Mateo García de los Reyes (5 February 1872 – 24 November 1936) was a Spanish naval officer and politician. He served in Spanish Navy operations against Filipino insurgents during the Philippine Revolution of 1896–1898 and in the Kert campaign of 1911–1912. He was the organizer and first chief of the Spanish Navy's submarine force and during the Rif War in 1922 led that force's first combat operation. He served as minister of the navy from 1928 to 1930. Early in the Spanish Civil War, he was arrested and executed by Republican forces on suspicion of having Nationalist sympathies.
Biography Early life García de los Reyes was born at 06:00 on 1872 in Montevideo, Uruguay, to Mateo García Anguiano and Manuela de los Reyes del Villar, the only boy among the couple's five children. His father, Mateo Sr., was the commanding officer of the Spanish Navy screw frigate , which was based at Montevideo at the time. For a short time, his father also served as acting commander of the naval base at Montevideo and the Spanish Navy squadron based there, but a persistent myth that his father was the Spanish consul in Montevideo is not true and appears to have arisen because he carried out a diplomatic mission as Spain's highest-ranking representative in the region. Almansa′s chaplain baptized the baby boy with the names Mateo Felipe Adolfo Hercilio on 1872 at the Main Church in Montevideo.
After the family returned to Spain, King Alfonso XII appointed Mateo Sr. as his aide-de-camp in 1880. As a result, the family moved into the Royal Palace of Madrid, where the younger Mateo began his schooling. Mateo Sr. subsequently received a promotion to brigadier de la armada (navy brigadier) and in 1881 was made Commandant General of the Captaincy General of Puerto Rico. The family moved to Puerto Rico, where Mateo Sr. died of tuberculosis in December 1882. The family returned to Madrid and the royal court after his death. Thanks to royal patronage, García de los Reyes continued to receive an excellent education. However, he decided to join the Spanish Navy to reduce the burden on his mother of raising five children as a widow and received his mother's permission to do so, a requirement for a minor.
Early career
After passing the required entrance examinations, García de los Reyes was accepted to the Colegio Naval Militar (Naval Military College) on 1886. On 1886, at the age of 14, García de los Reyes entered the Colegio Naval Militar, located aboard the old screw frigate Asturias, hulked at Ferrol as a floating jetty.
On 1888, García de los Reyes was appointed as a guardiamarina (midshipman), and on 1891, having completed his studies, he was promoted to alférez de navío (ship-of-the-line ensign). In the summer of 1892 he embarked for training at sea and his first major voyage aboard the corvette , a training ship under the command of Capitán de fragata (Frigate Captain) Fernando Villaamil. The ship got underway from Ferrol on 1892, stopped at the Port of La Luz in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, then made a transatlantic voyage to Bahia, Brazil. She crossed the Atlantic Ocean again and visited Cape Town in the Cape Colony. She then rounded the Cape of Good Hope, sailed as far south as the Antarctic Circle, stopped at Melbourne in the Colony of Victoria, Sydney in the Colony of New South Wales, and Wellington in the Colony of New Zealand. Her voyage then took her to the Society Islands, California, on the United States West Coast, Callao in Peru, and Valparaíso in Chile. Nautilus then rounded Cape Horn, stopped at Saint Helena, passed close by Puerto Rico without making a port call there, and called at New York City. She then crossed the Atlantic again, visited Plymouth in the United Kingdom and Cherbourg and Brest in France, and completed a -month circumnavigation of the world — during which she had crossed the equator four times — with her return to Spain, arriving at San Sebastián on 1894. There King Alfonso XIII and Queen Regent Maria Christina visited Nautilus.
Nautilus remained at San Sebastián until 1894, when she got underway bound for Ferrol. Along the way she was becalmed in the Cantabrian Sea, however, and had to put in at Bilbao with the assistance of a tug, mooring on the Nervión River opposite Sestao on and receiving visits according to protocol. On she again set out for Ferrol, which she reached at 08:00 on 1894 after an absence of months.
García de los Reyes disembarked from Nautilus at Ferrol and received orders to duty in the Captaincy General of the Philippines. Traveling on a troopship, he arrived in the Philippine Islands in the Spanish East Indies later in 1894. There he became a commanding officer for the first time, taking command of the gunboat . On 1895, the new commander general of the Cavite Naval Station, Vicente Carlos-Roca y Sansaloni, arrived and made García de los Reyes his personal assistant. García de los Reyes remained in this position until 1896, when he became executive officer of the gunboat , aboard which he played an active role in Spain's military and naval campaign against Filipino insurgents during the Philippine Revolution of 1896–1898. He was promoted to the rank of capitán de corbeta (corvette captain) on 1897.
García de los Reyes completed his tour of duty in the Philippines in early 1898 and returned to Spain. Not long after his return, the Spanish-American War broke out. He spent the war at Cartagena, seeing no combat. The Spanish Navy suffered heavy losses, and as a result of the conflict the Spanish Empire lost control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
García de los Reyes was appointed personal aide to General José Marenco in September 1899. Demoralized by the disastrous results of the war, however, he requested a voluntary leave of absence from the navy so that he could pursue further education, as well as employment opportunities in the private sector. His voluntary leave request was granted on 1900, and he subseuqently studied in Belgium, where he received a degree in electrical engineering. The Spanish Navy, with an excess of officers in its ranks, changed his status on 1908 from voluntary to compulsory leave.
In 1911, the Ministry of the Navy began efforts to revitalize the post-1898 Spanish Navy, and the navy recalled a number of officers to oversee the construction of new ships and to man existing ones. Accordingly, the navy finally recalled García de los Reyes to active duty, and on 1911 he began a tour as navigator aboard , a protected cruiser which had been modernized to serve as a colonial gunboat in the Spanish Empire. Aboard Infanta Isabel, he participated in combat operations in Spanish Morocco during the Kert campaign of 1911–1912 and operated in the waters of Spanish Guinea, policing the Gulf of Guinea and supporting Spanish authorities and forces ashore in Río Muni and on Fernando Po. Still facing the psychological impact of the disastrous war of 1898, however, he was considering leaving the navy entirely by 1912, and on 1913, he was placed in an inactive, unassigned administrative status.
Submarine force World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, and in the Action of 22 September 1914 the Imperial German Navy submarine U-9 sank the British Royal Navy armoured cruisers , , and with four torpedoes in less than an hour in the Broad Fourteens region of the southern North Sea, killing 1,459 men. Spain remained neutral during the war, but U-9′s exploit demonstrated the potential of submarines in naval combat and prompted the Spanish Ministry of the Navy to reconsider its decision not to pursue the development of submarines after the Spanish inventor Isaac Peral built the submarine in the late 19th century. It also reinvigorated García de los Reyes's interest in naval affairs, and he decided to remain in the navy.
On 1915, King Alfonso XIII signed the "Miranda Law" — named for Minister of the Navy Vicealmirante (Vice Admiral) Augusto Miranda y Godoy — which envisoned a Spanish Navy force of 28 submarines and authorized Miranda to acquire the Spanish Navy's first four operational submarines and a submarine rescue ship later named . It also authorized Miranda to make administrative changes and personnel assignments to crew and support the new vessels. Passage of the law marks the birth of the Spanish Navy's submarine force.
Under the law, Spain acquired the first of the submarines in the United States and the next three in Italy. Miranda recalled García de los Reyes to active duty in 1915 and gave him an assignment to travel to both countries to inspect the construction of the submarines. After a few months of delay, García de los Reyes was assigned to the Spanish Navy's North American Naval Commission on 1915. He traveled to the United States to visit the Fore River Shipyard at Quincy, Massachusetts, which the Ministry of the Navy had contracted to build the first submarine. After he returned to Spain, he was assigned to the Spanish Navy's Italian Navy Commission and, as president of the Submarine Construction Inspection Commission, visited La Spezia, Italy, to monitor the construction of, and acquire expertise in technical aspects of, the next three submarines. These were Italian F-class submarines — which become known as the in Spanish service — which Spain had contracted with the Fiat-San Giorgio shipyards to construct at La Spezia. Subsequently, the commission visited Switzerland to study the new submarines' internal combustion engines manufactured by Sulzer.
At the beginning of 1917, García de los Reyes became prospective commanding officer of the first of the A-class submarines, , which was launched on 1917 with the Spanish ambassador to Italy in attendance. García de los Reyes took full command of Narciso Monturiol when she was delivered to the Spanish Navy at La Spezia on 1917. He also was appointed head of the Spanish Navy's Submarine Division that day, holding both positions concurrently with his role as director of the Radiotelegraphy and Diving schools, both of which were located in Cartagena along with the new submarine force. After the shipyard delivered all three A-class submarines to the Spanish Navy, they made a cruise along the Italian coast from La Spezia to Genoa to test their equipment and conduct diving tests. After a few days at Genoa, where they completed fitting out, they got underway on 1917 for their delivery voyage to Spain with García de los Reyes in command of the submarine flotilla as a whole as well as of Narciso Monturiol. The protected cruiser escorted the flotilla on its voyage. The three submarines and Extremadura arrived in Spain at Tarragona on 1917. They departed Tarragona on 1917 and proceeded to Cartagena. The three A-class submarines and Isaac Peral then made a cruise along the Spanish coast, visiting various ports to display themselves and their capabilities to the Spanish public.
While under García de los Reyes's command, Narciso Monturiol received her battle flag, donated by the city council of Barcelona, while moored alongside the battleship during a visit to Barcelona on 1919. On 1919, he received a promotion to capitán de fragata (frigate captain), and during the summer of 1919 the four submarines undertook their first extended cruise, accompanied by Extremadura. During this cruise, they arrived at Santander on 1919. On , King Alfonso XIII boarded Narciso Monturiol at Santander, and during the day she submerged off Cabo Mayor with him aboard, touching bottom at a depth of and making him the first Spanish monarch to submerge aboard a submarine. García de los Reyes relinquished command of Narciso Monturiol on 1919 but remained the commander of the submarine division and of the Submarine School at Cartagena.