Grade A

At anchor behind Napoleon's breakwater in Cherbourg Harbor last week lay the huge U. S. battleship Oklahoma. Suddenly telephones jangled in the captain's cabin. Washington was calling with urgent orders. All leaves were to be canceled. Most of the Annapolis midshipmen aboard on summer training cruise were to be transferred to other warships. The ship and the Coast Guard cutter Cayuga were to proceed to San Sebastian immediately to rescue U. S. citizens from the inferno of Spanish civil war. Under way, the Oklahoma's petty officers doubled up in their cabins, and sailors cleared out the crews' recreation room for an emergency nursery. Plowing down the Bay of Biscay watch officers worried. U. S. Ambassador Claude Gernade Bowers had not been heard from in Spain for four days. He was not at the summer embassy at San Sebastian but a few miles away at his own villa at the narrow little seaport of Fuenterrabia. Was he alive? The engine room telegraph rang up more revolutions.

Spain was weltering last week in a revolution which experts had to certify as absolutely Grade A. Its authentic qualities of mass upheaval reduced to secondary stature both the government leaders and the revolutionary generals. The Spanish Government, a regime of Socialists, Communists and rattlebrained Liberals had emptied the jails of cutthroats to defend itself and swell what could be called "forces of law and order." These forces included an indefinite part of the Army. Other Army units had gone over to generals of loosely Fascist forces in which were scrambled most of the Spanish Foreign Legion, parts of the Civil Guard, peasants whose priests had told them about Bolshevism, hired Pistoleros and boys and girls in their teens just shooting for the fun of it. It was these adolescents who killed the pregnant wife of the Norwegian Consul at San Sebastian as her trained nurse was helping her into an ambulance. That was pure, crazy REVOLUTION and it lapped and slavered at Madrid two ways, up from the South under hot-headed Original Revolutionist General Francisco Franco and down from the North under calculating, professional General Emilio Mola.

Soon more than 30 rescue ships dispatched by anxious governments to take their nationals off the frying pan of Spain were in its harbors. Before the Oklahoma could reach San Sebastian, the French destroyer l'Indomptable and the British destroyer Verity had already arrived, hustled all foreigners away who wished to leave. None was more shaken than five Swiss tourists who had been lined up against a wall for execution by the Leftists until they could convince them that they were not Nazi agents helping the Fascist revolution. Word finally seeped down from Ambassador Bowers. He was marooned in his villa, barricades between him and San Sebastian. This week, with his wife and daughter, he scuttled up the coast by car through barricaded San Sebastian, across the border into France. There from St. Jean de Luz, he announced that he would set up a ''floating embassy" on the cutter Cayuga, had ''no intention of abandoning my Spanish post for the present."

From Malta last week hustled the 32,000-ton British battle cruiser Repulse under forced draft with the entire second battalion of the Gordon Highlanders between decks to help protect the Rock of Gibraltar, overhauled a squadron of five Italian cruisers bound for Barcelona.

Close to the shore line kept the Repulse, for out in the roadway between the Pillars of Hercules, the Spanish battleship Jaime I (pronounced "Hymie Primero") and two cruisers were slinging shot for shot with rebel-held batteries at Ceuta, Spanish Morocco. A well-placed hit from the shore put the Jaime I temporarily out of action, nearly sank her.

From Barcelona, where a dozen ships were evacuating foreigners, went many a harrowing tale. For 17 years swarthy Santiago Iturralde was a clerk in the U. S. Consulate at Barcelona, running errands, filing papers, sorting mail. Late last week word reached the Consulate that Manager George Jenkins of the Ford Motor Co. branch was in imminent personal danger. With a British chauffeur Clerk Iturralde jumped into a car bearing a U. S. flag, attempted a rescue. Both clerk and chauffeur were killed with a burst of machine-gun fire.

"Local authorities," reported U. S. Consul Lynn W. Franklin, "have expressed concern, sympathy and regret." For the widow and four children of Clerk Iturralde the U. S. State Department proposed a pension.

Among the refugees from Barcelona to reach Marseille last week were one Joseph Friedman, U. S. cinema operator, and Mrs. George Haven Putnam, widow of the Manhattan publisher.

"Everybody seemed to be firing at everybody else,'' said Photographer Friedman. "Barcelona authorities had distributed rifles to 60,000 workers with orders to shoot anyone who looked like a rebel. Anyone who had a hat looked like a rebel, so they fired."

Added Mrs. Putnam: "We talked to several youths, all of whom wore red arm bands with the Communist emblem ot the hammer and sickle on them. They said they were for the Government, but judging from the number of churches and convents and homes of so-called Fascists they said they had burned, it was hard to say whether they had much use for law and order. ... On shipboard we stood on deck all day watching the coast. From time to time we heard the booming of guns, and saw dozens of churches aflame in little towns and many convents and other churches afire high on the hillsides over the sea."

Vivid were the Barcelona adventures of one Ruby Beach of Washington, D. C.

"I saw women fighting in the front-line barricades, shooting more often and with more precision than the men. These women kept calling on their men to take no prisoners but to kill them. The men Communists often stopped short, aghast at the atrocities the women asked them to perpetrate.

"I saw girls dressed in beach pajamas carrying refreshments and ammunition to the men fighting behind the barricades. The situation was such that the American flag was no use as a protection. Many of the fighters have never heard of the United States and don't know what our flag looks like. I am able to be here to tell the story only because our cook had a Communist sweetheart."

When Ambassador Bowers and the senior staff departed for the pleasant waters of San Sebastian four weeks ago he left the huge cream-colored stucco Embassy in Madrid in charge of youthful Third Secretary Eric C. Wendelin. Suddenly Diplomat Wendelin found himself responsible for the lives & safety of 150 U. S. citizens seeking sanctuary. He had been able to lay in enough food for a two-week siege. Every jug, every tub was kept full of water in case the city supply should fail. The ballroom was turned into a dormitory for women. Men were bedded down in the garage. Efficient Mrs. Wendelin organized a corps of amateur cooks and took over the kitchen.

There for nearly a week the refugees stayed, in occasional telephone communication with Washington, but with no chance of leaving the city, as all railroad lines were cut. Secretary Wendelin had other worries. His ornate building, a mass of French windows and hence difficult to defend, stands directly on the broad Paseo de la Castellana, main road to the fighting in the North, down which looting troops, bitter in defeat or delirious in victory, might pour at any moment. Over the trees in the garden loomed the office building of the newspaper A.B.C., on the roof of which was a machine-gun nest that could sweep the entire Embassy garden. Finally after days of haggling a special train and an armed guard were provided for both British and U. S. refugees in Madrid. They were hustled off to Alicante to the east coast, there boarded a British destroyer.

Into the narrow French harbor of Port Vendres dashed an unarmed Spanish motorboat last week equipped with a camera and a telephoto lens. Rapidly it snapped pictures of Spanish refugee yachts anchored there, dashed back to carry the names of the renegades to Government authorities. One who took no such chance was Spain's first Constitutional President, tousle-haired Niceto Alcala Zamora, whose dismissal four months ago was a major event leading up to the civil war (TIME, April 20). Last week he arrived with his family at Reykjavik, Iceland. Another method of avoiding assassination was adopted by onetime Premier Santiago Casares Quiroga. He enlisted as a private in the Civil Guard, toughest, best-equipped, best-drilled corps in Spain.

By week's end Fascist forces held all Spanish Morocco, Seville and about half of Spain's 50 provinces, mostly in the North. Government forces still held Madrid and Barcelona, had regained control of San Sebastian. Both sides maneuvered warily for a great battle for the mountain passes due north of Madrid last captured by Napoleon's lancers in 1808.

At Burgos the northern Fascist commanders proclaimed a provisional government in the shadow of the medieval Gothic cathedral. Its figurehead was not General Mola but bushy-chinned General Miguel Cabanellas Zaragoza. Wagging a warning ringer at newshawks General Cabanellas announced:

"There is one thing I would like to clear up. Our national movement is not a Monarchist movement and it is not Fascist either. All my life I have been a Republican and I intend to remain a Republican."

"Why is General Franco not in your Cabinet?" asked a British correspondent.

"We have been unable to communicate with General Franco," admitted General Cabanellas.

In Seattle last week was made public the text of a letter beleaguered Ambassador Bowers had written to his cousin Mrs. Alice C. Wolverton month ago. Declared New Dealer Bowers:

"You are all wrong about the dangerous condition in Spain. ... In the three years I have been here there has not been anything in all Spain as serious as the elevator strike in New York City. I have entire faith in Spain's future. . . . Reports of conditions in Spain are misrepresentations and mostly pure propaganda inspired by the old regime that hates democracies and republics."

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