WAR IN SPAIN: Nine to Nyon

Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s northern army pecked gingerly at the remnant of Asturian militiamen still holding out at Gijón on the Bay of Biscay last week, otherwise Spain was as quiet as the tomb it is rapidly becoming. From Madrid there was no word, on the Aragon front both sides seemed exhausted after the Leftist capture of Belchite. The war was going on, but the real scene of action had switched to a small sedate town on the shore of Lake Geneva—Nyon.

As self-assuredly as though potent international conferences were an everyday occurrence, Mayor Schranz of 5,000-soul Nyon welcomed conferees on “piracy” in the Mediterranean to an E-shaped table in his flower-filled municipal assembly hall, remarking that some Swiss rivers empty into the Inland Sea. Nine nations were represented—Britain, France, Russia, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria, Egypt—and they were there to do something about the submarines that since the middle of August have preyed on neutral shipping attempting to run food, munitions and principally oil into Leftist Spanish ports. Very quickly French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos took the chair.

“We are dealing with governmental piracy!” cried Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinoff soon after the curtain rose. “Everyone knows its aims and the name of the State that is responsible is on everyone’s lips [Italy], but it cannot be mentioned in this hall!”

There is a vast difference in the conduct of international conferences that are determined on action and the usual gingerly debates of the League of Nations. Sea-potent Britain was obviously going to call this Conference’s tunes and she had sent to Geneva her hot-tempered, obstinate Foreign Secretary, Mr. Anthony Eden. The British plan he brought had already been approved by France, and in short order this week the other conferees sat down and signed it. It provided that “neutral shipping lanes,” in general synonymous with the present Mediterranean shipping lanes, be established and patrolled by the fleets of the nine Nyon nations— Britain and France doing most of the work. Although Britain was willing to court Italy by offering her the patrol of the Tyrrhenian Sea, the space between Corsica, Sardinia and Italy’s shin, Italy indignantly rejected the offer as “unequal.” Submarines attacking neutral merchant ships in these patrolled lanes, “contrary to the rules of international law as laid down in the London Naval Treaty of 1930” would be immediately hunted down and sunk.

Every British naval officer knows that the only real protection against submarines lies in convoying with destroyers and submarine chasers the entire length of the merchant ship’s passage, yet the idea of convoying was scarcely more than mentioned last week at Nyon. And even in the patrolled lanes, only those submarines attacking contrary to the 1930 London Treaty rules—i. e., those which do not rise to the surface, display their true flag and give a freighter’s crew time to take to the boats—would be counted outlaw. “Russia,” snorted Comrade Litvinoff just before Russia signed, “expected something strong and vigorous. …”

But Britain and France immediately ordered out additional warships, were expected to have as many as 100 ships shortly in action, the British contributing 40 destroyers.

Imperceptibly interest was already shifting from the tables of the diplomats at Nyon to blue Mediterranean waters at a spot near Cartagena. There Leftist Spanish divers claimed to have established contact with a “pirate” submarine paralyzed on the sea bottom by depth charges.

Spain’s diving Leftists presently clapped on iron censorship. The pirate crew, depending on their nationality, seemed destined to be either flaunted before the world or obliterated from the news as drastically as possible.