Again, Kleber

In the past month, Spain's civil war has briskly emerged from spring torpor. Once again Rightist shells screamed over Madrid in bombardments lasting several hours each week--and one night of shelling was the worst Madrid had suffered in seven months. Once again the Leftists launched counteroffensives of some consequence, and the one against Rightist positions in Huesca was still battering away last week. Anarchists at last had a Spanish war legend worthy of the highest traditions of Anarchism. They insist that the death of Rightist General Emilio Mola in an airplane crash as his forces advanced upon Bilbao (TIME, June 14) was "really no accident," but due to the fact that Mola's pilot was secretly an anarchist, suicidally wrecked the plane to kill Mola. Finally there was fierce, sporadic fighting on all sectors around Madrid but the month closed with a stalemate in status quo as the Rightists finally took Bilbao (TIME, June 28).

Last week warships of Britain and France, steaming up and down the Basque coast, had some humanitarian success scaring off Spanish Rightist warships from molesting the craft upon which Spanish Leftists were escaping as best they might. But those fleeing from, captured Bilbao along the coast road toward Santander were treated every few hours to bombardment of the road by such Rightist warships as the Almirante Cervera and Velasco (see map). Torrential rains made the road a sloshy ribbon of mud upon which people screamed, died and were blown to bits as shells came hurtling in from the sea.

As always happens after a big defeat, the fall of Bilbao caused the routed Basque and Asturian forces to be given a unified command, under General Gamir Uribarri last week. He thus had some 110,000 men wherewith to defend Santander, a larger force than that of advancing Rightist General Jose Fidel Davila, but markedly inferior in munitions and warcraft. Leftist propaganda declared: "Basque prisoners are marched through the streets of Bilbao taunted and in degradation." Rightist propaganda announced: "In Santander 15,000 rioters have seized Government buildings and proclaimed a Communist Libertarian Republic."

v Meanwhile at Bilbao and in the 15-mile swath of Rightist advance last week the Leftists had lost the richest iron mines, the largest smelters and steel mills and some of the finest munitions plants in all Spain. As any sophisticate of the armament business would expect, correspondents found that the manufacture of projectiles had not even been interrupted. The whirling lathes whined on, turning out gleaming 75-millimetre shells which would now be paid for by the Rightists, whereas a few days before they had been paid for by Leftists. Not only did Rightists attacking planes never bomb these munitions plants, but the evacuating Leftists left most of them intact, confined themselves to such melodramatic but relatively unimportant gestures as dynamiting the enormous Buenos Aires cantilever bridge, opened at Bilbao only a month ago after costing the city 20,000,000 pesos. To replace that will make plenty of jobs, as smart Basque proletarians well knew.

"It is most gratifying," boomed the Spanish manager of Bilbao's largely German-owned Siemens electric works who had skipped to the mountains for a few days while the city was taken. "Most gratifying! On returning to my office this morning, I find everything just as before." Undamaged too was the Firestone Hispania tire factory near Galdacano, a concern in which 75% of the capital is Spanish, the rest U. S. Worst trouble was that none of the paper money in Bilbao was any good, its Rightist captors insisting that only their paper had value, and supplies of this had not yet arrived. Temporarily the Rightists distributed food free, a form of propaganda swallowed with sulky looks by many Leftists. Local chambers of commerce bustled about fixing up temporary means of doing business.

Visiting U. S. intellectuals, emerging from recent tours of Leftist Spain, have stressed the present efficiency of native commanders and troops, declared they saw nothing of General Emilio Kleber (TIME, April 5), the hard-bitten proletarian warmaker dispatched from Moscow when it seemed Madrid was about to fall. Some have hopefully opined, "Kleber may have left Spain." Last week, according to United Press, General Kleber openly assumed command on the Huesca front northeast of Madrid. Same day Leftist war planes went into action, dueling above Huesca province in one of the great air battles of the war. At one time more than 100 ships were going for each other in the sky, ten were shot down, and it had been sufficiently demonstrated that the Leftists have a fine stable of aircraft in reserve which Moscow is saving to defend Madrid rather than wasting them in the defense of Bilbao and Santander.

Concealment of Kleber's whereabouts has been a Valencia tactic from the start. Few days before United Press announced Kleber in command on the Huesca front, assorted Leftist dispatches, while omitting to say who was actually in command, described a General Cahue as "killed," said his successor, Hungarian Communist General Matei Jalka Lukacs, "died when a shell hit his moving car," reported the Huesca command had passed to an "Italian radical," Adriano Nathan, then described him as dead with a bullet through his head.

At Madrid last week the Leftists let alone the suburban Medical Clinic building held by Rightists under which early in the week they exploded bombs claimed to have killed 750. "There is no need to take the ruins," explained one of Madrid General Jose Miaja's staff.

Spain's Leftist Government last week staged intensive hunts for Rightist sympathizers and spies in Valencia and Barcelona, discovered in cellars and hideaways a total of some 3,500 bombs. "We shall be inexorable toward [Leftist] cowards and defeatists," announced the Government. Britain and France the Government characterized as "cowardly democracies which watched unmoved the savage destruction of a sovereign country [the Basque region] and which tolerate that cynical neutrality patrol which only serves to insure for foreign Fascism immunity for transporting its armies of ruffians."

In efforts this week to cut the Madrid-Valencia highway, Rightist Italian tanks grappled with Leftist Russian tanks along a 15-mile front in what Madrid radio called "the biggest tank battle since the World War." Madrid complained that the Rightist air force has been "doubled" by recent arrivals of Germans and Italians, declared that 15,000 more Italian soldiers had just been landed officered by members of the Italian General Staff. Meanwhile seven German warships left their anchorages in Portuguese waters (see map, p. 15), steaming past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, where they were joined by the Admiral Graf Spee which arrived from Germany to replace the recently bombed Deutschland. London rumors had high naval officers in Berlin protesting to Der Fuehrer that in sending his best ships into Mediterranean waters dominated by France and Britain he was risking that they might be "trapped." If there were such protests, Adolf Hitler ignored them, relying upon heavy concentrations of Italian warships off the Balearics and Eastern Spain to wreck any trap which French naval concentrations at more distant Toulon and Bone might conceivably try to spring.

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