Battlefield Tours

Most countries wait until after their wars are over to show off their battlefields. Last week, however, Generalissimo Francisco Franco's newly opened Tourist Office announced that, beginning July 1, it would conduct tours into what was a year ago a bloody battlefield, is now a peaceful, although still partially ruined, countryside.

Chief announced aim of the Franco Tourist Office was to demonstrate that back of the front all is normal in Rightist Spain. Unannounced aim: to get needed foreign exchange for Rightist Spain's war. Tour No. 1 will run from burned Irun, on the French border, to Oviedo, scene of 15 months' fierce siege. Tour No. 2 will go from Tuy to Santander. Both tours will include such partially or wholly destroyed towns as Eibar, Guernica, Durango, Gijon, each a scene of important military engagements in Generalissimo Franco's last year's wiping out of the autonomous Basque Republic of Euzkadi, ally of Leftist Spain. The nearest front nowadays will be 150 miles away.

All-inclusive cost of the tour will be from $40 to $45. Unmentioned in the tourist plans was the fact that all U. S., French, British passports are stamped NOT VALID FOR SPAIN, also the unlikelihood that none-too-friendly France would permit mere tourists to cross her borders to Rightist Spain. But where France might prove stubborn on this score, friendly pro-Fascist Portugal might well prove amenable.

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