We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  We drove back to town past the republic’s fine new school and sanitary institute. The men who built these are dead, shot as ‘Reds’ because they sought to defend them.

  We passed a corner.

  ‘Until yesterday there was a pool blackened with blood here,’ said my friends. ‘All the loyal military were shot here and their bodies left for days as an example.’

  They were told to come out, so they rushed out of the house to greet the conquerors and were shot down and their houses looted. The Moors played no favorites.

  Back at the Plaza. During the executions here Mario Pires went off his head. He had tried to save a pretty fifteen year old girl caught with a rifle in her hands. The Moor was adamant. Mario saw her shot. Now he is under medical care at Lisbon.

  I know there are horrors on the other side aplenty. Almendra Lejo, Rightist, was crucified, drenched with gasoline, and burned alive. I know people who saw charred bodies. I know that. I know hundreds and even thousands of innocent persons died at the hands of revengeful masses. But I know who it was who rose to ‘save Spain’ and so aroused the masses to a defense that is as savage as it is valiant.

  Anyway, I am reporting Badajoz. Here a dozen or more rightists were executed every day during the siege. But – back in Elvas in the casino I asked diplomatically: ‘When the Reds burned the jail, how many died?’

  ‘But they didn’t burn the jail.’ I had read in the Lisbon and Seville papers that they had.

  ‘No, the brothers Plá prevented it.’

  I knew Luis and Carlos Plá, rich young men of good family, who had the best garage in southwestern Spain. They were Socialists because they said the Socialist Party was the only instrument which could break the power of Spain’s feudal masters.

  ‘They harangued the crowd that wanted to burn the three hundred Rightists in the jail just before the Moors entered, saying they were going to die in defence of our Republic, but they were not assassins. They themselves opened the doors to let these people escape.’

  ‘What happened to the Plás?’

  ‘Shot.’

  ‘Why?’

  No answer.

  There is no answer. All these people could have been allowed to escape to Portugal three miles away, but they weren’t.

  I heard Gen. Queipo de Llano announcing on the radio that Barcarrota had been taken and that ‘rigorous justice’ was dispensed with the Reds there. I know Barcarrota. I asked the peasants there in June if, now that they were given land, they would not be capitalist.

  ‘No,’ indignantly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we only get enough for our own use, not enough to be able to exploit others.’

  ‘But it’s yours.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What do you want from the republic now?’

  ‘Money for seed. And schools.’

  I thought then, ‘God help anybody who tries to prevent this.’

  I was wrong. Or was I? At the casino here, which is frequented mostly by landowners and rich merchants, I ventured to inquire what the situation was before the rebellion.

  ‘Terrible. The peasants were getting 12 pesetas for a 7 hour day, and nobody could pay it.’

  That is true. It was more than the land could stand. But they had been getting from 2 to 3 pesetas from sunup to sundown before. Twenty Spaniards with red and yellow ribbons in their buttonholes sat around the casino and from the fact that they were here I assumed that they did not feel Franco had yet made Spain quite safe.

  On the moon-drenched streets there was a smell of jasmine, but I had another smell in my nostrils. Sweet, too horribly sweet.

  On the foothill in the white Plaza by a fountain, a youth leaning against the wall with his feet crossed was playing his guitar and a soft tenor sang a melting Portuguese love song.

  At Badajoz in June boys still sang beneath balconies. It will be a long time before they do again.

  Suddenly through the square shot a car with a red and yellow flag. We halted. Our drummers came to meet us.

  ‘They are searching the hotel.’

  ‘For whom?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  We shall go away, as soon as it is light. People who ask questions are not popular near this frontier, if it can be called a frontier.25

  Jay might have hoped to gain a Pulitzer for such an important article but his boss Colonel McCormick, the owner of the Chicago Daily Tribune, refused to submit it. In fact, this and other articles convinced the Colonel that Jay was too left-wing and in October 1936, he would dismiss him along with other liberal members of the paper’s foreign staff.26 The article had outraged the American Catholic hierarchy, which was trying to present Franco and the rebels as saintly crusaders. Accordingly, Jay was attacked on the grounds that he was not actually present during the massacre. What is clear from a close reading of the article is that Jay was driven into and around Badajoz, at very considerable risk, by his Portuguese friends. He appears to have remained more or less hidden in the car for most of the time, listening to the conversations of his friends with their local acquaintances. The chronicle was assembled from what he read in the Portuguese press, from what he saw and heard while in Badajoz and from what both his Portuguese friends and Spanish refugees told him in Elvas, between his arrival on 23 August and beginning to write the article in the early hours of the morning of the 25th.

  A man who was to make a business out of impugning Jay’s credibility, Father Joseph F. Thorning, of Mount St Mary’s College, claimed that the massacre was no more than a ‘stupid story’. In a pamphlet, he wrote: ‘The story of Mr Jay Allen may be disregarded inasmuch as he himself acknowledges that he arrived eight days later.’ Thorning, on the other hand, had no difficulty in believing the statement, ‘I went thoroughly into that question and satisfied myself that no Red who surrendered at Badajos [sic] was shot’, from Francis McCullagh, who was in the town ten weeks after the bodies had been removed.27 Jay’s account gives plenty of details that he did know about, what he saw in Portugal with the terrified refugees, the bodies in the cemetery, interviews with Francoists. What he had to say is, in any case, sustained by the other great eye-witnesses, Mario Neves, who wrote on 15 August of the scenes of desolation and dread that he had witnessed, and Mario Pires, who was so traumatized by what he saw that he had to be admitted to the San José mental clinic in Lisbon. Jay’s account is also substantiated by subsequent scholarship.28

  Herbert Southworth commented on errors in the printed despatch on the Badajoz massacre:

  It was originally sent from a cable office in Tangier. At one place it reads, as published: ‘I know there are horrors on the other side aplenty. Almendra Lejo, rightist, was crucified, drenched with gasoline and burned alive.’ Jay Allen obviously cabled something like the following: ‘ALMENDRALEJO RIGHTIST CRUCIFIED...’ which should have been decoded from the cablese as follows: ‘A rightist of Almendralejo [Andalusian town] was crucified.’ […] Any news report, technically transmitted by telegraph, telephone, radio, and so on, has a built-in possibility for errors, and this fact should be taken into consideration when judging news dispatches as historical sources.29

  On 10 September, Gerald Brenan accompanied Jay to Lisbon to investigate rumours of a mutiny and to gather material on the way in which the Spanish rebels were being supplied through Portugal. By 13 September, they were back in Tangier and Jay was immediately flying to Gibraltar and then Madrid. On 16 September 1936, he reached the capital and spent the evening with Lester Ziffren, recounting tales of the plight of foreign correspondents in the rebel-held south. He later met up with Louis Fischer and told him about what he had seen in Badajoz. Fischer recalled: ‘We visited Badajoz together last April on an automobile trip through Spain to study Azaña’s agrarian reform.’ Jay told him that when he had entered the bullring, he saw ‘the arena covered with a layer, seven inches thick, of black hardened human blood. Every home in this small town mourned a member or relative. The population, he states, looked grim and s
ullen. It looked no one in the eye.’ Jay brought news that, after the columns of Yagüe had moved on to Madrid, the cleaning-up operations to the south of Badajoz had started in earnest and taken their toll of the small town of Barcarrota, ‘where we attended a Socialist meeting in April’.30

  His friend and colleague, John Whitaker, after commenting that Jay had ‘generally proved himself the best informed journalist in Spain’, noted with respect to this historic report: ‘His story was denied and he was vilified by paid speakers from one end of the United States to the other.’31 An interesting and perhaps representative example of this vilification would be found in a wildly inaccurate letter from Father Thomas V. Shannon to the editor of the New York Catholic magazine, The Tablet:

  Naturally, like all American writers abroad, Duranty, Gunther, Farson, he was pretty far to the left. Incongruous as it may seem, Allen represented the most conservative, not to say reactionary paper in the country. In a way, he was a free-lance. Colonel McCormick of the Tribune picked him up in Europe: he had not been sent abroad. He was dropped once, due to violent protests by Notre Dame, and a second time on protest from another source. He did not quit.

  Shannon claimed that Jay Allen was born and brought up as a Catholic until he was nine-years-old and thus saw his later political position as a betrayal:

  In Madrid, he fell in with Azaña and his crew. He was frankly committed to that regime, and so wrote. He approved with glee of confiscation and took particular delight in the plight of the Jesuits. He had been filled with all sorts of information about Jesuit wealth, all based on hearsay. He wasn’t in the least shocked with the pillage and arson in Madrid or Malaga. All of this he wrote to whatever American paper would accept his stuff. After the revolt of 1936, he became increasingly violent, and long before Badajoz had been letting his imagination run riot. He finally became a bitter partisan. The transition was not difficult. He was in the mood for this five years ago when I met him in Madrid.32

  Shannon’s character assassination of Jay was widely circulated. It was part of a concerted effort by the Catholic hierarchy to smear those who supported the Spanish Republic.33 A copy of it eventually reached Jay. The public assault on Jay was carried out by Dr Joseph F. Thorning, one of Franco’s most tireless propagandists in the United States. Thorning was an odd choice of champion to put up against Jay, since he was a man who had no prior knowledge of Spain. Jay recalled later:

  Dr Joseph Thorning popped up from where I wouldn’t know, originally with an S.J. after his name. These initials were later dropped for reasons never made clear to me although I did hear something about an inheritance. Poverty, chastity and obedience seemed not to apply to him, not the first two anyway and I know whereof I speak.34

  In 1938, Thorning, hearing that Jay was preparing to write more fully on what had happened at Badajoz, wrote sarcastically: ‘The mere fact that he finds this necessary 18 months after his first efforts indicates that his original story didn’t impress the more thoughtful readers. The unfortunate truth (for Mr Allen) is that, arriving 8 days late, he missed the boat. Hearsay evidence is a poor substitute.’ Thorning’s own account was based on the book of Major McNeill-Moss, who was never there.35 The success of the Catholic campaign may be measured in the fact that there were references in the American provincial press to ‘the Bolshevik Jay Allen’ and claims that he was earning huge sums in Moscow gold.36 More specifically, Jay’s beloved aunt, his mother’s sister, turned against him because of the poisonous criticisms of Joseph Thorning. Among other things, Thorning had acquired and published a letter from Jay’s godmother, Mrs J. Ham Lewis, to the effect that, after the death of his mother, he had been raised in godless and alcoholic surroundings.37

  Although the Badajoz article will probably be Jay Allen’s most important legacy, also quite remarkable was his achievement in securing, on 3 October 1936, the last ever interview given by the imprisoned Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera. When rumours abounded that José Antonio was dead, Jay was able to interview him in Alicante jail as a result of an invitation from Rodolfo Llopis, who was now the undersecretary to prime minister Francisco Largo Caballero. In order to gain access to the prisoner, Jay had first to convince the local anarchist-dominated Public Order Committee. Over two fraught meetings, he managed to persuade them by saying that, if they did not permit the interview, he would have to write that the Republican Government had no authority. On entering the exercise patio of the prison, Jay Allen found José Antonio and his brother Miguel in good physical condition. The Falangist leader reacted furiously when told that the rebels’ defence of privileged interests had swamped his party’s rhetorical ambitions for sweeping social change, saying: ‘If it turns out to be nothing but reaction, then I’ll withdraw my Falangists and I’ll, I’ll probably be back here in this or another prison in a very few months. If that is so, they’re wrong. They’ll provoke still worse reaction. They’ll precipitate Spain into an abyss. They’ll have to cope with me. You know that I’ve always fought them. They called me a heretic and bolshevik.’38 José Antonio may have been exaggerating his revolutionary aims to curry favour with his jailers, but his barefaced denials of the activities of Falangist gunmen before the war and of Falangist complicity in atrocities since was clearly infuriating the anarchists who had witnessed the interview.

  In view of José Antonio’s anything but conciliatory attitude, Jay felt obliged to terminate the interview ‘because of the astounding indiscretions of Primo’.39 He later told Claude Bowers’ biographer, Holman Hamilton:

  I believe that in the Fall of ’36 when I went to see him in prison in Alicante just before his execution, I was the last foreigner he spoke to and perhaps the last human being apart from his jailers, a wild and woolly lot calling themselves a Committee of Public Safety – which was before Negrín put a stop to that sort of thing.40

  In fact, there was more to the visit to Alicante than there seemed at the time or than Jay was prepared to tell Hamilton. In fact, as he recalled to Herbert Southworth:

  As I believe you know, Negrín had urged me to see JA and then go on to France or England and try to promote an exchange. For Caballero’s son, although Caballero had refused to consider that. I did my damnedest bit but, as you know, I accomplished nothing. Negrín’s idea was that José Antonio was a patriot by his lights and bull-headed besides and that he would cause Franco a lot of trouble. Maybe. But, thinking back on the mood of the Committee of Public Safety in Alicante, I doubt whether they would have let José Antonio out of their grasp regardless of what Madrid asked or ordered.41

  In April 1937, Jay made a speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. He started off saying: ‘When I came out of Spain I could not talk about it at all to anybody. It was like a nightmare, a four months long nightmare, the only difference being that from a nightmare you awake.’ He talked about the horror unleashed when the military coup provoked the collapse of the Republican state and opened the way to violence in Republican territory. He tried to explain why the Republic had such a bad press in the United States, arguing powerfully that the truth does not come out of rebel Spain:

  No correspondent can write it and stay there… What the rebels do the world does not know, perhaps does not care to know. But every last atrocity on the loyalist side has been told amply and more often than not without any explanation at all. There is another reason why the truth has not been told. Most of the correspondents who went to Spain were ignorant of the Spanish scene. They knew all about fascism and communism, the issue about which everyone nowadays is so glib, and they knew nothing about Spain. They took stock in Franco’s crusade to save Spain from the ‘reds’. Franco’s rebellion is in reality the French revolution in reverse. But how can you expect a correspondent whose stock in trade is communism and fascism to deal in anything so démodé as the French revolution? They do not know. Then there is another reason. There are elements in this country, press services and organizations, that have sought to draw some profit from the red issue. />
  Stressing that ‘It has been a great tragedy, a great tragedy!’, he ended: ‘I ask as someone about to return to this “horror” that people in this democracy of ours try to read about Spain with open minds. And I ask too that in this country of ours interested groups not be allowed to muzzle truth, to stifle press, to pin “red” labels on correspondents who are writing the truth as they see it. They, we, can do no more.’42

  Catholic efforts to discredit Jay Allen and Herbert Matthews were partly based on material supplied by William Carney and Edward Knoblaugh. Thorning distributed to a wide network of correspondents a statement from Edward Knoblaugh about Jay:

  It is not exactly a secret among the foreign correspondents in Spain that Mr Allen, ardent Socialist, did a considerable amount of stumping (some uncharitable souls might call it ‘agitating’) in Spain for the Leftist revolt cause long before the war. Close friend of Socialist leader Del Vayo, and of Leftist revolt leader Luis Quintanilla, the painter, Allen was arrested during the 1936 [sic] revolt for allegedly harbouring the revolutionary executive committee in his apartment. Files of the New York Times during that month will reveal that he was warned by Ambassador Bowers to keep out of Spanish politics. The article in question (I do not recall the exact date) was written by Mr Carney, and resulted in a bitter feud between the two during the remainder of their assignment in Madrid.43

  Knoblaugh himself published extremely dubious atrocity propaganda for the Francoists and contributed to the cover-up on Guernica. According to Jay Allen, the entire book written by Knoblaugh was a fabrication: ‘As you know, some Jesuit or other helped him with his book. He was hardly literate. If you remember the book, it was a very special production, wildly untrue. Of course, Eddie did have some odd ideas and his powers of observation were not exceptional but it was odd that his “memoires” came out in that special pattern.’44 In 1942, Jay met him in Peoria, where he was working on the local paper, the Peoria Star. When Jay raised the issue of the letter, Knoblaugh, who was not very bright, replied that it had been ‘taken care of’, by which he meant that he had written to Thorning to protest that personal letters should not be circulated freely. Jay retorted that ‘the matter may have been “taken care of” with the man of God but not yet with me, seeing as how the letter had been written and was about me and, among other things, was quite wrong’.45 In a similar effort to convince Milly Bennett that his slanders were of no importance, Knoblaugh wrote: ‘I am happy to say that not a single statement of fact that I made in the book about the forces that were at work was challenged by those who would most have liked to have torn me to pieces. I knew what I was talking about and the Loyalist supporters knew that I knew.’ This was far from the truth, but it was hardly surprising that it was the view of someone who could write: ‘I think I have read almost every book out on the war, and believe me, I have never seen such a mess of junk as some of them are. Others have a modicum of fact, but it seems that no one tried to be objective and impartial except myself.’ Since Knoblaugh believed that the Russians were behind the Asturian miners’ uprising of 1934, his views could hardly be described as objective.46