Books: Peninsular Campaign

FREEDOM’S BATTLE-J. Alvarez del Vayo-Knopf ($3).

The Spanish Civil War, of which Senor del Vayo relates the essential history, was not merely a struggle of Democracy against Fascism, which it was often and correctly -but too simply-represented to be. It was the first campaign of World War II.

This fact was fully appreciated as early as 1936 by the British military historian, Liddell Hart. Senor del Vayo, who was Foreign Minister of the Spanish Republic, fought the campaign where it was really lost: in London, in Paris, and at Geneva.

At stake in the Spanish Civil War were strategic positions of deadly importance.

By the time the campaign was lost, British understatement had at least uncovered a certain Italian “threat” in the Mediterranean. But it had not publicized these totalitarian war axioms: 1) Italian control of the Balearic Islands would virtually kill French traffic with Africa, British traffic with Egypt; 2) German batteries at Ceuta would make Gibraltar untenable; 3) German operations from the ports of Vigo and El Ferrol on Spain’s northwest coast, from the Canary Islands and (if possible) the Azores, would imperil Allied sea lanes in the Atlantic.

The British-French policy of “nonintervention” in Spain could not have been maintained, del Vayo thinks, if France’s Premier Leon Blum had not been bluffed by a British threat to run out on France if French aid to the Spanish Republic provoked war with Germany. With painful calm, del Vayo recounts his vain efforts at Geneva to get even a British-French promise to work for”withdrawal of volunteers,” his experiences with buck-passers in Lon don and Paris, the frequent occasions on which Spanish notes or information to the two Governments were simply ignored.

Meanwhile Italian “legionaries” in Spain increased to a total of 100,000; German airmen and technicians, in relays of at least 10,000, used Spain as a training ground and laboratory; Italian bombers, by official count, carried out 86,420 air raids.

Of the three-year fight put up by the Spanish Republic, del Vayo, once a foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, writes with frankness as well as pride.

He concedes that in one respect democracy in Spain was a failure-in merely pooh-poohing the Army officers who early in 1936 openly plotted rebellion. He confesses to personal anguish over the constant dissension between trade unions and political parties which plagued the Loyalist Government. But he declares emphatically that Russian influence in Spain was no more than the influence to be expected for the one European power honest enough to sell Spain arms. As to the fiscal, agricultural and educational reforms carried on under fire, the devotion of peasants and workers, what del Vayo has to tell makes the final defeat, with 37,000 rifles left in all Catalonia, with President Manuel Azana chattering in Paris and an Army careerist plotting a Putsch in Madrid, doubly and grotesquely bitter.