WAR IN SPAIN: Rained Out

Intermittent, heavy spring rains last week put a damper on all large-scale attacks by both sides in Spain’s civil war. In the Pyrenees to the north snow turned mountain roads into slippery, slimy trails, prevented Rightist troops from making any appreciable gains. At week’s end

Rightist General Miguel Aranda, commanding the mud-sodden, zigzag line from Teruel to the Mediterranean, issued a “Fight, rain or no rain!” order but Rightist troops inched forward only five miles to take the town of Portell before being halted.

Meanwhile, in Barcelona, Author-Correspondent Vincent Sheean took advantage of the lull to get off a few fresh observations on the 22-month-old war. Most striking thing about the war to Sheean, who reached Spain only two months ago, is its incongruous combination of ultra-modern and primitive methods. The ultramodern: “Newfangled bombs, thermite, delayed-action fuses and the like, which are capable of greater destruction than any bombs hitherto used in war.” The primitive: “There are no proper trenches anywhere [with the exception of those outside Madrid]. The ditches and ravines in these dusty clay hills take the place of trenches and are sometimes supplemented by small dugouts along their sides. There are no ordnance or survey maps at all—Spain has never been surveyed. The only maps available are the tourist road maps put out by the big French companies, Michelin and Taride. It is a terrible thing to see an artillery or infantry operation in open country being carried on by a man who is only able to feel his way by means of a crude tourist road map. The ‘lines’ are very rough, there is no regular front at all. What you get is a number of concentrations at various points, with big gaps in between.” Three-quarters of the movements in the recent Leftist Aragón retreat took place “without the opposing infantrymen coming into contact at all,” observed Sheean.

The Leftists’ International Brigades, some of which lost three-fifths of their men and most of their officers in the Aragón retreat, are now reformed for service in the Catalonian, northern half of Leftist territory, reported Sheean. The 15th Brigade, which includes the U. S. Lincoln-Washington battalion, the Canadian and British battalions, is now commanded by a Croat, Colonel Chopic. Its political commissar, John Gates, is a little soft-spoken union organizer from New York. “The Americans in the brigade are about 75% to 80% Communists—a much higher percentage than in other brigades. In the British and Canadian battalions the percentage of Communists is much lower.” U. S. volunteers are still carrying on in the Leftist medical service and U. S.-donated ambulances, bearing such inscriptions as To the Spanish Republic from the Workers of Barre and Montpelier, Vermont, are still chugging about behind the lines.

“My general impression,” concluded Sheean, “is that Italy and Germany will have to make a renewed effort, a further expenditure of men, money and material, if they hope to win this war. The resistance of the Spanish [Leftist] people is incalculable. The very babies raise their clenched fists in the air against the foreign airplanes.”