Foreign News: Bread & Bombs

In “celebration” of the second anniversary of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, Spanish Rightist aviators last week dropped tens of thousands of quarter-pound loaves of bread over the hungry Leftist cities of Madrid and Barcelona. Believing they had pulled off a stunt calculated to persuade Leftists that a Rightist victory would mean a full stomach, Rightist propagandists announced that Madrid’s share of the bread, safely floated to the ground in makeshift parachutes, had been 178,000 loaves. Later, ending a week’s pause, Rightist batteries west of Madrid resumed their futile shelling of the city, and airmen from Majorca returned to drop live explosives on Barcelona’s mangled waterfront.

Madrilenos, now facing their third winter of siege, rationed only 100 grams (about three and one-half ordinary hard rolls) of bread daily, feared that their enemies’ gifts contained poison. Leftist chemists said they contained only “moral poison,” called the bread bombings a “grotesque” gesture by aviators otherwise engaged in “assassinating women and children in defenseless towns.” Grotesque or not, the bread shower was a pointed reminder that in Rightist Spain only a few nonessential items (tobacco, coffee, sugar) are scarce, while in overpopulated Leftist Spain the problem of foodstuffs is nearly as acute as that which faced Germany during the last year of the World War, is probably one reason why Leftist Premier Juan Negrin mentioned the possibility of mediation before the Spanish Parliament (see below).