Foreign News: Terrific Toledo

Nonetheless a farce for being the most spectacular siege of the entire Spanish Civil War, the bloody and infernal affair of the Toledo Alcázar boomed and belched and banged last week toward an end thoroughly Spanish, thoroughly heroic. The Alcázar is the West Point of Spain. The farce began on July 21 when the Red radio of Madrid announced that Commandant José Moscardó and his 1,400 soldiers and spruce Spanish cadets had surrendered to 10,000 peasants under radical General Riquelmo. This broadcast was a midriff laugh to all Spanish officers who know the stuff of which their West Pointers are made. With a rabble overrunning the town of Toledo, some 400 middle class women and children sought shelter with the cadets in the Alcázar, an ancient fortress-castle with walls six feet thick built on one of the most commanding and impregnable piles of mountainous rock in Spain.

On July 30 the commander of Toledo’s new Red workers militia, one Comrade Daniel Ovalle, admitted that the Whites still held the Alcázar, asked whether he should shell it. On Aug. 4 tentatively and one by one at intervals Reds popped 60 4-in. shells at the Alcázar without result, telephoned into the fortress to tell Commandant Moscardó: “We warn you heavier shells will come.” On Aug. 11 cadets shot a cavalry mount for meat and mobsters standing at a safe distance shrieked at the military academy: “You fools! Why don’t you surrender?”

The Portuguese, sympathetic with Spain’s Whites, kept broadcasting to the Alcázar cadets from Lisbon: “The world is breathless before your heroism! If you can hold out you can have full revenge on your tormentors. Moroccan troops have instructions not to leave a soul alive in Toledo! They are within nine miles of the city butchering Marxist villagers.” This false claim made mirth for the Reds who also guffawed when White Seville broadcast on Aug. 31 the lie that White “Colonel Yague is at the gates of Toledo!”

On Sept. 1 Toledo mobsters under orders from Madrid broke ground for subterranean mining of the Alcázar and talked of blowing it up with “20 tons of TNT.” On Sept. 3 a lieutenant of the Red Militia, apparently in his cups and wearing a gaudy bathrobe, staggered toward the Alcázar shouting that he wanted to rescue a Red comrade who had fallen wounded just outside its walls. “All right!” called an Alcázar cadet, “Come and rescue him, so long as you leave us his gun.” This bargain the bathrobed rescuer scrupulously kept. On Sept. 5 the calibre of Red guns picking at the Alcázar was up to six inches, but its six-foot walls stood firm. Next day a White plane flew over the fortress, dropped large packages of foodstuffs. Red batteries finally splintered to bits an ornate door frame of the Alcázar known as “The Portal of the Blood of Christ.”

On Sept. 7 United Pressman Irving B. Ptlaum flashed from Toledo: “The ancient Alcázar fortress is being pounded to bits tonight.” Added United Pressman Jan Yindrich on Sept. 8: “So terrific is it that, watching from a distance of 100 yards, I twice have been knocked down a flight of stairs by the concussion of explosions alone.” Mr. Yindrich retired to a comfortable vantage point and “there, sitting in an arm chair, I saw the bombardment. . . . The shelling had blasted away quite half a tower of the Alcázar and the pile of rubbish in the patio had grown higher. . . . Suddenly there was one great explosion which shook the city. … So terrific was its concussion that I was thrown backward from my chair and crashed head over heels downstairs to the floor below.”

This, however, was not the explosion of “20 tons of TNT” but only an amateurish preliminary Red blast. On Sept. 9 the Madrid Cabinet sent a staff officer and onetime Alcázar cadet Major Juan Rojo, to Toledo. After some telephoning into the Alcázar he approached it waving a large white flag. Cadets let the Major in after blindfolding him, and he shouted the names of personal friends whom he thought might be in the Alcázar. None answered and on being led before Commandant Moscardó, Major Rojo begged him plaintively to surrender, crying at last “I offer to take three of your cadets on a personally conducted tour of the Guadarrama Mountains and the entire countryside around Toledo so they can return and tell you that no army friendly to you is anywhere in sight.”

“We will hold out!” shot back the besieged Commandant as quoted by the Major afterward. “With our forces at the gates of Madrid you will be the ones to surrender. However you can send us a priest in case we need last rites.”

The priest, also blindfolded, improved his visit to the Alcázar by whispering to those to whom he ministered that at least they ought to surrender the women and children. None of these raised a voice against the Commandant when he declared “No surrender! Whatever befalls myself and my men will befall us all.” Same day three White planes darted out of the blue to hearten the Alcázar, dropped bombs on the City of Toledo and sent Mayor Pérez Agua dashing in such headlong flight that he tripped over two pigs in the courtyard of the City Hall. Few minutes later Toledo firemen found a cradle perched perilously on half a bedroom floor, the other half having been carried away by an air bomb, while the baby continued to suck contentedly a rubber comforter.

On Sept. 13 new Proletarian Premier Francisco Largo Caballero went down from Madrid for a look at the scarred but stubborn Alcázar, accompanied by Chilean Ambassador Aurelio Nuñez Morgado, Dean of the Diplomatic Corps, who aspired to get into the fortress and make Peace. Said the Premier: “This is war!” Said the Ambassador: “If I am permitted to enter the Alcázar it will be the most emotional moment of my life.” Relaxing his Dictator frown, Premier Largo Caballero told Ambassador Nuñez Morgado: “My Government wishes you luck.”

An extra loudspeaker was set up by Reds facing the fortress and connected to a microphone into which the Ambassador spoke at a safe distance: “ATTENTION ALCÁZAR! The Ambassador of the Republic of Chile, accredited to the Spanish Republic, wishes to speak to you! If you agree to this request signal with a white flag from the second balcony of the tower facing the Zocodover Square. Meanwhile the Government suspends hostilities. ATTENTION ALCÁZAR!” Five times the Ambassador thus adroitly asked the Commandant to show the white flag of surrender. Finally Alcázar cadets, who had been under siege for 54 days, replied with one shot at the squawking loudspeaker.

Three days later the Chilean was still appealing to the Alcázar without result. “If I succeed,” he declared, “it will be the success not of the Ambassador of Chile alone, but of the entire Diplomatic Corps, which I have the honor to represent as Dean!” By this time nearly three weeks of Red mining and sapping had stowed away under the rocky base of the Alcázar not the “20 tons of TNT” but something like four tons of miscellaneous explosives equipped with electric detonators 200 feet long. In Madrid the Cabinet, dramatically convened, agreed with Premier Largo Caballero that they must take what they called “the terrible decision” to order the detonating buttons pressed. All citizens of Toledo were ordered to quit their homes lest they go up in the GRAND BLAST, advertised to kill every one of the 1,400 cadets and 400 women and children in the Alcázar.

Down next morning at 6:15 a. m. went the handles of the detonators and afternoon papers throughout the world shrieked such page-wide headlines as: COMMUNISTS BLOW UP ALCÁZAR! — NEARLY ALL DEFENDERS FEARED DEAD! An entire trainload of additional Red militia had arrived from Madrid to help the Toledo Militia swarm in over the ruins. To make the assault safer Red artillery poured a 15-minute barrage into the clouds of dust and smoke rising over the Alcázar. Then 1,500 militia led by four militia girls surged forward expecting merely to wade in White blood. As they neared Spain’s West Point, suddenly and amazingly indomitable cadets poked the noses of machine guns from around splintered crags of the Alcázar, pressed the triggers and started a chug-chug of bullets most of which seemed to go low and catch the militia in the legs. As the Red charge broke and failed on the 59th day of the siege, its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Luis Barcelo, was carried off the field with a bullet in his leg, still crying with Spanish braggadocio: “Everything is going fine!” Explained one of his friends, Spanish Muralist Luis Quintanilla, Ernest Hemingway’s good friend (TIME, Dec. 3, 1934), who has now become a militia major: “We cannot take a fortress like the Alcázar in five minutes!”

Even West Point spirit has its limits of heroic possibility and this week things looked black for the Alcázar cadets and Commandant José Moscardó as the Madrid Cabinet in a frenzy of frustration took another “terrible decision.” This was to order to Toledo thousands of gallons of gasoline, to be squirted by means of fire engines into Spain’s West Point, and, by setting it alight, flood the Alcázar with searing flame until the last cadet, woman and child and the two babies born during the siege were burned out in Spain’s most savage and futile farce.

Still busy according to latest despatches was the Ambassador of the Republic of Chile, Dean of the Diplomatic Corps. Telegraphed he to the Council of the League of Nations in Geneva: “The attack which is being carried out at this moment with dynamite, shrapnel and gasoline gives an infernal aspect to this operation of war. An armistice of 24 hours may mean the lives of the women and children. I beg His Excellency the Spanish Foreign Minister to have these women and children who in the Alcázar are locked on the brink of Death placed in the care of the Diplomatic Corps.”

Meanwhile sociable United Press Representatives Ptlaum & Yindrich circulated in Toledo among “militia men and women mad with excitement.” Cabled Ptlaum: “Everyone had a rumor. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, what was happening or what was going to happen.

Some of the youths and girls asked me if I had a camera and could take their pictures. They wanted to pose before the smoking ruins. … A blonde militia girl came out cursing. . . . She looked beautiful in her blue trousers with her blonde hair, wet, falling over her shoulders.” Yindrich meanwhile found a “pretty girl” from Buenos Aires amiably acting as interpreter for a Soviet cinema cameraman who had arrived from Moscow to film the fall of the Alcázar for worldwide Communist purposes. According to Ptlaum and Yindrich, net result of the GRAND BLAST operation was apparently the death of not a single White, the deaths of some 50 militia.

Gasoline squirting by Reds began with a frantic will, for meanwhile a White army under Generalissimo Francisco Franco had at last decisively taken Talavera de la Reina (see p. 19) and, advancing five miles per day, was within 25 miles of the Alcázar when torches were applied and gasoline blazed high. Cheering wildly a Red column swept up the rocky base of the fortress—only to be driven back by sickening gasoline fumes while the blaze soon guttered out on the rocks. To save his Red face after this fiasco, General José Asensio of the Red militia started talking about how sorry he was for the White women and young cadets in the rock-hewn cellars of the Alcázar from which no Red efforts seemed able to dislodge them.

Added General Asensio as he sat with the other Militia officers in arm chairs placed in the street behind a barricade of sandbags: “We of the Government are taking great care to keep losses as low as possi-ble. They are now desperate men in the Alcázar fighting for their lives without food, water, or sleep—they’ll have to surrender shortly.”