SPAIN: Storm in the Pyrenees

Generalissimo Franco was in trouble. From the French side of the Pyrenees, Spanish Republicans who had fought with the F.F.I, made raids into Spain. Bloody skirmishes flared in the mountains.

The Paris radio announced a new face on the streets of Perpignan, France—Diego Martinez-Barrio, last President of the Republican Cortes, lately a refugee in Latin America. Somehow he had come through the Allied blockade.

Angrily, Franco ordered the border shut. A division of his army moved into the raided region. Rumor said that the Spanish dictator might well use some 10,000 German soldiers who had escaped to Spain from France, that he had offered to help the Gaullist Government clean up “the Spanish Maquis problem.”

This week the Gaullist Government prudently withdrew all F.F.I, men from the Pyrenees border. But the French leftist press made no bones of its sympathy for the Spanish Republicans. And from Moscow came a powerful supporting voice. Said the influential War and the Working Class:

“The liquidation of the center of the fascist infection in Spain [is necessary] for the future security of Europe. . . . As he loses his main support—Hitlerite Germany—Franco looks to other forces for aid. One of his best allies is the Vatican. Pope Pius XII could be called Franco’s ‘godfather.’ “