We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  Gerahty was greatly outdone in his desire to please his hosts by F. Theo Rogers, an American Catholic born in Boston who had served in his country’s wars against Spain in both Cuba and the Philippines, in the course of which he had developed a friendship with Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. Rogers became a journalist and eventually became editor of the Philippines Free Press and a relatively wealthy man. In the spring of 1936, he left the Philippines for a long vacation in Spain, where he had many friends among the aristocracy and the military. The fruit of his observations was Spain: A Tragic Journey, a fierce denunciation of the Republic and a hymn of praise for the rebels which sported an enthusiastic introduction by Theodore Roosevelt. In it, Rogers claimed that the election campaign for the Popular Front had been funded by Moscow and victory achieved by ‘terroristic influences’ and ‘huge electoral frauds’. In fact, violence and electoral fraud had been exercised, but by the Right. Rogers also repeated the absurd story that there existed a Communist plot to impose a Soviet government in Spain. He portrayed the military rising as a reaction against the ‘gangsterism’ of the Republican Government.

  With regard to the issue of foreign aid, Rogers quoted as ‘absolutely true’ the claim by his Spanish friends that ‘there are entire regiments of Russians, officered by Russians, fighting for the Madrid government’. In contrast to his assertion about the Russians, he wrote that ‘I have travelled through White Spain from end to end. I never saw an Italian soldier or officer. I saw probably 150 Germans at the most, all of them attached in a technical capacity to the foreign legions.’ Elsewhere he praised Hitler’s support of Franco on the grounds that the Führer ‘is fearful of what Communism will do to our civilization’. Life in Republican Spain was described as a constant wave of terror, assassination, rape and theft. Of the mass shootings and the terror in the rebel zone, he was totally ignorant. Rogers asserted that, during his extensive travels in White Spain, ‘I saw no trace of disorder, no sign of unorganized rabble’. His view of the Francoist repression was sanitized in the extreme. He knew of no violence, only of a few executions, ‘but there was at least a trial, summary though it might be’. He gave a naïve account of what happened when the Francoists took a town: ‘the word goes forth to the working men to return to their daily tasks. They may have heretofore sided with the Reds. Now they are to forget politics and war. It is their present and future that counts not their past.’ He claimed even to have found ‘workmen who approved of the executions ordered by the White forces’.

  When Roger’s book was published, a prominent Jesuit, Father Francis Talbot, wrote a preface in which he expressed his hope that Spain: A Tragic Journey would ‘serve to disillusion every American who still backwardly believes in the myth of Spanish democracy as professed and practiced in the so-called Loyalist territories’. He went on to affirm that the book’s conclusions indicted the Loyalists of ‘abrogating fundamental rights, of violating every liberty, of producing a reign of terror and chaos. They affirm that Nationalist Spain fights for law, for order, for culture, for justice.’71

  If not quite on a level with Rogers, William P. Carney of the New York Times was certainly an enthusiastic supporter of the rebels. In New York press circles, he was nicknamed ‘General Franco’s press agent on The Times payroll’.72 To an extent he had paid his passage with his damning farewell article to the Republican zone which had been published as a pamphlet in the United States and helped influence Catholic opinion there in favour of Franco. Constancia de la Mora later claimed that, as a reward for revealing the exact details of the gun emplacements around Madrid, when Carney abandoned Madrid, the rebels rewarded him with ‘a fine fascist uniform’. She also alleged that, after the Civil War, Carney signed a letter to Cardinal Gomá, the Primate of Spain, congratulating him on Franco’s ‘glorious victory’.73 As a result, Carney tried to sue her for damages. His lawyer did not, as he could not have done, dispute the claim about the anti-aircraft guns, but argued rather feebly that Carney was ‘not a fascist, never owned any uniform of a fascist, and certainly never wore one’ and that the letter did not congratulate Gomá for glorious victory, but for the fact that Franco’s victory had saved Spain for Catholicism.74 On 18 May 1937, the American Ambassador Claude Bowers reported to the State Department that the Italian radio station in Salamanca was paying war correspondents up to ten thousand lire for propaganda speeches. William Carney had accepted and, in line with the conditions imposed, had ended his talk with the Francoist cry ‘¡Arriba España!’75 Certainly, Carney was decorated after the Spanish Civil War by the United States Catholic fraternal Order of the Knights of Columbus. After the Second World War, he became a Cold War propagandist in the service of the US Government.76

  It is certainly the case that, once in the Nationalist zone, Carney continued in a similar vein to that of the disputed Madrid article, manipulating the news in favour of the rebels and against the Republic. He began to quote the red atrocity stories from General Queipo de Llano’s virulent propaganda broadcast as if they were factually accurate. On the day that Guernica was destroyed, he sent a triumphant telegram to the New York Times euphorically reporting the captures of Eibar and Durango and giving a wildly exaggerated account of Basque strength, including a claim that they had an abundance of modern artillery and an air force of one hundred aircraft when, in fact, their planes barely reached double figures.77 After the bombing of Guernica, he was quick to join the ranks of the pro-Francoists who argued that the town had been dynamited by the Basques themselves. He visited Guernica and wrote that ‘most of the destruction could have been the result of fires and dynamitings’. He also quoted approvingly the rebel slander of one of the prime witnesses, Father Alberto Onaindía, as ‘an unfrocked young priest’.78

  On 22 July 1937, he had interviewed the American pilot, Harold Dahl, captured after bailing out over Brunete. Although Dahl had been badly threatened, Carney quoted him as saying that he had been treated with ‘kindness and consideration’ and ‘exquisite courtesy’. The bulk of the article was devoted to implying that the Republican air force was entirely Russian-controlled.79 On other occasions too, he had invented details in his articles. In December 1937, when the Republicans were still defending the recently captured Teruel, the overconfident rebels issued a communiqué claiming that it had been reconquered. Carney both reprinted the communiqué and added colourful details of Franco’s troops occupying the town. Herbert Matthews, disbelieving this, made a hazardous three-day trip from Barcelona to Teruel with Robert Capa, saw that the town was still in Republican hands and filed a story that implicitly reprimanded Carney. He wrote:

  the Rebels never reached the city, never made contact with the garrison and refugees in the cellars of Teruel, never captured any Government general staff officers and in short never really menaced the provincial capital which remains firmly in Government hands. It has been axiomatic in this war that nothing can be learned with certainty unless one goes to the spot and sees with his own eyes.80

  On reading Matthews’ article, Jay Allen telegrammed Hemingway: ‘TELL MATTHEWS HIS STUFF CREATED MAGNIFICENT IMPRESSION EVERYBODY. CARNEY VERY HOTWATER BECAUSE HIS THINKING NOW OBVIOUS.’ In fact, the water in which Carney found himself remained barely lukewarm, receiving as he did only the mildest chiding from the New York Times’ managing editor, Edwin James.81

  In early April 1938, with some other reporters including Kim Philby, Carney visited the concentration camp at the Zaragoza military academy where captured International Brigaders were held. One of the Americans, Max Parker, said he would not talk to them if Carney was present because he believed him to be a Franco propagandist. Carney did not reveal his presence among the group of journalists and later published an account of the visit which bore no resemblance to the grim reality of the prisoners’ conditions. He sympathetically quoted the head of Franco’s juridical corps, Lieutenant Colonel Lorenzo Martínez Fuset, the man responsible for overseeing death sentences, to the effect that ‘foreigners were treated exactly like Spanish pri
soners’. Carney omitted to mention that this meant overcrowding, starvation, beatings, executions and disease for the international volunteers just as it did for Spanish Republicans. He claimed that the prisoners were delighted with their treatment, were astonished by how well they were fed and felt that their conditions in captivity were far better than they had been when fighting for the Republic. Parker revealed later that Carney had falsified interviews by using the prisoners’ records made available to him by the Francoists. In the same article, Carney falsely reported that the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy was recruiting volunteers, an assertion that damaged their subsequent fund-raising efforts. Later, he reported erroneously that the US Consul, Charles Bay, had claimed that the State Department would do nothing to defend American volunteers sentenced to death by the Francoists. He was obliged to print a retraction, but the intention to damage the recruiting efforts was obvious.82

  Certainly Carney seemed very much at home in the rebel zone. Revealing of his ethics was the report that he produced after a visit on 9 July 1938 to the improvised Francoist concentration camp in the disused monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña six miles south-east of Burgos. Among the prisoners kept in the appallingly overcrowded conditions of the camp were a substantial number of International Brigaders. They were subject to regular beatings and torture. When the guards ordered the Americans to the assembly area to be interviewed by Carney, the prisoners quickly called the Irish brigader, Bob Doyle, having recently been savagely beaten, to substitute for one of them, and join another torture victim, Bob Steck. Carney interrogated the prisoners, demanding to know who had provided the funds to send them to Spain and how many of them were members of the Communist Party. The prisoners were convinced that Carney was looking for information to besmirch the brigaders back in the USA. The Americans’ spokesmen, Lou Ornitz and Edgar Acken, himself a journalist, replied that all were anti-Fascists and they did not know how many Communists there were among them. They informed him about the atrocious living conditions and the beatings, but he was sceptical about their claims of brutality and refused to visit their quarters. So, they turned Doyle and Steck around and lifted their shirts to reveal the long red welts across their backs.

  Carney was visibly shaken. Ornitz told Carney that if he was serious about helping the prisoners, he should tell the State Department about the appalling conditions. In fact, Carney informed the prison commander, Ornitz was beaten and had his rations reduced. Carney’s dishonest report in the New York Times described the camp in idyllic terms, claiming that the prisoners had adequate space and good food and water. He stated that any mistreatment was provoked by the prisoners’ rebellious attitudes. However, the publication of their names in the article ensured that they would not simply be executed by the Francoists.83 Carney’s article was lampooned in the prisoners’ clandestine news-sheet the San Pedro Jaily News, with a cartoon by the British prisoner, Jimmy Moon, portraying the prisoners relaxing, reading and fishing in the river while the wounded were attended by a voluptuous nurse.84

  When fourteen prisoners were exchanged on 8 October 1938, Carney was present as they crossed the international bridge at Hendaye to be received by David Amariglio, the representative of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. With funds passed to him by Louis Fischer from moneys made available by the Negrín government, Amariglio was there to arrange their passage home. According to Claude Bowers who was also there, Carney, ‘whom they heartily dislike’, was treated in a friendly manner. However, they reproached him for outright lies in his report from San Pedro:

  He blandly admitted it. Shamelessly he told us that he lied because ‘it was the only way to get the story out’ – another falsehood, since he could have sent it from France. His unqualified statement that we all admitted having been recruited by the Communist Party or the North American Committee was preposterous; the subject was never mentioned in the interview, and the facts were otherwise.

  Carney’s own account does not mention the questioning of his ethics, but it is at great pains to insist that Amariglio was a Communist and the FALB a Communist front organization.85

  Carney was one of the American and British correspondents who had few problems with the rebel censorship apparatus. One who ran into serious problems was, astonishingly, the world-famous Hubert Knickerbocker. The incident was to cause Aguilera, and his superiors, considerable embarrassment. The red-haired Knickerbocker was a world-famous journalist who, through his articles in the Hearst press chain during the early months of the war, had done much for the Francoist cause, and yet he was arrested during the campaign against the Basque Country in April 1937.86 When Knickerbocker had first wanted to join the African columns moving north from Seville, Juan Pujol, as head of the Gabinete de Prensa in Burgos, had written to Franco recommending him as an ‘outstanding figure of North American journalism, who has done great work with his always accurate reports on our Movement’.87

  However, when he tried to return in April 1936, he was refused permission. The American Ambassador, Claude Bowers, reported to Washington on the background to Knickerbocker’s difficulties with the rebel authorities:

  General Franco is becoming more and more intolerant towards war correspondents with his armies. He turned them all away when the attack on Malaga began. The men he then turned away had been with him for months and had written the most pronounced pro-Franco articles. No war correspondent with him could have been more satisfactory to him than Knickerbocker who was convinced of his early and inevitable victory when I saw him frequently five months ago. He returned to America three months ago and has now been ordered back. I have seen him twice in Saint-Jean-de-Luz at my home. He was waiting for a permit to cross the border and to rejoin the army. He has just been informed that he ‘cannot continue his journey to Spain’. I can only interpret this denial to mean that there must be something in the present situation that General Franco does not care to have blazoned to the world. I find Knickerbocker completely flabbergasted by the changed situation.88

  Despite the prohibition on his proceeding into Spain, a week later the intrepid Knickerbocker sneaked over the frontier. He was caught and imprisoned in San Sebastián for thirty-six hours. His release was secured only after a considerable fuss was made by his friend and fellow newspaperman Randolph Churchill. Knickerbocker was then expelled from Spain. Believing that his experience had been the consequence of a denunciation by Captain Aguilera, Knickerbocker took his revenge in a devastating fashion. He simply published, in the Washington Times on 10 May 1937, an account of what sort of society the military rebels planned to establish in Spain, which he based on Aguilera’s anti-Semitic, misogynistic, anti-democratic opinions and, in particular, his claim that: ‘We are going to shoot 50,000 in Madrid. And no matter where Azaña and Largo Caballero (the Premier) and all that crowd try to escape, we’ll catch them and kill every last man, if it takes years of tracking them throughout the world.’ Knickerbocker’s article was quoted extensively in the US Congress by Jerry J. O’Connell of Montana on 11 May 1937. It may be presumed to have been a significant propaganda blow against the Francoists, coming as it did shortly after the bombing of Guernica.

  Asking a hypothetical question about the kind of society that Franco would establish if he won the war, Knickerbocker answered using the words of Gonzalo Aguilera, rendered as a mythical Major Sánchez. Aguilera was quoted as saying:

  It is a race war, not merely a class war. You don’t understand because you don’t realize that there are two races in Spain – a slave race and a ruler race. Those reds, from President Azaña to the anarchists, are all slaves. It is our duty to put them back into their places – yes, put chains on them again, if you like. Modern sewer systems caused this war. Certainly – because unimpeded natural selection would have killed off most of the ‘red’ vermin. The example of Azaña is a typical case. He might have been carried off by infantile paralysis, but he was saved from it by these cursed sewers. We’ve got to do away with sewers.

&nb
sp; Aguilera had apparently been melancholy for days when he had heard about the success of F. D. Roosevelt in the presidential election, commenting: ‘What you can’t grasp is that any stupid Democrats, so called, lend themselves blindly to the ends of “red” revolution. All you Democrats are just handmaidens of bolshevism. Hitler is the only one who knows a “red” when he sees one.’ His most commonly used expression was ‘take ’em out and shoot ’em!’ He believed that trade unions should be abolished and membership of them made punishable by death. He advocated for industrial workers the paternal direction of the factory owners and for peasants a benevolent serfdom. His beliefs on the pernicious effects of education had also been expounded to Knickerbocker: ‘We must destroy this spawn of “red” schools which the so-called republic installed to teach the slaves to revolt. It is sufficient for the masses to know just enough reading to understand orders. We must restore the authority of the Church. Slaves need it to teach them to behave.’ He had repeated to Knickerbocker views about women roughly similar to those to which he had treated Whitaker: ‘It is damnable that women should vote. Nobody should vote – least of all women.’ The Jews, he believed, were ‘an international pest’. Liberty was ‘a delusion employed by the “reds” to fool the so-called democrats. In our state, people are going to have the liberty to keep their mouths shut.’89 It can have come as little surprise when one year later, the rebels again refused Knickerbocker permission to cover their drive to the Mediterranean.90

  A correspondent who was ostensibly a rebel sympathizer was Harold A. R. Philby, nicknamed ‘Kim’ after the hero of Rudyard Kipling’s tale about a spy. Like Knickerbocker, he would inflict damage on the rebels but in a very different way. He was welcomed with open arms in the Nationalist zone because he was the correspondent of The Times and, even more so, because of recommendations from the German Embassy in London. Ostensibly, he repaid this faith by producing pro-rebel articles that delighted his hosts, but he was actually a Russian spy. He had been recruited in London in the summer of 1934 by an NKVD talent scout, Edith Suschitzky, who was the wife of Dr Alex Tudor Hart (who would later serve in the International Brigade medical services in Spain) and a friend of Philby’s Austrian wife, Litzi Friedman. Philby had then been paternalistically groomed by his ‘control’ or case officer, Arnold Deutsch, who was under the orders of the NKVD station chief in London, Alexander Orlov, a man who would later play a crucial role in the Spanish Civil War. Since Philby was known to have left-wing sympathies, in order to get him recruited into the Foreign Office or the security services, his past was buried by working for a small magazine called Review of Reviews, where he painstakingly built up an image of someone without political convictions, albeit vaguely liberal.91