[1] Born in A Coruña, Galicia, his father was José Millán Astray, a lawyer, poet, librettist of the Zarzuela genre, and chief jailer of Madrid.

On 26 October 1924, while stationed in Spanish Morocco, he was wounded in the left arm during an ambush resulting in it needing to be amputated.

With the support of then Major Francisco Franco, he created the Spanish Legion, and, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, served as its first commander.

Millán-Astray gave the legion a powerful ideology intended to evoke Spain's Imperial and Christian traditions.

For instance, the legion adopted a regimental unit called the tercio in memory of the famed Spanish infantry formations that had terrorized their opponents on the battlefields of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Millán-Astray also revived the Spaniard's ancient feud with the Moors and portrayed his men first as crusaders on an extended Reconquista against the Islamic civilization; and later as the saviours of Spain warding off the twin evils of Communism and democratic liberalism.

Favored by King Alfonso XIII and rewarded for his heroic leadership of the Legion in the aftermath of the Spanish military defeat at Annual, in 1924, he was promoted to full colonel.

In 1932, the Republican government of Azaña placed him on the retirement list along with other generals regarded as hostile to the Republic.

He served as director of the Office of Radio, Press, and Propaganda (1936-1937) on the Nationalist side and later (1937) was named head of the Corps of Wounded Veterans.

It is said that he administered the press office like a military barracks, forcing journalists to fall in line in response to his whistle, and subjecting them to the same brutal harangues he had given as commander of the Legion.

Millán-Astray is perhaps best remembered for a heated response to Miguel de Unamuno, the writer and philosopher, on 12 October 1936.

According to the British historian Hugh Thomas in his magnum opus The Spanish Civil War (1961), the evening began with an impassioned speech by the Falangist writer José María Pemán.

After this, Professor Francisco Maldonado decried Catalonia and the Basque Country as "cancers on the body of the nation," adding that "Fascism, the healer of Spain, will know how to exterminate them, cutting into the live flesh, like a determined surgeon free from false sentimentalism."

In 2018, the details of Unamuno's speech were disputed by the historian Severiano Delgado, who argued that the account in a 1941 article by Luis Gabriel Portillo (who was not present at Salamanca) in the British magazine Horizon may not have been an accurate representation of events.

Severiano Delgado, a historian and librarian at the University of Salamanca, asserts that Unamuno's words were put in his mouth by Luis Portillo, in 1941, possibly with some help from George Orwell, in a piece in the literary magazine Horizon, entitled Unamuno's Last Lecture.

[4] Severiano Delgado's book, titled Archeology of a Myth: The act of 12 October 1936 in the auditorium of the University of Salamanca, shows how the propaganda myth arose regarding the confrontation that took place that day between Miguel de Unamuno and the general Millán Astray.

Portillo had no intention of misleading anyone; it was simply a literary evocation.Unamuno took the floor, not to confront Millán Astray, but to answer a previous speech by Professor of Literature Francisco Maldonado who had identified Catalonia and the Basque Country with the "antiespaña" (Antispain).

Unamuno himself was Basque and was revolted with Francisco Maldonado's speech, but when addressing the audience, Unamuno used the example of what had happened with José Rizal (a Filipino nationalist and polymath during the tail end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines, executed by the Spanish colonial government for the crime of rebellion after the Philippine Revolution).

As proof that the incident was nothing more than a crossroads of hard words, the photograph reproduced on the cover of his book shows Millán Astray and Miguel de Unamuno calmly saying goodbye in the presence of Bishop Plà, with no tension between them.

The photo was discovered in 2018 in the National Library and was part of the chronicle of the act that the newspaper "The Advancement of Salamanca" published the following day, 13 October 1936.

[4] According to Delgado, Portillo's account of the speech became famous when a then very young British historian Hugh Thomas, aged 30, came across it in a Horizon anthology while researching his seminal book, The Spanish Civil War, and mistakenly took it as a primary source.

[4] Millán-Astray was by all accounts prone to actions and general demeanor frequently described as impulsive and ruthless, even by the standards of most Africanist officials.