Terrific Toledo

Nonetheless a farce for being the most spectacular siege of the entire Spanish Civil War, the bloody and infernal affair of the Toledo Alcazar boomed and belched and banged last week toward an end thoroughly Spanish, thoroughly heroic. The Alcazar is the West Point of Spain. The farce began on July 21 when the Red radio of Madrid announced that Commandant Jose Moscardo and his 1,400 soldiers and spruce Spanish cadets had surrendered to 10,000 peasants under radical General Riquelmo. This broadcast was a midriff laugh to all Spanish officers who know the stuff of which their West Pointers are made. With a rabble overrunning the town of Toledo, some 400 middle class women and children sought shelter with the cadets in the Alcazar, an ancient fortress-castle with walls six feet thick built on one of the most commanding and impregnable piles of mountainous rock in Spain.

On July 30 the commander of Toledo's new Red workers militia, one Comrade Daniel Ovalle, admitted that the Whites still held the Alcazar, asked whether he should shell it. On Aug. 4 tentatively and one by one at intervals Reds popped 60 4-in. shells at the Alcazar without result, telephoned into the fortress to tell Commandant Moscardo: "We warn you heavier shells will come." On Aug. 11 cadets shot a cavalry mount for meat and mobsters standing at a safe distance shrieked at the military academy: "You fools! Why don't you surrender?"

The Portuguese, sympathetic with Spain's Whites, kept broadcasting to the Alcazar cadets from Lisbon: "The world is breathless before your heroism! If you can hold out you can have full revenge on your tormentors. Moroccan troops have instructions not to leave a soul alive in Toledo! They are within nine miles of the city butchering Marxist villagers." This false claim made mirth for the Reds who also guffawed when White Seville broadcast on Aug. 31 the lie that White "Colonel Yague is at the gates of Toledo!"

On Sept. 1 Toledo mobsters under orders from Madrid broke ground for subterranean mining of the Alcazar and talked of blowing it up with "20 tons of TNT." On Sept. 3 a lieutenant of the Red Militia, apparently in his cups and wearing a gaudy bathrobe, staggered toward the Alcazar shouting that he wanted to rescue a Red comrade who had fallen wounded just outside its walls. "All right!" called an Alcazar cadet, "Come and rescue him, so long as you leave us his gun." This bargain the bathrobed rescuer scrupulously kept. On Sept. 5 the calibre of Red guns picking at the Alcazar was up to six inches, but its six-foot walls stood firm. Next day a White plane flew over the fortress, dropped large packages of foodstuffs. Red batteries finally splintered to bits an ornate door frame of the Alcazar known as "The Portal of the Blood of Christ."

On Sept. 7 United Pressman Irving B. Ptlaum flashed from Toledo: "The ancient Alcazar fortress is being pounded to bits tonight." Added United Pressman Jan Yindrich on Sept. 8: "So terrific is it that, watching from a distance of 100 yards, I twice have been knocked down a flight of stairs by the concussion of explosions alone." Mr. Yindrich retired to a comfortable vantage point and "there, sitting in an arm chair, I saw the bombardment. . . . The shelling had blasted away quite half a tower of the Alcazar and the pile of rubbish in the patio had grown higher. . . . Suddenly there was one great explosion which shook the city. ... So terrific was its concussion that I was thrown backward from my chair and crashed head over heels downstairs to the floor below."

This, however, was not the explosion of "20 tons of TNT" but only an amateurish preliminary Red blast. On Sept. 9 the Madrid Cabinet sent a staff officer and onetime Alcazar cadet Major Juan Rojo, to Toledo. After some telephoning into the Alcazar he approached it waving a large white flag. Cadets let the Major in after blindfolding him, and he shouted the names of personal friends whom he thought might be in the Alcazar. None answered and on being led before Commandant Moscardo, Major Rojo begged him plaintively to surrender, crying at last "I offer to take three of your cadets on a personally conducted tour of the Guadarrama Mountains and the entire countryside around Toledo so they can return and tell you that no army friendly to you is anywhere in sight."

"We will hold out!" shot back the besieged Commandant as quoted by the Major afterward. "With our forces at the gates of Madrid you will be the ones to surrender. However you can send us a priest in case we need last rites."

The priest, also blindfolded, improved his visit to the Alcazar by whispering to those to whom he ministered that at least they ought to surrender the women and children. None of these raised a voice against the Commandant when he declared "No surrender! Whatever befalls myself and my men will befall us all." Same day three White planes darted out of the blue to hearten the Alcazar, dropped bombs on the City of Toledo and sent Mayor Perez Agua dashing in such headlong flight that he tripped over two pigs in the courtyard of the City Hall. Few minutes later Toledo firemen found a cradle perched perilously on half a bedroom floor, the other half having been carried away by an air bomb, while the baby continued to suck contentedly a rubber comforter.

On Sept. 13 new Proletarian Premier Francisco Largo Caballero went down from Madrid for a look at the scarred but stubborn Alcazar, accompanied by Chilean Ambassador Aurelio Nunez Morgado, Dean of the Diplomatic Corps, who aspired to get into the fortress and make Peace. Said the Premier: "This is war!" Said the Ambassador: "If I am permitted to enter the Alcazar it will be the most emotional moment of my life." Relaxing his Dictator frown, Premier Largo Caballero told Ambassador Nunez Morgado: "My Government wishes you luck."

An extra loudspeaker was set up by Reds facing the fortress and connected to a microphone into which the Ambassador spoke at a safe distance: "ATTENTION ALCAZAR! The Ambassador of the Republic of Chile, accredited to the Spanish Republic, wishes to speak to you! If you agree to this request signal with a white flag from the second balcony of the tower facing the Zocodover Square. Meanwhile the Government suspends hostilities. ATTENTION ALCAZAR!" Five times the Ambassador thus adroitly asked the Commandant to show the white flag of surrender. Finally Alcazar cadets, who had been under siege for 54 days, replied with one shot at the squawking loudspeaker.

Three days later the Chilean was still appealing to the Alcazar without result. "If I succeed," he declared, "it will be the success not of the Ambassador of Chile alone, but of the entire Diplomatic Corps, which I have the honor to represent as Dean!" By this time nearly three weeks of Red mining and sapping had stowed away under the rocky base of the Alcazar not the "20 tons of TNT" but something like four tons of miscellaneous explosives equipped with electric detonators 200 feet long. In Madrid the Cabinet, dramatically convened, agreed with Premier Largo Caballero that they must take what they called "the terrible decision" to order the detonating buttons pressed. All citizens of Toledo were ordered to quit their homes lest they go up in the GRAND BLAST, advertised to kill every one of the 1,400 cadets and 400 women and children in the Alcazar.

Down next morning at 6:15 a. m. went the handles of the detonators and afternoon papers throughout the world shrieked such page-wide headlines as: COMMUNISTS BLOW UP ALCAZAR! -- NEARLY ALL DEFENDERS FEARED DEAD! An entire trainload of additional Red militia had arrived from Madrid to help the Toledo Militia swarm in over the ruins. To make the assault safer Red artillery poured a 15-minute barrage into the clouds of dust and smoke rising over the Alcazar. Then 1,500 militia led by four militia girls surged forward expecting merely to wade in White blood. As they neared Spain's West Point, suddenly and amazingly indomitable cadets poked the noses of machine guns from around splintered crags of the Alcazar, pressed the triggers and started a chug-chug of bullets most of which seemed to go low and catch the militia in the legs. As the Red charge broke and failed on the 59th day of the siege, its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Luis Barcelo, was carried off the field with a bullet in his leg, still crying with Spanish braggadocio: "Everything is going fine!" Explained one of his friends, Spanish Muralist Luis Quintanilla, Ernest Hemingway's good friend (TIME, Dec. 3, 1934), who has now become a militia major: "We cannot take a fortress like the Alcazar in five minutes!"

Even West Point spirit has its limits of heroic possibility and this week things looked black for the Alcazar cadets and Commandant Jose Moscardo as the Madrid Cabinet in a frenzy of frustration took another "terrible decision." This was to order to Toledo thousands of gallons of gasoline, to be squirted by means of fire engines into Spain's West Point, and, by setting it alight, flood the Alcazar with searing flame until the last cadet, woman and child and the two babies born during the siege were burned out in Spain's most savage and futile farce.

Still busy according to latest despatches was the Ambassador of the Republic of Chile, Dean of the Diplomatic Corps. Telegraphed he to the Council of the League of Nations in Geneva: "The attack which is being carried out at this moment with dynamite, shrapnel and gasoline gives an infernal aspect to this operation of war. An armistice of 24 hours may mean the lives of the women and children. I beg His Excellency the Spanish Foreign Minister to have these women and children who in the Alcazar are locked on the brink of Death placed in the care of the Diplomatic Corps."

Meanwhile sociable United Press Representatives Ptlaum & Yindrich circulated in Toledo among "militia men and women mad with excitement." Cabled Ptlaum: "Everyone had a rumor. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, what was happening or what was going to happen.

Some of the youths and girls asked me if I had a camera and could take their pictures. They wanted to pose before the smoking ruins. ... A blonde militia girl came out cursing. . . . She looked beautiful in her blue trousers with her blonde hair, wet, falling over her shoulders." Yindrich meanwhile found a "pretty girl'' from Buenos Aires amiably acting as interpreter for a Soviet cinema cameraman who had arrived from Moscow to film the fall of the Alcazar for worldwide Communist purposes. According to Ptlaum and Yindrich, net result of the GRAND BLAST operation was apparently the death of not a single White, the deaths of some 50 militia.

Gasoline squirting by Reds began with a frantic will, for meanwhile a White army under Generalissimo Francisco Franco had at last decisively taken Talavera de la Reina (see p. 19) and, advancing five miles per day, was within 25 miles of the Alcazar when torches were applied and gasoline blazed high. Cheering wildly a Red column swept up the rocky base of the fortress--only to be driven back by sickening gasoline fumes while the blaze soon guttered out on the rocks. To save his Red face after this fiasco, General Jose Asensio of the Red militia started talking about how sorry he was for the White women and young cadets in the rock-hewn cellars of the Alcazar from which no Red efforts seemed able to dislodge them.

Added General Asensio as he sat with the other Militia officers in arm chairs placed in the street behind a barricade of sandbags: "We of the Government are taking great care to keep losses as low as possi- ble. They are now desperate men in the Alcazar fighting for their lives without food, water, or sleep--they'll have to surrender shortly."

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