We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  Phillips similarly commented: ‘on the other side, correspondents are treated much better. I have met dozens of fellows who are in Barcelona and Madrid, and they told me that, though there was hopeless confusion, they were always treated like brothers.’48 The difference between the two zones in this regard was that, in Nationalist Spain, the military had no time for newspapermen. Phillips noticed that officers who were ready to be friendly with journalists were warned off by the press censors or by their own superiors: ‘I never felt so isolated in any army. I cannot make contacts with anyone. There seems to be a deliberate policy to prevent the British and American correspondents from making any contacts.’ When he was seen talking to an officer who spoke English, a member of the Press and Propaganda Office came and reprimanded the man, who never spoke to Phillips again. The result was an icy atmosphere: ‘You go into a room full of officers, but the Press censor, who is with you, carefully forgets to introduce you to a single one of them, and a few whom you happen to know shake hands with you coldly, and then hastily turn their backs on you without a word.’ He was told by one officer that ‘all the generals begged the Generalísimo to exclude correspondents from the country till the war was over’ and F. A. Rice, despite being the correspondent of the conservative Morning Post, was told by another that ‘there are too many reporters here’.49

  Randolph Churchill, who represented the Daily Mail, echoed Sir Percival’s envy of the Republican press services. In March 1937, aware of the British Tory Arnold Lunn’s close friendship with Bolín, he said to him: ‘I wish you’d go back to Salamanca and tell those damned people at the Press Office that they’re losing this war by their idiotic censorship. The Reds have got them beat so far as publicity is concerned. They let the Press go where they like, and consequently the Press send back great human stories from the front.’ He was exaggerating, however, when he expostulated that ‘in Salamanca they’re more interested in killing stories than in killing Reds’. Sir Percival Phillips concluded with regard to Bolín’s failings as a propagandist: ‘I would describe him as a preventive rather than a propagandist: he has a positive genius for preventing news from getting out.’50 It was illustrative of the military attitude to journalists that, while he was in charge of the Oficina de Prensa y Propaganda in Salamanca, each morning, General Millán Astray would summon with a whistle those journalists who were not at the front and form them up in lines to listen to his daily harangue. Bolín was clearly impressed by his example.51

  The more junior press officers who were given the job of accompanying the correspondents were, according to Sir Percival Phillips:

  young grandees or diplomats, amiable weaklings for the most part, ruled by Bolín with a rod of iron. He telephones them at all hours of the day and night, scolding, ordering, but never advising, and, as a result of this drilling, they never express an opinion, even on the weather, lest some correspondent should cable that such-and-such a view is held ‘in GHQ’ or ‘in well-informed circles’ or ‘by spokesmen of the Generalísimo’. As they also keep all officers away from us as carefully as if we had the plague, we are confined to the official Press reports and to the edifying but monotonous stories of Falangist valour which fill the Spanish newspapers every day.

  The groups of correspondents were controlled by the press officers to the extent that they became ‘like a bunch of schoolgirls under the guidance of a schoolmistress, or like a gang of Cook’s tourists dragged around by a guide’.52

  So tight was the censorship that the more critical journalists in the rebel zone would risk their lives to cheat the censors, as Noel Monks had done, by taking or sending despatches to France.53 The young American journalist, Frances Davis, for instance, endeared herself to Harold Cardozo by offering to carry out his uncensored stories and those of Edmund Taylor, John Elliott and Bertrand de Jouvenal. She was in a position to do so because she had played on her ethereal good looks and apparent innocence to obtain the necessary safe-conducts. As a result, she managed to get a job with the Daily Mail as Cardozo’s assistant. She actually took the copy out hidden in her girdle.54 Edmond Taylor would send one story out to his paper while, as a cover, submitting other stories to Aguilera. However, he sometimes could not resist the temptation of leaving debatable material even in the submitted dummy copy. A notice was put up in the pressroom forbidding journalists to refer to the rebels as ‘rebels’ or ‘insurgents’, or to the Republicans as ‘loyalists’, ‘governmentals’ or ‘Republicans’. The only permitted terms were ‘Spanish national forces’ or ‘Nationalists’ and ‘Reds’.55 One of the censors, a Barcelona millionaire named Captain Ignacio Rosales, whose racist views were similar to those of Aguilera, would react violently if he saw the word ‘rebel’ in a dispatch, shouting: ‘“Patriot” armies, “Nationalist” armies, “White” armies – any man who uses the term “rebel” will have his passes revoked and will leave the country!’ Rosales made life unbearable for an American photographer, Tubby Cohen, because he was Jewish, refusing to issue him with passes and making remarks about his ‘disgusting name’.56

  Foreign newspapers were scoured for items considered hostile to the insurgents. Many British and American newspapers themselves censored mentions of Axis assistance, but any transgression of this rule by the correspondents was quickly punished. Karl Robson was expelled because his paper, the Daily Express, printed a leader which referred to the ‘rebels’, despite the fact that he was not the author.57 While Aguilera was still running the censorship in Burgos, he ordered the detention on 11 September 1936 of F. A. Rice. His crime was to have sent two articles, one about Aguilera’s English education, and another piece, sent from France and not therefore subjected to the rebel censorship, in which Rice had used the phrase ‘insurgent frightfulness’ in relation to the rebel attack on Irún on 1 September 1936. Aguilera regarded both articles as revealing ‘a not wholly respectful attitude’ either to himself or to his cause. After threatening Rice with the serious consequences awaiting journalists who referred to the rebels as ‘insurgents’, or to the Republicans as ‘loyalists’ or ‘Government troops’ instead of ‘Reds’, Aguilera told him to choose between leaving Spain or staying under strict vigilance, without permission to cross the frontier – which was the only way of filing a story outside the Francoist censorship. Rice chose to leave. His newspaper, the Morning Post, commented on his expulsion in an editorial: ‘It proclaims urbi et urbi that any news emanating from Right sources belongs rather to the realm of propaganda than to that of fact.’58

  It was generally recognized by those correspondents who served in the Nationalist zone that only the representatives of German, Italian and Portuguese newspapers could expect privileged treatment. In return, they produced the sort of stories that the rebels wanted to see, larded with praise for Nationalist heroism and with horrified accounts of ‘red’ atrocities. A good example was Curio Mortari, of La Stampa of Turin, the first foreign journalist to be given a safe-conduct by Franco’s headquarters in Morocco. He later accompanied the rebel columns in their bloody progress from Seville to Badajoz. His admiring chronicles of their activities more than justified the rebels’ faith in him.59 The reports published in the Portuguese press were often highly revealing. It was admitted, for instance, that many refugees fleeing across the border from the massacre at Badajoz had been turned over by the local police to the Spanish army. More significant, perhaps, was what they revealed of the privileged position of Portuguese newspapermen. The correspondent of Diario de la Manhã, who covered the repressive activities of the brutal Columna Castejón, commented: ‘I follow the operations by the side of the commander of the column’. In Seville, on 7 August, during one of his notorious broadcasts, the rebel leader there, General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, after publicly welcoming a number of Portuguese journalists, introduced Félix Correia of the Diario de Lisboa over the radio, then actually turned the radio over to him. Correia was also invited to Franco’s headquarters in the magnificent palace of the Marquesa de Yanduri and granted a long interv
iew. Correia repaid his host in a long and sycophantic article by describing ‘his radiant charm’, presenting the diminutive general as a ‘man of normal height’ and comparing his patriotism to that of Hitler.60

  On another occasion, Queipo invited Leopoldo Nunes of O Seculo to accompany him on a trip to Córdoba and spoke freely with him for the two hours of the car journey. The mutual sympathy thus established saw the sympathetic Nunes go even further than some of his colleagues. In late August 1936, Nunes drove from Ayamonte in Huelva to Riotinto, where Socialist miners were still holding out against the rebels. Claiming to have lost his way, he managed to conduct several interviews and he was allowed to leave unhindered. He then drove to Seville where he informed Queipo de Llano of the location, number and weaponry of the miners. On 27 August, O Seculo published an article by Nunes in praise of the military operation which had crushed the resistance of the miners. On the same evening, a delighted Queipo de Llano invited ‘the distinguished Portuguese journalist’ don Leopoldo Nunes to speak on his radio programme. Nunes declared that the Spanish Civil War was ‘a struggle between a glorious army, supported by patriotic militias, and a herd of monsters who have nothing in common with human kind because they murder non-combatant men, women and children and then flee like cowardly vermin before the soldiers of the Nationalist army’.61

  Franco’s headquarters issued an order on 26 February 1937 to the armies of north and south: ‘Except for Italian journalists with safe-conducts issued by these headquarters, only German and Spanish journalists who, as well as said document, also carry a special authorization to visit the sector under your command may do so. Those of other nationalities must be accompanied by a press officer with a safe-conduct as a credential as well as the previously mentioned requisites. No journalist will be allowed to remain in the sector without these requisites.’62 The Italian and German correspondents themselves were apparently under instructions to avoid contact with journalists from Britain and America.63 Ironically, the liberty given to the Italians by the censorship authorities could cause problems for correspondents. Indro Montanelli was with the Italian forces that entered Santander in August 1937. He sent an article to Il Messagero in which he wrote that the advance on the city had been ‘una lunga passegiatta ed un solo nemico, il caldo ’ (a leisurely parade with the heat the only enemy faced). What he had not realized was that the official line of the Italian commanders was that it had been a hard-fought and bloody battle which avenged the defeat of Guadalajara. Ready to distribute medals and promotions on the basis of this account, they furiously demanded the recall of Montanelli.64

  There were a few exceptions to the harsh treatment meted out to correspondents from the democracies. These consisted mainly of several English extreme right-wing military men and Catholics. Arnold Lunn, a deeply reactionary old Harrovian, and a prominent Tory and Catholic, found a warm welcome from his old friend Luis Bolín, a fellow member of the right-wing English Review luncheon club in London. Lunn sympathized immediately with Bolín’s difficulties running the censorship and was rewarded accordingly. He gushed that Bolín had ‘a thankless task. He had to act as intermediary between the Military Command, whose job was to win the war, and the disgruntled journalists whose job was to report it. During my journey through Spain from Spain from Irún to Algeciras, I received every possible courtesy from Captain Bolín and his colleagues.’ Lunn had complete sympathy with the fact that the Spanish military were determined to prevent journalists seeing anything that might embarrass their German and Italian allies. He wrote afterwards: ‘The Germans, for instance, who are trying out their new anti-aircraft guns, are peculiarly sensitive to the propinquity of French journalists, some of whom may have been suspected, and one of whom has been arrested on a charge of spying on behalf of the French.’65

  Another English journalist who received relatively favourable treatment was the aviation correspondent of the London Evening News, Nigel Tangye. On arrival, he had delighted Bolín because he carried enthusiastic recommendations from the Embassy of the Third Reich in London and other German contacts. In consequence, Tangye was accorded the rare privilege of being given a car and driver and allowed to travel with a camera without a military observer. However, first-hand contact with the situation did little to dent his astonishing ignorance. Moreover, although the falsities that he produced entirely favoured the rebels, that did not give him immunity from the same frustrating delays suffered by other correspondents. Regarding the Moorish mercenaries fighting on the rebel side, he claimed that ‘the Sultan has sent the greater part of his magnificent army over to Spain, including his own personal bodyguard’. One of the reasons for this, he believed erroneously, was that Franco ‘speaks Arabic fluently’. He described the Catholic Church as having no sympathy with either side until forced by the desecration of churches and the murder of priests to favour Franco. Most bizarrely of all, he claimed that the Trotskyist POUM had gained prominence because of Soviet aid.66 However, Tangye’s difficulties with the rebel censorship had nothing to do with his ignorance. They applied to all correspondents.

  Accordingly, after the defeat at Guadalajara, the Italian military authorities began to cultivate the foreign press and take them to visit the Italian sectors of the Bilbao front. They also operated a special courier service to take their despatches from the front to St Jean de Luz. This allowed messages to reach London and New York between eight and twelve hours faster than those that had to pass through the Francoist censorship. Reynolds Packard of the United Press was given a severe dressing down by Major Manuel Lambarri y Yanguas, one of the rebel press officers at the office of the Oficina de Prensa in Vitoria. Threatening Packard with immediate expulsion if he visited the front with the Italians, he said: ‘It’s about time you fellows realize this is a Spanish war. We can’t help it if we have to have some outside help. The other side has it, too. But we are determined that you are going to see this war through Spanish eyes.’ However, the rebel censors faced enormous difficulties before they could prise the fiercely pro-Franco William P. Carney of the New York Times away from the Italian press officers, with whom he had established extremely close connections.67

  In fact, among Bolín’s subordinates, the portly Manuel de Lambarri y Yanguas was regarded as one of the more humane. He was a rather amiable incompetent who, in civilian life, had worked as a designer for the magazine Vogue, although, as a young man, he had attended the Toledo military academy with Franco. Lambarri had worked for Vogue in London and, according to the Daily Telegraph correspondent Alan Dick, ‘still kept the soul of an artist beneath his khaki shirt’. Virginia Cowles remembered how he fluttered around like a demented Sunday School teacher trying to organize trips to the front which turned out ‘like a mad tea-party from the pages of a bellicose Alice in Wonderland. His English was less than fluent and, when the correspondents wanted to send a despatch that would meet censorship problems, they would take it to Lambarri. Rather than admit that he did not understand the dense cable-ese, he would cross out a couple of words at random and then approve it. Among his other endearing qualities was an ability to get his column of correspondents hopelessly lost.68

  Lambarri was, however, an exception. John Whitaker, whom the rebels had good reason to regard as hostile to their cause, received altogether more sinister treatment at the hands of Aguilera. When, in the latter stages of the march on Madrid, Whitaker began to visit the front alone, Aguilera turned up at his lodgings with a Gestapo agent in the early hours of one morning and threatened to have him shot if he went near the front without a member of his staff: ‘Next time you’re unescorted at the front, and under fire, we’ll shoot you. We’ll say that you were a casualty to enemy action. You understand!’69

  There were, of course, a small number of journalists whose enthusiasm for the Nationalist cause ensured that they had no problems with the censorship apparatus. One such was Cecil Gerahty of the Daily Mail. He had made no secret of his virulently anti-Republican views. Accordingly, he was delighted to be told th
at General Queipo de Llano ‘would appreciate my giving a short talk on the wireless for the benefit of the fairly large number of English listeners, not only in Spain but in Gibraltar and Morocco’. After being primed with generous helpings of sherry, he made a speech which, he later claimed, provoked copious tears from the announcer. Among other adulatory remarks about what the rebels were doing, he proclaimed: ‘Please remember that Spain is not struggling to provide interesting newspaper copy in a series of spectacular victories. A dreadful weed has been sown by aliens in her gardens, and these weeds have got to be eradicated.’ Allegedly, Queipo de Llano was so moved, he had the speech translated and repeated it in his own broadcast on the following day. Either the amount of sherry consumed clouded Gerahty’s memory or else the Nationalist media chose not to report the general’s quotation of his words, for there was no mention of the speech in the Seville press.70