as a military school—the Alcázar of Toledo.

The Alcázar, as currently restored.

Colonel Moscardó was sheltering in the besieged Alcázar about 1,800 people—mainly soldiers but also many families who sought shelter in the fortress. The Republicans had quickly taken control of the City of Toledo after the Civil War started on July 17, 1936, and their forces surrounding the Alcázar numbered about 8,000. Many people were killed by the Republican forces in Toledo on July 23rd, including scores of Catholic priests and other religious.

One of Colonel Moscardó’s sons, 24-year-old Luis Moscardó, was captured that day by the Republicans and brought to Candido Cabello, the leader of the “Checa”—a committee of militant Socialists and anarchists. (The committees were named “Checas” after the name given by Lenin to the first Soviet secret police, the Cheka). Candido Cabello called Col. Moscardó to announce the capture of his son Luis. The 1937 book Spanish Rehearsal, by British writer Sir Arnold Lunn, has the following account of the final conversation between Col. Moscardó and his son, which took place on the one surviving telephone line connecting the besieged Nationalist fortress with the surrounding Republican forces.

“The telephone plays its part as a stage property in this drama. The bell rings in the dark little office whose walls are hung with photographs of men who commanded the Alcázar in times less stirring than these. Moscardó picks up the receiver, and a voice at the other end informs him that his son has been captured by the Reds and will be shot unless Moscardó surrenders the Alcázar. The boy comes to the telephone and asks his father what he is to do.”

“‘All you can do,’ replies the father, ‘is to pray for us and to die for Spain.’”

“‘That is quite simple,’ said the boy. ‘Both I will do.’”

Republican forces executed Luis Moscardó after the call with his father. Some accounts place the execution the day after the call, while others place the execution a month later. Nationalist forces broke the encirclement of the Alcázar on September 27, 1936, and the heroism of the Nationalist defenders was used by General Franco to boost Nationalist morale for the remainder of the horrific Civil War. The death toll from the Spanish Civil War is—as with everything else about the conflict—disputed. Most estimates are of half a million deaths.

Although the Alcázar was substantially demolished during the 68-day siege, it was rebuilt after the Civil War. It serves today as the Museum of the Army with displays regarding Spain’s military history. Before going to the Museum on my first-ever visit to Toledo in April 2025, I read historian Warren H. Carroll’s 1995 account of the Civil War—The Last Crusade: The Twentieth Century’s War for the Sake of the Cross. Warren Carroll writes this about the Alcázar as it existed in 1995:

“In the otherwise completely restored Alcázar of Toledo today, the room where Colonel Moscardó received that telephone call from Candido Cabello is preserved exactly as it was 60 years ago. On its scored and battered walls hang translations of this conversation in most of the principal languages of the world. A contemporary Socialist government, no longer revolutionary but hardly sympathetic, has removed all the most vivid and shocking mementos of the great siege—all but this, which they have not dared to touch.”

In April of last year I entered the Museum of the Army and obtained a museum map and inquired the quickest way to “visit Colonel Moscardó‘s office.” I got a cold reply: “It is closed for renovation.” “Oh,” I said, “when will it be reopened?” Two museum staffers shook their heads, and one replied, “We don’t know.”

As Warren Carroll notes in The Last Crusade, “the total number of Catholic priests and religious martyred in the territory of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War was 6,832, most of whom were killed without even ‘the simulacrum of condemnation by revolutionary tribunals.’”

One of those priests, Fr. Pedro Ruiz de los Paños, was shot, in front of Toledo’s maternity hospital, on the same fateful day as that phone call with Col. Moscardó. In 1995, Saint John Paul II beatified Fr. Pedro Ruiz de los Paños as one of the “martyrs who with their blood witnessed to their fidelity to Christ……at the time of the Spanish Civil War.”

What the Spanish Socialists had “not dared to touch” in 1995 is apparently now to be kept out of sight. But I am thankful that—90 years on—it is still possible to learn about Luis Moscardó‘s last promise to his father about prayer and dying for his country. “Both I will do.”