The Republic v. The Republic

The Republic v. The Republic

(See front cover)

Spain's atrocity-spangled Civil War burned and butchered into its second month this week. At least 25,000 Spaniards had been killed and less than half of these had died on any battlefield. Night after night all over Spain men were torn from their weeping families, lined up and shot for what were supposed to be their political opinions. Scores of cities, towns and villages had been bombarded and burned. More than 200 churches had gone up in flames and over $40,000,000 in cash and Spanish Government bonds stripped from clericals. Meanwhile Ladies of the Civil War made off with Singer Sewing Machines while Gentlemen seized out of salesrooms brand new Fords and Chevrolets. Property of U. S. citizens in Spain worth $70,000,000 had in large part been confiscated, temporarily at least, and U. S. consuls looked silly as they did their best to paste on U. S. doors stickers warning the Spaniards that U.S. "property must be respected."

Atrocity of the week occurred in the village of Buitrago in the Guadarrama Mountains which form the chief bulwark of Madrid on the north. There some 80 children too young to have any political opinions were discovered hiding in a church. Out they were dragged, to be lined up, dispatched by firing squads and left to rot on the ground. In the sore which was Spain last week, festering from the Pyrenees to Morocco, it was both confusing and disheartening that both President Manuel Azafia and his opponents, Generals Francisco Franco and Emilio Mola, claimed to be "Republicans"; and to be fighting for "The Republic." Enshrined Violence. His Most Catholic Majesty Alfonso XIII was chased out of Spain year after exiled Dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera had quietly died in bed in Paris and the Spanish people had voted strongly Republican (TIME, April 20, 1931). The Republic brought with it a new Constitution grimly designed to destroy the influence of the Church and to break the big landowners of Spain but leavened with idealism, notable in such clauses as that under which the Spanish Government cannot itself declare war on another country without obtaining the consent of the League of Nations. In the elections of 1931 the Republic seesawed violently to the Left, then to the Right in 1933 and again to the Left early this year.

On the basis of the popular vote, the Left won only 4,356,000 ballots to 4,910,000 for the Centre and the Right.

Thus, backed by slightly less than half the ballots cast, appeared the present Spanish Government under corpulent and frog-faced but politically agile and astute Don Manuel Azafia, a Republican of ultra-conservative Socialist leanings. He found in the Cortes that he could win votes of confidence only by yielding more & more to the radical Socialists and out-&-out Communists who thought hanging was too good for a priest or a wealthy landowner. Last spring astute Azafia, foreseeing to what upheavals this situation must lead, resigned the hot seat of Premier and got himself elected to the more stable office of President, the better to weather Spain's coming storm (TIME, May 18).

At this time President Azafia was perhaps personally less radical than President Roosevelt. After long talks with him, cigar-chewing U. S. Ambassador Claude Bowers called Azafia the greatest living Spaniard, compared his ideals with those moderate motives which inspired George Washington and the American Colonists to shake off English Kingship. In Spain the Right knew what to think when Republican Azafia proved unable to suppress political violence and murder even in the streets of Madrid, made the philosophical assertion: "Violence is deeply enshrined in the Spanish people. The time has not yet come for Spaniards to stop shooting one another." President Azafia made a still greater sensation with his dictum: "The only person whose views are always correct is Azana!"

Great Provocation. With both Left and Right convinced that the self-satisfied President had cast himself in the role of umpire and considered useless any attempt to prevent Spaniards from shooting out their political differences, the stage for Civil War was set. The Cabinet's radical Minister of Labor, only recently a jailbird, took to locking up Madrid employers and keeping them in jail until they yielded to the demands of their striking employes. The Left, feeling stronger, every day in its purpose to maneuver the Republic into a Soviet, then offered great provocation: the assassination of the leader of the Right, Don Jose Calvo Sotelo.

Don Jose, once Finance Minister under Dictator Primo de Rivera and Alfonso XIII, followed his King into exile, returned to Spain under an amnesty of the Republic. He was taken from his home and butchered by uniformed members of the Government's own Assault Guards. Though these assassins admittedly acted without President Azana's knowledge, their crime showed that the most violent Left terrorism was now operating in the shadow of the Government itself. In Right opinion, the Republic had ceased to uphold republican order or republican rights and the first broadside issued by forces of the Revolution said they were striving for a "Restoration" of the order and rights previously enjoyed by Spaniards.

Sifting of evidence as it gradually appeared made clear last week that the Revolution must have been carefully financed and planned in advance for it burst simultaneously during a single night in five cities of Spanish Morocco and at least twelve in Spain proper. At Madrid the sympathy of prominent Army figures with the Revolution was so marked that by last week distracted Premier Jose Giralt Pereira, a mild-mannered onetime apothecary, had progressively dismissed a total of 42 Spanish generals and was said to have left in his War Office not a single strategist or tactician of standing.

This did not greatly matter because the Government's forces against the Revolution were by last week in great part not Army detachments at all but civilian Socialists, Anarchists and Communists, male and female, for whose benefit the President had opened the arsenals of Spain and handed out some 500,000 rifles, pistols and small arms. In so doing Don Manuel Azana claimed to remain wholly Republican, but he also provided Spain with a problem in civilian arms-toting which it may take years to solve.

In regions held by the Government last week, to travel behind the front lines was to be stopped every few miles by men or women bristling with arms but too ignorant to read the passports and documents which they threateningly demanded. In Madrid one of the Government's official passers-out-of-arms, Commandant Carlos Gomez, cheerfully announced: "We are training 1,000 people a day and sending them to all fronts."

"How long do you train them?'' he was asked.

"Three days."

"How much of that training is spent in shooting practice?" "What!" cried Commandant Gomez, "You don't think we waste ammunition on rifle practice? Our Militia gets all its shooting practice at the front!" Franco and Mola, Soldiers of professional standing and technical proficiency are the leaders of the Revolution: short, stoutish, dynamic General Francisco Franco, Arabic-speaking onetime Commander of the Spanish Foreign Legion in Morocco whose brother Ramon is "The Spanish Lindbergh";* and slim, tortoise-spectacled, tenacious General Emilio Mola, the Cuban-born son of a captain in the traditionally non-partisan Civil Guard.

Last week the South Army of the Revolution under General Franco and the North Army under General Mola advanced until their forces finally made contact with each other for the first time since the war began, near Merida on their west fronts.

Field telegraph lines and military postal service were established between General Mola's headquarters at Burgos and those of General Franco at Seville. In token that Franco is No. 1 in the Revolution, Mola, as No. 2, flew last week from Burgos to Seville for a joint tactical and strategic conference on the situation.

Behind the Revolution last week were:

1) The influence of the Church.

2) The Spanish Monarchists and Fascists.

3) Landowners, big and small.

4) Adolf Hitler & Benito Mussolini.

5) Important members of the British Cabinet.

Behind the Madrid Government were:

1) The working class of the Spanish industrial towns and the landless peasants.

2) The Socialists and Communists of the Spanish "Popular Front" whose broad-faced and optimistic leader, Don Francisco Largo Caballero, is avowedly trying to bring Spain under "the dictatorship of the proletariat."

3) The Socialist and Communist parties of the world, including the U. S. Socialist party which from Milwaukee last week appealed for funds to be sent to Madrid.

As Generalissimo of the Revolution, General Franco announced: "We want a national government and intend to assure all classes in Spain a chance to draft a Liberal constitution assuring justice for middle-class property owners as well as for the working class. ... We propose that long-needed social reforms shall actually be pushed forward in Spain. . . . We started the revolt only after it had become self-evident that the Government was playing into the hands of the Communists and extreme Socialists and that there was no justice for others. The aims of the National Revolution are to restore peace, justice and democracy with favor to no one class. As far as the Church is concerned we intend to allow complete freedom of worship, but under no conditions to permit the Church to play a part in politics."

With this program, General Franco found himself surrounded in Seville last week not only by his Spanish staff but by individuals in Spanish uniform who obviously were Italians and Germans. Hitherto bombing by planes of the Franco-Mola forces had been so inaccurate that in London, famed Hector Bywater could write that thus far not a single Spanish ship seemed to have been sunk by air bombs. Two days later planes of the Revolution put the Government's best and biggest war boat Jaime Primero (James the First) out of action with 625-lb. bombs which scored direct hits on her forecastle head. This was not Spanish marksmanship and neither the planes nor the bombs nor the airmen were Spanish.

Held by the Revolution last week were all Spanish Morocco, the two largest Balearic Islands, whose political boss Juan March was contributing all the aid he could from Paris, and a great crescent- shaped swath of Spain swinging from Navarre around Madrid and down through Andalusia. The Government on the other hand held the region of Madrid, the east coast of Spain, part of the north coast and strong cities such as Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga.

Paradoxically in Seville and its languorous province of Andalusia the Revolution found itself embarrassed by enthusiastic assumption on the part of the local populace that it stood for restoration of the Monarchy. In charge of Seville, Generalissimo Franco had put General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano y Sierra, an officer so strongly Republican that he was forced to flee Spain during the reign of King Alfonso. Last week, although Generalissimo Franco had ordered all his forces to fly the flag of the Republic (which was the same as that flown by the Madrid Government they were fighting), General Queipo de Llano, as a matter of popular expediency, advised that King Alfonso's red, yellow and red Bourbon banner be permitted to float over the Revolution in the south.

In the north, still more paradoxically, General Mola, who served under several of King Alfonso's Cabinets and is supposed to have the most Monarchist leanings of any commander in the Revolution, continued his refusal to have anything to do with Alfonso XIII's heir Prince Juan, whom he recently sent packing out of Spain (TIME, Aug. 17). The exiled King, who is at pains to keep repeating that he never abdicated, was at Dellach in Austria for the mournful second anniversary last week of the death of his youngest son, Gonzalo, in a motor accident. Said he: "I am in deepest mourning over the events in Spain." Savage Sieges. Main fighting of the week was a series of attacks by General Mola in efforts to dislodge Government forces from Irun and San Sebastian, and the grim advance toward Madrid of Generalissimo Franco's columns of Spanish Foreign Legionnaires and Moors, but the most desperate and cruel conflicts were at Badajoz, besieged by the Revolution, and at Government-besieged Oviedo, where in 1926 Generalissimo Franco was married.

Inside Badajoz, according to reports from Lisbon, the defending Government forces held as hostages all Rightists on whom they could lay hands, threatening to butcher them if the city was bombed.

Planes of the Revolution bombed it nonetheless, and refugees said the Government forces promptly carried out the atrocity they had threatened, not wasting bullets, but hacking their victims and burning them on pyres. These were still smoking when Badajoz was finally stormed and breached by troops of the Revolution, who took vengeance by executing 1,500 Government adherents, most of whom asked for and received last rites administered by priests who had entered Badajoz with the Revolution.

Meanwhile the siege of Oviedo, which bloodthirsty Asturian coal miners had been trying to take ever since the Revolution began, proceeded last week with famed Colonel Miguel Aranda desperately at bay. It was he who under Government orders two years ago suppressed the Asturian miners' own attempt at a Marxian uprising, and they were out to get Colonel Aranda even though in so doing they imperiled the lives of their own families in the city he was defending. With the siege at its hottest, the Colonel abandoned the usual tactic of trying to defend a central stronghold, distributed the forces of the Revolution in various parts of the city and dared the Asturian miners to come on. On came the miners, chiefly armed with homemade dynamite bombs. On cheap cigars clenched in their teeth, they lighted the fuses of their dynamite bombs and flung them into every house they suspected of containing soldiers of the Revolution. Meanwhile the soldiers of the Revolution sniped skillfully, picked off many a miner and still held part of Oviedo after a whole month of savage siege.

Generalissimo Franco this week paid a return call by air on General Mola at Burgos where both appeared on a balcony with the snowy-bearded, inconsequential figurehead of the Revolution, Provisional President Miguel Cabanellas, later prayed in the Cathedral at the shrine of heroic El Cid, Eleventh Century Savior of Spain. Said Mola: "We do not want Spain split by class hatreds. We will stop exploitation of the workers who today are suffering misery born of discontent and stockmarket manipulation. Spain's national economy was ruined by greed."

Alcazar and Alhambra. In broiling summer Madrid were scarcely any Ambassadors or Ministers when the Revolution broke. Of the diplomatic underlings left to run things none has hung on more tenaciously in Madrid than U. S. Third Secretary Eric Wendelin, buttressed by his spunky wife. Last week even the brave diplomatic pups of the Great Powers were about to be whistled home. To 156 U. S. citizens still in Madrid, most of whom have commercial interests there, gallant Mr. Wendelin gave notice that at any moment he might be obliged to close the U. S. Embassy and that every U. S. citizen who had not left the Capital before then would remain at his own risk.

First news service really to cope with the Revolution was Universal which soared over censorship with an airplane ferrying regularly from Madrid to Paris the dispatches of tough old Correspondent Karl H. von Wiegand, who appears to enjoy risking his life on everything from the Graf Zeppelin to Ethiopia (TIME, Jan. 27). Some 40 miles from crass and modern Madrid is mellow and historic old Toledo, and out to it went Hearst's von Wiegand escorted by Red Militia. Wrote he afterwards: "A militiaman with a .32 calibre, nickelplated revolver in his hand stood at my side in a narrow and barricaded street only 180 yards from the Alcazar [fortress of Toledo]...From the battered, smoke-begrimed windows of the magnificent fortress the intermittent bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire, replying to the Radical Government besiegers, seem to have aroused the deepest hatred of the Red elements. ... As we passed the Archbishop's Palace one of my Militia escorts remarked, 'I'd like to hang the Archbishop to a tree!'. . . The rebels are said to have taken 60 horses with them into the Alcazar and their only food now is horseflesh, potatoes and wheat." Into the Alcazar in 1907 as a 14-year-old cadet went Generalissimo Franco to study in its Infantry School.

In the Hall of Ambassadors of the Alhambra in Granada squatted last week marooned U. S. tourists watching troops of the Revolution taking over the proletarian quarter below. A Government air bomb fell in the garden of the Hotel Washington Irving in which six U. S. tourists were staying. Only Spaniards were killed. One, an expectant mother, convulsively gave birth to two dead babes as she expired. Later the Vicomte de Sibour, with a plane borrowed from London's Drygoods Sportsman H. Gordon Selfridge Jr. (TIME, Aug. 17), began taking off tourists, four at a time. To rescue the 19 remaining, General Queipo de Llano sent from Seville a giant German Junkers transport, escorted by a scouting plane. This outfit safely evacuated Granada's U. S. tourists, flying them to Seville, whence they jounced by bus to Cadiz, boarded the U. S. cruiser Oklahoma and were taken to British Gibraltar, mostly dead broke. French tourists in Granada were not permitted to leave by officers of the Revolution, keenly suspicious that the French "Popular Front" Government of Leon Blum is helping the Spanish "Popular Front" Cabinet in Madrid.

"Private Aid?" In perfect agony at Paris all week was new Premier Blum, as French politics split wide open into factions, respectively, for the Spanish Government and for the Spanish Revolution.

Premier Blum heartily wished Spain would float away to some other planet while the French Chamber of Deputies adjourned and the Bank of France was reorganized, but he and Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos had to do something about Spain and kept pressing upon the Great Powers their round-robin resolution for absolute neutrality (TIME, Aug. 17). Benito Mussolini declared that Italy could adhere to it only if all powers signatory to it would bind themselves not only to refuse "State aid" to Spain but to prevent "private aid" as well from reaching Madrid. In a rage at this, some 30 Red and Pink Deputies and Senators of France announced that they had each privately contributed 50 francs ($3.30) to aid the Spanish Government, appealed for as many more private contributions as they could get and defied Socialist Premier Blum to do anything about it. With numerous German and Italian planes already fighting as the Revolution's strongest air arm, the Spanish Government was sold last week a few French bombers and pursuit planes.

At week's end Premier Blum was still in a quandary, and about the only help he had been able to muster was a British Foreign Office statement saying that "His Majesty's Government are continuing to give the fullest support to the efforts of the French Government" and advised "maintenance of a strict, impartial attitude if the unhappy events in Spain are to be prevented from having serious repercussions elsewhere." Simultaneously Whitehall buzzed with rumors that Army, Navy and Air Force experts were actually studying whether intervention by an expeditionary force to Spain may become "requisite." For centuries it has been London's basic policy that Britain must oppose whichever power on the Continent is strongest, lest it overwhelm her in the end. Today an important Cabinet faction close to Squire Baldwin holds that "the strongest European power" is now not any one country but the international Socialist-Communist forces of the "Popular Front" which have taken both France and Spain by ballot and are trying in a dozen countries for more sweeping victories. Britons knew what to think last week when, although there has been no battle in Madrid, 733 political opponents of the Government were revealed to have been killed by the Red militia and the tobacco, oil and other important Spanish industries were turned over by the Government "to the workers."

Spunk. It looked like war last week between President Roosevelt's Coast Guard cutter Cayusa (which Ambassador Bowers used as a "Floating Embassy" before he went to Hendaye in France) and Generalissimo Franco's cruiser Almirante Cervera. As the Cayuga was taking refugees aboard at San Sebastian, the cruiser radioed: "We will open fire on you if you allow Government adherents to escape among the refugees."

"Thank you!" tartly radioed back the Cayuga. When the Almirante Cervera's eight 6-in. guns moved as though taking aim, the cutter unlimbered her one 5-in. gun, her two six-pounders. After this bit of spunk from the minute Cayuga, the stately Almirante Cervera without further interchange steamed out into the Gulf of Gascony and over the horizon.

*Transatlantic Flyer Ramon Franco vexed King Alfonso by joining the Revolution of 1931 which unseated His Majesty, became a near-Communist Deputy, was appointed Air Attache of the Spanish Embassy in Washington. From that job Madrid fired him last week as a slap at his brother.

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