page_title: Manuel Fernández Silvestre
section_title: Spanish Morocco
hierarchical_section_title: Manuel Fernández Silvestre / Career / Spanish Morocco
caption_attribution_description: English: General Manuel Fernández Silvestre with other senior Spanish army and navy officers. Español: El general Manuel Fernández Silvestre junto a otros altos oficiales del ejército y armada.
context_page_description: Manuel Fernández y Silvestre was a Spanish general.
  Silvestre was the son of the lieutenant colonel of artillery Victor Fernández and Eleuteria Silvestre. In 1889 he enrolled in the Toledo Infantry Academy, where he met with the future high commissioner of Spanish Morocco, Dámaso Berenguer.
  He committed suicide on the battlefield following the disastrous defeat at Annual of 22 July 1921 suffered by the Spanish army under his command.
context_section_description: In 1904, after many postings to peninsular regiments, he was dispatched to the Spanish exclave of Melilla on the Mediterranean Rif coast of North Africa, where he proved to be an excellent negotiator but also a fierce and an unpredictable man. In 1912, he occupied Larache and in 1918, he became the Commandant-General of Ceuta. As such he reported to the High Commissioner, a position that was filled by Dámaso Berenguer. Silvestre and Berenguer had once been friends at the military school, but they had fallen out as Silvestre was actually senior on the officer's list although Berenguer's position as High Commissioner meant that Silvestre had to take orders from him. Berenguer regarded Silvestre as reckless but was unwilling to rein him in largely because his friendship with the king, who had the final say over who was promoted and when.  Silvestre led several campaigns against Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni, a notorious North Moroccan brigand, from 1913 to 1920. After a long struggle, Silvestre defeated Raisuni in October 1919 in the Battle of Fondak Pass. Although Raisuni and most of his troops managed to slip away, they eventually joined forces with the Spanish authority against rival rebel leader Abd el-Krim. Raisuni's army was key to the Spanish capture of Larache and Arcila and to contain Abd El-Krim's offensives in 1923 and 1924, but he ended up as a prisoner of Abd El-Krim, who had him executed in 1925.
  After stopping in Ceuta, Silvestre marched in 1920 to take command of the Command of Melilla from where in January 1921 he led the Rif invasion, to stop the local resistance, now led by Abd el-Krim. Berenguer commanded from his headquarters at Tétouan, south of Ceuta, and Silvestre was based at Meilila, 130 miles away, a command arrangement that did not facilitate smooth co-operation between the two generals. In March 1921, Silvestre met Berenguer aboard the old cruiser Princesa de Asturias to plan the operations in the spring. Silvestre dismissed the Moroccans as an enemy, said he had all the troops and equipment that he needed, and causally mentioned: "The only way to succeed in Morocco is to cut off the heads of all the Moors". French Marshal Hubert Lyautey, who commanded the forces in French Morocco, complained that the Spanish lacked sufficient cultural sensitivity and often gratuitously offended the Islamic traditions of the Moroccans by openly engaging the services of the ubiquitous prostitutes, who followed the Spanish Army everywhere in Morocco; by engaging in harassment of Muslims on the streets; by dishonest and bigoted treatment of Moroccan tribal chiefs; and by all too often simply assuming that an "iron fist" approach was the best way to deal with the Moroccans. Lyautey criticised the Spanish Army in Morocco in general, but Silvestre exemplified it perfectly with his arrogance that led him to dismiss the Moroccans as hopelessly inferior and his firm belief in the "iron fist".
  The operation was risky and dangerous since the Spanish soldiers were very poorly trained and scared of the Rifians. Silvestre's force comprised 20,000 Spanish soldiers, as well as 5,000 regulares, as Moroccans in the Spanish Army were called. Of the Spanish troops, well over half were completely illiterate conscripts from the poorest elements of Spanish society and had been sent to Morocco with minimal training. Despite Silvestre's assurances that his equipment was sufficient to defeat the Rifians, about three quarters of the rifles at the Melilla arsenal were in shoddy condition because of poor maintenance, and a report from late 1920, which Silvestre had never bothered to read, warned that many of the rifles in Melilla arsenal were unusable or more of a danger to the soldier who was firing them than to the enemy. The average Spanish soldier in Morocco in 1921 was paid the equivalent of US$0.34 per day and lived on a simple diet of coffee, bread, beans, rice and the odd piece of meat. Many soldiers bartered their rifles and ammunition at the local markets in exchange for fresh vegetables. The barracks that the soldiers lived in were unsa
caption: General Silvestre with other senior officers of the Spanish Armed Forces.
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