"A Long War"

In Valencia last week the six-month-old Government of greying, pugnacious Premier Francisco Largo Caballero fell. In the midst of the political crisis a flight of Rightist warplanes swept in from the open Mediterranean raining light bombs. They wrecked a streetcar, smashed windows, killed the cook and wounded the doorman of the British Embassy.

In their offices. Valencia's politicos paid little attention. Air raids were an everyday matter: here was a different kind of crisis. Everybody expected Premier Largo Caballero to succeed himself, everybody knew why he had forced out his own Cabinet.

"This is going to be a long war," said he last week. "I must have a stronger Government."

The entire effectiveness of the Leftist Government has been in the series of compromises making it possible for a mixed salad of political parties to work in some sort of harmony. Immediately behind last week's Cabinet crisis was the brief Anarchist revolt in Barcelona of fortnight ago (TIME. May 17). Premier Largo Caballero and President Luis Companys of Catalonia are both secretly determined to put the Anarchists, most hot-headed of Leftist groups, in their places, but the Anarchists are politically potent. The mere possibility of an unfavorable Cabinet revision caused the Socialist . labor union, U.G.T.. to announce:

"We shall not collaborate in any sort of government that may be formed unless it is formed with the identical groups as the outgoing one and with Largo Caballero continuing both as Premier and War Minister."

But noisy Largo Caballero kept neither job. At week's end the Anarchists were left out and Largo Caballero remained silently aloof while a new Cabinet was formed by stocky. 48-year-old Dr. Juan Negrin, Socialist Finance Minister under Premier Largo Caballero. The new Cabinet, reduced from 19 to nine members, was immediately accepted by President Manuel Azana, but the Anarcho-Syndicalist Union (the C.N.T.) declared it would "not collaborate." Madrid's defender, capable General Jose Miaja, avoided the whole row.

"To me it is nothing," said he. "I am not a politician. As soldiers we are all antiFascists and we will continue fighting until Fascism is destroyed."

He did not do much fighting last week. Every front but Bilbao remained in a stalemate. . Around Bilbao the German-Italian-Rightist ring crept closer and closer but still the Basques held out with deeds of incredible valor, sacrificing thousands in desperate counter-attacks and cheering each other with the thought that their grandfathers had held Bilbao through a siege of 125 days in the Carlist War of 1874. What made their chances blackest was an almost total lack of airplanes to oppose the German bombers of General Franco. The massacre of Guernica was sharp in every mind. Should General Franco be advised to repeat that mass bombing of a civil population there would be no way of stopping him. Reconnoitering on the Basque Front, 18 Rightist planes became lost in fog, came down perforce in southern France. Allowing them to return, French authorities recorded officially for the first time how preponderant in Spanish skies are U. S. makes of planes--twelve of the strayed ships were Boeing fighters.

Off Almeria the British destroyer Hunter, on patrol duty, hit or was hit by something that pushed in her bow, killed eight British seamen, wounded 14. Was it a mine, or was it, as Almeria fishermen are said to have insisted, a torpedo from a German submarine whose periscope had been observed? International complications from this might be so grave that British admiralty officials "suggested," even before a committee of inquiry was constituted, that the Hunter had hit a mine. With great secrecy the Hunter, bow awash, was towed stern foremost into Gibraltar, locked in a closely-guarded drydock, where gold-visored staff officers prepared to go over her plate by plate.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.