WAR IN SPAIN: Behind the Lines

Some 1,500 grim-faced prisoners in the Rightists’ San Cristóbal fortress at Pamplona,30 miles from the French border, suddenly attacked a few of their guards, connived with the others, and last week succeeded in executing a mass jailbreak. In a few days, posses of Rightist Civil Guards rounded up 600 fugitives, killed scores more in clashes in the dense thickets of the Navarre border territory. A few prisoners managed to escape to France and there revealed that many of those who took part in the escape were not Leftist prisoners of war but Rightists, members of the Falange Española, clapped in jail for attempting a revolt against Rightist Generalissimo Franco.

Meanwhile, from behind Rightist lines last week came the report that many U. S. volunteers captured earlier in the war had been summarily shot without trial, most of them by grizzled, hard-boiled Legionnaires of the Tercio de Extranjeros (Spanish Foreign Legion). The Legionnaires, all Spaniards but part of the Rightists’ Moroccan army corps, are Franco’s shock troops and thus frequently bang up against the U. S. and foreign fighters, shock troops for the Barcelona Government. The Italians, more lenient with their captives, were reported to have insisted on a Rightist guarantee that U. S. and other International Brigade prisoners taken by the Italian legions on the recent Aragon march to the sea be convicted before a military tribunal before being shot.

From the Leftist side in Spain, New York Times Correspondent Lawrence A. Fernsworth, temporarily in Marseille, reported last week that agents of the Leftist military police, dissatisfied with the slowness of civil judicial authorities in dispatching alleged members of Barcelona’s “Fifth Column” (Franco supporters within the city), recently “started to take the law into their own hands by seizing prisoners at night and executing them in isolated spots. They had executed between 20 and 30 persons before their activities were ended.”