Balloons Burst

Driving southward behind the heaviest prolonged artillery and air bombardment put down in Spain's two-year-old civil war, Rightist forces of Generalissimo Franco, aiming for Valencia, last week burst and flattened a Leftist balloon-shaped salient of some 200 sq. mi. in their lines, advanced to within 34 miles north-west of their goal.

For two months, the balloon, billowing up in the Teruel-to-the-Mediterranean front, has been in Leftist hands. Last week, unable to stand up under the downpour of shells, bald-domed General Jose Miaja, commander-in-chief on the Leftists' southern front, inched his troops backward, holed up in new trenches dug across the neck of the balloon in the rugged Sierra Espadan Mountains. Against this straightened, bristling front line of barbed wire, concrete machine-gun emplacements running from just northwest of Viver, 34 miles from Valencia on the Teruel-Sagunto road, to the seacoast 30 miles away, the Rightists at week's end hurled their full force, but at last reports had failed to breach the line at any spot. To prevent General Miaja from withdrawing long-inactive troops scattered along southern Spain's far-flung battle line for the defense of Valencia, the Rightists' famed radiorating General Queipo de Llano, commander-in-chief of southern Rightist Spain, was last week ordered to drive against another Leftist balloon-shaped salient. This balloon, 3,125 sq. mi. of the rich, mineral-producing Estremadura region, bulged into Rightist, lines north of Cordoba and extended to within 50 miles of the Portuguese border. This week, as military observers had long expected, one knife thrust through thinly held Leftist lines did the trick. The balloon burst, leaving the Rightists in possession of several thousand prisoners, 5,000 head of cattle and the strategic copper, iron and lead-mining centre of Castuera.

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